Preview of The Rewind by Allison Winn Scotch

Preview of The Rewind by Allison Winn Scotch

ONE

Frankie

Frankie awoke to a headache that felt akin to a leech sucking the blood straight from her spinal cord. The throbbing started low in her skull, right at the nape of her neck, and reverberated out with each heartbeat, each pulse, into every vein, every cerebral fold, every nerve. She squeezed her eyes closed, willing for sleep for one more moment, but the pain was unbearable, too much to allow for rest to settle back in. This, certainly,  was one of a hundred hangovers she had endured, and yet this one felt different. Harrowing.

She allowed her eyes to flutter open and found herself staring at a white wall. To be sure, this was not the first wall she had woken in close proximity to but certainly, she knew immediately that it wasn’t her own. She’d painted her bedroom a vibrant purple last year, and though all her friends in LA thought it was a little much, Frankie, unlike so many other things in her life, had yet to grow weary of it. (Really, she only had, like, three friends in LA, and mostly, those friendships were work friendships, but still. They really all did think she’d get sick of the purple wall.)

Frankie rolled to her back, emitted a groan, and noticed a heat emanating to her side. The naked back of a man rose and fell next to her. This was also not a highly unusual experience for Frankie, who often took advice from Prince and partied like it was the end of the world, or at least the end of the century. Who could blame her: hot men and tequila went with her business.

This morning, however, Frankie narrowed her crusty eyes and took stock. The room was dim, the shades still pulled, and low light filtered in. The bed was small, very small. True, she occasionally woke up in a shabby studio with an aspiring drummer or the like (Frankie did prefer drummers as they knew what to do with their hands; guitarists were pretty alright too) but as adults, nearly everyone had at least a decent sized bed. Sometimes, yes, there were futons involved. She rarely even bothered to give those aspirings her number. Futon-guys were fun, but they were not on Frankie’s long-term radar. Laila would argue that Frankie didn’t have long-term radar, while April would urge Frankie to find her long-term radar. “It’s very fulfilling once  you do,” she’d once said, while Frankie made groaning noises over the phone that she hoped April could intuit three thousand miles away. 

Frankie pushed up to her elbows and glanced around. The furnishings were….she tried to place them. The furnishings were familiar but only in a vague, back-of-her mind way. They were utilitarian, basic, standard-issue beige wood. Frankie squinted, her brain running in the way that it sometimes does before she had either a brilliant epiphany or needed to take an Ativan. 

This did not seem right. This did not feel right, and if Frankie Harriman was good at anything, it was tapping into a feeling and riding that wave. That’s how she discovered Night Vixen in a dank club off of Fairfax and brought them from bickering post-high school naïfs to the A-lister girl band who currently had the number two record and five singles on the charts. No small thing for a girl band in the late ‘90s, when, despite the success of, well, Frankie will just say it: ugh, the Spice Girls, girl bands still had to fight for both respect and airplay. It was how she’d navigated the boys’ club of her industry and landed on Hollywood Reporter’s 30 Under 30 at twenty-eight: by tapping into feelings about up-and-comers, massaging egos and wiping tears and sending ridiculously large bottles of champagne to front doors when a single got its first spin on Y100. 

This morning, with alarming and rapid acuity, Frankie realized that her feelings screamed: something is not right. 

Gingerly, she eased closer to the man beside her, craning her neck until she hovered just above his face.

She recognized him both too slowly and too quickly, in the way that you might when you slam on your brakes one second ahead or one second too late before you hit a biker who runs a light. How quickly you react determines everything that comes next. An adrenaline rush but nothing except tire marks in the street, or a man dead in the crosswalk. Half a second makes all the difference.

Frankie Harriman, who was accustomed to finding herself in plenty of oncoming traffic, did not react well. She stared at the stubble and the chestnut hair and the long eyelashes and the straight nose, and she screamed.

Preview of The Rewind by Allison Winn Scotch