Grace and the Fever

by Zan Romanoff

  “Oh, really?”

  “I mean, it’s not like—what happened to you. And the band. But things have changed for me, too. Like that dumb stuff on Twitter yesterday. Or people ask, sometimes, at school. And—and I miss you,” Grace says. She stumbles over the words, but then she’s said them, and she can’t take them back. “I’ve missed you, Jes. It’s not like you never happened.”

  “That’s the worst part,” he says. “I miss you, too. I wanted you to come here and say something magical to make me forgive you, and then we’d be friends again. And something would be fixed. Something would be fine.”

  “I can’t give you that,” Grace tells him. “I can’t give you anything.”

  “Come here,” he says.

  “What?”

  Jes scooches to the back edge of the couch and gestures with one hand. “Here. Come here.”

  Grace navigates the climb awkwardly. She doesn’t know what this means—if she’s allowed to touch him, or if he just wants her closer. She settles herself on her back, and Jes curls himself along her side.

  “Can we just…talk?” he asks. “We can figure out everything in a minute. Let’s just pretend it’s all still normal. Like we haven’t spoken since the night we met. Tell me about college. Tell me: did you escape yourself?”

  “Kind of,” Grace says. “You know. Not really.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I guess you never will, huh? If you’re recording again. Doing all of that.”

  “I’m not, really. Recording.”

  “I thought you were.”

  “I was for a little while. It didn’t really—it didn’t work out.”

  Grace can’t help herself. “You and Willa?”

  “My management didn’t feel like it was authentic to have me working with a country singer,” Jes says. “Wasn’t our sound in the band, and it can’t be my sound now, because. They want me to do something R&B. They want me to dance. I grew up in the goddamn south, you know? Willa lived in Connecticut until she was fifteen.”

  “You can’t just say, fuck you? I’m Jes Holloway and I’ll do what I want?”

  “They know what they’re doing.”

  “But you know who you are.”

  “Do I?” Jes smiles sadly at her. “Didn’t we have this conversation once before? About knowing who to be?”

  “Fair enough.” Grace can’t imagine the pressure-cooker Jes’s identity has been formed in—what it would be like to be young and famous, trying to figure yourself out in the middle of a white-hot spotlight. Comparing yourself to the stories people told about you and always having to wonder: is that what I’m like? Is that what I’m supposed to be like? And especially when your identity, like Jes’s, comes pre-loaded in so many people’s minds.

  “I’d buy the shit out of your country album,” Grace says. “For the record. If that’s what you wanted to do.”

  Jes shrugs. “It was also, um. It was also kind of a Willa thing. She’s much smarter than I am. Did you know she went to college? Online bachelor’s while she was recording her first album. She graduated in the middle of her first tour.”

  “The first thing I learned in college is that lots of idiots do it.”

  “She’s not one of them,” Jes says. “And college isn’t even— That’s not really what the problem was. She, um, she thought I was too clingy.” He laughs into Grace’s shoulder.

  Privately, she has to concede that Willa might have had a point.

  “She told you that?”

  “Wil doesn’t mess around. And the writing wasn’t going that well, honestly. She’s so country. That’s not really my— Or it wasn’t our thing, I guess.”

  “You don’t want it to be your new thing?”

  “I don’t want to have a new thing,” Jes says. “The old thing was working fine.”

  Grace shifts so she can elbow him in the side.

  “Okay,” he says. “Okay. I know it wasn’t. I just—I don’t understand what to do with all of this time.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  Jes sits up. Grace moves so that she’s propped against the couch’s armrest, and in the movement she almost misses what’s happening on his face. She catches his gaze, though, and there’s a split second where he looks at her and all he looks is blank. It’s not a mask, this time. It’s just his face. Grace realizes: he doesn’t know the answer to that question.

  He doesn’t even know how to ask it.

  He knows how to cover that, though. “I’m visiting my friend Isaac in London for the next few weeks,” he says. “And then I’ll be back in Georgia for the holidays, though I can’t imagine I’ll do New Year’s in Athens. Rick’s going to set me up with some guys—songwriters, not performers; I think we agree that’s the way to go—in January. I’ll be busy enough, I guess.”

  This has been Jes’s life since he was a teenager: write, perform, promote, and tour.

  Grace asks it a different way. “Do you want to take a break?”

