by Zan Romanoff
Grace chooses her words carefully. “I think that’s maybe why he’s confused. Or, like, why he thinks he has a chance. Because if you think you might be together someday, then, you know. Why not now?”
Cara zips her into a black slip dress. Grace actually likes the way it looks on her: casual but not messy. Like something she picked out carefully so she could throw it on whenever.
“Because right now I want to see what else is out there,” Cara says.
Grace catches herself pouting at herself in the mirror and turns it into a funny face. “Yeah. I know. Of course I just feel like, man, if I knew someone I liked that much—loved—I’d be happy to quit dating forever. Not that I really, you know. Date. In the first place.” She forces herself to laugh, like it’s totally funny and fine that she’s never not been single, like it doesn’t bother her and definitely shouldn’t bother anyone else.
“You’re a romantic,” Cara says. “And a babe. This is perfect. This is the one, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Grace agrees. She doesn’t believe Cara, but it’s still nice to hear. “Unzip?”
Cara does. “See, you can’t get out of this dress fast enough, even though it looks sick on you,” she says. “That’s how I feel about Evan. I love him. It’s still not what I want right now.”
“Not wanting to date doesn’t make me a romantic,” Grace says.
“Thinking it’s possible to meet someone when you’re a teenager and stay with them for the rest of your life is what makes you a romantic.”
“You don’t think it’s possible?”
“I mean, I don’t think it happens often enough to bear thinking about.”
A cramp pulses between Grace’s hip bones. Land and Solly grew up together; they sang in church choir together for years before Jes moved to town and turned them into Fever Dream.
It’s not that she thinks it’s normal, it’s that she finds it beautiful, the idea that someone could know you and know you, that you could slide seamlessly from one kind of love into another. It’s what she wants most for herself, and can’t have, because no one’s fallen in love with her yet.
Whoever she ends up with will walk into her life midway through, and she’ll have to figure out how to make room for him in the middle of all her clutter and mess. She’ll have to figure out how much of herself she can show him without scaring him off.
—
After Cara leaves, Grace puts the dress on again. She does her hair. She puts on eyeliner. She looks at herself in the mirror.
The outfit helps, but it doesn’t make Grace into someone else entirely, which is who she wants to be at this party: a girl whose beauty is faultless and flawless, the kind of thing that just radiates out from her skin. Someone who can date casually. Someone who can walk away whenever she wants to.
Instead, she catalogs all the things that give her away as a faker and a try-hard: Her indifferent, unstructured eyebrows, and her crappy at-home manicure and bitten cuticles. Her knees are rough and dry. She’s wearing a thong and bra from some cheap mall store, and she’s never even had a bikini wax. On the day of the party she’ll probably have all that plus a maxi tampon. And even if she could sheen and buff and polish her surface, the interior would still be what it’s always been: she would still be her wild, messy, impossible self underneath.
The cramps let up but they don’t disappear. The day of the party Grace pops two Advil just before getting in the car and spends the drive waiting for them to smooth her out, feeling sore and flushed, almost sick with anxiety.
The Advil kicks in around the time she pulls off the freeway and starts climbing up the narrow lanes of Mulholland. Every time she rounds a curve, the world seems to fall away just outside her window, a sheer drop down into nothing; when she catches glimpses of the city waiting below, it’s all metal and glass, glinting knife-bright. The roadside foliage is summer brown and sere, but the houses up here are surrounded by lushness, and green.
“You’ll see the gate,” Raj said on the phone when he was giving her the address, and in fact it’s hard to miss. Solly’s house has fifteen feet of fencing in front of it, and razor wire at the top. It seems out of place in the quiet repose of the neighborhood until Grace sees exactly what it’s keeping out: a few men are already idling against the hoods of their cars on the street nearby, heavy cameras hung casually around their necks.
Grace registers them registering her as her car slows and noses into Solly’s driveway. She ducks forward and hopes that her hair will hide enough of her face before remembering that the point of tonight is to be photographed with the boys. Somehow it seems different, though, to be out here alone. Vulnerable. She’s glad when she dials the code Raj gave her and he answers immediately, buzzing the gate open.
