by Teddy Wayne
I ran deep. Like I’d practiced it every day the last two years, I thought, “Oh baby oh baby oh baby cut.” You cut left after the third “Oh baby.” I still couldn’t remember why we called it that. Michael’s pass sailed behind me.
“You’re supposed to cut right,” he said.
It was true. There used to be a seesaw to the left, the one with me and Jane in the photo in my bedroom, and I had to cut right. It wasn’t there anymore, so I forgot.
I said, “Sorry.”
We ran it a few more times until we completed a pass for the camera crew. I spiked the ball and did my trademark spin move when Kevin asked me. He said they had enough tape, and told me and Michael to say our good-byes before they drove him home. “Bye, Michael,” I said.
“Bye.”
“Stay in touch.”
He smiled. He needed braces soon. “Yeah,” he said. “Like when you left the first time.” He didn’t sound sad when he said it. It was like his eyes were seeing through me and through the seesaw that wasn’t there anymore.
I thought he was done, but he kept going. “My parents wanted to fly me out to visit. We couldn’t get through to you.”
“I never knew that.” I really didn’t. “The label doesn’t tell me a lot. They probably thought you were a fan. There are a lot of impostors who pretend to know me.”
He would’ve loved going into the locker rooms of any team and backstage at any concert we wanted. Maybe I could still invite him out to L.A. He could sleep in one of the extra rooms and we could finally try staying up all night, now that I knew how to make coffee.
“I know.” He shuffled into a car without looking back at me. “You’re busy with your label. And getting free clothes. And going on fake dates. Like all the other celebs.”
He shut the door. I stared at the tinted window he was behind. I wanted to knock on it, open it up and tell him I was sorry, I didn’t mean to talk to him like that, this is how people talk in L.A., I’m still the same kid who played football with you for hours after school and ate Doritos till three a.m. while we watched infomercials and used to cry imagining your funeral, and there was a weasel in here?
Except I wasn’t the same kid, and neither was he, and if he visited we wouldn’t have a fun time together and I wouldn’t be able to stay up all night because it would throw off my schedule for the next day and I wasn’t allowed junk food and he probably didn’t even remember the weasel joke.
Jane came over and asked how it all went as his car took off. “I think they’ll edit it good,” I said.
“Was it nice seeing your school?”
“I guess.”
“And Michael?”
I traced the pass route for “Oh Baby” on the ground with my red Nikes. “He was fine.”
“Just fine?”
“I don’t know. It was sort of weird. He said he tried to visit but couldn’t get through to me. I told him the label doesn’t pass on personal messages.”
She nodded. “I’ve explained to you before how it’s hard for people from your past to adjust to you. They can get jealous, or resentful, or try to use you. You know that’s why I cut everyone from St. Louis off.”
“Michael wasn’t like that, though.”
She stroked my hair out of my eyes and gave me a kiss on my forehead as if I’d fainted again. “I know, baby. I’m so sorry.”
“It wasn’t you who was acting weird, it was Michael.”
“Yeah, but—” She straightened up and got into her business mode and said, “They’re taking us somewhere else. It’s a surprise, so we have to be blindfolded. We’ll ride together.”
They had a limo for us, and Robin and a camera guy sat inside with us and made us put on blindfolds. In the dark, I imagined it was like a hostage situation. Me and Jane were being kidnapped, and the kidnappers told Jane they would only let one of us live, so she told them, “Fuck you, let my baby go,” and they let me out of the car, but then I found my way back to them because the car left a trail of gasoline, and I killed them all even though it was too late to rescue Jane, since they’d slashed her neck and blood was oozing everywhere.
They took our blindfolds off, Jane’s first, and I heard her say, “No way. Absolutely not.” I wriggled out of mine. We were in the parking lot of Schnucks. “Turn the camera off. Now.”
Robin said, “Phil, turn it off.”
“First, how did you know I worked here?” Jane asked.
“It’s not exactly classified information.”
“Well, I’m not going in, if that’s your plan.”
