Grace and the Fever

by Zan Romanoff

  Grace feels a thrill of spite and satisfaction as she closes out of all her apps, shoves her phone in her bag, and tosses the bag into the backseat of her car. Something is happening, and it’s happening to her. Just her.

  She turns the volume on the radio up. The music is so loud that it feels cleansing; it takes the anxiety that’s swirling through her and gives it an outlet, a way to be aggressive and powerful. Strong. She puts on her sunglasses against the glare and drives fast, California-rolling through stop signs, whipping across lanes on the freeway. The familiar physical rhythm of driving soothes her. By the time she eases her way onto the 405, she’s feeling almost entirely like herself again.

  The DJ’s voice comes in as the song that’s been playing fades out. “Next up we have a track from everyone’s favorites: the boys of Fever Dream. They’re in town for the next few weeks, and already causing controversy just by leaving their hotel rooms. Did everyone see those pictures of Jes and some girl hanging out in the Valley last night? I have to say, if I was a pop star, I wouldn’t head to Canoga Park, but they do say that fame changes you….”

  Great, they’re talking about the pictures on the radio now. So maybe the whole thing won’t exactly disappear without a trace. But one of the other boys is bound to leave the hotel soon, and do something else everyone cares about. Maybe management will want to distract them from Jes and the cheating rumors by letting Land and Solly go public, even?

  It’s an outrageous fantasy. It will never happen. But god, if it did? Everything would be worth it. Once Land and Solly are out and in public and in love, there won’t be any need for fandom. The things she’s been saying privately will be public knowledge at last, and maybe she’ll actually be able to walk away from the whole thing.

  The DJ’s voice cuts through her thoughts. “I’m actually just seeing a report—and this is from the band’s Facebook page, so it is official—that they are indeed going to be canceling the remaining stops on their tour. Bummer for Asia! But this isn’t coming out of nowhere; you might remember hearing that Jes—”

  Yeah, Grace remembers. She remembers Jes last night, sitting on the hood of his car. He seemed so normal. He seemed fine. They keep saying he’s too anxious to perform, that he’s sick, that he’s stressed, but he didn’t act like someone who was about to disappoint hundreds of thousands of fans, and cost his band, what, millions of dollars?

  He didn’t even seem surprised when the paparazzo showed up.

  The rational part of her brain wants to argue with her: of course he didn’t seem stressed. Maybe he had already made this decision and taken his out. He was sitting alone in the dark, talking to a girl who didn’t seem to know him, or care who he was. He’s used to being followed and photographed.

  But something about it niggles at her: Jes appearing, and the photographer appearing with him. The way he squared his shoulders and kept his hat on backward as he drove away, giving the man a clear shot at his unmistakable face.

  She knows their management has pulled stunts on the fans before. She knows. She doesn’t know what this one means yet, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t something.

  Grace coasts off the freeway and makes a left. She follows the line of Main Street as it winds along parallel to the ocean. She parks six or eight blocks away from the hotel and feeds the meter.

  Jes walked into her neighborhood last night, she tells herself.

  Now she’s just returning the favor.

  Of course there are girls outside the hotel. It’s like there’s an invisible barricade set up to keep them off of the actual grounds, but they’re gathered on the sidewalk across the street. The most intrepid among them have signs and sleeping bags and tents. Mothers and daughters are drinking smoothies and juices and coffees, sharing boxes of granola bars.

  Immediately, there’s something Grace didn’t take into account: these girls could potentially recognize her. If anyone could do it, it would be them. They’ve been sitting out here all morning—maybe since last night—with nothing but passing traffic and the internet to keep them entertained. They can probably draw what that paparazzo captured of her profile from memory: the faint constellations of freckles high on her cheekbones and the loose curl in her hair.

  She’s barely a block away when this occurs to her. There’s not much to do about it, since she already has her sunglasses on. Grace sweeps her hair into a ponytail and finds a tube of lipstick in the bottom of her bag. The ponytail is too casual for her sundress, and the lipstick is both too try-hard and too coral, but it’s better than getting herself into another mess when she doesn’t even really understand the first one yet.

