Summer almost feels bad about confronting Scott. She almost feels bad about coming up to him right after the graduation ceremony, interrupting the fun while he is posing for wacky photos with his friends, and telling him, in front of everyone, “We have to talk.” The guys start heckling him, of course, and the girls give each other snide little looks, not even bothering to conceal their disdain for her. She almost feels bad about dampening his spirit; he is laughing with his head thrown back over something someone just said, and here she is pulling him aside, about to throw his betrayal right in his face. She almost feels bad for him, but more than anything else, she feels bad for herself. Because now that she thinks about it, Scott and Roxanne do make sense together—at least more sense than he ever did with her. The worst part about this heartbreak is that she cannot say, with absolute sincerity, that she never saw it coming.
He keeps his head down and his hands shoved deep into his pockets. For the entire ceremony, while the honor students and keynote speakers were delivering their speeches, she composed a reasonably dignified exit monologue in her head. But now that he is in front of her, she finds it a struggle to open her mouth and start saying goodbye to him. “What’s wrong?” he asks, and it sounds less like “What did I do?” and more like “What the fuck is your problem?” She does not want to lose her temper, does not want to make a scene—she just wants to get this over with. So she tells him, trying to keep any emotion out of her voice, “I heard about you and Roxanne. Is it true?”
He says, “You weren’t supposed to find out about that.”
“Is it true?” she asks again, and she can feel her voice and hands shaking with disconcerted disbelief. She would give anything not to be crumbling to pieces at this moment, to be able to hold her head up high and tell him with conviction that she is better off without him. She has never been capable of hiding her feelings; her delight and depression and anger and relief would always proclaim themselves without her permission, parading all over the place. “I just need you to tell me,” she says, as gently and as kindly as she could.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he mutters. It is neither an admission nor an apology, and his eyes dart towards the spot where his friends are signaling for him to hurry up and standing impatiently with their hands on their hips or their arms across their chest. Summer knows she cannot stay long—Ellie and Ken are waiting in the parking lot to take her to a fancy restaurant. Their dinner reservation is only until eight-thirty, and they have to pick up Nick from Ken’s parents’ house before eleven. She looks at Scott, tries to convince herself that maybe he never meant to hurt her, tries to find an easy way out for the both of them. But all she can say is, “I guess I already know everything I need to know.”
“I guess you do,” he says, his tone frosty and every word laced with undisguised contempt. She is used to hearing him speak like he hates every bone in her body. In those three years, their fights would often get ugly, and he always told her exactly what he was thinking: You expect too much, or You should stop acting like my girlfriend, or I don’t remember ever promising you anything, or I warned you from the start that I will not be falling in love with you, or Why do you have to ruin everything? He has never been one to soften the cold, hard realities that defined the boundaries between them, and she always admired him for this—she always thought being brutally, unyieldingly honest was such a big, brave thing to do.
She thinks, When are you allowed to give up on someone?
There is nothing else left to say and nothing else she wants to hear. When she walks away from him, he doesn’t run after her, doesn’t call her name, doesn’t grab her arm to say something repentant or bittersweet or meaningful. When she walks away from him, he just stands there and lets her. Summer continues walking. Around her, people are hugging each other furiously, vowing to stay in touch, wishing one another all the luck and success in the world. They promise each other all sorts of happy, hopeful, wonderful things, in between their goodbyes.
Chapter 8
It is six months after graduation, and Summer—shocked and disheartened and miserable—is bawling her eyes out in Ellie’s living room, being careful not to drip tears and snot all over the new beige and rose brocade couch. In the dining room, four-year-old Nick is busy with his after-school snack: apple slices smothered in peanut butter, animal crackers with cheddar cheese, and a glass of full cream milk. He hums and sways his head from side to side while he eats, seeming thoroughly entertained with himself. Ellie hands Summer a bowl of chicken noodle soup (“From a can,” she says apologetically) and a mug of warm calamansi juice, as if her sister’s broken heart were a common cold. She doesn’t say, I told you so, doesn’t hurl Summer’s hurt back at her, but she shrugs and raises her eyebrows as if to say, Well, what did you expect?
What Summer expected was this: that Scott would come to his senses and—fueled by the fondness absence brings—fall madly in love with her once and for all. Every day after graduation, she would wake up and imagine Scott knocking on the door of the small studio apartment she was renting with more than half of her call-center-trainer salary. She would imagine the lost, lonely look on his face that she wouldn’t be able to resist, imagine throwing her arms around him as he begged for forgiveness. In her mind, he always carried a colorful, tastefully arranged bouquet of flowers in his right hand, and a tiny red velvet box (sometimes a pair of diamond earrings, sometimes an engagement ring) in his left. She would imagine kissing him, their lips meeting with a passion and urgency neither of them has ever felt before, her hand on the back of his neck and his fingers in her hair.
