For the Record

by Charlotte Huang

  “Who the fuck is Ray?”

  “His security. He goes everywhere with Lucas.”

  “You better get them off the bus in Phoenix. Pem, Beckett, and Malcolm are going to lose their shit when they find out about this. Everyone’s going to be pissed about the overcrowding, but they hate that guy. He, like, offends their sensibilities. You should have heard them go off when you first hooked up with him at the Roxy.”

  “Trust me. I’m not trying to make things worse, but it’s not like any of them exactly asks for my stamp of approval when they bring a girl on the bus. Does anyone give a second thought to whether I actually enjoy babysitting the parade of girls who come through here? No! So let’s be real—if anyone else wanted to bring someone on for a couple of days, we’d figure it out.”

  Rob sighed. “That person would probably not have security the size of a house.”

  “They might. And Ray’s totally nice and low-key. I’ve been around him for like two days now.”

  “Whatever. If you think it’s worth the shitstorm, more power to you.”

  Rob and I finished moving all the junk to the front lounge. People would either have to find new places for their stuff or else store it underneath the bus. Not exactly convenient.

  I ran down the bus rules for Lucas and Ray. Once we were moving, I set up a movie in the front lounge. The back lounge was pretty cliquey and I didn’t want to subject Lucas to that. Mandy and Oscar and, of course, Ray, stayed up front with us.

  I felt good, curled up in Lucas’s arms, watching a lighthearted, funny movie about a regular high school student who robbed banks. I tried to act like it was no big deal that the guys hadn’t rolled out the welcome wagon. “It’s just not their way,” I said. But I could tell Lucas thought it was strange. I hoped Mandy’s enthusiastic reception had made up for everyone else’s rudeness.

  When the movie ended, I made Lucas wait in the lounge while I changed into my pj’s in the bunk. We took turns brushing our teeth in the bathroom. It wasn’t quite as cute as side-by-side brushing, but we did share my bottled water.

  Lucas took off his shorts and T-shirt in the bunk aisle then stood there in his underwear. It was like seeing a famous piece of art in person. “Do you not own pj’s?” I asked.

  “This is how I sleep. Didn’t you notice?” Of course I had. “I didn’t plan on going to sleep with an audience.”

  “Just get up there.”

  “Oh man,” Lucas said once we were up in the bunk. “I haven’t slept in a twin bed in forever. And never with another person.”

  “I’m honored, I guess,” I said.

  “You should be. You’re my first.”

  “Mm-hmm.” I knew he was trying to be funny and broach a subject that I wasn’t going anywhere near.

  We lay facing each other, our legs and feet intertwined. Lucas was on the outside and held on to me for dear life, convinced he was going to go flying out of the bunk. We had so much fun trying to guess which noises belonged to which person. When the snoring started up, he guessed it was Mandy, which made me burst out laughing.

  We stayed up whispering and laughing until someone shushed us. He propped himself up on his elbow and rolled toward me for a kiss. “We can go slow,” he said.

  I wouldn’t say slow is exactly how it went, but we didn’t go there.

  24

  Since it was a travel day and we were mostly stuck on the bus, no one was in a hurry to leave their bunks. I knew I’d have the lounge for a while, so I opened my laptop, slipped on headphones, and clicked on Beckett’s music file. For several exits I just listened and zoned out, sipping tea, watching the scenery zip past. I eventually talked myself into opening a blank document and attempting to put words to the music.

  You and I were a secret

  And when I agreed to keep it

  I didn’t know you meant forever

  I stopped and deleted. God, my first attempt at lyric writing and it was so…juvenile. Embarrassing. Bad. I reminded myself what Beckett had said about experimenting. These words were about Mike, a boy I didn’t even want anymore.

  The problem was that it felt like a sad, angry song, and there weren’t too many things I was sad and angry about. If it felt like a song about worrying, I’d have a lot more to work with.

  Beckett came into the lounge. “Hey.” He gave me a begrudging smile and started making one of his gross breakfast concoctions.

  “Er, sorry about the overcrowding,” I said, shutting my laptop.

  “It’s nothing we haven’t seen before.”

