by Teddy Wayne
Into the cafeteria, about thirty feet away, walked a boy.
“So we found your best friend, Michael Carns,” Robin said.
He looked how he used to, same pale skin like he’d been scared and lived underground, but a few inches taller and his hair was shorter now. He’d become sort of funny-looking, with his ears sticking out, and was wearing dark blue Champion sweatpants and a sweatshirt, same as before, at least the way I remembered it. People always wear the same thing in your mind, like Jane in St. Louis is the Schnucks black polo shirt and khaki pants, but in L.A. it’s a black skirt and top and stockings because black is slimming.
The last time I saw Michael was the night before we left. Jane let me do one final sleepover. With Nadine I once figured out that I probably slept over at his house about two hundred times. We tried to stay up all night together, watching TV and eating junk food in his room like we always did, but we couldn’t do it, and we both fell asleep around five a.m. When Jane picked me up in the morning, I didn’t want to wake him up on so little sleep, so I just left without saying good-bye. I guess I thought I’d be seeing him again soon. I felt like running over to him now and telling him I wished I’d woken him up, but maybe he didn’t remember it anyway.
They must not have told Jane about this, because she would have definitely leaked it to me, and the surprise would be ruined. Most of the time that stuff is faked on TV, which I know from doing it a few times, and when I see it on reality shows I can always tell who’s pretending to be surprised. You have to be a high-caliber enough actor to pull it off. I’m just good enough to do it, but I guess they didn’t know that.
Michael glanced at Kevin like he didn’t know if he was supposed to stay at the door or come to me. He was pretty uncomfortable with all the cameras on him. Those lights are hot, and it’s hard when you’re not used to it. Kevin motioned to him to come over, so Michael walked up to me and said, “Hi,” all quiet, and I said, “Hey, Michael.”
It was weird. I knew it would read bad on TV if I didn’t do something, so I slapped him five like Dr. Henson and said, “It’s awesome to see you!” and he said, quietly again, “You, too.” Then we stood around waiting for something to happen and he looked at his feet with his face angled away from the crew. I couldn’t tell if he was so quiet because of the cameras or because of me or because that’s what he was like now. Robin looked at Kevin, who said they’d clean it up in editing and told me they were taking us someplace special.
Kevin said me and Michael would go in a car with each other so we could catch up off-camera. It was a town car, not a limo, so the crew guy who drove us could hear us in the backseat.
“What’s new?” I asked Michael as we pulled away from the school.
“My parents adopted a baby boy last year,” he said. “From Ethiopia, in Africa. His name is Justin. He’s pretty fun, actually.”
I couldn’t imagine Michael with a younger brother. We always said we were like brothers and it was better than having a real brother since we got to choose each other.
“From Africa,” I said. I didn’t really want to look straight at him, and I tilted my head down. Under my unzipped winter coat and jacket, my black graphic T-shirt had a picture of Brangelina as farmers standing in front of a house with a pitchfork, but they’ve got white makeup and jet-black hair and lipstick and mascara, and it says AMERICAN GOTH. “Cool. Like Brangelina.”
He looked at my shirt and the rest of my outfit. “They give you those clothes?” My jeans were distressed and my jacket under my winter coat was shiny black leather with metal studs and my sneakers were custom-made red Nikes with heart shapes on the tongue.
“Who?”
“The TV people.”
“No. This is from home.” He didn’t say anything, so I added, “Well, the designers give them to me. They send me stuff and pay me to wear it. There’s a lot of contracts involved. I have to wear certain pieces a certain amount while out and at photo ops.” As I was saying it I was wishing I wasn’t, but I couldn’t stop myself. It got quiet again, so I asked him, “Is Jessica Stanton still the hottest girl in our class?”
“No, she got fat. Luann Phelps is now.”
“Luann?”
“Yeah. She got contacts this year and became hot,” he said. “She has a crush on you.”
“For real?” I got a little tingle. I don’t know why I was so into the idea of Luann Phelps having a crush on me. She used to be this dumpy girl with thick glasses and a lisp. For a second it was like she was the celeb and I was the fan.
“All the girls do. Whenever you say your songs are about this one girl, they all say that they’re your ex.”
I had to stop using that line so much. Or maybe I should use it more. “They didn’t used to,” I said. “Have a crush on me.” I knew I could date any girl at one of my shows, but somehow it seemed cooler to be able to go to a school and date any student I wanted to. If there was ever a dance, I could ask whoever, and I wouldn’t call attention to myself with a dance-off or anything, but everyone would know I was the best dancer there.
“You left in the middle of fourth grade. They didn’t get crushes till the fifth grade. The boys didn’t get crushes till this year.”
I wondered if he’d hit puberty yet, or if any of the other boys did. If I asked him in the back of a town car if he had any pubes, though, then I’d be like a child predator.
“Who do you have a crush on?”
He played with the string on his sweatpants. “No one, really.”
“Does anyone have a crush on you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Girls don’t talk to me much. Except when they want to know about you.”