Almost as soon as her car is through, the gate starts to close behind her, hurrying to seal her in. When she gets out, the quiet around her feels hermetic, like the air is different here, heavy with money or maybe the same gravitational force that was working on Jes the first time she saw him. Most laws are different for the very famous; why should nature’s be an exception?
The front door bangs open before she has a chance to straighten her dress or touch up her lipstick.
“Hey,” Jes says. “Grace. You’re here.”
It’s only the second time Grace has ever seen him in person, she realizes. She wasn’t ready that first night, and he was out of his context, dropped in the middle of hers. This, though, is Jes Holloway like she’s learned to look at him: he’s dressed already, hair done, head-to-toe golden in the last light of day.
It’s like she’s a child in Mary Poppins, hopping into a sidewalk drawing and watching it turn real all around her. The house is a movie mansion, and standing in front of it is a teen magazine centerfold, calling out her name.
“Sorry,” she finds herself saying when she can get it together to exhale. “I wasn’t totally sure, um, what to wear.”
Jes grins impishly. “Whoops!” he says. “Oh, I should have told you to ask someone—Row could have had someone pull you a dress, or— I mean—You look great, though. You do.”
Raj appears behind him in the doorway and smacks him playfully across the back of the head. “You made the girl get dressed on her own?”
He crosses the threshold and comes out to where Grace is standing, still, stuck to the pavement. “They really do forget that not everyone has a stylist on speed dial. Or an assistant with a stylist on speed dial.” He wraps an arm around her, and Grace has never been so grateful for anything in her life. His touch anchors her back in her skin and gives her the courage to move her legs.
“Boys are always useless,” she says, only a little faintly, to Raj as they walk.
“You really do look great,” Raj says. “And you know how these parties are: it’s only attitude that matters, anyway.”
Grace doesn’t know how to say, Of course I don’t know that.
Jes steps back to let them come in. Raj pats her as he pulls his arm back and starts up the stairs. Jes touches her shoulder absently, already turning to look for someone else. “Aleks?” he calls. “Aleks?”
A man roughly the size of a small mountain peers around the doorway. Beyond him Grace can see tiles; she thinks it might be the kitchen. “Hey,” he says. “So this is the infamous Grace.”
“Sorry,” Grace says again. “I didn’t mean to cause—”
Jes swats her shoulder this time. “Stop apologizing,” he says. “Aleks knows that all the trouble I get into is my own fault, anyway.”
Aleks does not disagree with him.
“Anyway, Aleks is gonna be coming out with us tonight, just to make sure everyone is on their best behavior. So if you need anything, he’s your guy.”
“I don’t get drinks for you, though,” Aleks says. He winks at her and turns back to the kitchen.
“You ready?” Jes says, nodding up the stairs.
Oh god, Grace thinks, a little hysterically, remembering. There are more of them.
But th
ere’s nothing for it now. Jes leads her up the stairs and she trails behind, trying to see everything. It’s so different from Max’s apartment, which looked like an IKEA floor model someone had been crashing in without permission. Solly’s house is an overgrown Mediterranean villa with terra-cotta tiling and white walls, deep navy fabric, and little gold accents on the end tables. There are end tables. It’s beautiful, but too fussy to be stuff he picked out himself. Some poor decorator was probably tasked with making the place feel personal, and finding touches that would say to someone she’d never met before: home.
The master bedroom, where everyone is hanging out, is the only part of the house that she recognizes as belonging to a boy. It’s covered in the detritus of the band getting ready, shirts and pants, hats and sneakers strewn everywhere but the clothing racks they came in on. Hip-hop is blasting so loudly that the floor shakes in time with the beat.
Kendrick is sitting on the edge of the bed, his blond head tilted low to drink something amber and icy from a heavy-looking cut-glass cup. He doesn’t glance up when they come in. Solly is in the bathroom, messing with his hair, and Raj is sitting on the counter next to him.
She doesn’t see Row or Land.