  And now Jes focuses on her, actually looks at her. “I don’t,” he says. “Everyone keeps asking me that. And I don’t. I don’t need to.”

  “But if you wanted to—”

  “I don’t want to. What would I do?”

  “That’s the point. You wouldn’t do anything. You’d just—whatever. Figure it out.”

  Jes laughs. “Where? In Athens? Am I going to move to Los Angeles and party with George and Ivy and Land? Or New York, maybe? Sol and Raj are talking about moving here. Or! Grace. I could move to— Where are you? Ohio?”

  “Gambier.”

  “Great. Gambier. The dorms suck, right? We could get a house. I would write songs about the simple country life. Everyone would come visit us, and we’d throw the best parties. You could teach me how to cook.” He was kidding when he began talking, but he’s starting to sound like he’s serious about the idea.

  Grace says, “I don’t really know how to cook.”

  “Even better. I’d teach myself how to cook and surprise you at the end of each day with something new and terrible.”

  The idea is fresh and bright on his face. He’s gleaming with it.

  “You can teach me how to live like a regular person,” he says. “How to—how to live in the world. We can figure out who we are when we’re alone. And who we want to be. But, like, together.”

  For a minute, Grace lets the fantasy consume her. The two of them cozy together in a farmhouse, or a wood-floored, brick-walled apartment just off campus. Jes making hot cocoa and scorching the milk, apologizing, the two of them laughing about all of their funny little mistakes together. Jes reading a book with those glasses on, and talking to her about it, and letting her talk to him about what she’s studying. Jes in bed, first thing in the morning, soft and fuzzy with sleep, all hers, and Jes at night, his body a long, hot line in the sheets, all hers.

  The two of them in a world of their own.

  Which is not, she knows now, the same thing as the world.

  The fantasy of it feels good, but it feels old, too. It’s something high school Grace was always indulging: this idea that she could find some private space where she was only ever responsible for dreaming. That she could find it and keep it, and no one around her would notice or care.

  Because what Jes is talking about would be the two of them hiding. It would be the two of them hiding out inside of each other. He isn’t at all interested in being a part of her actual, messy life.

  And she’s not interested in giving it up for him again.

  Grace feels her heart crack cleanly in half. As soon as she starts to step back from the lulling pull of the fantasy, she sees all the different ways she knows it will never work. Jes would lose his mind, alone in a house somewhere with no one to talk to and nowhere to go. She would never be enough to keep him happy, if he had to give up the rest of his life to have her.

  And if she gave up the rest of her life to have him, she wouldn’t be happy, either.

  “I can’t,” she says. “We
can’t.”

  “Oh, don’t be that way about it, Grace. We can. We could, if we—”

  “This isn’t a joke, Jes,” Grace says. “It isn’t, to me. And I want to so much. Which is exactly why I can’t.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you remember when you came to my house?” Grace asks. Jes nods. “I said I wanted you to know how to treat me like a person.”

  “I did,” Jes says. “I’ve always—”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything,” Grace cuts in. “Or I’m accusing us both of the same thing, I think. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about, since—you know. That night. How I failed to imagine you guys, and your lives. How complicated they were. How personal. I guess that sounds stupid, but you really were like characters to me. I read your stories, and I watched them. And then I was in the middle of one, and I still couldn’t see everything that was happening, because I thought I already knew the plot.”

  “That was before, though. You know that, now. And, look, we don’t have to get a house, really. I could just come visit for a few months. See how I like it. See how we like each other.”

  “You don’t know me, Jes.”

  “Not yet.”

  “No, I mean, you don’t—you’re failing to imagine me, too. Right now. This idea that I’m going to teach you how to live like a regular person—I don’t know how to do that for myself yet. I can’t do it for you.”

  “You can’t do it with me?”

  “I don’t know how to make those two different things,” Grace says. “I think that’s one of the things we like about each other: when we’re in, we’re all in.”

  “So what are you going to do? Avoid something with someone you know you care about, because it might end up hurting you?”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Grace says. “I’m excited about it, I think. The not-knowing. The finding out. That’s the point.”

  Jes drops her gaze. He says, “I don’t know how to do that.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” Grace says. “And then you should come to Ohio.”

  “You’ll definitely have graduated by then. You’ll probably have grandchildren by then.”

  “I have faith in you,” Grace says.

