Grace and the Fever

by Zan Romanoff

  Instead, Grace’s life seems to mostly be staying the same as it’s always been. If she wants anything to change, she realizes, she’s really probably going to have to make it happen herself. Ugh.

  Grace turns to her computer. She has two Tumblr accounts, technically. One is linked to her actual name; it has fifty followers and a handful of random posts. It’s mostly just an excuse to keep the Tumblr app on her phone.

  The other account is Gigi’s. It’s called The Lollypop Guild, and it’s just Land and Solly all the time over there, reblogs of photosets and videos of them together, recommendations of fan fiction she’s read and liked, tweets about them from other fans and celebrities, screenshots of pieces from gossip magazines.

  The Guild has nearly four thousand followers, which is respectable—though she really only has that many because she’s friends with Katy. Usually Grace tries not to rely on her for anything, but just this once she’s hoping Katy will make a big deal out of what she has to say. Because she’s pretty sure someone really needs to say it. She’s not sure what she can do about her self yet, but she can try to help Jes and the band just a little bit.

  She keeps it simple.

  Tumblr text post

  the-lollypopguild.tumblr.com

  June 8, 2:46 pm PDT

  I think we need to look a little more carefully at this whole JES IS A CHEATER STORY, and some of its content. Management is letting the press print straight-out lies, or at least letting speculation run rampant, and why? So we’ll get distracted and miss what’s right in front of us: they’ve run these boys into the ground, and they’d rather destroy them now with awful rumors about their personal lives than admit the obvious truth: Jes is exhausted. Kendrick is exhausted. Land and Solly are exhausted.

  Who cares if he met up with an ex (and who says she’s an ex, besides some nebulous “source close to the band,” L O L what even is that)?? He and Row are in NYC hanging out and she looks happy. If she’s happy and he’s happy, we should be happy—and give them space to do whatever it is they need to do.

  There. Easy. She hits Post and then closes the laptop to avoid the temptation to refresh constantly to check for notes. She tells herself it doesn’t really matter if anyone on the internet cares what she has to say.

  —

  They do, though. When she checks an hour later, Katy has, in fact, reblogged the post with the tags #THIS #YES #THIS, and it’s garnered fifteen hundred–plus notes.

  Not all of them are from people who agree with her.

  LOLLY ’SHIPPERS, STAND DOWN, a well-circulated version goes. YOU THINK EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS TO FEVER DREAM IS SOME DAMN MANAGEMENT CONSPIRACY BUT GET YOUR HEADS OUT OF YOUR ASSES, SOMETIMES JES CHEATING IS JUST JES CHEATING. The post was written by a Rowena fan blogger, but that doesn’t make it sting any less. YOU MIGHT HAVE TO ACCEPT THAT THE FEVER IS BREAKING. THE BOYS MIGHT BE BETTER OFF WITHOUT HIM.

  Grace closes her laptop and rubs her eyes.

  She could have seen this coming, kind of: the part of the fandom that doesn’t believe in Land and Solly pretty much hates the part that does. They think Lolly ’shippers are overbearing and oppressive, and meddling where they don’t belong. They think Lolly girls are deluding themselves, or fetishizing gay men, or sublimating their disgust at their own female bodies by worshipping men’s.

  Grace has read all of the arguments, or the beginnings of them, anyway, because none of them change the fact that she believes in Land and Solly together, and thinks it’s beautiful. She loves the idea that love can be kept like a secret, that it can grow up through the cracks between things and take you by surprise. That it can be tender and powerful, forbidden and flourishing.

  She was a Fever Dream fan before Land and Solly, but the idea that they might be together was one of the big things that drew her deeper into fandom, looking for a community that saw what she was seeing, and wanted to keep seeing it, and imagining it when they couldn’t. The two of them together became the image of love for her: the way they looked at each other during interviews and solos onstage. The ease of Land’s arm around Solly’s shoulders.

