Infamous

by Jenny Holiday

  “Yes.” Jesse refrained from babbling about how grateful he was. Matty didn’t seem like the kind of guy who appreciated empty words, and Jesse respected that.

  “Is there anything else I need to know about? Any other scandals brewing? If I don’t know about it, I can’t fix it.”

  Jesse hesitated. As much as he hated to do it, it was probably wise to lay all his cards on the table.

  “What?”

  “That . . . person in the photo from GossipTO . . .”

  “She going to talk to the press?” Matty did the dismissive waving thing again. “That’s no problem. We can spin that to our advantage.”

  “I don’t think so. It’s more that she . . . wasn’t a she.”

  Matty blinked rapidly.

  “But I don’t think he actually knew who I was,” Jesse continued quickly. “We didn’t really talk, and he didn’t say anything about recognizing me. I met him at—”

  “What are you saying, Jesse? You’re gay? Because that is not going to work with the brand I’m envisioning for you.”

  “Not gay. Bisexual. And not even that much.” It was true. Jesse thought of himself as mostly straight but . . . open to other possibilities. But he figured Matty probably didn’t care about shades of gray here.

  Matty got up and walked around to the front of his desk. Jesse stood, thinking he was being dismissed. Fuck. That picture really had ruined his life. He’d had the biggest agent in all of Canada almost locked down.

  “Sit.” Matty leaned back against the front of his desk, like he was a school principal.

  Jesse sat.

  “I don’t want to hear another word about this. From this point onward, you are not . . . bisexual.” Matty spat the word like it was a curse. “You are Jesse Jamison, the bad-boy rock star next door. What does that mean? You’re a fucking rock star. As I said, no one wants you to be a saint. You’re brilliant and prickly and you live large. Or rather, you give the appearance of living large. You do what you need to do to keep yourself clean enough that your head is in the game, but you are not to speak publicly about having a problem with booze or any of that. Jesse Jamison the recovering alcoholic is not what we’re going for here. When you appear at high-profile events, you have a fucking craft beer in your hand. You’re single now, and we’re going to use that. You are going to date casually. You are going to break a heart or two. All that’s the rock star part. But you have a soft side. You’re a little vulnerable. A sixteen-year-old girl can imagine reforming you. She can imagine you taking her to the fucking prom. Hell, I might make you actually do that. That’s the boy-next-door side.”

  Jesse could see where Matty was going with this. It made sense. Matty’s “brand,” as much as Jesse hated that word, picked up on Jesse’s natural tendencies and . . . magnified them.

  Well, some of his natural tendencies.

  “But one thing I need to be absolutely clear about is that both the rock star and the boy next door are straight. Those hearts you’re breaking are female hearts. Those teenagers fantasizing about you are female teenagers. If you don’t agree one hundred percent with this right now, we’re done.”

  Something pinged inside Jesse’s chest, like a pebble being dropped into an empty box. And for some stupid reason, he thought of Dr. Hunter Wyatt, the heartbroken pediatrician.

  Then he thought of the cover of Rolling Stone. He thought of what he’d been striving for his whole goddamn life.

  He stuck his hand out. “It’s a deal.”

  Two Years Later

  Move-ins were the worst.

  Hunter loved his kids, but what he loved even more was watching them leave. Saying goodbye meant they were well enough to go home. He took a deep breath outside the door of room 7-102, which would be the home for one Avery Flannigan, age eleven, for the next few months. Avery was a math whiz and an aspiring architect. She could play a pretty mean ukulele cover of any Taylor Swift song.

  She also had congenital heart failure.

  Hunter had gotten to know Avery when he’d started at the hospital a little over two years ago. She’d been in then to get a new drug regime going. Avery had an indomitable spirit that attracted everyone to her—staff and patients alike. When she’d been well enough, she’d been the one organizing floor talent shows and practical jokes. When she hadn’t been, she would still be cracking jokes when he came around, plying him for hospital gossip, even through her exhaustion.

  They’d thrown her a party the day she’d left.

