Grace and the Fever
Page 18
“Well, clearly grounding you doesn’t do any good,” her mother says. “And there’s nothing I can do about next year. So.”
She digs the car keys out of her pocket and drops them onto the table. They clink hard against each other. It’s everything Grace has been wanting: permission and freedom. She doesn’t know how she ends up being the one who says, “I’m sorry, Mom. I really didn’t mean—”
“I’m glad that you met someone,” her mother says. “I told you I didn’t want you to be lonely. So I’m glad you aren’t anymore.”
It seems like such a happy ending. Grace doesn’t understand how, when she goes upstairs, she feels worse than ever.
—
There is one thing, though, one piece of her life that isn’t totally messed up. That night she distracts herself by lying in bed and composing halves and thirds of texts to Jes. That was fun. I keep thinking about you. Have you talked to Rick? Is the show still on? Are you okay? Are we okay? Her fingers dance over the keyboard, tapping out letters and then taking them back.
So am I going to get to kiss you again, she types, the boldest one yet: so bold she has to delete it immediately and even put the phone down for a second so that she won’t have to think about what would have happened if she’d accidentally hit Send.
Then, somehow, without meaning to, she’s picking it up again and making a call. Jes answers on the third ring. His voice is sandy with the weight of sleep.
“Didn’t mean to wake you,” Grace says.
“Nah, ’sgood. This nap wasn’t supposed to last this long.”
“It’s nighttime,” Grace says. “Time for real sleep, now.”
The intimacy of this, the two of them talking, her in her own bed and him curled up in his, spreads through her veins, erasing the argument from earlier. Who cares what her mother or her friends think of her when she has him all to herself?
“Mmm. But now I’m awake.”
“Is that okay?”
“You’ll have to talk to me for a while, I guess. Until we both fall asleep.”
“I can do that,” Grace says. She burrows down farther and pulls a sheet over her head, so that she’s in an even smaller, darker space, alone with his breath and hers.
She says, “Can I ask how you feel? About, uh. Earlier?”
“I feel good about it,” Jes says. His voice is rough in a different way when he talks about kissing her, not low with sleep but heavy with promise. “Are you? I mean, are you good?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Of course. But I feel like you did end up getting yelled at, at some point. Um. Because of the sneaking off. Not because of anything else.”
“The boys came over for dinner,” Jes says. “We had room service and yelled at each other. If I had any neighbors on this floor, there would have been noise complaints. But I think we’re okay now.”
“Really?”
“We spend so much time together. Stuff just builds, and it’s hard to see it, because there’s never any space to recognize—anything, really. We were probably overdue for a blowout. This happened, like, once a month that first year.”
“I didn’t know,” Grace says.
Jes laughs at her. “Of course you didn’t,” he says. “It’s not the kind of thing we advertised.”
“No, I mean, I figured there was friction. I don’t know.” It’s hard to say anything without making it clear how many hours she spent imagining them, and how far off she was when she did it. “Did you ever think you wanted to quit?”
“Never.”
“You sound so sure about that.”
“It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do. To sing and perform. To be up there with my best friends. So, yeah, there are all kinds of trade-offs. But for me, it’s always been worth it.” This speech Grace knows from television Jes, awards-show Jes, the Jes who’s always gracious, always thankful, always blessed. He sounds more like himself again after he stops, pauses, and then goes on. “And for every dumb, shitty thing, like today—I don’t know. I probably never would have met you, you know? There are tons of lame parts, but there’s always something really good mixed in. Something good enough to keep me going.”
I never would have met you. Grace takes that small, bright sentence and tucks it carefully inside of herself.
Jes says, “It’s my life. And it’s been like this for a long time now.”
“Yeah,” Grace says. “But it’s, you know. It’s new to me. So I just, I worry a little bit.” Her voice is so soft that she’s almost whispering. “That you wouldn’t like me if you met me in a different context. That you like me because I’m ordinary. Which is different, for you, than everyone else.”
