by Zan Romanoff
She writes, I have something to tell you. She writes, You will never believe this. She writes, rough week not ready to talk abt anything. She erases every line.
Katy is kind of a big deal in Fever fandom—and beyond it, actually. She’s been around for years now, moving from one fixation to the next, amassing a following of people who love her sharply lined, beautifully detailed portraits of TV show characters and band members. Her fan art has been featured in exhibitions; she got the graphic design internship she’s working in now when one of her pieces crossed the dashboard of the firm’s art director.
She’s the kind of fan who does something with her obsession. Grace is the kind who just has it.
If those paparazzi pictures had been of Katy with Jes, everyone would have known it. She posts selfies to her Tumblr pretty regularly. She once sent Grace a careless screenshot of something that included her follower count in the right-hand corner: just above seventy-five thousand, and that was six months ago, so who knows by now. She only ever seems to get better known.
They’re really only friends because Katy happened to post about a Korean soap opera on the one night Grace has ever been drunk. Lianne had dropped her off at home two minutes before her curfew, at 11:58 p.m., and she’d been sitting alone in her room, after, trying to figure out if she should eat something, or drink water, or just go to bed. She was scrolling idly through Tumblr. Whatever rum and Coke was still in her system convinced her that sending Katy a message about her post on Boys over Flowers was a fine idea.
The rum and Coke had been served at her first party, which was held at Cody Robesville’s house. He lived in Calabasas in a gated community. Everyone came and got drunk out on the tennis court under harsh fluorescent lights. Bugs kept flying up to them and getting zapped, or swarming down to hover around the party. Girls slapped their own bare shoulders, thighs, knees.
Grace remembers looking around at all of her classmates and thinking: I don’t know any of you. She had a Fever Dream song stuck in her head they wouldn’t know the lyrics to. She was halfway through reading a fan fiction she couldn’t talk to any of them about.
She’d been lurking in the tags and running her own little Tumblr for a year, at that point, keeping the two halves of her life strictly separate. She liked it that way, she thought—at least Lianne had let her know early how to curate herself so that she could still seem normal on the outside. That night, though, something about being drunk made it seem sad to her—the idea that she worked so hard to hide what she loved from a bunch of people she wasn’t even sure she liked.
What was the point of pretending to feel things she wasn’t feeling when she was capable of feeling so much?
Her skin was alive and the night was full of possibilities, but she wasn’t interested in any of the immediate ones. She didn’t want to kiss Cody or any of his friends. She didn’t want another drink.
She wanted to be with people who loved what she loved. Who felt that love all through them like fire, like light.
Grace understood, then, why people let themselves get drunk even though it’s dangerous. Honesty seeped in where she’d been so careful to hold it at bay. It crumbled what she’d used to paper over her desire, exposing her to herself. It gave her permission. That was the night she realized that being able to act normal didn’t mean she ever really would be.
When she woke up in the morning, she was almost too embarrassed to check her Tumblr, but of course Katy had immediately messaged her back. That was part of the trick to her popularity, Grace learned eventually: she made herself accessible and approachable. Grace didn’t know that then, though, so it only seemed polite to reply to the message. And again, when Katy wrote back, and again and again, until they’d moved over to email, and one day Katy said, hey I don’t have ya numba, do I?
And that was that.
Grace looks at the last text she sent Jes: so far. So far, and no further. Doesn’t she owe Katy so much more than some boy she doesn’t even know?
But she does know Jes, is the thing. Or she doesn’t know him, but she knows them, the boys, the band, the sound of their voices filling stadium and studio air. She knows the creeping, pressing feeling that closed in on her when Raj said, All it takes is one or two phone calls. Doesn’t she owe it to Jes to be someone who’s not screwing him over, or telling his secrets, especially with whatever’s going on right now?
Finally, she types without looking and hits Send before she can let herself delete a word of it. Hey girl, lots going on this week. The thing with them canceling shows is—I don’t know, I honestly haven’t let myself think about it. They said it was b.c of Jes but, like, he hasn’t seemed tired or stressed really? He was out a few nights ago? Right now just keeping busy + keeping hope alive. Send me anything / everything.
It’s true as far as it goes: she hasn’t let herself think about how the break, for whatever reasons they’re taking it, will affect Fever Dream’s future. She believes that they need it; they’ve been on the road since their first album came out four years ago, pretty much, and their management company is well known for being a tyrannical nightmare.
So this will help, probably. And they’ll come back when they’re ready, and release the album, and everything will be amazing. And after that one, their contract with their record company, Elliptical, as well as Rackwell & Hart Management will be over, and Land and Solly will come out, and, and, and.
Grace curls up on top of her covers. She slept badly last night, and a nap sounds so good right about now. She clicks over to one of her favorite YouTube videos and closes her eyes while the sound plays.
She’s seen it so many times that she doesn’t need to look at it now to know what’s on the screen: clips from the earliest videos the band posted, of the four of them singing in Kendrick’s garage after church. They’re wearing good-boy polo shirts and carefully pressed khakis, and Jes’s hair is long and shaggy. Land is a gangly sixteen, and Solly is achingly quiet.
