Fame Adjacent

by Sarah Skilton

  He hit the call button and I stood next to him so we could both talk.

  “Braden, hey, it’s Thom, we met yesterday?”

  “Sure man, what’s up?”

  “We need a ride to the train station,” I said. “And money for tickets.”

  Silence on the other end. “How much?”

  “A hundred bucks. Do you like camping?”

  22

  An hour later, Braden had come to our rescue, and he was willing to speed, although that may have had more to do with the fact that he was late for Econ 101 than wanting to be a hero. Nevertheless, he was happy to accept the camping gear as payment, and handed us five well-used $20 bills for our train tickets.

  When Braden pulled up to the station, we shouted our thanks, and he barely waited for us to exit before he hit the gas.

  The train rumbled into view, so we raced inside. We shoved our wrinkled, compromised, sad twenties through the ticket window to the cashier.

  “You’re short five dollars,” she said.

  “No, it should be exactly right, we calculated it—”

  “After taxes, you’re five dollars short.”

  “That’s all we have,” I said. “Please.”

  “Ma’am,” said the ticket taker. “You have to let the next person come up. There’s an ATM outside. If you hurry, you can still make it.”

  The train had arrived. A rush of movement whirled around us as passengers stood from their benches and moved to the door.

  The next train wouldn’t be here for three hours.

  “Oh, come on,” I groaned, to no one in particular.

  “Next!”

  “Wonderful,” I muttered to Thom as we reconvened in the corner. “I’ve been ma’am’d and ATM’d and we’re totally screwed.” I lowered my voice and glanced around for eavesdroppers. “Should we hop on anyway, and hope the guy forgets to check our tickets?”

  “While I’ve often fantasized about the hobo life, it’s only twelve thirty,” he pointed out. “If we catch the three thirty, we’ll get there by six, with two hours to spare.”

  “How do we get tickets for the three thirty? We’re still five short.”

  “Easy. Go forth and busk.” He sat on a vacated bench, propped his arms behind his head, and stretched his legs out. “Chop, chop.”

  “Mmm, no.”

  He grinned. “Your call. I’ll be waiting right here, silently rooting for you.” He closed his eyes.

  I wanted to wipe the smirk off his face. The easiest way was through a kiss. A bitey one.

  “Ow,” he complained, touching his lip. “Here, I’ll get you started.”

  He found a pen in his bag, and wrote thickly on an abandoned newspaper sheet: YOUTUBE STAR NEEDS TO GET TO NEW YORK!

  It was the most asshole thing I’d ever done.

  Sensing the ticket-taker would not approve my own version of an ATM, I moved my “show” outside the station to the parking lot. I flipped Thom’s Yankees cap upside down and set it on the ground to hold coins. Unfortunately, Friday-afternoon traffic to New York was not as robust as the morning commute would have been, so there was a lot of downtime before the next passengers trickled in from the park ’n’ ride.

  Having pegged my latent tap-dancing skills as the most pathetic and therefore the most pity-inducing, I danced my heart out while intermittently singing a medley of ’90s songs. Maybe some fellow thirty-somethings would pay me for the nostalgia. Plus, it was on-brand for me.

  “Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls,” “Here’s Where the Story Ends,” “Hey Jealousy,” “Creep,” and “Wonderwall” got me up to four smackers.

  One more dollar and we’d be set. Tired and hungry, I shuffled back inside the station on aching feet and handed Thom the fruits of my labor.

  He stood, stretched, and rotated his neck. “Guess it’s up to me.”

  “Gee, thanks for participating,” I responded sarcastically. “By all means…”

  He flipped my newspaper sign over and scrawled across it in deep dark pen: PAY ME TO STOP.

  He stood on the bench, held the sign aloft like Lloyd Dobler with his stereo in Say Anything, took a deep breath, and…orated. I didn’t know if he was truly tone deaf, or pretending, but barely a verse into his half-shouted / half-“sung” version of “Bye Bye Miss American Pie,” we received the final dollar we required and nine beyond it, courtesy of an irritated Mr. Moneybags, whose crumpled-up tenner chucked at Thom’s face caused cheers to break out from everyone in the waiting area. Including the ticket-taker.

