We were coming down the end of the last windy street and entering Stonebury. Here, all the streetlights were on, and I had to blink a few times as my eyes adjusted. When I looked at Jack, his face was spotted with yellow stars.
I didn’t know the words to “The Sun in Summer”, but I knew the melody. It was sad and sweet at the same time.
“I’m hungry.” Jack pulled the Grand Am—which also seemed to be lacking a muffler—into the Rite Aid parking lot and cut the engine. I looked around quickly. There was an arcade next door where a lot of the kids I knew hung out. All I needed was for Adam or Amber to come around the corner. “Want anything?”
“Oh, no. I’m okay. Actually, I really need to be getting home…”
Jack studied me carefully. He nodded slightly, as if accepting something. Then he started the engine. “No worries. I’ll drop you off and come back.”
I looked down into my lap. “Oh. Okay. Thanks.”
“No worries,” he said again, but his voice had an edge to it now. When his music started playing, he unplugged the chord from the lighter and it stopped. We drove the rest of the way to my neighborhood in silence. I directed him to my house, where he pulled into the driveway. Things were weird between us now, and he was obviously waiting for me to get out of his car. Why wasn’t I getting out?
I kept on rubbing the back of my neck. “I really like that song. About your family vacations. It was really good.”
Jack turned to look at me. He reached out and touched my neck with his fingers, putting a warm pressure on the spot that hurt. It seemed, in that second, with our faces so close together and his fingers on my skin, that maybe his touch could make everything that was wrong with me better.
“You’re not going to call your insurance company, are you?” He was teasing me but acting serious, talking in a low voice, whispering almost. His fingers worked the back of my neck, and I couldn’t speak, so I just shook my head. “Feel better?”
“Yes,” I said softly. “I had fun tonight. I wish I had more nights like this.”
Jack lifted an eyebrow. “You need more fun? I can totally help with that.”
“Really?”
“Count on me to show you a good time. Though, next time, I promise I’ll leave the proper distance between the car in front of me.”
He released me and I bit my lip on a sigh. Next time, I thought.
“Have a good night, Natalie.”
“You, too.” I shut the car door and the body of it shook. “Sorry,” I said through the window. He smiled, lifting his hand in a wave. I hurried through the rain into the house. It was dark in the foyer, but I heard the television coming from inside the den. I stood by the window, peering out through the curtains, watching his car back out of my driveway and into the road, then, finally, driving out of sight. It wasn’t until later, when I was in bed and couldn’t sleep, that I was able to identify the feeling I couldn’t place before. I was happy.
Chapter Six
The night before my interview with Jack, I couldn’t sleep. Memories played in my head like scenes from a movie I watched long ago. I knew the scenes were real, but I didn’t recognize myself as the girl in them. There had been so many versions of myself then, and maybe more now. What had happened to the girl obsessed over the pictures she took for the Brown University Herald, determined to make a career for herself? Or the one who knew it was wrong to be friends with mean people, let alone agree to be a bridesmaid in the wedding of one of them? And what about the girl who fell in love with the guy she wasn’t supposed to? Even though it had lasted only a short time, that girl had felt thrilled by life—not like it was just something to slog through, day by day. Now look at me. I knew I could never get back what I’d had with Jack, but maybe I’d have the chance, somehow, to make amends.
The outward version of myself that met Gillian at my apartment the next morning was simply a girl who worked at a newspaper, preparing for an assignment. I gave Gillian a quick tour, helping her maneuver around all of Sarah’s boxes that were stacked in the foyer and cheerfully recalling the flea market where I’d gotten the cool hurricane lamp that sat on an end table in the living room. The whole while, a hurricane spun in my head. Should I tell her? What would I say? Would she believe me? What is he going to say? Will he be mad that I showed up? And the words that hit me hardest, Jack’s last—I don’t want to see you again—threatened to make me forget this whole thing, fake an illness, and send Gillian in alone.
“What’s going on with all the boxes?” Gillian asked, jerking me back into the moment.
