Fame Adjacent

by Sarah Skilton

  * * *

  Inside the Cracker Barrel, we ordered two coffees, two ice waters, and a bucket of fries to share. Thom dipped his in mayonnaise; I went for ketchup. You know, for health reasons. A vegetable.

  A TV in the upper corner was halfway through an ad for Kelly’s new TV show in which she played a single mom / undercover narc with Chicago PD.

  Thom saw me watching and glanced up at it. “Is that…?”

  “Yep.” I tore my eyes away. “I’m sorry I misled you about the money,” I said, head down. “We’ll keep track of every expense, save all the receipts, and I’ll mail you a check the instant I get home. I’m good for it, I swear.”

  “That’s nice and everything, but the problem is I don’t have my ATM or credit card, either.”

  His words hovered in the air, refusing to land, because if they landed I might have to acknowledge what that meant, and how screwed we were.

  “Did you leave your wallet at Prevail!?” I asked pleasantly. That wasn’t a big deal. “We have time to go back…”

  “I have my wallet but I don’t have access to my money. My parents are in charge of my finances.”

  “Why?”

  “I asked them to be. I transferred my bank accounts to their names so they could pay for whatever Sammy needed while I was gone.”

  That seemed extreme to me, but okay. “So we’ll stop at a bank and fill out a form and have it revert back to you. Right?”

  “It’s a local credit union in Greenburgh. All three of us need to be there in person to sign off on it. Also my idea.” He swallowed. “I didn’t trust myself.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “And you don’t need to. All you need to know is that I don’t have credit cards or much cash.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense. None of what you’re saying makes sense.”

  “Online gambling.” He sounded impatient. “Poker. Okay? That’s—that was my addiction.” He took a deep breath, started again. “If I had access to money, I’d have kept losing it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Now you know my deep dark secret.”

  I had no idea what to say, so I went with the first thing that came to mind. “I don’t think any less of you,” I offered awkwardly.

  “You will,” he responded. “Give it time.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You want to know the worst part? I blamed Sammy for it. ‘No sense going to sleep if I’ll be up again when he has a nightmare. Gotta kill the time somehow.’ As though it was a little boy’s fault his dad’s such a—”

  I held my hand up. “Stop. The important thing is you took steps to fix the situation, and you got help. I know I sound cliché, but I also happen to believe what I’m saying, and I want to talk about it more, but right now we have to figure out what we’re going to do.”

  “Yeah. You’re right.” He took a long pull off his coffee. Dug his fingers roughly through his hair in what I now recognized as a tic when he was upset with himself. Hence the reason it had always, always been messy at Prevail!

  “How on earth were you planning to get home?” I asked as gently as I could.

  He set his coffee mug down. “My per diems. I worked it out when I first arrived.” He borrowed a pen from our waitress and jotted down figures on his napkin.

  Expenses

  Per diem: 10 bucks a day x 42 days = $420

  Woodbury, Minnesota, to Greenburgh, New York = 1,207 miles

  Fill up the car 4 times, at $2.60/gallon, with 18.5 gallons/tank = $192

  Three nights at a hotel that’s not sketchy = $150

  Food = $60

  Total = $402

  Left over = $18

  Wow. Eighteen entire dollars for emergencies.

  In the blinding light of the diner his eyes were a translucent blue, and I knew I should proceed with caution given the vulnerabilities he’d exposed, but the situation seemed to call for a little tough love.

  “Twenty dollars a day for food might not be enough. Even if it was just you. And gas is up to three bucks in most places.”

  He dismissed me. “It would’ve worked. I would’ve been fine.”

  “The good news is, with me along to help drive, we can shift the columns around, and we only need one night in a hotel.”

  He pointed at me with a french fry. “This from the person who threw away ten bucks in under a minute.”

  “It wasn’t part of the budget, it was from my quarters. From now on we’ll take austerity measures.”

  “I’m not dumpster diving.”

