“Fine,” she shrugs. “Suit yourself.” Zac resumes ignoring her. Bored, she hits refresh on Scott’s Twitter page. There have been no new updates since last week, and she is starting to get antsy. Without any knowledge of where Scott is and what he is doing, she feels powerless—she doesn’t have his LA number, and every time she tries to e-mail him, she receives a failure notification. Her numerous blog comments and tweets and Facebook messages have all disappeared into cyberspace, swallowed up by the countless blog comments and tweets and Facebook messages he probably receives from his other fans. So she has no choice but to troll the Web for anything she can cling to, anything that will link him to her in some way; these days, even the most insignificant bit of information about him gives her a sense of control, weak but satisfying.
And there it is, suddenly: a new tweet from Scott, announcing the title of his new album. “I’ve decided to call it Summer Love,” he wrote. “It’ll be epic.”
In college, Summer played tug-of-war with her expectations, managing them one second and letting them run wild the next. She learned to read Scott’s facial expressions, learned to understand what his specific tones meant, learned to decipher his one-liner texts and decode the things he said to her over the phone. But now that their relationship has taken on an entirely impersonal level, she can no longer spot the subtle changes in his eyes or smile, no longer listen for clues in his voice. She can no longer access the part of him that she believed for years only she could access.
And perhaps it is because of this complete lack of connection and contact that she has recently—just this week, actually—started to overcompensate by assuming everything Scott posts online is a secret cry for help, a secret cry for her. Perhaps it is because of this absence of intimacy that she is so willing to believe that Scott is harboring feelings for her. When you’re desperate, it is easy to blindly, recklessly throw your hopes out into the open; to rely on luck when there is nothing else to rely on. It is easy to risk failure, really, when you don’t even know what to measure your life against anymore.
Besides, it is right there: Summer Love. What more proof does she need? And when she receives a call from Meg informing her that Scott has broken up with Roxanne (“I figured I owed this much to you,” she begins, before even saying hello), Summer can almost picture Scott sitting by the windowsill, pining for her, can almost hear him saying he loves her. It is implausible and borderline delusional, but it brings a smile to her face. She imagines the myriad of serendipitous events leading to their happy ending—she and Scott will get there, no matter how long it takes. “They weren’t right for each other,” Meg says, and although Summer is fully aware that her ex-roommate is only buttering her up out of repentant obligation, she agrees. “That’s true,” she says, taking advantage of Meg’s remorse and the chance to feed her ego. “They weren’t.”
Over the next several days, Summer keeps herself busy. But no one is too busy to escape those few fleeting moments when you’re lying in bed at night, your body on the verge of sleep but your mind wide awake and running a million miles an hour. Those moments are when you strip the day—and your life—down to the very core, making a mental tally of the good things versus the bad things, and deciding which side wins. Those moments are when you’re at your most honest with yourself, and as you drift off to sleep, you ultimately decide whether or not something is lacking, and whether or not you are going to do something about it tomorrow.
In those moments, Summer thinks of Ellie and Ken and Nick. She thinks of Zac. Then she thinks of Scott, and the way she waited and waited and waited for him to fall in love with her. She thinks of how her life has been a series of incidents where she always ends up falling short, hoping for something wonderful to happen but not quite getting there. Her life must have been interesting and fulfilling or at least bearable at some point in the years before she met him and the months after he left, but right now, she just can’t seem to make herself think otherwise.
One night, after a full day of work, she lies in bed and tells herself, I don’t belong here anymore. There is nobody here who will ever make me feel the way he made me feel. It is something she has been mulling over for a while, but it has always been a question, a vague possibility, a hazy, hasty thought—she has never allowed it to go beyond that. But on that night, it is a statement. And if I don’t belong here, she thinks, maybe I belong somewhere else. If she can’t find herself here, then there must be another place in the world where she can.
The next day, she e-mails Scott, “I miss you. How are you? You haven’t tweeted in days. I don’t even know where you are. I miss you and I can’t stand it anymore.” It’s worth a shot, she thinks, the way she does every time she clicks Send.
