Grace and the Fever

by Zan Romanoff

  He says, “You forget how much time I spend with people on the payroll. Mostly what they’re paid for is not to mind when I’m a dick.”

  “This isn’t being a dick; this is, like, being a danger to yourself—”

  “Okay, okay, after-school PSA, I get it.”

  “And others,” Grace finishes. “Don’t you care if you kill me, at least?”

  Jes reaches across the gearshift and grabs her hand. “Not really,” he says. “I go down, you go down with me.”

  Grace squeezes his hand and then lets it go. She says, “That’s not the deal, though. Don’t forget: I’m not on your payroll.”

  He stiffens, and Grace sees that, as usual, she’s taken it a step too far. Of course he was making a joke, but it wasn’t a funny one. She couldn’t keep that out of her voice.

  Jes makes the turn into the parking lot and finds them a spot in silence. Once they’ve parked, he looks over at her. “Sorry,” he says. “I guess it doesn’t help if I say, I’m trying, or some other trite bullshit.”

  By then Grace just feels bad for making him feel bad. “Come on,” she says. “You can make it up to me by helping me pick out a duvet.”

  —

  In the elevator, though, Grace finds herself acting like one of Jes’s bodyguards, shifting herself in front of him when a woman’s gaze lingers on him too long. She probably doesn’t even recognize him—she might just be staring at his tattoos, or his stupidly perfect face, or, actually, maybe all she sees is a brown boy and some imaginary danger—but Grace feels vulnerable on his behalf.

  Jes pinches the back of her arm and grins at her. “Hey, there, lil Aleks,” he says. “Calm down.”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “I’m not sure I know what a duvet is, to be honest.”

  “Comforter,” Grace explains. “Quilt.” She pulls the list Kenyon sent her up on her phone. “I need sheets and pillowcases and pillows, I guess. Lamps? Storage boxes. A trash can. A couch.”

  “You’re gonna ship all of that to Ohio?”

  “We’ll probably get some of it there. Ugh. Maybe we should get all of it there?”

  The elevator doors open. The walls of the store are stacked to the industrial ceiling with stuff. They’re in a basement, so the light is sickly and fluorescent and the air tastes dank and stale. After the bright, clear morning outside, the whole place seems exceptionally dead.

  Jes says, “Look, you don’t have to decide anything today, right? This can just be, like, an exploratory mission.”

  Grace is dubious. “Feels like a waste of time.”

  “What’s the fun of time if you don’t waste it once in a while?”

  “I feel like there’s got to be a fault in your logic,” Grace says. She finds them a cart and hands it off to Jes to push. “Just in case,” she says.

  She’s used to shopping with her mother, who’s always on a deadline and a budget, or her girlfriends, who get hypnotized by possibility and are content to spend hours wandering through the racks and touching everything, like objects have power and they can absorb it with their fingertips. Jes shops like he’s in a dream, trying to figure out the rules of the world he’s found himself in. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that what they’re doing needs to have a point.

  A girl brushes by them in one of the aisles, and this time, Grace sees her see Jes: the split second when she thinks, I know that person, and then the moment at which because he’s famous clicks into place. She doesn’t say anything, though, and when they run into her again a few aisles up, Grace wants to ignore it as a coincidence.

  “Should we—” she starts.

  Jes doesn’t seem to have noticed. “Maybe we’ll buy little things today,” he says. “Do you think these glow-in-the-dark stars are too childish? ’Cause I feel like they’d be sort of cool.”

  She doesn’t want to take him out of the moment. “I like them,” she says. “A little childish, but, you know, sometimes that is cool?”

  “Subversive cool,” Jes says. “I like it.”

  Grace doesn’t know exactly when the volume of people in the store starts to swell. She isn’t sure until it’s already too late: it’s not like anyone is following them, exactly; there are just more people than there were when they walked in. And then more. And they all keep looking.

  “Jes,” she says.

  “I know.”

