Grace and the Fever

by Zan Romanoff

  The minute he has it, cold dread washes over her. She is dumb, apparently. There’s nothing in the Photos folder that’s particularly incriminating—mostly it’s embarrassingly, stupidly normal, a mirror selfie testing her makeup before the party this morning, the picture she sent Jes of her friends in the pool. He’d have to sift over a week back through her texts to find the pictures she sent to Katy.

  But her texts from today. Shit.

  “Sorry about that,” Rick says. He hands the phone back to her. Katy’s last message is open on the screen. Grace hastily scans up above it but it’s all innocuous—before that, Katy was talking about a client who was annoying her a few days ago. It just looks like she’s teasing a friend about bad romantic decisions.

  “So you’ll come invade my privacy, but it’s fine if people at your party are putting my face up on the internet?”

  “It’s funny about the boys,” Rick says. “I’ve watched it happen. Not just to them: Jes, and the rest. To lots of them before, too. All of them. For a while you can’t forget that everyone is watching. And then, after a certain point, you can’t remember. It’s too normal. The brain just absorbs it.

  “Plus, the boys are used to having someone clean up when there’s a mess. I don’t think they know how many of these pictures we have caught and deleted. How many girls we’ve chased home to get NDAs from. Jes said you didn’t know anything worth telling, by the way. We left you alone because he begged us to. But I think he just liked the idea that he could trust someone. It must seem kind of romantic to him, you know? That there’s anyone he wouldn’t have to put under contract to keep his secrets.”

  Grace feels like the biggest asshole in the world. She feels like the fault line that rides across her heart—the crack that divides Gigi from Grace—is trembling with strain, the plates of her worlds rubbing together and shoving up against the surface. She wants, desperately, to be that person for Jes.

  But she can’t be. She wasn’t. She isn’t. She can be so many things, but someone who doesn’t care who he is and what he does, who doesn’t need him to be someone special, someone specific—that will never, ever be her.

  “I guess it would make me feel better if you would sign one,” Rick says. “An NDA, I mean. Pretty standard language. Just so we can all be sure that you aren’t out to do anything that would hurt the band.” He’s drunk, still, but there’s a sharpness that comes to him when he says it. He’s not so messed up that he can’t be cunning. He’s played her expertly, right into his hands.

  Grace is too demoralized to say anything except “Sure.”

  She follows him upstairs to his office. He keeps blank nondisclosure agreements in a file in his desk. She’s eighteen. She’s responsible for herself. She doesn’t even read before she signs with a flourish: okay, okay, okay. Jes won’t like it, but now he’s protected. Now they’re both safe from her and what she wants.

  It’s dark out by the time Grace pulls into the garage that night. Her mom hasn’t texted, but she’s probably inside getting suspicious. Grace knows she should hurry, but she can’t bring herself to do it. Instead, she opens her phone and googles her own name.

  The first thing that pops up is a story someone’s updated with the latest: Fever Dreamer Falling for Grace? Jes Holloway Rows Away from Longtime Girlfriend Toward Fresh-Faced New Flame. NOW WITH NEW SEXY POOL PARTY PICS!!

  Great. No one besides Katy has texted her about it yet; either they haven’t seen it, or her friends have finally given up on her for real. Grace checks her email, but it’s just full of the usual: spam and nonsense. She almost deletes one with the subject line Apparently we’re roommates? before she realizes Kenyon said they’d be sending out assignments this week. It might be legit.

  Hey!

  I’m Allie—I just got the letter from Kenyon today that we’re going to be roommates in the fall :) I looked for you on Facebook but there were too many possibles to sort thru, and I figured you might have made your profile private or something. (Has everyone been asking you if you’re the Grace Thomas who’s been in the news recently? Or do you not know what I’m talking about, and now you’re googling it, and now think I’m addicted to celebrity gossip or something? Ahhh this is so awkward to write! Anyway, maybe you ARE that Grace Thomas, in which case, ummm hi! You are much more exciting than I am!)