I forced my worries from my head. I wasn’t going to back out now. I was doing this. “My roommate’s ditching me to move in with her boyfriend.”
“Really? I’m actually looking for a new place. My lease runs out at the end of July.”
I perked up. “Would you be interested?”
“I’d love to be closer to work.” She drove in from Rockport every day.
“That would be really great!” I tried to tone it down so as not to appear completely desperate. “I mean, I definitely need a roommate.”
“Yeah, no kidding. Why didn’t anyone tell me that getting a degree in journalism would be about as lucrative as my high school job at Honey Farms?”
I laughed. “Let me show you where your room would be.”
She poked her head inside Sarah’s room to see as much as she could with all the boxes. “Bigger than my room right now. I’m sold.” We fist-bumped. I probably could have happy-danced. It felt like the first good thing that had happened to me in months.
And as quickly as it had come, the good feeling was replaced with a slow rise of anxiety when she checked the time on her phone. “We should probably get going.”
“Yeah. You ready?”
She shook her head.
I wasn’t, either, but we had no choice. We made the walk out of the complex and through town. Everything seemed normal, a typical Wednesday afternoon in Stonebury, until we arrived at the high school parking lot.
It was as if one of those Beatles concerts you see on TV had come to life and was happening on the quad. Scores of people—girls and women, mostly—were waiting outside. A couple of them held up homemade signs: marry me jack and you’re good enough for me! Up toward the front, a black sedan with tinted windows was attempting to steer while the crowed converged right in front of it. It was the first time I’d ever seen human beings running toward a moving vehicle.
When we got closer, we saw some girls were crying. The passenger side window of the sedan rolled down a tad. “Move back from the vehicle, please,” a man said gruffly. No one listened.
We flashed our press passes to the security standing in front and they opened the doors for us. Another first—I was relived to be inside the school.
The doors opened again almost immediately, and a security guard ushered a man inside. The man looked at us, noticing the press badges hanging from our necks. He introduced himself as Ray Cohen, Jack’s manager.
Ray was short and extremely skinny with a goatee and the unmistakably orange glow of too much time in a tanning bed. He gave Gillian and me a suspicious glance, probably doubting that we were the journalists charged with this story. I straightened my shoulders and smoothed down my skirt. “I’m Natalie Jamison, the photographer. Gillian Butler will be doing the interview.”
Ray had very nice fingernails. Also, his eyebrows were perfectly manscaped. Apparently, the men of New York City took very good care of themselves. He turned to Gillian, and when he spoke, I recognized his voice as the man from inside the sedan. For such a small guy, he spoke with authority. “This is a list of questions you’re not allowed to ask.”
Gillian unfolded it.
Who did you write “Good Enough” about?
Is your album autobiographical?
Who are you dating now?
Boxers or briefs?
Gillian folded the paper back up, looking at me and then at Ray. “Um. Okay. What can I ask him about?”
<
br /> “The music. His influences, his creative process.”
Gillian smiled. “Oh, okay…”
“This is fine,” I assured him. “We’ll be nothing but professional.”
Ray nodded. “Okay then. Let’s get started.”
He walked toward the gym, expecting us to follow him. Gillian clutched my arm. “We told Hilary we’d get the scoop,” she hissed into my ear.
“You heard him. They want to focus on the music.” Thank you, God.
“This is ridiculous. If I wanted to be a serious journalist, I wouldn’t be working at the Gazette, now would I?”
Ray turned with raised eyebrows, and we picked up our pace. A second later, I was standing in the gymnasium, my least favorite place in the world. They had set up tables and chairs and there was, oddly, a handful of basketballs in the middle of the court. Also hanging around were two girls dressed in the old Stonebury High School cheerleading uniform. The same purple and silver, the same ugly seagull plastered across their chests. The sight of it was enough to give me a stomachache.
