Grace and the Fever

by Zan Romanoff

  —

  As surreal as she had imagined it might be, actually having Jes at the house is even stranger. Aleks is along for the ride; Grace flutters around getting him water and settling him in the living room so that she won’t have to watch Jes moving uneasily through the unfamiliar space. He looks smaller here, somehow, like he’s trying not to let the edges of himself and his life brush up against the normalcy of hers.

  “Where do you want to do this?” he asks, when even Grace can’t keep pretending that Aleks might need something else from her.

  “Um? Wherever?”

  “Is there a backyard?” Jes doesn’t quite gesture toward Aleks, who’s looking very involved with his phone.

  “Yeah,” Grace says.

  They end up sitting on the edge of the back porch with their feet in the grass. It’s almost too hot to breathe.

  Jes waits for her to break the silence.

  There are too many questions to sort through, so Grace blurts out the first thing on her mind. “Does he come everywhere with you?”

  “Pretty much. Sometimes, when things are quiet, I sneak out a little bit—you might remember, ha-ha—but with the way things are right now…”

  Jes lets the end of the sentence drift off. He’s trying to make it all sound like a joke, but his body is giving him away. He has a breakout on his forehead and his hair looks like it hasn’t been washed in days.

  But he said he wanted to talk.

  “What really happened that night at the party?” Grace asks.

  Jes nods like he’s been expecting the question. “George said she mentioned something to you about Row.”

  “She told me Row flew back to New York that morning. That she was never coming with us.”

  “Not never,” Jes clarifies, like that will make a real difference. “It was last-minute, her job. But I knew before you showed up, yeah. That she wasn’t coming.”

  “Why, then? Why did you let me do it?”

  “I felt bad canceling,” Jes says. “It seemed like a dick move to invite you to something and then be, like, Whoops, never mind, we don’t want you after all if you don’t make sense in the picture. I thought you might feel like I was using you.”

  “But you did use me, didn’t you?”

  Jes puts his face in his hands and rubs his eyes for a long minute. “You said you wanted to go to a party,” he says. “And I was hoping it would distract people from some other things that have been happening. That backfired pretty spectacularly. Obviously.”

  “So you told me it would help everyone out, help make things less crazy, and then put me in the middle of a big media spectacle.”

  “You have to understand. I meet so many people who do just want to go to parties. Who say they don’t want their faces out there, but when the time comes—”

  “I don’t have to understand anything! You lied to me. You assumed I was like everyone else, and that was a shitty, selfish thing to do.”

  Jes doesn’t look at her for a while. “What do you want?” he asks finally.

  “That’s the point,” Grace says. “I don’t want to have to tell you how to treat me like a person. I want you to know that already. Because I want to be a person to you, and not just—” That wild, hysterical sound is back in her voice. She feels it billowing up in her, that intensity she can’t shake and can’t hide. She swallows the rest of her words.

  “I’m sorry,” Jes says. “I guess I haven’t actually said that yet.”

  “No,” Grace says. “You haven’t.”

  “Oh. Let’s start there: I’m sorry. I screwed up.”

  She expects him to hate the apology, but as soon as he says it, his shoulders relax fractionally, like he’s let go of something he’s been carrying for so long he’d forgotten it was heavy.

  “I took your hand,” Grace says. “I got out of the car with you.”

  “You didn’t know what it meant when you did it, though. Not really.”

  “Yeah.”

  The sun angles hard on everything: it glints meanly off the grass and makes the pool water too bright to look at.

  She asks, “Can you tell me, then? What’s actually going on?”

  “Oh,” Jes says. He taps his fingers absently against his bottom lip while he organizes the story for himself. Grace recognizes the habit and hates that it makes her feel tender toward him, like she knows him. The whole point of this is that she doesn’t. And he doesn’t really know her. “Okay. I guess the first thing I should tell you is that Row and I broke up, like, six months ago?”

  Right around when their most recent album, Stay Up, came out. He seemed especially exhausted at the time, lean and drawn, and she assumed it was just sleeplessness and stress.

