by Robin Benway
Apparently Simon thought so, too, because in five minutes, he had produced several of his bandmates’ MP3 players and a pair of speakers, and I was kneeling on top of the band’s dressing table in front of the mirror, scrolling through songs and frantically making a playlist. (I don’t know whose player it was, and I prayed it wasn’t Simon’s, because somebody had way too many Barbra Streisand songs saved up.) Simon watched as I worked, resting his chin on my shoulder. Even his chin felt good. Not too round and not too pointy. I’ve never felt a hotter chin in my life.
It took a few minutes, and just as I finished, the musical gods decided to do me a huge favor. The dressing room had only gotten more crowded, so much so that all the smokers had to hold their cigarettes above their heads to avoid burning people. (I guess the Los Angeles smoking laws didn’t apply to dressing rooms.) It soon became the place to be, because after the Plain Janes had showered, they appeared in the doorway and started squeezing into the room. I didn’t see them, because I was too busy plugging in the MP3 player, but just as the Plain Janes appeared, fresh from their first show after drug arrests and breakup rumors and assorted dramas that only rock stars could experience, my playlist started and LL Cool J came blasting out of the gigantic speakers.
“Don’t call it a comeback!”
The room went mental.
The Plain Janes thrust their arms into the air as if on cue, and the rest of us started cheering and clapping, and everyone who was standing was dancing, and everyone who was sitting started climbing up on whatever they were sitting on so they could dance, too. I could see Victoria and Jonah on the couch with at least five other people, all of them looking like they were surfing on the same board, they were so unsteady. I stood up on the dressing table because I wanted to dance, too, and Simon took hold of my hand and pulled himself up with me. He was, if I do say so, impressed. “Fucking fantastic!” he was saying. “That was bloody brilliant!”
And then he kissed me.
Mama said knock you out!
12 “In the hands of a rock-and-roll band…”
—Oasis, “Don’t Look Back in Anger”
FOR THE NEXT HOUR OR SO, Simon and I kept to a tight schedule of making out, then talking a little, then making out again. I was so high on adrenaline and caffeine that I didn’t even mind that everyone could see us, but after awhile, he pulled me behind one of the huge wardrobe cases so we could have some privacy.
Right then, though, privacy was the least of my concerns. After all, it had been six months since I broke up with Evan, and in that time, I had kissed no one. No. One. The closest I had gotten to any guy was with James under the counter and—
Hold the phone. Was I insane? Why was I thinking about James? Or Evan? Or the fucking Scooper Dooper? I was kissing Simon, lead singer from the Lolitas! More importantly, he was kissing me back! We were kissing each other! I immediately banished all other boys from my head and focused on the one in front of me.
“So,” I said as we pulled apart to catch our breath. “Where’s your next show?”
“San Diego, I think. Maybe Arizona. I don’t even fucking know anymore.” He grinned and began twirling a strand of my hair around his finger. “You have really sexy hair.”
I love you, hair. I will never hate you again, not even when it’s humid.
“Thanks,” I said. “Yours isn’t so bad, either.”
“Yeah?” He leaned closer and kissed me fast. “What else do you think?”
If I told him what I was really thinking, he’d run screaming from the room. In my mind, I had already imagined myself flying across the Atlantic to visit him in London, having dinner together with our new friends Gwen and Gavin in some cute little restaurant before I went to work DJ’ing while my adoring rock star boyfriend wrote songs and won Grammys and made millions of dollars in royalties. However, I thought it best to keep that little fantasy to myself.
Just then, I saw Victoria across the room. She saw me at the same time and I realized that maybe I should check in with my best friend. “Um, can you just, um, wait here for a minute?” I said to Simon. “I’ll be right back.”
He pretended to pout. “How do I know you’ll come back, though?”
My God, man, have you looked in a mirror lately? Trust me, I’ll be back.“Two minutes,” I told him. “Plus however long the wait in line is for the ladies’ room.”
