by Holly Rayner
Brian made a face like he had just been poisoned. “Please don’t do that to yourself. It would be way less trouble just to come clean to him.”
“He must never know.”
“You’re not going to convince the entire town to cover for you. Katie Rees-Howells will blab the truth if no one else does.”
“Or…” I said slowly, “or I could act like a celebrity for a couple days and get everyone to treat me as one. Maybe throw a live concert at one of the parks—it’s been a while since we’ve had a town concert. You and your buddies could open for me.” Brian and some of his friends had formed an indie-folk band called The Sea Foxes that still played occasionally.
“If Umar sees us opening for you,” said Brian, “then he’ll know you’re no celebrity.”
As much as it pained me to admit it, Brian was right. I had rashly invited Umar to stay in town before thinking through the consequences. I almost wished I could email him again and tell him that we would be spending the weekend together in Chicago, but that would have roused his suspicions, and in any case he seemed bent on meeting my family.
“You do realize that if you and Umar start getting really serious,” said Brian, fitting the last of the pies into a blue cooler, “he’ll eventually find out the truth?”
“The thought had occurred to me, yes.” It was almost tempting to end things now and be grateful for what we had had. If we progressed any further, I was bound to ruin it.
I was just getting ready to leave the kitchen in despair when my eyes fell on a pecan pie peeping out of the top of the cooler.
“Brian,” I asked: “how long did it take you and Rita to bake these pies last night?”
“We baked two at a time, so about five hours total. We had already pre-made them and kept them in the freezer overnight. That was the hard part. Once they had been frozen it was just a matter of taking them out and baking them in the oven.” He gave me an ominous look. “Why?”
“Because,” I said, and I could feel my face glowing with inspiration, “I think I may have just had an idea.”
Chapter 16
Shannon
Brian didn’t think it could be done, but with Rita and Ginger’s help, I spent the next two days baking dozens of pies. We baked them in all kinds of varieties and flavors: cherry, pecan, apple, lemon meringue, sweet cookie crust… And once we had finished, we canvassed the neighborhood, passing them out at random to friends and acquaintances alike.
“And if you wouldn’t mind doing me a huge favor,” I said to Lonny Mills who lived three doors down, “maybe come over this weekend and say hey. Ask for my autograph. Buy an album. Just normal things.”
“Sure thing,” said Lonny, who was watering his grass. “I always told Lana you were going to make a great musician someday.”
“I’m sure you did.” I managed a smile, trying to forget what he had said about me in the Beacon’s comment section recently. “Hey, and your nieces Loretta and Lilith—how old are they now?”
“Five and seven,” Lonny said proudly.
“You can send ’em over, too, if you’d like.”
“I just might. I bet they would love to hang out with a real pop star.”
“Well, this pop star would love to hang out with them,” I said in my folksiest voice—the one I usually reserved for interviews and the stage. Lonny smiled and went on hosing down the side of the house.
“Well, I don’t think this is going so badly,” I said to Ginger as we began walking back down the street in the direction of my parents’ house. “As long as Katie doesn’t find out what we’re up to.”
“And as long as no one comes running up to you hollering about how you asked them to pretend you’re a celebrity—” said Ginger.
“They can do that, as long as Umar isn’t sitting within earshot.”
Umar would be arriving the following afternoon and we had successfully canvassed anyone he had even the slightest chance of running into. Despite the confusion of many, they were all thrilled to be getting free pies and agreed to keep my secret through the weekend. “Aren’t you a real celebrity, though?” asked Evan Truett, who managed the auto parts store, and several of his patrons voiced their assent. For many of them, I was the closest thing to a celebrity they’d ever seen.
The other part of my plan didn’t go nearly as well—the part that involved asking Dad if I could rent out the Winslow House for the weekend. I could tell he was about to lecture me before he even opened his mouth, the way some people can feel rain in their bones on a cloudless day.
“Shannon, why are you trying to sustain this charade?” he demanded. In the chair behind him, Brian sat studiously scanning his phone. “I think it’s time you came clean to him. If you’re going to be in a real relationship, it’s past time.”
“Dad, I can’t…”
“Why not? You know you’re just making this worse for yourself the longer you drag it out.”
I looked to Brian for help, but he was conspicuously avoiding the discussion. There was no way I could get Dad to understand why I had been lying to Umar for so long. At some point, it had become less risky to continue the deception than to admit that our whole relationship up to this point had been based on a lie.
“I just wish you would trust me on this,” I said finally. “I know what I’m doing and I wish you’d believe me when I tell you how much I need to use the mansion this weekend.”
“Maybe I would trust you if it didn’t seem like you were lying to so many people,” Dad replied.
“One person, Dad. I’m only lying to one person.”
“Oh, excuse me.” The condescension underlying his sarcasm was infuriating. “And now you’ve enlisted half the town in your conspiracy of deception. It’s bad enough that you’re misleading this person without making three hundred other people co-conspirators! What is he going to think when he finds out?”