  No one stops her as she walks behind the rows of patient girls and waits for the light. It’s stupid, but her heart is in her throat as she waits for it to change. She crosses the street. Nothing. Walks up the driveway to the hotel’s entrance. Nothing. Being alone helps, she thinks. The girls who do this usually come in twos or threes or groups, gaggles, with their friends or their moms or coolest aunts. Someone, anyway. Someone else.

  On the other hand, a lone girl on a mission is probably the real sign of trouble.

  The hotel lobby is done up in an array of sandy pinks and flecked with twinkling gold. Chairs are covered in pelts of tufted white fur; their curved arms and legs are left bare to gleam bone white. The animal shape makes everyone who sits in one look cartoonish or sinister, depending on the angle of the light. Grace has never been anywhere so stylish in her life.

  “Excuse me, miss.” Even the security guards wear careful, fitted black. “Are you a guest at the hotel?”

  “No,” Grace says. Well, shit. She’s always been an awkward liar. The lobby is full of little sounds—the click of keyboards and muted ring of phones at the reservation desk, people making small talk and laughing high, tinkling laughs. The women on the chairs next to her are drinking champagne. She latches on to that and says, “I’m meeting someone at the bar?”

  “I see.” The guard eyes her hasty ponytail skeptically. Grace is just eighteen, and she looks it, and they both know it. “And are you looking for the Cove, or the Skyscape?”

  “Skyscape,” Grace tells him authoritatively. That’s the trick to lying, right? To sound like you believe your own story?

  “I’m afraid we have a few VIPs staying with us today, so the elevator bank requires a room card to access. Are you meeting a guest of the hotel?”

  Grace nods wordlessly. Clearly, this was a bad plan. She just wants him to leave her alone so that she can slink out unnoticed. She’ll have to figure out some other way to see Jes again. “I’ll just, uh, call him,” she says. “So he can come get me.”

  “All right.” The guard smiles. Another guest walks through the front doors and pulls his attention. “Have a lovely afternoon.”

  Grace gets out her cell phone and pretends to thumb through her contacts. She even holds the phone up to her ear for good measure, trying to remember how many rings you get before a line goes to voicemail. If only she could just hang out in the lobby, maybe she’d hear something, or see something, or—

  The guard is back again. “No luck?” he asks.

  “Not answering.” Grace shrugs.

  “I’m so sorry to do this, but we will have to ask you to wait outside.”

  “Oh. Okay. Sure.” What would Katy do? She’s always seemed bolder than Grace—she’d just make a break for the elevators, probably. Cara would bat her eyelashes. Lianne would have had a strategy and a backup plan ready before she ever walked through the door.

  Grace just babbles. “I really can’t, like, sit here? He said twelve-forty-five, so I’m a little early; maybe he didn’t—”

  “We can have the desk call up to your friend’s room if you’d like,” the guard offers. “What’s the number?”

  “Grace!”

  She has never been so happy to hear her own name.

  “Hey, wow, Grace! It’s fine, Tony, I got this one.”

  Grace is so flustered that it takes a second for h
er to place the smiling young man clapping an arm onto the security guard’s shoulder, dismissing him easily. She hasn’t seen Max in a few years—she knows him through Lianne’s older brother, Gary, and they must be college juniors by now—but he looks mostly the same: tall, broad-shouldered, the kind of handsome you could probably be as a job. He kept his hair buzzed in high school, but now it’s grown out a few inches into the beginnings of a real ’fro, the kinks swirled into loose twists.

  “Thanks,” Grace says. “Also, wow! Hi.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  The lie she should have used in the first place pops up now, of course: “I’m on my way to the beach, and I wanted to stop and use the bathroom,” she says. “I just thought—you know how gross the public restrooms are—but, uh, I guess there are famous people staying here or something?”

  Max rolls his eyes. “They loooove doing this,” he says. “They make the biggest freaking deal out of every minor celeb who books a room, I guess so other people will think that if they come, they’re, like, staying where the stars stay? It’s some bullshit boy band, anyway. Fever Dream!” He does jazz hands.