  But now she was back. He’d always known she would be—more hospitalization had always been inevitable for Avery, as was an eventual transplant—but that didn’t make it any easier.

  He pushed open the door.

  “Hey, Avery, I told you not to show your face here again so soon!” he joked, wagging his finger.

  She turned from where she was hanging a poster on the wall of the small room.

  “Hi, Dr. W.!” She thought it was hilarious to call him “Dr. W.” because, as she’d pointed out, “Dr. W. contains more syllables than Dr. Wyatt, so it’s like the opposite of a nickname.” She taped the final corner of the poster, climbed down from the stool she’d been standing on, and high-fived him. “I couldn’t stay away from my favorite doc.”

  He shared a look with Avery’s mom. Her face reflected what was in his heart: fondness for Avery mixed with pain that she was back here so soon.

  Avery unfurled another poster. “I’m making the place more homey. Don’t tell Marilyn.” Marilyn was one of the nurses in the cardiac unit. She ran a tight ship, but she loved the kids as much as anyone, and Avery knew it. Avery enjoyed baiting her, in fact.

  “My lips are sealed,” he said, walking over to examine her décor. The one she was affixing to the wall was a reproduction of the architectural plans for the Eiffel Tower.

  “This is cool.” He moved on to examine the next one, which was . . .

  Jesse and the Joyride.

  Holy crap.

  He tapped the poster and said, “So what’s this?”

  “Only the best rock band of a generation.”

  “Wow,” he teased. “Pretty high praise. What about One Direction?” One Direction had been her favorite band last time around.

  She made a theatrical gagging noise, and said, “No way. One Direction was a phase. These guys are the best. Old-school rock and roll.”

  Hunter had to tamp down a grin at the notion of an eleven-year-old holding forth about “old-school” rock and roll. Avery sat on the edge of her bed and tilted her head as she examined the poster. He couldn’t help but notice how small her frame was—too small for her age, which was a side effect of her condition.

  “Also?” She sighed as she gazed at the poster. “Jesse Jamison is sooo hot.”

  She didn’t have to tell him that. He coughed. “Okay, kiddo. I’m not here officially yet. I just dropped in to see how you’re getting settled. I’ll be back in a couple hours.”

  Avery sighed again, but it was a completely different sigh than the dreamy one of a moment ago. It was resigned. It contained intelligence that no eleven-year-old should have.

  Dear Jesse,

  You probably won’t remember me, and I’ll be surprised if this email address still works, but here I go anyway.

  We met on a train from Montreal to Toronto two years ago. I’d recently been dumped, and you got dumped en route. (So maybe you will remember me. That doesn’t happen every day—to me, anyway.) Then we got drunk off tiny bottles of wine.

  I’m a doctor at Children’s Hospital in Toronto. I have an eleven-year-old patient named Avery who has a congenital heart defect. She’s in for a surgery that will basically patch things over as best as possible, but she’ll eventually need a transplant. Turns out she’s a huge fan of you and your band.

  Any chance I could convince you to pay a visit? Wouldn’t have to be a big deal—I could make sure it was on the down-low and there would be no further obligations. Avery fronts like she’s tough—and she is—but meeting
you would mean the world to her.

  Thanks for considering.

  Hunter Wyatt

  Jesse looked up from his phone. “What am I doing tomorrow, Amber? We don’t have studio time booked until next week, do we?”

  The band’s assistant looked up from where she was tapping away on an iPad. The band had just come off a session of signing photos for the fan club in a conference room in Matty’s offices, and neither Jesse nor Amber had left yet. “Nope, not until next week. Tomorrow you’re calling in to Classic Rewind on Sirius at ten in the morning. Then you have a late lunch with Peter.”

  “Cancel the lunch, will you?”

  Amber ceased the tapping—the tapping that made the band’s world operate smoothly—and raised her eyebrows. Amber didn’t do raised eyebrows normally. Amber was basically unflappable—she was a big part of why the band had been so successful in the past couple of years.

  Well, she was a medium-size part of why the band had been so successful. The real reason, the big-kahuna reason, was of course Matty.

