Goodbye Is All You Left Me

As the Times Square Ball dropped on the grainy, antenna-only picture, Danielle Doolittle couldn’t help but hold her breath.

Sure, if the entire grid exploded and society was set back 200 years, Sawtooth, Idaho might be the last place on earth you’d notice the difference, but still.

Phil, her father, who she always just called Phil, waggled his eyebrows at her from his perch on the couch they’d picked up for $7 at the secondhand store down in Bear Lake on a whim.

“Ya nervous?” he asked, clearly wanting an affirmative.

Danielle exhaled. “Nah. Dick Clark looks like he isn’t a prepper yet.”

Phil belly laughed. As the New Yorkers’ screams reached a fever pitch, he opened the door to the garage — Danielle yelped at the unexpected blast of frigid air — and ran back into the living room, waking the dogs, who started barking.

“Dannie —”

She rolled her eyes. Such a childish nickname.

“Eighteen years ago today, you came into the world and completely changed my life.” He cleared his throat, unaccustomed to speechifying. “I was the age you are now, which is just nuts, frankly …”

“Daaaaaaad!” Danielle groaned. Was she getting the birds and the bees as a high school senior?

“But I’m so proud of the woman you’ve become.” He choked up. “You with your one-liners. Didn’t get the way with words from me. Write it all down, Danielle. Don’t forget.”

She took the package wrapped in butcher paper tied with froufrou pink ribbon.

It was a small, high-end black notebook with one of those mall pens. It definitely cost a lot more than their couch. How many grocery runs did he have to give up?

“Happy New Year!” she screamed along with the crowds on TV as she clung to him and started crying, surprising herself with the depth of her feeling.

* * *

Five months later, Danielle heard the refrain of “don’t forget” as she sat alone in the bleachers of her all-American suburban high school outside Boise. For reasons that made sense at the time, but now were opaque even to her, she had agreed to live with her mother, Marilene, after ten years of her mother being nothing of the kind.

Danielle shouldn’t be surprised she didn’t show up, but still.

She tap-tap-tapped the bleacher in front of her with her platform sandals, and a goth sophomore girl glared back. Danielle had to tug her hip-hugging flare jeans, encrusted with rhinestones along the pockets, so they didn’t fall off. She was wearing an American flag crop top she was sure her grandparents would have strong opinions about.

But there were no relations in the bleachers, just her classmates and their parents, a few teachers, the rival team’s students, their parents, and no fewer than three news crews.

When her choir conductor asked Danielle if she wanted to sing the national anthem at the end-of-year pep rally, she thought he was joking. Unlike the other choir kids, who she thought were nerdy try-hards, she was an indifferent student and didn’t burst out into spontaneous “Newsies” sing-alongs. Her lone-wolf-ness was intensified by basically being an adult living alone, with Marilene absent for days at a time. But no, he was serious, and said that Danielle had “by far the best range of any of my students, maybe ever. Anyone else, it will just be painful. Please?” So, here she was.

One of the announcers blasted a boy band hit, and the thrill of adrenaline hit her as she stumbled through a line of cheerleaders. This was carefully choreographed on their part, but not hers, and she felt both clumsy and fearless. All eyes were on “Dannnnnnnnnie Doooooooolitttle!” Why the nickname? He swallowed “little,” so it was more like “l.” Everyone, from the soccer moms with their chunky jewelry to the popular kids to the trench-coated outcasts, were jumping and cheering for her.

True to her indifference, she hadn’t rehearsed. Fortunately, the lyrics were projected onto a large screen.

“O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming.” Dang. These lyrics were better than she’d remembered. She wasn’t a sports person, so she didn’t really think much about the national anthem.

A huge crescendo while the bombs burst in air. It was demanding, but her diaphragm kicked in.

Here it comes. “O’er the land of the freeeeeeeeeeeee!”

It came out of her like someone else’s voice. She closed her eyes. Opening them, her choir teacher literally grabbed her by the arm.

“Danielle Doolittle. That voice cannot stay in Boise. You have to give an interview.”

She didn’t have time to protest. Something had been set in motion that was bigger than a graduating high schooler in Idaho. When the evening news anchor, barely out of college herself, shoved the mic in Danielle’s face and asked if they’d be seeing her name in lights, that national anthem voice said, “Well, duh. I’m going to write my first album and find an agent in L.A!” A cheerleader who had never shown anything but contempt for her small-town bumpkin clothing and slight accent leaned into the frame and shook her pom-poms behind her, going “whooo!” in a clearly besotted, not derogatory, fashion.

An oafish football player, who had come up with the original insult against choir kids that they were “gay” just a week prior in an assembly, begged her to let him drive her home.

She savored being the heroine of her own John Hughes movie, until she saw that Marilene was leaning against the doorjamb of their rented, dingy apartment. Marilene started screaming. Really screaming.

The football player just wordlessly pulled away, leaving Danielle to deal with this alone. This wouldn’t be the first time. But the ground beneath her platforms felt steady.

“Look who’s big for her britches,” Marilene slurred.

“You’ve been drinking.” It was a statement of fact, not a question.

“Do you think you’re gonna get rich and famous from your lil’ songs?” So, she had watched the local news.

“Maybe I will,” Danielle responded flatly. The only winning move when Marilene was like this was not to play.