“Well, I worry that you only like me because I’m not ordinary,” Jes says. He doesn’t sound mad about it. It seems like a thought he’s used to. “Sometimes people—they like the idea of getting inside of me and my life. They don’t like staying there. It’s not for everyone. I’m not for everyone.”
“Of course not.”
“I mean it,” Jes says. “The stuff we were talking about earlier—race and everything—how I feel about it is the least of it. I’ve heard things—I was going to say you should hear the things I’ve heard, but I hope you never do. I hope no one ever does. But then it’s like, I don’t want to be troubled. I don’t want to be exotic. I don’t want you to think that you need to save me from my terrible fate.”
“I don’t.”
“I know you don’t.”
“I just want to know you,” Grace says. “Whatever—however you want to let me.”
“I like that you let me be quiet,” Jes says. “My life is full of so many people. I forget what that’s like, sometimes. To talk to someone because I want to, not because I have to. I mean, you saw the team today—that’s just the big guns. That’s who they call in so that everyone can tell their teams what they need to do to make our lives happen. It’s a whole ecosystem. Economy. And they tell me where I’ll sleep, what clothes I’ll wear, where I’ll eat, who I’ll talk to. Before the show and after.” Jes pauses. Grace wishes she could bury her face against the smooth skin of his shoulder. She wishes her fingers were tangled in his hair again. “Can I tell you something gross?” he asks.
“What kind of gross?”
“About me. As a person.”
“Oh. Yeah. Sure.”
He’s hesitating now, though, making little grumbly sounds of uncertainty.
“Jes,” she says. “You can tell me.”
“Before today I hadn’t gone shopping in years,” he says. “The night we met, I had to have Raj go out and get me those clothes after dinner. I’d just assumed we would have what I needed on the racks. Not on mine—mine’s always that tight, show-offy rock-star shit—but I figured I’d find something on Kendrick’s. A freaking hoodie. It just didn’t occur to me that what I needed wouldn’t be there for me already. I put on those jeans and they didn’t fit right, because no one had tailored them for me. And it just— I’m out of the habit of dressing myself. All of my clothes show up and fit right on my body, but not a one of them belongs to me, not really.”
There are whole blogs dedicated to watching certain items of clothing circulate through the band: a set of photographs of each boy wearing a particular striped shirt, in the earlier days, and now Jes in Land’s oversized tank tops, extra-enormous on his slender frame, or Kendrick borrowing Solly’s Thunder hat for the day.
Lolly girls run a subset that tracks the two of them particularly: Solly has a habit of leaving clubs alone and ending up in Land’s sweaters in the morning. Another failure of imagination, to think that each time, one handed the garment to the other: Here, take this. Of course they’re always ending up in each other’s clothing, when none of it really belonged to anyone in the first place.
“You’re going to have to get grosser than that to scare me off, Holloway,” Grace says. “I’ve read Us Weekly. I’m aware that no one who gets dressed for a living is allowed to pick out their own clothes.”
“I don’t know, either,” Grace says. “But I’ll take it.”
She has no idea how to tell him that the opposite is true for her: when they’re together, she’s still trying to squint through the smoke screen of the Jes she’s been constructing for herself for years, the blur of her life as Gigi, the things she wants to tell Katy and the things she’d never let herself tell Cara or Lianne. It’s really kind of funny that her mother ever worried over her being lonely: she’s so full of imagined selves that, just for a moment, her room feels so crowded she’s surprised she can breathe in it.
Tumblr text post
Jadeonfire.tumblr.com
July 7, 4:52 pm PDT
THEY HAVE A RING, PEOPLE.
DIANA’S DETECTIVE WORK AND UNPARALLELED ABILITIES AS A STALKER PAID OFF
PLS NOTICE TODAY’S DATE
7+7 = dsklfjdkslfjksfjklsdfjdsklfjdskfjdskfjdslkfjdsklfjskfj!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I HAVE NEVER BEEN HAPPIER
Tumblr text post
Jadeonfire.tumblr.com
July 8, 2:02 am PDT
Anonymous asked: y do u care so much? U dun even kno these dudes?