In the first clip, Land nudges Sol up closer to the laptop’s microphone and Solly shoots a smile over his shoulder at him. Their sound is compressed and distorted by a bad mic and the garage’s walls, but the echo of what’s coming is there already, somehow, that brain-melting intensity, the way their harmonies deepen beyond what four voices should be capable of.
There are a bunch of those, from before they thought to be self-conscious—before they could name what they were trying to be conscious of, Grace has always thought. They touch each other like those boys at the party last night, but with them the tenderness is never undercut by sarcasm. Solly’s head fits just so on the curve of Land’s shoulder, and when they’re not singing, it’s there more often than not.
Then there are interviews, the first ones soundtracked by shrieking girls, before interviewers figured out you had to get the boys inside and alone if you wanted to hear anything that was being said onstage. Jes has cut his hair and Kendrick has grown his; they’re all wearing terrible skinny jeans and oversized jerseys because the label was trying to give them an urban edge or something.
The clips get shorter, faster, there are so many of them: Solly singing you wake up what’s in me / what I didn’t know I needed / to breathe / your fire is my air and Land blushing, Jes filming the two of them napping together on one of the couches in the back of the bus, Solly’s hand lingering on Land’s thigh in an interview.
There are thousands of vids like this on the internet, LOLLY PROOF and SANDY LOVE and SWEETEST MOMENTS SOLLAND, but this one is Grace’s favorite because it ends with an interviewer asking them straight out about it.
The clip is from the beginning of the promo tour for their third album, Next Up, and the beginning of the boys being taken a little more seriously. They’re wearing their own clothes: dark jeans, vintage T-shirts. Kendrick looks even more sweetly Southern when he sticks with khakis, which he claims to actually like.
“So there are some heavy-duty internet rumors swirling about you guys and love,” the interviewer says.
“…Do you have a comment on that?” the interviewer asks.
Land surprises everyone by taking the question. “As everyone knows, my girlfriend and I have been together for almost a year now,” he says. Not: I have a girlfriend, or I don’t have a boyfriend. Just, as everyone knows. “But I get why it seems like we’re together. Sol is the love of my life.”
Something in Solly’s face breaks and shifts, like clouds clearing for sunshine, like sunshine striking water and turning its surface to shimmer and gleam. It only lasts for a second before he puts it away again.
“People are going to believe what they want to believe,” he says then, softly. “We know what’s true, and that’s all that really matters, honestly.”
The video ends with a close-up of two paparazzi stills taken when the boys were on someone’s yacht, vacationing off the coast of somewhere far away. It’s the kind of thing Grace usually tries not to look at, and then ends up looking at and feeling guilty about, like the guilt will balance her out somehow. Anyway, these pictures she always makes an exception for.
Because the boys are shirtless and grinning a few months later, and you can see that Solly has what’s true tattooed over his heart. Land has the same phrase inked on the back of his left shoulder, like they were shot through with the same arrow, so that in the last picture, where Sol has his arms around Land and his chin hooked over his shoulder, the words are pressed together, invisible to everyone except the two of them, and people who know how to look and see what’s true, and has been all along.
—
Days pass. Nothing. The boys move out of the hotel and Grace pores over cell phone photos someone took from the roof of them leaving: Their tiny bodies surrounded by staff and security, and then the crush of girls pouring in on all sides. The cars sliding away and down the street.
Press reports say that Jes is headed back to New York to make nice with Rowena, and that Kendrick is going to Georgia to spend the downtime with his fiancée, Cricket. Land is renting a house in Bel Air, and Solly owns a place in Beverly Hills.
Finally, Grace gets up her courage and sends Jes a text. You don’t have to tell me, obviously, she says. But you’re okay, right?
He answers almost twelve hours later. Grace is looking at pictures of him walking down the street to Rowena’s apartment, trying to match the depth of the circles under his eyes to what she saw on him a few days ago.
You’re sweet, he says. I’m fine.
Tumblr text post
Jadeonfire.tumblr.com
June 3, 3:00 pm PDT
Anonymous asked: Jay, I have a question. I feel like everyone is so mad at this girl who hung out with Jes, and usually I would be, too. But I’ve been in Fever fandom for two years now, waiting for the coming out, and I’m starting to feel like—are Lolly really fighting for it as hard as they could be? Are any of them? Why does the band keep saying yes to all of this stunting for the media instead of finding a way to be true to who they are? And why should I hate this random girl who probably has no idea what she’s gotten herself into?
Hi Nonny. First of all, I totally understand your frustration. Some days it’s super hard to hold out hope. But I just have to remind myself that this is exactly—exactly—what Rackwell & Hart is hoping will happen. They want to sell us a band of boys who are ALL AMERICAN STR8 FROM THE GOOD OLD SOUTH, and they’ll use Jes to promo a boys will be boys, fooling around with all the girls ;) agenda if Land and Solly won’t cooperate. Since Lolly were pictured clubbing together in Thailand a week ago I’ve been saying something gross was coming and now BOOM, management has manufactured a cheating scandal with Jes to make sure no one pays attention to, like, what exaaaactly went on that night.