“Oh.” Neither of us said anything. The more I tried to come up with things to say, the less I did. All I could think of was, “My record label wants me to date this actress and singer Lisa Pinto. You know her?”
“She’s on that show,” he said. “So what do you do? Like, go to a movie or something?”
“No. Not real dates. Fake ones, for publicity. That’s how most people do it in L.A. Celebs, I mean.”
He didn’t respond but he sort of smiled to himself, so I closed my eyes and pretended to fall asleep. Soon the crew guy told me we were there. I looked out and we were at our old apartment. And I got that feeling I don’t get when I come home in L.A., times a million, but right after, for some reason, and it’s not like I would really do it, I felt like I wanted to throw a rock or something at the windows.
I wondered for a second if maybe the third surprise would be that they’d found my father and brought him to meet me where we all used to live together, but then I saw Jane standing outside, stamping her boots in the cold while talking to Kevin, and there was no way she would have signed off on that. She said, “Hi, Michael, what a nice surprise,” and made a little face to me that meant she’d just found out I was hanging out with him, but she didn’t say anything because he was still there. She probably wished my old best friend was more telegenic. Me and her were going to do a quick tour of the apartment before I’d throw a football with Michael in the park like we used to.
Our apartment was in a row of buildings that all looked the same, two floors each with pinkish concrete on the outside and a short walkway leading up to a red door. We were on the upper floor. Kevin said we had to be careful not to mess anything up inside or the family that lived there now would charge the show even more. I would’ve thought they’d be happy enough that their apartment was on TV and they could say they lived in Jonny Valentine’s old apartment, but people are always trying to find ways to monetize you.
Robin took me and Jane inside with a few crew guys. I was glad Michael stayed outside. The place looked different with the new furniture, but it felt familiar, with the pipes clanking and the way the floor creaked under your feet when you took your first step inside and how it always smelled like something had burned a little.
Jane showed them around, fast, since there was only the bathroom, the living room, the
kitchen, and the bedroom. Nothing in it was that nice. They’d put in an ugly tan wall-to-wall carpet that wasn’t there before. Jane said to the camera, “So, obviously, the new tenants have decorated it their own way.”
It felt like I was a burglar in our old home, and I was scoping it out to steal from the younger Jonathan and Jane from two years ago. I could almost see myself sleeping in my bed, with me from now creeping around the room and taking sports equipment and schoolbooks and clothes from Jonathan Valentino and replacing it with Jonny Valentine merch.
The whole strategy with footage like this was stupid. It was like, Let’s see how you’re like a normal person behind the scenes, but the more we want to see you acting regular in private, the more you have to hide there and throw up a bunch of public buffers, so if we really saw you behind the scenes, it wouldn’t look normal at all, that’s why we have to show you pretending to be normal in your old apartment.
There was one picture up on the wall near the kitchen. It was a man and woman in their thirties, and they were holding a baby between them in the hospital bed after she’d given birth and was all sweaty and tired. There was a crib in the corner. The baby was cute, but for a second I thought, Fuck you, baby.
Robin asked me if it brought back any memories. I knew I should come up with something, but nothing from the past hit me when I was in the main rooms. Nearly the first ten years of my life had happened there, so it’s not like it was easy to pick out one thing. When we went into the bathroom, though, I thought about the time I’d gotten sick from eating crab cakes at Ben Marton’s birthday party at Captain D’s, and I spent all night vomiting, and Jane stayed up with me rubbing my back and giving me water even though she had the six a.m. shift at Schnucks. Probably I remembered it because of my preshow routine with her.
“I used to come home from school every day and have a snack before starting my homework,” I said.
“What did you eat?” Robin asked.
“Peanut butter and jelly with the crusts cut off. Jane would make it.” That was another clue for my father, since she’s afraid to go near peanut butter because of her allergy. She actually made tuna sandwiches with a ton of mayo and the crusts on and left them in the fridge for me, but she doesn’t even let Peter buy mayo anymore since it’s so fatty.
Robin looked over at Jane, who was staring at the stove like she was watching something boiling. “Were you as involved in Jonny’s life back then as you are now?”
Jane turned back to her quickly. “Well, obviously. I’m his mother.”
“But now you’re his mother and his manager. Before, you were just his mother.”
“I consider it a blessing that we get to spend so much time together.”
“Does it ever feel like it might be too much time?” Robin asked.
Jane looked ready to kill her, but she adjusted and smiled huge. Never lose control.
“Of course, you have to give your child room to breathe,” she said, totally composed in a cheery talk-show voice. “But I do fear that parents aren’t spending enough time with their children these days and are just scheduling them for activities without them or letting them entertain themselves.”
“And was it a hard decision to bring Jonny into show business?”
“The hardest decision I’ve ever made.” She shook her head and made a small frown like it still tore her apart. Jane could star in a dramatic vehicle. “But it was really Jonny’s decision. He wanted it so badly.”
“It was always my dream,” I said, to help her out.