After about two minutes, Scott tweets, “Working on a new song called ‘Come Find Me.’ And that’s exactly what I want you to do. Yes, you.”
She hears his voice in her head, as clearly as if he were right beside her and not half a world away. She remembers him writing last year, See you around. She found it discouraging at the time, but maybe that line meant it was only a matter of time for them—that just because they couldn’t be together yet didn’t mean they’d never be together.
A week later, Summer packs her suitcase for Los Angeles.
Chapter 10
Summer has always wanted to star in her very own airport scene.
You know the drill: a girl is about to leave for a foreign land. The outfit is crucial—she will be dressed in a sweater and jeans, a beige trench coat, a red scarf, and brown boots. When she steps out of the yellow cab, she will be wearing shades and pouting her glossy lips. Her luggage will all be matching, and posh—no balikbayan boxes hastily sealed with packaging tape and scribbled on with a black marker. Before the glass doors slide open, she will look back, but only for a split-second. You will not see her eyes through the dark frames of her sunglasses, but you will predict that she is tearing up a bit.
The audience will be given the impression that she has already gone through security, although she will not be shown struggling to remove her boots and flashing other travelers her butt crack during the tedious process of bending down to put them back on. She will strut across the airport towards the check-in counter, passport in hand and head held high.
And then, a boy—tall, dark, handsome, and the love of her life—will come out of nowhere (presumably having gotten through security without a glitch, too), grab her, and kiss her so hard her world starts spinning in slow motion. She will not say it outright, but you will know that she’s decided to stay. For him. They will walk out of the airport together, hand in hand.
Today, Summer’s very own airport scene isn’t exactly turning out like she imagined it would. To begin with, it is thirty-six degrees at high noon, and she is sweating buckets through her gray shirt. She isn’t wearing sunglasses or lip gloss, let alone boots or a trench coat. And she isn’t riding a yellow cab alone. Instead, she is lurching forward as Ken sends the car screeching to a halt, while in the passenger seat, Ellie bawls into an old face towel and makes it sound like someone just died, telling Summer how she couldn’t believe she was leaving them so soon and how she hoped her sister would be happy wherever she ended up. Summer didn’t exactly have it all planned out—she had nothing but a tourist visa and enough cash for the airfare and a few months’ worth of living expenses—but she was almost sure she didn’t want to come back. “I don’t belong here anymore,” Summer attempted to explain. “You and Ken and Nick have your own life, and when I look at the three of you, I want what you have too. Badly. But I want it to be my own.”
“But we are your family,” Ellie told her, and Summer said, “I know. But that doesn’t change the fact that I have to go.”
As Summer watches Ellie and Ken drive away (they left Nick at their house, where she kissed him goodbye this morning—he thinks she’ll be back next month), she is flooded with loneliness. Nobody understands why she has to do this; nobody even bothered to try. Summer wants to be boun
cing up and down over the prospect of flying to the place where Scott is, over the prospect of reuniting with him, but right now, all she can feel is a cold, sick sense of dread.
Her phone beeps with a text message from Zac. “Please don’t go,” he tells her. Summer feels a bit cheated—if he really wanted to stop her, shouldn’t he be bursting through the glass doors instead of half-heartedly punching a few measly words into his phone?
“You’re ruining my airport scene,” she texts him, and he texts back, “I just don’t think he’s worth it.”
“But what if he is?” she asks.
When she receives Zac’s reply, she has already gone through security, already checked in her luggage, already lined up for immigration. When she finally gets to read his message, she is sitting on a cold metal bench inside the airport terminal, looking out the window at a couple of airplanes lined up like schoolchildren on a Monday morning. There is a cup of overpriced coffee beside her, and she notices her hands are trembling as she grips the Styrofoam container.
“Then maybe you have to go and find out for yourself,” he says. She thinks about this until it is time to get up and board the plane, and when she enters the aircraft and makes her way toward her seat, she almost texts him, “I’ll miss you.” But her phone is already in her bag, sandwiched between her camera and the stack of magazines she brought for the long flight, switched off like it should be.
