by Zan Romanoff
Because of course Rowena is here. She’s here because she does belong in this scene, this world, in the very public narrative of Jes and the band’s very public lives. Jes’s ex is here and he didn’t tell Grace she was coming because it didn’t matter if she minded and it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s all definitely, totally fine.
“Which one is she?” Lianne is surprisingly good at making it look like she’s not looking. “Jeans, or dress?”
“Jeans.”
“Oh, I recognize her. She’s, like, a model, right?”
“Very much so.”
“You’ve got some fancy friends, Gracie.”
“She’s not really my friend.”
By now they’re all staring. Rowena catches them at it. She must be used to it, being stared at: she gives them a sliver of a smile and looks away, easy, casual, before the flinch of recognition registers on her face and she looks back. Cricket notices her distraction, and then she notices Grace. Her smile seems genuine when she waves to them and says, “Hey!”
There’s nothing for it but to walk over and say hi. “Fantastic,” Grace mumbles to herself.
She isn’t ready for how much of Rowena there is up close: she’s whip-thin, of course, but lanky, with long legs, long arms, long hair, long eyelashes. She looks endearingly low-key in jeans with ripped-out knees and a thin white T-shirt. “Hey,” she says. “You’re Grace, right? I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Yeah. Hi.” Grace can hear her own voice as if from very far away; it’s hard to tell whether she sounds polite or robotic. “I’ve heard a lot about you, too. I guess, um, obviously.”
“I know I’m, like, surprise! Rick didn’t tell me when he bought the ticket that no one knew I was coming.”
This makes Grace feel marginally better: so Jes didn’t deliberately not tell her. He just didn’t know.
Row is still talking. The words come out a little too fast, like she’s nervous, too. “I sort of knew I should check with Jes to make sure it was cool, but it was so last-minute, and it was, like, either I’m going or I’m not, so I figured, whatever. Why not come to LA, you know? It’s like a zillion degrees in New York right now, and anyway, no one hangs around for July.” She smiles brightly at all of them, including Cara and Lianne. “Are you traveling this summer?”
“No,” Grace says.
“We’re, like, getting ready for college,” Cara fills in. “The big trip.”
“College! So fun. I still think about going sometimes. I hear Brown is super fun. That’s always where I thought I would go if I went somewhere. Or NYU. Cricket is talking about applying next year. Right, Crick?”
Cricket shrugs. “I want to,” she says. “Also hey, Grace.”
“Hi. Oh, right, these are my friends. This is Cara and Lianne, and this is Cricket and Rowena.”
Everyone says hi. Cara says, “Honestly, I wouldn’t go to college if I didn’t have to. If I was traveling and whatever. I feel like I’ve spent enough of my life trapped in classrooms already.”
“I don’t mind it,” Cricket says. “School. Plus, you know, it’s not like I’m traveling. My fiancé is. I’m just tagging along.”
“You don’t have to go with them,” Row says.
“You don’t,” Cricket reminds her. “I do.”
Cara and Lianne exchange a glance, and Grace wills them not to ask why.
“You don’t have to,” Row says again, softer, like this is part of a conversation she and Cricket have already had a thousand times. Maybe they have. Probably they have. Only a handful of people know the boys the way they do, and an even smaller number know what it’s like to try to love them up close. Grace is suddenly, seethingly jealous of their intimacy, and their certainty about where they belong.
The stagehand who brought them in earlier pokes his head through the door and calls out to the room at large, “Five minutes till showtime.”
“Oh, excellent.” Row looks genuinely thrilled. “You guys want to go watch, right?”
“Yeah,” Grace says. “Definitely.”
Row leads them out to a little side balcony that’s apparently been reserved just for them. Something ripples through the crowd when their faces appear—Cricket, Rowena, and Grace, whom they recognize, and then Cara and Lianne, whom they can’t place. Grace can feel the moment at which everyone reaches for her phone to take a picture or send a text, and then remembers it isn’t there.