“I’ve read your dumb poems in that book you’re always squirreling away.”

Danielle felt her heart slow to a death’s crawl. “What?”

“Your stupid poetry, or song words, or whatever. No one wants to read that crap, Danielle.” Marilene grabbed the black notebook, her daughter’s birthday gift, and the fancy mall pen, the ink half-used, and taunted her with them.

“Stop! Give that to me! What the hell is wrong with you?” Danielle was desperate, wishing the football player was here to tackle Marilene.

They tussled around the kitchen, swearing and banging elbows and knees in the melee.

The ink was everywhere, staining her crop top and ruining her jeans, but the notebook was unscathed.

She was 18. She was done with her high school classes, even though commencement was tomorrow. Commencement meant a new start, though. And Danielle desperately needed that.

“I’m leaving. Call Phil if you need bail or whatever.”

She grabbed whatever would fit in one garbage bag from her closet and the bathroom. She left a lot behind. She would always be leaving things behind — razors and paperback novels, lovers and the class of 2000, only a few of whom noticed her absence at the graduation bacchanals. The goth girl would later claim they’d been besties.

* * *

The gas in her tank lasted through Steptoe, Nevada. She let herself sleep for a few hours, since the gas station didn’t open until 7 AM. As she went to pay for her gas and a Powerade at the Pony Express Station, she heard the Today show.

As the half-asleep clerk counted out her change — she had to ask for a dime more — she did a double take. There, on the Today show, was herself. It was a clip, cut straight from her high note to “Find an agent in L.A.!”

“Dannie Dew,” Katie Couric said, apparently sincere, “we can’t wait to see your name in lights.”

Dannie, as she now was apparently known, had thrown an old summer camp hoodie over her ink-splattered top but had changed into Converse, and her hair was in a messy bun. At over 6,000 feet, she was freezing, even in June. She didn’t think the clerk recognized her.

But then he shouted out, “you’d make quite the showgirl in Vegas, kiddo!”

A few hours later, and she was in Vegas. The temperature was already 90°, and she thought if she could use the public bathroom in a casino, she could at least change and comb her hair.

She chose the Bellagio, because it was new and looked like no one would bother her. She wore sunglasses and didn’t make eye contact with the gamblers and their chaperones.

She fished a tight-fitting black dress out of her purse that had looked bold in Boise but was hardly worth noting surrounded by kitsch and glitz. As she was untangling a pernicious hair knot over the long bathroom sink, an actual showgirl, wearing essentially nothing but a bejeweled thong and bra, said in a thick Southern accent:

“Aww, hon, you look famished. We’re going to hit up the buffet before call time. You should come!”

“Call time?” Dannie ventured. She didn’t trust authority figures, but this near-naked, friendly Amazon sounded harmless.

“We’re here for the residency” for the boy band that was so huge, so mega-famous, so dreamy that Dannie said “no!” and the showgirl just squealed in reply.

“How many dancers are there in the show?”

“Oh, darlin’ I’m not a choreographer, too many to count. Dozens. Maybe a hundred.”

Dannie seized the moment. “What about singers?”

“I reckon the five, their understudies. Are you a singer?”

She blurted out yes before she could regret it. “Yes. Dannie Dool-“

“Dannie Dew! From the Today show? That’s just waaaaaald!” And for the second time in 24 hours Dannie found herself being dragged by the arm, this time to the buffet for the entire cast and crew of the biggest band on the planet in the year 2000.

* * *

She was starving, and stuffed herself on bacon-wrapped shrimp, ambrosia salad, cheesy mashed potatoes, and a slushie drink that slithered out of the machine like an octopus leg.

During this dignified motion, she bumped the arm of another Amazon, this one a 6’6” blond man who protested like the Swedish Chef Muppet.

“ExCUSE me JUNG-e lady!”

She was awkwardly trying to save the slushie from spilling onto him by licking it, when the showgirl swanned by with a Mai Tai and rescued her.

“Exca-use you, Ärne. This is my guest of honor.”

She deftly grabbed Dannie’s slushie and said, gesturing with a drink in both hands, “Meet your next client, Dannie Dew!”

Ärne stuck out his hand and coughed. “Ärne Ärnesson. The talent manager of some of these yahoos. So sorry if offense I caused you.”

The showgirl burst out laughing, and Dannie started laughing, too. “Oh, no, no. Of course not. I’m really…”

The showgirl shot her a glance that shut her up.

“Dannie appeared on the Today show, Ärne. This morning. Surely you saw her! She’s seeking representation.” She winked and went for buffet seconds, slurping the slushie before it melted.

Ärne looked Dannie up and down. “This is unconventional, but here’s my card. I’m only in Vegas for the week.”

* * *

A week later, she pulled up to Ärne’s office in the Capitol Records building in Hollywood. A secretary with nothing but a phone and a glass table let her in.

He got straight to business. “Dannie! I watched your clip! Gina wasn’t kidding, eh?”

“I came with some lyrics,” she said, laying her notebook on his desk.

“Gud, gud, gud.” He waved his hand as if lyrics were an afterthought. “I have a song for you, ‘Goodbye Is All You Left Me.’ Also, a check. For twenty.”

“Twenty dollars?”

“No, no, no, you crazy kid, twenty thousand, for five singles.”