  Thom bowed, stretched out the bill, lifted it to the light as though making sure it wasn’t counterfeit, and kissed it.

  “Four measly bucks for an hour of tap-dancing,” I said. “No one appreciates the arts anymore.”

  “At least they appreciate peace and quiet.”

  We kissed and boarded the train, holding hands.

  Hoarse, relieved, and safe at last, we flung our weary bodies across from each other by one of the large window seats.

  I wanted to crawl into his lap and stay there forever, but we’d reached the limit of goodwill from the people around us.

  Safe, legally seated on the train, headed in the right direction, with an estimated travel time of two hours and forty-five minutes, I predicted we’d reach Grand Central Station at six thirty p.m. No more planning, no more worries.

  We made it.

  We’re almost there.

  “While you were singing for your supper, Renee sent about twenty texts,” Thom said. “You have some phone calls to return.”

  I clicked on the first number, which had a San Diego area code and looked vaguely familiar. I’d just registered who it belonged to when a gruff voice answered, “All-Star Management, Geoffrey speaking.”

  It was the direct line of my former talent rep. I hadn’t even had this number when I was a client, just the number for the front desk.

  “Hi, it’s Holly Danner returning your call.”

  “Danner! In all the years we worked together, why didn’t you tell me you were a master at self-promotion? We could’ve capitalized on this years ago. But no matter,” he backtracked, perhaps sensing insulting me was not the way to go. “No time like the present. The anniversary, the sudden interest in you, the timing couldn’t be more perfect. We’ve got four offers right now.”

  “Four offers on what?” My pulse jumped and my palms turned cold and sweaty. Every phone call I ever had with Geoffrey made me feel this way. I didn’t like it. The gut-churning sensation of money being offered and yanked away; the unrelenting knowledge my life could change in an instant, but more likely it would not. More likely it would continue indefinitely while my self-worth got chipped away.

  It had been a decade since we’d spoken, but the old anxiety fell on me like an illness.

  Geoffrey didn’t answer right away. I realized later it was because he felt insecure about his ability to handle what had occurred.

  “I know my expertise is mostly for above-the-line, on-camera work, but this is a type of performance, in a way, and I’m confident that with the assistance of our literary branch and our in-house counsel we’ll secure you the best possible deal.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “All the big publishing houses are interested in a tell-all. Memoir. Autobiography? I can never remember the difference. Anyway, they’re floating six figures.”

  “Ha! No, you must have misheard. The offer was for a hundred fifty dollars. From an e-publisher named Jinx. Call them back and tell them they might want to consider changing their name; it’s not exactly confidence-inducing. Besides, I turned them down already.”

  “Jinx? Never heard of them. This is the big time. Your rise to stardom this week was a perfectly calibrated submission. Your presence on Reddit, J. J. bringing you up on that talk show, all the magazine articles, trending on Twitter. You blew up this week.”

  “A memoir, though?” It was a strange word, and forming it in my mouth only made it more so. Me
m-wah.

  A chance to set the record straight.

  A stone dropped into my stomach, sending ripples across my insides.

  Didn’t part of me always know if I wanted to sell a book, all I had to do was make it nonfiction? If I wanted people to give a shit about my writing, all I had to do was write about real life. Write about me.

  And by me, of course I meant them.

  “And today, the video…” He sounded giddy.

  My blood shivered in my veins. “What video?” I demanded. “I’ve been traveling and haven’t had access to the internet.” My jailer/boyfriend/tentmate only lets me on fifteen minutes a day.

  “Okay, Danner, hang up and go on YouTube. There’s a video of you from last night at some stand-up club and it’s gone viral. People are responding to your self-deprecation. All that woe-is-me-I’m-a-loser stuff. Watch it and call me back.”

  I proceeded as told.

  Thom cocked his head to the side like a confused puppy.

  “I know you were joking about me being a YouTube star, but according to my phone call, the joke’s on us.”