  “It had been coming for a long time, honestly. I love her, you know—she’s really amazing—but it’s so hard when you’re both all over the place like we are, and it had just become clear that we couldn’t fight for it anymore. We didn’t want to. But announcing the breakup in the middle of the album launch seemed dumb, so we agreed that we would wait it out.

  Grace wishes she could reach back through the days and touch him somehow, tell him to go easy on himself. Didn’t he know the fans would buy his album no matter what? Didn’t he know they would have loved him even better, if they’d known the truth?

  “And then, well, you’ve seen Kendrick. I guess everyone knows about Kendrick now.”

  “That wasn’t the first time he—”

  “It’s been a problem for a while.”

  Grace nods slowly. “Is he going to rehab?”

  “Tried to make him,” Jes says. “But: no, no, no.”

  She doesn’t know whether she’s allowed to laugh at his joke.

  “We’d spent our entire careers fighting the paparazzi. Trying to seem like the nicest, sweetest boys. Kind and polite and humble and regular. It turns out it’s a lot easier to deal with them if you let go a little bit. Give them one thing so they won’t see the others. We all had secrets, but it didn’t matter if mine got found out. So I started trying to buy us some time.”

  We all had secrets. Kendrick and his drinking.

  Land and Solly.

  “When you came here? Was I a part of it then, too?”

  “You weren’t supposed to be,” Jes says. “I mean, obviously I didn’t know you were here, and I didn’t plan a midnight date with a paparazzo on the off chance that some girl would wander into the frame at the right moment.”

  “But you planned it. To be photographed.”

  “I did.”

  This changes everything. Grace has always known that the boys pulled stunts for the media, but she assumed that management was forcing them to do it. That they wouldn’t lie to her if they didn’t have to.

  On the other hand, Jes was desperate. So he did have to.

  Or he thought he did, anyway.

  “Boy-Bander Skulks Off to Ruin His Lungs and Career? Or whatever you said, the other night? That was the plan all along.”

  “The boys needed a break,” Jes says. “I had a whole story planned out. That I was stressed, which was code for partying and cheating on Rowena. Which, I mean, they wrote that one for me even when I wasn’t trying. I figured I could lean into it—come back here, look exhausted and homesick—take all the heat, and buy Kendrick enough time to get himself together. And when he was ready, I would do a big public breakup thing with her and repent by getting us back in the studio. We’d finish the next album and pick up where we left off.”

  “And, what, I made a better story?”

  “I am really, really sorry about that. I never meant for you to end up in those pictures, I swear to god. It was so nice to just chat with you about college. I was thinking, If I had stayed in California, maybe I would have known this girl, maybe we would do normal stuff like this all the time. I forgot what I had planned until he showed up. That’s what happens when I forget myself: it’s always a mess for everyone else.”

  “When we talked the other night, about it bei
ng hard, and lonely—”

  Jes barks out a laugh that sounds like he’s choking on it. “Please don’t feel sorry for me.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry. I mean, I’m not sorry.” Grace leans forward so that she can press her face against the tops of her knees. She’s sticky and damp with sweat, and it’s too stifling to stay there for more than a few seconds. “I don’t know what to think. Or feel.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  “Okay.”

  “You didn’t take those pictures, right? The ones of Land and Sol?”

  Grace doesn’t have time to decide; she just says, “No,” and then, “No. No. No.”

  She expects Jes to be more curious, but he seems relieved by her answer. “I didn’t think so,” he says. “I just had to ask. You know.”

  “Yeah. No. Totally. I wouldn’t—I wouldn’t want to hurt you guys. Or cause you any trouble.” Which is true. He can trust her. She certainly won’t ever do anything like it again.

  Jes says nothing.

  “Why do you think someone would do that?” Grace asks. She wants him to understand, even though she can never tell him. “I mean, I know paparazzi are, like, it’s a job. But why would someone—”

  “They wanted a piece of us,” Jes says. “They recognized that they could sell it, maybe. Or. I don’t know. Maybe they thought they were helping.”