“We won’t have to worry about it,” I said in a tone of false cheer, “if you’ll call around and get me the keys to the mansion. Besides, don’t you owe me for the repairs to the patio?”
I had him there, and he knew it. With some of the money I had earned from my concert in Umar’s palace, I had paid to have the back patio, which was being eaten by termites, torn down and completely replaced.
“I don’t owe you a thing,” Dad said, though I could see defeat in his eyes and sense it in the tone of his voice. “I’ll get you the keys on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“That you tell this poor man the truth before he returns home. You don’t want him finding out from someone else, trust me.”
“Sure thing, Dad,” I said, returning sarcasm for sarcasm. “I’ll get right on that.”
Shaking his head, Dad began heading off in the direction of his back office. Pausing at the front of the hall, he said, “And I don’t want you to come crying to me when it all falls to pieces. I warned you, I tried to tell you. But no prophet is heeded in his own house.”
I rolled my eyes: Dad could be the most melodramatic person when he wanted to be. “And thanks so much for standing up for me, Brian!” I shouted as I skulked into the kitchen to pour myself some tea.
Umar arrived the next day, and I spent most of that evening and the following day introducing him to Woodfell. Ginny was still pretending to be my manager, Mrs. Tessmacher. Before his arrival that morning, I had gathered the rest of the family in the living room so we could practice saying her new name a few times. (“I don’t want anyone slipping and calling her Ginny at dinner,” I had said, to which Dad shouted, “But that’s her name!”).
Luckily, Umar seemed too nervous to notice the odd ways in which the rest of the town was acting. We couldn’t go out in public without one or two people whom I had known for much of my life running up and asking for an autograph or a selfie. After the fourth or fifth time this had happened, as we were walking through the parking lot of the crab shack on Saturday afternoon, he said to me, “I haven’t known many people who have this many
fans. I feel famous by proxy.”
“It must be nerve-wracking,” I said teasingly.
“It is a little. I don’t know if I’m entirely ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.”
It was intended as a joke, but I could sense that he wasn’t kidding, not completely. We paused at the front of my car and I turned to face him, hand raised over my face to protect my eyes from the honeyed sunlight. “Hey, what are you worried about?”
“It’s nothing, really.” Sensing that I wasn’t going to let it go, he added, “I get nervous around your family, is all. I feel like they’re analyzing my every gesture. Perfection is a hard thing to live up to.”
“Nobody expects you to be perfect,” I said in surprise. It was shocking to me that someone actually cared what my family thought. It occurred to me, with a twisted feeling in my stomach, that maybe I had sold my deception too well. The difference between his image of me and the reality was growing further and further apart.
“Were you not listening when we had lunch at the crab shack?” replied Umar. “All the questions they asked me—your dad, your mother, even Brian. Wanting to know how I made my fortune, whether I would ever move back to America…”
“I think they were just curious. Here in America, when we make a new acquaintance, we tend to ask them a lot of questions. And it’s not because we’re testing them, but because we’re genuinely inquisitive and friendly. That’s just how Americans are.”
“I don’t remember getting asked so many questions in New York,” said Umar shyly.
“Well, maybe they do things differently in New York. My family’s always taken a lively interest in my friends and boyfriends. When I first met Ginger in junior high, they invited her over for dinner and grilled her for an hour. I think it would have terrified anyone else, but Ginger didn’t seem to notice.”
“Maybe so.” He opened the driver’s side door and climbed in. I half-wondered whether he was just agreeing with me to avoid continuing the discussion. “It’s a relief not to be surrounded by palace guards, anyway. It would be worth moving here just to get away from that.”
I went around the other side and waited for him to unlock the door, wondering whether he would really move here or if he was just getting my hopes up. “But then you wouldn’t get to live in that enormous palace.”
“Bah!” said Umar with a light laugh. He started the car, which murmured and purred like a cat. “I could always buy a new house. Or build one.”
It wasn’t a boast and I didn’t take it as one; Umar was just being matter-of-fact about his wealth. Although the rest of the family seemed dumbstruck by his riches, I had never considered it the most salient fact about him. To me he was just Umar: sensitive, shy, sweet, kindly Umar. “Wealthy” was very low on the list of adjectives I would have used to describe him.
“Well, what about you?” he asked me later that night as we lay in bed in the guest room. We had been watching a movie about tiger attacks, but the movie had gotten boring and we had turned it off. Now I was resting my head against his broad chest, feeling the ache of an unsatisfied hunger. “What inspired you to get into this business?”
“You mean why did I become a pop star?”
I could feel him nodding, just as I could feel the rhythm of his heartbeat. “I remember where I was sitting when Hakim made me the business offer that led me into finance. There must have been a moment when you realized you wanted to pursue a career as a musician.”
I could remember the exact moment. “It’s a little embarrassing to talk about…”
“Oh, come on. You can’t just lead with that and then not tell me!”
“Well… If you really want to know.” I raised myself up on one hand so that I could see him better. “My sophomore year of high school, there was this very awkward boy who had a crush on me. His name was Caleb and he was brilliant, but lacked social skills. The kind of boy who would thoughtlessly pick his nose in class and rub the snot on the underside of his desk. So, anyway, he asked me to the homecoming dance.”
