by Zan Romanoff
Grace buries her head between her arms, her nose mushing against the fine wire mesh of the lounger. Her head feels too full of uncomfortable thoughts, shifting, half-formed ideas about her and her friends, and how she’s been behaving, and how much she’s been lying. She’s always thought that she was hiding fandom from her friends because they didn’t want to see it, because, probably, they didn’t really want to see her. The idea that they’ve been frustrated by her withholding—that they’ve noticed her withholding at all—surprises and then shames her. It feels like all of her choices lately have been wrong ones.
All afternoon she’s been good about leaving her phone in her bag, but now she pulls it out and swipes the screen to life. As if he knew how she’d be feeling, there’s a text from Jes: a snapshot of Land stretched out on a super fancy, modern couch somewhere, wearing enormous white and gold sneakers and holding an old-school video game controller. The look on his face is one Grace hasn’t seen in years. He looks easy. He looks happy.
Some time off doesn’t totally suck, Jes’s text says.
Grace takes a picture of Paige, now riding on Hank’s shoulders in the pool. They’re blurry with motion, two anonymous bodies against the blue of the water and the green of the lawn behind them. Look at the normal suburban life you missed out on, she says. Aren’t you jealous? Is Land getting those Nikes all over an actual Eames?
Nice eye, Jes says. But don’t worry, it’s not ours.
That doesn’t mean it’s not VALUABLE
Ricky bought that couch when Burning Up went platinum
We get sneaker privileges
Oh. So they’re at Rick’s house. One of his houses. Rick is their manager; he’s the guy who saw the boys singing on YouTube and signed them up. He started off his career—all of their careers—as a crusader, the only guy in the room who believed in Fever Dream, but recently he’s started to seem more like a vigilante. More often than not when the band is performing or being interviewed he’s there hovering. He’s become fandom’s bogeyman, their stand-in for everything keeping the boys from being who they want to be.
Must be nice
You’re like the child emperors of all you survey
Puyi started running China when he was two years old
We’ve reached the age of legal majority. I think we deserve it
Grace googles Puyi, who, it turns out, was the last-ever Chinese emperor. She likes the way Jes knows things: he’s like a walking Wikipedia, useless for formal research but brimming with the particular facts he’s taught himself and learned to keep.
Are you the last of your dynasty, too? she asks, and then wonders if Jes will take it the wrong way.
Land just threw one of Rick’s precious original Nintendo controllers at my head
He says I’m texting too much
I know you’re probably busy like, drinking wine coolers
But if you want you could come over?
Spritzers, Grace sends back. And Smirnoff Ice. Her fingers are shaking. But we’re running low. A blaze goes up on the grill, too high to cook anything on or even stand over. I think someone just lost an eyebrow trying to make us hot dogs. I’m getting out to save myself. Where should I go?
Jes sends her an address. It’s in Beverly Hills, but not near Solly’s place—down in the flats, on a picture-postcard street, lined by palm trees on either side. She probably won’t be able to stay long, but she’ll get a couple of hours in.
Grace gathers her things and offers her excuses. Cara kisses her on both cheeks and makes her promise that they’ll hang out soon, soon, totally, though, soon.
She looks to see if Lianne is glowering at her, but she hasn’t even noticed that Grace is leaving. She’s fixing the mess Mike made of the grill situation, tonging coals into a pile, waving the boys off with her free hand. Grace doesn’t know what she feels—proud, or guilty, or just glad to be out of there. Lianne’s so good at this life. She belongs here.
Of course she couldn’t understand why Grace had to find a way to escape it.
The thing happening at Rick’s is a full-on rager. The party’s noise spills out into the street, echoing down the block. There’s valet parking and a security guard working the door. Or at least Grace thinks he’s working; he’s wearing black and lingering menacingly, but he doesn’t stop her when she walks in. She wants to ask him if he knows where Jes is, but she’s afraid that if he looks at her closely, he’ll see that she’s someone who never should have ended up here at all.
