Grace and the Fever

by Zan Romanoff

  “It is small.”

  “You grew up here?”

  “Down the block. I’m leaving for college in the fall, though.”

  “Getting the hell out of Dodge.”

  “Yep.” Grace doesn’t want to press him, but she’s curious whether he’ll tell her if she asks the right questions: who he is and what he does. He’s surprisingly easy to talk to. Or maybe it shouldn’t be surprising. It’s his job to talk to strangers, to girls. “You?”

  “Nah,” Jes says. “My job involves a lot of traveling. So the shine has kind of worn off for me, you know?”

  Grace doesn’t.

  “It’s so dumb, but it’s really true, you know: wherever you go, there you are.”

  Jes is only a few years older than she is. He turned twenty-one in February at a party at a club in New York. Grace spent the whole next day clicking through the pictures as they filtered onto the internet: paparazzi shots of everyone coming and going, underlit cell phone photos taken inside, snaps of the photo booth strips uploaded to Instagram. She lingered longest on professional shots of Jes’s girlfriend, a model named Rowena, holding out a cake with gilded frosting and sugared roses, and blowing him a kiss before he blew out the candles.

  She knows there’s more to it than that, but still. It’s hard to imagine that he could be tired of his life. That anyone could.

  “I’m excited to go be me somewhere else for a little while,” she says at last.

  “Enjoy it,” Jes says.

  He stubs his cigarette out on the car hood. Grace’s has burned itself almost to the filter while she’s been ignoring it, and she does the same.

  Another car slides up the block.

  “Shit,” Jes says. He flinches instinctively away from the headlights and the noise of the engine, but there’s nowhere for him to hide. He sits up again.

  The car pulls to a stop in the center of the cul-de-sac. The person driving throws it into park and leaves it idling as he steps out, something large and black clutched tightly in one hand. He raises it to his eye and aims. Grace registers that it’s a camera a second before the first flash goes off. She turns away just fast enough to keep from being blinded by it.

  “I’m sorry,” Jes says. “You should really go.”

  Graze is frozen to the spot. Who found him here? How could they possibly have known? Did they follow him? Did they wait, purposely, until he was comfortable, maybe until she appeared, until they knew exactly what scene they were going to capture?

  “Seriously,” he says. He reaches out and touches her arm. “It’s about me. He won’t follow you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Grace says. She doesn’t know what she means by it.

  Jes shrugs and gives her a little shove. “Sorry about whatever happens tomorrow,” he says.

  “What—”

  “You’ll see.”

  He slides off the hood and onto his feet. The photographer doesn’t approach him, and he doesn’t approach the man. They don’t acknowledge each other at all except for the click of the camera and its intermittent flash.

  In a series of moments that unfold in blinking white light, Jes gets in the car. He turns the key in the ignition and sets his jaw.

  The noise of the engine turning over seems to stir the photographer from his single-minded focus. “Hey,” he calls to Grace. “He’s not taking you with him?”

  Grace feels tremors running up through her limbs. She’s still frozen, but adrenaline is starting to shake through her. She’s back on the starter’s block, trying to will her muscles to move. She can feel that she’s about to—soon, soon, almost, she can almost—

  “Who are you?” the photographer asks.

  Jes puts the car in drive and lets it drift forward. He aims for the mouth of the cul-de-sac, a little closer to the photographer than he really needs to. The man jumps out of the way, even though Jes is only driving five miles an hour.

  It gives Grace the window she needs. She takes off at last, grateful for the quiet of her shoes on the pavement now, and for the years she spent doing cross-country, learning how to run and run and run.

  The gate to the Jamesons’ pool is easy to unlatch from the outside if you know how to tug right, so she undoes it and ducks into their backyard. She waits there, her breath still shaky with nerves as the photographer turns and sees that he’s lost her. He looks up and down the street, and after Jes’s taillights. He makes a calculation and comes to a decision. He’s back in his car and disappearing down the block before Grace can catch her breath.

  The night is so huge, so dark, so empty, so unquiet. The wind is whispering now, not the leaves, not the grass, just the air saying something soft and wicked, speaking like music in her ears and against her skin.

