by Zan Romanoff
Because Lianne is the most confrontational of their little trio, she’s the one Grace can always count on to say what she and Cara are trying to pretend they aren’t thinking. So if she’s ignoring it, maybe their noninvitation really didn’t mean anything. Cara did reach out to her this morning, and she wouldn’t have done it if she thought there was anything to be awkward about.
Grace knows she can be intense about stuff other people take for granted. Probably she’s just flipping out about something that doesn’t matter at all to Lianne.
Because Lianne doesn’t care what you do or don’t do anymore, some cruel voice in the back of her mind whispers.
Lianne did text about this, though, and she didn’t have to. She said they would pick Grace up. Lianne isn’t really known for doing stuff just to be polite. She’s offering something, and Grace knows better than to let her closest friends slip through her fingers just because she can’t get out of her own head.
That would be great, she says.
—
The apartment is close to the water in Santa Monica, so there are four boys splitting the rent on a three-bedroom. They’ve rigged a curtain to section off a corner of the living room, which is where Max is sleeping, apparently; when they walk in, the curtain is pulled back and he and one of the girls from the bar this morning are sitting on the bed, sharing a joint. Behind them another pair of girls is lounging, looking like an ad for something expensive and hip.
Gary isn’t intimidated by the scene. He yells, “Maxwell!” and Max leaps up to greet him. The force of their bodies colliding almost knocks both of them off their feet.
Lianne elbows Grace in the side and rolls her eyes. “Heyyy, boys,” she singsongs at them.
“Hey, Li,” Max calls. He and Gary are involved in some kind of complicated bro hug that involves a lot of slapping. “And you got Grace to come out!”
“Grace got Grace to come out,” Lianne says.
Grace wonders if Lianne was secretly hoping she wouldn’t come. She’s hasn’t been rude to Grace tonight, exactly, but she’s been sort of distant. Like she’s deliberately holding space between the two of them, warning Grace not to get too close.
Things are definitely not as fine between them as she’d hoped.
More of Gary and Max’s friends filter over, greeting each other with fist bumps and handshakes and by ruffling each other’s hair. Grace thinks of a video she watched last week of Fever Dream on their first tour, the boys hanging out in the back of one of the buses, Kendrick playing video games with his cheek pillowed on Jes’s thigh. The band is so unselfconscious with one another, their bodies always caught up in some warm, loose tangle. These guys here act like touching each other is an ironic joke somehow, an elaborate unspoken no homo underlying and undercutting all of the affection they perform.
Grace scans the rest of the party as Lianne floats away from her to get a drink. She recognizes plenty of people—she spent most of elementary and middle school in the Parks’ backyard, and she knows Gary and his circle pretty well—but there’s no one to talk to, exactly. Grace feels the emptiness around her inhale, and expand.
She’s pathetically grateful when Max separates himself from the fray and throws an easy arm around her shoulder.
“You got some sun,” he says approvingly. He’s moving like he’s underwater, which Grace guesses means he’s stoned. When he leans down to examine the new freckles on her collarbone, his nose bumps against her ear. “Man, I love freckles. I want freckles.”
“You don’t, really,” Grace says. “Skin cancer.” No one has ever accused her of being too cool.
“Shhhhh.” Max nudges her with his forehead. “Don’t talk about that kind of thing.” He turns to Lianne, who’s walking back with a beer in hand. “Why didn’t you come to the beach today?”
“Grace didn’t invite me.”
“It was kind of a last-minute thing,” Grace says. “It wasn’t—”
Max distracts them both by turning his investigation to Lianne. “You have no freckles,” he announces. “Your skin is like…hmmm. Like milk? Cream, but also—”
“Dude! Max!” Gary calls from across the room. “Do you only have Tecate?”
“Fancy stuff’s in the cooler,” Max says.
“Great. And stop touching my sister!”
“You’re not the boss of me,” Lianne yells, but it’s too late. Max is already putting his hands up and heading away from them, toward the bed full of girls.
