by Zan Romanoff
Kendrick, Solly, and Jes drink the vodka straight, dropping in cubes from the bucket to cut it just a little bit; they pour the champagne for whoever stops by to say hi. When Land arrives, he takes possession of one of the champagne bottles and disappears into the crowd with it.
“Someone’s amped up tonight,” Kendrick observes.
Solly finishes his drink for him. “You’re one to talk.”
Mostly to make Jes feel better about how obviously out of place she is, Grace lets him order her one drink, and then another. Whatever he gets her from their waitress is so fizzy and fruity that she can barely taste the booze.
For a while she pretends that means there wasn’t any to begin with, but when she stands up to go to the bathroom and her legs wobble, it’s harder to believe. Jes steadies a hand on the small of her back. His palm is warm, and it seems almost possible that the smile on his face is hers and hers alone.
Grace feels better after she’s peed and changed her tampon. The cramps are starting to break through the Advil again, something clenching like a fist below her navel—not painful, exactly, yet, but still distracting. She’s pretty sure that taking more on top of the drinks would be a bad idea.
By the time she wends her way back to the table, a teensy redhead has taken her spot at Jes’s side. She’s wearing a white romper and a white feathered headdress and her legs are curled easily underneath her on the banquette, a pair of platforms with disco-silver heels hanging off the red leather edge. They’re arguing about something, heads close. It looks too intimate to interrupt.
Grace flushes with discomfort: of course Jes would rather hang out with his actual friends than the weird girl his weird life demanded he bring along. She figures it’s time to take a lap of the place, anyway, so she loses herself in the crowd again before he can see her.
The air in the club is hot and thick with sweat and perfume. She wants to duck out, but the main entrance will probably still be covered by paparazzi. Grace doesn’t see any other doors except one, unmarked, that’s being flanked by a couple of security guards. VIP something-or-other, she figures. She’s about to walk right by it when the door opens, and a couple of girls blow in along with a gust of cool, clear night air.
The desire for quiet makes her reckless. She strides right up to the guards. One looks like he’s about to say something but she strides past him before he can, letting the door bang closed behind her.
She finds herself in a little garden patio, more like an alley than an actual outdoor space. There are chandeliers strung on wires that crisscross the sky overhead, and dividing walls and potted palms make secret corners to sit in. Rugs cover some of the pavement underfoot, and there are a few low couches and stools. Everyone else out here is smoking.
Grace wishes she’d saved one of her drinks and brought it with her. She would much rather sit and sip and eavesdrop than spend another hour nodding and smiling at conversations she can only half hear and barely understand. But even without an excuse she’s happy to find a little corner cushion enclosed by the folds of a screen, where she can sit down and exhale.
Without really thinking about what she’s doing, Grace pulls out her phone and texts Katy. Dude I’m at the weirdest and most exhausting party.
It’s closing in on midnight in Los Angeles, which means nearly 3:00 a.m. in New York, but it’s not even two minutes before Katy says, :(((( can u leave?
I mean I could, I guess? But it would be rude to the dude who brought me
Ummmmmm what dude would that be
Grace snorts, and then ducks her head so that no one will be able to pin the snort on her. Luckily everyone is too deeply engaged in their cigarettes and their gossip—and she’s too well hidden—for anyone to notice.
A friend of a friend of a friend, she says, which is true if you consider Max to Raj to Jes the way she got herself here.
It’s like this weird Hollywood thing
I can barely handle parties where I do know people
Wait but is anyone exciting there?? Aren’t FD supposed to be out in LA tonight???
“Hey,” someone says. “Mind if I join you?”
Jes is standing over her, hands shoved in his pockets. He’s shed his sharp, skinny blazer and there are rings of sweat visible under the arms of his T-shirt. The heat inside has melted his carefully coiffed hair, and with his bangs falling into his eyes he looks more human, somehow, less intimidatingly handsome and famous.
“Sure,” Grace says. There’s not really much room on the cushion. His thigh presses against hers when he sits. “This is how it all started,” she observes as he pulls a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “One innocent smoke break gone horribly wrong.”
Jes grins sideways at her. “That’s really how you think of it, huh? Horribly wrong?”
“Isn’t that what you would call it?”
“If you hadn’t been there, it still would have been a story,” he says. “Brooding Boy-Bander Tries to Ruin His Life and Lungs or something. Claiming I’m trying to sabotage my voice to get out of the contract. They can always make up a story. I almost admire it, you know. It’s creative, at least.”
Grace knows, intellectually, that smoking is gross and bad and wrong, but it’s very hard to believe that when Jes’s cheeks hollow with an inhale, skin pulling over the sharpness of his cheekbones, and his mouth pouts around the white cloud of his exhale. There’s something luxuriant about the way he does it, ostentatious, self-indulgently self-destructive. Looking at him, she understands instinctively that beauty and danger are twin edges of the same knife.
“Do you ever have trouble keeping it straight?” she asks, only really hearing the next words after she’s said them. “You know. What’s true?”