  On a separate napkin, I scribbled down new figures.

  “Tonight, we’ll share a room with twin beds, in a ‘non-sketchy’ Econolodge or anyplace that takes cash.”

  “Places that take cash are sketchy, and it probably won’t have a pool,” he pointed out.

  We’d officially swapped roles. He had fallen off the cliff’s edge and I was holding out a rope for him to grab onto. “You can’t go one night without it?”

  “Exercise is part of my treatment. And it helps me sleep.”

  “Do some jumping jacks, buckaroo.”

  Motel 6 = $39/night x 1 night = $39

  Gas = $222

  Food = $100

  Total = $361

  Left over = $59

  “Boom.” I handed him my napkin. “Problem solved. ‘Why thank you, Holly, I’m so glad you’re along for the trip.’ With a day to spare before the anniversary.”

  He scrutinized my napkin. “I guess it’s the only plan we’ve got.”

  He opened the map app on his phone.

  The fry I was eating tumbled out of my mouth as my world shrank to a single directive. Screen. Screen. Screen.

  “Let’s aim for seven more hours today—you can take over for all of it, or part of it, and that should get us to Pennsylvania,” he suggested.

  “That’s far for one day. I figured we’d stop at more of a halfway point.”

  My eyes remained locked on his phone. SCREEN.

  “Can I just…? Please?” I gasped, reaching for it again.

  Calmly, Thom looked between me and his phone, enjoying the power trip.

  “What time is it?” he asked at last.

  What did that have to do with anything? “Food o’clock,” I snapped. “I don’t know. Two.”

  “Okay, then yes. You may have it for fifteen minutes.”

  Very suspicious turnaround. “Really? Why? Is there no reception, or something?”

  “Reception’s fine, and middle of the day is perfect.”

  “Says who? Lisa? The person who ‘can’t find her ass with both hands’?”

  He offered his phone to me, and my sense of unease went up another notch. I had figured he’d say, Not until we reach the hotel tonight.

  Something else gave me pause: I’d gone three weeks without internet use, my longest stretch since high school. Did I want to give in? How long could I go, if I had to?

  On the other hand, what if something else changed regarding the time or location of the anniversary? I couldn’t be caught unaware again.

  “How about last thing before bed?” I suggested. “Make me earn it?”

  A lazy smile wrapped around his face. “How would you earn it?”

  I blushed. “That’s not what I—”

  “Middle of the day. Take it or leave it.” His confident blustering wasn’t enough to convince me.

  “Why is that the best time?”

  “If you check email last thing before bed, it’ll ruin your sleep. You’ll be thinking about how to respond, or worse, you’ll decide to stay up and answer the damn things, when you’re already tired and not thinking straight. Ditto if you check first thing in the morning: You won’t be able to concentrate on any other tasks if something in your email, newsfeed, or social media upsets you or requires attention you don’t have time to give it. Not to mention if you check in the morning, you’ll be pissed off if the emails you sent at midnight haven’t been answered, which is absurd beca
use you only sent them six hours ago when the rest of the world was sleeping. The best method is to check once, in the middle of the day when you can respond, so you don’t run into either of those problems.”

  It made sense. Lecture-mode Thom was extremely persuasive, and I was painfully familiar with the pattern he’d described: When I didn’t get the email responses I was waiting for or hoping for, I ended up refreshing my inbox every few minutes, because—and this was the killer, the root of it all—it could technically arrive any second; therefore each time it didn’t, I grew more anxious and angry. It was a terrible way to live, handcuffed to one’s phone and feeling microbursts of rage in minute intervals, all day, every day.

  It occurred to me that snail mail came once a day when I was a kid, in the middle of the day no less, and never on Sundays, which freed us to get on with our lives during the in-between spaces. Now there were no in-between spaces.

