The Man Who Told the World

by Hanna Dare

  He’d waded a bit further out, thinking, so that the waves splashed against his knees. He turned back, looking at Toby with his parents on the beach, and, beyond them—more felt than seen—the huge city, seeming almost ocean-sized in the parts that he’d only glimpsed. There was a way—he’d find a way—to be part of all this. The ocean might not care about him, but Conor would find a way to swim in it.

  “So, what did you think?” Toby’s father asked him as they made their way back to the car.

  “I liked it,” Conor said. “I want to come back.”

  When he got back to the house, the bottoms of his jeans still damp, Conor made his way upstairs. The door to his old room was open. Inside, he could see Jesse sitting on one of the beds, with what looked like everything he owned scattered around him.

  Jesse looked up as Conor stood in the doorway. “I was just,” he said in answer to Conor’s raised eyebrows, “getting organized.”

  “I can see that’s working well for you,” Conor said lightly, about to withdraw.

  “My gran’s coming,” Jesse said. “For the finale.”

  Conor stepped into the room. “Jesse, that’s great.” Jesse’s family hadn’t come from Michigan for any of his performances yet. A few cousins from Oakland had been in the audience last week, but Conor knew that it bothered him that his parents and brothers hadn’t made the trip.

  “Yeah, so I figured I should clean up and this happened.” He gestured helplessly at the room.

  “I can help you,” Conor said. “I know your hat-stacking system pretty well by now.”

  “Could you—I mean, when you’re not busy—make sure Gran’s okay during the show? I hate to ask, it’s just—”

  “Of course,” Conor said. “I want to meet her.”

  “I can’t believe she’s coming on her own,” Jesse said, staring at his hands. “Of course, when I called, Mom gave me the usual rundown of excuses, like every week. She and Pop can’t take time off work, and Charles has his own business, so it’s not like he gets vacation days. Rich’s baby is sick and now his wife has the same cold. And Michael, well, he’s studying to be a doctor, so he’s too busy and important for any of this.” Jesse looked up at Conor with his soft amber eyes and tried to smile. “When Rich played football for Michigan State, we never missed a home game. Whole family loaded in the car, rain or shine or snowstorm, we were there. But this? It’s silly. Not a big deal. It’s just Jesse showing off again.”

  Conor sat down on the other bed, opposite Jesse, as he had so many times before. “You’ll show them how big this is. When you win.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I can do this.”

  Conor touched his hand. “Of course you can. C’mon, break it down for me.” Jesse shook his head again, eyes blinking fast. Conor took his hand more firmly. “I know you’ve run everything through your head a hundred thousand times. You know what you’re up against. Go on. Emerson.”

  Jesse took a breath, focusing. “He’s smart, real smart, and a sharp competitor. He knows how to play all the angles. Country music is still popular, and Em’s got the looks; he could have crossover appeal.”

  “Now my favorite part,” Conor said, showing his teeth. “Weaknesses.”

  “He doesn’t have a lot of vocal range. He comes across as cheesy on camera, working too hard for that applause. And people who don’t like country music hate it.”

  “Okay, now Madison.”

  “Her voice is great. She’s got that whole pop princess thing going on. She’s every teen girl’s new best friend. And folks want to just scoop her up and buy her a puppy or something so she won’t cry.” Jesse’s eyes lost that despairing look as he talked and thought. “But she’s so young. It shows sometimes when she performs or chooses songs that are wrong for her. She gets easily rattled during the show and it throws her off.”

  “Yeah, you aren’t going to try and rattle Madison yourself, are you?”

  Jesse gave him a look. “Please. She can freak out just fine without me playing games.”

  “I know.” Conor patted his leg. “See? You’ll be great.”

  “Wait. There’s still me to suss out.”

  “How could you resist? Are you starting with hats as your biggest strength?”

  “Tremendous personal style,” Jesse said, nodding. “Voice is good; I have a better range than the other two. I know how to connect with the audience. The music I go for is familiar, but not overplayed, it works for a lotta different people. I know the show; I know what I’m doing.”