  “Did Pem say anything?”

  “Yeah. He’ll get over it, but I wouldn’t be in his face about it.” He took his breakfast to the jump seat.

  At least he was being nice to me again. I wondered if his graciousness would extend to Lucas but somehow doubted it.

  A muffled but sharp bang came from the sleeping berth, followed by a string of swears. When the door slid open, I heard laughter, then Lucas shuffled out holding a hand over his forehead.

  “What happened?” I asked, reaching for his hand. He was still in his underwear, not that he seemed worried about it.

  “I tried to sit up.”

  “Rookie mistake, dude,” Beckett said before swiveling back around in the jump seat. I guess that answered my question.

  Lucas put his hand down. “Is it bleeding?”

  “No. Just a little red. It’ll go away. I learned that the hard way,” I said to comfort him.

  “It better,” Lucas said.

  To me, the bigger problem was that he’d woken everyone up. Now they were all coming into the lounge at once, talking over each other and cutting in line to make breakfast.

  “You want some cereal?” I asked Lucas.

  He shook his head. “Carbs.”

  Malcolm snorted. “Are you actually standing here in your underwear right now?”

  “I can make you some eggs,” I said, ignoring Malcolm.

  “Like an omelet?” Lucas asked.

  “More like hard-boiled.”

  He nodded without enthusiasm.

  By the time I actually got a chance to cook his eggs, we were at the hotel and everyone flew off the bus to get some space.

  “Where’d everyone go?” Lucas asked.

  “They get cabin fever. People sometimes do laps around the block to get privacy while talking on the phone. Especially the crew guys who have girlfriends.”

  “Do any of the Melbourne guys have girlfriends?”

  “Not exactly.” He looked concerned, so I added, “There’s no band-crew consorting allowed.”

  Lucas perked up. “Really? Who came up with that?”

  “Pem.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “Why is not really a question I can answer when it comes to anything Pem does.”

  Lucas rolled his eggs around on his plate to loosen the shells. “I have to say, I thought those dudes would be cooler. I’m such a huge fan….I’d thought maybe we’d be friends.”

  I sat beside him and looped my arm through his. “Everyone knows New Yorkers are prickly. They hate everybody.”

  We’d stopped in the middle of nowhere, so everyone just hung out in their rooms until the next morning, when it was time to get back on the bus and finish the drive to Phoenix.

  That night Lucas watched the show from the side of the stage. That threw me off a little bit because I felt like I had to direct some attention over there, even though I shouldn’t have. But his presence made me kick it up a level, so it probably evened out. He looked so cute, standing there bobbing his head along to the music.

  We had late bus call and nowhere we wanted to go, so that left lots of time for signing. Lucas hung back and kept his hood up. It didn’t make a difference. Somebody spotted him about fifteen minutes in and started squealing. “Lucas! Lucas! I know it’s you! Can you come over here?”

  He had no choice but to join me by the parking lot entrance. What started out as signing a couple of things and saying hi turned into
a mob scene within minutes. All the fans who were spread out along the fence swarmed to the center like metal shavings to a magnet. Most of them didn’t even want to talk to Lucas. They just wanted to verify it was him or snap his picture.

  Pem and Malcolm looked on in disgust. Ray got involved to keep people at a respectable distance from Lucas. Finally he had to pull Lucas away and get him onto the bus.

  Even though I was overwhelmed, I didn’t want to just ditch, so I stayed out. But from that point on, all I got were questions about Lucas. “Are you guys dating? Friends? How did you meet? Is he going on the rest of your tour?”

  After I tired of saying, “I don’t know,” I climbed onto the bus. Lucas was watching TV in the front lounge. I flopped down next to him. “Your life is nuts,” I said.

  “I know,” he replied, smirking.

  I elbowed him. “You love it.”

  “A little,” he admitted. “Being on tour is fun. How great is seeing your fans up close and personal every single day? With acting, it’s all removed.”

  “Well, now it seems like we’re done interacting with the fans. We’re stuck here. What do you want to do?”

  “I can think of one thing.”