It doesn’t begin with any kind of fanfare. The lights in the room dim, and the crowd hushes. The music that’s been playing in the background fades. There’s a moment when the whole room holds its breath to wait.
Then they file out, one by one by one. Jes is first, wearing tight black pants and that ripped T-shirt from rehearsal. He’s decorated only by the bare sliver of his collarbone and the half-moon curl of his smile. The light catches him all over, just right, everywhere, and this is the last piece of the puzzle, the part of the boy Grace hasn’t met yet: the one who knows how to walk onto a stage and stand under a spotlight and make you feel like you’re under it, too, just by looking at you.
Next is Land, with heavy circles under his eyes and one shirt sleeve rolled to show his tattoos. All of his sharpest parts are polished to a high sheen, his sheer, jagged edges brandished with the same regal certainty with which Jes wears his own beauty.
Solly looks hopeful and tired and younger than the rest of them, somehow.
Kendrick’s smile is a rictus. His hands are shaking. Cricket looks at him and looks away.
Grace wishes she didn’t know what it costs him to stand there; she wishes she could pull him down and put herself there instead. She’s never seen them perform live before—she didn’t want to go alone, or with people who wouldn’t feel about them the way she did—and it’s surreal to watch the boys she’s come to know turn back into the band she’s loved for so long.
The screaming in the room is so loud that she doesn’t think she’ll be able to hear a word they sing.
After a while, Jes steps forward. He’s holding a microphone. He brings it to his mouth.
The sound coming from the crowd slackens and fades, though it doesn’t die away entirely. Grace can hear girls crying, overcome with the shock of what’s happening. One of them hiccups into the quiet.
“Hey, guys,” Jes says. “We missed you.”
That’s their cue. Grace doesn’t mean to yell back—she doesn’t want to embarrass herself in front of Cricket and Rowena—but she can’t contain herself. It’s the first time since she walked out of her house and found Jes in the cul-de-sac that she feels like her whole, entire self again. Her voice gets swept up and lost in the crowd.
Solly steps forward next. “We talk all the time about how lucky we are to have fans like you guys,” he says. “The last few months have been tough for us, but it’s been so much easier knowing that you have our backs no matter what.”
Land slings an arm around Solly’s shoulder and a series of shrieks erupt from around the room. “So we wanted to give you guys something,” he says.
It’s too loud for them to continue. “Hey!” Jes calls. “Hey!”
It starts to seem like the room will dissolve into chaos. The early shock and paralysis are wearing off and girls are getting restless, adrenaline making them shaky and hungry, feral with how close they are, how impossibly close. These boys, gleaming in the light. These boys, offering themselves, and a room full of girls, a world full of girls. Isn’t this what everyone has always been waiting for?
Kendrick nudges Solly and a whisper goes from one band member to the next. He and Jes curl themselves so that the line becomes a circle and their backs are to the audience. Under the pitch of screams Grace can just make out the way they tune their voices together, and then Jes saying, “One, two, three.”
They start singing “Where We Belong,” their first single, a capella, the sound so sweet and plaintive that it calms and quiets the chaos in the room. Because everyone knows these words, and it gives the girls something to do
with their voices. They start to sing along.
Grace has always been moved by the idea of standing onstage and hearing a mass of people chanting your words back to you. Who wouldn’t be? How could you not be overwhelmed by it, something you’d written however many months or years ago coming back to you in waves? Knowing that your work had made a place for itself in someone’s ordinary life, special enough that they sought you out to scream across a stadium, to try to reach you with it and say back, Yeah, me too?
She gets lost in the music. This is what’s been missing all summer as she’s struggled with herself and Jes, with her mother and her friends, and the idea that she’s somewhere between public figure and private person.
It brings her back to what she fell in love with before any of that: four voices in tight, athletic harmony, singing songs that shoot straight up her spine to fill her to the brim with joy, or longing, or maybe it’s both at the same time. It’s everything all at once. It happens too fast to name any particular feeling. There’s only this, only now unfolding, carrying her on its broad back.
