Page 40 of Knocked Up by a Rockstar

It was hard not to think about my own pregnancy while going undercover to retrieve DNA samples of Apollo Brock and Priscilla Lamb.

I thought about Apollo’s descriptions of the four Brock mothers: the reclusive genius behind a lot ofBrock Technology’scode methodology, the hippie couple who’d invited Emory in to share a sexual experience, the mother who’d purposefully conceived to try and extort money, and Sylvester’s mom, who had feared that one day Emory would come for her children and had gone to great lengths to cover up the fact that she had birthed twins.

Which of these mothers did I most want to be like to my own kid? Sylvester’s, I supposed. Although being a reclusive genius did sound quite nice, my dad already had that role in our family. No, I wanted to protect my child. I wasn’t quite sure who from, just yet. From Sylvester? From Apollo? From the whole media circus that followed the Brock lineage around?

It was easy to get a DNA sample from Apollo. However, trying to catch another glimpse of the person I thought was disappeared recording artist Priscilla Lamb proved difficult. This meant that I had to schedule alotof meetings with Apollo. These left me so exhausted that Sylvester and I weren’t able to make much progress with his own book.

I was surprised to find myself missing him. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Things between Sylvester and me had been getting quite hot and heavy, as well as emotional, in turns.

Meanwhile, the film director, Eli Robinson, was plaguing me with messages through all kinds of media. I had voicemails, texts, emails, letters... I wouldn’t have been surprised if a missive had showed up via carrier pigeon.

While I was somewhat flattered, despite not being interested in soundtrack work, I also really didn’t have time to fend off the continued communication by the film director.

Deep in my heart, I wondered:what on earth does she see in my music that makes her so desperate to use it for her film?

I knew that I liked my music, but I had long resigned that I would ever find many others who agreed with me. Likely I was biased, since I was myself. For so long now it had just been a hobby, albeit one that I already had a failed career in, which had always loaded it with difficult feelings. I had persisted, nonetheless, but I could only sing and make music as long as it wasstrictlya hobby.

This offer of a film soundtrack was like a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it gave me some validation that my music was decent. But on the other, it told me that my music wasn’t good enough to stand on its own, only as a soundtrack to something else, somethingbetter. It was like a reminder that I was good, but not good enough. That’s the message I’d been receiving for decades now, loud and clear, and I was tired of it.

Frankly, I felt I’d rather be terrible at something than be almost-but-not-quite-good enough at it. At least being terrible at something, you didn’t have hopes and dreams, aspirations and expectations. At least the disappointment was with you all along, rather than coming heaping down in one big crushing mass.

Eli’s messages were needling at me. Each time one hit my inbox, or my voicemail, it flashed into my brain:not quite good enough.

Plus, the way that Eli Robinson had gotten my music in the first place was still bugging me. Had Sylvester put it on that memory stick by accident, or had he thought misguidedly he was making a gesture towards me? If the latter, I would be furious at him for thinking that could ever make up for how he’d skewered my career. As it was, I existed in state of Schrodinger’s fury about the whole thing – I wasn’t sure whether or not to be furious about it, so I was instead just confused whenever it resurfaced in my brain.

Really what I needed was to ask Sylvester, but the question would open up more questions from Sylvester than it would answer for me. I didn’t want to talk any more with him about how I’d been a failure, about how he’d abandoned me ‘to protect’ me, about how he was a martyr and I was just the collateral, or whatever it was.

So I blocked all the Eli Robinsons that I could, and tried to focus my mind on the task I’d been given by Sylvester: prove a link between Priscilla Lamb and Apollo Brock.

Luckily, I was to have my chance soon. At yet another meeting of Apollo’s, I caught sight of Priscilla when I excused myself to the bathroom during a meeting in his office. I had to do this a lot more frequently than usual due to the progress of my pregnancy, and it provided me with a good opportunity to scope out potential sightings of Priscilla.

On this occasion, it was handed to me perfectly. When I walked in, she was at the mirror, holding a tissue in one hand and a lipstick in the other. It appeared she was touching up her make-up.

I stood stock still in the doorway, surprised and unsure what to do next. She turned to see me and gave me one of those iconic smiles, which left me with no doubt this was definitely,definitelyPriscilla Lamb. She was older, of course, but there were some things you can’t fake, and that iconic smile was one of them.

I forced my legs to move into one of the little bathroom cubicles. Inside, I stood there holding my breath and listening out. She was holding a tissue and perfecting her lipstick – this was the perfect opportunity to get a DNA sample.

A sound of the tap running, and then high-heeled footsteps in the direction of the exit. A scuffle as she dropped the tissue in the swing-bin. Then, the door closing behind her on her way out.

I barreled out of the cubicle and made a beeline for the garbage can. I didn’t want to fish my hand in through the swing lid so I removed the entire thing. There, sitting atop a pile of other tissues and likely unsanitary things, was a white tissue marked with the signature deep purple of Priscilla Lamb’s lipstick.

Hunching over the bin, in case there was hidden CCTV in the bathroom, I used the tongs and small glass jar Sylvester had provided me for the DNA samples to swipe the tissue out of the bin and secure it in my possession.

Now to see if the tests came up with anything interesting.

Sylvester

“Have you opened them?” Luna burst in through my office door.

I was hunched over my computer on the far end of the room. By ‘them’, she meant the results from Apollo and Priscilla’s DNA tests. I’d texted Luna as soon as they’d dropped into my inbox, and she’d gotten here in record time. “No, I was too nervous. I waited for you.”

“Come on, then, let’s look.”

Luna was impatient, but then again, she had been formidable enough to be able to get samples of both Apollo and his suspected mother without being caught. It was impressive. She’d always been impressive to me, of course.

With Luna leaning over my shoulder, I opened my inbox and double-clicked the email, the subject which read:Test results for Sunny Badger and Prissy Sheep.

Oh yeah, we’d given them codenames, just in case. Sunny Badger and Prissy Sheep had given us quite the giggle when sending off the DNA samples to the laboratory.

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