  Yes, Grace wants to say. Helping them come out. Helping Katy see that we haven’t been crazy all these years. Helping myself believe that it’s real. But it’s too late to admit to any of that now. Bad enough that she did it. Worse still that she lied.

  Jes leans back on his elbow. “Lord knows I’ve done enough messed-up stuff when I thought I was helping,” he says. “Our fans drive me crazy sometimes, but I do know that they love us. They want to love us, anyway. Sometimes I think it’s our fault for making it more complicated for them. Trying to cover certain things up. It confuses them. It confuses us.”

  “But everyone knows about Kendrick, now. And Land and—” Grace isn’t sure what she’s allowed to say about Land and Solly. Is that a mess, too? How can it be something that needs to be covered with a stupid cheating rumor, when so many people want so badly for it to be real?

  “The thing between them—Land and Solly—is different,” Jes says. “Or the same thing, I don’t know.”

  Grace feels something small and stuttering start in her heart: like a tiny bird is beating its feathered wings against her throat and ribs and stomach. Land and Solly, like their names belong together. The same or different; either way, they’re a unit.

  Either way, they are real.

  It’s been too hot for too long. The sun has shifted west just enough that the pool’s surface is gleaming again, instead of shining like the edge of something sharp. Her body can’t contain what’s happening to it, so many years of faith and trust being given the cold, certain weight of fact.

  “Let’s go in,” she says, nodding toward the pool.

  “In what?” Jes asks. He gives her a wary look.

  Grace doesn’t know how to tell him, I’m not trying to take your clothes off. I’m not asking for more than you’ve given me. I just need something different to happen right now, to mark this moment, to make me understand.

  So instead of speaking, she takes off running, tossing her phone onto the grass behind her, and dives in in her shorts and tank top, heedless of how she’ll look when she emerges, what it will do to her ridiculous hair.

  Her eyes are closed, but she feels the reverb of the splash when Jes follows a moment later. She stays under and opens her eyes.

  The water between them is cool and blue, and it’s still so surreal when he looks back at her, and laughs, and his laugh turns into bubbles that break his face into something abstract, someone she does and doesn’t recognize all over again.

  —

  Afterward there’s nothing to do but lie in the grass and let their clothes dry. “This would take forever in Georgia,” Jes mumbles. “So humid there in the summer.”

  Grace mmhmms her agreement, and then neither of them says anything for a while.

  It’s thrilling in a new way to be with Jes and not be able to see him. She’s known his face so well for so long, but the simple weight of his body next to hers is new. They aren’t touching. If she reached and he reached, they could. But the point is that she doesn’t have to. The grass scratches gently against her elbows and the backs of her knees, and the sun bears down brightly so that even with her eyes closed the world is yellow and orange, red with her pulse.

  This is it, Grace thinks. This is it, this is it, this is it.

  Cara’s birthday is on the Fourth of July, so she’s always in charge of the party, and despite Grace’s thing about parties, this is one she hasn’t missed since they met.

  Getting her mom’s permission to go even while grounded is almost disappointingly easy—you’re the one who’s always on about how I need to treasure these friendships and make them last, Grace reminds her, and her mother gives in, because the only thing that she cares about more than her own authority is that her daughter’s life looks like something she understands as normal.

  It’s exactly the opposite of the party with Jes and the boys: Grace knows the entire day by heart already. She knows what to wear and who to talk to and what to say to them. And what not to say.

  Cara’s parents are good enough to stash themselves inside while it happens, so there’s a flask of vodka that goes around to doctor their lemonade. Grace politely tips a drop in each time it comes her way. She rubs sunscreen onto her friends’ backs, lifting up bikini straps and admiring the deepness of their tan lines. They’ve been doing this since middle school, minus the booze and the couples who drift away to Cara’s old tree house over the course of the afternoon to “take a nap.”