  He looks down at what they’ve assembled in the cart. “Probably time to abandon this project. You can come back for the stuff. Do you think you can remember the excellent choices we made? There’s a lot of important aesthetic here.”

  Grace laughs.

  A trio of girls walks up to them. They’re twelve, maybe, colt-legged in tiny shorts. “Hi!” one says.

  “Hi,” Jes says. “How are you guys?”

  It’s the wrong move. As soon as people see that the invisible perimeter around them has been breached, they start to surge forward, converging on Jes and Grace. It doesn’t take two minutes before they’re surrounded completely.

  The crowd seems to all talk at once.

  “Jes,” a girl says. “Jes, please, please, can you sign my shirt?”

  “And mine,” another one adds.

  “Can you call my friend? She’s not here, she’s home, sick, and she would love— It would change—”

  “My daughter is your biggest—”

  “Are you Grace? Are you guys dating?”

  “Can I take a picture with you?”

  “My name is—”

  “I just want—”

  From the center of the circle, there doesn’t seem to be an end to them: hopeful voices, hopeful faces, hands out, wanting and needing. Asking. Begging.

  Demanding.

  “I can’t,” Jes keeps saying. He tries to direct it to each girl in turn. “I can’t, I’m sorry, I’m just here shopping with Grace, my friend, Grace, she’s my friend, I can’t, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”

  They don’t believe him, or maybe they don’t care. He’s here, suddenly, in the middle of their ordinary lives, close enough to touch. He and Grace have stopped trying to walk. Their shopping cart has disappeared. The boldest girl reaches out to hug him. “Please don’t,” Jes says. The crowd presses in and in. “Please—”

  “Please!” A security guard is trying to move in from the outside, but there are a hundred people, probably, and just the one of him. They’re not doing a damn thing unless they want to, and all they want right now is to touch Jes. Some of them are trying to take pictures or record video simultaneously. One girl, distracted, trips. Grace wants to reach out to her, to help her up, but she’s afraid of losing her own footing, or worse, losing Jes.

  He’s pulled out his phone to call Aleks. “You can ream me out in the car,” he says. “We need you to come get us out of here.”

  She can see on his face how much it costs him to say it.

  The security guard has made his way through the crowd. He looks at Jes and Grace for a second, as if to say, Really? Just you? But it couldn’t be anyone else. They’re the ones looking dazed and helpless while everyone else asks, reaches, cries, and takes photo after photo after photo. “C’mon,” he says.

  Jes knows this dance by heart. He ducks under the guard’s arm. Grace does the same a half second later. Then they press out and out, and it seems like they’re walking forever, like the world is just girls desperate for Jes, for Grace, for some kind of proof that the person they’ve loved all these years is real. That, given half a chance, he could love them back just as fervently, one to one.

  Grace wants to tell each of them: I know, I know, I know, and also, I have no idea how I got so lucky. Why it ended up being me who gets to know him, even a little bit.

  The guard locks them in the employee break room until Jes’s team can show up to extract them.

  Jes sits at the table with his head in his hands.

  Grace lets him.

  An employee comes in and asks for an autograph for his daughters.


  Jes turns himself on like he’s flicking a switch. There he is again, bright as ever. “Of course,” he says. “Yes. What are their names?”

  —

  As soon as the real security shows up, time starts to move differently. Two enormous men clear a path for them to walk, while a third takes Jes and a fourth one is in charge of Grace. They shield them from the paparazzi on the street and herd them into a waiting SUV. Jes hands the keys to the rental off to someone who goes to retrieve it from the rooftop parking lot.

  It seems to be over in an instant. Before Grace knows what’s happening, she’s outside and in the car and they’re pulling away and it’s just barely noon and still lovely out, not nearly as hot as it’s been the last few days. She finds her sunglasses and puts them on even though the window tint on the car makes it too dark to see much, anyway. She’s like a little kid pretending that as long as she’s blind, she’s invisible, too.