Jes leans his head back against the screen behind him. The lines of his throat, blurry under the chandeliers’ soft white light, turn long and sinuous. He looks like a young animal, sleek and beautiful. Grace gives up on trying to tell herself that she doesn’t want to touch him.
“No,” he says. Then, “Actually. Yes.”
“It must be hard.”
He keeps his face tilted up toward the sky. “Solly’s mom threatened to disown him last year,” he says. “Over—dumb stuff. Those pictures of us getting high on the boat in Thailand. Smoking weed. If she even knew what—” He closes down around the rest of the sentence and starts over. “It’s not like we need money now, but my parents left California because my dad got fired and couldn’t find another job. We were kind of desperate when we left. Really poor. In debt, actually. That was hard. This is something else.”
“Just because it’s not, like, coal mining—”
“I have to keep perspective on it,” Jes says. He sounds almost fierce. “I can’t let myself start thinking about, you know, Would I rather. Would it be better?…I can’t.”
What did he say, that first night? Wherever you go, there you are? He has all the freedom in the world—to work or not work, to travel, to buy every house in the city he grew up in or never go there again. But all of that possibility means there’s nothing left for him to dream about. If he wants it, he can have it.
And then what?
“Is that— You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, obviously. But. Are you glad to be on hiatus? To have, like, a little break from everything?”
Jes laughs bleakly. He’s staring straight ahead now. “No,” he says. “I hate not working.”
“I thought you were— They said you were exhausted.”
“There’s a lot going on,” Jes says. He sounds tired and careless. “It made sense. It makes sense. To do everything this way.”
“What way is that?”
“To make me the scapegoat. I was already the bad boy, so.”
Grace nods. This is one of the many things that Jes is never allowed to say in public: that the media took his brown skin and blue-black hair, handed down to him by his Indian mother, and decided they meant he was a player, a troublemaker, some kind of dark horse, or maybe j
ust dark altogether. He gets in trouble twice as often as the rest of the group, and it’s always seemed to Grace—and to Jes, too, apparently—that it’s because people are paying twice as much attention to his mistakes.
Now that he’s not trying to be charming, it’s easy to see what an effort he makes, normally, to be open and inviting, to draw everyone in and make them feel comfortable with him. Grace realizes that this is the first time they’ve been alone together since the photographer appeared that night on the cul-de-sac. She’s drunk on the feeling, as drunk as she’s ever been: alive with it, vital and reckless.
Maybe that’s how she ends up saying what she says next. “I was lying,” Grace tells Jes. “That night that we met? I recognized you. I love your music.”
“You don’t have to be nice about it.”
“I’m not being nice. This is embarrassing to admit, okay? I’m, like, a big fan of yours. I love Fever Dream.” She hasn’t said that out loud in years. Grace is shocked at herself, and then she sees him wince. “I mean, not that being a fan of yours is embarrassing! I just feel like a dork being, like, I love your music. Admitting how much time I spent listening to you before I met you.”
Oh god, now she’s done it. She’s heard this tone in her own voice before, and it’s always the one that makes guys rock back on their heels and squint at her. “Whoa,” they say. “You’re, like, kind of a handful.”
Jes isn’t most boys, though. He shakes his head a little bit, but not at her. “Nah,” he says. “It’s nice.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
He thinks about it. “Half the people we meet are industry people, totally full of shit. Like, they would unhinge their jaws if they thought it would make their smiles bigger. So of course they say they love it. And then there are these girls—these fans—and they just— It’s hard when someone is screaming or crying. You know. To have a conversation. And I get that it’s not about us, exactly. As people. The people we actually are. But then—it’s not about us, you know?”
Grace has always wondered about this: what it’s like to have someone you’ve never met before come up to you and say, You saved my life, and not just one of them, but hundreds of thousands, legions of people pinning their existence on you and your band and your songs.
“When I let myself think about it,” Jes says, and he is being careful, now, picking through a thought that must feel like a minefield to him. “I think that maybe I wish we’d had a period where we—not struggled, struggling sucks—just, like, had a slower ramp-up, you know? Where we played shows around Athens for two years, and the crowds kept building up, and there were people who fell in love with us on their own terms. Who we could sit around with after a show and they’d say, This was so good; this could have been better. If there was just…If there were more conversations.” Jes shrugs sharply. “I’m being dumb.”
But Grace knows what he means. There’s a sense, always, that they’re all or nothing: they will be the most famous boy band in the world until they’re not anymore, and then what the hell could possibly come next? Playing a small club or working on a solo, indie record feels so insignificant in the face of what they’ve already done.
“You’ve never had a real conversation with a fan?” she ventures, instead of saying any of that.
“No,” Jes says. “That’s not fair. I’ve had plenty of solid interactions. Probably if I could read all of the DMs and Instagram comments and the fan mail and stuff, it’s probably all in there. I just don’t even know how to deal with looking for it. I feel like if I did, I wouldn’t be able to do anything else.”
“I believe you that your life’s not hard,” Grace tells him. “It sounds like sometimes it’s kind of lonely.”
Jes drops his cigarette onto the pavement and grinds it out with his boot heel. He hoists himself to standing and dusts his hands against his jeans. There’s no rebuke in his silence. Somehow, Grace understands that it’s his way of agreeing with her.
