Summer asks Ashley for the twenty-seventh time, “Are you sure he’s coming?” She chews on her fingernails, which she had painted a bright blue the night before in the hopes that she’d find them so pretty it’d be a shame to chew on them. “Maybe he’s not. Maybe he’s not even thinking about coming. Maybe he woke up today and went, ‘Oh, I feel like skipping my recording session today.’ Maybe he decided to go back to bed and stay there for the rest of the week.”
Ashley pauses mid-bite. “You saw him come in, Summer.”
Summer giggles nervously. “Yeah, but I don’t know, it didn’t really look like him,” she says. “I mean, I haven’t seen him in so long, so maybe I’ve forgotten what he looks like, you know?”
“Will you cut it out?” Ashley snaps, finally losing her patience after more than three hours of keeping her cool. She hurls the box of donuts into the backseat, slams the pot of coffee down on the dashboard, and puts her hand firmly on the door. “We are going in there, and we are doing it now.”
“Now?” Summer asks, licking powdered sugar off her lips. “But I’m not ready.”
“I don’t care,” Ashley says. “Out of the car. Now.”
So Summer finishes her donut, wipes her mouth, and gets out of the car. “Satisfied?” she asks Ashley as they walk up the stairs towards the building lobby.
“Very,” Ashley says, smiling good-naturedly now. They pull open the heavy glass door and step inside.
“I have an appointment with Scott Carlton,” Ashley tells the receptionist, sounding confident and credible and mature. “This is Summer and she’s my guest.” The receptionist (an artsy-type chick with red hair, blunt bangs, a slim frame, and black plastic-rimmed glasses that look quirky without being geeky) yawns, takes Summer’s ID, hands her a visitor’s card, and points at the elevators on the other end of the lobby.
“Fifteenth floor,” she says, sounding bored.
“Okay, thank you,” Summer and Ashley chorus.
Inside the elevator, Summer cannot stop fidgeting. “You’ll be fine,” Ashley tells her. “Relax,” she adds, making Summer wonder if people actually expected other people to relax on cue—whip out a pair of board shorts and sunglasses in five seconds flat, conjure a straw hat, a hammock, and a fresh mango shake out of thin air, and snap their fingers and magically transport themselves to a deserted white beach where Jason Mraz plays on repeat all day long.
“Relax,” Ashley says again. “It’s not going to be the creepy kind of awkward. It’s going to be the cute kind.” Summer didn’t even think it was going to be any kind of awkward, but now Ashley was telling her that it will be awkward and expecting her to feel better because at least it won’t be the creepy kind. Summer doesn’t want it to be awkward—she wants Scott to take her in his arms right away and ask her why it took her so long to come. The elevator doors open on the fifteenth floor with a game show ding, and Summer finds herself face to face with Scott, clad in a black leather jacket, sporting a disheveled ‘do, and looking like he was having the worst day of his life.
“Hey, Scott!” she says brightly, casually, as if he has just walked into a fast food joint for his daily grease fix and she is the girl beaming a fluorescent beam behind the cash register, about to serve up a Happy Meal and a wind-up toy of his choice.
He blinks. “What are you doing here, Summer?”
“Surprise!” Ashley says, throwing her hands festively in the air. Then, catching herself, “We haven’t officially met. I’m Ashley.”
“Hi,” Scott says distractedly, shaking her hand. He finally recovers enough to give Summer a hug and ask her how she’s been, and Summer notices how he pulls away from her just as soon as her chin touches his shoulder.
“I’m good,” Summer says. “And I’m here.”
“I can see that,” he says, the shock still evident in his face. “I’m sorry I’ve been MIA, I’ve been really…”
“Busy,” Summer finishes for him. “Of course. I’m sure you are.” She doesn’t mean to sound sarcastic and bitter, but she knows that’s precisely how she sounds.
“What are you doing here?” Scott asks again.
“She’s visiting me,” Ashley says. “We’re old friends. We go, like, way back.”
“Oh,” Scott says. “Right. Yes. Okay.” He runs out of one-word sentences and starts inspecting the zipper on his jacket. He looks slightly younger now than the last time she saw him—the unkempt beard has disappeared, and his hair is now shorter and a lighter shade of brown.
Ashley clears her throat and makes some excuse about meeting up with her boyfriend Colin. “He’s super-duper needy,” she says, rolling her eyes like she was so tired of being wanted. “Text me and I’ll pick you up from wherever,” she tells Summer, just before the elevator doors close.
“We have to talk,” Summer says, and she is aware that this is exactly what she told him on graduation day when she confronted him about Roxanne, in the exact same manner. She expects him to protest or to brush her off or to tell her to get on the next plane back to Manila. Instead, he just nods and says, “We do. Absolutely.” He takes her hand as they wait for the elevator and Summer can feel her strength—her determination to keep herself at a manageable distance—dissolving. She promised herself she’d keep it together, but now everything is rushing back and she feels light-headed and unstable and all she really wants to do is grab Scott and kiss him and tell him that she is here only for him—not for Ashley or for anyone else. He is staring straight ahead like he is deathly afraid to look her in the eye, but with his hand wrapped around hers in that familiar, comforting way, it almost feels like they are back in college, back when it was much simpler, back when their story was just beginning.