Instead, she wanders, trying to look like she knows where she’s going. No one pays any kind of attention to her. Everyone is drunk, or high, or just too beautiful to notice someone who isn’t.
Every room looks like a page from a magazine. One is populated by barefoot girls smoking cigarettes and using thin-line Sharpies to draw designs onto each other’s honey-smooth skin. Next door is a group of guys with carefully trimmed stubble and intricate tattoo sleeves sorting through stacks of vinyl, taking a record off the turntable and putting a new one on, even though the music pulsing from the backyard is so loud that it’s hard to hear.
She finds the room where the boys were playing video games earlier—she recognizes the couch—but the television has been taken over by an R&B singer and her crew, who are watching a car-chase movie with the sound off. As Grace passes by, the singer’s big hit comes on over the speakers outside and she dances to it lazily in her seat. It’s like a music video coming to life in front of her.
Past the glass door Grace can see the backyard, which is full of color and barbecue smoke, big sunglasses and big smiles.
When she finally finds Jes, he and Land and Kendrick are holed up in Rick’s screening room playing Guitar Hero. They’re sitting in the first row of seats on a big black leather couch. Kendrick’s fiancée, Cricket, is curled up on the one behind them.
Grace keeps expecting seeing them to start feeling normal, but her breath still stops every time. She looks down to hide it. The carpet underneath their feet is distractingly hideous.
They all turn to her when the song finishes, and she wonders, surreally, if they’re expecting applause. Grace kicks at the carpet with the toe of one shoe instead. “What’s the deal with this?” she asks.
Land laughs. “Isn’t that awful? Ricky got it from the mall he went to when he was a kid. They had closed down, I guess, and the place was just sitting there empty, so he hired some dudes to go in and rip it all up and bring it here.”
“Rick’s just a regular emperor,” Jes says. “But he wishes he’d been one when he was a child.”
Land pinches Jes’s nipple. Jes shrieks and dances out of his way, almost knocking Kendrick over.
“Don’t do that thing where you go all inside-jokey when I’m baked,” Land says. “I can’t tell which one of us isn’t making sense.”
“Maybe don’t get so baked, then,” Cricket says. Her accent is stronger than the boys’, an unmistakable Southern drawl. Kendrick puts down his drumsticks and rolls over the back of the sofa so that he can go sit with her.
“We can’t all be models of sobriety,” Land says.
“Just the once would work for me.”
Kendrick presses a kiss against Cricket’s shoulder. Grace doesn’t know all that much about her—she and Kendrick were high school sweethearts who reconnected a year ago and got engaged six months later. Another publicity stunt, a lot of ’shippers thought, and Grace is surprised to find that she’s glad that they appear to have been wrong. It’s nice to think that Kendrick has someone who looks like a peach in public, soft and gold, pink and sweet, and who’s willing to bust his bandmates’ balls in private.
She’s glad he has someone outside of the band to hold on to.
“Speaking of which,” Land says. “I need some kind of refill.” There are a handful of empty beer bottles on the floor and plates with the remains of snacks from earlier. “You guys want anything?”
“No thanks,” Kendrick says, a little pointedly.
Cricket rubs her
belly. “Well, I’m hungry, actually.”
Kendrick laughs. “When did we eat lunch?”
“Like, hours ago.”
“Two. Two hours ago.”
“And I said then that I would want—”
“I know, I know, the demands of The Pit must be met. Grace, by the way, this is my fiancée, Cricket, and this is what she’s always like.”
Grace smiles a hello.
Kendrick stands and pulls Cricket up with him. “Do you think the caterers are up to the task?”
“If they can keep Landon in booze, they can usually keep Crick fed,” Jes says.
Land nods sagely. “Truth.”
“Grace?” Jes asks.
Grace is hungry, but she also wants a minute alone with him, so she shakes her head.
“Your loss,” Cricket calls as she and Ken and Land leave.
Grace turns back to Jes once they’re alone. He’s standing closer than she’d thought he was. He reaches out and traces the pad of his thumb along the arch of her eyebrow. “So you weren’t a casualty of a grill accident after all?” he asks.