  It isn’t until they get to Jes’s hotel that anyone thinks about what to do with her. “Oh,” the guard who helped her in says as she starts to slide out of the car. “I guess—should we—” He turns to Aleks for instructions.

  “We’ll take you home,” he says.

  From behind him, somewhere in the forest of oversized bodies who’ve sprung up around them, Jes says, “You can stay if you want.”

  Grace waits until she can find him, and see him. “Only if you want company,” she says.

  Jes’s nod is barely there, but she recognizes the way his mouth curls and twists on itself, like he’s trying to keep something sad or angry from spilling out of it.

  “I’m staying,” she says.

  Aleks doesn’t look happy about it, but of course there’s nothing he can do.

  He’s on Jes’s payroll, after all. They all are.

  Housekeeping must have just come through the suite. His clothes have been folded and stacked in piles, books organized, and his laptop is sitting, closed, in the center of the neatly made bed. Somehow, even though it’s full of his stuff, the room still feels sterile, like a stage set to be photographed: a fantasy of a room, instead of a space made to sit and sleep and talk in.

  Grace decides to keep it light and neutral. “Is this where you usually stay?” she asks.

  “We have to change it up,” Jes says. “But, yeah, this one is in the rotation. Easy to book out a floor or two. They don’t make such a big deal over us. They’re used to, like, diplomats and things. Different kind of security, apparently. A room service dude once told me Fever Dream had nothing on the sultan of Brunei.”

  He shoves one of the clothing stacks off of a couch so that he can sit.

  “I wish they would just yell at me,” he says.

  “You could…tell them that?”

  “Yeah. Great. So then yelling at me is part of their job, too. It’s just—the consequences never fall on my head, you know? Now Aleks is gonna get yelled at for letting me sneak out. We probably interrupted their lunch hour or something. And don’t tell me I should just behave myself,” Jes says, even though Grace wasn’t about to say that at all. “I’ve tried. I’ve tried so hard. And I can never be good enough, so fuck it, right? I just want—and it never— I don’t know what to do anymore.”

  Grace has been standing in the center of the room, at a loss. Finally, she folds herself down right next to him, even though there’s plenty of room to sit farther away on the couch.

  He told her she could stay this morning, and again just now. It seems impossible after the crowd at the Bed Bath & Beyond, but he seems more isolated than ever.

  She snakes an arm around his shoulders, careful. He leans his head against her, and the weight of it gives them both permission to relax. Grace feels their bodies turning toward each other, her legs curling in his lap, his arm coming across her knees. They form a little unit, a circuit completed. No one can see inside.

  “You make me feel safe,” Jes whispers. “Is that stupid?”

  “Corny,” Grace says.

  “How do I make you feel?” he asks.

  Grace knows the answer in her bones before she finds the words for it. Cara and Lianne really did see right through her. Even when she thought she was mad at him, she still liked him. She likes him, not Jes Holloway but Jes right here: Jes by the pool, and in this room, and sending her texts late at night. She likes the way he drums an idle, rhythmless rat-a-tat-tat against her kneecap while she thinks about it. She likes the way his hair feels when she lets one hand come up to tangle in it, stroking his head.

  His eyes flutter closed. She likes that he’s as confused and messed up as she is, and that he can tell her about it, like he isn’t ashamed, just exhausted.

  She likes the way their bodies fit together, warm and easy. I’m right here.

  “You make me feel like things are possible,” Grace says. “That anything might happen.”

  “Anything at all,” Jes says wryly. She can tell that he’s thinking about all of those girls back there.

  “I don’t know who I am, or what I’m doing,” Grace says. “But I like you. I like that you like me. It makes me feel like—maybe I’m doing okay. If you trust me, and I trust you.”

  “Who’s supposed to be in charge of this thing?” Jes asks. His smile is wide and glorious, and Grace sees him looking at her mouth and thinks: Oh.

  “We both are,” Grace says. “No one is.”

  And then he kisses her.