It goes without saying that Summer is scared out of her mind. She has never traveled alone before, much less gone out of the country on her own. Her last trip was in December, when Ken drove them all to Fort Ilocandia, where he and Ellie spent hours holed up in their hotel room while she chased Nick around the enormous lawn, tickling him until they both collapsed onto the grass, wheezing with laughter. And the last time she was on a plane was the summer before her high school junior year, when Ellie took her shopping in Bangkok; it was there, over a lunch of chicken satay and shrimp pad thai, that she learned Ken had proposed. After college graduation, she could have gone to Hong Kong or Singapore with all the cash she got from her relatives (they have been showering her and Ellie with gifts for years, and sometimes all the pity presents made her sick—she knew they wouldn’t be getting anything if they weren’t orphans) but she was too depressed over Scott and Roxanne to summon the energy to travel, so she saved the money and figured she’d find some other way to enjoy it in the future.
She has surprisingly vivid memories of the last time she went to the US. She was either five or six, and her parents were still alive. She remembers giggling over the fact that she fit into the suitcase that held her clothes and Ellie’s, remembers asking her parents countless questions about how airplanes worked. For most of the flight, Summer clasped her mom’s hand, closing her eyes when the plane bobbed up and down, gaping at the sight of clouds passing by outside her window. They landed just before sunrise in Los Angeles, where her mother’s sister, Tita Elizabeth, was waiting; she had driven all the way from Sacramento to meet them. They had a huge breakfast of pancakes and sausages and hash browns and toast—Summer knows this because there is a photo of her peeking from behind a tall stack of pancakes, her eyes open wide in awe. In Disneyland, her dad hoisted her up onto his shoulders so she could watch the parade, and she remembers looking around smugly at the other little girls who had to stand on tiptoe to see the lights and costumes, the street dancers and acrobats and princes and princesses and Mickey and Minnie Mouse; she remembers the feel of her dad’s hair as her hands rested safely on top of his head.
The middle-aged man sitting beside her on the plane wants to talk and talk and talk about his wife and kids and in-laws and neighbors, and at some point she has to fake falling asleep just so she can have some peace and quiet. He is wearing a black v-neck shirt and ripped jeans, and she develops a deep, immediate dislike for his nauseating perfume, his pretentious goatee, and his tacky, heavy gold chain. When she barely touches her food, he leans over and tells her, “Are you on a diet? You don’t have to be.” She says, “I’m not hungry.” He shakes his head at her and says, “Then you should have just sent the tray back.” He reminds her of one of her professors in college—he asked a lot of unnecessary questions and made a habit out of judging everyone.
She tries to ignore him for the rest of the flight, keeping her nose buried in a magazine, furrowing her brows so she’d look like she was concentrating and must not be disturbed. She catches him leering at her more than once, and she shudders and prays he’d transfer to another seat soon. When she puts on her headphones to drown out his voice, he asks, “What are you listening to? You know, I used to be a musician. All the ladies loved me.” She turns the volume up and doesn’t say anything.
An hour before the plane lands in Los Angeles, Summer goes into the cramped bathroom and inspects her reflection in the mirror. She looks exhausted and frightened—her hair is greasy, her skin is dry and flaky, and there are dark circles under her eyes—and no amount of powder or moisturizer or concealer is going to fix it. She remembers looking into the mirror in Scott’s place the first time he invited her in, back in junior year; she looked just as exhausted and frightened then too, nervous at the thought of Scott on the other side of the door.
Summer goes back to her seat, and before she knows it, she is stepping out of the arrivals gate in LAX, craning her neck to see over the heads of the tall teenaged guys standing in front of her. She walks slowly, unsure of where to go, her feet numb and her back aching and her luggage in tow. She
recognizes the girl smiling at her from near the taxi bay, and she smiles back and waves. Here goes nothing, she thinks, as she grips her suitcase’s handle, takes a deep breath, and crosses the street.
Chapter 11
Ashley Crosby is delighted to meet Summer.
“I can’t believe you’re finally here,” Ashley shrieks, throwing her skinny arms around Summer. “We are going to have so, so much fun!”