“Dude, this is some bullshit macho—” Lianne goes into the kitchen to yell at Gary at close range without quite indicating that Grace should follow her.
Max stops after a second and looks back. “Oh,” he says. “I almost forgot that I brought you a present.” He looks around the room. “Raj! Raj?”
And before she’s ready for it, for the second time in two days Grace is face to face with someone from the internet.
“Sup,” he says.
There are girls online who are obsessed with his smile, which is crooked and genuine, impossible and irresistible. He directs it at Grace and cocks his head at her. “You’re Grace, yeah? Max said you were, like, a Fever Dream fan?”
This is one reaction she doesn’t have to fake, at least. Grace buries her face in her hands. “Max. You didn’t.”
“I definitely did.”
“Oh my god, this is so embarrassing.”
When she looks up, Raj is still grinning like all of this is totally hilarious to him. “So you’re not a fan anymore?” he asks.
“I’m—I don’t know. The Fever never breaks, I mean, right?” There are girls with that phrase tattooed on their wrists and hips and between their shoulders. Sometimes, instead, still burning up.
Raj shrugs smoothly. “I don’t know,” he says. “I only ever see the crazy ones.”
Grace doesn’t say, But I am the crazy ones. She doesn’t have a tattoo, anyway. It’s nothing anyone can see on her, and that’s part of the problem, actually. People have this idea of what fangirls look like, and she’s not it. She can get away with so much pretending.
She’s going to owe Katy the longest email when all of this is done.
Grace tries to think of what a normal person would ask. It’s hard to remember what she is or isn’t supposed to know. Also, she wants to know everything. “So what do you, uh, do for them? The band?”
“I’m an assistant, technically,” Raj says. “Which, in practice, is, like, I don’t know, being the assistant to a tornado? An eight-armed, eight-legged tornado, because they’re all always together and they all always need something, or one needs something for the others, and they can’t go out in public and get— Like, for instance, someone introduced Landon to macarons, and I want to kill them for it. Because either I can go drive to every macaron shop in the city, and pick up batches for him to try, or I can explain to these people who don’t normally do delivery why I need them to deliver, and risk it being an Us Weekly headline: Boy-Bander Living the Sweet Life, Spending His Fortune on Cookies.
“Or, like, Solly got his mom a ring and it needed to be resized, and I will have to pick it up in disguise so I don’t accidentally start any engagement rumors.” He shakes his head. “Sorry. It’s been kind of a week.”
“Yeah, I heard,” Grace says. This one is easy; it was on the radio this morning. Anyone might know about it. “They’re really canceling those shows? I mean, I guess, like, they really need a break?”
Something tiny in Raj’s face tightens, and then smooths itself out. “Yeah,” he says. “They’re taking a break.”
A break. A rest, Grace tells herself. A hiatus. That means they’re coming back again, probably soon. Right?
She wills herself to sound casual when she says, “Have they told you for how long? Do you still have a job and everything?”
“They still need an assistant,” Raj says. “Whether they’re touring or not.”
He sounds fond when he talks about them, even if he’s also annoyed. Grace is glad. It didn’t
occur to her until now how thoroughly it would have destroyed her if Raj had just said, casually, Oh god, no, they’re all complete assholes. Didn’t you know?
“So you’re in LA for a while, then.”
“I guess.” Raj looks around the room.
Max is on the bed again, lying on his back and tracing idle shapes in the air with two of the girls. Lianne is flirting with another one of Gary’s friends, and Gary is cozied up with his high school girlfriend in a corner of the kitchen. This is the only kind of party Grace has ever been to. Is it boring, for Raj, or exciting to be somewhere so incredibly normal?
The coolest kids in her world don’t even begin to matter in his.
“It’s a good enough place to be stuck,” he says.
Now it’s Grace’s turn to say, “I guess.”
“You’re sick of it?”
“Not sick of it,” Grace says. “Just excited to be leaving for a while.”
“Where are you going?”
“In the fall, to college. Kenyon. In Ohio?”