  After Jesse had sold his soul—willingly—to Matty, eff him if the magical manager hadn’t proceeded to get them the major-label deal, line up sponsorship for their next tour, and conduct a slow-burn PR campaign that seemed to have repositioned Jesse as the sexy bad-boy—but not too bad—rock star. “The boy next door with a serious edge,” Matty called it.

  And, hell, even Amber had been Matty’s doing. Jesse had wondered, when Matty’d hired her, what the hell they needed a full-time assistant for. Turned out they hadn’t known what they’d been missing. Amber just made everything happen.

  And now she was, in her quiet Amber way, shocked that Jesse was bailing on a lunch with Peter Severson, the band’s A&R rep. They were about to start recording their second album on AMI. Their first with the label had done really solidly. They’d toured the US, opening for Green Day, and had even earned a Grammy nomination for best new artist last year. A lot was riding on their second major-label release.

  Jesse had spent two years doing whatever Matty told him to, to the letter. He made nice with prospective producers. He was charming-with-just-the-right-amount-of-attitude during interviews. He went to awards shows with ridiculously beautiful starlets, as assigned.

  When Peter said, Lunch, Jesse said, When?

  Which was why Amber looked surprised he was canceling. Keeping the label happy was high on Matty’s list of priorities, and hence, on Jesse’s.

  But, damn. Could he have one afternoon to do something off script? Yes, yes, he could.

  “Tell Peter I’m sorry, but something came up.”

  “Okaaay.” When he didn’t elaborate, Amber regarded him silently, like she was trying to read his mind.

  He should tell her what he was doing tomorrow afternoon. She’d tell Matty. Matty would be thrilled. Peter would be thrilled. Bad-boy rocker visits sick kids. It fit right in with the brand. All they would have to do was post one subtle shot to Instagram, and it would be all over the place. Viral with a capital V.

  He stared back at Amber and said nothing, until she returned to her typing.

  Eff him if he wasn’t nervous. As Jesse stood in the lobby the next day and texted Hunter as they’d arranged, his hands shook.

  Jesse had played arenas. Smiled at the Grammys as the camera hovered to catch his expression when the band didn’t win Best New Artist. Held his own on the Howard Stern Show.

  There was no reason for him to be nervous about meeting an eleven-year-old girl named Avery.

  “Jesse, hi.”

  He turned toward the voice.

  It was possible his nerves were not related to Avery.

  Dr. Baby Silver Fox was just as silver and just as foxy as he had been two years ago. And he wore a white coat that made him look much more doctor-y.

  Hunter stuck his hand out. “Thank you so much for coming. I never imagined you’d be able to come the very next day.”

  Jesse let his hand be engulfed by Hunter’s—it was as soft as he remembered—and cleared his throat. “No problem. I was happy to be asked. I only hope the real me doesn’t let this kid down.”

  Hunter smiled and squeezed his hand a little tighter before letting it go. “I assure you, that’s not possible.”

  Sometimes Hunter’s straight women friends jokingly made reference to their ovaries exploding. That was not generally a sentiment Hunter understood, even beyond the fact that he didn’t have ovaries. It was usually a response to the image of a manly man doing something stereotypically not manly, like playing with a baby, snuggling with a puppy, or painting his girlfriend’s toenails.

  It had never worked on him. He didn’t give a shit one way or the other about traditional “masculine” and “feminine” traits. He didn’t have a “type” beyond “don’t be a slob and have your shit at least moderately together.”

  Except . . .

  As he poked his head into Avery’s room two hours after he’d introduced her to Jesse, he found them sitting side by side on her bed, their heads bent together while Jesse coached Avery on the proper arrangement of her fingers on a guitar . . . Well, something twinged.

  It was the juxtaposition that was getting to him. Avery wore a pink sweatshirt and loose scrub-like pants. Jesse, by contrast, was clad in skinny distressed jeans and a leather jacket. A pair of sunglasses was perched on his head, and his hair hung loose to his shoulders. He couldn’t look any more like a rock star if he tried.