“Is Rowena here yet?” Grace asks Jes.
“Her flight got delayed. She’s gonna meet us at the party,” Jes says. For a guy who’s supposed to be introducing his girlfriend to someone he was photographed hanging out with in the middle of the night, he sounds very casual. But probably this kind of thing is normal to him, now.
Jes nudges Kendrick’s ankle with his own. Watching it happen, unmediated, makes things seem momentarily surreal again: the easy physical intimacy between them is something she knows best from seeing it on a screen.
Jes says, “Ken, Grace, Grace, Kendrick.”
“Hi,” she says, and gives him an awkward, aborted wave.
“Hi,” Kendrick says. He squints at her a little bit, like he’s aligning the face in front of him with the one he saw in pictures. Grace resists the temptation to do the same thing back at him. “Raj says Jes messed up?”
“He didn’t give her a dress code,” Raj says.
Kendrick says, “You look fine, but whiskey helps with everything.” He nods toward a table across the room that’s been set up as a makeshift bar. “Especially nerves. So feel free to help yourself.”
“Oh,” Grace says. “No. Thanks. I’m good.”
“Smart girl,” Jes says. “No reason to start early when it’s going to be a long night.” He sounds edgy. Grace is relieved to see a crack in the practiced calm of his façade.
Jes takes an ice cube from Kendrick’s glass and hurls it at Solly in the bathroom. It pegs him on the shoulder. “Sol, stop messing up Brooke’s hard work and come say hi.”
“Hi!” Solly calls over his shoulder, and goes back to his hair.
Jes frowns.
“See?” he says to Grace. “I’m not even the worst animal of the bunch. You want anything else to drink? Water? Soda? Usually there’s no food, but since Sol’s been here for a minute I think someone must have stocked up the fridge.”
“You know Raj did,” Kendrick says. He stands to refill his glass, and Grace can see in the way his brows draw toward each other and the concentration he’s mustering to do it without stumbling that this refill won’t be his first.
“That’s what assistants are for!” Jes says. This time there’s definitely something forced in his tone, like he’s trying to keep Grace’s attention on him instead of Kendrick’s half-full pour.
Oh, she thinks. So maybe this is why they’re on hiatus, actually, or a piece of it. Kendrick—not Jes—would be the one Max was instructed never to serve.
As soon as she sees it, a half dozen other rumors swirl into her mind, stories she’s heard about girls running into Kendrick as he’s sneaking into a hotel just before sunrise, unsteady on his feet, or talking to them at parties and telling them the same story once, twice, three times in a row. Everyone gets too drunk sometimes, she thought when she heard them. And everyone exaggerates about celebrities’ bad behavior.
Something about the steady, focused way Kendrick looks at his drink makes her think this might be a little more serious than that.
“Land just texted,” Raj calls from the bathroom. He’s knocked Solly’s hands away and is fixing the last little pieces of his bangs with casual efficiency. “He was with George and lost track of the time. He says he’ll meet us there.”
“Does that mean George is coming?” Solly asks. Grace doesn’t catch the look that the two of them share, only that there is one. She files that away for later. She’s never heard of George. Is it possible that someone is coming between Land and Solly—and she’s never even heard of him?
Jes turns to Grace. “We’re leaving soon, I promise. Thanks for, um, you know. Putting up with all of this. It’s good of you.”
Grace doesn’t always know what to say, but this time the answer comes to her easily. “The most famous boy band in the world invites you to a party, you don’t turn down the invitation,” she tells him.
“That’s what I figured you’d say.”
On the drive over, the music is even louder: too loud for anyone to talk. In addition to Aleks, who’s the muscle, there’s a driver so nimbly efficient and so completely disinterested in the speed limit that he manages to shake their paparazzi tail—not that it ends up mattering.
When they pull up to Holy Communion, the valet line is atrocious and the sidewalk is choked with photographers. The driver gets them as close as he can, but there’s probably ten or fifteen feet they’ll have to walk to get through the scrum and up to the roped-off entrance of the club.