“And you said yes?”
“And I said yes.”
“Because you felt sorry for him?”
“I didn’t feel sorry for him, exactly,” I said. “I just knew he wasn’t going to be able to find a date unless I agreed to go with him. And at this point, I had been friends with Ginny for a couple years and it didn’t bother me, being around quirky people. I was something of a misfit myself.”
“Maybe that’s why we’re together.” Umar reached over and stroked the underside of my chin with his thumb. The brush of his hand flooded me with warmth. “I don’t really get along with people who weren’t misfits. I don’t trust them.”
I could have leaned over and kissed him in that moment, but I restrained myself. “So, anyway, we went to homecoming. And Caleb managed to not humiliate us—his suit was a little too big and he had obviously bought it at a thrift store, but it was dark in the cafeteria and nobody was really paying attention. But of course, Katie had to ruin everything.”
“That’s the second or third time she’s come up this weekend,” said Umar. “Assuming that this is the same Katie.”
“One and the same. Katie is my personal nemesis. In seventh grade, she wanted really badly to be my friend, but I chose Ginger, whom she had been bullying. She never got over it. And so she got up onstage that night in her pinafore, in front of everyone—and as long as I live, I’ll never forget this—and she said, ‘Shannon is a loser who only dates losers!’”
“Yikes. How’d you react?”
“I was mortified, of course. I thought I had been so brave going with Caleb, but when she said that, I burst into tears and ran out of the room sobbing. And I remember sitting on the curb crying and thinking, ‘No matter how hard I try, I’m never going to be accepted by the people who matter.’ And I knew the only way I would ever win acceptance was by being talented or rich. If I had money and talent and power, then no one could ever hurt me again.”
“So that was when you decided to become a star.” A smile had crept into Umar’s voice and he began stroking my hair softly.
“That was the moment. That was it. So I went home that night after Caleb’s dad dropped me off and I threw on my jammies and dug the guitar out of the garage. It was an old acoustic that had belonged to Dad back when he was in a band in college. And I cried and played that thing the entire night. A week later, I landed a small-time job at a local diner and by Christmas, I had saved up enough money to buy a guitar of my own. And I managed to snag an old piano that the church was throwing out.”
“And now look at you,” said Umar in his most flirtatious tone. He reached around and began kissing me softly at the back of my ear.
“Now look at me.” Still working at that same diner, still being harassed by Katie, wondering if my dreams of glory were going to go the same way as Dad’s.
Umar’s kisses were becoming more aggressive and my heart hammered at the thrill of his touch. I forgot what point I had been trying to make, or if there had even been a point. The only thing that seemed to matter, suddenly, was that we were alone in bed together in an empty house. No one to disturb us, no one to disrupt us. We could spend the entire night here doing the things we had both been wanting to do. Things that, owing to a combination of shyness and guilt and nerves, we hadn’t done.
Umar trailed a thumb along my hip. He seemed to be operating purely on instinct, only half-conscious of what he was doing, like a bird navigating the currents of air on its way home. I didn’t want to interrupt, but I felt like we ought to at least talk about it first. Placing a hand to his chest I said, “Wait.”
Disappointment flickered for a second in his dark eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“Is this really happening? I just need to know what we’re doing here. I mean, I think I know, but I want to make sure.”
“All I know for sure is that I want you,” said Umar. “I’ve wanted you since the moment I stepped into this house.” Sensing my hesitation, he added, “Do you
want this?”
“I do. I just didn’t think it was something I could ever have.”
“What’s to stop us?”
Lowering me down onto the bed, he began to caress me gently with his lips just over my belly button. The last of my resolve faded as the dark waters buoyed me aloft and carried me far from shore.
A few minutes or an hour or a night and a day later, we found ourselves in the same position in which we had started: him leaning back with his hands behind his head while I reclined on his chest, stroking his silken hair.
It occurred to me that we had done it, we had won the haunted house challenge, and I wondered whether the secret of winning was to be so preoccupied with some other activity that ghosts weren’t a bother. I could prove that we had both stayed the night in the house, but I also knew that we could never claim the ten thousand dollars, because of the questions it would raise about why we had been here together, just the two of us, and what we had done.
Umar nuzzled my ear softly with a kitten-ish fervor. “By the way,” he said quietly, “what ever became of that song you were writing? The one for the movie?”
“Movie?” I asked, my brain still foggy from love-making and lack of sleep. “What movie?”
“The Hollywood film you were writing a song for. You said you flew home and locked yourself in your room for a week or two so you could write it.”
“Oh, right.” Idiot that I was, how could I have forgotten my own story? “I’m still working on it. I think I’ve nailed the verses, but I’m coming up on the bridge and it’s a lot of pressure.”
Umar mussed my hair with his lips. “Well, I have complete faith in you.”
“I’m glad.”
I lay back and breathed a sigh of relief. His brain was still foggy, too.
Chapter 17
Umar
