Grace and the Fever

by Zan Romanoff

  “No, it’s fine. I’m fine.”

  “Not so tired after all, then?”

  Grace lets a slow smile spread across her face. She lets herself pretend that wanting him is the only thing that matters. “Nah.”

  “Then you won’t mind me keeping both of us up,” Jes says. He puts down the drink, finally, and reaches for her.

  They both end up drifting off on top of the covers. When Grace wakes up, it’s dark and Jes is sprawled out next to her. An uncapped bottle is sitting on the nightstand. He closed the windows, so the air in the room smells trapped and stale, like tobacco and tequila and sweat, like uneven sleep and bad dreams, the kind whose shadow casts a pall over your whole day. It’s just about four in the morning. Grace blinks at the clock and thinks, Oh shit, I forgot to call my mom.

  She picks her way gingerly out of bed and over to where she left her purse, but her phone’s not in it. Right, of course. She went to get the car and Cara and Lianne grabbed their stuff back from security; she forgot to get hers from them after. She debates just going back to bed and letting it sit until the morning, but she worries about her mom worrying. So she props the door to the room and goes out into the hall.

  Grace knocks on the door of one of the neighboring rooms once, twice, three times. “Go away,” a man’s voice calls. Oh, right, she thinks. Raj said he was going to bed. She tries the room on the other side of hers and Jes’s, where, up close, she can hear noise spilling out, even through the thick door, even this late.

  George answers. Her eyes are bloodshot and her pupils are pinpricks. Her skin gleams with sweat that darkens the hair at her temples and her brow. “Are Cara and Lianne here?” Grace asks. “I just, um, I need my phone.”

  “Cara’s with Land in the other room,” George says. She sways back so that Grace can see the chaos behind her, which makes Jes’s room look comparatively well kept. “Lianne’s asleep on the couch. And these idiots were just kicking me out.”

  Solly looks up from where he and Raj have been sitting, kissing, on the bed.

  “Shift someone across the hall,” he says. “Or curl up with them. They won’t mind.”

  “Don’t disturb your security team, please. They need their sleep, too,” Raj says. “They’re tired.”

  “I’m tired,” Solly says. “Everyone’s—”

  “Tired from watching your unruly ass all day long,” Raj says, grinning.

  “I’ll show you unruly,” Solly says, and goes back to kissing him.

  Grace is glad everyone else is too messed up to pay any attention to her, standing there stunned, seeing something she genuinely can’t believe is real. Solly is gay, Solly is kissing someone, and it’s not Land. Land is apparently kissing her best friend, a couple of hundred feet from here.

  The wild, mechanical part of her mind knows how to make this work: Solly is ready to come out and Land isn’t, probably. They broke up over it. They’re brokenhearted over it. They’re consoling themselves and making each other jealous, driving each other crazy on purpose. Solly is kissing Raj and thinking of Land. Land is kissing Cara and thinking of Sol.

  It’s just—it seems sad, all of a sudden, to think that way. It makes her feel sick to imagine Cara as just some body, a character caught up in their drama. She would be so hurt if she knew how Grace was seeing her: like a pawn who has to be moved.

  Grace keeps trying to rearrange the facts and keeps coming up with the only thing she knows for sure: Solly and Raj kissing, Land and Cara gone. She can tell herself a lot of stories about what that means, but for once, she doesn’t want to.

  She’s tired, finally, of searching for evidence of things not seen.

  “Are you going to look for it?”

  “What?”

  “Your phone,” George says impatiently.

  It isn’t in Lianne’s purse, and Cara’s is with her. Grace takes Lianne’s phone and texts her mother: Hey it’s Grace! Sorry, I think I lost my phone but I’m fine, with Cara and Lianne. Having a sleepover. Will be back in the morning. Love you.

  —

  “What?” Jes asks when Grace climbs into bed.

  “Nothing,” she says. “Go back to sleep.”

  “Mmm.” He rolls over closer and curls her up against him. The warmth of his body feels suffocating in the close air. He’s so sleepy that he barely knows who she is. Just that she’s there.