They’re idling the last few minutes in the car when Jes’s phone lights up with a text. He reads it once, twice, looks at Grace, and looks out the window. “Dammit,” he says, more to the street than to anyone in particular. “Row says she can’t make it.”
No one else reacts. Grace tries to figure out whether or not he’s upset before realizing that she’s the one who’s supposed to be upset by this.
“What do you mean, can’t make it? I thought we were meeting her?” Her voice, what can be heard of it over the music, anyway, sounds high and thin and strange.
“She’s been visiting family in the Bay,” Jes says. “She was trying to catch a late flight down, but I guess she missed it. She has to be back in New York tomorrow, anyway. So it was kind of a pointless trip, really.”
“But I thought—” Grace cuts herself off.
The car stops and Kendrick, impatient, cracks his door. The wall of street sounds that rushes in drowns out even the music.
But I thought I was the point.
“She says she’s sorry. She’ll make it up to you.”
Jes keeps pressing his phone’s Home button, lighting up the screen and then clicking it dark again. His lock photo is of the boys sitting onstage somewhere, probably on their first tour, their skinny arms wrapped around each other’s necks and shoulders, wound around and through each other like a long braid.
He says, “You said you wanted to go to the party.”
He’s been drinking on the way over, and she can smell whiskey, acrid, on his breath.
Solly and Kendrick have slipped out already, and Aleks is stepping forward to hold back the wave of paps turning their way. Flashes snap and pop through the open door and into the car’s dark interior, lighting up the odd angles of Jes’s face, exploding like lightning in the air between them. Suddenly Grace understands that she struck a bargain without asking much about the terms. The rules are different here, inside of the pictures they’re taking.
“I did,” she says.
Jes offers her his hand.
She tries to remember anything about how to get out of a car, how to stand and walk, but it’s so overwhelming: the flare of flashes going off blinds her, and the roar of men screaming out names fills up her ears, and then her head. There’s no room left for thought, only the animal instinct to pr
ess into his body, away from theirs. She stumbles every step she takes.
When she sees the pictures in the morning, she’ll wonder why she didn’t put up a hand to shield her eyes, why it didn’t seem possible to protect herself against the invasion of their gaze. In every image she looks wan and dazed and surprisingly small. Jes is smiling vacantly. They are holding hands.
Grace doesn’t know that now, though. She barely registers when they step to the other side of the rope and Jes turns to give a wave to the ravenous horde behind them.
It’s only when they’re inside, surrounded by a different kind of noise and light, that she starts to feel like she can breathe again.
“You get used to that eventually?” she asks. The music is so loud that she has to stand on her tiptoes and yell right into Jes’s ear.
“No,” he says. He seems to be looking directly at her for the first time all night. “You learn how to get drunk before it happens.”
“I don’t really drink,” Grace says.
“I’m sorry,” Jes tells her.
Kendrick nudges a flask against Jes’s chest, and he pushes it away. He leans in, and his breath is hot against her neck. “Maybe this was a mistake. I forget how— What it’s—”
“I’ll be fine,” Grace says. It’s too late now. She puts on a smile. “Go have fun or something. I can take care of myself.”
Jes laughs. “I’m not leaving you alone in this mess.” Someone coming by bumps into him, and his nose collides with her cheek. He reaches out a hand to her shoulder to steady himself, thumb brushing her collarbone. He keeps it there and tilts his head so he can yell into her other ear. “Who knows, you might even have a little bit of fun tonight.”
“Is that the idea?” Grace asks.
“Let me tell you: it is.”
It occurs to her a half second too late that he’s flirting with her, and she’s letting him. What’s worse is that Rowena’s not here and she’s not coming, and Grace is letting herself flirt back.
—
Someone reserved the band a banquette opposite the club’s entrance, and once they’ve set themselves up there, even though it’s someone else’s birthday party, it’s hard not to feel like the boys are the ones holding court. Jes is the only one who can legally drink, but their table is heavy with bottles anyway, metal buckets sweating in the heat from their loads of ice and Ketel and Dom. It occurs to Grace that no one even asked to see her ID.