Even when she’s complicated and the boys are confusing, the music is just what it is. The song lasts four minutes, maybe just three and a half. No time to get sentimental. All she can do is raise her hands and open her mouth, close her eyes, sing along.
—
They close with “Keep You,” the first of Solly’s songwriting credits. He tilts his face up and the lights above must be blinding him, white-hot, but he stays that way: eyes blank, throat bared. His voice is so raw and lovely, aching with the weight of hope he’s been carrying around for years now. They can’t see, / no they can’t see / the way you are / and who you are, / baby, when you’re with me.
The rest of the boys swell up around him on the chorus: From the first / it was you / and it’s never, never been anything but true / what’s between me and you.
Land takes the second verse, and it’s this moment that always kills Grace to witness. Land can never help himself: he looks over and catches Solly’s eyes, and there it is, that private smile, that moment that’s love distilled down to its helpless essence. We thought we could hide it, yeah, / bury it deep / but it’s you, it’s you, / it’s you I’ve got to keep.
Of course Jes has to take over and belt the last part of the verse; if the rest of the band didn’t swallow up that tender moment, it would overtake them all. The force of the boys in the room, of Land and Solly, of Kendrick, of Jes— Grace looks up at the lights, too, and lets them white out her vision for a second, so that she doesn’t have to see anything, so that all she can do is listen as the sound embraces her, and swallows her whole.
After the show, the greenroom crowd seems to swell considerably. George and her crew have arrived, and they’re unsubtly tipping flasks into their drinks. There are more girls, more men, more people trying to catch glimpses or grab pieces of the thing they just saw, bright and moving, up on that stage.
When the band comes in, they get cornered immediately, surrounded by congratulations and hearty laughs and intimate-looking small talk. It takes a little while—ten minutes, maybe fifteen—before Grace sees Jes stepping back from someone to scan the crowd. She doesn’t know if he’s looking for her, but the smile that flashes across his face when he finds her is warm and unguarded and exactly what she’s been dying to see. She takes it as an invitation.
“I’m gonna go,” she says, gesturing vaguely to Cara.
“Yeah, yeah, go ahead,” Cara says. “Li and I are gonna get some water.”
It seems to take forever to cross the room, but when she reaches him, Jes sweeps her up in a hug that pulls her right off her feet. Grace holds on and lets herself bury her face against his shoulder. It’s the whole stupid summer in an instant: the way her heart races and her stomach gets weightless, and for as long as it lasts she can forget that there’s anyone in the room but him. Including herself.
He puts her down carefully.
“You were— That was so great,” she says.
Jes nods. She’s never seen him this relaxed before. It’s like performing burned off all of his excess energy, and now he’s just spirit and shine. He’s so beautiful it almost hurts to look at him.
“It felt so good,” he says. “God, I love doing that.”
Grace gives him a smile. “Good. I mean. Since it is your job.”
“What a job!” Jes holds his arms out, sweeping them to encompass the packed room and the theater beyond it and the whole world, probably, which is full to bursting with girls who are hungry for his face and his voice, for him and his boys.
Land appears at his side. “Jes,” he says.
It’s like a code between them. Jes says, “In a minute.”
“No,” Land corrects him. “Now.” He nods at someone over Grace’s shoulder, and she turns to find Rowena at her back.
Row darts a kiss at Jes’s cheek, and then another one onto his forehead. “Rick wanted a reunion scene,” she says, low enough that only the three of them can hear her. “Sorry!”
“That job you love? Do it, Jes,” Land says, and punches Jes on the shoulder. It doesn’t look friendly.
Grace scans the crowd and sees that Lianne and Cara found the drinks table—and George along with it. She can’t quite bring herself to go over there with them, so she finds an unoccupied couch and sits on it, wishing desperately she had her phone to absorb her attention. The room feels airless, and she wants out of it as soon as possible. She stares straight ahead for what feels like forever.
“Can, I, um…,” Rowena asks.
