Fame Adjacent

by Sarah Skilton

  After they left, Lisa split us off into pairs.

  “Everyone has a piece of paper with questions on it. Alternate who asks and who answers, and when the timer goes off, move to your right.”

  “Wait. Is this speed dating?” asked Thom.

  Lisa’s jaw twitched. “Think of it as a chance to practice the art of conversation.”

  I was initially partnered with Twitter Fiend, who didn’t bother with any conversational pleasantries. He picked up the scratch paper and read aloud, “What’s your goal for treatment?”

  I stopped chewing on my fingernail and looked up. “To leave.”

  “It says you should be specific.”

  “To leave triumphantly,” I revised.

  Popaholic’s goal was to reduce her video watching to five minutes a day, and to watch videos in a wide range of topics instead of one. It seemed to me she was self-aware enough to turn the Good Ship Pimple Popper around. I had many, many questions for her, but they had to wait, because Wikipedia Avenger was next on my rotation. We swapped tales of poor eating habits and what we’d do differently once we left, such as eat meals at tables instead of snacking all day at our desks or in bed.

  Thom and I were paired last. He crumpled up his list and tossed it over his shoulder.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “My questions are better.” He cleared his throat. “Why’d you and J. J. Randall break up? Did he cheat on you?”

  What was wrong with him? “No! Next question.”

  I could tell he didn’t believe me, but it was true.

  “When you were on the show, did you get recognized a lot?”

  “Not really. It was on PBS but it didn’t air in all markets, and it was for kids who were younger than us, so we rarely met them. When we weren’t rehearsing or filming, we had to perform at parades and street fairs to hype the show. There was a fan club you could join if your parents donated money to the station. Every month you’d get a signed eight-by-ten glossy and a handwritten questionnaire that one of us had filled out.”

  “Please tell me you kept them.”

  I shook my head. “Sorry. I remember wandering into the subscriber phone bank once and seeing a huge stack of them in the recycling bin. Apparently, it wasn’t a hot-ticket item for the Masterpiece Theatre crowd.”

  He chuckled and I smiled back. I loved it when someone thought I was funny; it made me feel calm. Like I didn’t have to be a real person so long as I made other people laugh.

  “Have you done any other acting?” Thom asked.

  “Yes. Brace yourself. Are you ready?”

  He slapped his hands together. “So ready.”

  “Do you remember that show Fowl Play?”

  He cringed, which was the only reaction that made sense.

  “About the…parrot who…” He trailed off. “Don’t make me say it.”

  I giggled. “Come on, you can do it.”

  “The parrot who solved crimes,” he finished in a pained, embarrassed rush.

  “Ding-ding-ding, we have a winner.”

  “God, that show ran forever. You were on it?”

  “I was the daughter.”

  His eyes widened. “That’s huge.”

  “I know. I think it ran for ten years. But I was only in the unaired pilot; they recast my role for the series.”

  Thom frowned. “That sucks. I mean, I wasn’t exactly a fan of Fowl Play, but…”

  “Not even the creator was a fan of Fowl Play.”

  “That must have been frustrating.”

  He sounded like Lisa. According to them, my life was one big frustration.

  I waved him off. “It’s all right. It was a long time ago.”

  Every episode hinged on whether the damn bird overheard and mimicked exculpatory or incriminating evidence. They stole a page from Murphy Brown’s rotating cast of secretaries and hired a different guest star to play a quirky judge each week. (Some of the actors were former Murphy Brown secretaries.)

  “The kicker was I’d done this whole extravagant makeover at the producers’ request to book the role, but when they fired me, the person they got to replace me looked exactly the way I used to.”

  He covered his mouth and moaned, “Nooo.”

  “Honestly, it was for the best. I figured out there was no winning. The next time, I would’ve been too tall or too short or too skinny or too fat or too smart or too dumb, or too much of whatever it was they didn’t want. I couldn’t keep putting myself through that, so I quit show business for good.”

  Outside of Reddit, which I only started posting to a month ago, I hadn’t thought about those experiences in years. Thom seemed safe to talk to; he didn’t care about fame, as his blistering takedown of Instagram influencers made clear. But he seemed genuinely interested in me, which made it easier to open up.

  Of course, we were supposed to be alternating who asked and who answered. I’d been treating his questions like an interview for Star magazine instead of a conversation. I felt like a self-absorbed asshole.

  “How about you? What job do you go back to when this is over?” I asked.

  “I design skate parks,” he replied simply, proudly, letting his chair fall forward with a thunk. Even his chair-thunking was confident.

  “You don’t still ride a skateboard, do you?” I asked, my nose wrinkling. I pictured him wearing a suit and tie and holding a briefcase while he zigzagged around pedestrians on the sidewalk.

  One of his eyebrows went up. “I’m an adult, Holly.”

  “Weekend Warrior, huh?”

  “No, really. I hung up my wheels a long time ago.”

  “And this is in…Ohio, did you say?” I mentally high-fived myself for remembering, because it proved I wasn’t a frenzied narcissist.

  “I grew up in Ohio, but I’m on the East Coast now.”

