Suzie Troll's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Suzie Troll set her sticks down and checked her phone again. The Just Girlz had blown up overnight, and Mic wanted a piece of it. He'd cut a promo clip for his label, pushing the band as the next big thing — but she hadn't seen the final edit yet. All she wanted was to hold on to the people who knew her before any of this. Across town, the old crew crowded into a small editing studio, packed shoulder to shoulder around a bright screen. Mic's clip played loud. Suzie's face filled the frame. Their faces did not. Every shot of the early days had been scrubbed clean, like they'd never been in the room at all. Someone paused the screen. The silence after was worse than the clip. They thought she'd signed off on it. They thought she'd chosen this. Suzie found out from a single text: "saw the cut. nice work." She read it twice. Then she drove straight to her uncle's place, because Billy would tell her the truth without dressing it up. He watched the clip once. He said, "That one lands different. You didn't make it, but they think you did. So you fix it." She dug through her bag and pulled out the crumpled lyric notebook from those early days — the unfinished song they'd all started together, her handwriting tangled with theirs. Underneath it, the original uncut tape Mic's team had handed her as a courtesy. She hadn't watched it. She did now. The full footage was all of them. Every face. Every laugh. Suzie brought both to the old crew that night. She set the tape on the table and the notebook beside it. "I didn't choose the cut," she said. "But I let it get this far." They didn't smile. They didn't hug her. But one of them picked up the notebook and turned to the unfinished page. It was a start. And somewhere across town, Billy was already on the phone with Mic, and Mic was about to learn that using Billy's niece had a price.