That cracked him up. “You’re such a trip!” he laughed. “Fuckin’ incredible. Hurry up.”
Victoria saw me separating myself from Simon and she left Jonah on the couch as we both pushed our way through the room. “It’s like one big boa constrictor,” she gasped as we both nearly fell out of the room and into the empty hallway.
“Bathroom,” I said. “Now.”
“Yeah, you think?”
We ran around the backstage area, showing our passes to every security guard who saw us, until we came across a room that just had a toilet and sink, and we scrambled into it as Victoria twisted the lock. We looked at each other for a second, then burst into our Happy Dance, the one that involved a lot of twisting and leaping and whooping around. “You’re making out with Simon Lolita!” Victoria cried. “I saw you! Tell me everything!”
“He said I had sexy hair!”
“Ohmygod!” She jumped up and down. “What else, what else? Is he a good kisser? He looks like a good kisser!”
“I can’t even feel my knees, he’s so good!”
“Kneeless! That’s so awesome! How’s the tongue action?”
“Perfect! Not too much, not too little. What about me? Do I look like those fish on ice in the grocery store?”
“No, you look totally hot! Has he called you a bird yet?”
“A bird? What kind of bird?”
“I don’t know. British guys always call women ‘birds.’”
“No bird calls yet.”
“Well, either way, you better remember every single word he says, because you’re so telling me everything on the way home.” Then she paused. “Do you think you’ll get to go on his tour bus?”
The idea hadn’t even occurred to me. I had skipped ahead by about five hundred steps and was already interior designing our London apartment. Wait, our London flat. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m pretty happy behind the wardrobe case.”
“How big do you think those bunks are, anyway? Big enough for two people?”
I laughed and we jumped around some more. Then we calmed down and I looked in the mirror. “How’s my makeup?”
“Beautiful. That mascara is really holding up nicely. It’s not even smudging.”
“What about my lipstick?”
“You’ve got make-out lips. You don’t need lipstick.”
I turned back around to look at her. “Promise me you and Jonah won’t leave without me? I don’t want to end this night by having to hitchhike home.”
She looked at me like I was an idiot. “Audrey. We’re at a backstage party with the Lolitas and the Plain Janes and about fifty other people whose pictures you have plastered all over your wall. There’s free alcohol and cheese, and right now, Jonah’s smoking hash smuggled in from Amsterdam. Trust me when I say this: We’re not going anywhere without you.”
13 “Be my photo bitch and I’ll make you rich…”
—Belle & Sebastian, “Sukie in the Graveyard”
THE ONLY SLIGHTLY UNCOOL THING I had to do before going back to the party was text my parents to let them know I was okay. As parents go, they’re pretty lenient with curfew stuff. The official deadline to be home is 2 A.M., but after midnight, I have to text them every half an hour so they know I’m alive and not being seduced by some roofie-dropping dirtbag. Victoria got wise and told her mom about my curfew, so our parents sat us down and gave us the whole “going out is a privilege not a right” speech, and now Victoria has the same curfew and rules, too.
I may have been busy making out with rock stars and impressing people with my mad DJ skillz, but I wasn’t stupid enough to screw up my curfew.
There were some kids at school who had to be home by ten on weekends, and the mere idea made my heart hurt.
Anyway, Victoria was half-right about her and Jonah staying at the party. The part she got wrong was the “we’re not going anywhere” part, since right after we got back to the room, and I found Simon, and we began making out without even a hello or a “hey, long time no see,” the police arrived and declared the whole room to be a safety hazard. Their timing was pretty ironic, since Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire” was playing, but also a relief, since every guitar player in the room—and there were many—was air-guitaring along with Jimi and making that horrible guitargasm face. Thank God Simon was a singer and I was spared the embarrassment of watching him do that.
“Fuuuccckkk,” he groaned when he saw the firemen. “We gotta move this party back to the hotel.” He looked down at me and grinned. “Come with us.”
