Rules of the Job

Marcus had rules. He told them to her on the tour bus the first night, while everyone else was asleep and Lola couldn't sleep, which happened a lot. "Rule one," he said. He was sitting in the seat across the aisle, and he had not slept either, because apparently bodyguards just didn't, that was a whole thing she was learning. "You tell me where you're going before you go there. Not after. Even if it's just the lobby. Even if it's stupid." "That's going to be a lot of texts." "I like a lot of texts. A lot of texts means I know where you are." He held up a second finger. "Rule two. If I tell you to move, you move first and ask why second. There won't be time for it the other way around." "Rule three?" "Rule three is you stop trying to lose me." He said it without any anger, just flat, like a fact. "You did it twice today. The side exit at the venue, and then the thing with the two hoodies so I'd follow the wrong one. That was actually clever, by the way." Lola felt her face go a little hot. "You noticed that?" "Lola, noticing that is the entire job." And here was the thing — he almost smiled. Almost. It was like watching a door open one centimeter. "You're good at it. If you ever want to quit music you'd be a real problem for someone in my line of work. But I need you to stop, because every time you lose me, there's a window where nobody is in the space between you and a problem. And I have read the letters. I don't want there to be a window." The bus was quiet. Outside, the highway lights went by, orange, one after another. "Can I ask you something," Lola said. "Why do you do this? Like — it's a weird job. You spend your whole life standing slightly to the side of someone else's life. Doesn't that get lonely?" Marcus didn't answer right away. He looked out the window at the orange lights. "I was in the army," he said finally. "I was good at one thing in there, which was keeping the people next to me alive. When I came out I tried doing other things. Normal things. I wasn't good at the normal things. But I was still good at the one thing." He looked back at her. "It's not lonely. Standing slightly to the side. You see the person better from there, actually. Front and center, everybody's performing at you. From the side you get the real one." Lola thought about that. She thought about how nobody, in six years, had ever once described her as a real one. They described her as a brand, a sound, a moment. From the front she was a product. She wondered, suddenly and a little dangerously, what she looked like from where Marcus was standing. "What do you see, then," she said. "From the side. Of me." And Marcus King looked at her across the dark bus for a second too long, a second that both of them felt and neither of them named, and then he looked back out at the highway and he said, very carefully, like a man stepping around something on the floor, "I see someone who hasn't slept in two days and has a soundcheck at noon. Rule four. Go to bed, Lola." She went. But she lay in the bunk and listened to the highway and thought that Marcus had not actually answered the question, and that the not-answering had told her more than an answer would have, and that this was, definitely, going to be a longer tour than the schedule said.