Chapter 12
Scott sits across from her at a rickety outdoor table, one palm cradling his chin, his face concealed by aviator sunglasses and a dark gray fedora. The café in West Hollywood seems to be an extremely popular spot for rowdy teenagers in trendy graphic tees and shiny neon sneakers and deconstructed denim cut-offs. They are all trying to be cool while trying to look like they aren’t trying, and it is excruciating to watch them. Summer says, “So what’s up with all the gloom and doom?”
“What are you talking about?” he asks. He was faking it; he knew exactly what she was talking about. She can tell because he used to do this all the time, answering a question with another question in an attempt to stall for time.
“That,” she says, pointing at him with her teaspoon, trying to keep her tone light and friendly. “You have gloom and doom written all over you. There it is, see? G-L-O-O-M…”
“Written all over me,” he says, smiling at her for the first time today. “Got it. I’m sorry, I just have a lot on my mind.”
“Such as?”
“This album,” he says. “The label execs want me to change so much of it, I almost want to tell them to go write the songs themselves. What’s worse is that they want to wrap up soon so I can go to Texas to start the tour by mid-summer, but I can’t wrap up if they keep delaying the recording. It’s driving me nuts.”
In Summer’s head, she is brave enough to tell him, “Then stop doing this. Look at you; you’re a mess. Let’s get out of here—let’s move out of LA, to some place quieter, where we can start a brand new life. You know we’ll be great together this time around. It’s not yet too late to be with me.” In her head, she is brave enough to tell him that she will do anything and everything to make it work, if he’d only let her.
But right here, in this noisy, humid café, surrounded by irritating teenagers flirting with one another and devouring cookies and cake slices and slurping on their green tea frappuccinos, all she can say is, “Really?”
“I can’t stand all the details,” he says. “What does this song mean, and why did I use this word, and do I really want to wear another leather jacket for the cover shoot, and can I please change the title of this song to something more commercial?”
“Don’t you have a manager?” she asks. “Isn’t
someone supposed to be defending you?”
“I do, but Leon doesn’t want to interfere. He thinks negotiating with the label on my own will give me a better grasp of who I am as an artist.” Under his breath, he says, “It will also make me bat-shit crazy, but apparently that’s not an issue to anyone.”
“Why are you having trouble with your songwriting?” she asks. “I’m your biggest fan, I know all your Violet Reaction lyrics. People sincerely love them. They’re excellent.”
“I didn’t write those,” he says quietly.
“What do you mean you didn’t write those?” She tries to lift a forkful of pecan pie to her lips but her hands are shaking and her fingers feel clammy and slippery. She still has the lyrics of “V-Day” memorized: so maybe on this day/ we can all be lonely together/ and maybe on this day/ because someone else is lonely/ in exactly the same way I am/ in exactly the same way you are/ it won’t be as bad/ as it is on the other 364 ones. The other Violet Reaction songs that went on to become hits in the Philippines also had earnest, insightful lyrics—people often used them as Facebook status messages and constantly quoted them on Twitter.
“I mean I didn’t write those,” he says, gritting his teeth. “Someone else did, and I’d really appreciate it if you would get off my case about it. Right now I just need to figure out how the hell I’m going to put this album together.”
“I can help,” she blurts out, sidestepping the anger in his voice. “Not with the negotiating, obviously,” she rushes to add. “But I can listen. I can listen to you rant. You can even show me what you’ve written, and I can give you feedback, as a fan. It may not solve all your problems, but at least you’ll have a…” She cringes. “Friend.”
He looks at her skeptically.
“We can sit down and work on your songs every week,” she suggests. “Every Sunday, if you want.”
He says, “The label gave me exactly one month ‘to get my shit together.’ Are you sure you can handle four weeks of this?”
“Yes,” she says. “Positive.”
They finish their coffee and pie and go, walking aimlessly, the sun on their faces and the wind in their hair. If someone had told her a month ago that she will soon be in LA with Scott Carlton, she wouldn’t have believed it. It seemed impossible at that time, and she had already resigned herself to never being able to speak to him again. She had already resigned herself to downplaying her feelings forever, acting like she is just a fangirl and nothing else. Scott smiles at her. “So what did you want to talk about?”
Summer can think of dozens of responses: I want to talk about us. Or I want to talk about Roxanne, and to make sure that she is out of your life for good. Or I want to talk about everything that happened before—every single hurtful thing I let slide back then because I didn’t want to lose you. Or I want to talk about why you left Manila, why you left me. Or I want to talk about the real reason I’m here now. But thinking about all these possible responses deflates her spirit and makes her feel like fleeing this café and this city and this country, and she doesn’t want that.
“Nothing,” she tells him. “Just that it’s really nice to see you again.”
“It’s really nice to see you too,” he says, finally looking her straight in the eye. “I missed you,” he adds, and nothing else matters anymore.