  She doesn’t even have to go looking for the pictures in the morning. By the time she wakes up, Katy has already chatted her like fifteen times:

  YO GIRL GET UP

  GET UP GET UP GETUP

  JES WAS LIKE MIDNIGHT STROLLING AROUND LA LAST NITE

  W SOME

  MYSTERY GIRL

  WAT DOES ROWENA THINK

  WHERE WAS ROWENA

  WHERE WAS ALEKS, PROTECTOR OF THE SMALL???

  Grace didn’t even have time to wonder about that while it was happening: how Jes slipped out without one of Fever Dream’s bodyguards noticing and tailing him, when some paparazzi could, and did. Katy’s messages keep coming:

  WHAT IS GOING ON IN UR CITY??????

  C’MON BIYATCH WAKE UP WE GOTTA TALK ABOUT THIS LIKE DON’T BE SLEEPING COME ON

  GIGI YR KILLING ME HERE

  Grace picked Gigi as an alias the day she discovered Fever Dream blogs on Tumblr. She was fourteen, and hated the good-girl Christian thing of her given name. She thought Gigi sounded cuter and sexier, like who she wanted to be: someone pretty and cool and fun. It worked, or at least it worked enough that no one’s ever questioned her about it. At this point she’s pretty sure everyone she knows through Fever fandom assumes it’s her given name. She has an email account attached to it as well as her Tumblr and Twitter.

  Gigi is the smoke screen that lets her pretend that no one could connect her online identity to her real-life one as Grace Thomas: recent high school graduate, middling athlete, and extremely boring person. It’s her only good secret, and she’s kept it for years.

  Wait, what’s going on? she types back into the chatbox, like she doesn’t already know.

  Katy just sends her a link.

  The pictures look real, somehow, in a way she wasn’t expecting them to: just like any other paparazzi shots, their bodies caught in high relief by the impossible brightness of the flash.

  The lead photo on the story is Jes touching her shoulder, telling her to go. She’s turned toward him, away from the camera, so that all you can see is her face caught in profile, mostly obscured by the tangle of her dirty-blond hair. Below that is the anonymous rumple of her clothes, her soft gray shirt and little black running shorts. Her tan is washed out by the light. They both look tense and pale. The edge of the picture holds them in the frame together. They don’t look like strangers at all.

  There have been reports of trouble in paradise lately, and it doesn’t look like sailing is getting any smoother for boy-band heartthrob Jes Holloway, 21, anytime soon. The Fever Dream–boat landed in Los Angeles yesterday morning after the band canceled the Shanghai stop on their Let’s Go tour, in support of their fourth studio album, Stay Up. Holloway arrived on a separate flight from his bandmates, who touched down at LAX later that night.

  There are a few photographs of the rest of them at the airport: Solly and Land and Kendrick in designer sweatpants and sunglasses, enormous headphones looped around each of their necks. Solly is carrying Land’s pillow. Grace smiles at the pair of them, distracted, before her eyes skim down the page and she remembers what she’s reading.

  Rumors about the boys’ out-of-control partying and interband tensions have dogged the quartet lately, and despite denials from their team, it seems t
hat where there’s smoke…well, mostly there’s Jes. He’s the one who’s literally flying solo these days, and he was behind the Shanghai cancellation: the band released a statement through their representatives that the “Where We Belong” singer was too stressed to perform, and they wouldn’t take the stage as a threesome. “We aren’t Fever Dream without Jes,” Solly tweeted as part of an apology for the cancellation. (Awww!)

  Grace knows the party line by heart: the band is in LA to let Jes—and all of them—take a break before they pick up the tour again in Tokyo later this month. Of course, in this case, taking a break means they’ll still be recording, because their next album is coming out in time for Christmas.

  When she turns back to the article, Rowena’s name almost jumps off the screen.