  Seconds later we watched me in last night’s performance. The homemade video opened with a hobbled-together “montage” of my “life”: tap-dancing on Diego; then the snippet of J. J. mentioning me on Jerry Levine (BECAUSE APPARENLTY NOTHING HAPPENED TO ME DURING THE INTERVENING YEARS); then a clip of some ancient Jeopardy! episode heretofore unknown to me in which I was the answer (er, the question) and none of the contestants got it right; and lastly, my “nightclub act.”

  Guess who randomly showed up at my favorite happy hour place last night??? J. J. Randall’s ex-girlfriend! #PickupthephoneHolly, crowed the text. Then it cut to the MC introducing me by name. The audience’s laughter throughout my impromptu set sounded thinner and higher-pitched than I remembered it, but it might have been due to the phone’s tinny speakers.

  After I exited the stage to decent applause, the video jumped ahead to the winners being announced. There I was, presented with my second-place envelope and bouncing offstage, pleased.

  If it didn’t cut off soon, if the camera kept following me, it was going to see…yep, there it was. Me and Thom kissing.

  So that was on the internet.

  I shot a guilty look at Thom, whose expression was unreadable. The saving grace was that the club hallway was dark and there was no way to identify him from the video.

  It had fifty-four thousand thumbs-up and seventeen thousand thumbs-down. I was savvy enough not to read a single comment and instead hit redial to Geoffrey, who answered on the first ring.

  “I didn’t have to do a thing, the calls came to me,” he said by way of hello. “‘Where have you been hiding her?’ they all wondered.”

  If you didn’t have to do a thing, why should I be giving you a commission?

  I rewound our conversation in my head and paused on the term six figures.

  “Are we really talking that kind of money?” I asked.

  “If there’s a bidding war, it’ll go higher,” Geoffrey said casually.

  Higher? I thought in a daze. What was higher than six figures?

  Oh.

  A million.

  A million-dollar book deal.

  “First things first: Will you be at the anniversary tonight?”

  “Yes. I’m on my way there now.”

  “Excellent. Because I’ve been getting calls about that, too. I’ll let them know to expect you and to have wardrobe and makeup ready. Secondly, the interested parties have made it clear they want dirt. The show, your lives after the show, the highs and the lows and scandals, everything. Do you know where the bodies are buried?”

  “Geoffrey,” I replied. “I am the bodies.”

  “Great, I’ll let everyone know you’re willing to play ball. Finally, and it’s the most important, you have to announce that you’re writing a book tonight on national television. You’ll never have a bigger audience, and that’ll help us negotiate from a place of strength.”

  “Wait, hold on, I’m not sure if I—”

  “You’re not sure about what? Look, it’s a lot to take in, I understand. But the good news is, you have time. You have hours to think about it. And you’ll have four to six months to write it. Is that doable?”

  “Yeah, yeah…” I trailed off.

  “Excellent. We’ll talk Monday.”

  We clicked off.

  It seemed silly to return any other calls after that one. What could they possibly matter?

  Thom waited until I looked over. “What’s this about a memoir?”

  23

  “I thought you didn’t have any reps,” Thom said, after I explained Geoffrey’s call in detail. It wasn’t exactly the climactic response I was going for.

  “It’s been a decade, but he never officially broke things off. That’s how Hollywood works. They might stop returning your calls, but they never want a permanent severing in case something like this happens.”

  “So now he’s back, trying to make money off you, assuming you’ll be so grateful you’ll forget that he hasn’t spoken to you in years? Don’t you think that’s tacky?”

  “Nothing tacky about six figures,” I pointed out.

  “Ask for a two-book deal. A memoir and something fictional. Get them to agree to publish one of your other books first.”

  “That’s not how this works. If you demand too much, they’ll drop the whole thing.”

  He was silent, watching the Amish farmland move past us. A combine harvester and other farm equipment looked like something out of a storybook. The light hit our train window in such a way that I could see his reflection as well as the countryside, depending on how I focused my eyes.

  “I thought you already turned down a book offer,” he said.

  “That offer was insulting. Come on, you know that.”

