Grace and the Fever

by Zan Romanoff

  I’m just saying. You guys. It’s coming. They know we’ve added it up. And soon they’re going to go ahead and tell us so.

  With nothing to do all day—no job, no friends, no Jes—Grace starts running again. She spent most of June enjoying her freedom from the cross-country team’s endless loop of pre- and postseason training. Now, though, running feels like a gift she can give herself: an easy way to kill an hour or two, thinking about nothing. She takes all the Fever Dream songs off of her mixes, and lets the beat of whatever unfamiliar tune is playing in her headphones dictate the rhythm of her legs, the pace of her breath, the pulse of her heart.

  She’s coming back from a loop around Blue Bell Park’s perimeter, a handful of miles that she should have started earlier, before it got this hot, when she sees Cara and Lianne standing on her front porch.

  For one too-brief, instinctual second, Grace thinks, Oh, thank god. Her friends are here, just showing up like they always do, like her house is their house; they’re here and everything is fine and she has someone to talk to at last. This is what she’s been hoping for: that they’ll all ignore whatever has actually changed between them, and keep on like they always have.

  The fantasy of relief crumbles almost as soon as it’s formed. What the hell am I going to say to them? Grace wonders. It’s been only a few days since the party at Holy Communion, but their silence since has felt deafening.

  At first Grace tried to make excuses—Cara’s been busy planning her upcoming birthday party, Lianne was getting over jet lag from her trip to Korea. But they sounded thin, even to her. Because whatever awkwardness was going on with them before Jes—the parties, and the way they politely pretended they weren’t not-inviting her to them—this is, like, orders of magnitude bigger. And this time it was Grace who chose to keep them out.

  Grace smooths her hair down self-consciously as she crosses the lawn to meet her friends. She tries to keep her face neutral.

  “Hey,” she says. “What’s up?”

  Cara hefts the grocery bag she’s carrying higher in her arms. “We heard you were super grounded,” she says. “We thought we should turn the Thomas house into Camp Grace for an afternoon.”

  Lianne won’t look at Grace, but she picks up the thread of Cara’s joke. “Plus, Cara needed to get out of her house before she turned into an alien,” she says.

  “Ilana?” Grace asks. Cara’s stepmom teaches Pilates and yoga out of their garage, and her clients are somehow always in Cara’s kitchen, drinking flax tea or something, talking about their digestive systems as if their gut bacteria hold the secrets of the universe.

  “Always,” Cara says. “The good news is that she’s been working me out a little bit. Do I look buff?”

  She flexes one skinny arm to make a muscle.

  “Like I said,” Lianne says. “An alien.”

  “Well,” Grace says. “You guys should come in.”

  She unlocks the front door and Cara walks through it, heading straight for the kitchen. Grace and Lianne trail uncertainly behind. Grace gets the feeling that none of them are totally sure what they’re doing here, or what’s about to happen.

  She thinks she finds that comforting.

  In the kitchen, Cara empties the contents of her grocery bag onto the counter and starts looking around for plates for the three of them. Grace watches her helplessly. Cara’s easy to watch that way: she’s just very pretty, is the thing. She’s definitely the prettiest of the three of them, so much prettier than Grace and Lianne that there’s no dancing around it. They all just treat it like an acknowledged fact. They’ve been friends long enough to have settled into certain roles with one another: Grace is the most athletic, Lianne is the smartest, and Cara is the prettiest.

  Today she’s wearing a pair of thrift-store sunglasses with mirrored pink lenses and a white shift dress, her long dark hair caught up in a bun that sits jauntily at the top of her sleek head. Looking at her, Grace can feel something old and worn inside of her cracking with new strain. Why can’t she just be Cara, who’s so effortlessly lovely, and loved?

  “Well, obviously I did work out this morning,” Grace says when she realizes how long the silence has gone on. “But that’s always kind of been my, um. I’ve always been that kind of alien. Sorry I’m so sweaty, by the way. I should probably go change, at least.”