I glanced at the time on my phone. Twelve forty. It would take forty-five minutes to get home in order for me to walk in the door by 2 A.M., which left me with thirty-five minutes of Simon time. “I have to leave by one fifteen,” I said.
“Oh, come on,” he said, pushing up against me. “This is just the opening act tonight. The real party always happens at the hotel.”
It was times like these that made me wish my parents were assholes. If they were, then I could just break the rules because I wouldn’t care what they thought. But the truth is, I kind of like my parents. I didn’t want them to worry about me or think that I was tied up in the trunk of some car. Or making out with rock stars at Sunset Strip hotels.
Damnit.
I tried to play coy. “I bet you say that to all the girls,” I murmured, pulling him down so that my lips just touched his as I talked. “But I’m not like other girls.” The Jack-and-Cokes had definitely made the flirting part of the night easier. Whoever had mixed them deserved a medal.
Simon said something that I didn’t quite hear, and then he took my hand and, while the firemen kicked everyone out, he led me down the hall, back toward the stage, and then out a door and we were outside in a little courtyard, away from the fans who were camped out by the tour buses, away from firemen and Crazy Arm Woman and whoever else might interrupt us. All I could see were headlights cruising up and down the Strip, and the air smelled really good and salty from the late-night ocean fog that blew east and the sausage vendors that always set up camp after the shows. It was like our own private Emo Eden.
Once we were by ourselves, it got intense. More intense, in a way, than things had ever been with Evan. We had been each other’s firsts and neither of us had seriously dated anyone before, so it was always a little awkward and fumbling. Not bad, but not mind-blowing. Simon, however, knew what he was doing. It was the kind of kissing where you had to remind yourself to breathe in order not to pass out and miss even a second of it.
After a few minutes, he put his hand under my shirt and began counting up my rib cage with his fingertips, and I wondered how far this was going to go. Or, more to the point, how far he expected me to go.
“Wait,” I gasped. “Just…wait for a second. I need a minute.”
We were both breathing hard, and he moved his hands so that they were on either side of my head, pressed against the wall. He laughed a little and brushed some hair out of my eyes. “Don’t be scared, baby,” he said. “Like you say, it’s all good.”
“I’m not scared.”
“Liar.”
“No, I just need a minute. Breathing is important to me, you know.” I was trying to make a joke, but he was right. I was lying.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re not gonna suffocate.” He ducked his head back down toward mine. “I won’t let you.”
We kissed for another minute, slower this time, but then we picked back up and when he put his hand up my shirt again, I didn’t stop him. The air around us was filled with traffic sounds and crickets chirping and Simon moaning against my mouth, and I could feel myself starting to not care about anything except him, not parents or curfews or Victoria or anything else but how his hand felt on my skin.
“Come on, Euterpe,” he suddenly whispered. “Inspire me.”
The sentence hit me somewhere in the back of my head, and not because it sounded so bizarre. I had heard that name before. It was Greek. My dad always liked Greek mythology and used to tell me stories about gods and goddesses when I was a little kid. (My mother also had to talk him out of naming me Hera, which is a tale for another time.) But I remembered Euterpe. She was a Muse, one of the nine Muses.
“Wait, what?” I said, trying to pull away from him long enough to talk. “What’d you say?”
“I said, ‘Inspire me.’”
“Before that part. What’d you call me?”
“Euterpe.” He smiled against my mouth so that our teeth touched. “I said, ‘Come on, Euterpe, inspire me.’”
The next time I broke off our kiss, I could tell he was getting a little annoyed. “What?” he said. “Now what?”
“It’s just…do I inspire you? Like right now?” I was starting to get a bad tingly feeling in my toes.
“Well, yeah.” He laughed a little and shook his hair out of his eyes. “That’s what you do for everyone, right?”
“Um, not really,” I said. I was trying to be cool about it, but my pounding heart was suddenly everywhere but in my chest.