  “So it wasn’t the tell-all you objected to. It was the price?”

  “Hey, I haven’t agreed to it yet. But if I’m going to do it, Geoffrey wants me to announce it tonight, onstage.”

  “That makes sense,” he said. “I guess.”

  “Thanks for the support,” I muttered.

  We looked at each other through the reflection in the window, as though from an impossible distance.

  “Without distractions, I could crank it out in two or three months I bet,” I said.

  “So let’s say you do it. You write some trashy tell-all.”

  “It doesn’t have to be trashy,” I muttered, but we both knew that was a lie.

  “What happens after that?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’ll never speak to you again.”

  “They don’t speak to me now!”

  “You might not care at the moment, but someday…”

  “Never thought I’d see you take their side.”

  “I don’t care what it’ll do to them. I care what it’ll do to you.”

  I crossed my arms. “What will it ‘do’ to me?”

  “It’ll make you think this is all you are.”

  “Pretty sure the universe has been telling me that for a while. May as well make money off it, right?”

  He motioned for me to sit next to him, and I did. His words came out gently, and I could tell they were carefully considered. I found myself leaning closer to hear him.

  “You could have written a book about them anytime during the last decade, but you didn’t. You chose not to. That should tell you something.”

  “I was dating J. J.” As if he needed any reminders.

  “Not the last five years you weren’t,” he retorted.

  “No one asked me to write a book before. Today they’re asking me.”

  “You’d be wasting your talents.”

  “What talents?” I roared.

  “Your sense of humor, your way of looking at the world, your ability to get an audience invested. You have great instincts, you’re smart, you’re creative. Write your book, not theirs.”

  I shook
my head, not listening. “I’ve never been less certain about what I’m supposed to be doing with my life than I am right now, and this saves me. I don’t understand why you don’t see that.”

  “You must have had a plan for yourself, some idea of what you wanted to do when you quit watching Lainey. What did you have in mind when you told your sister it was time for you now?” His words were soft, gentle, coaxing.

  My heart slammed in my chest and my throat went dry.

  Thom laced his fingers through mine, concerned. “Hey, you okay?”

  I took a slow, deep breath. “Can we talk about something else?”

  “I just…I hate seeing you sell yourself short.”

  “Noted,” I said. “And appreciated.” He wrapped his arm around my shoulders and we kissed. Nothing had been resolved—we were on opposite sides of the fence as far as the book was concerned—but kissing was a good start.

  “What should we talk about?” Thom asked.

  “First crush: Go.”

  “Winnie Cooper. You?”

  “Michael from For Better or For Worse.”

  He had to think about that for a second. “The comic strip?”

  “He was perfect and our love was pure,” I declared. “Every Sunday, in color.”

  I was reminded of Thom’s Calvin & Hobbes wrapping paper, the months he’d spent cutting out the strips for his friend. He was such a fundamentally decent person. No wonder he recoiled at my eagerness to sell out.

  “A hand-drawn boyfriend and a pop star. Pretty hard to live up to,” he muttered.

  His tone was fairly light, but it reminded me of the way he’d interrogated me at the start of our road trip, about whether I made guys “compete” for my affection. I didn’t have the energy to explain to him he needn’t fear a long-ago funny-pages character stealing my affection.

  I plunged ahead with a different topic. “What’s the worst movie Sammy became obsessed with?”

  “Land Before Time.”

  “What? That’s a good film.”

  “Ahh, you didn’t let me finish. Land Before Time: Journey of the Brave.”

  “Oh.” I nodded. “A sequel. They always prefer the subpar ones. Lainey was obsessed with Daniel Tiger. Did you ever see the episode where Mom Tiger is by herself for a split second and she sings a song about cleaning up—‘Clean up, pick up, put away, clean up every day’—and it’s not even the main song of the episode? She wasn’t imparting wisdom—this was her life. Something she sings to herself when she’s alone in the house. They circled around to it later in the season and expanded the song so it could be reconfigured as the main one everyone sings to the kids, but it started as a cry for help from a desperate woman.”