Robin sighed and said she’d talk to Kevin. The camera guy left with her. “This is ridiculous,” Jane said to me. “They’re deliberately trying to belittle me.”
“Won’t this help the heartland ID with us?” I asked.
“I don’t care.”
Kevin came inside. “Jane? You have a problem with this?”
“I’m not doing it.”
“Listen,” he said. “We made a lot of concessions already, namely not interviewing any family members or friends. We need more footage. So I’m afraid this is a deal breaker.”
“Me not agreeing to humiliate myself is a deal breaker?”
“What’s humiliating about this? It’s a job you used to have. I used to work at a hardware store. This is what people do. If you don’t want to do it, we won’t run the profile.”
I almost said out loud what I knew Jane was thinking, that this guy didn’t know what it was like to be a celebrity, even a backstage celebrity like Jane, that he might run a TV show but no one cared what dumb job he had before, but Jane had image maintenance to worry about.
She looked out at the Schnucks again, the big red letters over the brown front. “B-roll footage only. Robin doesn’t come in. If anyone I know works there, we’re not talking to them. Deal?”
He agreed. Jane’s good at bargaining. She always reminds me how the label tried to screw us on our first deal and her business advisers were pressuring her to sign but she knew she had leverage and used it when less sophisticated people would’ve just buckled. You extend a fair offer to the other party but make it clear you’re not giving them anything beyond that. People respect that you’re not conning them and you’re also not a pushover.
She put on her sunglasses as she got out of the car. “No sunglasses, please,” Kevin said. She took a sharp breath in through her nose and placed them on top of her head and walked fast to the entrance. The camera guy raced to catch up.
I asked Kevin if I could go in. I hadn’t even been inside a supermarket in forever, and I’d been in this one hundreds of times. He said, “You can put on your hat and sunglasses and go in, but stay away from your mom, okay?”
Kevin walked inside with me and the hired security guard. The doors dinged open. Everyone knows how music can make you remember something, but even a sound like that double-ding brought me back to how I imagined the double-ding sound was saying, Jon-ny, when Michael’s mother used to drop me off after school before she took Michael to his violin lessons or his tutor or his speech therapist, and I’d do my homework in the staff room, and when her shift was over Jane would let me choose a candy bar to use her employee discount on. For a long time I always picked Butterfinger, but when I was old enough to know Jane was allergic to peanuts, I switched to 3 Musketeers in case the crumbs fell in her car and made her depart the realm, and then we’d drive home together.
I hung around the front fruit displays as Jane went down the main aisle, not saying anything while she walked ahead of the camera guy and Kevin and the security guard. A few people turned around because of the camera, but not all that many, since it was a small handheld and it’s not so strange to see a camera out in public, even in a St. Louis Schnucks.
I followed a little farther in, ducking behind the other displays like in Zenon when projectile weapons or spells are coming for your head. She made it about three-quarters to the end of the aisle when a woman from an empty checkout register in one of the Schnucks polo shirts intercept
ed her. “Jane?” she asked. “Jane Valentino, is that you?”
Jane stopped. The woman was around her age, with a lumpy body like a potato and her hair in a bun. “Yes?” Jane said.
“It’s Mary Ann. Mary Ann Hilford?” She pointed at her name tag. “Remember?”
Jane looked blank. “Of course. Hello, Mary Ann.”
I barely remembered her, or any of them, except for this one black guy named Vaughn who snuck me M&M’s when Jane wasn’t looking. Mary Ann reached out to hug her, and Jane kept her arms mostly by her side and didn’t hug her back. “Vanessa and Lillian and Phil and me, we all follow Jonathan’s career. Or Jonny’s career.”
“That’s nice of you,” Jane said. “I hope you’re all doing well.”
Mary Ann said, “Look!” and she went back to her checkout line and came back with something. “He’s on the cover.”
I couldn’t see it, except that it was a tabloid and definitely not the glossy we’d contracted with. She handed it to Jane, who looked at the cover for a few seconds, and turned to the camera guy and said something. He took the camera down off his shoulder and pointed it at the ground. “Is he here?” Mary Ann asked.