So usually I don’t answer questions like this one, because, sorry nonny, but you’re pretty obviously just a boring old troll. Why do you care if I care, you know?
But since THE COMING OUT IS COMING like, imminently, I was thinking our wedding present to Lolly could be a collection of stories about how their love changed our lives. We have a week; let’s spread the tag #lollylovestories and then on the 14th we can all tweet the tag at them and hopefully they’ll see it and at least understand a little bit how much their courage has meant to all of us.
(Ugh also can’t you imagine Solly scrolling through Twitter one morning and seeing it, and clicking, and the smile will light up his face when he shows it to Land. “That’s us, babe.”
And Land will do what he always does, trying to get Solly to take some credit, and be like, “It’s you! You know you’re the reason I was brave enough for all of it.”
AND THEN THEY SMILE AT EACH OTHER JUST LIKE THIS. AND THEN WE DRAW THE CURTAIN FOR PROPRIETY’S SAKE.
BECAUSE THEY ARE BOOOONNNIIIINNNNNGGGGGGG.
Anyway.)
So here’s a story from my own personal archive. I was twelve when Burning Up came out, and I was pretty into it. I liked the music a lot. My best friend had a crush on Jes (obvi) and our other friends had crushes on Solly and Kendrick, so I ended up being like, “I like Land,” just by default, because, you know, we couldn’t possibly have the same crushes, that would have been madness!!!
And it was honestly sort of fine with me to get assigned a boy, because I wasn’t sure how the other girls could be so sure about their choices. They were like, automatically, yes, this one, and I was like, I don’t know, they all seem fine???? What even…how do you…like…a boy???? They kind of gross me out????????
(I mean, I didn’t say any of that. Maybe I should have, and someone could have guided me onto the path of queerness way, way sooner, but oh well.)
Anyway we would spend hours watching vids and things, about the boys, and sometimes the girls they were dating. L O L to when I believed they dated girls, but actually I’m sort of glad, because watching those videos I saw it with my own eyes. I saw all of these pictures and GIFs of Land and Poppy, and Land and Olivia, and he just looked—off. Uncomfortable. Like he was having fun, but there was something missing.
Like I felt, all the time.
I remember the first time we ended up watching a Lolly vid. I think it was a YouTube autoplay accident. It wasn’t there, and then it was. My friends kind of got distracted and I was just glued to the screen, thinking: Yes. Yes exactly. I was always happier with those friends than when we were trying to hang out with boys. One friend in particular.
But this is not the story of how hard it sucks to be a bb lesbo in middle school / the time I tried and failed to ask a girl to the homecoming dance. This is the story of how I looked at Lolly and saw myself. I saw the kind of love that I wanted was possible. It still seems like a fairy tale, some days, like it happened for them and won’t happen for me, but I stay strong and keep the faith. Lolly is real. And it helps me remember that I am, too.
Email from raj.sidhu@gmail.com
to grace.eileen.thomas@gmail.com
July 8, 9:32 am PDT
Hey Grace,
I’m sure Jes didn’t actually talk to you about any of this when you were making your Great Escape yesterday—which, by the way, no one blames you, but please don’t trust him when he says stuff is a good idea, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Anyway, there are some logistics for the upcoming concert we’d like your help with.
As you heard yesterday, the plan is to use the moment to bring the boys back to their base. We’re going for small-scale, relatable, “we care.” So we’re not selling tickets; the PR team is going to be handpicking fans to attend for free. Very hush-hush. We’re still working out the cover story. They won’t know what’s going on until it’s happening.
You’re on the guest list; you’re welcome to invite friends if you think they’ll be on board with the messaging. (In other words, please don’t use this as an opportunity to prove that you’re a big shot to half your high school class—we’ve got really limited numbers on this, and want to use each admit wisely!)