  —

  Lucas woke up first the next morning. He repeated his rookie mistake and banged his forehead on the ceiling when he tried to sit up. “Goddammit!” he yelled, holding his head.

  I propped myself up on my elbows. “What happened?” I asked, dazed.

  “Seriously, this is going to bruise. I’m screwed!”

  I took his hand away, and sure enough he’d managed to bang his head in the exact same spot. It was a darker red than last time. “Let’s get some ice.”

  “I have a photo shoot and an awards show in two days. If they can’t Photoshop this thing out, the studio execs will lose their minds.”

  “Will you two shut up?” someone shouted. I hadn’t realized we’d been speaking at full volume.

  I got some ice out of the freezer and wrapped it in a paper towel. Lucas held it up to his forehead, wincing.

  Within the hour, Lucas’s bump really started to swell and turn purple. He was completely preoccupied with it; he even called Lisette to have her make an appointment with his dermatologist for when we got to LA. I couldn’t believe how unnerved he was. I handed him my concealer.

  “We’re not even the same skin tone,” he said. I gave him a strange look. “What? You think this is the first time I’ve put on makeup?”

  The concealer did the trick well enough that he could stop staring into a mirror. He was right; it wasn’t the same tone, but it wasn’t as attention-getting as the purple bruise.

  Still, when the guys woke up, the first thing Pem said was “Man, are you wearing makeup? That’s so high-maintenance.”

  “But eyeliner is okay?” Lucas asked.

  “I wear it onstage. There’s a difference between onstage and off,” Pem said.

  “In your world, maybe,” Lucas retorted.

  —

  Ray was all fired up for San Diego, our next stop. He’d lived there for a year and put some buddies on my guest list. Unfortunately, that ended with Ray and Lucas getting hammered with said buddies. By the time I got on the bus, Ray was passed out in his bunk and Lucas was slurring at the TV.

  I kicked everyone out of the back lounge, which went over so well, and put Lucas to bed back there. At least he wouldn’t hit his head in the morning.

  In the middle of the night, I was awakened by Jared yelling, “What the fuck!”

  I pulled open my curtain to see Ray, hunched over on the edge of his bunk, peeing into Jared’s bunk across the aisle. Most of it hit the curtain, but some of it must have trickled in. “Omigod. Ray! Stop it! Go to the bathroom. Ray!” He didn’t hear me. He just finished his business and rolled back into his bunk.

  “This is so fucked up!” Jared yelled.

  “I’m so sorry! Here, sleep in my bunk. I’ll go in the back,” I whispered.

  Other curtains opened up.

  Rob: “Chelsea. We can’t have this.”

  Malcolm: “The manny’s an even bigger douche than him.”

  Pem: “They’re done in LA.”

  Beckett: “Go to sleep. Can’t do anything about it now.”

  Jared: “No way. Chelsea, out. I’m sleeping in your bed.”

  I groaned and climbed down, clutching my blanket, which Jared promptly snatched out of my hands.

  Lucas was sprawled out over one of the back lounge couches, still fully dressed, mouth hanging open. I was surprised no one had come back here and drawn on him. It was a bit of an eye-opener to see that even big movie stars couldn’t make drunk look good.

  25

  Lucas fled to Chateau Marmont as soon as we got to LA. We were staying at the Sunset Marquis, since everyone wanted to be centrally located for our day off. There was plenty of time before our show, so Mandy talked me into a random tour of Hollywood called the Dearly Departed Tour. A minibus zipped us around for two hours with a guide pointing out all the sites of some of Los Angeles’s most famous murders.

  “Are you okay about them banishing Lucas from the bus?” Mandy asked during a rare lull in the guide’s spiel.

  “No. Their love lives haven’t exactly been convenient and nonannoying,” I said.

  Mandy nodded slowly. “Yeah…but then, none of their guests have ever done that. I mean, I’m on your side. But they didn’t actually say Lucas couldn’t come back. Just Ray.”

  “Are you being serious right now?” She knew as well as I did, as well as we all did, that no Ray meant no Lucas. “What’s he supposed to do? Follow the bus in a rental car?”

  The guide launched into an overly detailed description of another grizzly murder. I texted Lucas and got a quick reply: Working on something. See you at the Wiltern. XX.

