Playing By Heart

by Melanie Shawn

  It brought her back. She glanced at Troy’s face and was filled with nostalgia. For a moment, she didn’t understand why the two things—memories of school and being with Troy—were somehow connected in her psyche, but then it hit her like a lightning bolt. The epiphany was overwhelming.

  It was because Troy made her feel like a teenager again.

  The last time she’d felt this optimistic, this full of wonder about the world and enthusiasm for the future, she’d been walking the halls of her own school, daily inhaling the very same smell that was causing those long-ago memories to flood her memory now.

  Dion and the Belmonts had asked the world, in their famous harmonic lament, “Why must I be a teenager in love?” And, sure, when it was happening to her in real time, it hadn’t been a walk in the park. But revisiting a second teenagerhood through the power of love? That was a whole different story. She was enjoying that experience to the hilt.

  She stopped short, the blood draining from her face.

  “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

  The concern in Troy’s voice told her that her expression must be dire. She made a concerted effort to relax the muscles in her shoulders and her face, to put on a casual smile and an even more casual air. “I’m fine. Just got a little chill.”

  His head tilted to the side and, even though he didn’t seem entirely convinced, he let it drop as they started to walk again.

  Wow. The body of work she’d done in drama school was really serving her well, here. The last thing she wanted to tell him, right smack dab in the middle of the hall at his little sister’s middle school, was, Hey, guess what? I think I just realized I’m in love with you!

  Even if it was true.

  One of the many doors that lined the corridor opened at that moment and a man with John Lennon glasses and perfectly-pressed khakis stepped out into the hall. “Ms. Bartholomew? Mr. Valentine? We’re in here.”

  Alison gratefully accepted the opportunity to escape Troy’s questioning glance for the moment, as well as her own deepening feelings.

  They stepped into the room, and the teacher motioned for them to join the other adults who were lined up against the back wall of the classroom. She saw that Troy greeted each and every one of them with either a smile or a nod and she felt, again, the now-familiar pull of community that Valentine Bay spurred inside her.

  Troy knew all of these people. Not just knew who they were. Not just seen them perform or heard about their work. No, he’d lived his life side by side with them. Helped them through their own hardships and accepted their help when times were tough for him. He’d celebrated their milestones along with them and mourned their tragedies.

  That was a community. That was what she was missing in her life, and she was realizing it more and more every day she was here.

  As the teacher took his place at the front of the room and the students quieted, Mila turned surreptitiously in her seat and gave Troy and Alison a little wave.

  Warmth spread throughout Alison as she returned the sly greeting. With one small flick of her hand, Mila had included her in the community. It felt good. It felt damn good.

  “Good morning! Good morning, everyone. For our guests, I’m Mr. Harris. I teach social studies here at Valentine Bay Middle School, and I’m thrilled to welcome all of you to our class today. When the students and I originally put out the call to friends and family to fill out our career day roster, I have to say that I was overwhelmed by the response.

  “So, let’s get started. Owen, would you please introduce your guest speaker?”

  An awkward, gangly boy stood from behind a desk in the front row. “Um, yeah. Hi. I’m Owen. This is my dad. His name’s Bradley. He’s, like, the mayor.”

  The kid crashed back down into his seat so quickly that if his butt had been made of steel, the only explanation would’ve been that someone had turned on a powerful magnet on the underside of his chair.

  The mayor, who shared his son’s tall and lanky frame but none of his awkwardness, stepped to the front of the room and spoke for a few minutes about the role of local government. The kids, to Alison’s view, didn’t seem particularly interested, but they impressed her with their polite attention. When she’d been in junior high she didn’t remember her classmates behaving with such respect in… well, any situation. This was a good group of kids.

  Mr. Harris called on various students to introduce the adult that they’d brought with them until finally, Alison knew that Mila’s turn would be up next. It was a simple matter of the process of elimination—there were no other adults left in the room.

  When her name was called, Mila stood proudly. She displayed none of the embarrassed shuffling that the rest of her classmates had when called upon to say even a few words in front of the group. Rather, her shoulders were thrown back confidently and when she spoke, her voice was clear and without hesitation. Alison was proud. The girl knew how to command a room.

  “I actually brought two people today. First, my brother Troy. He builds things. Right now, he is working on giving a house he bought a new inside so that people will buy it. And I also brought Alison. She’s a singer. And an actress. And a dancer. She’s on Broadway. She’s, like… The coolest. Ever.”

  Troy and Alison walked to the front of the room. Alison stood off to the side so the Troy could take his turn to speak first.

  “Well, let me start off by saying thank you for having me. It’s an honor to come speak for your career day. Although, I am disappointed to find out that I’m not the coolest ever. I was under the impression I was.”

  Mila hid her face in her hands, but the comment drew laughs from a few of the other students Alison guessed must be familiar with Troy’s patented style of a dad joke.

  Troy went on to talk for a few moments about the process of construction, and flipping houses. The students peppered him with more knowledgeable questions than Alison would’ve predicted, based seemingly mostly on their knowledge of house flipping reality shows, and Troy answered them amiably.