“Sol was talking about getting out of here soon,” he says. “You ready?”
Someone else comes out to the patio, and the spill of noise that accompanies the open door makes Grace’s head start to hurt again. He sees the look in her eyes.
“I can get Aleks to have them pull the car up,” Jes says. “I’ll come grab you when it’s here?”
“Thank you,” Grace says. She tucks herself even farther back on the cushion, letting the screen above her shadow her face.
Jes disappears around one corner just as Land and Solly turn another one. This is the first time Grace has seen Land since he showed up and made off with the champagne bottle, except for the glimpses she caught of him in the crowd, laughing and dancing. Now he and Solly are so wrapped up in each other that they don’t notice her as they take the couch just diagonal from hers.
There’s no way for Grace to hear what they’re saying without getting closer, but getting closer would mean admitting that she’s spying.
Isn’t she, though? Isn’t that what she’s been doing for years now? All of that time she’s spent looking at pictures and videos and wondering, and now here they are in person: Land and Solly, sitting close on a tiny couch, smiling their private smiles at one another.
Land is talking rapidly, waving his hands so fast that the cigarette he’s holding traces lines of fire that linger in the darkness. Something in his monologue makes Solly throw his head back and laugh.
Instinct takes over. She’s in the picture, now, and she wants evidence of the moment for when she’s out of it again, working a boring shift at Coffee Bean, sitting by the pool doing nothing, toting around a phone that never rings. This is her life—her real life. She’s not Gigi or Grace as she stands up and arranges herself behind a palm tree, where she can see them a little more clearly. She’s desire incarnate, a hundred thousand hungry girls, all eyes, seeing, at last, what she’s always wanted to see.
They don’t even look up from where Land has Solly’s hand in his lap. Land’s cigarette is smoldering on the carpet and he taps at it absently with the toe of his sneaker, not quite extinguishing it. Solly has spread the flat of his palm against Land’s thigh, and they’re examining something on the back side of it, heads bent intently together.
Grace takes the pictures without looking at her phone screen.
Land touches the back of Solly’s hand with one reverent fingertip. Solly flinches, and it’s only then that Grace realizes what they’re looking at: Land’s cigarette pressed a small pink circle onto his skin. Land lifts Solly’s hand and kisses it, just below the freshness of the burn.
Grace takes a picture of that, too.
Solly pulls his hand away and shoves Land with an elbow. “You’re not funny,” he says. “I know you’re whatever tonight, but we talked about this. You can’t—” Grace only barely has time to duck all the way behind the palm tree as Solly looks around to make sure they’re still alone.
What is she doing? What if Jes catches her? She hurries back to her seat with her heart in her throat. She can’t keep the pictures—what if someone here sees?—but she can’t bring herself to delete them, either. So many years and so much hope, and if this isn’t proof, it’s certainly the closest she’s ever gotten to it.
This means that she wasn’t wrong to see something between them all along. She wasn’t crazy, and Katy wasn’t crazy. None of them were. They were just being lied to. They weren’t being allowed to see the whole of the truth.
She’s looking at the pictures—Solly’s hand, Land’s mouth—when Jes reappears.
“All set,” he says. “You ready?”
Grace tilts her phone toward herself and says, “Just one second.” It’s such a simple movement of her fingers on glass: she sends the photos in a text to Katy, and then deletes the originals. Jes is her secret to keep, she tells herself. But Land and Solly aren’t.
“Yep,” she says to Jes. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”
—
The ride back to Solly’s is quieter.
The redhead Jes was talking to earlier proves to be George—Georgina—a party-girl friend of Land’s who sits up front and chatters at the driver. Kendrick took off for some after-hours thing and took Aleks with him, so it’s Jes and Grace in the middle seat, with Raj, Land, and Solly crammed together in the back.
The anxiety of their arrival wore off hours ago, and the party drained the rest of their energy. Solly naps on Land’s shoulder. Grace’s fingers are tight around her phone.
The radio is still on low, tuned to a pop station. “Hey,” George says. They’re gliding back through the flats of Beverly Hills, racing down long, silent streets. No one seems to have followed them home. “Guys.”
When she turns it up, Fever Dream’s first single, “Where We Belong,” is playing. Solly groans in the backseat. “No!” he cries. “No, George, stop.”
“The radio loves you,” she says. “The world loves you.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Jes reaches back and pokes Land, singing his line from one of the verses.
“You’re flat,” Land says, and takes it over.
Solly comes next. He does it grudgingly, with his eyes still closed. But he opens them and sits up when the chorus starts, when they’re all singing together.
Even without Kendrick they sound so stunning that Grace can feel her own heart cracking with—not happiness, she thinks, just fullness. Their voices are gorgeous, tuned to church-choir harmonies, rich with gospel. The sound is electric on her skin and in her veins.
Grace feels like she’s being allowed to witness something rare: the moment at which Jes, Land, and Solly stop being three goofball boys and become what they are together, which is something else entirely. They slip into sync without even thinking about it, and speak to each other in a private language so fluent she can’t even guess at its grammar.