  And it wasn’t just the physical contrasts. Hunter had seen Jesse get dumped via text and shake it off. And he’d read about Jesse in the years since that train ride—how could he not? In fact, he’d probably become the band’s biggest social media stalker over the age of thirty. The guy didn’t just look like a rock star; he was a rock star. He oozed masculinity and virility as he slouched his way up red carpets with pretty actresses on his arm. He’d had a short flirtation with the famous pop star Emerson Quinn, which had ended with a big blowout in Central Park after Emerson had run into him kissing someone else. Apparently getting caught in public kissing someone he wasn’t supposed to be kissing was a pattern for the devil-may-care rocker.

  All this to say that Hunter would have assumed Jesse was the type of person who had more to do than fritter away an afternoon in a hospital. Yet here he was, so engrossed in helping a sick kid that he hadn’t noticed Hunter’s arrival.

  Neither of them had.

  He cleared his throat, and both heads popped up.

  “OMG, Dr. W., Jesse is letting me play his guitar!”

  “Yeah, I think it’s time this kid graduated from a uke,” Jesse said. “She’s got talent.”

  Avery beamed as if she’d been told her heart had been magically repaired.

  There was that twinge again.

  “That’s great, Avery!” Hunter said. “I hate to be the party pooper, but I’m afraid I’m here on official business. You have a consult with the surgeon tomorrow, so I want to check on a few things and get some info. I ran into your mom in the cafeteria, and she’ll be here in a few minutes.”

  Jesse popped up from the bed. “That’s my cue.”

  Hunter hung back, wanting to give the pair some space to say their goodbyes, which were over-the-top effusive from Avery and quieter, though no less heartfelt, from Jesse.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said to Avery as he ushered Jesse out the door.

  “I wasn’t just saying that to make her feel good,” Jesse said once they were in the corridor. “She has some serious raw talent. She should have a guitar.”

  “Her parents are pretty stretched, both financially and emotionally,” Hunter said. “They’re not from Toronto. Her dad is back in Owen Sound, working during the week and taking care of her older sister. Her mom’s living at the Ronald McDonald House. I don’t think guitars are at the top of the priority list right now.”

  Jesse nodded. “I’d like to get her one, but I don’t want to overstep or make things awkward for her parents. What do you think?”

  Hunte
r grinned. It seemed Avery had snagged herself a rock star fairy godfather. “I think she’d love it.”

  Jesse wasn’t really into cover songs. He’d never recorded any. He’d tried working a few into the band’s live shows over the years—interpretations of songs by his idols, like Lennon and Hendrix and Prince. But it always felt weird, and eventually he’d stopped doing it. He preferred to play his own stuff.

  But if he was going to play a cover song, never in a million years would it be one of Katy Perry’s.

  Except . . . never say never.

  “Pick up the pace, girls!” he called as his pupils started to drag. He was playing the bottom strings of his Takamine as a bass, trying to keep Avery, who was lying in bed playing the guitar he’d given her a month ago, and her friend Madison, who was playing a portable keyboard, on beat.

  They needed a drummer to really keep them tight. He filed that problem away to solve later as he said, “Okay, here comes the big chord change, Avery. And both of you, keep those vocals energetic! You’re supposed to be roaring, right? Remember, you’re fierce!”

  Which they were, these two sick girls who were facing down their own mortality with courage and good cheer.

  They were also slowing down as the song unspooled, a common mistake among beginner musicians.

  He started singing along, God help him, to try to speed them up a bit. He pitched his voice to be louder than theirs, so as to force them to match his tempo.

  So there he was, belting out a bubblegum-pop teen anthem of female empowerment.

  What had happened to him?

  The thing was, his visits with Avery, which had become a once or twice a week habit over the last two months, fit perfectly into his life. The band was recording the new album, so they were hunkered down in the studio for long stretches. The mixture of creativity and doggedness required to make a record was intense. It sucked the energy out of him. In the old days, he would go out in the evenings and party as hard as he’d worked during the day. He still accompanied the guys, sometimes, when they hit the bars, but he always left after one drink. He was sticking to the commitment he’d made to Matty the Rainmaker two years ago and keeping the partying in check.