Remember My Name Read Free

heckled by a group of five-year-old sadists as my Elsa braid repeatedly thumped me across the forehead.
    I switched on the handheld microphone and waited until Ruby flicked on the backing track. She’d pulled the equipment under the gazebo with her as well, which was a pretty sensible idea. Otherwise she might get electrocuted. This way, I thought, looking at the snow machine and the wires stretching out to an extension plug, at least only one of us would get electrocuted. Me.
    I glanced up at the heavens as the now intensely familiar opening chords of ‘Let It Go’ kicked in. The sky was completely black now, almost as though there’d been a total eclipse of the sun. I said a quick prayer to the Patron Saint of Children’s Party Entertainers—and if there isn’t one, there really should be—and asked very nicely if any lightning that was planned could hold off for the next ten minutes at least. I wasn’t at all keen on that electrocution thing.
    I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and … let it go. However wet I was, however tired I was, however itchy that dress was, I loved to sing. Even this, which I’d done over and over and over again for so long, still had the power to lift my spirits.
    It was a beautiful song, and an absolute dream to perform. I tried to avoid Jocelyn’s gaze—I suspected her eyes were glowing red like an evil child from a horror film by now—and threw myself into it heart and soul. That’s what I was paid to do, and, more importantly, that’s what I loved doing.
    Things might not have worked out quite the way I’d hoped when I was eighteen, but at least I had managed to make a living from singing—assuming by ‘living’, you meant a steady diet of Ramen noodles, no landline, and sneaking vodka into pubs in my handbag to add to my coke on nights out.
    Still, I was doing what I loved. What I still thought I was born to do—and at the ripe old age of twenty-two, I wasn’t quite ready to give up on my dreams just yet.
    Plus, if I kept my eyes screwed closed, and ignored the rain, and blocked out the sounds of the kids screaming at each other, I could still lose myself in the music; lose myself in the joy of the song … and imagine everything was very different. That I wasn’t standing here being mocked by a group of minipsychos and their boozed-up parents. That I was on my own stage, doing my own concert, for my own adoring audience …
    As I sang out the last few lines, my fantasy was rudely interrupted by what felt like a giant blast of washing-up liquid to the face. It sloshed up my nose, choked my mouth, and stung my eyeballs. I yelled and tried to back away from the liquid punch in the gob; sadly, my heels were still firmly embedded in the muddy ground and, although the rest of me backed away, my feet didn’t.
    As a result, I landed on my blue-polyester-clad backside, squelching around in an ever-expanding puddle of dirt, grass, and rainwater. I’d dropped the mike, and was now screaming as the snow machine continued to spew at me.
    It was supposed to create a beautiful fairy-tale effect as I finished the song—one that the children usually loved. We filled the special tank with what was mysteriously called Snow Fluid, and when Ruby pressed the button, it gently showered me with foamy snowflakes. It got oohs and aahs every time we used it.
    This time, though, something had gone badly wrong. I don’t know whether it had malfunctioned, or Ruby had pressedsome magical and previously unused setting, but the stuff had blasted me full in the face like one of those water cannons police use in riots.
    As I lay there, drenched to the skin, unable to get up again because the mud was now of a level that hippos would enjoy wallowing in, I finally heard it. The sound that usually made me happy.
    Bloody applause.

Chapter 2
    I craned my neck up at such a weird angle I knew I’d have a crick in it later. Yep, I was getting a standing ovation—not for my majestic performance of ‘Let