This was what Summer expected, but what she got instead was an e-mail from Scott last week telling her he was going back to the States for good. “I’ll miss you so much,” he wrote, after six months of no contact. “I’m sorry for everything I did to you, and I hope we can be friends someday soon. I’d really like to be friends with you. I’m leaving tomorrow, but maybe you can let me know if you ever find yourself in the area.” Summer did not even know what “in the area” meant—she knew he was born and raised somewhere in California, and that his family still lived there, but she didn’t know exactly where he would be. It had never come up, and until that moment, she had never felt the need to ask. He went on to tell her that his parents were the ones who wanted him back there to help with the family business, that he wasn’t sure if he would take the job right away or gather experience in another company first, that he was looking forward to finally seeing his buddies from middle school again. He signed off with, See you around, as if it were that simple, as if he actually believed he would.
Nick bounds into the living room, his white shirt stained with cheese and his cheek smeared with peanut butter. He climbs onto Summer’s lap and says, “Tita, are you sad?” She can smell his fruity baby shampoo and the powdery scent of fabric softener on his clothes, and she feels a wave of calm washing over her as she hugs him close. Nick is an intelligent, insightful, uncomplicated child—he follows instructions, rarely throws tantrums, and can somehow sense when the grown-ups around him are upset or having a bad day. He is always quick to dole out smiles and hugs and kisses, even to strangers at church or in the supermarket. Summer loves him fiercely, and sometimes she would look at him asleep on his bed after a day at the playground or an afternoon of cookies and cartoons, and vow that she would never let anything happen to him. Nick, in turn, seems to find his only aunt positively enchanting. He hangs onto her every word, follows her around the house every time she comes to visit, and cries when it is time for her to leave. His face automatically lights up like a hundred Christmas trees each time Summer walks through their front door, and this is how she knows that this kind of love is real and possible; because of Nick, she knows that a love this pure and unconditional truly exists, and that she is capable of receiving it, worthy of feeling it.
She tells Nick, “A little. But that’s okay, we all get a little sad sometimes.”
He looks at her suspiciously.
“You were sad the last time I saw you, too.” Beside them, Ellie lets out a snort, covering her mouth with one hand.
“I’ll tell you what, Sweetie,” Summer says. “As of today, you are officially in charge of making sure I never get sad again. You can be my number one Cheerer-Upper. What do you think?”
Ellie snorts again, louder this time. Nick mulls over the offer, putting an index finger to his chin and tilting his head to one side. “Okay,” he says after a while.
Summer laughs. “Great, thanks,” she tells him. “You got any ideas right now?”
He jumps off her lap and runs upstairs, yelling something about crayons and dinosaurs and Patrick Star’s shorts and Kung Fu Panda. Summer and Ellie listen to him scrambling about in his room, faint smiles on their faces. Ellie’s unspoken question and all of Summer’s unspoken non-answers hover limply, uselessly above them, and neither of them says anything until Nick is back in the room with a bunch of toys and books and art supplies, bursting with energy and enthusiasm. “My son is taking you very seriously,” Ellie whispers, and Summer says, “Good. At least somebody is.”
In retrospect, that was precisely what Summer’s problem was with Scott: he never took her seriously enough. It wasn’t because he thought she was stupid—he knew she was smart, and he definitely knew she was much smarter than he was. It wasn’t because she wasn’t fun or interesting or unique. It wasn’t because she would obviously do absolutely anything for him. No, it wasn’t because of any of those things. It was because she was never his girlfriend, because she never demanded to be.
Summer realizes this when she receives a call from Roxanne one Saturday night in November, all the way from Los Angeles. “Scott and I are now a couple,” she declares, her voice dry and haughty. “I just thought you should hear it from me.”
Summer rubs the sleep from her eyes—it is almost eleven-thirty, and she was already in bed and about to drift off when the phone rang, jolting her awake. She was startled at the shrill sound bouncing off the four walls of her cramped apartment, alarmed that it might be an emergency, frightened that it would be some dreadful news about Ellie or Nick or Ken. She gripped the receiver with both hands, silently praying it would just turn out to be a prank call or a wrong number or some pesky agent asking if she wanted to apply for a credit card.
The thought of losing Scott had always terrified her, but now the thought of losing him to Roxanne repulses her. She can feel her dinner lurching around violently in her stomach, her throat tightening. She can feel her ears trying to reject everything Roxanne is telling her: how she moved in with her cousins in Los Angeles right after graduation, how Scott would call her every day from Manila, begging her to come back, how she finally told him that if he wanted to be with her, he should prove it by coming to LA. How she demanded he stop seeing other girls, how she demanded to be his girlfriend.
“It turns out my cousins’ place is just a thirty-minute drive from his house,” Roxanne says, sounding extremely pleased with herself. “What a wonderful coincidence, right?”
Summer thinks about the time she met Roxanne—how she found her intriguing and hauntingly beautiful, with her long, dark hair and a smile that never seemed to reach her eyes. She remembers secretly wanting to be Roxanne’s friend, wanting Roxanne to like her and think she was cool. She remembers vividly how she stuck out a hand and said, “Hi, I’m Summer. Your roommate,” and how Roxanne looked her up and down and up again for the first time, before gingerly touching her hand with only her fingertips. She wishes she could go back and undo that moment; she wishes she could have predicted all of this would happen and requested to transfer rooms before it was too late. She wishes they had never even met.
Roxanne says, “He just signed with a label, by the way.”