We also thought that it might be helpful to have your touch on the larger list as it’s being assembled. I know you’re a fan—do you know anyone in that community we should think about inviting? Don’t want to go for the big obvious gets (like these girls, in case you don’t know what I’m talking about; they’re the bigger names among FD bloggers) at the expense of anyone less well known but equally passionate. Think Taylor Swift’s Secret Sessions: who’s never met the boys before, and thinks she won’t have a chance? The idea is to make some dreams come true.
God, I wish their stupid band name didn’t lend itself to so many jokes, but it was already too late for that when they hired me, so what are you going to do?
The rest of the email is details: she’s supposed to meet up with the PR team at their West Hollywood headquarters tomorrow afternoon with any suggestions for specific girls or general ideas about how to run the search.
Grace can’t help herself: she laughs out loud at the absurdity of how much power they’ve handed her. The girls whose blogs Raj’s email links are people she’s been following for years now. She’s more familiar with “the community” than anyone on their team could have known. The trick isn’t going to be finding names for them; it will be keeping from showing her hand. She’ll have to be careful about how many Lolly ’shippers end up on the floor at the shows.
It’s easier to focus on that list than to think about whether she wants to bring anyone she actually knows, which is to say, of course, Cara and Lianne. They haven’t said a word to her since she left Cara’s birthday party on Monday, and at this point it’s impossible for her to keep pretending that’s not deliberate. She’s so used to thinking of herself as the one who’s being avoided and hurt, but Lianne’s comment mixes with her mother’s accusation—you keep secrets—and part of her is starting, reluctantly, to wonder if maybe she has to be the one to make the gesture. She hates the idea of making herself vulnerable like that—but she hates the idea of spending the rest of her life wondering if there was something she could have done just slightly more.
And if it falls apart—if they don’t want to be friends anymore—whatever, she tells herself. That’s fine, too. She’s got Katy. She’s got Jes. At least she thinks she has Jes. For now.
—
The PR firm’s office isn’t too far from Jes’s hotel. She decides to be bold, and texts him on her way over. In the ’hood if you want to g
et lunch later?
Slammed w rehearsals for the next two weeks, Jes sends back. Trying to scale an arena show for a 150 person venue on short notice is rly tough, it turns out?
Grace swallows her disappointment.
A minute later he sends another text: he’s backstage somewhere, wearing lazy rehearsal clothes and pouting at the camera. There’s a rip in the collar of his T-shirt that doesn’t look like intentional distressing. Grace fastens onto that detail: here, at least, is one thing he’s kept long enough to break in.
Jes says, I would if I could tho. I swear.
I believe you, she sends back.
—
Pixel and Grain Public Relations takes up the entire fourth floor of their building. The office is a brutally minimal expanse of white space with windows so huge that a few of the employees are wearing sunglasses indoors—or maybe they’re just trying to be cool? Grace can’t tell. She also can’t tell if her decision to try to care a little bit less is working, or if the girls they sit her down with are actually kind of nice.
They’re not so much older than she is—Adria, who’s clearly in charge, might be in her late twenties, but most of them look fairly fresh out of college. One of them, Hannah, reminds her a little bit of Katy. Something about the way she discusses the band, with a combination of love and worn-in derision, makes Grace think she might be a closeted fan.
Grace expects them to give her the cold shoulder, but it’s less like the war-room thing that was happening at Rick’s and closer to the kind of debate she might have with Katy, actually. Grace has been armchair-quarterbacking the band’s strategy for years now, and it’s surprisingly easy to translate all of those opinions and ideas into something the girls will be able to work with. It’s thrilling to see her creepshow adolescent hobby in the context of the professional world—as something she might be able to do out in the open, someday, even.
See, Grace tells herself. This is real life. It can be. Fandom is more than just a dreamscape she’s been using to avoid high school, and the things she doesn’t like about herself.