  “Small-town Ohio, or like, Cincinnati?”

  “Small town that gradually became a hellhole.” His mouth twitched.

  “Like, the Rust Belt where ‘real Americans’ live,” I joked.

  “No, I mean a hellhole.”

  I sighed and continued my attempt to pry information out of him, because we couldn’t go back to me until I’d put forth a reasonable effort. “And you design the skate park structures? Like an architect?”

  “Urban planner. Upstate New York.”

  His reticence to talk about himself surprised me. Every other time we’d interacted, he couldn’t shut up.

  “I thought about applying to Cornell,” I offered. “It’s beautiful there. But I ended up at San Diego State. That’s one good thing that came out of Fowl Play: It paid for college.”

  “That’s cool.”

  “Until I dropped out,” I added sheepishly. No sense tricking him into thinking he chatted with an educated person. Not that I thought he’d care, necessarily, but it seemed important to me that he knew.

  “Why’d you drop out?”

  “My older sister needed me.”

  “What for?”

  “She had a nasty bout of postpartum depression and her husband was serving overseas. I moved in with her so I could help out with the baby.”

  “That was thoughtful of you.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was being sardonic or genuine.

  Out of habit I reached in my back pocket for my iPhone so I could show him pictures of Lainey, but obviously, my phone wasn’t there. Thom used this momentary distraction to dig further.

  “What’s the real reason you left college?”

  Jesus Christ with this guy. “What do you mean?”

  “Your sister could have gotten outside help. She’s not your responsibility.”

  “I wanted to help.”

  He tilted his chair back on its hind legs, looked at me, and waited.

  I had nowhere to be and nothing better to do, so I waited, too.

  “What if you’d said no?” Thom pressed me.

  “I couldn’t have said no!”

  “It’s a mental exercise.
”

  “Okay, okay, it wasn’t the only reason. There might have been other factors.”

  He smirked. “I knew it. Such as…?”

  “Midway through sophomore year I realized that even if I worked my ass off, got a 4.0, graduated summa cum laude, earned a degree, got an upper-middle-class job, and basically did everything right for the rest of my life, it would still take me seventy years to make as much money as Melody did in a week from ‘Sock Me in the Face (Right Now).’”

  “Huh. I can see how that would be demoralizing.”

  I readjusted my ponytail. “Yeah.”

  He studied my face, his clear blue eyes penetrating mine. “I believe you.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.” I wiped my brow with exaggerated movements. “I wasn’t sure I’d be able to sleep again if Thom from Prevail! didn’t buy my sincerity.”

  “Thom from Prevail! is the best damn question-asker on the planet.”

  “You must be doing something right,” I admitted. “I never talk about them and here I am spilling my guts.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Most people have no idea I was in show business. It’s not something I tend to bring up.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t want it to be the only thing they think about when they’re with me.”

  “It’s not what I think about.”

  My stomach flipped. I’d always been fairly good at telling whether someone was interested in me, or interested in my connections. The easiest way to find out was to watch how they introduced me to others. Was I their friend Holly, or was I their friend Holly who was on that show with all those people, can you believe it? Thom’s questions had focused so tightly on my experiences and not those of the so-called Denizens (the Daily Denizen’s nickname for Diego alum) that it was clear which category he fell into.

  “I read somewhere that whatever age you are when you become famous is the age you stay the rest of your life,” he said. “It traps you because you never have a chance to mature beyond it.”

  A shrug was all I could offer him.

  “I’ve decided to interpret your shrug as full and total agreement.”

  I slapped him lightly on the arm.

  “What?” he laughed. “It props up my high school reunion theory.”

  “It’s not a—”

  “What do you do when you’re not on Reddit?”

  Smooth, Thom. At least he agreed a change of subject was in order.

  Was he undercover? Was he secretly a counselor going incognito so he could confront us about our personal lives when we least expected it? It would explain his persistence, and why he wouldn’t tell me his internet addiction; maybe he didn’t have one.

  “Freelance writer. I’d love to sell a book someday, but it’s hard to find the time.”

  “You’re here for six weeks with no distractions,” he pointed out. “Hundreds of hours of uninterrupted writing time, a king-size bed, meals prepared. It’s practically a writing retreat.”

  “Pshaw. Have you met any writers? How am I supposed to write if I don’t have the internet to procrastinate with?”

  His lips quirked in a half smile. The little fang I noticed earlier made an appearance.

  “What kind of freelance?” He sounded genuinely curious.

  “Have you heard of Living magazine?”

  “Southern Living?”

  “Just Living. They usually have a vibrant fifty-five-year-old on the cover, smiling so hard you’d swear there’s a gun against her head that’s been Photoshopped out.”

  “I think I’ve seen it at the doctor’s.”

  “Well, I wrote for its chief competitor, Dying.”

  He sputtered. “That’s not a thing.”

  “Oh yes. It’s a niche market. Although technically everyone’s in it,” I finished spookily.

  “You’re totally messing with me right now.”

  “It’s real, I swear. Look it up next time you’re online.”

  “And waste my precious fifteen minutes?”

  “Holly Danner: Contributing Writer.”