  If that wasn’t enough, Jes’s longtime love, model Rowena Avery, was spotted partying in New York with her ex-fiancé, DJ Zippo, a few nights ago. Apparently, Jes decided to give her a taste of her own medicine: he’s pictured here with a mystery blonde. Sources say…

  The words seem to melt in front of her. Grace keeps scrolling and lets the pictures do the talking. There are a few distant shots that must have been taken from over the hedge, of the two of them chatting, their cigarette ends burning cherry red against the black. Her face is all shadow and blur, impossible to identify. The caption is suggestive: Intimate, late-night, getting very cozy.

  The photographer probably decided that long-lensing wasn’t enough, because then it shifts to the close-ups, flash-lit: the pictures she saw before. She can’t tell whether or not you can make out that it’s her in them if you didn’t already know. She can barely recognize the girl in front of her, who looks, somehow, like she belongs where she’s found herself. Seeing them, Grace feels a familiar flash of jealousy, and then how absurd it is, to be jealous of herself.

  She is, kind of, though.

  Grace closes the tab.

  Katy’s last chat just reads, ?????​?????​?????​?????​?????​?????​???

  I don’t know, Grace says.

  She really doesn’t. She has no idea what to say to Katy or herself. Would Katy even believe her if she confessed the truth? They’ve spent so many hours chatting like this, and Grace has seen Katy’s face on her Tumblr a zillion times, but Grace has never posted a selfie or suggested they go on Skype. Not showing her face felt like calling herself Gigi, a little thin thing she could use to pretend she wasn’t really doing what she was doing.

  You HAVE to go to Santa Monica now, Katy says. Just go hang out in the lobby. Talk to a bellboy. Whatever. Just. Go. Go!!!!

  Grace weighs her options. The beachside hotel the boys are staying at is probably on high security alert, and nothing will be more suspicious than a teenage girl trying to hang out there by herself. It’s not like Jes will be wandering through the lobby unattended.

  On the other hand, she has a trump card: he thought she really didn’t know who he was last night. If a girl met a random boy and her picture ended up all over the internet the next morning, wouldn’t she go looking for him? Maybe someone on their security detail will recognize her, and let her talk to him again. If not, she can go to the beach and swim, at least.

  Okay.

  Katy immediately sends back, That’s my girl!!!

  Grace rolls herself out of bed. Her face in the mirror looks alien, almost like Jes looked last night: a blurry photocopy of something she recognizes but barely recognizes. She brushes her teeth and washes her face. She’s still wearing the same clothes, the shorts and shirt girls across the world are analyzing for clues right now. She wishes she could tell them that it’s just what she had on when it happened.

  Her computer dings with more incoming messages.

  I mean I think we both know the REAL question is whether this is going to make it harder for Land & Solly to come out

  If Jes is causing trouble it’s gonna make management clamp down even harder

  Those idiots

  Ughhhh I hate them

  I feel like we were so close

  Grace reopens the tab with the pictures and scrolls to the ones of Land and Solly leaving the airport. Land is wearing the red string bracelet they all keep tied around their left wrists, and above it rises the tangle of his tattoos: stars and mermaids and swords caught in a bramble of rosebushes. Sharp things twist around his forearm, climbing toward the elbow and shoulder.

  Solly is standing next to him so that his own ink matches up, the way it’s supposed to: a hand reaching down across his bicep, one finger pricked and bleeding. He’s carrying Land’s pillow. They’re so, so sweet together. She can’t bear the idea that her late-night meeting might have messed things up for them.

  She clicks over to her Tumblr dashboard, but there’s nothing about that, yet—just her, her, and more her. There are two camps so far: One is girls wondering WHO IS SHE and HOW DARE SHE, and putting up pictures of her in her sleep shorts next to an Instagram of Rowena that Jes posted six months ago, captioned she always wakes up like this, tagging it #JES #HONESTLY #DO #U #HAVE #EYES?????

  Then there are her defenders, who are almost worse:

  dudes the truth is WE DON’T KNOW who this girl is. She could be anyone! Jes grew up in the neighborhood. He was probably visiting an old friend. THEY ARE NOT EVEN TOUCHING in these pix. Media always wants to make it out that Jes is some kind of hyper-slut every time he talks to a girl but honestly we should know better by now. We have to trust our boys.