“Label?” Summer squeaks, and is instantly conscious of how dumb the question sounds.
“Label?” Roxanne mocks, sighing afterwards as if Summer’s mere existence frustrated her. “A record label. He’s going to be a solo artist, and he’s going to be really big. They’re already talking about a website and a high-budget debut album and a national tour starting in Texas and massive collaborations with all these huge celebrities. I think they’re planning to launch the album by June or July next year, and Scotty and I are just so excited about all these opportunities.” Roxanne is talking too quickly, and Summer’s head is spinning at the way she said Scotty like he belonged to her, and she just wants to hang up and go back to bed and maybe stay there until she forgets everything she just heard. Roxanne says in a dreamy voice, “I’m so, so proud of him, you know?”
Summer hears herself say, in a barely audible voice, “Please congratulate him for me.”
“I will,” Roxanne says, and it sounds like she has finally had enough, like she is suddenly tired of gloating. “Bye, Summer,” she says. There is a soft click and she is gone, and Summer is left with a steady beeping noise and the sound of her own breathing, hard and fast against her own ear.
Chapter 9
It felt like déjà vu, sliding back into fangirl mode after years and years of making a determined effort to put herself above it. Summer discovered it was easy to do research on him—when she typed “Scott Carlton” into Google, she got more than twenty-five pages of results, all waiting to be explored. It was easy to convince herself at first that she just wanted to see how he was doing, that it was natural to want to make sure he was okay because they were, technically, still friends. It was easy for her to slip into the habit of checking his blog and his Facebook and his Twitter first thing in the morning, while she sipped her three-in-one coffee or combed her hair. It was easy for her to feel that this was completely normal, that maybe if she worked hard enough at being a fan, then maybe it would somehow cancel out the fact that she was an ex, but not quite. She missed him terribly, and she learned to stay at the relatively safe distance of fandom to distract herself from the question of whether or not he missed her back.
Success came overnight for Scott. His record label showered him with money and publicity and all the resources a new musician could ever need, and it paid off—people were already calling him the Breakthrough Artist of the Year, predicting platinum sales and critical acclaim. He uploaded one carefully crafted YouTube video after another, went on dozens of TV show appearances, and gained a colossal following within a couple of months of being signed. Fans, music bloggers, and radio DJs anticipated the release of his debut album, placing advanced orders online and marking the date on their calendars. They flocked to his shows—intimate ones in small bars downtown at first, then eventually bigger, more posh venues with a seventy-dollar cover charge and at least five burly bouncers at the door. They were smitten with this mysterious, charming musician, curious about his background and his life in the Philippines, impressed with his raw talent. They loved his sexy, soulful melodies, but more than anything, they loved his lyrics, his ability to put into words exactly what people were feeling. Summer swelled with pride every time she read of his success, but at the same time, she felt panicked and more than a bit threatened—he was slipping farther and farther away from her, and there was nothing she could do about it.
Zac sits beside Summer on a lazy Friday evening, poking at his cup of frozen yogurt, crushing the chunks of cheesecake with his spoon and pushing the blueberries all to one side. He is making a show of ignoring her, his eyebrows knitted together and his face deliberately turned away from her as she peruses Scott’s Twitter page, one hand on her chin and another on her laptop’s scroll keys. She comments out loud on a phrase or a photo every few minutes, but Zac says nothing. Summer has gotten used to his unbending disapproval, his constant condescension; she has long ago stopped expecting him to understand.
Still, Zac is her best friend—her only friend, if she’s being honest with herself—and she tries to lighten the mood. “Are you asking Cassie out for Valentine’s?” she asks. Several weeks ago, his parents had finally had enough of him being a know-it-all bum and decided he should take over t
he family business: a retro-themed restaurant called Time for Diner. Cassie is the girl who owns the vintage boutique across the street, and Zac has had a crush on her since the first time he saw her through the window, arranging the clothes on the racks and lining up the accessories by color. He has never spoken to her—he only knows her name because of the name tag she forgets to take off when she comes into the diner for breakfast or the occasional late afternoon snack.
“No,” he says curtly.
“Why not?” she persists. “You can slip a cute little note into her take-out order one of these days. I’m sure she’ll find it endearing.”
“What’s the matter with you?” he snaps. “You’re like a factory of horrible ideas.”
This doesn’t hurt as much as it is supposed to, and for that, Summer is relieved. She and Zac have never been careful with one another, have never tiptoed around each other’s feelings, and the fact that the carelessness is mutual shields her from any hint of guilt. Almost all of the cruel, hurtful things she has ever said in her life have been directed at Zac: When he tried to get her to talk to him after Scott flew off to Los Angeles without a proper goodbye, she refused to take his calls, refused to reply to his hourly texts reassuring her that she will be okay, that it will all be okay. When she finally picked up the phone, she pointedly told him, “Stop calling me, Zac. You’re not helping.” Later that day, she e-mailed him, “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to speak to you right now. I am not in the mood for your empty words of encouragement, the cut-and-paste hope you plaster over the hole in my heart.” It was melodramatic, and it was unkind, but she had pressed send and that was that.
Fan Girl Page 4