“You’re leaving this for Ohio?” Raj looks around the room again, skeptically this time. “Have you been to Ohio?”
“Have you?”
He raises an eyebrow at her. “I’ve been on tour for three years,” he says. “So the honest answer is that I have no idea. Probably, though, right?”
“Probably. At some point.”
The conversation stalls. Grace presses her mouth closed and looks away, trying to give him an out. She figures that’s as much as he wants to talk to her, really.
Instead of leaving, though, he asks, “Have you seen the roof yet?”
“No,” Grace says. “This is the first time I’ve been here.”
“Oh,” Raj says. “Well. You want to?”
“Sure.”
They stop in the kitchen so that Raj can pour more vodka and ginger ale into his cup. Grace picks up a beer to be companionable. It’s cold, at least, and with enough lemon squeezed in, it almost doesn’t taste like dishwater. If she sips it slowly, it can last all night.
Max’s apartment is on the top floor of a four-story building, which doesn’t mean much in terms of their view from inside, but gives them easy access to a door at the end of the hall, marked ROOF DOOR—ALARMED—DO NOT OPEN.
“Don’t worry,” Raj says. “It’s not.”
Outside, the night is still and cool. In the Valley it’s probably hovering around eighty, the whole world stultifying, breathless with heat, but this close to the ocean the air is damp and sweet. The stars are pale but the sky is dark.
“How did you end up here?” Grace asks.
“Max invited me,” Raj says.
“I mean, right, but—”
“We made friends,” Raj says. “He works at the hotel where the band is staying.”
Silence again. Grace lets it linger. She can hear the wash of the ocean on the shore, or maybe it’s just the sound of cars moving in the streets below.
“Can I ask you something?” Raj says. “Because you look…familiar.”
Grace’s breath catches in her throat. “I was at the hotel, earlier,” she says. “I ran into Max. Upstairs. At the bar. Maybe you—”
“Yeah,” Raj says. “I thought I recognized you then, too.”
Something in Grace’s chest collapses. “I didn’t know,” she says. “There’s no way I could have known when I went out there. He just, like, appeared on my street.” She realizes too late that she’s confirmed for him that he was right: that it was her with Jes last night.
“Did you recognize him?”
Grace only has a split second to settle on a lie. “Not at first,” she says. “And then it seemed awkward, to, like, ask, you know? I figured I’d just go home and google him or something. It wasn’t like there was anyone else around to care. Until the photographer showed up.”
“I just…” Raj rubs a hand across his eyes. “I’m sorry. I have to ask. Because you were there last night, and then today, and Max said you were—”
“Hey, I didn’t know you were going to be here!”
The roof seems small, suddenly, its corners pulling in toward the center. No wonder he wanted to bring her up here, alone, where they could yell at each other about something no one downstairs cares about.
Raj goes on, “Look, it’s my job to take care of them, okay. All of them. And Jes doesn’t always think about what the consequences are for everyone. For anyone, actually. He’s been—”
“Stressed, resting, putting them on hiatus, canceling tour dates. I know, okay, everyone knows.” Hysteria starts to color Grace’s voice. She can’t seem to calm enough to quiet it. “I wasn’t lying, I’m not a stalker, I’m not trying to do anything. I just—I really didn’t know who he was when I went out last night. I didn’t know anyone would be there. And now my stupid picture is on the internet, and people are—”
She stops. They aren’t, really. Raj is the only person who’s managed to connect the real her to those images. Everyone else is railing against a picture, and whatever details they’ve made up to fill her in.
Is this what Jes’s life is like all the time? And Land, and Solly, and Kendrick? She tries to picture them slipping out like Jes must have last night, or finding quiet roofs like this one. All the spaces they’ve been where she and her curiosity never knew to follow them.
Raj asks, “Has it been bad?”
“No,” Grace says. “I mean, if I go looking, it’s not great. But I don’t think anyone has figured out who I actually am.”
“Yet,” Raj says. “They will.”