  Grace closes the tab. She types to Katy,

  I hope not

  Gotta run but I’ll check in later w any news

  Katy writes back instantly. Don’t wait! Tweet that shit!

  K, Grace says.

  —

  She goes downstairs to make herself breakfast in the empty kitchen. Her mother left for work a few hours ago; her coffee mug in the sink is the only sign that Grace doesn’t live here alone. She’s used to it, mostly—her dad moved out when she was little and has been living in San Diego since the summer before seventh grade, so it’s been the two of them for a while now, and her mom has always worked long hours.

  Plus, it’s not like she would admit to what happened last night even if her mom was here. They just don’t talk about stuff like this, really: boys, bands, feelings.

  The thing is, though, she doesn’t want to tell anyone. Only she and Jes actually know what happened on that street last night. After so many years of keeping secrets about him, she has one with him. She isn’t ready to let go of that yet. The keeping is too delicious, still.

  But it’s also burning under her skin.

  Grace turns to the empty kitchen. “I met Jes Holloway last night. It was, um. It was pretty cool,” she says.

  Grace makes herself toast and coffee. She sits at the kitchen table. Her mother left her the paper, so she reads the comics while she eats. “Jes Holloway,” she says again to the kitchen. It doesn’t say anything back, of course.

  “Jes,” she says, and smiles.

  Her phone keeps chattering with updates and alerts, but they have nothing to do with last night: they’re mostly just Twitter mentions and Tumblr notes still coming in from old posts. Yesterday she put up a picture of a doodle Katy drew her—Solly as a mermaid and Land the confused fisherman who’s got him on the hook—and, like everything Katy does, it’s been kind of blowing up. So Grace almost misses the notification from Snapchat that she has a new message: it’s from Cara, and it starts with a video taken from very close up of Lianne’s sleeping face.

  Offscreen, Cara whispers, “Grace. Look at this beautiful little angel. Do you want to help me ruin her day?” Then the perspective switches to show Cara sitting in her kitchen, looking tired in a way Grace recognizes: that morning-after messiness, the face she wears before she’s woken up enough to put her public one on. Not crumpled, just softer. One of her hands is wrapped tightly around a very full mug of coffee.

  “She made me drive to this thing last night,” Cara says to the phone’s camera. “So now she’s mise
rable and hungover and I’m tired and bored, and I’m betting you’re not hungover, so I thought it might be fun to gang up on her a little bit.” White text that reads call me let’s make a plan hovers over the video while she talks.

  Grace finds herself shaking her head at no one, like her empty house is going to sympathize with her. The hurt she felt when she found out her friends had gone out without her last night was specific and acute, a hot, clean stab of certainty: they had finally realized she wasn’t cool enough to take out anymore. But she’s been expecting it for a while now, and along with the pain there was a small, bizarre sense of relief. At least the wait was over.

  She’s been half-expecting this ever since the morning of Grad Night, 4:30 a.m., when, stumbling off the bus half-blind with exhaustion, Lianne turned to Cara and said, “I feel drunk.”

  “I feel drunk but not even in a fun way,” Cara said.

  “There’s a fun way?” Grace joked. Or she thought she was joking. She thought it was an okay thing to say.

  “Of course there is, Misery-face,” Lianne said, and then clamped her mouth shut like she had just let something slip.

  “Misery-face?”

  “You know,” Cara said, trying to pretend it wasn’t awkward. “The face you make at parties. Your misery face.”

  “I’m not miserable,” Grace said. “I’m—” but she was miserable, and now she was humiliated that they had noticed, and talked about it, and not told her. “Not good at being drunk, apparently, ha ha.”

  Cara will be able to see that Grace has seen her message; she’ll be able to count the minutes between when it gets read and when she gets a response. Usually that kind of thing makes Grace feel vaguely guilty.

  This morning, though, with the go of Jes’s presence still ringing through her, she’s too impatient for any of that. She’s been waiting, and she’s done with it. So what if her friends are going to parties and living cool, normal lives? At least her weird secret hobby has given her something interesting to do in the meantime.