I crouched lower behind the cantaloupes and watched through a small space in the pile. They smelled rotten. Bottom-shelf supermarkets are always kind of sad, with all the D-list merch they’re trying to get rid of that no one wants. “No,” Jane said. “But we have to get running. It was great seeing you.”
She walked away. Mary Ann said, loud enough for Jane to hear, “I’m sure.”
Jane turned. “Excuse me?”
“I see how it is,” Mary Ann said. “Thought you were better than everyone back then, still do.”
Jane’s face twisted around. She seemed a little hurt, even. I didn’t know how this woman from Schnucks with a bun could say anything to hurt her feelings. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said quietly.
Mary Ann looked like she hadn’t expected this. “Wait.” She shook her head and sighed. “Jane. That was bitchy of me.”
Jane smiled at her. I couldn’t read if it was a fuck-you smile or an I-forgive-you smile. “That’s okay. All this stuff”—Jane pointed to the camera guy and waved the tabloid—“makes people say and do things they don’t actually mean.”
“Yeah.” Mary Ann didn’t say anything else because you could tell she did mean it but just felt bad about it.
“And it makes it hard when you meet people who knew you before,” Jane said, even though it wasn’t like Mary Ann asked her to keep talking about it. The camera guy was still there, and he was itching to turn the camera back on and catch this, but he couldn’t do it. “So I understand why you’d feel the need to say something hurtful like that.”
Now Mary Ann really didn’t know what to say. She nodded, and Jane said, “Anyway, it was so nice seeing you again, Mary Ann.”
Mary Ann mumbled something that sounded like she was apologizing. Jane’s a natural at spinning.
I rushed out through a different aisle and an empty checkout line so Jane wouldn’t see me running out ahead of her.
I climbed into the limo before she could see that I’d been inside the supermarket. When she got to the car I heard her say to Kevin, “We’re not using the end of it or else we’re canceling the interview tomorrow, and that’s final.” She got inside and slammed the door and said TV people were paparazzi with fancier job titles.
She was holding the tabloid Mary Ann gave her against her chest. My photo was splashed on the cover. Central real estate. “What are they saying?” I asked as the driver pulled out of the parking lot.
She turned it away from me before handing it to me. “You may as well see it.”
The cover was me getting into the car with Lisa as I stuck my tongue out at the camera. But it was a tabloid, which is much less valuable to your image than a glossy for gossip. The headline said GUY AND GIRL: JONNY VALENTINE AND LISA PINTO.
A few pages inside, there was a short article with a few more photos:
According to raven-haired songstress Lisa Pinto, 12, when Jonny Valentine, 11, asked her out last month, he did so by quoting a line from his hit single “Guys vs. Girls”: “Will you be my girl today?”
The two young lovebirds have become a serious item and were recently photographed canoodling outside an ice cream parlor in Denver, where JV passed through on his Valentine Days tour and Lisa was promoting her upcoming debut album, School’s Out!, before its Feb. 14 release.
“What I love most is hanging out with him away from the spotlight, when ‘The Jonny’ comes off and he’s simply Jonathan—that’s what I call him when it’s just the two of us,” says Lisa, referring not to her new boyfriend’s angelic halo of golden locks, but his public image. “He’s a normal kid who doesn’t take himself too seriously.”
Which means what, exactly?
“Jonathan’s a huge dork,” she says with a trilling laugh. “A total nerd. Yet so am I. And I love that about him.”
The feeling is mutual, according to a person close to the young “Breathtaking” songster. “Jonny’s completely obsessed with Lisa,” says the source. “I’ve never seen him like this with another girl.”
“I can’t believe they sold it to a tabloid without my consent,” Jane said. “ ‘I’ve never seen him like this with another girl’—Jesus. Not to mention this Jonathan garbage.”
