“Hi, Pepper. I thought I recognized your car. You’re home really early, Courtney.” She wandered over to our spot on the floor, and tension radiated in her body language. “What are you guys doing?”
“I’m showing her pictures of Alex,” Courtney said.
I could read worry in her mom’s expression, so I gave her a tiny smile and nod to reassure her. She looked torn, like she wanted to say something. She cleared her throat. “Do you girls want some soup?”
I knew it wasn’t what she wanted to ask, but I answered like it was. “Sounds awesome,” I said. Courtney said yes too, and Donna slipped back out.
Courtney released a sigh. “I love her, but she hovers.”
“Better too much parenting than not enough,” I said.
“Maybe. But I need a little space sometimes. I feel so loved that I can’t breathe.” She dropped her head back against the bed behind her.
I thought about my mom’s anxiety over my “Single in the City” column and grinned. “I hear that.”
She climbed to her feet. “Potty break.”
“I’ll go help your mom with the soup.” I briefly coveted the luxury of a bathroom attached to my bedroom, one that I didn’t share with mirror-obsessed Ginger, toothpaste-flicking Rosemary, and AXE-abusing Mace. Then I got over myself and bounced down the stairs to help Donna. I found her in the kitchen, stirring something delicious smelling.
She smiled when I walked in. “Corn chowder. Would you mind getting some crackers from the pantry?”
I didn’t mind and fetched them for her. I set the box down on the countertop, and when she looked up, I smiled. “I think Courtney’s okay,” I said.
A crease appeared between her eyebrows. “I hope so. Is it obvious that I’m worried?”
“She told me why today is rough. Any mom would be worried.”
She sighed. “It’s been a hard few days for her. The funeral is when Alex’s death became real for her. She’s asked me not to crowd her, but I can’t help it. She was broken for a long time. It’s only been in the last couple months that I’ve seen the old Courtney trying to break through the fog.” She stirred the whole time she talked, but she did it on autopilot. I guessed she was inside a memory, recalling the aftermath when Courtney learned of Alex’s death.
I kept quiet, trying to let her work through it. After a moment, she snapped out of it and reached for a bowl. “I wish I could do more than feed you to thank you,” she said as she ladled chowder into it.
“You’ve said that before, but I don’t know what you mean,” I confessed, eager to try the soup.
“Your thank you note. The one you wrote to her a few weeks ago? She showed it to us, and I’m not sure why, but it caused some kind of . . . breakthrough, I guess. She’s been more present, more here.”
The praise embarrassed me. “I just told the truth.”
She handed me a second bowl of chowder. “Not everyone takes the time to do that. I’m glad Courtney has you for a friend. Now, why don’t you take both of these up so my daughter doesn’t think I’m hovering again.” With that, she tucked the cracker box into the crook of my arm and sent me on my way.
I found Courtney on the floor, but her scrapbook was gone. I handed her a bowl.
“Did we look at all the pictures already?” I asked, surprised.
“No,” she said. “But the ones that are left are from his deployment and clippings from the newspaper about his . . .” She waved a hand, the words escaping her. “I don’t want to go through those today. It’s been good remembering the other stuff. Thanks for putting up with it.”
“Are you kidding? That was such a cute love story.” They had met when Courtney was sixteen and Alex had come to speak in her family ward when he was fresh off his mission to Poland. In the throes of a mad high school crush, she had chased him and he had stayed out of reach, sure she was too young. He joined the Marine Reserves to pay for schooling, and the night Courtney graduated from high school, he stood waiting on her porch with a bouquet of flowers in hand, ready to beg for a date. It was very Jake Ryan a la Sixteen Candles, she assured me. When he got his orders for deployment, he proposed, and the wedding was set for when he came back. Only that never happened.
Even though Courtney didn’t go into a lot of description about her emotional state when she heard the news, I could put the pieces together and see that it had cut deep. If her family’s protectiveness was anything to go by, things must have gotten scary bad. And yet, the Courtney I was getting to know was someone with quiet strength.
A knock sounded at the door. “Is everything okay in there?” Donna called.
“Fine!” we called back in unison. Courtney shook her head ruefully, and I grinned. “So much for not hovering, huh?”
“I know they mean well, but it’s like they need me to have a backbone of steel. I don’t,” she said. “And they get all worried.”
I whipped out my phone and blessed my 4G connection.
“What are you doing?” Courtney asked.
“Looking something up,” I said. A minute later, I found it. “You do not have a backbone of steel. You have a ‘multi-walled carbon nanotube’ where the rest of us mere mortals have spines.”
“A what?” she asked, her brow wrinkled.
I waved the phone at her. “I Googled it. It’s the material with the most tensile strength. That means it can take stress. Tons of it.”
She checked out my phone and lifted an eyebrow. “Thank you, Wikipedia.” She handed it back. “Your turn, Pepper. Spill your guts.”
I flopped back into the beanbag. “Whatever do you mean?” I asked.
“I’m on to you,” she said. “You have a ‘boys are evil’ vibe sticking to you. Who was it?”