  “Just go put on your bathing suit,” Cara says. “I was thinking we would swim after we ate.”

  “I see. You came over to use me for my pool,” Grace says.

  “Um,” Cara says. “Duh.”

  —

  Her friends brought over probably half of the Ralphs deli case: chicken fingers and French fries and pasta salad and greasy bacon-soaked Brussels sprouts, plus a fruit salad that’s stewing in an upsettingly viscous layer of pink water. It looks sort of surreal all piled on a plate together, and under normal circumstances, Grace would be laughing about this, teasing Cara and Lianne for their inability to make simple decisions, their maximalist approach to casual hangouts and lunch and life.

  Instead, she takes her overloaded plate into the dining room with them and listens to Cara’s careful, cheerful stream of chatter about how summer’s been going. Grace is certain that the second she opens her own mouth, she’s going to ruin everything.

  Inevitably, though, Lianne gets tired of listening to Cara stall.

  “For the record,” she says into some lull, “Car and I weren’t the ones who, like, told the paparazzi who you were.”

  “I mean, I figured,” Grace says. “Doesn’t seem like your style.”

  “We talked about it,” Cara tells her. “Our faces are in those pictures, too, you know. Technically. And, um, my dress, also. Which did look amazing on you, obviously. So we would have been within our rights to claim our fifteen minutes.”

  “Except that we didn’t want them,” Lianne says. “My mom basically tried to ground me, even after I explained that a picture of me on a phone case at a party is not the same thing as me being actually at a party.”

  “I’m sorry,” Grace says. “I didn’t— I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Yeah, well, I talked her out of it.” All of the air seems to have been sucked from the room. Even Lianne sounds too quiet when she asks, “So how are you and your mom? You guys okay?”

  “What do you think?”

  The silence at the table turns prickly. Grace watches Lianne forking deliberately at a limp piece of penne and feels her anger for what it is: reflexive, and defensive. At least they came to ask about it. They didn’t have to.

  “I screwed up,” she says. “I know it. Okay?”

  “What was your mom more pissed about?” Cara asks. “The sneaking out, or the lying?”

  “I don’t know,” Grace says. “We’re not really talking.” She takes a deep breath. “Which one are you guys more pissed about?”

  Cara and Lianne exchange a look.

  “The lying,” Lianne says. “Aren’t you going to eat anything, Grace? We didn’t know what you’d want, so we tried to bring you everything.”

  —

  It’s just kind of impossible to explain to them. Not the story itself—that’s easy to tell, though Grace gets the sense that they don’t quite believe her, and she can’t really blame them. It sounds unbelievable, first of all. And the only thing they know for sure is that she’s been lying through her teeth since it started happening.

  Plus, she’s still not telling the whole truth. She leaves out the part about Gigi and fandom.

  “Okay” is all Lianne says when she’s done.

  Cara didn’t want to get anything on her dress, so she stripped it off to eat in her bikini. She’s picking all of the watermelon out of her fruit salad with the kind of concentration that suggests she’s mostly using it as a way to avoid having to say anything to either of them.

  Grace says, “I honestly never thought it was going to end up being a big deal.”

  “You mean, the part where you met a dude you were obsessed with when we wer
e, like, fourteen?”

  Grace has always wondered what Cara and Lianne suspect about her double life with Fever Dream. This is why she never wanted to tell them: so she’d never have to hear what they thought.

  “You’ve met famous people before,” Grace counters.

  “Yeah,” Lianne says. “And I always tell you about it right after, because it’s, like, that’s the whole story. I saw Kristen Stewart buying a Vitaminwater! I saw a Kardashian in my spin class! Not, like, I had a random encounter with a pop star, and then became an anonymous overnight media sensation, and went to a party with him as…I’m not sure I understand that part, actually, were you supposed to be his girlfriend? Is he supposed to be cheating on his girlfriend?”

  “That’s the part I don’t understand, either,” Grace says. “What the hell I was there for.”

