Priscilla Monroe stood at the pay phone outside the Ivywood radio station with a shivering chihuahua in her coat and no tape in her hand. The dog wore a purple robe stitched with little stars, a gift from her sister that Priscilla had never bothered to take off. The receptionist had already said no twice this week. Priscilla wanted one thing: to sing a duet with Elvis Presley and hear it on every radio in Ivywood. But no one would forward a girl with no demo to a man with a full calendar. She hung up and counted the coins in her pocket. Six dollars and change. The proper studios in Ivywood charged forty an hour, and they wanted the money before you sang a note. She had knocked on three doors that morning. Each man asked the same question. Where is your tape? Each time she opened her mouth to explain, and each time the door closed before she finished. She walked to the park because the park had the little painted gazebo with pine benches, and the gazebo had power outlets the groundskeeper forgot to lock. Behind the hedges sat a battered coin-operated recording booth with a red curtain, the kind carnivals used to sell for a quarter a song. Priscilla had watched a repairman haul it there last spring and never haul it back. She fed it two dollars. The needle twitched. The reel began to turn. She set the chihuahua on the bench, pressed her mouth to the microphone, and sang both parts of a duet she had written for Elvis and a girl who sounded like her. She sang the man's line low. She sang her own line clean. The booth spat out a small acetate disc, still warm. She walked the disc back to the station and put it on the receptionist's desk without a word. The receptionist called a producer down from the second floor. He listened to thirty seconds, lifted the needle, and told her he could not send this to Elvis, but he could send it to someone bigger tonight, if she signed a release before she left the building. He slid the paper across the desk. The release named a manager Priscilla had never heard of and gave him half of anything she ever recorded. The chihuahua whined inside her coat. Priscilla picked up the pen.

Priscilla walked out of the radio station with a signed copy of the release folded in her pocket and no receipt for the disc. The producer had kept the acetate and the paper both. He said he would call. He did not write down her number. She stopped on the sidewalk and realized she had traded half her future for a promise she could not check. The chihuahua poked her head out of the coat and sniffed the cold air. She went back inside and asked the receptionist for the producer's mailing log. The receptionist said the log was not for visitors. Priscilla asked which studio in the city the disc was going to. The receptionist said she did not know and could not ask. Priscilla stood at the desk until the receptionist picked up the phone and pretended to dial. Then she left before anyone called security. She needed proof the disc had moved. She thought of the community board by the park, the one where people pinned lost dog notes and help-wanted slips. Musicians read it. Session players read it. If a producer in the city had taken in a new demo tonight, someone on that board would know within a day. She wrote a short note in pencil. Heard a duet on acetate this week. Trying to find where it landed. Reward for a straight answer. She pinned the note between a market day flyer and a drawing of a lost cat. By noon the next day a boy in a delivery cap was waiting by the planter near the board. He said his uncle drove tapes for the station. He said last night his uncle had driven exactly one package, and it had gone two blocks, to a back room above a barber shop, and it was sitting on a shelf with a stack of others. No label. No rush note. The producer had not sent it anywhere bigger than Elvis. The producer had not sent it anywhere at all. Priscilla paid the boy a dollar and walked to the barber shop. She went up the back stairs. The room was empty at lunch. She found the shelf. She found her disc. She also found a wooden microphone stand in the corner, cables coiled neat, a working setup someone had abandoned mid-session. She took her disc off the shelf and slid it into her coat beside the dog. She left the release on the shelf in its place, folded once, so the manager's name faced up. She walked down the stairs with the acetate against her ribs. The disc was hers again. The signed release was not. Somewhere in the city a manager she had never met still owned half of anything she recorded next, and now she had stolen back the only copy of what he thought he owned.

Priscilla walked home with the acetate pressed to her ribs and the chihuahua warm against her side. The disc was hers. That was the whole problem. She had one copy of a duet nobody had heard, and no way to put it in front of anyone who mattered. A record in a coat pocket was a novelty. A record on the air was a career. She needed a room full of ears, and she needed it before the producer noticed his shelf was short. She stopped in the village square and thought. The wooden clock above the post office read a quarter past four. In an hour the square would fill. Farmers came in for the evening market. Shopkeepers closed their tills and stood by the fountain to talk. On Fridays a man set up a small speaker on the fountain's rim and played dance records for tips. She had watched him a dozen times. She knew where he plugged in. She knew he took a break at five to eat. She walked to the fountain and waited. The man arrived with his crate and his speaker and set them on the painted basin. She offered him two dollars to play one side of her disc through his rig at five sharp, no questions. He looked at her, looked at the money, and nodded. At five he lowered the needle and stepped back. Her voice came out of the speaker, doubled, singing both parts of the duet. The square went quiet. A woman near the herb rack stopped counting change. A man at the notice board turned around. When the last note ended, a small round man in a grey coat pushed through the crowd. He said he ran the Pinevale Bandstand on Saturday nights. He said he had a live radio feed to three counties. He said he wanted her on the stage that weekend, singing it live, and he wrote his name on a card and pressed it into her hand. Priscilla walked away with the card and the disc and a booking she had not asked for. The bandstand feed would carry her voice past the village for the first time. It would also carry her name to every producer who listened on a Saturday night, including the one whose shelf she had emptied, and the manager whose signed release still gave him half of whatever she sang next. She had found her room full of ears. Now the wrong ears would hear her too.