“Oh, come on. I’ve heard ‘Audrey, Wait!’ It’s like ‘Sexy Sadie’ for the Beatles, right?” Simon started singing into my ear. “You came along to turn on everyone.…” And just as he was about to move his hand even further up under my shirt, I remembered who Euterpe was: the Muse of Music.
And everything clicked together.
“Oh God,” I said, and pulled away again. “Oh my God.”
“What? You don’t like the Beatles?”
“No, I love the Beatles, it’s not—” I took a deep breath and looked at him, trying to see what he really wanted from me. “I’m not your muse. I’m not anyone’s muse, all right?”
“You know about the Muses, baby?”
“Enough to know that I’m not one of them.” The Jack-and-Cokes were long gone and I felt disgustingly sober. “It was just a fucking song, Simon. I didn’t even write it.”
“So help me write one,” he said, and tried bending down to kiss me again. “We can be famous together. Let’s help each other out. We can be—what’s that word? Symbiotic. Use each other to survive.”
“I know what symbiotic means,” I snapped. (I didn’t mention that it had been one of my favorite PSAT words last year, and that now he had totally ruined it.)
“Yeah, ‘cause you’re smart.” Simon stroked the hair away from my face, but I pulled away. “So be smart now. You gotta strike while the iron’s hot, right? You and me, we go on a few dates, make some press. The London papers will fuckin’ eat it up. You’ll be like the American Kate Moss.”
I didn’t even want to know who Simon thought he would be in that twisted media fantasy. “So you only like me for—for the song? That’s it?”
“Well, I mean, you’re pretty hot, too. It’s a win—win situation.”
“Dude!” I said, and now I stepped away from him entirely. “In case you didn’t get the memo, I’m only sixteen!”
I thought that would be my ace in the hole, the one thing to remind Simon that I was, in fact, a minor, and therefore as illegal as the cocaine the Lolitas’ drummer had been snorting off the dressing table. But Simon just shrugged. “Well, that’s all right,” he said. “So’s my girlfriend.”
You know how you start laughing not because anything’s funny, but because you’re so mad and disappointed and crushed that it’s all you can do? That’s what I did, sort of laughing and wheezing and sighing all at the same time. Simon looked at me strangely and after a minute he said, “So is that a yes or a no?”
I shook my head. “It’s the biggest no you’ve ever heard in your life, you fucking parasite.”
He scuffed his shoe on the pavem
ent and swore under his breath. “Fucking tease. No wonder he dumped you.”
I just shook my head. “I dumped him. Try listening to the lyrics once in a while, Zeus.”
He swore again and went back inside, slamming the door behind him. I stood by myself outside and looked at all the lights on the Strip and realized that despite all the lights and cars and stars, the street seemed so, so dark.
And then I wondered why I didn’t hear crickets anymore.
I don’t know why I told you any of this. After all, you know the whole story. You know that I wore cut-up tube socks on my arms. You know that the Plain Janes played the chorus of “Audrey, Wait!” during their encore. You know that Simon and I spent the whole night making out, and that I got the party started with a great rap song and some serendipitous timing. You also know that the “crickets” weren’t really crickets, but the Lolitas’ tour manager crouched in the bushes with his camera phone.
And I know you’ve seen the video.
14 “Sunshine, I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.…”
—The Libertines, “Up the Bracket”
MY PHONE RANG at 8:32 the next morning. Victoria’s ring. (Who else would be brave enough to call at that hour on a Saturday?)
At eight thirty-three, I threw a pillow at it.
At eight thirty-four it started up again.
At eight thirty-six I finally answered.
“Is the world ending?” I croaked. My tongue was thick in my mouth and my eyes were glued shut with leftover super-strength mascara. It had taken forever for me to fall asleep the night before, and now the last thing I wanted to do was wake up.
“It might be.”
“Little green men?”
“No. Video on the Internet.”
I forced my eyelashes apart. “Video of who and what?”
