by Zan Romanoff
All of the heads around the room nod even more furiously. It’s an elegant plan. Simple. Grace can see exactly how it’s going to play out in the press, and then online, which is where it really matters. Rolling Stone and Perez Hilton can help sell tickets, maybe, but it’s the girls on Tumblr who’ll buy them. And this is the kind of thing the girls on Tumblr will love.
She almost can’t believe she didn’t come up with it herself, or read it as a suggestion online first.
“And then we take a break,” Solly says, so softly that everyone almost misses it under the hum of their busy agreement.
“Sure,” Rick says. “We can reassess once the album’s finished. I asked Olivia to draw up a list of possible venues—”
“That’s not what I said,” Solly says. This time only the boys seem to hear him. They turn in toward each other. Rick doesn’t try to pull their attention back to him. They’re the reason for the meeting, but they’re not in charge of it.
“He knew what you meant, Sol,” Jes says. “You know he just doesn’t want to commit to anything this far in advance.”
“That’s the trick,” Solly agrees.
Land nods. “It’s true, Jes. He talks a big game about whatever, we’ll reassess, but every time we reassess, we end up in the same place. It’s a delicate moment, just launching something new, don’t want to lose interest, whatever. There have been a lot of next times.”
From Grace’s angle all she can see is the stubborn set of Jes’s jaw. “Honestly, after the big tour, I think three two-hundred-person venues in three weeks will feel like a break,” he says. “I know it’s hard to imagine, but it will. And I know he’s said it before, but, like, guys. It is kind of a delicate moment.” He glances down into his lap so that he won’t have to look at Kendrick, or Solly or Land. So that he won’t seem like he’s accusing anyone in particular.
Kendrick, though, doesn’t have any problem looking up at Grace when he says, “And whose fault is that?”
“Hey,” Land says. “We’ve all been messing up.”
“Only some of us are doing it on purpose,” Kendrick says. “Planting stories. Playing their fucking game.”
Grace assumed they were all in on everything together, that when Jes called her and asked her to come to Holy Communion that night, everyone knew the game plan except for her. Now she sees that she was wrong.
The boys are so close together on the couch, and their bodies make space for each other so easily, but they’re not all the same animal, actually. Or if they are, they’re like—an octopus, is it? Grace thinks. Like Jes’s wide-eyed tattoo. With a brain in each arm, so that they can’t quite coordinate their movements, or know what another arm is doing except by feeling it once it’s already started to happen.
“I’m trying—” Jes begins, but he’s loud enough that a few heads from the conference table whip around to see what’s going on.
Rick gives them a very mild look. “Do you need a moment?”
“I do, actually,” Jes says. He disentangles himself and stalks out of the room. The rest of the boys look too shocked to follow.
Grace says, “I’ll, um, I guess I should,” and when no one contradicts her, she has no choice but to go.
—
The house is different when it’s empty: its spaciousness turns cavernous. It’s too sterile to seem haunted, so instead it just seems dead. Grace read a story in a magazine once about a man who built a house for himself somewhere deep in the Valley, on acres and acres of land, and discovered when he tried to move in that the architects had made a mistake in scaling it: with so much space to cover, they’d built the rooms too large for ordinary furniture. It all got dwarfed by the span of the walls and the distant ceilings, so he had to have the pieces custom-made. She’s always wondered what his body looked like on those enormous couches, staring out of the overgrown windows. Whether he recognized the irony in his grand vision and impossible wealth making him a home where he would always appear so much smaller than he actually was.
Jes is outside lying prone on the diving board, smoking. She slides the doors open and kicks her shoes off in the grass, approaching on bare feet. He must know that someone’s coming, but he doesn’t look up. When she gets to the other end of the diving board, she can see that his eyes are closed.
He finishes his cigarette and flicks it into the pool.
“Hey,” she calls.
“Hi,” he says back.
Grace waits, but he doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t tell her to go away, either, so she climbs up on the diving board and walks out to where his body is suspended over the water. He took off his jeans, his shoes, and his shirt, and piled them up on the cement behind them. Now he’s mostly bare to the brightness of the midmorning sun. If she didn’t know any better, she would think he looked peaceful, lying there. He reaches a long arm above his head, toward her. Grace folds herself awkwardly so that she can sit and take his hand into hers. His palm is warm and damp: normal, human.
“Did they send you?” he asks.
“No,” she says. “I left.”
“Hmmm.”
“Do you want me to get someone else?”
Jes laughs. “No. Definitely not.”
“Do you want me to leave?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
Grace puts her free hand on Jes’s wrist to let him know that she’s not going anywhere as she unthreads her fingers from his. Then she turns his palm up in her lap and traces one fingertip along the lines of it, careful, gentle. It’s the first time she’s been allowed to look at any part of him without him looking back and seeing the intensity of her gaze. She falls into the moment hungrily.
He asks, “Are you reading my future?”
“You will become very rich, and very famous,” Grace intones. “Oh, wait. You already are.”
Jes winces, and she wishes she could take it back. Apparently, he’s not in the mood for jokes. Instead, she digs her thumbs into the juncture of his thumb and pointer finger, where her mother always taught her to press and hold when she got headaches.
