by Ash Parsons
The house band stops playing.
I hear Santiago shouting. More security converge on the stage. It’s too little, too late as the entire first three rows rush at us.
Joshua turns toward me and bolts, half lunging, half shoved by Santiago toward the exit a few paces from where I stand.
Two more security members of Santiago’s team join in, attempting to cover Joshua.
As they get nearer to me, the fans arrive as well, buffeting. Pushing and cheering. Some of them start grabbing anyone they find, hugging strangers, crying or throwing their arms into the air in celebration of their audacity.
I can’t see Joshua. Or Santiago.
“It’s her! It’s Roxy!” a high-pitched voice shrieks by my ear, and I’m engulfed in a terrifying instant of fame by association.
Arms grab at me, and phones are pressed in my face. A tear on the neck of my T-shirt widens as I am grappled into hugs I don’t want.
More voices join in as more people arrive—a bottleneck at the exit, and I am trapped against the wall.
I shove out, hard. Panic crests in my chest, and I start punching wildly. My steel-toed Doc connects with a shin, and a girl yelps, turning eyes wide with betrayal at me.
I want to maim her. All of them.
Instead I take a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” I blurt out as we are buffeted from all sides.
“Clear the building!” a voice shouts over the speakers “Anyone remaining in the studio when the police arrive will be arrested. Clear the building.”
There is instant relief as those nearest the main doors leave. Then Santiago is there beside me, forcing people back and boosting me toward the stage door.
We barrel through the hall, past the greenroom, out into the alley.
More fans scream and press against the metal barriers.
Santiago and I jump into the SUV, and it pulls away.
Artie is disheveled. Her shirt is untucked, and her hair is mussed as if it, too, was grabbed.
Joshua curls against the opposite car door, his eyes wide as he watches me try not to shake.
We ride in silence.
The phone in Artie’s hand rings. She listens, then hangs up.
Her face is a storm.
“It’s already out. Cell phone footage and the show, too,” she says to the entire car. Then she looks at Joshua. “Stay offline. You too, Roxanne.”
I sink down into the seat. What if there’s footage of me kicking and punching? It will look bad, regardless of what was really happening. Or how scared I was.
I tell myself that it was too crowded. That even with the cell phones out, once it started, there’s no way anyone could have seen me, how I reacted.
But if I’m wrong . . .
I’ll be dragged online again. Worse than last time. But at least this time Grandma will be left out of it. Fringe benefit to Joshua’s largesse and his home-buying spree.
No one knows where she is now. So I won’t be doxed, and she won’t be pestered by angry fans because of me.
“You know I never go online.” Joshua’s voice sounds wrung out. “Santiago carries my phone. He posts for me. Or Speed does.”
“I know. Keep it that way,” Artie says, and doesn’t bother with me.
I have an old-fashioned flip phone. I only text Joshua, Grandma, and sometimes Speed, and I never, ever go online.
It’s not a healthy place to be. For me. Anymore.
Artie texts on her phone, lighting quick.
“The studio head has our back,” she says. “I’ll get a team on any individual complaints that arise. The footage so far is fine.”
She smooths her hair as we arrive at the hotel.
“We’ll go up to the suite. I’ll have a quick interview scheduled with Entertainment Today. That will cover it.”
Joshua just nods.
Artie takes a deep breath. Then it appears, the gleaming smile. “You can’t buy better press.”
I want to laugh. Or cry.
Or kick someone else.
6
LOST ONES
After the Late Late Show performance, Joshua waited in a separate hotel suite for the damage-control interview with Entertainment Today. Then he remained there for another hour for a surprise VIP meet and greet that Artie couldn’t turn down, A-listers who saw the Late Late Show performance and wanted to commiserate.
Joshua slid into and out of performance, Joshua Blackbird like a shell, or a skin that he could take off. Yet every time it comes off, it seems to take a piece of him with it, selfhood a slowly lost battle, a quiet erosion.
A war of attrition. Ms. Kearney would be happy I remember that phrase. A battlefield term for the bloodless fight that whittles you away.
When it’s done at last, we ride up to Joshua’s suite on the top floor to settle in for the night.
Joshua separates from the rest of us in the sitting room. He disappears into the bedroom, leaving the door only slightly open.
He’s on the phone, sitting in an overstuffed chair by the window. I wait at the bedroom door until he nods at me. Then I collapse across his bed with my book.
Speed hangs out in the sitting room watching TV with the guys from Marchant, Dan and Rick.
When I met him, Joshua was a skinny boy with a kid brother, and Dan and Rick weren’t our friends.
Before he got famous. When I was little, before I went to live with my grandma for good, when I’d just be visiting, I’d see Joshua around the trailer park. The first time we met, he was seven, I was six, and his brother, Tyler, was five.
Joshua tried to be nice to me. I kicked him in the shin for it.
We didn’t talk again for years. I didn’t really even feel bad about it, or think about it, until I moved in with Grandma when I was fourteen and saw him again.