Grace holds herself perfectly still so that she won’t tilt her face up into his touch.
“Just lunch,” she says.
“Well, when you do get hungry, let me know,” Jes says. “There’s, like, more than enough food. Ricky’s parties are kind of legendary.”
Of course they are. Last year’s was New Orleans–themed—a Fourth of July semi-ironic celebration of the city’s French heritage. (The underlying message being: eff you very much, America.) Grace remembers it particularly because someone took a picture of Kendrick standing in the crawfish pot before the boil started.
He was wearing sunglasses and smiling lazily, and someone was smoking in the background, and online a two-day flame war erupted over whether he was stoned, and whether it mattered, especially after the video they’d all seen of the boys smoking in Thailand, and after the public apology, during which, Grace had pointed out to Katy at the time, they’d definitely never promised they wouldn’t do it again.
Though it turns out weed wasn’t what anyone should have been worrying about with him.
Jes curls up at one end of the couch, his back against the arm. Grace follows his cue and takes the opposite side. He looks around uncertainly. “I guess it was kind of lame to invite you to this thing where we’re just hiding out.”
“I couldn’t even hide out at mine,” Grace says. “Trust me, I was happy to escape.”
“You don’t want to go see the sights? One of the dudes from Gumball Eyeball was doing cartwheels off the diving board when we came in.”
“Maybe later. If you want.” Grace shrugs. “I mean, I guess I’m the lame one, because I’m not really into parties ever. In general.” Admitting it to him is surprisingly easy.
“What was wrong with the one you were at?”
Grace pulls her knees into her chest and wraps her arms around them. Having her whole body contained like this makes it feel small, or at least manageable: she can look from the knobs of her knees to the ones at her ankles, and keep them caged by the lock system of elbows and wrists. She tries to sort out a truth she can tell Jes, one that doesn’t start, I’ve spent most of the last few years avoiding parties to hang out online with people who like to talk about you.
“I’m just not sure I’ll be friends with any of those people after high school,” she settles on. “I feel like we’ve grown apart, I guess. They’re all great. They’re great people. I just sort of feel like a freak when I hang out with them. Like maybe I should like what they like, or want to do what they’re doing.”
“Which is?”
“Getting drunk, mostly.”
Jes laughs. “Yeah. I get that. The growing-apart thing. And the thing about going to parties. Sometimes I feel like that’s mostly what our job is: To show up here and there and wherever. Wearing the right things. Talking to the right people. Like that’s more of what we perform than our actual music: The idea that we like hanging out with strangers all the time. That we could be your best friend, too.”
“Are you, like, contractually obligated to be here right now?”
“Rick would never be that crass. He just, you know. He has a way of letting us know what’s important. Land and Ken and Crick and I are the first wave; when we need to send Ken home, Solly will come and tap in.”
Grace has been resisting asking about Kendrick, but it seems like he’s giving her an opening. “How’s he doing?” she asks. “Kendrick, I mean. It sounded like he wasn’t drinking today. So, like, that’s good, right?”
Jes doesn’t pull his knees up, but Grace sees the way he goes inside just like she did: as if he’s checking on the walls that surround him and separate him from everything outside of himself. “Not yet,” he says. “He’s better when Crick’s around, but parties are always the worst with him. He’s so shy. He really…he hates this kind of thing.”
“I’m sorry,” Grace says, like I’m sorry is enough in the face of everything in front of him.
Jes stays lost inside himself. He keeps talking in a low monotone, as if it’s all he can do to pull the facts up and present them neutrally, as if acknowledging how he feels about them would be too much to bear.
“I used to say to him, Just take a hit. Take a shot. Take the edge off. It’s easier if you’re not so self-conscious. And, look, it works for Landon. Five minutes of vaping in the car on the way over and he’s mellow all afternoon. He’s probably out there now talking the ear off of some suit or some girl or whoever Rick steered him toward first. He’ll sleep like a baby tonight. I just didn’t know that Ken— The rest of us could always— We knew when to stop.”