“I mean, if they haven’t already, it seems like they probably won’t—”
“The pictures are on the internet right now,” he says. “A zillion people have seen them, but they’re the people who go looking for information about Fever Dream, probably. Maybe a handful of rubberneckers clicking over from general-interest gossip websites.” This sounds like something he’s seen before. “Unless you’re friends with superfans, you’re probably safe for now. But trust me, next week they’re in print, in Us or Star or whatever. A girlfriend of yours pages through it at the nail salon. Someone you went to middle school with sees it. A friend of a friend picks up her sister’s copy. All it takes is one or two phone calls.”
“Good thing I don’t have many friends,” Grace deadpans.
“Everyone looks more carefully when the boys are in the frame,” Raj says. “Ugh. I am sorry about this.”
“Me too,” Grace says. “I didn’t mean to get him in trouble.”
“Jes’s trouble is his own,” Raj says. “Trust me. It’s nothing to do with you, really.”
Grace knows she shouldn’t be, but she’s hurt by that. She’s started to enjoy the idea, in the last day, that she matters: that she can make things happen instead of waiting for them to happen to her. But of course it’s none of her business. Raj is probably right.
“Okay,” she says. “Are we done here?”
“Okay,” Raj says. “Sure.”
Grace starts toward the door that will take them back down the stairs to the party, where she doesn’t really know anyone, either.
“Wait,” Raj calls after her. “Let me give you my number. In case it gets bad and you need, you know. A professional opinion.”
“Oh,” Grace says. “Yeah. Um. Thanks.”
“Least I can do,” Raj says.
He takes her number, too. Probably won’t ever smile at her again in person. Probably the whole thing will come up and crest hard, and then wash away, high tide falling back to low again. But there she’ll be in his contacts list, Grace Thomas: some tiny proof that all of this happened for real.
—
Grace wakes up in the morning next to Lianne in the center of a slowly deflating air mattress. Gary is passed out on the couch. Max and Dylan are cuddled up in his bed, and the girls from last night are nowhere in evidence. Paul, one of the other roommates, is standing in the kitchen, making coffee with the careful air of someone whose hangover is bur
ied like a land mine somewhere just under his skin.
Grace winces against the sunlight and shifts quietly. By the time it became apparent that Gary couldn’t drive them home last night, she was too tired to take over for him. Everyone else was drunk enough to pass out immediately wherever they were, but she was sober, and now she’s stiff with discomfort. Her phone was in her dress pocket but it must have migrated out at some point, and now it’s lodged uncomfortably against her back.
Katy texted her twice: wheeeeerrre aaaaare you? Need to talk about THE BREAKKKK!!!!!!!! And then: only if you’re ready of course.
There’s another text from an unknown number. Underneath the area code it just says, RURAL AREA, GEORGIA.
You’re not gonna sell this # to the tabloids, it says, right?
Her heart is racing, her pulse so strong that her fingertips shake with it.
No, Jes, Grace says.
Good, he sends back. Raj says things have been quiet for you so far.
So far.
“Hey,” Paul calls from the kitchen. “Grace, you up? Can you come help me with this? I’m sort of worried I’m going to puke in the grinder.”
“Shut up,” Lianne calls back.
“Yeah, shut up,” Max agrees from bed. “Dylan, what the hell are you doing here?”
“I don’t know, leave me alone,” Dylan says. “I might die here, bro.”
Grace’s phone stays quiet in her hands.
Lianne says, “Grace. Grace. You are not hungover. Please go make sure that my coffee doesn’t have vomit in it.”
“I’m tired,” Grace says, but she’s already swinging her legs to the floor, testing them for pins and needles.
“Please,” Lianne says piteously. “If you love me at all.”
There are many things Grace doesn’t know, but a boy in a kitchen is a very predictable kind of creature. The minute Paul sees that she’s coming, he lets the cup he’s holding drop with a clatter.
“We love you, Gracie,” Lianne calls from the bed.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she says. “I’m making your coffee. Of course you do.”
At home, Grace opens a message and types Katy’s name into the To field.