  “Exactly—”

  Jesse’s mouth twisted. “But I’m a coward.”

  “Jesse—”

  “And I lost you. So I can’t be that smart, can I?”

  “You didn’t lose me,” Conor said. “I’m still your friend. Always.”

  Jesse dropped his eyes. “Yeah. I know.”

  Conor leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “I’m going to go. But I’ll be down the hall, call me if you need help cleaning up.”

  Jesse kept his head down, but his voice was easy. “I’m just gonna enjoy the mess a little longer.”

  “Okay,” Conor said, and left him in the space that had once been their room.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The week leading up to the Singing Sensation finale was a frantic blur: songs were chosen and rejected, and replacements scrambled for; dance steps were rehearsed; glitter cannons reset—especially after Oksana was nearly blinded by one; wardrobe selected and hairstyles perfected. There were reunions both happy—Darleen and Toby kissed in front of everybody—and tense, as Jesse and Jean-Michel practically hissed at each other during rehearsals for the group numbers. There was also the unexpected, as Shawna looped an arm in Conor’s and led him off to a quiet spot in the studio where she confessed that she had a girlfriend back home.

  “I kept telling her we had to keep it quiet because I was on the show, but now she’s all like, ‘Well if Conor can do it, why can’t you?’”

  “Sorry,” Conor said, though he was not. Still, he didn’t like to think he’d made anyone’s life harder.

  Shawna smiled. “No. It’s good now. Hiding everything away is exhausting.”

  “It really is,” Conor agreed. “I’m glad that’s done for us now.”

  Conor ended up escorting Jesse’s grandmother to her seat in the theater the night of the show. Jesse had barely time to introduce them and hug his tiny, but incredibly straight-postured grandma before rushing off backstage, anxiety radiating from every pore.

  “He’s usually much calmer before a show,” Conor reassured her. “But once he gets out there, he’ll be amazing; you’ll see. This is a big night for him. The biggest.”

  Jesse’s grandmother had dressed up for the show in a bright blue pantsuit. Her hair was steel gray with curls so even and precise that Conor supposed it was a wig. She had the air of someone who didn’t miss much, so she picked up immediately on what Conor had left unsaid and sighed. “His parents would have liked to have been here, it’s just that, well—Jesse is the youngest of the family, so a lot of times we don’t take him as seriously as we should. I worry that he doesn’t know how proud everyone is of him.”

  “I know he’s glad you’re here, at least,” Conor said, because Jesse did not know that anyone in his family was proud, and Conor was unwilling to let even this nice old lady off the hook for that.

  “I love all my grand-babies, but Jesse’s a special one. He’s always had his own ideas, his own way of doing things. Sometimes the rest of the family doesn’t understand it, but I love him for that, for being true to who he is.”

  Conor looked away, but she put a gentle hand on his arm.

  “I’m so glad Jesse found a friend here in you. He talks about you all the time on his phone calls.” Her eyes were the same color as Jesse’s but sharper, even behind her wide glasses. “All I want for him is to be happy.”

  “I think,” Conor said carefully, “what will make Jesse happy right now is doi
ng well tonight and having a singing career afterwards. It’s the most important thing to him.”

  Her hand tightened on his arm and her mouth turned regretful. “Well, I’m still glad to have met you, Conor.”

  “Me too, ma’am.”

  The theater was filling up, some of the audience waving to Conor as they went to their seats. He had to go backstage soon; Conor could almost feel, like prickle on the back of his neck, the sheer force of Matty somewhere fretting about his whereabouts.

  Jesse’s grandma settled into her seat and patted his arm again. “You go on. I’m all set here.”

  “Enjoy the show. It’s really going to be something.”

  The woman at the airline counter smiled when she looked from his name on the ticket to Conor. “I watched some of the finale last night,” she said. “I’m sorry you didn’t get to win.”

  Conor, his head still a little sore from the champagne he’d had last night, smiled easily. “I’m happy with how it all turned out.”