He seems to remember, then, that there is someone else in the room, and that she’s not necessarily someone he can trust all the way yet. “Anyway, the whole point of us being here is to be here,” he says. “We probably should go mingle. Keep the boys out of trouble if we can.”
—
The backyard is even crazier than the inside was, more crowded and much louder. But there are familiar elements, too: the pool, the grill, girls lounging and boys watching them. It’s not so foreign—it’s actually a lot like the party Grace left behind at Cara’s, except that everyone is a few years older and a few million dollars richer.
Jes flips his sunglasses down and stays close to her, like her invisibility is a force field that will protect them both. Still, people stop them every few feet to say hi and chat with Jes about something, or nothing. Grace honestly can’t tell from what she catches of their conversations.
It takes fifteen minutes for them to walk fifty feet. She looks around while she waits, and catches a glimpse of Land talking animatedly to George and another girl. The girl looks like George’s blond twin, each of them bone-thin and milk-pale. Most of the other women here are dressed in eye-catching color, Ring Pop jewel tones and tropical prints, but these girls are wearing ripped denim and faded black, no lipstick but plenty of eyeliner. One of the Sharpie girls drew something intricate and weblike between the wings of George’s shoulder blades.
“Sorry,” Jes says. He nudges Grace’s back with the point of his elbow, where the person he’s talking to can’t see. His grin is pinned in place but it’s starting to slip off. “I promised Grace I would get her a snack and she’s really starving, so—”
“Can’t reason with a hungry woman!” Grace says, improvising.
The man Jes was talking to is aggressively, self-consciously handsome, but a little bit older than he wants to admit. “The grilled filet is bomb,” he says. “Oh, but you don’t eat beef, right?”
Jes’s smile gets rigid. “I’m not a vegetarian,” he says.
The man does not take the hint. “Right, but I thought Muslims didn’t eat beef. Am I wrong? Is that pork?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Jes says. “I’m not one, so.”
“I am going to eat everything. Immediately. Let’s go do that.” Grace tugs Jes away before the man can say anythi
ng else. She starts to say, “That was so—” but Jes cuts her off.
“The grilled filet is bomb,” he parrots. “What a loser. God, I hate everyone sometimes. Lean in like I’m telling you a secret. Good. Now stay.”
“Does that happen to you often?” she asks. “The Muslim thing?”
“Constantly.” Jes’s mouth is still a firm, thin line.
“I’m sorry—” Grace starts, but he cuts her off.
“I don’t need your sympathy or your pity,” he says. “I want to be allowed to be like everyone else, and everyone else gets to not have this conversation. So let’s not have it, okay?”
“Okay,” Grace says. It feels unfinished, but he’s right that he doesn’t owe her his feelings, especially on a sensitive subject. It must be exhausting in so many ways, to almost always be the only person who looks like you in a room. It must be especially exhausting for Jes, who is always going out of his way to make everyone else feel comfortable. Or maybe that’s part of why he does it: because so many people look at him and automatically think other, or even danger. When, in fact, he’s just a boy. Still, she owes it to him to change the subject. “Are all these people Rick’s friends?”
“Kind of. A lot of them are like us, Rick’s clients,” Jes says. “And then it’s, you know. Rick’s friends. Rick’s friends’ clients and clients’ friends.” He sees Land and George and the girl. “Some people kind of wander in.”
“Do you and George not get along?”
Jes shrugs expressively.
“You can complain to me,” Grace says. “I won’t tell anyone, I promise.” She unlinks her arm from his to describe an invisible box around them. “Safe space.”
“She’s whatever,” he says. “She’s fun. I don’t think she’s good for Landon.”
Food is set up in a corner of the yard under a gauzy tent. There are trays of hors d’oeuvres and platters of grilled meat. Despite the shade, everything looks limp and greasy with heat. Grace makes herself a plate of chips and guacamole and finds a bottle of water.
Land ambles over, girls still in tow. “Dudes,” he says. “Ivy and George have such a chill setup by the hot tub. You should come sit with us.”