  Anyway, I’m like, the only Allison Burczyk so I’m easy enough to find. And I promise to be fairly normal in person! Hitting send before I can stop myself—

  Grace blinks and blinks.

  College is, like, actually going to happen.

  She’s known that, of course. But in the face of everything going on, it’s been feeling a little abstract recently. Her mom has been badgering her about getting sheets and towels and lamps, and labels for her underwear, like she’s going to camp or something, and she’s been resisting. But the future is coming for her. It’s not a matter of willing it. It’s just a matter of days.

  She goes inside and finds her mother in the kitchen, making dinner.

  “How was the party?” her mother asks.

  For a minute Grace is flustered—how did her mom know where she was? And then she remembers which party she’s talking about. She nods furiously to cover the pause and says, “Good! Good. It was good. You know. The usual.” She looks around the kitchen. “Should I help?”

  “No. I’ve got it.”

  “Okay.” Grace fiddles with her phone in her hands. “I, uh, I guess I’ll go—”

  “You could stay,” her mother says. “Keep me company.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Sure.”

  Grace looks around the kitchen for things to talk about and comes up empty. She doesn’t want her mom to start asking questions about how she spent her afternoon. So she offers, “I just got an email from my roommate. At Kenyon.”

  “Oh?”

  “She seems cool. As cool as you can seem in, like, two hundred words, anyway.”

  “That’s nice,” her mother says. “Maybe you guys will get along.”

  “I hope so. I mean, we will be living together.”

  “I hated my freshman-year roommate.”

  Grace knows this story, but she likes to hear her mother tell it. It’s fun to hear about when she was young and a little rougher around the edges. Now she’s just so focused and certain. She keeps chopping onions while she talks.

  “Evelyn was basically nocturnal. She wrote all of her papers at night, after the libraries had closed, in our room when I was trying to sleep. And this wasn’t, you know, the way you do it now—tapping away on a laptop. She had to have a lamp on. She banged on her typewriter keys so hard I always thought the machine was going to give up one day in protest.”

  “But that’s how you met Maura, right?” Maura is her mom’s best friend.

  “I fell asleep next to my breakfast in the dining hall. Maura pulled my ponytail out of my cereal milk and made sure no one messed with me. I knew right away she was a keeper.”

  Maura introduced her parents, too, at some dance sophomore year, but Grace doesn’t ask about that. Her mom talks about her dad in her most dispassionate voice, her tone so remote and frozen that Grace always thinks of an iceberg. She uses the same tone when Grace starts to remind her of him: when she gets carried away with some idea, impassioned and intense.

  It’s weird to think that if her dad was around—if they had a real relationship—he would probably know all about her and Fever Dream. He gets what it’s like to love something so wholly that the rest of the world just melts and fades into the background.

  What he doesn’t get is the part where you keep loving one thing that way, forever. The thing about sticking around to see it through.

  “It’s okay if you don’t make friends right away,” her mother is saying. “Sometimes it takes a little while.”

  That’s not what they were talking about. Grace hates that it’s the first place her mother goes. “You know me,” she says, hoping her sarcasm doesn’t sound as defensive as it feels. “I’m great
at making friends.”

  She expects her mom to give her a lecture, the way she usually does. With that attitude, you never will be. Grace has heard the speech a thousand times, enough that she knows it and its subtext by heart. I wish you weren’t such a hopeless case.

  It’s true that she found Cara and Lianne in grade school, and she’s been hanging out with them pretty exclusively ever since, but until recently, that seemed like a very reasonable thing to do. They didn’t necessarily get her, all of her, but they seemed to like her, at least. And she— Grace is surprised to find a spasm of hurt go through her when she thinks, I love them. It’s easy to say they’ve been difficult, or distant, but she’s the one who walked out of Cara’s party today—on her birthday. It strikes Grace that she’s been wasting time with them, time she won’t get back, and might not get more of, either.

  Her mom surprises her, too. “I know high school’s been a little lonely for you,” she says. “I wish it hadn’t been, but it has.”

  “I’m not lonely,” Grace says.

