Grace and the Fever

by Zan Romanoff

  “Because you didn’t want to go!” Cara cries.

  Grace and Lianne are both so surprised to hear her speak up that they fall silent. Cara takes in a deep, gulping breath before she continues. “You would always stand around looking uncomfortable all night. You would remember everything the next morning, and make these little jokes: Ha-ha, wasn’t it funny when you were all messed up and I wasn’t?”

  “I was embarrassed!” Grace says. Cara getting emotional feels like it’s tapped into some deep vein of feeling, a seam of hurt she didn’t even know existed. “I was the lame one! I didn’t know how to do it, okay? Any of it. I just felt like I was so bad at it, and I just kept waiting for you to—for you to—” But she can’t get the last words together: figure it out.

  Instead, she says, “I don’t understand how you guys do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Let people see you like that.”

  Cara snorts. “Drunk and embarrassing?”

  “At all,” Grace says. “How you can just—assume that you’re not going to do something that makes people hate you. Or want to avoid you. I don’t get that. I can’t do that.”

  Lianne says, “You’re not the only person in the world who gets self-conscious.”

  Grace feels completely worn down, like fabric rubbed and rinsed until it’s transparent, gossamer-thin. “I thought you were sick of me,” she says in her smallest voice. “I guess I just—I don’t know. I was so sick of myself sometimes.”

  Cara unbuckles her seat belt so that she can lie down and curl up sideways in the backseat. Watching her, Grace understands all over again how physically Cara avoids confrontation—and how that avoidance gives people who say they love her tacit permission to hurt her. How Cara’s niceness, her endless, giving permissiveness, comes as much from generosity as it does from her fear of taking up too much space, which is something Grace might know a thing or two about herself, actually.

  Grace catches a glimpse of her own reflection in the windshield and imagines what they must look like from the outside, each of them stone-faced and exhausted in the early morning light.

  “It’s not easy for anyone,” Lianne says.

  “I’m sorry about last night. I didn’t mean to drag you guys into anything. I really didn’t.”

  “Let’s leave last night alone for now.” Lianne’s voice, finally, is gentle again. “We can—later. I just wanted to say that we’ve missed you, Grace, which is messed up. We’ve been missing you for a while. So, like, it’s up to you, I guess, now that you know that for sure, if you want to let us in again. Or if you—you know. If you don’t.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” Grace says. “I really, really didn’t. It just—it was easier. To keep to myself. And to tell myself that you didn’t care if I did.”

  “We always loved you,” Cara says softly. “We always wanted to love you, anyway.”

  “I wanted you to love me,” Grace admits. “I just thought maybe it was selfish. Wanting that. Like having to want it meant I didn’t deserve it.”

  Cara blows a raspberry. “Everyone wants to be loved,” she says. “Everyone. God.”

  There’s a pause.

  “Hey,” Lianne says. “If you want me to, I can drive the rest of the way home. You must be exhausted.”

  “We’re all tired,” Grace says. “Thank you, I mean. But I’ve got it. I do.”

  The rest of the car ride happens in silence. Grace isn’t sure what this means about Cara and Lianne and her, whether this will end up bringing them closer together or if, finally, this is what will make them fall apart.

  Part of the problem is that they’re so used to each other, Grace thinks—they’re so used to seeing each other that they’ve never gotten good at looking at one another, for how each of them has changed and evolved in the long years they’ve been friends. Grace isn’t the fourth grader who was too shy to argue and let her friends pick a science project that almost got them all electrocuted, and she’s not the same uncertain girl they knew through high school, either. She wonders who Cara and Lianne have become while she’s been busy figuring herself out, and whether they’ll want to let her discover that, now that they know who she’s been. Who she is.

  It seems like they’re willing to try, anyway.

  Cara pipes up just as they’re turning onto the block for her house. “At least now I have an amazing how I spent my summer vacation story,” she says.

