“Rolling,” said Mr. Studdard once the five of us had gathered in a lump in the middle of the set. But his ear mike had malfunctioned and no one heard him.
“What a cock-up this is,” Tara sighed, smoothing her hair.
J. J. turned beet red.
Brody hissed, “You can’t say that. You can’t say that word.”
“What, cock-up?”
“Stop saying it!”
“In the theater, they would’ve—”
“You guys,” Kelly said through clenched teeth, “the TVs are rolling. The TVs are rolling.”
“‘The TVs are rolling’?” Tara repeated, perplexed.
“The cameras, she means the cameras,” Brody shouted.
“The telly’s not rolling.” Tara giggled hysterically. Even our professional stage actress fell prey to nerves.
“Get it together,” Kelly pleaded out the side of her mouth.
J. J. froze and stared directly into the camera. He didn’t utter a peep for the rest of the opening segment.
The others talked vaguely and loudly about the agreed-upon ad-libs regarding “the band’s demo” and “waiting to hit it big” despite “living at the San Diego Zoo,” until mercifully…
Kelly performed an old drill team routine from school, minus the team.
Brody tossed her a wooden walking stick. She caught it effortlessly and used it as a baton. While the rest of us watched, she performed a military march, a solo Rockette kick line, and a few twirls without music or sound.
When she finished, I stepped forward to provide the edutainment aspect of the scene: “Did you know the California sea lion is the fastest of all the sea lions and that males can weigh up to seven hundred seventy pounds?” I squawked.
“Noooo,” said Kelly.
“Oh my God, pause it,” Thom begged. His eyes shone with delight. He even threw in a toddler-esque handclap.
“It’s not a DVR,” I said.
He pointed at the TV with glee. “That’s you, though, isn’t it?”
I blushed. “Uh, yeah.”
Onscreen, Tara reemerged from behind Brody, her human shield, and tried to draw out the California sea lion sequence with me, asking me questions about their eating habits and vocalization barks, but Brody was acting like the main character in Memento; he couldn’t seem to remember anything that had happened in the previous thirty seconds, so his way of coping was to repeat Tara’s questions after they’d already been addressed.
The three of us attempted to steer the conversation in opposing directions until J. J. boldly stepped forward.
And that’s how we found out he couldn’t just sing.
He could motherfucking dance.
No wonder Jerry chose that particular blooper. It showcased his ol’-buddy-ol’-pal in the most flattering light. The current studio audience went nuts for it.
The clip ended.
“You had some serious moves,” Jerry said. “Give it up for baby J. J.”
J. J. smiled modestly, looking a bit dazed. “Wow. Lots of memories.”
“Got a favorite one?”
“Yeah. How close we all were, getting to play pretend all day, how every day was something new. I actually lived with one of my castmates because my parents had to get back to work. Her parents became my legal guardians so I could stay on the show.”
Jerry about popped a forehead vein from the sheer Teen Bop Excitement of it all. “‘Her’? Who was it? Kelly? Please let it be Kelly, please let it be Kelly…” He crossed both sets of fingers and held them aloft.
“No, it wasn’t her.”
“Oh man…we’ve got to break for a commercial, but when we come back maybe we can find out who the mystery girl is.”
Ad break.
I studiously avoided Thom’s gaze.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” he deduced. “You’re the one he lived with.” His voice sounded flat, but then again, everyone on earth’s voice sounded flat when contrasted with Jerry Levine’s.
I nodded. “His parents ran the youth group at a megachurch in North Carolina and couldn’t take all those months off. But the real reason was they had second thoughts after arriving in California and decided they didn’t want J. J. to be on TV. They wanted him to live a life serving God and didn’t think the two were compatible. I saw how heartbroken J. J. was, so I begged my parents to step in, just for a little while so he could tape the show. We thought it would last a few months, tops.”
“And his parents agreed?”
“Well, no. Until J. J. told them they could have every dollar he made for the church, even the stuff that was supposed to go into a trust fund by state law.”
Thom looked appalled. “Jesus.”
“Exactly.”
The years he spent living at my parents’ house in San Diego were wonderful. It was the only time of my life I’d go back to and relive without changing a single thing. So much of our relationship to come was about the distance between us. It was hard to remember we lived under the same roof for years. Hard because it hurt to think about, and hard because it felt like a fantasy; but it was real, it happened, and no one could take it away from us. There’d been so many paths ahead of us, so many choices. Back then, it felt as though the future was vast, and friendly, and receptive to any possibility, when in fact my best parts had already happened, and only J. J.’s future was wide open.
“When they come back from commercial, he won’t say my name, though. Just wait. He’ll change the subject. He’s never mentioned me by name to the press. Not once.”
“Why the hell not?”
His anger startled me. I always forgot that while the story was old news to me, something I’d lived with since adolescence, it sounded strange to everyone else.
“He was protecting me from hate mail,” I explained. “Nobody wanted to imagine the cute boys from OffBeat dating anyone. They weren’t allowed to have girlfriends because it would alienate their fans. That’s what Pam always said.”