  “How long have Raj and Solly been together?” she whispers.

  “Dunno. A while. You aren’t supposed to know that.” Jes’s eyes are still closed, but a smile is starting around the corners of his mouth. “Are you getting me into more trouble?”

  “No,” Grace says. She wants desperately to put some distance between her and him, but every time she moves, he moves with her. “I just saw something. They weren’t trying to hide it.”

  “Bad boys,” Jes grumbles. “Always bad at the plan.”

  “Yeah? What’s the plan?”

  “You know the plan.”

  Jes is fully awake now. He props himself up on one elbow and leans over Grace, pressing a palm against her hip bone with intent. It feels good, which is awful. Grace wants to be alone somewhere and let numbness take her over, just wash her out to sea. It seems cruel that her body can want anything when her brain is too overwhelmed to process. It seems impossible that she hasn’t just evaporated into nothingness. Because if they were never real—never, not at all—

  “Tell me,” she says.

  “Kinky,” Jes says. He laughs. He kisses her mouth. “You know the whole thing with him and Land. Right?”

  “Yeah.” The whole thing.

  Jes kisses the hinge of her jaw, and the side of her throat.

  “That’s the plan,” he says. “Girls love the idea of them together. They love the idea that they have to protect us.” He kisses her collarbone. Grace is numb, now, under his hands. “But it only works if the boys play along, and I think everyone’s getting tired of the game. Everyone’s getting tired of everything.” He sighs against her shoulder.

  This is where Grace is supposed to say, That sounds hard. That sounds lonely. I’m so sorry. She’s supposed to kiss him back.

  “Don’t you feel bad for them?” she asks. “All those—the girls. Who are getting lied to. Who. You know. Believe.”

  “We’ve never lied,” Jes says. He tries to start kissing her, really kissing her. Grace turns her face away.

  “Whoa,” he says. “Okay. Jeez.” Jeez, like he’s twelve. Media training, Grace thinks automatically. All the words they’ve taught themselves not to say. “Sorry. I know how it sounds, I guess. It’s not like it was our master plan or anything. It was just that these rumors started on their own, and there was nothing we could do about them. At a certain point we thought, Okay. May as well find a way to use them. And once Sol came out to us—how better to hide it, you know? You get a bunch of people screaming about a conspiracy, and everyone else will go out of their way to ignore that anything about it might be true.” He rubs his head. “Ugh, I think my hangover just kicked in.”

  Grace doesn’t say anything.

  “We try to give our fans everything they want,” Jes says. He kisses her forehead. “And I promise, I haven’t ever lied to you.”

  Of course he didn’t. All he said was, Land and Solly is different. Or the same thing, I don’t know. Grace was so desperate to hear a confirmation that she made one up for herself.

  “I’m just so tired,” Grace says. She does turn away, now, all the way away, and tucks her knees into her chest, wraps her arms around them, curving her whole body to contain the sucking black hole of hurt at the center of it. Jes is impossibly warm at her back. How can he still feel so real when so many of the things he meant to her were lies?

  “Mmmm,” Jes says. “Tired, yeah. Okay.” He kisses the back of her neck. He’s still curled around her when he drifts off to sleep.

  Tumblr text post

  the-lollypopguild.tumblr.com

  July 22, 5:30 am PDT

  Hey guys.


  It’s not Gigi.

  And Gigi’s not who you think she is.

  Last night I was the l u c k i e s t g i r l i n t h e w o r l d to be invited to Fever Dream’s special surprise show, which was [diamond emoji twinkling forever] [my dead body being atomized and ascending to heaven in a cloud of glory and dust because perfection, actual perfection]. [Kelsey aka belongwithfevers wrote an actual thing; you can read it here.]

  They took our phones when we entered the venue and gave them back when we left. I was the last person out of the theater, and there were only a handful of phones sitting with security. One of them had a pretty distinctive case.

  I’ve been suspicious of Grace ever since she showed up randomly earlier this summer in the middle of so much FD drama. At first I suspected she was a Rackwell molegirl, and then I thought maybe she was on Pixel’s team.