  If Cara and Lianne knew Jes—if this was some high school drama that they’d been in on from the beginning—they’d already have a working theory about what he was up to. Usually they seem to have an instinctive understanding of what the game is and how to play it that’s always escaped Grace; she’s glad to see that, at least in this case, they’re as baffled as she is.

  Cara pops a piece of watermelon into her mouth and spits the seeds onto her plate, each of them plinking delicately against the rim. “I lied to you guys about Bobby when we first started dating,” she says. “Remember that?”

  “I will never forget that you dated Bobby, trust me,” Lianne says.

  “No,” Grace says. “She means—”

  “I know what she means,” Lianne says. And then, “Wait. Oh.”

  “What?”

  “What she means is, you have, like, an actual crush on this guy.”

  “Everyone has a crush on Jes,” Grace says automatically. “Remember when the Nights We Spent video came out, and you were, like—”

  “First of all, the fact that you remember what I said about this dude however many years ago is so telling,” Lianne says. Grace tries to cover her mistake, but Lianne is already continuing, “And, no, but, you have a crush on him, like, as a person. And he took you on a date! Oh my god, Grace, is your first boyfriend going to be a superfamous boy-band dude?”

  “Typical,” Cara says. “This is why you’re supposed to hold out. Of course Grace is going to end up with the most exciting boyfriend of all time.”

  “You think he’s—” Grace starts, but she doesn’t even know how to ask the question. You don’t think he’s super fucking lame? Or, You don’t think I’m super fucking lame for caring who he is in the first place?

  She tries again. “We’re not—” she says, but it’s useless.

  “Sure you’re not,” Lianne says, and somehow it’s clear that she means, you’re not dating Jes. “But you are,” she says, like you are falling for him, and for a second it does feel normal, it feels like her friends are just teasing her about some normal boy, like she’s some normal girl, like she’s doing what she’s supposed to, for once in her life.

  “You are,” Lianne says again, satisfied with her diagnosis.

  Grace takes a bite of her watermelon so she can spit seeds at her friends instead of acknowledging that, before it all went to hell, she really, totally was.

  There is someone who could definitely offer more insight into what’s going on with Jes and Fever Dream if she knew the whole story—if she even knew half of it, Grace thinks. But she’s not sure how she feels about getting in touch with Katy again after what happened. What Katy did.

  She keeps expecting Katy to decide for her, to wake up one morning and think that enough time has passed and chat her like everything’s normal, but days pass in silence. Grudgingly, Grace admits it’s probably up to her to make the first move. Even if she doesn’t tell Katy the whole, true story, she’s bound to have some theories Grace hasn’t thought of on her own.

  Plus, Grace is so sick of the inside of her own head that she’ll take almost any escape she can find.

  When she reaches out, Katy makes it easy. She’s so good at that. I’m just going to say I’m sorry one more time, she says, and then sends a blinking, glittering GIF of the words that stretches and rotates while Grace watches.

  Then: Now pleaseeee can we talk about what is going ON, because it is EVERYTHING. Everything at once!!!! I feel like I don’t even know what’s real anymore!!!!

  I don’t know either

  You don’t?

  I’m not suddenly BFFs with the band or anything. I was just at a party.

  Sorry not trying to pry!!!!

  I’m just worried about them. I wish they would like, tweet more.

  Even just dumb stuff

  So we knew things were okay

  That they were there, behind whatever gross nonsense R&H is making them do

  Grace doesn’t say, But what if they aren’t okay? She feels like she’s just touched the edges of something happening in Fever Dream, something curdled and sick, rot that’s crept in at the roots. She’s spent years thinking about one big secret they were keeping, seeing its outline and its shimmer; now that she’s closer, she’s starting to think about how keeping a secret that big for that long would affect you and everyone around you. The surface is all sheen, but what’s shining is actually a thick glass that warps things, looking in and looking out.