I willed the thought away and concentrated on setting up my equipment. It still didn’t seem real. There was no way Jack was going to come strolling into the gymnasium. It would have to be someone who looked like him, that was all…an alternate dimension doppelganger. That seemed more likely to happen than for me to actually be in the same room with him.
Until I saw him.
He hardly made a noise. He didn’t walk in with an entourage or anyone at all. He wore dark jeans and sunglasses, and at first, I wasn’t sure if it was really him until I saw Ray break away from Gillian and hurry over. And then, when I saw him walking toward me with a guitar strapped around his shoulder, I knew. My breath caught, but Ray was starting to talk to me, and I needed to act like a real, professional photographer.
“All right, we’re going to take some pictures first.” I nodded as if I was listening. Beside him, Jack watched me behind his sunglasses. Did he know it was me? And why was he wearing sunglasses inside?
There were a couple of handlers in charge of setting up the pictures exactly how they wanted them. I followed them down the gym to a section of the bleachers where they were going to have him sit with his guitar. They spoke to me as if I just happened to be the girl with a camera. But then again, they probably were used to working with extremely famous people, not some hack from a local paper nobody read. They would set it all up. All I’d have to do was point and shoot. They didn’t seem to care about my credentials. Which was fine. Maybe I could slip out and Gillian could take a few with her iPhone…
I was standing there, suddenly sweating profusely under the lights, when Jack took his sunglasses off and handed them to Ray. And then, in the second before a handler began to position him, he looked at me, and I knew he knew exactly who I was.
The handlers wanted the pictures taken in very specific shots. They had him pose in the bleachers strumming his guitar, then standing up against the gym walls, his hands in his pockets and the basketballs strewn around him on the floor. They had him stand in the middle of the gym with his guitar over his shoulder, the cheerleaders standing behind him. That shot freaked me out a little.
When it was finally over, Jack walked out of the gym without saying a word. I heard Ray on his phone explaining to someone that the interview was for the local paper only, an exclusive, and then he led Gillian over to one of the tables. “He went to wash his face. All the makeup makes him edgy. Anyone want coffee?” Gillian and I shook our heads. We’d already agreed to say no if we were asked. Neither of us trusted Gillian around Jack with a hot beverage.
We sat there for a couple of minutes, and I wondered if it were actually possible to die of anticipation.
Ray’s cell phone rang and he stalked off. Gillian’s leg was twitching, hitting the table and making it shake. I put my hand on her thigh. “Please. Stop before I get sick.”
“I feel like I’m going to get sick,” she said. “All over the place. Holy shitballs. I don’t think I can—”
She stopped dead. I didn’t want to turn around. Was this really happening?
The two of us stood up at the same time. Jack was maybe fifty feet away. Forty, thirty…
“Hi,” I said.
I hadn’t planned on smiling, but I couldn’t help it. So many things had changed about him. His hair, which I knew from the photographs, and the rest of him, which was still slim but no longer so skinny. He wasn’t a boy any more.
“Natalie,” he said.
So he wasn’t going to pretend he didn’t know me.
I flushed as his eyes scanned me from top to bottom. What, exactly, did he see? He used to tell me I was the hottest girl in school. But school was over. He was a celebrity, with access to celebrities, who were the popular girls in school times about a billion. Yesterday on Celebrity Weekly’s website there was a picture of him with a hugely famous pop star on his label, a bombshell who was regularly photographed wearing “bras” made out of cake. My old cheerleading uniform was minor league. He had ascended to an entirely new level.
I could tell nothing from his expression or the even tone of his voice when he spoke next. “Well, this is a surprise.”
“I—I know.”
I glanced at Gillian, who was staring at us with such an incredulous expression it would have been funny if I were in any shape to laugh. But I was frozen, unable to speak or even think of what to say. It was Gillian who had to shake me out of it—literally, her grip so tight on my upper arm it would probably leave a mark—and I collected myself. “It’s been a really long time.”
“That it has.” He sounded like he was talking to his accountant. When he smiled, it reminded me of his pictures in Celebrity Weekly and MuchMusic, posed and composed. He’d obviously gotten used to talking with the press.