“Seriously, that would be the most boring story in the world. Want to watch paint dry instead?”
“No, I want to bond with my new friend. After you tell me about your boy, we’ll braid each other’s hair and make friendship bracelets.”
“Cool. What about magic jeans? Are we getting any magic jeans outta this deal?”
“We’re kind of built the same, so I don’t think it would be very magical if the same pair of pants fit us both.”
“True.” She had an inch on me, but she was thin too. She had more going on in the bra department, but the jeans thing was pretty much even. I stared up at the ceiling. “What am I doing to put out an evil-boy vibe? I’ve gone on three dates in the last three weeks.”
“Dates I didn’t hear anything about, so you must not have enjoyed yourself.” She propped herself up on her elbows and stared me down. “Besides, you’re not into Tanner. All girls are into Tanner, so if you don’t like Tanner, then you probably don’t like guys.”
“I like guys!” I said. “Just not at the moment.”
“Because of . . .”
I grumbled. “Landon.”
“Here’s where you spill it, friend.”
I hated talking about that failed relationship, but Courtney looked lively for the first time all day, and I knew I’d have to tell her the story at some point. “I’m only doing this in the name of bonding because there is nothing I want to discuss less,” I said.
“Okay. Bond.”
“I was engaged too. My fiancé called the wedding off a week before the date, and I went into hibernation for seven months. The end.”
“Boo! That’s bad storytelling for a reporter. Do over!”
“My ex-fiancé is Landon Scott.”
Her jaw dropped. “The Landon Scott?”
I nodded, and she digested the information before speaking again. “He’s an idiot for breaking up with you.”
“Oh, he didn’t breakup with me.” I gave her credit for not jumping right to questions about what Landon is like or if I could get tickets to his next show—the usual response to the revelation that we used to date.
“But you said—”
“That he called the wedding off. He still wanted a relationship, but I’m the one who ended it comp
letely.” I waited for the look that always came next, the look that showed the listener was trying to fathom why anyone would breakup with a celebrity like Landon. She surprised me again by thinning her lips and saying, “He must have deserved it.”
I sighed. “He did.” I felt more comfortable telling her the whole story since she wasn’t starting from the assumption that I was crazy for walking away from him. “I met him during my first summer term at the Y, before the full fall semester even started. We clicked right away.”
“I can see that,” she said. “You both have this kind of independent spirit thing going. Or at least, he seems to.” She shot me a questioning glance, but I could only shrug.
“I’m not sure how well I ever really knew him, which is sad, considering he’s the only guy I dated the whole time I was in college.” I picked at a loose stitch on the beanbag, a bit startled that dredging it up hurt less than it used to. “We set a wedding date once, and he canceled it for some music festival competition. When that didn’t go anywhere, he showed up again, and I took him back. We dated for two more years and then got engaged again last spring and set the wedding date for the end of the summer, a week after my graduation. The idea was that having a degree would make it easier for me to find a job when we moved down to LA so he could pursue his music.”
“Making it big as a pop star was the plan all along?” she asked. I nodded, and she looked vaguely disgusted. “In all The It Factor interviews, he always made it sound like auditioning for the show was a whim, like he had no idea how good he was.”
“He knew,” I said, “but he thought he needed a compelling back story.”
A look of understanding crossed her face. “So his story is that he had no idea he had this amazing voice and now he’s going to be an ‘accidental’ star.”
“That’s about it,” I said. I had never liked his idea of fabricating a backstory. Landon always intended to break into music, and it seemed pointless to cover that up. He worked hard to cultivate a soulful singer-songwriter vibe, but it hid a deeply rooted narcissism that finally revealed itself toward the end of our relationship. He wasn’t into music because he couldn’t imagine himself doing anything else; he was into it because he thought it was the fastest path to stardom.
I looked up at Courtney. “I figured most of this stuff out after we broke up. I couldn’t have stuck with him if I had known how shallow he was.”
“Why do you think he was able to hide that part of his personality from you for so long?” she asked.
I sighed. “Part of it was because I was young and dumb. I got caught up in the fact that he’s super hot and he was interested in me. I was always the quirky girl, not the prom princess all the guys in high school drooled over, so to have him coming after me . . . it scrambled my brains, I guess.”
Courtney’s understanding smile encouraged me. I shoved my hand through my hair as I searched for the easiest way to explain what I had realized with time and distance after the breakup. “I’m not super high maintenance, so even a little attention from Landon was enough to keep me happy. We started talking marriage by spring of my freshman year, but I knew my parents would flip if I wasn’t done with my schooling yet. Landon was cool about it. We talked about his future plans in the music industry, and suddenly, I went from wanting to be a journalist to thinking about how I should get a job that would support us in the short-term until he broke through, and then I could stay home with our future babies.”
I hated that part, the part where I had so easily given up on what I wanted because I was blinded by Landon’s conviction of his own talent and my belief that it was more important to nurture his than mine. It took little persuasion on his part to talk me into changing my major to a field that he viewed as more flexible and less career driven than journalism. “You should major in English,” he had said. “You’ll still get to write, you’ll get to read a ton, and it’ll be a great undergrad degree to have under your belt if you decide to go to grad school later.”