  When he handed the floor over to Alison, she was surprised to see several students pull out cameras or their smart phones and snap pictures of her. She wouldn’t have predicted the pre-teen population of Valentine Bay would be such rabid fans of the Great White Way.

  It all became clear, though, when the questions they shot at her all centered on her time as a judge on Broadway Baby.

  “Do you think Gemma should’ve won?”

  “Is Steve Apolonia really as mean as he seems?”

  “Why did you use your Softshoe Save on Fiona? She was, like, the worst!”

  And on and on. And on. Damn, these kids really were reality show junkies!

  Alison did her best to answer the questions as diplomatically as she could. It was tougher than any magazine interview she’d ever been a part of. The thing about eighth-graders was they had no filter when it came to asking an awkward question. If they were curious about something, they’d just throw it out.

  While they were not disrespectful to her in any way, they also had no innate sense about whether a question would be impolitic. They just asked about the things they wanted to know. It was refreshing in a way, but it also made them extremely hard to field, and by the time her five minutes was up, she felt as drained as she ever had after a long day of rehearsals.

  As she walked with Troy back down the hall toward the parking lot, he turned to her. “I’ve got time before I need to be on the jobsite. Lunch?”

  She smiled sardonically. “Since I take it day drinking’s not an option, then, yes, please. Lunch would be fantastic.”

  Chapter 32

  Troy took a healthy bite out of the juicy cheeseburger on his plate and savored the rich mix of flavors that flooded his tongue. He chewed and swallowed, then took a deep drink of his cola.

  Alison sat across from him, an iced tea and green salad in front of her. Impulsively, he reached across the table and took her hand. “This is just about perfect,” he said. “Awesome food, awesome com
pany. What more could I ask for?”

  She squeezed his hand, her eyes softening as she looked at him. He loved the way her expression always changed in some way as soon as her gaze landed on him. It was never static, it always filled up with excitement, or affection. Or lust. He didn’t want to forget lust.

  “I think the career day went pretty well,” she said. “Even though both of our Q&A periods focused a little bit more on reality shows than our actual jobs.”

  He laughed. “Well, I think that’s just the generation nowadays. They’re pretty obsessed with social media, and if you think about it, reality shows are just kind of the ultimate social media. It’s just that you’re keeping up with the lives of people you don’t know instead of your friends and family.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “You know, I never thought of it that way. It does kind of explain why people react so much differently to me after they’ve seen me on the show, though. Because, when people would recognize me before, from my work—there was a certain element of them feeling as if they knew me, just because they were familiar with me, with my face and my voice. But after the show, it was like they really thought they were my friends. It was unsettling at first. But what you said makes sense. Their brain is categorizing it in the same place that it puts Facebook updates or tweets or Instagram posts from people that are in their social circle.”

  Troy grinned. “See? I’m more than just a pretty face.”

  She laughed. “And with a face that pretty, you wouldn’t even need to be. I’m impressed.”

  Her phone chimed from inside her bag and she reached down to pull it out. “Speaking of connectivity in the modern age…”

  She swiped her fingers gracefully across her phone, and her eyes widened.

  “Babe, what’s wrong?”

  She seemed suddenly unaware that he was even at the table with her. “Oh, crap. Dammit,” she mumbled as her fingers flew across the virtual keyboard of the smart phone screen.

  When she’d apparently found what she was looking for, had the information listed out in front of her on the screen, she just stared at it for a moment with ashen skin and wide eyes. Troy was starting to get really worried, so he reached across the table and put a hand on her arm. “Alison, just tell me what’s going on.”

  She looked up at him as if she was waking from a trance. Without a word, she simply handed over the phone. He took it and looked at the screen. He couldn’t imagine what would be so shocking.

  The first thing he saw was that it was full of photos of her in front of the classroom at the career day. At first, he thought that it was nice. That they must’ve been posted by classmates of Mila—that what he was looking at must be a tagged search on Twitter or Instagram.

  But then he saw the thing that changed his perception of the situation, and he understood why she was so upset.

  Along with the photos were headlines. These weren’t social media posts. They were articles, along with thumbnails of their accompanying photos.

  The headlines were brutal.

  “Bartholomew Bails – Broadway Baby Judge Flees New York”

  “Alison Bartholomew Giving Up Career to Teach Elementary School?”

  “Alison Bartholomew, Career in Tatters, Speaks to Students”

  “Bartholomew Can’t Do, So She Teaches”

  His thumb moved mindlessly, scrolling down the screen from one insulting headline to the next.

  He put the phone down, brows scrunched tightly together. “I don’t get it. We left there literally an hour ago. We haven’t even finished our lunch yet.”

  She shook her head and slumped her shoulders. “Welcome to so-called journalism in the internet age. They’re bottom-feeders. They have interns sitting in rooms monitoring Google alerts twenty-four hours a day, for every celebrity’s name imaginable. B list, C list. Hell, Z list. Some kid must’ve posted a photo with my name, some gossip blog picked it up and filled in their own clickbait backstory, and the rest ran from there.”