  Her matter-of-factness startles a laugh out of Grace. “Yeah, right. At least there’s that. I banged a boy-bander—ask me how!”

  “Oh, I didn’t actually bang him,” Cara clarifies. “We started making out, and then he had some kind of panic attack or something. I don’t know. He said he needed to be alone and locked himself in the bathroom. I spent most of the night playing Tetris on my phone.”

  “Did you get a high score?” Lianne asks.

  Cara laughs. “In one way, no,” she says. Lianne rolls her eyes at the pun. “But in another way—”

  “I am honestly sorry I asked,” Lianne says.

  “—I mean, also no,” Cara finishes.

  Grace thinks of her wild hopes for the night with Jes and how everything actually turned out. Dread fills her up all over again. She can’t bear to think about the vast nothing that’s coming for her next. So instead she finds another joke to make. “See,” she says. “This life I’ve been living, it’s very glamorous.”

  “I get that now,” Cara tells her. She catches Grace’s eye in the rearview mirror and smiles. It occurs to Grace that neither of them had the night they hoped for, actually. But here they are still, together, in the morning.

  “Yeah. Me too,” Grace agrees.

  Katy’s email just says, is it true.

  Grace writes back, Yes. Well, the stuff about who I am, anyway.

  —

  Whoever logged in to her Tumblr didn’t change the password. She didn’t alter anything, except put up her post. Grace deletes it, like it will matter. It’s already been screen-capped by half the fandom. The original has several hundred thousand notes. Every media outlet in existence has emailed to ask her for comment. Thank god all of her social media has been set to private since Holy Communion.

  On the other hand, who knows how many people from her real life have gotten to explore the archive of her formerly private internet one.

  Grace deletes everything, every post, thousands of them, years’ worth, all of her history gone with the tap of her fingers on the trackpad. This action cannot be undone.

  Fine. Click. Gone.

  —

  It doesn’t erase a thing from her brain, though. That’s all still there, neatly ordered and carefully preserved. If she lingers for too long, she can almost convince herself that none of it happened: that she didn’t see what she thought she saw last night. That Jes was wrong, or lying.

  She had so much evidence for her version of the story. It just made sense.

  It made sense of her.

  Grace opens her laptop again and starts to delete unrelated things: lab reports, middle school English essays, half-started short stories, ill-conceived selfies. What’s the point of keeping all of it? It doesn’t tell the real, whole story. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just stuff. Facts. Receipts.

  The useless, terrible truth.

  If Lolly wasn’t real, why was it so real?

  She spent years collecting things she thought were clues. It wasn’t that they didn’t arrange themselves neatly into her narrative; it’s just that they didn’t belong in it, not really.

  Those boys really did and said all of those things. She thought the facts being true meant her story about them was, too, but that’s not how it works. She gets that now. You can see something very clearly without knowing what it is. You can know what something is without understanding what it means.

  Something can be real, and not at all true.

  She had fifteen different pictures of the tattoo on Jes’s hip, and she used to have fifteen different arguments for
what it was, or might be. Now she knows: something blooming, coming into itself. A design he put there because he liked the way it looked. It was always what it was, even when she didn’t know that yet.

  Land and Solly were never, ever in love.

  And Jes never knew who she was. Not really. Probably not at all.

  Holding his hand by Rick’s pool, she thought she knew what he meant to her: he was a person, suddenly, instead of a saint. But Land and Solly—the two of them, together—they were her religion. She performed her acts of worship and accorded them all of her faith. Their love was the first mystery, the one that bound the world together.

  Now, faithless and adrift, Grace isn’t sure if she knows who she is. She used to be a disciple. Now she’s a heretic. Now she’s really lost. Grace had friends, even if she didn’t trust them. She had a life, even if it was built to hide something she was ashamed of loving. She had choices about which self she wanted to be, and when.

  Now she’s Grace and Gigi, distinctions collapsed. Everything to everyone at once.