  She’s tried not to let it get the best of her. Sometimes fandom functions like an echo chamber, and it’s hard to remember that the rest of the world thinks she’s crazy for believing in them in the first place. It just seems so evident, though. They’ve inked it onto their skin, a forever promise: what’s true.

  Of course their management company doesn’t want them out. They barely let the boys talk about their relationships with girls, unless they’re the convenient kind: Caro is managed by Rackwell & Hart, too. She and Jes dated for exactly one month before her second album came out.

  But there’s no point in saying any of that to the internet, which already has Gigi’s post in its teeth. Trying to defend her position will only make it worse.

  Ugh, she messages Katy. Thanks for the reblog / I always forget that the wider ’net is full of jagweeds. Her Tumblr inbox is showing twenty new messages, and the post has crossed past two thousand notes. Her dashboard is wrecked. She blocks notifications and turns off anonymous messaging, but the damage is already done.

  It’s weird not to have the internet as a refuge. Grace is so used to opening up her laptop and slipping into another world, one where she’s essentially anonymous, and everyone is excited about the same things. But she’s also always managed to slide under the general radar before, and she didn’t mean to invite criticism now, not about something that seems so stupidly, self-evidently true.

  Jes is tired. She is no one.

  But Grace can’t say that, and no one really wants to listen to Gigi when she does.

  —

  The rumors that the band is about to break up gain enough traction that her mother asks about them while they’re making dinner one evening: “Will you be sad about that?” she says absently. “I know you used to listen to them a lot.”

  Grace looks at her mother, who’s concentrating on the bell pepper she’s chopping, mostly focused on the knife in her hands.

  “Yeah, I guess,” she says.

  When Grace’s phone rings, June is sliding rapidly toward July: It’s been two weeks since the photos. Longer than that since Jes’s last text to her.

  “Hi,” she says, and then thinks, Was that a stupid thing to say? And then, How can hi be stupid? That’s what everyone says, and, It feels really stupid, though.

  “Hi,” Jes says. “I tried to text you but it was getting really long, so I thought that I would call.”

  “Okay,” Grace says. She wants so badly to be calm, but her heart is hammering in her chest. She feels a babble coming up and can’t seem to stop it. “Isn’t it funny that you have to say that? I mean, we all carry our phones the whole day, everywhere we go, and this is what they’re for, but when you use it for that, for a phone call, you have to, like, justify yourself.”

  She wasn’t this awkward when they were in person. Why could she hold it together then? But she was numb with shock at that point. Now she’s had way too much time to think about it.

  Jes doesn’t seem put off, though. He laughs. He has a really good laugh. “Totally,” he says. “I actually prefer talking on the phone to texting sometimes, if you really have something to say. It can get confusing otherwise, you know?”

  Grace wonders if he’s thinking of things with Rowena. She doesn’t know if she can ask. Instead, she just says, “Totally,” and waits for him to say something else.

  “Well, so, but I did call about something. Actually.” He sounds a little nervous now, too. That’s nice. “You can say no if you want. But I’m back in LA, and Row…who’s…she’s…my girlfriend, she’s flying in next week. We’re going to a birthday party, and we’re going to be photographed, probably.” He takes a deep breath. “I don’t know if you’ve been following what people are saying online. Are you okay, by the way?”

  “I’m fine,” Grace says. “I just keep telling people that whoever she is, she’s a dead ringer, but she’s not me.”


  “Okay. Um. Because there keep being reports about me, and Row, and the band, and it’s stupid, and usually we’d just ignore the whole thing, but it’s starting to drive everyone a little crazy, and I think our fans are worrying. So we’re all going to the party together, and we were thinking you might want to come with us, too, to show that there’s nothing weird going on. Row kind of wants to meet you, actually.”

  Grace has no idea what to say.

  “I mean…won’t that…won’t everyone…know?” she finishes lamely. “About me? Who I am?”

  “You really don’t have to,” Jes says. “I can understand why you wouldn’t want to. But I feel like the problem here is the mystery. Who are you? What were you doing with me? And we can just say: old friends, hanging out, Row knows her, mystery solved. You can all go home now.”