  And that’s true, too, in its own way. Grace wishes she was surrounded by her fandom friends in real life, but at least she has them—has had them for a while now. It’s not like she’s the one who thinks no one will ever like or get her. She’s just not sure the people who do will ever end up in her area code.

  What would her family have been like if her dad had been able to stay? Louder and messier, certainly. Grace thinks she would have an easier time talking to her mother: there would be someone to bridge the largest of the gaps between them.

  Instead, she and her mother keep having to explain even the most basic things about themselves to each other. Grace thinks about Lianne saying, Sometimes it seems like you want it to be hard to be friends with you. She wants to ask her mother if she feels the same way, but the words don’t ever quite come.

  —

  Jes texts, you really didn’t have to sign that thing.

  It’s fine, Grace sends back. I don’t have anything to hide. Or she won’t, anyway, anymore.

  Those NDAs are pretty draconian.

  I’ll be pretty careful, then.

  Grace opens her laptop. Online, there are more pictures of the boys from after she left, their eyes red-rimmed, smiles loose from having been stretched out too wide. They’re with handfuls of girls: George and Ivy, also looking a little worse for the wear, and girls Grace doesn’t recognize, who must have arrived after she left. None of them are named.

  Jes Holloway and Solomon Granger were snapped with fans at manager Rick Vroman’s annual Fourth of July throwdown. Solly arrived separately from the other boys (pictured, at left: Solly arrives with assistant Raj in tow). There are also images making the rounds which show the boys’ bandmate Landon Baxter smoking out of a vaporizer pen, which can provide smoke-free hits of tobacco as well as marijuana. Representatives for the band had no comment. (Probably because they were busy throwing the party.)

  It’s kind of amazing to watch how delicately everyone plays their part and skates around the truth. Obviously, Land was getting high. Jes’s hand is on the bare hip of one of the girls in the picture; if you look closely, you can see that his gaze is sliding away from the camera and toward her. Someone got Raj to pose with Solly’s sunglasses on; Jes and the girl are still talking in the background of that one.

  Grace feels stupid and hot and mean. She closes every tab she has open just to spite herself. Then she opens a new one, just for Facebook, and types in Allison Burczyk. Who cares if Jes hooks up with some girl? She’ll sign an NDA, too, and disappear or not.

  It’s none of her business either way.

  Allison looks normal. Vaguely pretty. Grace sends her a friend request and then realizes that Allison will see her face when she accepts it. She’ll know exactly which Grace Thomas she’s dealing with. At least it sounds like she’ll be excited about it, instead of weirded out.

  So much for not bringing Fever Dream to college with her.

  Her phone buzzes in her bag. Jes again.

  Well, looks like someone else got us in trouble this time!

  Attached is a screenshot of the article she was just looking at.

  To be fair, I feel like you got yourselves in trouble?

  There’s a long silence. Grace clicks through the three profile pictures Allison has made public: One of her in a soccer uniform, grinning, at dusk on a field. One of her wearing a dorky chef’s outfit and mugging for the camera with her friends in some professional-grade kitchen, at a fancy birthday party, maybe. The last one is a prom photo. She’s wearing a pink dress, and her date is holding her like he’s used to it, like the enforced awkwardness of this kind of posing is just another thing they’ve learned how to do together.

  She sends Jes, sorry! I feel like that came off kind of harsh.

  It’s cool, he says. You’re not wrong.

  Then: The good news is, you’ve gotten yourself into Rick’s good graces. Also he’s drunk. Anyway, we’re planning something—a little Fever Dream offensive, to take back public opinion. You around Friday? Got R to agree that we needed you to help us plan.

  Still grounded, Grace reminds him.

  You can’t sneak out?

  No car keys.

  Grace. We can send you a car.

  Walking back into Rick’s house for the meeting marks the first time Grace has seen Team Fever Dream fully assembled. She recognizes the boys’ bodyguards and Rick, of course. Raj gets up to greet her, and points the rest of them out to her in turn: who’s from the label, Elliptical, and their management company, plus their agents and PR reps. All told there are nearly twenty adults who’ve turned out to discuss the next six weeks or so of the lives of four dudes who are only just out of their teens.