  Conor sank into his seat on the plane, looking out the window to see if he could see anything more of the city, but it was nothing but tarmac as far as he could tell. He allowed himself a flicker of anxiety over his guitar, stuck in checked baggage again, but then let it go. Some of the people on the plane had looked at him and then quickly looked away as Conor had boarded and stowed his backpack, something that would have once made him feel nervous and judged—but now he realized it was simply them finding him somehow familiar and trying to place him, or recognizing who he was and not wanting to make a big deal. Either way, it was one more thing that he wasn’t going to let himself worry about. Instead, he closed his eyes, trying to sort out the overwhelming jumble of images from the Singing Sensation finale.

  There were two big group numbers—one at the start of the show and one at the end—and Emerson asked Zane and Conor to provide back-up on one of his songs, which was weird, but of course Conor wasn’t going to say no (“It’s a desperate, last-ditch attempt to form a boy band with us,” Conor would have whispered to Jesse, but he never got the chance to say it). Even though he’d had relatively little to do for the show, Conor found that the night had sped by at an impossible speed.

  There were so many moments he would have liked to have stopped and appreciated, but each one was followed by another moment, equally big.

  Priya had performed onstage at long last, perhaps goaded by Kai’s earlier performance. Hers was the direct opposite—instead of wild, growling sex, Priya offered polished perfection, the epitome of look but don’t touch. It still showed them all what a star could be; she was a benevolent presence, dancing in stilettos, hair tossed by wind machines, utterly otherworldly and riveting. Conor thought she might be lip-synching, but found he didn’t care. And when Madison displayed an echo of Priya’s magic in her confident strut around the stage during her own performance, Conor felt a surge of pride.

  There was a long video segment of everyone’s time on the show. Conor would have liked more time to sit with it, to remember his friends and the people he’d barely got the chance to know. Even his own personal timeline, highlighted in the video, felt like something he needed to remind himself of. Seeing himself audition, cry at the Beatles show, joke around at the house, try on new clothes, sing Elliott Smith, and out himself onstage—it almost felt like something that had happened to someone else. A story. But it had happened, and he could feel that things had shifted within him, right down to the bones.

  It would have been nice to have said better goodbyes to the crew, those people who’d been lurking just out of camera range in his life for all these months. He did manage a quick word with Crystal and Matty backstage, taking out his phone—earning him a glare from Crystal as he wasn’t supposed to have it during the show—and asking if they wanted to exchange numbers or email.

  Crystal gave him a sour look. “Conor, the show has every piece of contact information you possess. We don’t need your number; we could steal your identity in a second.”

  Matty winced and added, “She means to say, we’re not going to lose touch.”

  Then both their walkies crackled and they dashed off, but not before Crystal shocked Conor profoundly by throwing her arms around him in a hard, fast hug.

  But mostly, sitting on the plane as it taxied towards the runway, Conor wanted to think about that final moment of the show, when the winners were announced.

  All of them, those who’d been cut, and the three who remained, were onstage, while Matt, dapper in his tuxedo, drew it out almost to a breaking point. Jesse held Emerson and Madison’s hands, his eyes down and body still as he waited. Madison bit her lip to keep from crying, while Emerson stared past the cameras for once, looking to where Conor knew his parents were sitting, along with his brother, given leave to attend the show.

  Matt finally spoke a name and time seemed to freeze, all eyes on the three of them there in the center—Jesse and Emerson and Madison—until Jesse stepped forward, into the spotlight, just as the confetti erupted above. It glittered so that it looked like pieces of light hanging in the air, drifting onto the upturned faces of the cheering crowd. Conor thought the moment perfectly captured the show, maybe even Los Angeles itself: it was ridiculous, it was over-the-top, it was cheesy and fake, and, if you admitted it and let yourself feel it, it was also perfect.