  And you know what? I wasn’t wrong about her being a plant.

  Or about Lolly being so. Totally. Real.

  This is IT guys. The coming out is HERE.

  So what I found from the phone, first, is that Grace Thomas has been running this blog—right here!—as Gigi since 2013. She’s an old-school Lolly believer—you can go back through the archives. (When Grace was first introduced into the band’s world earlier this summer, Gigi made a simultaneous post about how we needed to believe the boys in the face of rumors and nonsense. Because she ALREADY KNEW what we are so close to finding out.)

  She’s also an old friend of Jes’s, according to numerous press reports.

  So why did she end up back in their lives? Why her, and why now?

  Let’s look at the timeline. When the boys started canceling shows this summer, fandom tried to be supportive and understanding. They’ve been on a punishing tour for years, and they’ve given us so much. So we couldn’t understand why management would keep pushing them to perform when there wasn’t any fan anger being directed their way about slowing down.

  My theory then—and now—is that they were just trying to keep FD away from Pixel and Grain, which, as a PR company, ACTUALLY UNDERSTANDS THAT COMING OUT WOULD BE GOOD FOR THEIR CAREERS. Plus P&G’s founder is an OUT GAY MAN. (Bless u, Vincent Price! Blessings on yr camel, blessings on yr house.)

  So the boys land in LA and launch a sneak attack: they bring Grace into the picture to force the issue of going on hiatus. R&H couldn’t afford to screw up their one functioning fake relationship and so they let the hiatus happen to save Jowena.

  Then things start to get interesting.

  Here’s a screenshot of an email from Pixel and Grain—FD’s PR group—to Grace from July 9.

  Hi Grace! Thanks for your help with everything this week. We’re excited to have you collaborating with P&G on the Fever Dream Team.

  It was sent two days after these pix were taken of her and Jes in Bed Bath & Beyond.

  At the time I had a lot of questions about how that happened. Jes is superfamous. He has been for a while. He’s not stupid; he doesn’t go out without security unless he has a reason.

  And in this case, the reason was to cause a small riot so we wouldn’t see what was going on with the rest of our boys. Grace and Jes have been pulling focus all summer, and I’m pretty sure it’s because there are contract negotiations happening to free the band from Elliptical and R*ck.

  Why now, though? Here’s the thing: Land and Solly aren’t just coming out—they’re almost definitely planning on getting married when they do.

  The day that Jes and Grace were pulling that stunt, we got this post from Diana, who was in a Beverly Hills jewelry store watching Raj pick up a resized ring. I had theorized that Solly asked him to do it, again to deflect attention and create plausible deniability. It could also have just been that he wanted a ring for his own reasons. But now that we KNOW that a LONGTIME ’SHIPPER, EMPLOYED BY THEIR PR team, was out BEGGING FOR ATTENTION AT THE SAME DAMN TIME—doesn’t that change the story?

  Grace and Jes knew each other growing up. So when P&G went looking for something to complete the summer’s redemption arc, of course they picked her. She was willing to pretend to date Jes, and pull the band apart, knowing that at the end of it they would come back better than ever, with these shows, and then with the biggest and best surprise: that Land and Solly would be together forever.

  And she was trying to tell us.

  Because you guys. THESE PICTURES? SHE WAS THE ONE WHO LEAKED THEM.

  I mean. What the hell else is there to say?

  Obviously I jacked her blog, but it seemed like the only way to really give you guys proof. I know you can fake screenshots; I promise all of these are real. Below are all the other pix and texts I could pull from her phone. (Numbers are blacked out for security reasons, duh.)

  Gigi. Grace. We know who you are now. You may as well just go ahead and tell us the whole, beautiful truth :)

  Grace wakes again to someone knocking on the door. When she opens it, Cara and Lianne are standing in the hallway, zombie-eyed. Their hair is like lightning. Cara still has the line of a pillow crease, soft and red, on one cheek.

  Aleks is standing behind them.