  Allison accepted her friend request last night, and wrote another email:

  Oh, shit. So you are way more exciting than I am.

  Grace didn’t know what to say to that. Her knee-jerk reaction was Of course I’m not, but looking around at the casual display of power in the room, she understands why Allison would think it. Everyone is well put together in this particular Hollywood way: they’re all wearing expensive jeans and expensive watches, like it never occurred to them to dress up for this meeting—it’s just that fancy basics are the only kind they own. They speak a language of power whose fundamental grammar is taking its own influence for granted.

  She can see how, from a distance, it would look like she does, too.

  The room is slightly too small for everyone in it, and every seat at the table is taken. Someone dragged a love seat in and positioned it along the far wall; the boys have crammed themselves onto it, Kendrick draping his body over one arm to avoid the limbs that come flying off of Land and Solly tussling idly with one another in the middle. Jes is at the end closest to the door, and somehow even though Land keeps reaching over to tickle Solly, he still manages to keep Jes’s knees curled into his lap.

  It seems most natural to go sit with them, so Grace does. She expects Raj to follow her, but it turns out that one of the high-backed chairs at the table belongs to him. Right. She’s seen him so much socially that it’s easy to forget that he’s always working when he’s around.

  “Sorry we didn’t save you a seat,” Jes says.

  “Doesn’t look like there were any to spare,” Grace says. “It’s fine, I can perch.” The love seat’s arm is just wide enough for her to balance on, but there’s nowhere to put her legs: either they hang awkwardly to one side or end up in Jes’s lap. She tries to cross them and almost knees him in the back of the head. By the time she’s settled, Rick has stopped flirting with one of the publicists and is in the process of calling the meeting to order.

  “It’s been a rough few weeks,” he says. “And I’m not interested in placing blame, at this point. I’m interested in what we need to do to get the Dream Team back on track.”

  Grace can’t believe how corny he’s being, but every head around the table is nodding seriously in agreement. She catches Raj sendi
ng a glimmer of a smirk over to the couch.

  “If you want us to dial up some positive coverage for the boys, just say the word,” the PR girl says. “We have a number of possible strategies available to us—we can go Bieber, and acknowledge it, let it roughen up their image a little bit. If we want to cast it as part of the transition to the adult market, I think Rolling Stone would play ball on that. Especially if we let them shoot a more provocative cover.”

  Jes nudges Grace with his forehead, and she leans down so that he can whisper to her. “She means shirtless,” he says. “And, like, dirty. That’s what they always mean by provocative. Us clutching our junk and looking like we’re angry about being hot.”

  “That’s what ladies love,” Grace says. “A man who hates his own beauty. And bathing.”

  It’s getting easier to concentrate when Jes’s face is this close to hers, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t notice it. He does something with it—puts on that magazine-cover smolder—and then lets it morph into a constipated grimace.

  She muffles a laugh, but not well enough.

  Kendrick looks up and over at them from the other side of the couch. There’s a greeny undertone to his face and circles like bruises under each eye. “Shhh,” he says, just a little too loudly.

  “Do I have to separate you?” Rick asks from the front.

  The boys manage an impressive unison when they chorus, “Sorry.” Grace thinks there might even be a harmony in there.

  “If anyone doesn’t know,” Rick goes on. “We’re joined this afternoon by Grace, a…friend of Jes’s. One of the fun little pieces of our PR puzzle.” He doesn’t look at her when he talks. “We’ve been trying to buy time in a lot of ways, recently, but we’re really starting to lose ground with all of the traditional stuff. So I appreciate your suggestion, Adria, but I think we’re going another way on this one.

  “We’ve been talking about it, and I think the boys need to go ahead and do something. We’re arranging a small-scale, intimate concert, here in LA—just for superfans. The boys give back, and go back to their roots. Assuming it goes well, we’ll do another one in Athens, and then a few more. Small cities. Places they’d never play otherwise. We record on the road.”