  “But…but…we just left there an hour ago…”

  She laughed. “Troy! You were a ballplayer. You’re a celebrity, too. You get how this works.”

  He shook his head. “I was never a celebrity. I was a player.” He gestured at the smartphone. “It was never like this.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Maybe you never paid attention to it, but you got plenty of press. There was coverage of you out with actresses and models. Lots of articles about wild weekends in Vegas.”

  He sat back and crossed his arms, studying her, a small smile growing on his lips as she spoke.

  Suddenly, as if she only started hearing herself halfway through the paragraph, she snapped her mouth shut and cut her words off abruptly. Her cheeks reddened and he laughed.

  “Really?” he teased. “Tell me more about my press coverage. And, more to the point, how you know about it.”

  She pressed her lips together to try to stem the tide of the embarrassed smile that was spreading across her face, but it was no use. Finally, she cracked and laughed. “Fine! Fine. You got me. I googled you, okay? I googled you long and I googled you hard.”

  “Did you google me deep?”

  “Oh, yeah, baby. So deep.”

  His voice grew husky in spite of the fact that the whole exchange was a joke. “How deep?”

  She leaned forward seductively and made her voice low and sensual. “Ten or eleven pages, lover.”

  He nodded. “Wow. That’s deep, all right.”

  “And…I went way beyond a regular search.”

  “Don’t stop, baby. Tell me about it.”

  Her voice dropped to a sultry whisper. “I used the news tool. And…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Images.”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s the spot, girl. Images. That’s where the money shots are.”

  She leaned back in her chair, cracking up. “Thank you for making me laugh. That’s what I needed. A little perspective.”

  He nodded. She was laughing, and that’s what he’d wanted, but, damn. Now he was turned on as hell, and with what she was dealing with in the moment, it didn’t feel like this was a good time to suggest running off for a quickie.

  “So, how’d you find out about this, anyway?” He grinned. “Don’t tell me you have your own Google alert set up for your own name?”

  She shook her head. “No. That would seriously drive me crazy. My publicist has one, though. And she texted me these.”

  Alison’s phone chimed again and she continued, “In fact, that’s probably her right now.”

  She picked up her phone and tapped into the messaging program. Her eyes widened. “Yep. It is.” She put the phone down and looked up at him. “And she’s flying out here to see me.”

  He waited a moment to see if she was going to continue. When she didn’t, he said, “So, is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

  She raised her eyebrows and laughed. “Oh, God. Remains to be seen.”

  Chapter 33

  “Well, here we are!” Alison said a touch too cheerfully as she pulled her car into a parallel parking spot along Valentine Bay’s main street.

  Caroline, her agent, took one last, long drag on her cigarette before putting it out in the center console ashtray. She patted her elegant chignon as she let her gaze linger languidly on the view of downtown visible from the front window. It wasn’t like it was necessary; even after an entire day of traveling, not one strand of Caroline’s hair was out of place. It wouldn’t dare.

  Alison had always been a little intimidated by her agent. Her elegant manner, her dry wit, her way of expressing volumes with one raised eyebrow. Caroline was a firestorm of barely-contained energy in the form of a sardonic, restrained fifty-year-old woman.

  She was, by no coincidence, the most powerful theatrical agent in New York, and Alison was unleashing her on the streets…well, street of Valentine Bay.

  “Charming,” Caroline remarked dryly, in that way she had that left Alison unsure if she was conveying sincerity o
r sarcasm.

  Alison hopped out of the car, as well, and the two women walked into the bar and grill. As they took their seats, Alison opened her menu been said, “I hope you’re hungry. The food’s really good here.”

  “Darling, if they can mix me a decent dry martini, that’s all I really care about.”

  “Well… I don’t know about that, but I’m pretty sure that they can pop the top on a decent bottle of beer.”

  Caroline sighed, the picture of long-suffering. “As I suspected.”

  The waitress came up to their table, pad and pencil in hand. “Hi, there! I’m Beth, and I’ll be serving you this afternoon. And what can I get for you today?”

  Caroline looked up at her. “Martini?”

  Beth shook her head. “No, sorry. We don’t do mixed drinks. But we’ve got a great selection of local microbrews, if you’re interested.”

  Alison didn’t think Caroline would be interested in a million years, but to her surprise, Caroline replied, “When in Rome, I suppose. Yes, dear, that will be fine. Bring me whatever you recommend.”

  “Make that two,” Alison added, stunned.

  The side of Caroline’s mouth twitched in the smallest ghost of a smile, which was her equivalent of a broad grin. “You see, Alison? You’re not the only one who can adapt.”

  “Apparently. I’m impressed.”

  “The question is, can you adapt back?”

  Alison chuckled. She should’ve known that the whole exchange was leading up to an object lesson. “I think the real question is, do I want to?”

  Caroline raised her eyebrow. “Indeed.”

  Beth returned and set two frosty steins in front of them, filled with rich, dark ale. Alison raised hers with a wink. “Cheers, Caroline.”

  They finished their drinks, the topic of conversation turning to lighter topics, small talk and catching up on mutual acquaintances.