  Grace tries to laugh, like, I know, right?

  “Wait a minute—weren’t you really into them? When you were in, like, ninth grade, when that first album came out? I think Gary and I drew dicks on some of Lianne’s posters when we were stoned once.” Max doesn’t look at all sorry when he says, “Sorry about that.”

  “It’s fine,” Grace says. “I mean, I was. I used to be a pretty big Fever fan.”

  This lie is a practiced one: she’s been hiding the extent of her fandom ever since Lianne took those pictures down. Grace told her, “I can bring you new ones,” and Lianne said she didn’t want them; she’d been thinking about taking them down anyway. Fourteen was too old to be obsessed with a boy band.

  Grace smiled and agreed. That was when she started lying to her friends about how she was spending her time; that was when fandom went from an occasional hobby to a necessary escape hatch. For a long while she thought it would be enough to just hide what she was into. Thinking about last night, though, and all the ones that led up to it, she has to admit that it didn’t make much difference after all. Her friends don’t know about Fever Dream, but they know her, and they don’t want to hang out with her. So it’s who she is that’s turning out to be the problem.

  Max missed out on most of that, though. To him, she’s just Gary’s little sister’s sidekick. Just another girl. “I’m working the Skyscape,” he tells her. “You should come see it. The views are sick. And there’s a bathroom you can use and everything.” He leans in conspiratorially. “I can’t serve you unless you have an ID, though,” he tells her. “A good one.”

  “Oh,” Grace says. “That’s fine. I…don’t.” Another mark against her with her friends: the fact that she doesn’t like drinking.

  Max doesn’t know that, either. He turns toward the elevators, still talking to her. “You’ll want one before college,” he says. Grace hurries to catch up to him. “You just graduated, right? Or are you going to be a senior?”

  “Just graduated,” Grace says. She is a grown-up, or she will be. She knows which direction she needs to point herself in to get back on track. It’s okay to indulge this last fangirl fantasy before she gets serious about figuring out how to deal with the rest of her life.

  —

  The view from the Skyscape is totally sick: they’re up on the roof of the hotel, and below them the ocean is navy and white, the beach crowded with striped umbrellas and lobster-pink tourists. The spread of the city to the east looks comfortingly small and neat and clean, with shining cars filling the width of Wilshire and the curve of the freeway. It looks like a toy beach and a toy city, like something anyone can pick up and play with.

  The pool is full and the bar is already crowded with girls in bright bikinis and enormous sunglasses, ordering cocktails Grace has never heard of. When she comes back from the bathroom, Max is chatting up three guests at once and slicing a lime without even looking at the knife in his hands. Grace slides onto one of the empty stools at the far end of the bar and waits for things to quiet down so she can say thanks again, and goodbye. It’s clear now how crazy she was to come here. She doesn’t even begin to belong.

  It takes another five minutes before Max can come over. “You want anything? Lemonade or whatever?”

  “Nah,” Grace says. “I should probably…the beach…” She has an extra suit and towel in the trunk of her car. It won’t be a totally wasted afternoon, anyway.

  “Oh yeah, right.”

  “Thanks for the rescue, though.”

  “Anytime,” Max says. “Hey, will I see you tonight?”

  “Um. No?”

  “Lianne didn’t invite you?”

  Oh, good, another party no one wants her at. Grace shakes her head and shrugs. She’s pretty sure she’s pulling off pretending she doesn’t care.

  “I’m subletting a place near here, and we’re having a little get-together tonight. Gary’s coming, and he said she might, too. But maybe—”

  “I haven’t checked my phone in, like, hours,” Grace says. “She probably texted me or something.”

  The worst part is that she understands why Lianne is leaving her out; truly, she does. Grace really doesn’t like drinking, which makes it hard to have fun at parties where the main activity is getting drunk.

  “If she’s coming, you should,” Max says. His easy confidence warms something in Grace. She’s definitely been a little hard to see this summer; she owes it to her friends to at least show them she’s trying to keep up.