As they push the loaded cart into the LAX parking lot, Ashley fills Summer in on her home situation. “It’s super messy,” she tells her. “Just warning you.” She appraises Summer from head to toe and back again, like she is measuring just how much space she’ll be taking up. “But you and your stuff will definitely fit,” she says. “It’ll be like an extended sleepover! I’m so, so excited!”
When they get to Ashley’s apartment after a twenty-minute drive, Summer realizes she wasn’t exaggerating: It was super messy. There were clothes and accessories strewn all over the floor, dirty dishes piled high in the sink, a pizza box containing discarded bell peppers and a single uneaten slice on the coffee table, empty juice bottles on top of the TV, a soiled towel thrown over the couch, and something that looked suspiciously like mold growing from a half-full bag of Cheetos lying next to the shoe rack.
But cheap housing was cheap housing, so Summer turns to her and says, “I love your place! It’s so… full of life.” She meant this literally, because she can almost swear she saw a striped sock inch its way towards the door.
“I know, right?” Ashley says. “Make yourself comfortable. You want something to drink?” She walks to the refrigerator and shoves her head in. She gives Summer a muffled inventory: “I have orange juice, apple juice, chocolate milk—but I’ve had this in here for two weeks, so maybe not that. There’s beer, there’s iced coffee, and there’s Diet Dr. Pepper. Oh, and a cucumber smoothie. And water.”
“Just water, please,” Summer says. “Thanks.” Ashley is being so nice to her, and Summer knows she should be grateful but all she feels is a definite unease; it was the kind of niceness she wasn’t used to, the kind of niceness that made her nervous. It was the same kind of niceness she heard in Meg’s voice last week.
“I know you miss Scott,” Meg said over the phone. “And I might have the solution.”
Summer was suspicious. What was the solution, and why would Meg, of all people, have it? “I don’t want you to do anything that involves Roxanne,” she said.
“Don’t be silly,” Meg s
aid. “Roxanne is totally out of the picture. This is just about you and Scott.” It felt good hearing someone say that last sentence out loud. “Listen,” Meg told her, “I have a friend in LA who needs a roommate. Her name is Ashley and she’s a musician. And get this—she just signed with Scott’s label. She knows where Scott is, Summer. And she’s more than willing to help. I think you’ll get along really well.”
“But I can’t…” Summer started.
“You can’t what?” Meg interrupted. “Can’t quit your mediocre job, can’t leave your lousy apartment, can’t pack your bags and go after the love of your life?”
“I don’t even know how Scott feels about me, exactly,” Summer said.
“Then you’ll go there and ask him face-to-face,” Meg said. “Don’t give up. You know you want to go. You know you don’t belong here.”
Summer found it strange that Meg could tell exactly what she had been thinking, exactly which options she had been considering. But maybe Meg knew her better than she gave her credit for, after all.
“Okay,” Summer said. “Give me her number. I’ll get in touch with her.”
And now here she is, catching the water bottle Ashley has pitched from across the room, right before it smacks her on the nose. That night, they sit on Ashley’s bed in their pajamas, munching on cheddar caramel popcorn and chocolate-covered almonds and looking at Scott’s blog. When they finally hatch a game plan for the following day, Summer raises her Coke glass and clinks it with Ashley’s. As the cold, sweet liquid touches her lips and tongue, she actually feels like there is something in her life worth looking forward to. For the first time in months, Summer feels like there is something in her life worth celebrating.
Summer and Ashley are camped out in front of the building housing Scott’s recording studio on a cloudy Sunday morning, armed with a box of assorted jelly donuts, a pot of Turkish roast coffee, and “Eye of the Tiger” on the car radio. Their windows are half-open, and the air smells like a mixture of rain and urine and chicken noodle soup. Summer gobbles up a donut in two bites, feeling like she and Ashley are two potbellied, balding cops on a stakeout. Every five minutes, Ashley asks her if she’s ready; every time, she tells her, “No, not yet, give me five more minutes.” They’ve been parked in this spot since six AM. It is almost nine-thirty.
Fan Girl Page 5