  It’s not like it’s awful or anything. Grace is braced for an interrogation about Fever Dream, but it never quite comes. Someone starts to ask her about it, and she deflects the question.

  Paige takes the opportunity to repeat her well-worn story about the time Chris Pine bought her a latte to meet a credit card minimum at some coffee shop. Lianne insists that she saw a washed-up sitcom actor give Cara a once-, twice-, three-times-over in line for a movie at Commons. Andrew reminds them that Davey’s music-producer dad paid a B-list rapper to appear at his bar mitzvah party.

  Grace realizes that she’s not as special or different as she’s been feeling; as far as anyone here knows, hers is just another Los Angeles story. It’s strange to think that telling it—parts of it—would probably be the most normal thing she could do. The very thought that she would discuss Fever Dream in any real way with her friends still feels hilariously illicit and impossible, but the idea that seeded itself when Cara and Lianne came over last week starts to put down roots. Maybe there’s a way to spin all of this that she could actually live with.

  And if there isn’t, well, she’s leaving in a few months, anyway.

  Grace relaxes a little bit; she stops dreading how much of the afternoon is left. She has someone sunscreen her back and takes over a chaise longue, facing toward the pool so that she can watch the boys roughhousing lazily in the water. They’re not as handsome as Jes, but they’re not bad-looking, either. Grace wonders if things had been different—if, say, Hank Norton had moved to Georgia instead of Jes, and ended up as Fever Dream’s fourth—if she’d be lying here watching Jes dunk someone and hold his head under, and thinking, I just can’t imagine wanting you.

  A cold hand presses against the back of Grace’s shoulder, and she jumps at the contact.

  “Gotcha!” Lianne says. Her fingertips are icy from carrying water bottles over from the cooler. “What are you doing moping here, Misery-face?”

  In one corner of the yard someone is starting to fire up the grill, and the air smells like gas and flint and the first faint hints of char. Grace hopes fervently that whoever is i
n charge of the fire is still relatively sober.

  “I’m not miserable,” Grace says, for what feels like the zillionth time.

  “You’re bored then,” Lianne says, handing one of the water bottles to Grace. “You probably don’t even need this, do you?” She is tipsy, and in order to avoid slurring her syllables on a long word, she trips across them, enunciating like an acting coach. Grace always forgets how prickly Lianne is when she’s drunk, her usual semi-polite coating washing away with her first glass of alcohol.

  “I don’t understand why everyone always cares if I’m drunk or not,” Grace says. “You are. Isn’t that enough for you?”

  “You’re always watching,” Lianne says. “Keeping to yourself. Keeping secrets.”

  “I don’t have any secrets,” Grace says automatically.

  “Um, yeah, your low-key friendship with some megafamous boy band totally doesn’t qualify. Duh. Right. Sorry.”

  “Didn’t we talk about this already?”

  Lianne shrugs.

  Grace feels whatever relaxed in her earlier pull so tight it snaps. She says, “Last I checked they were, like, dumb and embarrassing. So excuse me if I didn’t think you would care.”

  “One. I always care who my friends are friends with.” Lianne starts picking at the label on her water bottle.

  Oh, so we are still friends, Grace wants to say. It’s been a little hard to tell lately. But the restraint she’s been cultivating for years keeps the sentence trapped in her throat.

  Lianne goes on, “And two. You’re just— Sometimes it seems like you want it to be hard to be friends with you.”

  Grace doesn’t know what to say to that. She doesn’t know if it’s the thimbleful of vodka she’s had, or the sugar in the lemonade, or just the sun making her head hurt. Either way, she doesn’t really want to talk to Lianne about this when Lianne is drunk.

  “I’m not trying to be anything,” Grace says. Which isn’t even true—she’s been trying to be normal, and now that she’s not, Lianne can’t handle it.

  “Sure,” Lianne says. “Okay.” She sweeps the confetti she’s made out of her bottle’s paper label into a pile. “I’m gonna go throw this away.”