“I’m Gillian.” She stuck out her hand. It hadn’t even occurred to me, an easy way to touch him. “It’s so nice to meet me. I mean, nice to meet you.” She added under her breath, “Oh God.”
“You, too.”
He sat at the table and I took the seat across from him. Gillian sat at the end, between the two of us. “Thanks so much for meeting with me today. I just have a few questions. This will be painless, I promise.”
Her voice was shaky, but I was impressed by how well she was keeping it together.
Jack smiled. “The best things are never painless.”
Gillian laughed way too loudly, and it echoed throughout the gym. I wondered, though, if it had been meant as a joke. I glanced at him, but his gaze was fixed on Gillian. I swallowed, remembering how it felt to be looked at by him. It was such a simple thing, but it used to make me feel as if no other part of me existed except my heart.
“Okay, let’s see, first question. So how does it feel to be back in your hometown?”
He rubbed the side of his face, his classic move when he felt uncomfortable. When he spoke, I couldn’t stop looking at his lips. “It’s been great. My parents don’t live here anymore, so there’s really no reason for me to come back, but it’s always nice to get back to your roots, you know, where everything started. If I hadn’t grown up here, then maybe I never would’ve written this album, and I wouldn’t be here, sitting with you now.”
“Right,” Gillian said. “It’s almost like fate, I guess, if you believe in that sort of thing. So…” She flipped through her notebook, getting flustered. “Sorry, most of the questions I had I found out I wasn’t supposed to ask you.”
“Really? What were they?”
She glanced up at me, panic in her eyes, and I could feel Jack looking at me, too. I shifted my gaze to him and forced myself to speak. “We wanted to know if you’d tell your hometown paper who you were singing about. It’s all anyone around here wants to know.”
Jack nodded, pressing his fingers to his lips as he considered my question. His lips. Yeah, they were the same as I remembered, and all I could do in that second was to remember what it felt like when he kissed me—as if I’d dis
covered the reason lips were invented—the way no one else ever had. Sitting here like this, asking him questions like he were a stranger, I would have thought it would seem as if everything between us had happened to somebody else. But it didn’t. I was drawn to him in the same way I had been before, and it made even less sense now.
“It’s okay,” I said before he could answer. I could hear my voice shaking. “We know you’ve said a thousand times before that you’re not singing about anyone in particular. But we had to ask…for our editor.”
“Ah, for your editor.”
He was looking at me for way too long without speaking. Gillian’s eyebrows were lost somewhere in her bangs. Out of all the awkward moments I’d had in this gymnasium over the years, this had topped every last one of them.
“There are some people in your life,” Jack said, “who have an impact on you, you know? Some people who you just connect with. But other things get in the way. Other people, maybe, the way they see us, or the way we see ourselves. And that connection you created isn’t enough.”
We hadn’t broken eye contact, and I’d forgotten that Gillian was there until she cleared her throat. “Oh…yes. That’s true. I don’t know what that had to do with the question, but okay…” She fumbled through more papers. The tip of her nose had gone completely red. She and Reid blushed in the same exact way.
Jack turned to her and smiled. “Any other questions?”
“Um, a couple more. Sorry, I can’t read my own handwriting. Um, how about, uh, boxers or briefs?”
Jack laughed. A real laugh this time. He scooted in closer to her, as if getting ready to tell her a secret. “Neither.”
That was the Jack I remembered.
I started to cry.
I pushed back the chair quickly, and it screeched on the gym floor—a horrible sound—and I got out of there. Gillian called my name, but I didn’t turn around. I rushed through the gym doors. Ray was out in the lobby, but he was on his phone and didn’t notice me. A couple security guards turned around and watched as I passed. I cut through the cafeteria and came out by the science wing. We used to have our Science Club meetings down here, in room 207, the chemistry lab. I did experiments and always get the right answer. I thought I knew everything.
The Mean Girl Apologies Page 8