  “Think of the places you truly need to go and don’t deviate,” Thom instructed me before typing in his code to unlock the phone. “That’s the main thing: need. Not want. And remember, the clock is ticking.” He set his iPhone’s countdown timer to fifteen minutes and slid it to me across the table like it was an envelope filled with cash.

  Since he was watching, I pretended to take his advice and opened my email.

  Of the 1,728 emails that had accumulated in the past three weeks, 97 percent were spam. It was possible people respected my journey and to prove it resisted emailing while I “recovered,” but that seemed unlikely. Almost no one from my day-to-day life knew where I was or why. Mostly my inbox overflowed with urgent messages from the Democrats, as well as a children’s charity group I’d donated to a few years back.

  I looked up. Thom watched me curiously.

  “What?” I said.

  “Your eyes are dilated. You look like an anime character.”

  “Just trying to take it all in,” I hedged. Really I was thinking, This is what I missed? This is what I was so excited about? “Go ahead and add a minute to your timer to make up for the interruption.”

  “No can do—”

  “Do not call me ‘buckaroo.’”

  “How you spend the fifteen minutes is up to you. Not my fault I’m more interesting than your inbox.”

  “May I surf in private, please?” I asked, crisp as a Granny Smith apple.

  He smiled and walked to the counter for a coffee refill.

  I took care of logistics first. Shot off a rapid, typo-filled email to Renee explaining the situation and giving her Thom’s number. “Call us once you’re Stateside.” I signed off, “xoxoxo.”

  While his back was turned, I headed to Twitter. I didn’t usually go there but it felt good delaying my visit to Reddit. I liked to think I’d developed self-control.

  Hashtag JJJ trended nationwide. Curious, and not a little ill, I clicked the hashtag and pulled up the top mentions. Sure enough, it was that J. J.

  My J. J.

  He would be on The Jerry Levine Show tonight promoting the twenty-fifth anniversary of Diego and the Lion’s Den. J. J.’s fifty-seven million tweeps papered the web with gifs and memes of J. J. and Jerry (hence the third J), who were bros on and off camera.

  It would probably be a laugh riot.

  Unless, for example, you were me.

  Fuck it. I closed out the window and logged in to Reddit. What a relief to be back on friendly, familiar ground. Adrenaline, and a sense of belonging, coursed through me. Ahhhh.

  The mods could have closed out my thread for lack of activity, but there it was—pulsing enticingly, right where I left it. Memories from the past few weeks—staying up all hours, guzzling iced coffees, ignoring phone calls, emails, texts, people, hitting refresh refresh refresh—engulfed me. The first several times I’d posted, fear and excitement had jolted through my veins. The novelty of speaking about a time long past, a time I’d suppressed and ignored and fought down for so many years, was a joyful rebellion. Now I felt mostly dread.

  Should I have stayed at Prevail! and finished the program?

  No, I couldn’t stay, because then they’d get away with it.

  It wasn’t enough to have strangers read my Reddit posts and enjoy the behind-the-scenes info, because the intended audience, all five of them, were oblivious as ever, unaware of and incurious about my perspective on our shared history. It was way past time they were confronted with it. With me. All five of them in the same room—I’d never get that chance again.

  Leaving was the right move.

  Still, I couldn’t help feeling as though I watched myself from a distance, hovering outside my body. Nothing seemed real; not my actions, not my posts, and not the responses. There were never enough.

  My existential dread (and its corresponding lack of movement) activated Thom’s auto lock. Shit, what was his password?

  7269, I typed (“SAMY”).

  The phone buzzed angrily.

  7266, I typed (“SAMM”).

  Bzzz.

  One more chance before it shut me down. If that happened I’d be forced to admit I tried to crack his code.

  7263, I typed (“SAME”—that is, Sam-e), not expecting it to work.

  But it did.

  The implications were delicious.

  When Thom fell asleep tonight, I’d have unfettered access for hours. All my revelations and misgivings about Reddit from seconds ago took a swan dive out the window.