  “What kind of articles would that even entail?”

  “Wills, power of attorney, Is Hospice Care Right for You?, plots. Riveting, I know.”

  He looked disturbed. “Plots? Like, how to fend them off, that sort of thing?”

  “Not plots against you. Cemetery plots. Final resting places. Paranoid much?”

  “Sorry,” he guffawed. “I didn’t—I couldn’t figure out if…”

  “Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. They fired me. I got fired by Dying magazine.”

  For the first time since it happened, the hilarity of the situation overcame me. How bad did things have to get, to be fired by Dying magazine? I guess he wondered the same thing because we couldn’t stop laughing. A tear of unhinged delight poked at my eye. We leaned toward each other and I even smacked the table, helplessly.

  “Ow,” I lamented.

  He pretended to check on my injury. My body didn’t understand he was joking, and little tendrils of joy shot up my arm from his touch as he examined my palm. Our faces scrunched up with more laughter and my ribs hurt. I couldn’t figure out why nobody had shushed us or glared at us yet. Come to think of it, the room was a little dark, too.

  That’s when I noticed we were alone. Group ended twenty minutes ago and everyone else had left. I thought about pointing it out to him, but stopped myself in time. If he hadn’t noticed, why ruin the rapport we had going? And if he had noticed but kept it to himself, all the better; that meant he was as protective of the bubble that had formed around us as I was. We were safe, here. Together.

  A comfortable silence settled between us as we caught our breath.

  “All right, let’s get into it.” I elbowed him gently. “Why are you here?”

  “I don’t want you to know,” he replied quietly.

  It was an abrupt end to our hysteria a moment before.

  “A hint, at least?”

  He shook his head.

  “I won’t judge you. Probably.” I winked, trying to draw him out.

  “That’s because you don’t know, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “Were you going to leave next week without telling me?”

  “Ideally.” He smiled, but it wasn’t the lazy, sunshine-and-mimosas smile from earlier. It was tense.

  He’d been going online for two weeks already, starting after the third week, which meant he had only one week to go.

  Who would I talk to after he left?

  He mimed finding his phone in his pocket. Pretended to swipe and unlock it, and widened his eyes. “Would you look at the time?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “I need to hit the pool before they close it for the night.”

  I blushed, remembering what he looked like in those butt-hugging red swim trunks. If I’d noticed his impressive physique, surely other people had, too. Depriving him from swimming was like depriving the population of the hospital at large.

  “Don’t let me keep you,” I said.

  Despite the downturn of the conversation at the end, I felt a vague, humming sense of contentment for the connection we’d made and what tomorrow might bring.

  12

  I had to wait a few days before we had the chance to speak again. With all his prep work for “returning to IRL” he missed a couple of group sessions. At midnight on the second day, I slunk out of my room carrying my backpack, to buy a snack from the vending machine.

  When she’d dropped me off, Renee gave me a Ziploc bag of quarters for precisely this purpose, but the choices were distinctly unappealing: ramen noodles, protein bars, white cheddar popcorn, and Sour Cream & Onion Tato Skins.

  I reluctantly punched in the code for the Tato Skins, which got stuck above the exit flap. Of course. I reared back and—

  “Don’t kick it,” said a voice. Startled, I whirled around, heart pounding.

  “Here, just sway it,” Thom told me, and wrapped his arms ar
ound the sides of the machine like they were dancing.

  “If you guys want to be alone, I can give you some privacy.”

  He pushed on the machine a few times until the Tato Skins fell through. He stooped and retrieved them.

  “Thanks. The sad part is, I don’t even want them. Whatever happened to plain Tato Skins? Original style. Those were so good. Why does everything have to have flavor dust all over it?”

  “Old Lady Danner has a lot of opinions. I think someone could use a subscription to Dying magazine.”

  I snorted. “What are you doing up?”

  “Couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d take a walk, and then I saw you about to lay down some violence.”

  We sat together at the plastic picnic table, passing the Tato Skins back and forth like a flask.

  “You want something else to eat?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  I reached down to open my Ziploc bag, and the movement knocked over my backpack. It fell off the picnic bench, and its contents scattered across the floor, including a rectangle of cardboard with puffy stickers strategically placed on it.

  Thom’s hand flew to his mouth and his eyes went big.

  “Shhh,” I begged, and looked around for witnesses.

  “It’s you! You’re the bandit!”

  “No, I—I found it—”

  “You’re the bandit!”

  “Shh! It just, it made me so mad.”

  “It made all of us mad, but we didn’t feel the need to steal it.”

  “You won’t tell, will you?”

  “Can I see it?”

  I pressed it into his palm. He examined it, stroking his thumb over the stickers. “Why did it make us so mad?” he wondered.

  “I don’t know. Maybe we were jealous he thought of it and we didn’t?”

  “And here we all thought you’d be more moral, somehow, or that you weren’t as fucked up as the rest of us,” he mused.

  I stuffed the stolen talisman in my pocket. “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve only had ‘poor internet habits’ for two months, right?”

  “Right…”

  “Most of us are going on years. Didn’t you think it was a little strange they let you in the program right away?”