  And nothing and no one to herself.

  Email from allison.burczyk@gmail.com

  to grace.eileen.thomas@gmail.com

  July 22, 8:32 pm ET

  Damn, girl. You crazy. Can’t wait to hear this whole story. So soon!

  Email from adria@pixelandgrain.com to

  grace.eileen.thomas@gmail.com

  July 23, 11:07 am PDT

  Hi Grace,

  What an intense week! I understand from Rick that they won’t be pursuing any legal action against you, since the pictures were sent before the NDA was signed, and they can’t track down the girl who took your phone. (Well, and they’re choosing to believe that someone took it! Hannah says you wouldn’t have outed yourself on purpose, and I guess Rick is willing to believe her. There’s also the issue of needing tangible proof, something you should think seriously about before you make any further claims alleging relationships within the band.)

  However, it doesn’t look great to have P&G’s name dragged around like this, especially in some kind of intricate gay/outing conspiracy re one of our major clients. Your statements—and lack thereof—so far aren’t helping matters. Would you be willing to do a super brief press conference with a few handpicked outlets? We can preapprove questions and make the whole experience pretty painless, and it would really help us out! Let me know what you’re thinking.

  Very best,

  Adria

  Email from grace.eileen.thomas@gmail.com

  to katy.hendricks@gmail.com

  July 23, 5:46 pm PDT

  I know you’re furious with me, but I just have to tell you: Lolly isn’t real.

  I can explain if you want.

  I am so, so sorry.

  Email from katy.hendricks@gmail.com

  to grace.eileen.thomas@gmail.com

  July 24, 4:45 am ET

  Are you sure?

  Email from grace.eileen.thomas@gmail.com

  to katy.hendricks@gmail.com

  July 24, 8:13 am PDT

  Yeah. I’m sure.

  It’s great not having a phone. Grace is pretty sure she’s never going to bother having a phone again. No one can reach her. She checks her email twice a day, once in the morning and once at night, and deletes almost everything she gets. Instead of feeling viral, like something that swirls around in the air and makes the whole world hum, the internet lives in her laptop, trapped like a demon.

  The best emails are the ones from other Grace Thomases complaining that she’s ruining their Google search results.

  Grace bites down on the urge to write back, yeah well I ruined my own LIFE. No one cares. Whatever she did, she did it. She wanted to step up and out and become someone, and she did. It’s just that who she became is who she was all along: a weirdo, and a loser, and a loner.

  At least she’s spent her whole life getting ready for this role. She knows how to handle it: Grace is actually pretty good at being alone. She wakes up after her mom leaves each morning to makes herself elaborate breakfasts; she reads a lot of books. She runs every single day. It feels appropriately futile to spend hours looping around the neighborhood, exhausting herself thoroughly, only to end up exactly where she started out. In the afternoons, she sits by the pool and lets the sun bake and glaze her. By the time her mom gets home in the evenings, she’s tired her body out enough that she can sit calmly at the quiet dinner table, thinking almost nothing and saying even less.

  Her mother, for her part, doesn’t bring it up. At first Grace is grateful, but eventually the silence starts to wear on her. It makes her feel even crazier to know that they both know and just won’t talk about it.

  Grace wonders if this is how her mom felt for the last few years: heavy with the weight of something she wasn’t sure she would ever be allowed to say.

  I thought maybe if I didn’t pry, you would tell me, her mother said.

  Now Grace keeps waiting for her mother to ask even though she knows she won’t. That’s her mother’s legacy to her, that kind of withdrawal, that fierce inward pull. Her father is an irresistible force and her mother is an immovable object; Grace is whatever happened when the two of them collided.

  Which makes sense: she does feel like a black hole.

  She could start the conversation if she wanted to. The problem is she’s pretty sure that if she started talking, she wouldn’t ever be able to stop. It’s so much, so much of her that was there, and hidden, and now is vanished. Gone.