  “I just—can I think about it?”

  “Of course! Of course. Party’s not till next week. Thursday. Oh, I should—are you busy?”

  Grace swallows her laugh. She is so not busy. “I work a day shift at a coffee shop,” she says truthfully. “Other than that, my schedule is, like, pretty open.”

  —

  Grace mulls it over and over and over until her head feels dizzy with the turning of the thought: Of course I have to go. And then, Of course I can’t. Even if it wasn’t with Jes, the offer would be tempting: She’ll be inside the kind of party she’s only ever seen pictures of. She’ll move from the margins into the center of everything. No one else will care that she’s at the party, but she’ll be there. She can stop wondering what that kind of life would feel like and live it, however briefly, for herself.

  The thing about being in that center, though, is that she won’t be able to control who sees her there, or what they say about her when they do.

  She’s gotten away with so much, so far. It seems stupid to risk more.

  Eventually she screws up her courage and calls Raj.

  “So Jes did ask you,” he says. He doesn’t sound surprised. Grace wonders, and can’t ask, how closely they’ve all been keeping in touch since the band’s been on this break. “Good.”

  “Good? You think I should do it?”

  On the other end of the line, Raj shifts and sighs. There’s mumbling somewhere near him, someone else’s voice speaking soft and low and urgent. “Hang on,” he says.

  Grace waits.

  “It’s sort of the opposite of what happened before,” he says when he returns. “Because that was, you know, a story, and this probably isn’t news to anyone who doesn’t already care about the band. Who’s going to report, Oh, they might not really break up after all? And this way we’re out in front of it. The PR people are all ready with the She’s just a regular girl, please respect her privacy routine.”

  “Isn’t the point of the paparazzi that they don’t respect people’s boundaries?”

  “Um,” Raj says. “Yeah. Sure. True. There might be some speculation. I guess really what we’re asking you is selfish: Risk some backlash. Help the band.”

  Grace doesn’t know she’s already made her decision until she feels Raj’s words turn something in her, the last click of a key in a lock. She owes Fever Dream the last four years. Some days, she feels like she owes them everything. They’re the fantasy she lived on through the long, boring days of high school, the idea that her life could be taken, suddenly, and turned into something sparkling. That what’s burning inside of her matters. She isn’t ready to give that up yet. When he puts it that way, there’s just no chance she’ll say no.

  “Okay,” she tells him. “I’m in.”

  Two days before she’s supposed to show up at Solly’s house, Grace wakes achier than usual, a low gray cloud settled heavily over her mood. She works through half of her shift at Coffee Bean, blaming all of the standing for her irritation and her back hurting, before it starts to occur to her what’s really happening.

  The tightness that’s been swirling inside her gathers and concentrates in her abdomen. Her mood grows sharp edges that form into teeth. She mixes up an order, makes the chai iced and the coffee hot instead of the other way around, and has to slip into the back room to cry with frustration.

  She’s totally about to get her period.

  When she gets home that night, her black mood settles heavily over the dinner table. Her mother gives up on trying to coax her into talking after the first few minutes, and they eat in uncomfortable silence. Grace is supposed to do the dishes; she wishes that her mom was the kind of person who would give her a pass, even once, without her having to ask for it.

  It’s only in moments like this that she fantasizes about her dad still being around. He’s a talker. He would take up so much space she could slip around the house unnoticed if she needed to. He fills up every room with his presence.

  Until, inevitably, he leaves it. Which is why Grace doesn’t let herself dwell too much on the what-ifs of him.

  Instead, her mom lets the silence sit and waits until she’s heading upstairs to ask, “Grace, I was just— Is anything wrong?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “You seem pretty quiet for this to be nothing.”

  “It’s PMS. I’ll survive.”

  “Do you want a Midol?”

  This is how her mom handles things: she thinks of rational solutions and practical to-dos.

  “I just want to go upstairs,” Grace says. “Can I, please?”