I didn’t know why she was acting like it was a character assassination when it was all positive press. I closed my eyes to pretend I was trying to nap, but what I really was doing was imagining that Lisa replaced Jane in the limo, and there were paparazzi outside but the windows were too tinted for them to see into, and Lisa looked at me and said, “Door’s locked,” and we humped each other and I stuck my tongue inside her mouth. I turned on my side so Jane couldn’t see I was getting a boner. As I was picturing this, I kept wondering why she called me a dork and a nerd. She called herself one, too, I know, and female celebrities always do that so ugly girls don’t hate them, except they never admit to being what a dork actually is, which would be like saying to an interviewer, “Yeah, I’m a huge dork, I have bad social skills and no one likes me.” But you don’t need to call male celebrities one. I really shouldn’t have asked her on a date. The way she kept calling me Mr. Something would’ve annoyed me after a while. I bet if she ever met Mi$ter $mith, she’d call him Mr. Mi$ter $mith.
Jane tapped one heel hard on the floor a few times like she does when she’s pissed and took out her phone and made a call. “This is Jane Valentine calling for Olivia. Yes, I’ll leave her a voice mail,” she said. “Olivia, this is Jane. I saw the story about Jonny and Lisa, and I’m not happy that it was sold to a tabloid without my knowledge. If this is Stacy’s doing, please tell Ronald that I never signed on for it and this is not the way I want to run things in the future.”
I opened my eyes. She hung up and turned to me and shook her head. “You’re eleven years old,” she said, wiping some snot from my nose that had turned crusty from the cold air. “They forget that you’re eleven.”
“I’m almost twelve,” I said.
She pulled me close to her and hugged tight. She had on more of her Chanel No. 5 than usual that this movie actress told her she should wear after we moved to L.A. My boner was going down but it was still there, and I had to adjust my hips so it wasn’t uncomfortable.
“Not just yet,” she said.
CHAPTER 8
St. Louis (Second Day)
The morning after my concert, which was a straight A, me, Jane, and Walter hustled down to the Arch. I was worried the show had invited Michael to watch, but even if they’d been thinking about it at first, they’d have to be blind not to see how bad he played on camera.
They’d set up a circular outdoor stage underneath it, and the crowd was already surrounding it and hollering when the show’s security guys escorted me onstage. It was my usual audience, girls with their mothers or sometimes fathers, plus a few stragglers. When people see a crowd,
they always feel like they’re missing out if they’re not part of it. Kevin reminded me they’d air the video from yesterday, Robin would do the ten-minute interview, and then I’d sing three songs over a musical track. They estimated a 3.2 and twenty-two share, with a 1.1 in the twelve-to-seventeen demo, solid numbers for morning TV.
They showed the video on a small screen near us. It was all the regular stuff, video and photo clips of me with voiceovers talking about my career, spliced with shots of St. Louis and me walking around the school. I could be a TV director. It’s pure formula.
They cut to me and Michael meeting, and they edited it as B-roll so it didn’t seem awkward. We walked to the park like a weirdo pair, with him in his Champion sweats and me in my sponsored wardrobe. But they cut it so it seemed like we were having fun, and with “Kali Kool” in the background instead of a love song, it didn’t look too gay, even though it didn’t make any sense to play a song about partying on a beach in California over shots of an empty park in St. Louis in the middle of winter. If you didn’t know, you’d think we were still best friends. I let my eyes get blurry like when I’ve been playing video games for a long time, so I had a sense of what was happening on the screen but didn’t have to watch.
After I could tell they were done with me and Michael, they ran a few shots of our old apartment before the segment wound down. They’d cut the whole Schnucks thing.
I wasn’t nervous for something like this, because I’ve done plenty of live TV, but when they were counting down, it was the last thing I wanted to be doing. I wasn’t tired, so I didn’t want to be sleeping, and I didn’t want to be playing Zenon, either, or hanging out with anyone in particular. What I suddenly wanted was, I wanted to be back at our old apartment, and I wanted to tell Jane to buy it back. We could afford it easily, and we could decorate it the same exact way it looked back then. We wouldn’t stay there or anything, because it was still a crap apartment, but when we came back to St. Louis for shows we could just pop in and remember that it was still around.
But she’d say it was a wasteful expenditure and these kinds of purchases were what bankrupted musicians with stupid business instincts.