Grace feels like she has to say, “Sure. Of course.”
Rowena sits gingerly, folding the array of her limbs up as small as she can. “I would say sorry about Land,” she says. “But I’m sure you know how he is by now.”
“Kind of,” Grace says. “Not really. We haven’t actually hung out that much.”
“Oh. Yeah. So it’s just been you and Jes? Ugh, god, you don’t have to answer that if I’m being weird and invasive. I’ve been up since four a.m. New York time. And I keep forgetting that you don’t really know how it is between us. How it’s been.”
“It’s cool that you guys are still…friends,” Grace says.
“Yeah, right? I mean, thank god, because they probably would have made us go through with this whole rigmarole either way. It’s nice to do it with someone I’m actually cool with, you know? Someone on the housekeeping staff at the last place we stayed at together, in London, was leaking dumb stories and we had a really good time staging intricate, like, scenarios for her to find when she came to clean. Jes is a good time.”
“He is.”
“I’m so sorry. This has to be so weird for you.”
Grace wants to hate Rowena for how easy this is for her, or seems to be, anyway. Of course Row isn’t threatened by some normal girl Jes is hanging out with. But she seems to be genuinely trying to make Grace more comfortable, and she doesn’t have to. Grace is charmed in spite of herself.
She says, “It just took me by surprise, is all. Seeing you. I mean, not that Jes and I are—we’re not—anything. He just didn’t mention you were coming.”
Across the room, Jes is posing for pictures with his bandmates and girl after girl after girl, each of them a friend of a friend of someone, or maybe just lucky and pretty enough to have caught a security guard’s eye. The girls are all a little trembly, but mostly hiding it well. They engage him and make tiny offerings of jokes. Jes laughs uproariously at each one.
Rowena says, “That was one of the things that drove me crazy when we were, like, together-together. He thinks of himself as public property, basically. It doesn’t bother him that much to have his life arranged and managed. I think he prefers it to being lonely, anyway. But it’s genuinely hard for him to save anything that’s just, like, for one person.”
What did that girl at Pixel and Grain call her? Company.
“Yeah,” Grace says. “I’m getting that.”
“I can leave if you want,�
� Rowena offers. “I love Jes and everything, but I’ve done my thing here. Rick arranged some pictures of me landing at LAX, and when they release the previews for the official concert video tonight, everyone will put the pieces together. We’ll probably have brunch tomorrow or the next day, and then I’ll go back. But I don’t need to get in the middle of tonight.”
“No,” Grace says. “Please. Seriously. Stay.”
Cara and Lianne are huddled up with George, still. Grace has no doubt that when they find her again, their cups will be sharp with booze. So she and Jes both can use all of the company they can get.
—
It takes an hour for the crowd in the room to thin down. Grace talks to Row for a while; she talks to Cara and Lianne and George and Raj and everyone Raj introduces her to. She’s just starting to run out of winning smiles to plaster over her boredom when Jes appears behind her and hooks his chin over her shoulder.
“Are you ready to get the hell out of here?” he asks. She tries not to loll her head back against him, but the brush of his breath against her neck is a temptation she can’t quite resist.
“Mmm. Yeah. If you are.”
“I think the party’s coming back to mine,” Jes says. “Do you guys have a car?”
“Yeah,” Grace says. She turns to face him. The darkness of his eyes tightens something low in her, throwing her off balance with a sudden spur of want. She blinks it away before she loses herself in it, and sees her friends over his shoulder. Their tipsiness is tilting into full-blown drunk. She says, “And I’m definitely going to have to drive.”
“That’s lame. You want to leave the car here, come with us instead?”
“We’ll have to get home eventually,” Grace says. She’s trying so hard to keep her footing.
“Party could go late,” Jes says. His hand tightens on her waist. “Till tomorrow, maybe.”
“Eventually, I said.”
He dips his head like he’s going to kiss her and then doesn’t. Grace smiles just to give her mouth something to do.
“We’ll meet you there, then,” he says, and leaves without touching her again.