“But Brody and Melody dated,” Thom pointed out. “And no one was bothered by that. That was, like, tabloid ecstasy.”
“That was okay because they were equally famous and she was the band’s opening act. That helped the band; constant free publicity. But it wasn’t real.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“I’m really not.”
His knowledge of pop culture had been thrown out of alignment. “But…but…Brody and Melody were, like, a super couple. And that’s not a word I use lightly. Or ever.”
I shrugged. “That’s what you were meant to think.”
Once again, he noticed the program’s return before I did. “Show’s back on.”
I hesitated to turn up the volume. I would rather have talked more with Thom.
When I didn’t move right away, Thom pumped the volume in time to hear J. J. confess, “She was my first girlfriend. My first kiss. My first love, Holly Danner. And we tried to make it work for years, under the radar.”
I felt a detonation in my gut. It spread through my limbs. Why on earth did he wait till now, when we hadn’t spoken in five years, to talk about me to the press? How could he do something like that without discussing it with me first?
The answer hit me like a pile of bricks.
He’d done it because he was mad.
It had thrown him for a loop when he showed up in San Diego and I wasn’t there, waiting for him. In the past I’d stood by him, argued for him, taken him back over and over, because the main, unspoken agreement between us was that I was supposed to wait for him, and then I was supposed to fold at a moment’s notice, whenever and wherever he asked. That’s how it worked for so many years; why would this time be any different?
Yet it had been. When he sauntered back to our old stomping grounds, I was gone, and all he could do was ask Renee for my phone number. And then when he reached out, I hung up on him. I’d flipped the script, and he couldn’t handle it.
J. J. leaned in toward Jerry as though he were sharing a heartbre
aking story with a friend instead of millions of viewers.
“And now she won’t talk to me,” J. J. pouted.
“Awwww,” fretted the audience.
“She won’t even pick up the phone.”
They booed me! Assholes!
I flailed at Thom. “See? He’s getting them on his side. Who would hang up on J. J.? She must be AN UNGRATEFUL BITCH.”
“Wow. He didn’t say that…”
“Oh, come on. That was obviously the implication.” I shut the TV off with a decisive click.
“Are you okay?” Thom asked.
I flexed my fingers in his direction. “Phone, please? I need to correct some shit on Reddit.”
“He cheated on you, didn’t he? I’m not judging you, I’m judging him.”
“No. He really didn’t.”
“Come on. He was in a boy band, traveling the world.”
“He could barely get past the guilt of having sex with me. Why would he cheat with a stranger?”
“He barely had sex with you?” Thom lowered his voice. “J. J. Randall’s gay?”
“No, he’s born again. And again. And again.”
“Wait, didn’t he get a DUI?”
I jerked my chin in a manner that could be construed as a nod.
“Was it church wine?” Thom goaded me. “Or was that between confessions?”
“He’s evangelical, not Catholic. And after the whole debacle with his manager ripping them off, he became a…” I closed my eyes briefly. “A Christian stoner.”
Thom tried to stifle a laugh, and failed. Badly. “Wait, what?”
“You know, ‘God gave us this plant’ and ‘God helps those who help themselves’ and ‘Behold, I have given you every herb-bearing seed.’”
Thom’s eyes practically twinkled. “No.”
“Oh yes.”
“But having sex with you was verboten?”
“No, I already told you, we had sex. Just…in bouts.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means whenever we reunited we hit it like jackrabbits but then he’d leave on tour again or to promote an album and while he was away he’d convince himself we shouldn’t have done those things outside the bonds of marriage.”
“Easy fix,” Thom snapped. “Marry you.”
“That was a whole other can of worms. Notice the lack of crosses on my person?”
“Atheist?”
“Agnostic. You?”
“I definitely see the value of churches, having a community to lean on, but dogma is a tough sell for me.”
“I think it would have been easier if I was a nonbeliever. Then he could have walked away. But knowing there was a chance I’d come around, any moment, any day, probably kept us together past the expiration date.”
Thinking back, it probably tortured him as much as his back-and-forth about sex tortured me. Our hopes that the other person would change inevitably turned to resentment.
“His faith inspired Renee’s, though, and I’ll always be grateful for that,” I said.
Thom squinted at me. “Are you sure he’s not gay?”
“How many times do I have to say it? He’s not gay, Brody is.” I clamped a hand over my mouth.
Thom’s had fallen open.
“You didn’t hear that from me,” I insisted. “I never said that.”
“So Melody wasn’t just a fake girlfriend?” he whispered back. “She was a full-on beard?”
I nodded mutely.
“I would never say anything,” Thom assured me. “And anyway, it’s his business, not mine.”
“It should have been Tara who faux-dated him,” I remarked. I couldn’t stop myself; talking with him was natural and easy, and I’d been starved for conversation about this particular topic for years. J. J. and I used to discuss it but we both found it hard to accept. I thought Brody should come out, and J. J. thought he shouldn’t do anything. He never said “love the sinner, hate the sin” or anything like that—and he did love Brody—but I think he was still hoping Brody might turn out to be bi instead.