Ha. Like he ever would have supported that. He wanted me biddable and available to him, to pander to his ego and make him the center of my everything. Worst of all, I had done it. I thought being a dutiful Mormon young woman meant putting everything I wanted aside so I could support my husband and raise kids. It’s like I hadn’t been paying any attention to the stellar examples I had in my parents, in the way they did everything as a partnership and each looked for ways to support and encourage the other in whatever they did. It was Landon’s sea blue eyes and perfect white teeth and heart-stopping dimple that did me in . . . and my amazement that he picked me when other girls flirted their brains out trying to capture his attention the whole four years we were together.
In hindsight, the reason was obvious. I was impressionable when we met and easy to mold. I didn’t listen to anyone who warned me that maybe Landon was trying to control me by granting and withholding affection to keep me dancing on an invisible string. That string bound me to him as surely as a steel chain would have.
“What did your parents think about all this?” Courtney asked.
“When we announced our engagement again, they confronted me because they were concerned about his influence. They begged me to rethink things.”
“Let me guess,” Courtney said. “You clung to him tighter.”
I laughed. “I cast myself as a star-crossed lover, defying everything to be with my man. It was ridiculous. I announced my independence and said that I didn’t need their full support because MasterCard would be happy to sponsor the wedding. Which was how I ended up with a nearly ten-thousand-dollar credit card debt.”
Courtney winced.
“Yeah,” I said. “Turns out credit card companies will offer you obscene lines of credit for a shot at all your future earnings.” The tops of my ears burned as I told Courtney the rest of it, about how Landon scored a spot in the semifinal round of The It Factor Hollywood auditions and suddenly felt that it would be best to postpone the wedding so he could “focus on the competition.” I insisted that I couldn’t do that. I could imagine the expressions on my friends’ faces if I mentioned a postponement. First of all, I didn’t want anyone assuming we were delaying the wedding because of worthiness issues. There were no issues, and I didn’t want anyone judging me, which they would have. It’s human nature. I also felt Landon slipping away from me emotionally. His focus on the show and making the top ten drove everything else out.
As I argued with him about keeping our date or pushing it back, a distinct thought sliced through all the noise in my brain. It was simple but shone a giant light on a situation I’d been examining through half-closed eyes: if Landon loved me, there is no way he would have waited for four years to marry me and then postpone it a little longer until it was convenient.
“It’s so obvious now,” I concluded to Courtney, “but I’d been able to sustain a really phenomenal piece of fiction by telling myself that he was fine waiting on a wedding because he wanted to respect my parents’ wishes. But he only wanted me on the hook until he lined up something better.”
“Right now, I think viral videos might be my favorite thing ever,” she said.
I smiled. She was referring to a half dozen YouTube clips that had surfaced showing Landon doing several pre-It Factor performances. They belied his manufactured back story that he’d been unaware of his own talent. It called into question his authenticity for the viewers, and entertainment and gossip blogs flogged the story to death. He was voted off before he could get past a sixth-place finish.
“Was that you?” she asked, watching me closely.
“No! My revenge was never speaking to him again. I know, I’m really mature.”
“Still, I bet you were happy to see him miss out on the big prize. Justice is served, right?”
I shook my head. “Not really. He got the exposure he wanted, and girls really do fall for his looks. Someone is going to snap him up. Several misguided friends like to send me links to articles about what he’s up to, and I
think after The It Factor tour ends this summer, he’ll go right to work on an album. He came out of this exactly where he wanted to be. Look for his future celebrity scandals coming to a grocery store tabloid near you.”
“I’ve got your back,” she said. “If I ever see his face on a magazine cover, I’ll flip it around on the rack and then glare at anyone who tries to buy one.”
“Excellent,” I said. “We should be able to completely undo the national exposure he’s gotten within a matter of weeks if we stick with your plan.”
She grinned and flexed an arm. “Small but mighty.”
I laughed and ate the rest of my soup before it got too cold. Courtney did the same, and we sat in companionable silence for a while. When my spoon clinked against the bottom of my empty bowl, I set it down and leaned back with a happy groan. “Your mom is the best cook ever.”
“Stay for dinner,” she said.
“Thanks, but I should probably head home soon.”
A thoughtful gleam lit her hazel irises. “This is about Tanner. You don’t want to see him.”
“Not really.”
“Why not? For years, girls have befriended me to get to him. I don’t mind that you aren’t interested, but why not? Does it have something to do with Landon?”
“Only in the sense that I don’t feel like dating anyone,” I said. “That’s not specific to your brother.”
She looked confused. “So why are you going on dates every weekend?”
I flopped back on the beanbag and stared at the ceiling. “Keep a secret?”
“Of course.”
“I’m writing a column for Real Salt Lake, and that’s why I have to go on dates every weekend.”
“No way! You’re Indie Girl?”
I sat up again at her amused gasp. “You’ve read ‘Single in the City’?”
“Both of them. I’m waiting for more. They’re hilarious,” she said.
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