  When we took a bathroom break, Mandy decided to broach a slightly less inflammatory subject: her crush on Oscar. “I finally laid it on the line,” she said, reapplying lip gloss in the mirror.

  “Uh-oh. What does that mean?” I asked.

  “You know. I told Oscar I like him.”

  “Bad boys are your new thing.”

  “I know. The boys at home are so blah. Anyway, we talked, and he likes his job too much to risk it. He says Pem has his reasons, however weird they may be, and that it’s Melbourne’s tour, not his, so he’s going to play by the rules.”

  “What an upstanding citizen. It’s nice that he’s so honorable,” I said.

  “Yeah. But what’s not is that he feels free to entertain all the girls who hang around the bus and venue till all hours. Ironic, considering he was so worried about me hooking up with a stranger.”

  “You don’t know that he’s doing anything,” I told her.

  Mandy gave me a look. And I thought I was the one with trust issues.

  —

  I was really nervous for my first real LA show. Maybe it was all that talk about murder, but I didn’t think so. Not only was everyone from our stylist to the president of our record label here, but there were also celebrities and press. The guys were on edge, and I knew that we couldn’t make any mistakes.

  Before we took the stage, I could feel that all of us were more charged up than usual. The crowd was restless, waiting for us to begin.

  We started out strong, totally in sync and revved up. Somewhere in the middle of the set Pem noticed people in front looking to the side of the stage. I glanced over, but Lucas wasn’t visible. “What are you all looking at?” Pem asked, pretending he was curious to see what was over there too.

  There were scattered callbacks of “Lucas Rivers” but nothing we couldn’t ignore if we chose to.

  Of course, Pem chose otherwise. I looked at Beckett. His mouth was tight. Malcolm looked like he just wanted the whole thing over with. “Lucas Rivers. Seriously?” Pem laughed and went back to his planned banter entertaining everyone with stories from the tour. Pem was most on when he was a little agro.

  Right before our
last song, Pem gave shout-outs to the people on our team. Then he said, “If you see Lucas Rivers, tell him to go fuck himself!” That met with a lot of laughter and hoots of approval from the audience.

  We played the rest of our show really fast. I was so upset with Pem I could barely focus. And I had to figure out how to get Lucas to take Pem’s attack as the territorial posturing that it was.

  As soon as we were done with the encore, I accosted Pem backstage. “I get you want the focus to be on us, but was that really necessary?”

  “If your boyfriend needs an attention fix, tell him to get it somewhere else. This isn’t the Lucas Rivers sideshow,” Pem said.

  “Lucas stayed out of sight during our entire set,” I said. “Is it so bad that he likes your band? He’s not exactly some loser.”

  Pem snorted. “Debatable.”

  “Are you jealous because he has more fans than we do?” I asked.

  Malcolm and Beckett looked like they’d rather not jump in but knew that they might have to.

  “More doesn’t always mean better. And it definitely doesn’t mean smarter,” Pem said.

  I went to find Lucas. He was waiting for me in the dressing room. “You haven’t been here the whole time, have you?”

  “No, I watched. You couldn’t see me?”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry about Pem. You know he just said that for show, right?”

  Lucas stood up and hugged me, stroking my hair. “I don’t need to be one of the cool kids. As long as you like me.” He gave me a kiss. “You like me, don’t you?”

  I looked into his eyes and nodded, even as I was thinking, I barely know you. There was something impenetrable about Lucas; he was always on, saying or doing the perfect thing. And since I wasn’t exactly an open book, our interactions did feel a little superficial. Maybe that would change over time.

  “You were great.” He kissed me again. “I need to get my beauty sleep. I’ll pick you up around four tomorrow.”

  —

  Lucas was presenting at an awards show on our day off and invited me to be his date. Mandy spent the morning with me at the stylist’s studio and then helped me do my hair in the afternoon. Without the leather cuffs on my wrists and ankles, the overall effect of the layered tulle skirt and thin cashmere sweater would have been way too ballerina for my tastes. I had my doubts, but I figured our stylist knew what she was doing.