Chapter 13
If there’s one thing Scott is consistent at, it’s this: he always makes Summer feel like she is auditioning for some sort of role. In college, the role was Casual Pseudo Girlfriend, and she played that part the best way she could—she demanded nothing and made excuses for everything. When he left, she was the Fangirl Stalker, looking up to him and admiring him from afar and hunting for bits and pieces of information on him just so she can still feel like he is a part of her life somehow. And now that she is here, the role is Helpful, Supportive Friend and she finds that this is the most difficult to portray; she has to drain herself of all hidden agenda and all her other emotions so she can focus on being there for him. She has to push all her uncertainty and resentment and eagerness and infatuation out of the way; she has to pretend that she is completely okay with friendship and nothing more. She is learning all over again, in harder and more pronounced doses, just how little a girl like her is allowed to expect from a guy like him.
Entertainment writers and reporters are always asking celebrities if they would ever date a fan. The celebrities are always ready with some clichéd, cardboard answer, like, “It doesn’t matter whether she’s a fan or not, as long as she supports me and believes in me,” or “Of course I would. My fans are awesome; any guy would be lucky to be with them,” or “We’ll see. Never say never.” But maybe at least one entertainment writer or reporter should do the opposite: ask a fan if she would ever date a celebrity. Maybe someone should ask, “Are you willing to have your world turned inside out?” or “Are you ready to pull him down from that pedestal and start seeing him as an ordinary, everyday guy who can break your heart just as brutally as the next person?” or “Can you deal with the crushing insecurity, the crippling self-doubt, the pressure to compete with every other girl on the planet?” Or perhaps most importantly: “Are you ready to feel, every single day, that this guy is way out of your league?”
Summer didn’t know what to do or say so that Scott wouldn’t be out of her league anymore. She didn’t see how this particular reality could possibly be altered, tailor-fit to suit her needs; there seemed to be nothing anyone could do to change the fact that he was Scott Carlton, Breakthrough Artist, and Summer was just…well, Summer.
Sometimes, when Scott was busy talking to someone on the phone while Summer was knee-deep in songwriting, she would sneak glances at him and try to will him to see her in a romantic light again. She would summon all her mental strength, focusing intently on transforming the sound waves passing through Scott’s phone into brainwash waves: You are in love with me. You are in love with me. You are in love with me. Sometimes, Scott would catch her gaze and hold it, and she would think, Oh wow, it’s working. But then he’d put down the phone and say, “Crap. Leon says we have to write double-time,” or “I hate this stupid, stupid day. Nothing is going right.” And Summer would want to say, You’re with me right now. Doesn’t that count for something? But she’d chicken out and feel like a complete loser instead.
Summer wondered if it were possible to just take a shovel, dig deep into the ground, and bury all these feelings. She wondered if she could put all these feelings in a box, seal it shut, and send it far, far away to some exotic location where it would be lost forever. She wondered if she could turn these patient, persistent feelings into threads and start tying them together, making big knots and small knots everywhere until she was left with a tangled, useless piece of junk she wouldn’t even recognize anymore. She would stare off into space as she pondered this, and Scott would snap his fingers in front of her face and say, “Earth to Summer! Double-time, remember?”
Once, she came remarkably close to telling him the truth: “I love you,” she told him, but because she did her best to empty her voice of all emotion, and because she looked away immediately after saying it, and because she didn’t say anything more to make it substantial and significant, the idea barely took shape—it crackled weakly in the air between them for the briefest moment before fizzling out in a cloud of smoke.
“I know you do,” he said dismissively. His phone rang, and he stood up and said, “I better take this outside. I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.” Through the window, she could see him smiling—not the cool, detached superstar smile he usually reserved for girls like her—but a smile that radiated warmth and joy, like he had a strong, solid connection with whoever it was he was talking to. He looked like a different person.
Some nights, he took her to his gigs, where she blended into the half-critical, half-appreciative crowd. She would stand there, in the middle of the darkness and noise, and listen to him. Every time she saw him on stage, it came naturally for her to detach herse
lf from anything personal and just lose herself in the music—he may not have written his own songs, but they were undeniably good, and she knew them by heart. When the show was over, they would either go back to his place or head out to a party, where Scott would demonstrate just how much of an expert he is at the fine art of schmoozing. He’d flit from one spot to another, high-fiving or fist-bumping with some boy, putting his hand casually on some girl’s waist, listening to some random person hell-bent on impressing him. Summer wasn’t good at schmoozing at all—to her, every party seemed like a flurry of names and faces and air kisses and forced laughs—and she was so sure she stuck out like a sore thumb at each one. Sometimes, Scott would stay with her for about ten minutes, asking her if she wanted another drink or if she was having fun, but most of the time, he’d introduce her to somebody and disappear, leaving her trying to make small talk and trying to fill in all the awkward conversation gaps. For lack of a better topic, they usually asked her how she knew Scott, and she would often smile and say, “Oh, I’ve just been a fan for a really long time.” One time, she told a particularly nosy guy, “I was roommates with Roxanne,” and the guy didn’t say, “It was too bad they broke up,” or “Hey, how’s Roxanne doing these days?” All he said was, “Yeah, she’s hot. I don’t know why she’s not here now.”
Fan Girl Page 6