We were in the same English class. Even though he’s a year older than me, we were both in the ninth grade because Livie had made him stay home an extra year to take care of Ty. That way they could start school at the same time, Ty in kindergarten, Joshua in first grade. By skipping kindergarten and staying home that extra year, Joshua let Livie work and not have to pay for day care for Ty.
Helpless and apathetic as a parent, she at least knew enough not to leave a four-year-old alone with their dad, who, before he left for good, never did much beyond sit in front of the TV and drink.
On my first day in ninth-grade English class, I was so angry and was pretending I wasn’t. I had only moved in with Grandma for good the previous week. Joshua walked into the classroom, and I knew he was the kid I had kicked all those years ago. And I thought, Great. Just great.
But he smiled at me.
Later he said he liked my hair, how it looked like it had been cut with a knife and was so red it looked like it was on fire. He wasn’t intimidated by my combat boots or my black jeans with the knees torn out. Or how I tended to glare at everyone.
That first day, there had been a ring of empty desks around me.
Joshua sat right next to me.
Even back then, he was beautiful. It was a little hard to think of anything to say when I actually looked at him. And I did like looking at him. It was obvious, to me at least, that most of the other girls in class and some of the boys did, too.
Joshua seemed oblivious to the admiration.
He sat and started talking, first just talking, but then the questions came. Where did you move from? What kind of music do you like? Do you like living at Avalon Estates? Isn’t that the dumbest name for a trailer park?
By the end of class, I’d decided he was okay. Maybe more than okay.
At the end of the day, we rode the same bus home together, sitting on the same bench, Ty sitting across the aisle.
Grandma liked him, said he was a good kid. That was high praise from her, so I knew it was true. Grandma has a compass f
or a heart, always pointing true north. Her eyesight was already so bad she could barely drive anymore, but she could see into people like they were made of clear glass.
Though I think the real reason she liked him was that he recognized the Johnny Cash song playing on her radio. I never really listened to what Grandma played; to me it was all background, even as she hummed along. But Joshua knew all the words to “Folsom Prison Blues” and lit up around Grandma and her music. Gospel, country, bluegrass—he loved it all. When Joshua was around, Grandma turned up her music loud, leaning forward in her chair like she was about to get up and dance. Sometimes Joshua would sing along to the radio and Grandma would just take in the show and smile.
Joshua and Ty spent a lot of time at our house. Our circumstances were different, but only superficially so, like the insides of the trailers themselves. A little different, mostly the same.
A similarity: there was never enough money. A difference: Joshua didn’t like that I shoplifted, and I didn’t like that he didn’t. I never took anything I didn’t need.
He never took anything he did.
But we found our ways around each other’s fault lines. Became friends. Then more than friends. Love like learning, actually learning, who you are and who the other person is. Who you want to be, and being that person, your true self, with someone who recognizes you. And loves the person you are, and the person you can be, and the person you are not—when you fail.
Love is like a tangle. A thorny vine surrounding something precious. But people think of it as magical, like watching an acrobat, suspended in the light, shining like a diamond. It looks effortless.
But it’s not.
Now we’re in a hotel, on the other side of the country from where we started, and things are so much harder, even if there’s always enough money. In spite of how hard Joshua throws it all away, with both hands, ever since he turned seventeen. Like he can’t get rid of his money fast enough.
Dan and Rick laugh at something on TV, raucous crows calling.
I turn the page of my circus history book, skimming for more information on Lillian Leitzel. She was the first performer in the history of the circus to demand and receive her own private carriage on the train.
Imagine, knowing your worth like that.
I keep reading about all the parties in the roaring twenties, how Henry Ford wooed her, waited for her at her railcar, filled it with flowers. And how a Chicago magnate proposed marriage. Threw a massive party for her, gave her a diamond tiara, all for the wild abandon of her aerial performances.
But the love of her life was the trapeze star Alfredo Codona, although in the end their love became yet another tragedy. But at first, they were magical: the King of the Trapeze and the Queen of the Air. Alfredo always envisioned himself Leitzel’s romantic guardian. He would dress as a roustabout and check her rigging himself, every performance. Or he would dress in stagehand’s clothes and act as her spotter as she flipped and twirled.
Joshua has been on the phone nonstop. First talking to Artie. Then to Speed in his own room one floor down, before Speed cut out the technological middleman and just came up, hanging out in real life. Then Joshua called Quinn, the lead guitarist. It’s strange, in a way, the time he’s spending on the phone with those who are closest to him now. It’s like he’s catching up after a long absence. When we’re all right here for him and will be here on tour with him for the next year.
But everything’s strange now. And maybe this is healthy, Joshua taking this time to decompress and connect with those around him. When it has nothing to do with a performance.
I listen closely to his murmurings. Speaking softly to rest his vocal cords.
“Mom, please. Is Ty awake?”
My heart stills and falls.
He’s talking to Livie.
Joshua stands at the windows beside the overstuffed chair where he’d been sitting before this moment. Before this call.
“It’s not that late,” he says, after listening briefly.
He doesn’t need to be talking to her, not now.
“No, it’s not,” Joshua says. His hand tugs at his hair, pulling it back, a quick gesture of impatience and frustration.