  “You have to go,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Rick called. He said to get Gigi and her friends out of here. He said you would—”

  Grace doesn’t hear the rest of the sentence. Finding out about Land and Solly felt like getting sucked into a tornado, a roaring, buffeting whirlwind that turned and tumbled her over and over. Hearing someone say Gigi out loud to her feels like getting sucker-punched: it happens swiftly, completely, and leaves her breathless. “I don’t—” Grace says desperately. “I have no idea—”

  Lianne makes a noise that sounds like it’s supposed to be a word, and hands Grace the phone she’s holding. Safari is already open to a list of search results for Gigi, Fever Dream.

  It’s not her blog. Not at first, anyway. The whole first page is articles about her, and her blog. Her blog, and her real name.

  Someone found out.

  And told.

  Grace hands the phone back to Lianne.

  Aleks says, “I’ll escort you downstairs.”

  “You don’t have to,” Grace tells him. “I’m not going to be any trouble.”

  She wants to go back and curl up with Jes again, anesthetizing herself against reality with the smell of his skin and the heaviness of his sleep. Or at least to wake him and explain. To keep him in that room until everything makes sense to both of them again. He told lies; so did she.

  But could she say that in a way he would listen to? Could she talk long enough that he would hear her?

  When she was done, would he want to listen anymore?

  Better to leave him here. The last thing he’ll remember is kissing her at some indistinct hour between night and morning, like a fragment of a dream: something sweetly fleeting, a sensation that will dull and blur and spread, coloring the rest of his memories, making the good ones stay fresh just a little bit longer.

  Aleks lets her go back in to collect her purse and put on her shoes. In the hallway she pauses just long enough to hear the door fall shut behind her. Click.

  “I’m sorry,” she tells her friends. “I’ll drive us home.”

  Cara naps in the car. Grace envies the ease with which she just turns herself off.

  “I’m sorry,” Grace says to Lianne.

  “Sorry about what?”

  “Everything?”

  Her body is on autopilot. The freeway miles fly by so fast that the whole world is reduced to a blue-gray blur of cement and the slant of yellow sunlight that’s coming in through the windshield.

  “Oh, well, in that case.”

  Grace doesn’t want to know, but she has to. “How much did you read?” she asks. “What did you—”

  “Enough,” Lianne says.

  Grace wants to ask, Enough for what? but she knows the answer. Enough to realize what kind of freak you are. And how much you lied. Everything you never said.

  “I’m sorr
y,” she says again.

  “Don’t be,” Lianne says.

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t do that, either.”

  “Do what?”

  “Just close yourself off like that. Shut yourself up. You just, like, dissolve, Grace, the second something happens, the minute it seems like—”

  “It’s been kind of an intense morning for me!” Grace says. Lianne is right, she was bottling herself up, and the second she stops doing that, she can feel that she’s going to explode. “I don’t know what you know, or think you know, but, like, I have been in love with that band for years, Lianne. I was obsessed with them. They were my life! And I was wrong about them, who they were, which doesn’t even matter, because now they fucking hate me! Now they know what a mess I am! And now you know it, too, so excuse me if I don’t—”

  “Pull the car over,” Lianne says.

  “Don’t tell me what to do!”

  “Grace, you’re shaking. This isn’t safe. Pull the car over.”

  Grace doesn’t say anything, but she signals, and veers them one lane to the right, and then another. They coast off the freeway somewhere in Studio City, and she pulls them into a gas station parking lot. As soon as she turns the car off, the tremors that started in Grace’s hands take over her whole body. She puts her forehead against the steering wheel and tries to regain some control.

  “Cara,” Lianne says. “Open your eyes.”

  Silence.

  “Cara!”

  “What?” Cara asks.

  “You don’t get to skip this.”

  “I told you, we don’t need to talk about it,” Grace says.

  “I do,” Lianne says. “Cara does, even if she doesn’t want to admit it. What the fuck is going on with you?”

  “I had a secret Fever Dream blog,” Grace says. “I had a secret Fever Dream life. And now it’s not a secret anymore.”

  “That’s why you disappeared?” Lianne asks.

  “I didn’t go anywhere.”

  “You did.”

  “This summer? Because, as I recall, you guys were the ones who stopped inviting me to parties.”