  She knew it was coming, kind of, but that doesn’t stop her from making a small, startled noise against his mouth. Jes stills like he’s going to stop but there’s no time for that, and anyway, Grace is tired of talking. Instead, she leans into the space he’s pulled back from, and he’s there, lush and soft and gentle, clinging to her, kissing her, opening up against her, lips and tongue, a flash of the sharp of his teeth.

  The hand that was on her knee finds her hip, and then the skin of her back and the ladder of her ribs. If Grace had thought about it, she would have imagined being self-conscious, after all the women he’s kissed before, the girls he’s touched whose bones are so much closer to the skin. In the moment, though, she can’t bring herself to think of anything at all except the dizzy sweetness of what’s happening, and how it keeps happening, doesn’t stop, doesn’t stop.

  At first Grace doesn’t register what it means that her mother’s car is already in the garage when one of Fever Dream’s drivers drops her off at home. She’s still trying to tether herself back to her body, to feel something that isn’t the ghost of Jes’s palms, warm and then electric on her skin.

  They didn’t talk about what they were doing or what it meant. He kissed her until she had to curl away from him, breathless, to keep herself from asking for what she wanted, which was everything.

  “I should—” she said. “Go. I should go.”

  “If you want to.”

  “I should,” she said again, and then kissed him anyway, helpless.

  He gave himself up so easily against her. It made it too tempting to imagine that she could do the same thing, just let the drag of sensation carry them both, and that she would wash up on shore, the same as ever, when it was over.

  But Grace could see, even when she didn’t want to, that Jes knows how to navigate these waters because he’s had so much practice in them. Now she keeps shivering with the aftershocks of sensation, the memory of his mouth on hers, but she’s glad she found a way to leave when she did.

  This way, there’s so much left to look forward to.

  Inside the house her mother is sitting at the kitchen table, staring at nothing. Her phone is next to her, faceup, black and blank.

  “What do you want me to do with this, Grace?” she asks.

  “I don’t—”

  “You aren’t even trying to hide it,” her mother says. “Going out with him again in public. Letting everyone take your picture. Like there was no way I could find out. As if we didn’t even live on the same planet!”

  “That’s not what— We weren’t supposed to
be photographed.”

  “Oh, I see, so you were trying to get away with it. I guess I’ll take comfort in that, then. That at least you don’t think I’m stupid.”

  “Of course I don’t think you’re stupid!”

  Grace recognizes the stony face her mother has on as one she wears herself sometimes. It takes her by surprise every time they resemble each other. Her mother seems to be made of stuff that’s too hard to flake off and find itself in anyone else.

  “Then tell me what you are thinking, when you go out with this boy you barely know and get your face plastered all over the internet and lie to me about it. Tell me what’s going on with you.”

  “I like him,” Grace says. It’s probably the worst way to explain it, but she’s still raw from earlier, scraped down to the softest parts of herself by unexpected pleasure. “It’s not complicated, Mom. It’s not about you—or my face being—or anything. It’s about Jes.”

  His name is such a funny little syllable in her mouth.

  “Then why can’t you tell me about it?”

  “When did you ask?”

  The question echoes faintly in the empty house. They both wait for the sound to settle.

  “I didn’t know,” her mother says. “You keep secrets. I thought maybe if I didn’t pry, you would tell me some.”

  “Well. I didn’t know that. I couldn’t have known that, Mom.”

  Her mother nods. She picks up her phone and then puts it down again. That’s a gesture Grace recognizes, too. The search for escape. The decision not to pursue it.

  “I didn’t tell you at first because I didn’t know what was happening,” Grace says. “I wasn’t sure enough to talk about it. When they take pictures like that—it makes it look like things are happening so much faster than they are. We still barely know each other. And then you found out in the worst way, and I was grounded. So what was I going to say: Please unground me so that I can keep hanging out with the guy you grounded me over?”

  “The photographs today were in the mall, they said. Bed Bath & Beyond.”

  “We were shopping for college. Like you’ve been telling me to.”