I’ve heard it all before. I’ve been in the room between them, on the phone or in person, so many times that I can guess exactly her end of the conversation, murmured into his ear.
Ty used to come visit, short bursts, a weekend or a part of a weekend. Now he never comes, even though he wants to. He loves everything about his brother, even the rock-star lifestyle.
Especially the rock-star lifestyle.
But Livie keeps him in Georgia with her, in the mansion Joshua bought for them. Ty attends a private school, which is funny in its own way, because Ty is a lackadaisical student at best, unconcerned in subjects where Joshua was fascinated. Ty is mostly interested in engines he can take apart with his hands. Lawn mowers, mopeds, and finally his greatest love: dirt bikes.
And his idol, his big brother. Ty’s eyes light up when he sees him.
If Ty had his way, he’d spend his days in the shop or on the track, or he’d stay with us, and not at the fancy private school where the kids all wear uniforms. But Livie insisted.
Joshua pays the tuition.
Livie puts up walls between Joshua and Tyler now, or tries to. I can’t say I don’t understand it, a little. At the same time, it’s unfair. It’s reasonable and unfair.
Livie likes to pretend she’s aggrieved. Like a Greek tragedy somehow, nothing is ever her fault and she’s always been wronged. So she pretends that keeping Ty away from Joshua is something she does out of protectiveness and wanting “what’s best for him,” but really it’s all about leverage—ever since Joshua got emancipated.
“Quit stalling and put him on.” Joshua knocks the filmy curtain aside and presses a fist on the glass door to the balcony.
I can imagine Livie’s response.
No, he’s asleep.
“Wake him up, then.” Joshua presses his forehead to the cooling glass, next to his fist.
I won’t. You shouldn’t call so late, anyway. I was asleep.
“I’m sorry I woke you up, but I really need to talk to him.”
You can talk to me. What’s up?
Joshua bangs his forehead against the glass, once, quick, then drapes the fist over his head, forearm pressing into the glass, like he could release the tension, could warp the glass he leans on, curling and shimmering from the heat of internal pressure.
“I can’t talk to you.”
Are you trying to hurt my feelings?
“No, it’s just the truth.”
You don’t even try.
“You don’t listen.”
And now I wish I could slip out without him noticing me. Because the intimacy feels like too much, even though I know he hasn’t forgotten I’m here.
This time Livie takes the conversational ball and runs with it, and Joshua stands listening, a taut wire of tension, pressed against the glass.
I don’t know what she’s saying, but I can guess.
It’s a song that’s new but already sounds familiar, from the first verse, something you’ve heard before and can almost hum along to.
Things like That’s a horrible thing to say. And All I ever wanted was what you wanted. Or All I ever did was support you.
She’ll build it up, a master manipulator. She’ll start with her feelings being hurt, then she’ll switch to being protective. Who should I talk to? Do you want me to fire Artie? I’ll do it! A false ferocity that everyone but Joshua can see through.
I guess to him, it feels like love. Like Mama Bear’s protection, the things he wants and never ever gets. Never had.
Mama Bear was the one who sold her cub to the circus.
After faking protective instinct, she’ll switch to sympathy and coaxing. The I know
you’re tired but phase. Or the I know you’re scared but phase, which started after Dallas. The endless reasons he can’t ever stop. It’s too late now. Everyone’s depending on him, not her certainly, but the crew, the managers, the musicians, the label, everyone who ever did anything for him, like he owes them, when it was only ever just business. When they owe so much to him.
She’ll make it an obligation, a tie of blood, something that becomes a yoke around his neck.
Indentured servitude he can never work off. And if he had any stamina, he’d see it will all get better. He just has to tough it out.
This time, Joshua cuts her off.
“Fine,” he says. “Let him sleep. But tell me about him. Is he happy? What have you guys been up to?”
His voice and his question, the one behind the words, asking one thing: Tell me about home.
The one he bought them.
He eventually uncurls from the glass door, sitting back in the deep chair nearby, leaning into the phone as she talks.
Occasionally he says little things like “Yeah?” and “That was stupid.” And I imagine her, weaving him stories about Tyler, what he’s up to, what he said yesterday.
They talk about Tyler’s date to the upcoming school dance, what she’s like, and where Tyler is going to take her for dinner beforehand.
And who knows if any of it’s even true?
Then Joshua laughs, a little polite sound, nothing behind it, just an echo of hers as she finishes another funny Tyler story.
And then he’s silent. Sprawled in the chair, phone to his ear.
Annoyance gathers in my chest like a curl of smoke rising over dry leaves. Something that could become a blaze and consume me if I let it.
Because I know what she’s doing now, too.
She’s telling Joshua about the repairs to the roof. Or about how the pool has a leak. Maybe she’s telling him about how his dog needs another surgery, or about how Tyler’s dentist said he should have his wisdom teeth out. That the car is making a funny sound. A myriad of things that amount to send money.
There’s always something, and she always asks, never waits for another time, always asks, every time they speak, every time he calls her or she calls him.