  Working hard to keep the evil smirk off my face, I opened a new tab and headed to the Daily Denizen website. And there it was, confirmation of InstaMom’s countdown clock: 2 days, 5 hours, 29 minutes, and 3 seconds until the Diego and the Lion’s Den reunion in NYC. Mesmerized, I watched the seconds tick down. My stomach dropped with each movement.

  “Whatcha readin’?” Thom appeared behind me so suddenly I almost dropped his phone. Can you imagine if I’d broken it?

  I covered the screen with my hand. “Nothing.”

  His wolfish grin came out. “This is your thirty-second warning.”

  Jesus! Had it already been fourteen and a half minutes? I frantically toggled back to my inbox. Nothing new except for an email I’d missed during my first perusal.

  Hello Holly,

  I hope this message finds you well. I’m an assistant editor at Jinx Books, an imprint of PopTV, which is part of YouTube Red. I don’t know if you’re familiar with our series Stars: Behind the Spotlight, but it’s rated #2 in the 18-34-year-old demo, in the category of “online music shows about the 1990s.”

  Anyway, I’m writing because I’ve been reading your Reddit AMA with keen interest. Everyone here loves what you have to say and thinks your voice is fabulous. We’d like to make you an offer to publish the entire thread, and we’d ask you to write about 10,000 additional words of never-before-seen information, plus a foreword (perhaps someone from your past could write that? Wink wink). We’re a small e-publisher so we can’t offer much, but the possibilities for royalties are limitless. Our standard contract is $150 up front, and $150 once it goes live. Let’s talk!

  Best,

  Diane

  I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Had I been offered a book deal (…of sorts)? Frazzled and confused, I stared at the words until—BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP.

  I nearly jumped out of my skin, and glared at Thom. “That’s your alarm? The one the phone comes with?”

  “It’s alarming,” Thom said defensively. “As it should be.”

  “It sounds like a nuclear reactor’s about to blow. ‘Core meltdown. Core meltdown. Please evacuate,’” I said in a breathy, AI death-voice.

  “How come female robots are always sexy?”

  I tried not to smile. (Sexy, huh?)

  He leaned his hands on his palms and spoke in a gossipy tone. “Where’d you go? What’d you do?”

  “I froze up at first. I had no idea what to do.”

  His normal voice came back, low and sympathetic. “My first time back online, I was so overwhelmed by the amount of work emails I’d misse
d, it paralyzed me.”

  “I got a strange email from a publishing company.”

  “Oh?”

  “I should go to rehab more often,” I joked. “I went in with no job, and I came out with a book offer.”

  “A book offer?” he sputtered.

  “This small online publisher—I guess they have a show, or something, too, about music and the ’nineties. Anyway, they want to reprint my Reddit thread.”

  “I’m not sure what that would look like.”

  “I’m not sure, either.” I pulled up the email and showed it to him. He scanned it quickly. “Doesn’t fifteen hundred seem a little low?” he asked.

  I closed my eyes briefly, regretting the conversation. No matter how many times I’m humiliated, I never get better at it. “Not fifteen hundred. One hundred. And fifty.” I paused. “Dollars.”

  He whistled.

  “When I wrote for Dying magazine, I made six fifty per article.”

  “This would be a significant downgrade, then.”

  “There shouldn’t be anything lower than Dying, though. This shouldn’t even be possible.”

  “Tell them to screw off.”

  He was right. Jinx’s offer was insulting.

  “Besides, don’t you want to tell your own stories?” Thom asked.

  “Yeah, definitely.”

  That settled it.

  And yet. And yet.

  “Permission to delete?” I asked Thom.

  He slid the phone back into my palm. “Granted. But no funny stuff.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  Was it rude to not respond at all? Would a quick “Thanks but no thanks” suffice?

  “You’re worth so much more than that,” Thom said firmly, as though he’d heard my misgivings. “You know that, right?”

  He might think that, but the fact remained $150 was the only offer on the table.