  Jes gives her a look, and it takes her a minute to remember why. She laughs, and reaches out one last time, to tap the tattoo that sits watch over his heart.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Faith. Exactly. That’s something I can give you.”

  “That,” Jes says, “is maybe the only thing I can give you back.”

  Grace isn’t due back at Katy’s for a few hours; the plan is to meet there before going to Gregor’s to help him eat last night’s leftovers. After she and Jes say goodbye, she sets off walking without any sense of where she’s going. She’s not ready to be indoors again, or to talk to anyone about what just happened. She feels light and free and lost and terrified. New York is full of people in dark coats, hurrying hard against the coming evening and the cold. Grace walks and walks.

  She’s been thinking about getting a tattoo of her own for a little while now. In the aftermath of the concert, she turned Jes’s phrase over and over in her mind, the idea that she could decorate herself with her mistakes. Then they seemed too ugly and enormous to pin down and too wretched to bear keeping. She wanted to write everything or maybe nothing on her wrists or like chains around her ankles.

  Now, though, watching the sunset fade and glow in the west, pink against the gray of everything else, Grace sees another possibility. She has to Yelp a parlor that’s open the day after Thanksgiving; it’s just far enough away that she ducks into a cab to spare herself the walk. The warmth of being inside is so sudden that she’s too shocked to take off her coat. Her mother is going to kill her for spending her money this way. She rattles across town in the backseat, thinking, Am I really doing this? and finds that yes, yes, she really is.

  She’s the last customer of the day, but the artist doesn’t seem to mind doing the work. He likes her idea, and it’s simple enough to execute.

  Grace gets a sacred heart tucked inside the crook of her elbow, at the soft part where her veins lie blue just under the surface. It beats softly with her pulse, and burns with all the longing and possibility of her epic, aching desire. To love like this is part of who she is. Her own fever burns in her; it marks her, and crowns her, and decorates her skin.

  When the artist is finished, he covers the tattoo with a square of Saran Wrap to protect it and leaves Grace in the chair and goes off to run her credit card. She looks at her heart, just black lines against whiteness, stark, lovely, wreathed in flame, and does what she always does when she sees something she loves: she snaps a picture with her phone. She opens a text to Katy, and then closes it, and then one to Jes, and closes it, too. She thinks about tweeting it. She thinks about deleting it.

  Instead, she puts her phone back in her bag and pulls her sweater on, careful not to jostle the plastic wrapped around the freshness of the wound. For now, it’s hers and hers alone. She can wait as long as she needs before she decides what she wants to do with it next.

  In November of 2014, I sent my friend Logan Sachon an email about a boy-band book I was thinking about writing. This is not that book, but this book never would have come to be if Logan hadn’t written back “OHMYGOD WRITE THAT RIGHT NOW!” and kept asking where it was already, until, a few months later, I sent her an email with the first thousand words of what would ultimately become Grace and the Fever. And then the next thousand, and the next, almost every day until it was done. For a few months we were Grace and Fever Dream’s fandom of two, and it was one of the most surreal, incredible things that’s ever happened to me. So, in the first place, Logan: thank you so much for letting me tell you this story. It just wouldn’t exist without you.

  It also wouldn’t exist without Dinosaur Coffee and their lemon ginger tonics and the Wi-Fi I stole from the McDonald’s next door, one 8 a.m.–10 a.m. morning at a time.

  Thank you to the rest of my personal boy-band think tank, whose emails about Niall’s memoirs, Harry’s grosgrain neck ribbons, Louis’s selfies, and their weird, weird One Direction dreams are probably the best things I’ve ever read, if I’m honest: Catie, Kelsey, Miranda, and Nozlee.

  Thank you to the One Direction internet, even though you didn’t know I was lurking. Thank you to the Hanson internet, even though you didn’t know I was lurking either.

  Thank you to Annie and Jen for writing fan fiction with me in elementary school. Silver, Andy, Lexy & Romy forever. (Special shout-out to Jen for the copyedit.)

  Thank you to Amanda for reading Grace on the plane to New York, and for loving her almost as much as I do. Thank you to Mushanto for being Mushanto. Mushanto.

  Thank you to my parents for letting me be such a total weirdo.

  Thank you to my agent, Logan Garrison, and my editor, Katherine Harrison, who always somehow Get It.

  And of course, thank you and I’m sorry and I love you to Harry, Louis, Liam, Niall, and Zayn.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  * * *

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.