  Trying to sidestep the truth with Katy ends up being incredibly frustrating. Grace is used to the idea that her life is compartmentalized: real-life friends hear about real-life things, and Katy hears about fandom. But somehow, without her quite noticing, Katy’s become her go-to confidant for both. It’s just that her real life was never a secret, so there was no reason to keep it from Katy. But there was every reason to keep fandom from her friends. And what’s going on now is something else entirely, a queasy mix of both of the worlds she’s been living in for so long now.

  She wants to confess and has no idea where she would even begin.

  Katy says, can I ask about the night you took the pictures?

  I know you were just at the party but was there anything else? Anything?

  Also HOW did you end up there????

  Oh yeahhhh so like I said then, it was this dude

  It was a weird night

  I don’t know, man. About him or anything.

  A little zing of inspiration comes to her. The ease of the lie almost erases the fact that now, officially, she is lying all the time, on purpose, to everyone.

  He’s my friend’s older brother’s friend

  He’s a bartender at that bar, so

  Like, no one famous wanted anything to do with me haha trustttt me

  And I’m not sure what he’s doing with me, either

  Katy doesn’t seem suspicious about the collision of Grace and Gigi—and why would she be, when all she knows about Gigi is that she lives in a boring suburb of Los Angeles, that she’s too shy to even Skype? But adding on details makes her feel better, like Katy will be too distracted by them to start to wonder what if.

  It also occurs to her that Katy might also be feeling too crappy about her betrayal to feel comfortable questioning Gigi about anything right now.

  Dudes tho :(((((((

  Hah yea right?

  No but it’s not even…I don’t know, it’s so dumb and complicated

  Do you like him?

  I thought I did

  I think I do?

  I think he might have brought me to this thing to settle a score with someone, or something

  “Or something”?

  Do you need to me fly to LA and bust some kneecaps?

  ’Cause I’m probably not the girl for that but I am great at yelling

  “It’s complicated”

  LOL sorry that’s such a copout answer

  Ummmmm basically he told me he just wanted me to come to this party, and then it started to seem like there were maybe ulterior motives.

  And we haven’t talked since

  So I just honestly don’t know whether he’s busy and not thinking about me<
br />
  Or if he’s avoiding me ’cause he knows I know

  Geeg, maybe I’m stating the totally freaking obvious here but: why don’t you just ask him?

  Grace chews at her lower lip and watches the faint outlines of her face reflected, moving, in the computer’s screen. Why doesn’t she just ask him?

  I don’t want to feel stupider than I already do.

  But if he’s using you, he’s the asshole, you know?

  God, there’s nothing I hate more than the way girls punish themselves for daring to BELIEVE SOMEONE

  HOW COULD YOU BE TRUSTING? HONESTLY HOW DARE YOU

  I mean you don’t have to do anything! Obviously!

  But if he lied to you, he’s the dick

  It’s not your fault

  Grace’s mantra from the morning after, only this time it seems less defensive and more reasonable. The whole point of lying to someone is to get them to act like a gullible fool. It’s not her fault she wasn’t on her guard enough to recognize that Jes was luring her into something more complicated than he originally let on.

  Grace sends, thanks. I really needed this.

  Katy sends, You know I got you, girl.

  For the first time, Grace understands exactly how important that is to her.

  On Monday, Grace swims until she’s pickled and pruned. She sits in the house in her bathing suit, listening to the AC click and whir, feeling the cold air dry the chlorine tight against her skin. It’s such a summer feeling. The days are long enough for anything to happen. She’s spent years waiting for something to come and find her, and it has. She’s on the verge of losing her high school friends and her high school self.

  What is she going to replace them with?

  She texts Jes, hey.

  He replies almost immediately, surprising her: Hey.

  Sorry, been hectic.

  I wanted to talk to you about that night.

  Yeah. Me too. Can we meet up somewhere tomorrow?

  I’m grounded. No car.

  I can come to you?

  So Grace sends Jes her mother’s address.