She can feel the tension of his body pulling him taut. She can’t read palms, but she spent enough years in and out of trainers’ offices for cross-country to know how to work a muscle loose. She kneads him with her knuckles, and watches Jes’s fingers uncurl as she does.
When she’s done, he offers her the other hand.
Grace has a sudden, surreal flashback to the first time she held hands with a boy—fifth grade, maybe sixth. Jeremy Goodkind. Towheaded, tall for their grade, and still pretty, with fine features, long fingers, slim wrists. They were watching a scary movie at someone’s birthday party and she kept covering her eyes. “Quit it,” he said. “You’re missing everything.”
“I can’t,” Grace whispered back. “It’s, like, an instinct.”
“Here,” he said. He let her squeeze his hand with hers instead of shielding herself with it. It seemed, then, like the most intimate thing that you could do with another person: to touch someone for so long like that, just her skin and his, for an hour, and then another.
Later, he was her first kiss, but that was different: wet and scary and strange. It required technique. Holding hands was just a way of saying, I want you to keep knowing I’m right here.
Grace doesn’t think about what she’s doing. She takes the hand that she’s holding between hers and pulls it up toward her. She kisses the soft, salty skin of Jes’s palm, just once.
She feels like a pilgrim who’s made it to her shrine at last only to find a living person in place of the statue she sought, a breathing human body instead of the bones of a saint. It’s terrifying to think of what the conversation she left behind in that room might mean for him and the band—what it might mean for her, if the band falls apart. If there’s no new music left to love.
But she’s not sorry that she’s here with Jes now, while he goes through whatever it is he’s going through.
She’s embarrassed as soon as she�
�s done it. She lets his hand go, and Jes pulls his arm back toward himself. He starts to sit up, negotiating the turn gingerly on the narrow, moving board. Grace looks down at her crossed legs.
Jes says, “I lied to you the other day.”
“Oh?”
“About my tattoos.”
“Oh.”
“This wasn’t my first one.” He touches the ink above his heart, and then reaches down to pull the edge of his boxers up, giving her a glimpse of the tender inside of one thigh. This one, too, is just a series of black lines, but it’s not another Bible verse. Instead, it’s a sketch of a scene, slightly wavery, like it was done by hand: riverbank, palmetto, the sun overhead. “This is where I was baptized,” Jes says.
“I thought your mom wasn’t, like, so into all of that stuff.”
“She wasn’t. She wouldn’t have let me do it if she’d known. I slept over at Solly’s house the night before so that we could go in the morning.” Jes touches the tattoo absently, stroking along the lines the artist sketched to mimic the movement of water. “I was so afraid that I wasn’t going to make any friends when we moved. Especially—you know—being brown in the South. Athens is a college town and all, but that seemed like it might be a mistake. But I got lucky, mostly, and Ken and Land and Sol, they picked me up right away.
“I had thought I would never get over having to leave California, but I loved Georgia—mostly, I loved them. I loved that they knew all of these stories and songs. Solly’s parents would have us over and we would grill and sit in the backyard and his dad would play guitar and we’d sing and sing and it was just— I didn’t know I could be that happy. So when they were getting baptized, of course I wanted to do it, too.
“I don’t really believe in most of that stuff anymore. My mom was right: I’m not actually cut out for religion in a real way. But that day—with those boys—going under. Being sanctified. It was so physical. It wasn’t about faith in god. It was faith that no one was going to hold me down or hurt me. That someone would pull me up again. That all I had to do was stand in the water, and then I would be blessed.”
“When did you get it?”
“I was seventeen,” Jes says. “A few days after Rick got in touch with us about the videos.”
This is Fever Dream’s founding myth: Rick’s young niece finding the recordings they were posting on YouTube of themselves singing folk songs and oldies. He saw them and knew he had to sign them, but searching for their contact information yielded nothing. Finally he left a comment with a link to his then-nascent company’s website: I’m a manager, please give me a call. And they came within seconds of deciding it was just a prank and ignoring the whole thing.
Jes says, “I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I could feel it. Physically, almost. Like the wind changing, maybe. Something so enormous coming, and I wanted to remember: When my life really changed. Who I really belonged to, and with.”
Grace lets all of this settle around them. “Solly wants to take a break?” she asks.
“Has wanted to,” he says. “And Land, but Land’s lazy. So it’s just so hard to know with them. Because I was the one who said we should record the videos and put them up. And I was the one who said, Let’s take a chance on Rick being for real. I don’t want to keep pushing. But my pushing is what got us here.” He puts his head in his hands. “It’s such a mess. I feel like a fuckup no matter what I do.”
“I’m sorry,” Grace says. She doesn’t know what else to say.
“No, god, I’m sorry for making you listen to this. I feel like every time we hang out, I start whining, because you’re the only person I ever see who isn’t already sick of my stories and my crap.”
“It’s fine—” Grace starts.
“It’s not! It’s not fine. I should at least hear about your problems, too, right? Fair trade?”
“My problems are boring.”
“You took off from that party the other day to come here,” Jes says. “Did your friends end up being pissed?”