They think if they just keep disappointing and distracting us for long enough we’ll stop caring about Lolly, or stop believing altogether. They think we can be fooled because we’re young; they think that because so many of us are women, we’re going to turn on each other and take each other apart.
So when I feel shitty and frustrated, I always try to remind myself what it will feel like when they have to admit they were wrong about us, and that they’ve been lying all along.
As for this latest Mystery Girl, who says she has no idea what she’s gotten herself into? She almost certainly signed some kind of contract—at the very least a nondisclosure agreement, or NDA, about what exactly her involvement is. Probably she has something that dictates exactly what appearances she’ll make with Jes, etc. She had to wonder when she did it about why they needed a fake nongirlfriend for someone so badly—and why they couldn’t just have someone he already knew do it.
Whatever she knows or doesn’t know about Lolly, she knows that she’s being used to perpetuate some kind of lie. She’s probably an actress or singer or something; as soon as we have a name, I’d bet you money we find some old YouTube video of her trying to Make It.
She’s furthering her career by helping hide a love story, contributing to the cruel tradition of closeting, and upsetting legions of loyal, devoted fans. I’m not saying to send her death threats—hate is never the answer—but we all need to acknowledge that she’s not a good person, and it’s fine to be upset at her for what she’s done to the boys and us. They keep trying to tear that closet down, and she’s helping R&H build it right back up again.
There are so many ways to break someone’s heart. I feel like Lollies know that better than most.
A week later, it happens just like Raj said it would. Cara’s text starts with a blurry picture-of-a-picture, and then it says: Got bored in the Vons checkout line. How much does this girl look like you?
(She’s not, right????)
Grace is standing in a strip mall parking lot when she gets it, suddenly frozen under the merciless Valley sun. She tilts her phone screen into her shadow to make sure she’s reading it right.
Haha, she sends back, and then panics. Should she have just ignored it? Consulted Raj, or Jes? She definitely shouldn’t confirm. Does that mean she should lie and say it isn’t her?
Cara doesn’t respond. Grace sets her phone to vibrate and puts it in her pocket so she’ll know right away if someone else is trying to get in touch. She goes to the sushi restaurant she’d planned to pick up lunch from and collects her takeout before heading to the 7-Eleven a few stores down. Better to know right away who has what on her.
Plus, she’d be lying through her teeth if she said she wasn’t kind of dying to see herself in a magazine.
Star printed the version with her back to the camera. People mentions the photos but doesn’t reproduce them. Life & Style has her face, but it’s too small and grainy to see much. Somehow, her favorite has betrayed her: Us Weekly has a two-page spread about Fever Dream’s recent dramas. Most of it is taken up by pictures of Row and Jes out in New York, but there’s a Where Are They Now? sidebar featuring each of the band’s exes—plus Grace.
It’s maybe the most surreal moment so far, to see her face—well, a quarter of her face—alongside Poppy (Land’s ex from early days, when management still thought they could straighten him out), and Olivia (also Land, and started right after the Poppy thing ended, like you could trick everyone by just replacing one girl with another), and Caro Ford (Jes, this time. The girl is a star in her own right, and the only one of Jes’s string of pre-Rowena girls anyone outside of fandom can be bothered to remember). As usual, Grace notes with satisfaction, Solly has no one to his name on the list.
Jowena together again at last! the blurb under one of the New York pictures starts.
Jes Holloway’s band recently canceled tour dates due to the star’s “exhaustion,” but he looked well rested and ready to party as he reunited with girlfriend Rowena Avery just days after pap shots
of him spending an intimate evening with another woman hit the internet.
A source close to the band claims that the mystery blonde {see WHERE ARE THEY NOW? at right} is a childhood love from Jes’s early days in California. “They hung out all night, and there were definitely sparks,” this friend said. “But Jes isn’t sure he wants to leave Row, when they have such a long history together.”
Grace stares at the page and tries not to laugh. It’s, like—childhood love, definitely sparks—she knew people made stuff up, but this is so made-up. This is, like, actual fiction. She stays there looking at it for long enough that the clerk wanders over and hovers behind her, as if to remind her that magazines aren’t free. She takes the hint and buys the copy. Her sweaty fingerprints have already smudged the cheap ink on either side of the page.
Somehow then it’s easy to text Cara back, crazy coincidence, huh? But I think if my “childhood love” was an international superstar or whatever you would remember that??
She doesn’t even have to make up her own lies; the tabloids are doing it for her.
It remains her line through the afternoon and the next day when people send her messages about it. LOL, as if.
She feels like a prey animal in the forest, lying very still, and hoping everyone will just forget about her. Which is pretty much how she spent high school, actually.
The point of fandom was that it was the one place she wasn’t afraid to be anything: weird, passionate, intense-to-obsessive, to show the unironic, uncool underbelly of her otherwise carefully guarded private self. The deepest fantasy of Fever Dream was that if she could meet them—if she could know them—somehow they would help her bridge the gap, and the alchemy that made Jes, Kendrick, Land, and Solly into a world-famous boy band would transform her, too, and make her into some perfect combination of Gigi and Grace: a girl who knew who her self was, and how to be it in all different kinds of rooms.