“Why Tara?” Thom leaned against the headboard with his hands behind his head, the way he used to sit at Prevail!, like he was settling in for a spell.
“They were close for a long time. But she didn’t want any part of it. Until…” I hesitated, out of habit.
“You’re the one who brought it up,” Thom teased me. “Let the record state I have not been hounding you for information on Brody Rutherford’s fake love life—”
“Shh, okay.” I moved onto Thom’s bed and he pulled his legs in so I’d have more room. I kept my voice low. “Melody’s contract with Brody was about to fizzle out, and she wanted to date other people for real, so they agreed to ‘break up’ and say he’d cheated on her.”
“Better to be an asshole to women than loving toward men,” Thom paraphrased. “This just in: I hate everyone.”
“Mel’s team had written ‘Low Down, Dirty (Cheat),’ so it was perfect timing. It debuted at number one and helped Brody score an audition as a bad boy in one of the Fast & Furious derivatives.”
Thom looked a bit ill. “Win-win, I guess.”
“But back to Tara. She saw how much publicity he and Mel got for being a couple, how that could’ve been her, and I think she regretted turning him down. She and Brody came up with a long-term plan. Years one, two, and three, they’d plant items in the press and let the public wonder who he cheated on Melody with.”
“Ugh, I remember that,” Thom said. “Wasn’t it a sketch on SNL, too?”
I nodded. “Year four, they’d float the possibility it was Tara and see how people reacted.”
“How did people react?”
“Mixed, which was the point. Countless opinion pieces. Year five, they’d confirm it all in time for the release of Manchot’s greatest hits, and play up the love-triangle / girl-fight angle. Year six, which is coming up now I think, is where it gets psycho—”
“Stop, I can’t take any more,” Thom begged.
“Sorry. Meet my ‘friends,’ for whom nothing is real and everything is calculated.”
“But not you and J. J.,” he floated.
“No,” I said softly. “That was as real as it gets.”
It was after midnight. Ten hours since I’d last been online, and so much had happened since then.
“Phone, please?” I opened my hand and waggled my fingers at Thom. “This can count for tomorrow’s session, I swear. But I have to see what people are saying about J. J.’s interview.”
“Nope. This would, in fact, be the worst time for you to go online.”
“You get that you’re not really my sober companion, right?”
“It was literally the only condition of my driving you to New York. And considering you’ve reneged on every other promise you made…” His tone was light, not serious, so I responded in kind.
“What are you, a lawyer now?”
“Secondly…” Thom intoned pompously.
“Stop pontificating. Give it to me,” I interrupted, and moved closer to him on the bed.
He looked startled and held the phone behind his back. I tried to grab it.
He scrambled toward the headboard and I pursued him. I managed to get my fingers around the phone. His hand covered mine, warm and firm, like it had on the stick shift earlier today.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
Electric sparks flew between us. Around us. Under us. Over us.
I pulled and pulled and manage to dislodge it from his grasp. I whooped in triumph.
He wrapped one strong arm around my waist from behind and lifted me up, then reached around with his other hand and stole the phone back.
I turned in his arms. Our faces were inches apart.
He moved closer.
I stared at his lips. My entire body hummed in anticipation. Sure, I’d kissed him at Prevail!, but that was in service of getting his clothes off before either of us could think straight. This time, it would cou
nt. I would make sure of it.
But the knee-buckling kiss I longed for never came.
Instead, he let go of me, and I nearly toppled over. The hesitant smile on his face slowly morphed into a smug one.
“What?” I asked.
“Go ahead,” he replied casually, handing me the phone and leaning against the headboard again, all stretched out on the bed like a jungle cat.
“Really?”
“Sure.”
I remained standing above him, like a tower, but more like the Leaning Tower of Pisa; I swayed from how off balance he’d made me when he removed his arms from around my body. I moved with as much dignity as I could muster—which wasn’t much—over to my own twin bed. It was like walking on a trampoline.
Mirroring his pose, I lay on my back and held the phone aloft.
“After those huge beds at Prevail!, this is an adjustment,” Thom said.
“They’re an obscenity.”
I swiped my finger across his phone and filled in the password, vaguely curious how Thom knew that I knew it.
Bzz.
I swallowed, tried again. SAM-E, same as before.
Bzz.
I ground my teeth. Looked over at Thom on the opposite bed.
“Something wrong?” he asked innocently.
“You changed it, didn’t you?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” His grin widened.
“Oh, shut up.”
“Do I need to sleep with it under my pillow, or are you going to behave tonight?”
In response, I chucked the phone at his bed. It bounced once on the mattress before he retrieved it.
I didn’t want to behave. I wanted his arms around me again.
According to Thom, the reason he didn’t have sex with me before was because I’d been crying. Did that mean if I’d been cheerful, we would’ve gone at it full tilt?
Another thought hit me, unbidden: What if we had done it, and the sex was bad, and then we’d been forced on this road trip together? That would’ve made things more awkward than they already were. I should be relieved, I decided. It was a good thing he’d turned me down.
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