  “How was your day?” her mother asks at dinner every night. Grace thinks she hears hope in her voice, and sometimes it makes her angry. It reminds her of how she used to wait for other people to make her life happen—how she used to be able to believe they would.

  She answers every night with the same limited little piece of truth. “I’m just really tired,” Grace says when her mother asks. “Sorry I’ve been, like, so tired lately.”

  Raj emails her. I need to talk to you. Can you come by Solly’s house this week?

  Grace has no idea what’s going on with Fever Dream: the rest of the band’s planned minitour dates haven’t materialized, and they don’t seem to be recording. All she knows is that she’ll do anything the band asks her to. That much hasn’t changed, at least.

  She says, Of course.

  —

  When he opens the door, Raj almost looks relaxed: he’s barefoot, wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt. He could be any dude on vacation, spending a lazy week at his boyfriend’s house, coming to greet the pizza guy or something. When Grace really looks, though, his face is wary, and the line of his shoulders is high and tense.

  “Hi,” he says, and steps aside. He doesn’t ask her to come in. He just turns and starts walking.

  Grace hurries after him, the door slamming closed too loudly behind her.

  She can’t help speaking into the silence that follows. “So you guys are hanging out in LA for a while?”

  Raj has led her to a formal living room. Grace doesn’t remember it from last time she was here. It doesn’t look like Solly uses it for much.

  “We’re living here,” Raj says. He takes a seat, and gestures for her to do the same. Then he says, “Solly’s out right now,” like she might get up and go looking for him.

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t want to hear your side of the story,” Raj tells her. “I’m not interested in the things you made up about Sol.”

  “I wasn’t—” Grace starts, and then subsides. It’s true: she used Solly’s actual life as the material for her fantasy one. It didn’t seem like it would matter because it didn’t seem like she could matter—not really, not to someone that distantly and untouchably famous. But what she wanted was the same thing that millions of other girls wanted, and together they were a force to be reckoned with. Together they’d managed to shape Solly’s life, and Land’s and Raj’s, in ways they couldn’t see or understand.

  She never meant to hurt anyone. She’s still not sure she did. But she understands why th
at distinction doesn’t matter to Raj.

  “I need to know that you’re not going to out us,” Raj says. “I need to know that whatever happens next, you’re going to sit on what you know.”

  “I signed an NDA,” Grace reminds him.

  “That’s enough for Solly. It’s not enough for me.”

  “What would be?”

  “I just want you to tell me,” Raj says. “To look at me. In this house. In our home. And tell me that you’re going to leave us alone.”

  “I have been leaving you alone.”

  “That’s what Solly says.” Raj twists a fancy button on the cover of a nearby pillow. “I don’t like the way he looks when he says it.”

  “Like it’s not going to hold?”

  “Like there’s always something coming for him, and he’s given up on trying to figure out what it’s going to be.”

  Speaking of demons. Grace has to ask, “Is Kendrick okay?”

  Raj looks at her steadily. “He’s going to rehab,” he says.

  “So the tour is postponed?”

  “The tour is canceled. The album is canceled.”

  “And the band?”

  Raj is still looking at her. “What do you think, Grace?”

  She wants to ask if it’s her fault, but it’s the same thing again: it is and it isn’t. She happened to come along when the threads were already starting to fray. She touched the weakest part of the weaving and it crumbled in her hands. But it would have happened eventually, sooner or later. Probably sooner.

  The fever has finally broken. Land and Solly were never together. Grace has staked her life on certain things for years. None of them are true now, if they ever were.

  “It’s different, right?” Raj says. “When you see what the consequences really look like. When you’re not just eating up whatever stories a tabloid is feeding you, or making up your own.”

  “Are you trying to scare me?” Grace asks.

  “I’m trying to make you understand,” Raj says. “Any way that I can. There are consequences, Grace. For people. Real people. For the boys, yeah, but also for everyone around them. For me.”