  Afterwards, Conor didn’t get much of a chance to congratulate Jesse—everyone was there around him, so Conor’s hug and words were lost in the sea of well wishes. Even at the after-party, Conor was only able to catch Jesse’s eyes a few times, once both of them raising glasses of that champagne to each other from across a wide room. Mindful of his flight the next day, Conor didn’t try to say goodbye when he left early. Jesse was in the middle of everything, so many people trying to get his attention; he kept one arm around his grandma, looking like it was both to keep her from getting lost in the crowd and to anchor himself. Conor had slipped out of the room.

  In the morning, he texted Jesse from his cab to the airport, not saying goodbye: I’ll see you soon. Promise. You were/are amazing.

  As happy as he was for Jesse’s triumph, as he replayed it all in his mind, Conor decided that the moment that he really wanted to remember most wasn’t a big, flashy one.

  There’d been a day, weeks ago, when after hours of practicing guitar his hands had been so stiff and swollen that Conor had gone upstairs and filled up the bathroom sink to soak them in it. The house had been quiet; the remaining contestants were so few that it was possible to be sure of their locations, and there had never been cameras upstairs anyway, so it was no big deal when Jesse came into the bathroom to join Conor. Jesse was silent—the day before, his throat had gone sore and raspy, doctors had been consulted, gargles and sprays prescribed, and Jesse had been told not to speak unless absolutely necessary. So he came in wordlessly and put his arms around Conor from behind, nestling his head down on Conor’s shoulder, careful not to breathe on him in case his sore throat was contagious.

  Conor had looked up at the mirror.

  “Look at us. We’re quite the pair,” he said, meaning to be ironic, with his useless hands and Jesse’s silenced voice. But the reflection in the mirror of the two of them was so lovely that Conor could only say again, “Look at us.”

  And Jesse had lifted his head, his amber eyes meeting Conor’s dark blue ones in the mirror, and smiled.

  It was a picture of everything they might have been, and it was the image Conor held onto as the plane lifted off, leaving Los Angeles behind.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Conor arrived back home in Wisconsin on a day he vaguely recognized as a Saturday. It explained Tori’s presence at the airport and, as his dad explained several times, the lack of workday traffic and the good time they were making back towards home. Conor, his head still full and buzzing from the finale, the time change, and the world change, stared blankly out the window at all of the green. It seemed extravagant after the dry hills of Southern California.

  Once
he was inside, the house briefly seemed wrong, like clothes that didn’t quite fit, but then his aunt and grandparents descended and Conor was able to forget all the strangeness.

  At some point after dinner and a glass of wine, with the chatter showing no signs of dying down, Conor excused himself and went down the hall to his bedroom. He crawled onto his bed, on top of his covers, and closed his eyes for just a moment.

  Conor awoke to the sound of vacuuming. It was loud and annoying, but more jarring still was the brief moment when he opened his eyes and couldn’t remember where he was. He was in his bedroom, the most familiar place of all, but in that brief time between sleep and wakefulness, Conor was utterly lost as to where he was.

  He got up and padded out, first to the bathroom and then down the hall to the living room where the noise continued. Tori was pushing the old vacuum relentlessly over the carpet.

  “Thanks for waking me up,” he yelled over it.

  She clicked the vacuum off and glared. “It’s two o’clock. In the afternoon? You slept all day.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, and some of us have chores to do, you know. Chores that I had to do all by myself, all winter.” She turned the vacuum back on aggressively.

  Conor took the vacuum from her and turned it off. Tori crossed her arms.

  “Why don’t I finish this?” Conor said.

  “Big whoop, I’m almost done.”

  “I’ll do the dishes, too.” He almost generously offered to do them for the week, the month, but stopped himself. No need to promise something he’d regret. “For tonight, and then we can get back on an even chore schedule.”

  “Okay.” For a moment, Tori leaned against his arm where it held the vacuum. Not a hug, but a quick pressure, like reassuring herself that he was there. “It sucked having to do everything myself.”

  Conor had his doubts about how much Tori actually had done in his absence, but instead nodded over to the old piano in the corner of the room. “Why don’t you play something for me? I bet you haven’t practiced at all while I was gone.”