  “Yeah,” Grace says. “Maybe.”

  “It’s good practice for college.”

  “Well, in that case.”

  Max turns his smile on her, and it’s dazzling. “It’ll be fun,” he says.

  She holds up her hands in surrender. “Okay. You got me. I’m in.”

  Max scans the deck, looking to see if anyone else needs help. Grace gathers herself and starts to stand.

  “Psst.” He leans across the bar. “On your way out. See that guy down at the far end: Indian, in the black shirt?”

  Grace recognizes him immediately: Raj has been working with the band for a few years now. He doesn’t have Twitter, but he Instagrams from the road pretty regularly, often something abstract, a good color or shape, the landscape blurred by the motion of a plane or bus. He pops up in the boys’ feeds, too, usually looking harried and holding a clipboard. She doesn’t envy the people tasked with keeping them in line.

  “That dude works for Fever Dream. He’s, like, an assistant, or something? I met him last night and he seemed pretty cool. So maybe you can catch some Dream-y drink orders on your way out.”

  “Every girl’s fantasy,” Grace says. She hates herself for being curious.

  “One of them isn’t allowed to drink, actually,” Max says. “They showed us a picture and everything, like, Do not serve!”

  Grace leans back across the bar. “Which one?” she asks. Maybe this is what’s going on with Jes. There have been rumors, but there are always rumors about all of the boys. She’s always discounted them.

  “God, I honestly don’t remember.” Max makes a face. “Dude, I could really get in trouble. What are their names again?”

  “Uhhh.” Grace tries to pretend she doesn’t know. “Jes,” because that’s easy, everyone knows Jes, “Land, and, um, Solly, and, Kendrick, I think?”

  “You are such a superfan.”

  “Am not!”

  “Are too!”

  Max sticks his tongue out at her. It’s nice to watch that untouchably handsome face of his dissolve into something familiarly, goofily childish. Grace can’t help laughing.

  “I’ll find out and tell you at the party tonight,” Max says. “How’s that?”

  “Fine,” Grace says. “Sure, okay.” She hitches her bag higher on her shoulder and slips her sunglasses on again. “I’m holding you to that.”


  “Excellent,” Max says. A girl in a one-piece made mostly of strings has sidled up next to Grace, who watches his focus slide inexorably in her direction. “You look thirsty,” he says.

  Grace tries to linger when she walks by Raj, but he’s done ordering, and absorbed in his phone. It’s probably a good thing, really—other than the girls, he’s the person most likely to be able to identify her, and if Jes really is in trouble, they won’t want her around to cause any more of it.

  Lianne texts Grace and Cara late that afternoon.

  I was going to invite you guys to this party Max Hooks is throwing by the beach tonight

  Remember him???

  And then he texted Gary to say he already told Grace we’d give her a ride there

  So apparently she’s in

  Wanna come too, Cara?

  Grace sends back,

  haha whoooopssssss you don’t have to

  Lianne says,

  I didn’t know you guys were bros like that

  Yeah that’s cause we’re not

  I ran into him by accident at his work today

  Is he still insanely beautiful?

  Oh my god yes

  You’re an animal, Gracie

  Well if you want to come we’re leaving around 9 probably

  G says we can pick you up

  A few minutes later Cara chimes in to say she’s busy, but they should have fun without her, and then follows with a bunch of kiss-face emojis and clinking mugs of beer.

  No one mentions last night or this morning, and Grace doesn’t know what that means. They’ve been friends since elementary school, so it’s not like there’s never been tension between them before; there was a whole month in the sixth grade when Cara got her first boyfriend and Grace and Lianne basically stopped speaking to her, and then when Lianne got put on honors track in ninth grade, Grace and Cara, trying to compensate for feeling like they weren’t smart enough for her, teased her until she couldn’t take it anymore, and they all got into a screaming fight that took weeks to resolve. But Grace has never been the source of one of their conflicts before—if that’s even what’s going on now, she thinks.