  Upstairs, though, her room is a catastrophe. Her closet door is open, and there’s a knee-high pile of clothes on the floor. Neither Raj nor Jes told her what to wear to this thing, and Grace has been driving herself crazy trying to figure it out. Last night she pored over pictures taken at Holy Communion, the West Hollywood nightclub Raj said the birthday girl has rented out for the occasion, but it’s a gay spot, so mostly there were shots of enormous men in tiny shorts, or girls in bandage dresses and heels that look like practical jokes.

  There’s an easy solution to her problem, or at least one of them: Cara has selected every important outfit Grace has worn since they started hanging out in the fourth grade. She’s just better at this kind of thing than Grace is, maybe because she actually enjoys it. And she would probably be happy to be asked.

  It’s just— Ugh, Grace thinks. She’s seen Cara and Lianne a few times since the party at Max’s, and whenever they’re all together, things seem normal and fine, but then every now and again she’ll see another Snapchat or Instagram, and know that the two of them are still going places without her. Lianne’s family is out of town now, doing their annual summer visit to her grandparents in Korea, and Grace hasn’t heard a peep from Cara the whole time. She doesn’t know what to make of that. Because, unlike Lianne, Cara will keep quiet about whatever’s going on with her for as long as she possibly can, which makes guessing extra difficult.

  Grace weighs the humiliation of Cara avoiding or ignoring her against the shame of showing up at the party in whatever dumb thing she’ll inevitably put on herself, and decides that at least whatever happens with Cara will stay private.

  So she texts her,

  I have to go to a work party for my mom on Thurs.

  Cara writes back immediately: Ughhhhh SO boring

  I know! But it’s at a cool restaurant

  And the summer associates will be there

  So I was thinking I might at least wear something fun

  Grace Thomas! Are you inviting me to dress you up!!!!!!

  Grace lets out an actual sigh of relief. One of the reasons Cara is such a clam is that once you get her talking, she’s a truly terrible liar. If she’s texting enthusiastically, she’s going to be genuinely enthusiastic.

  Yes please.

  I’m coming over right nowww and you can’t stop me!

  Grace flops face-first onto her bed.

  Cara tumbles into her room twenty minutes later with a duffel bag over her shoulder. “I hope you meant it when you said fun,” she says. Grace sees the edge of something hot pink peeking out from where the zip
per is straining to keep the bag closed.

  “Fun for me,” she says.

  “I wasn’t aware you knew what that word meant in the first place,” Cara says.

  Grace isn’t hurt by that; she knows it’s true. She rolls over onto her back. “Sick burn, dude.”

  “Thank you!” Cara says. “I’ve been practicing.”

  She probably has been, too. She’s a soft touch, and they both know it.

  Grace stands up and holds her arms out at her sides. “Okay,” she says. “Make me over.”

  Cara has her try on the hot-pink number, but she brought a bunch of reasonable options, too. Grace slips in and out of them while Cara gives her a rambling update on her summer so far, which mostly involves either avoiding her ex-boyfriend at parties or letting him drag her into corners at parties to discuss whether she’s really, really sure they shouldn’t try to stay together in college.

  It’s nice, Grace thinks. It’s been too long since she actually made an effort to hang out alone with Cara, instead of relying on the bonds of their trio to keep them automatically close.

  “He just keeps trying,” Cara says.

  “And you keep letting him. Because you’re the world’s most patient person,” Grace tells her.

  “I know,” Cara says. “But, like, I was really in love with him, you know? I don’t want to hurt him. I also don’t want to spend my whole freshman year texting someone four states away.”

  “You never want to hurt anyone.”

  “Who wants to hurt people?” Cara asks.

  Grace wants to say, Me, sometimes, but that’s not true, exactly. She didn’t want to hurt Lianne or Cara that morning by ignoring their message, any more than they probably wanted to hurt her by going to a party and not inviting her along the night before. It’s just that sometimes getting what you want involves hurting people, even if you don’t mean it to.

  Or maybe that’s just Grace being selfish.

  Cara is still contemplating the problem with her ex. “I just can’t— I can’t do what he wants. Not right now. Maybe someday.”