“We haven’t talk about it.”
“Do you think that’s because they’re pissed?”
“I wish.”
“You wish they were mad at you?”
“No, I don’t, that’s not—that’s not what I meant. That’s not fair to them.” Once again, Grace finds herself trying to explain something to Jes, and realizes she can’t even really explain it to herself. Lianne was kind of pissy with her at Cara’s, and she didn’t like that any more than when she thought her friends were just straight-up ignoring her. “I guess I feel like—remember what we talked about how, like, you guys come here and you’re essentially party accessories? Famous friends for hire?”
“Yeah.”
“I used to think my friends didn’t want me around, because I was a weirdo,” Grace says. “A bad, wrong kind of party accessory. But then I stopped being around, and it seems like maybe they don’t like that either. So I just—I don’t know how to be with them, at this point. Who to be, when I’m around.”
Jes arranges his face into wide-eyed earnestness. “Grace,” he says. “Why don’t you just be yourself?”
She knows he’s kidding, but it still touches a nerve. “Hey, why don’t you,” she shoots back.
Jes recoils.
“Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean—I know I don’t know you very well. And it’s not a fair thing to ask you, or to tell you, or—I was just thinking about you at that party. And the guy and the Muslim comment, and the way the press talks about you, and I know you don’t want to have to have this conversation, but, I don’t know. Doesn’t it get hard not to talk about?” Grace is genuinely curious. She’s never met anyone else who seemed as determined to keep himself a secret as she is. “It just seems like you want to keep doing this, even though parts of it really suck for you, you know?”
“I keep hoping it will go away,” Jes says. He’s looking down at his hands. “I know it’s fucking childish, okay, but I thought maybe all the race shit would go away, like I hoped Kendrick’s drinking and Land’s laziness would go away, that I could just—will them to not be true anymore. Because I don’t want them to be. Because I want to think about other stuff, and do other stuff, and be other stuff. Other than explaining why I’m brown and why that’s okay for the rest of my life.”
“Sometimes—I don’t know if this is like, the same thing at all—but I feel like if I start explaining myself, I’ll never stop,” Grace says.
“Yeah,” Jes says. “And, I don’t know. If I don’t give anyone anything real, or personal, it’s not their fault when they get me wrong. You know?”
Grace understands that a secret life in fandom is not the same thing as what Jes is talking about—not hardly. She believes there’s something wrong with her; the rest of the white world is convinced there’s something wrong, or different, or suspect, about Jes. But she can see that they’ve both shaped themselves around a fear of rejection, and let its pressures, real and imaginary, make them circumspect and small.
“But you’ll be leaving all this pretty soon anyway,” Jes says, and Grace can’t believes he still remembers their first conversation, that he’s allowed her to take up this much space in his life. “College, right?”
“Yeah,” Grace says. “I got an email from my roommate last night, actually. My future roommate.”
“That’s cool. Right. Does she seem cool?”
“She, um. She recognized my name.”
Jes nods sagely. “Excellent. So she has taste.”
“I guess so. She also sent me a bunch of links to, like, what she’s thinking about for sheets and towels and posters, so we can start decorating our room, which is so crazy to me. I’m just—I really haven’t been thinking about it.”
“Yeah, well. There’s been a lot going on.” Jes contemplates this. “Do you have strong feelings? Decorating-wise?”
“Not really. I’ll probably end up waiting until the last minute and then buying whatever’s left at Bed Bath & Beyond, like, the
day before I leave.”
Jes shakes his head. “That’s no way to start a new life,” he says. “You need to be confident! Well prepared! We should go on a field trip. A shopping field trip.”
“To the mall?”
“Hell yeah. I never go to the mall.”
“Isn’t there, like, a reason for that?”
“You’d be surprised what you can get away with,” Jes says. “You show up somewhere people assume you have no reason to go, and don’t dress up about it—we’d probably be fine.”
“It will also be supremely boring.”
“I’m bored of my life,” Jes says. “Let me come out and play around in yours. Just once. It’ll make me feel better about bringing all of this drama down on your head.” What he doesn’t say is that he needs a project, but Grace is starting to know him well enough to understand that it’s true. He’s animated again, easy, wheels greased by the promise of something to do and someone besides himself to think about.
“If you really want to,” she says.
“Trust me,” Jes tells her. “I really, really do.”
Of course, though, it’s not exactly a normal shopping trip. Jes insisted on driving himself and Aleks over to Rick’s, so he has the keys to the rental in his pocket. The car itself is relatively inconspicuous—a navy Audi convertible, which looks downright homely next to Solly’s vintage Mercedes and Rick’s cream and gold Rolls also hanging out in the driveway. When they nose out onto the street, Jes whips his head around instinctively, but no one’s there to see them.
Grace tells herself it’s a good omen.
The closest Bed Bath & Beyond is over in West Hollywood, tucked under the looming bulk of the fortress-like Beverly Center. She reads directions to him off her phone’s GPS, but he hates not being able to see the map and keeps trying to grab it out of her hands.
“Eyes on the road!” Grace cries after his third attempt. “Jesus, do your bodyguards let you text and drive, too?”