“Since he was old enough to sing,” Jane said. We were like a veteran shortstop and second baseman on joint interviews, me flipping the ball to her to turn the inning-ending double play. “So we prayed on it, and we felt it was the right time to share Jonny with the world.”
That was really smart brand strategy, because it was just enough religious stuff to make her look good after she’d snapped at Robin, and also coastal media never probes when you bring up religion, because the risk of controversy is too high.
Sure enough, Kevin said the family was gouging them on each ten-minute block and we had to leave. I was kind of surprised they hadn’t set up a museum, like “Jonny Valentine’s Childhood Home.”
When we left, we passed by the TV, which used to be on the other side of the living room, because they’d switched where the TV and couch were, since it was better to sleep in the other position but better for people to sit in now, but before even that, when my father lived there with us, I had a bed in the living room and Jane and my father slept in the bedroom. And it brought back another memory.
It must have been right before my father left or I couldn’t have remembered it. It was rainy and gray and cold out, and Jane had been staying with Grandma Pat for like a week. She must have been sick or something. The Cardinals were on TV, on the road because they couldn’t have played in the rain, and I guess my father decided I was old enough for him to explain the game to me. I bet I didn’t get much of it since I was so young, but he talked nearly the whole game, in this really fast way, and he was sweating even though he was only lying on my bed and getting worked up every time the Cardinals got a hit or something. But one reason it stands out is that the Cardinals got into a brawl with the other team, both benches clearing out, and my father called someone on the phone and asked if they were watching this shit. That must be nice, to have a friend you could just call up like that and know they were watching the same thing as you. Me and Walter don’t follow the same teams, so I don’t call him in his bungalow when I’m watching a game.
The Cardinals scored a few runs off the other team’s errors, and I kept asking what an error was because the announcers kept bringing it up. My father tried to explain. He was like, “It’s when you make a mistake, and it screws everything up for your team.” Then the Cardinals gave up a few runs after they made a bunch of errors, and the announcer said, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” and his color man said that was always true in baseball, and it was the first time I’d heard that saying so I asked my father what it meant, even though he was pissed the Cardinals had let the game get tied.
He said something like, “It means right when you get something good, you lose it.”
“Like the toy car?” I asked. They’d gotten me a remote-control car for my birthday, and I’d been all excited to use it, but it broke right away.
“No,” he said. “We returned that to the store when it broke, and we got a new one that worked.” He didn’t say anything for a minute as we watched the Cardinals lose, then he spoke real slowly so I can still mostly remember it. He was like, “What it means is what our neighbor Mrs. Warfield said to me the other day, which is that God has a plan for everyone and it’s not our place to question him.”
He turned the TV off. “So if anyone ever tells you that in the future, you’ll know they’re as big a moron as Mrs. Warfield.” Up till then Mrs. Warfield had just been this nice older lady who gave me candy, but after that I knew she was a moron.
Just as we went out the door to the apartment, I got this empty feeling in my chest, like this would be the last time I’d ever see it. I turned back to look inside, but the final crew guy had already closed the door. Maybe if I reconnected with my father we could visit it again together, without a TV show.
Outside, the camera crew walked with me and Michael to the park down the block. “Should we be talking?” I asked Kevin.
“If you want,” he said. “Or we can cut footage with music over.”
But I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to ask Michael if he ever thought about our sleepovers, how we’d stay up late and sneak out of his room to watch the TV on low and raid the kitchen for cookies and chips and soda when his parents were asleep. His house always had a million snacks. I didn’t feel like it, though.
I used to lie in bed at night sometimes before sleep and I’d think about what if Michael died, and I’d imagine me being at his funeral and staring into his coffin like they do in the movies a
nd seeing him in a suit even though he should’ve been in his Champion sweats, and knowing no one else knew the jokes we had together, like when we’d crack each other up by saying, “There was a weasel in here?” after Elinor Burt once asked that in the middle of science class when Mrs. Potts said the word weasel, and I’d make myself cry even. I wondered if I could even do that anymore. I could make myself tear up onstage when I sang “Heart Torn Apart,” but I didn’t have to think of anything to do it, I only had to tell myself to cry and the tears were waiting for me, like the song brought it on, not anything from real life.
It would sound pretty gay if I told Michael about that, or asked if he ever thought about anything like that for me.
No one else was at the park. It looked empty, just a swing set and a small field I also remembered being bigger that was all dirt now from the winter. Michael was always the QB and I was the receiver, so I tossed him the ball.
“Do you still play a lot?” I asked.
“I’m on the intramural flag-football team,” Michael said.
“I just play with Walter.”
“Who’s Walter?”
“My bodyguard.” I shouldn’t have brought him up. “He’s not here today, because it wouldn’t play good on camera.” Michael just picked at the grip on the ball, so I asked, “What was the name of that play we made up?”
“ ‘Oh Baby,’ ” he said.
“Right. Why’d we call it that again?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.” But it looked like he did. I couldn’t ask him on camera, though. I couldn’t even really ask him off-camera.