Everybody Knows Your Name (10 page)

“Magnolia sucks,” one of the girls says.

I stop and look her in the eyes. “No, she's really good,” I say.

“We hate her,” the other girl says. This is crazy.

I'm suddenly aware that all this is going to be on the Internet.

“I have to go.”

I break free of the girl holding on to me, and jump back on my Triumph. The girls and their moms keep taking photos next to me as I put on my helmet and start the bike. The video guy's still filming. I don't even know what his face really looks like because I haven't seen the whole thing.

“What happens if you and Magnolia are the final two?” he yells over the bike engine.

I push the Triumph back out into the street, and accelerate away. I'm light-headed with the strangeness of what just went down. Driving back to the mansion, I wonder how much trouble my little field trip is going to get me in. With the producers, with Magnolia.

Those girls wouldn't have looked at me twice normally. I won't say it doesn't feel good to be seen as something besides a local screw-up, but whatever this attractive new vibe is, I don't feel like it really belongs to me.

It could all go away the second that stupid paparazzi video goes online and the producers find out I already broke the rules. All I had to do was hang out in a sweet-ass mansion, but no, I needed to do my thing. Maybe it's true—maybe failure is in my DNA. Maybe that's why I'm all worked up about Magnolia instead of thinking about winning the competition. It's as good a way to self-destruct as any. Then I remember about Magnolia and this supposed white, blond guy, and I think maybe I'm not the only one who doesn't have their head on straight.

But underneath all that, I know I don't want to lose. I'm so tired of having nothing. So how about maybe I could let myself try to win just this once? This one time. I promise myself that after tonight, I'm gonna be all business. No more distractions.

I drive back up into the Hills, the moon hanging over my shoulder. When I get to the edge of the mansion's street, I turn off my bike and walk it past the neighbor's gate so that no one at the mansion hears me coming. If I'm going to get hell for this, I'd like to save it for tomorrow.

But when I round the curve, I see two people coming back down the hill toward the house. I stay put, duck a little. They pass under a streetlamp, and I see her. Magnolia. She's walking with the blond guy. And there's something about the way their faces are turned toward each other's that puts the knot back in my stomach.

I balance my motorcycle on its kickstand.

Then I get real angry at the knot for being there. This feeling is a traitor, a thing in me that would rather focus all its attention on another lost cause than on the chance I have.

Here I am, a thousand miles from my home. Finally far enough away that the heavy feeling I've had my whole life has started lifting. But the vote tomorrow could put me right back there like none of this never happened. And there's no one who's going to save me from that. I have to do this alone.

Something's ringing.

I think it's coming from inside my head at first—that it's my anger at myself—but then I realize it's in my pocket. It's the phone I got from the producers. I step back around the curve and think,
Great, the video is probably already up on the Internet. They want me to pack my bags
.

“Hello,” I answer.

“Well, well, if it isn't our own damn TV star.” My spine crawls when I hear that familiar voice. It's not the producers. It's worse.

“Hey, Cody,” I say. I have no idea how he could have gotten this number, but I'm not surprised he did. Cody can pull almost any con he sets his mind to.

“We all watched you last night. I gotta tell you, you kicked some ass, bro! Even if you stole half those licks from me.”

“Thanks,” I say, knowing Cody's never given a compliment in his life without some kind of string attached.

“But then we see most of the other people have their families out there with them, and we got to thinking—it ain't right for you to look like some kind of orphan, man. I know you were joking when you told the people that your family was dead, kid, but I don't think the people out there really picked up on the joke.” He's talking about my video package.

It seems stupid now, but I was just hoping I'd get lucky. I was hoping the night the first show aired, my family would be passed out. Or someone would have thrown an ashtray through the television screen. There were an incredible amount of things they could have been doing instead of watching and paying attention.

Cody's still talking. “We're thinking about maybe making the drive out there, see Hollywood and everything.”

I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I feel an ache when I think about Magnolia, probably about to fall into the arms of someone she actually has a real history with. It only gets worse when I imagine what she'll think when my real history shows up. They say your past has a way of catching up to you. I just thought it would give me a better head start.

Earlier tonight I had a sit-down with Lucien to discuss, as he put it, “what we're going to do with this romance that sprang up. Like a goddamn tulip.”

“I wouldn't call one showy kiss a romance,” I told him.

“But we can make it one,” he said.

I asked him if he ever watched television or movies, and if he believed that every time an actor kissed an actress, they were in real-life love.

He laughed, rubbed his eyes, and said, “Okay, do you have a better idea for yourself?”

I told him anything else. Anything else besides a romance or doing a weepy package about my dad.

We decided on a light story about how Mila and I are becoming friends, with human interest details like Mila discovering I don't move at all when I sleep. Which is true.

When I came out of that meeting, Felicia, leaving one of the upstairs bathrooms in a robe, said, “Magnolia, there's someone yelling your name from the street.”

“What?” I said.

“Yeah, I'm in the bathroom relaxing in the tub, and there's some guy out the window going, ‘Magnooooooolia, Maaaaaaaag.'”

“Like a ghost or a real person? Because it sounds like you're doing a whoo-whoo ghost voice.”

Felicia smiled at me quizzically. “A real, live person with longish blond hair.”

I guess I already knew who it was going to be when she said that because there are no other significant blonds in my life.

I went out the mansion's front doors barefoot, and jogged down the front walk. When I got to the top of the driveway, that's when I could tell it was Scott standing on the other side of the gate. In the scheme of things, there are very few white people who still wear Baja ponchos. And also, even from a distance, I'd know him anywhere.

The last time we'd seen each other in person was the night we broke up. When I saw him at the gate, I had this feeling of not being prepared, kind of like if I'd shown up to class and had no idea there was a test. It was that kind of sinking uneasiness. I guess a feeling of wishing I'd had more time to get my head right.

Scott spotted me and jumped up on the bars of the gate, hanging there, smiling. I walked down the driveway. Once I was facing him, I could tell he'd been in the ocean that day because his hair was pretty stringy and wavy from the salt.

“This is a big house, Tiny,” Scott said.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“You hung up on me.”

“A couple of weeks ago.”

“So maybe you've had some time to cool down.”

I could have banged my head on the gate. “It's not like I'm actively mad at you. Us talking just wasn't very good for me.”

“What did I do?” Scott asked. But as spacey as he seems to people who don't actually know him, I knew that he understood. Scott is an everything's-always-cool! kind of guy on the outside, but what's really happening is that he's a person who can't handle anything negative. The positivity doesn't go all the way through him. From the very beginning I think that's what I was so drawn to about him. I felt so sad, and he wanted to be the hero who cheered me up.

That's also why the breakup was doubly painful. Because one, we were coming apart. And two, it felt like he had given up on wanting to fix me.

My sense of it was that I became an uncomfortable person for him to be around. I didn't know this right when we broke up, but I think I've figured it out since. Before, I made him feel like his best self, but then, once he became nervous about his future and what he was going to do with himself, he saw me as a negative presence. I held him accountable. I asked questions. I was the kind of person who made him feel like his worst self. So he tried to cut me loose, but he couldn't do it completely because you can't always force yourself to break a bond. That's why he still called me. That's why he was standing at the gate.

Coming a night after the show, Scott being there felt like concrete proof that I'll never escape myself. You can change where you live, you can change your hair, you can change everything that's going on in your life, and still you'll project your you-ness, which is what's left underneath everything else.

And again, that's why Scott was at the gate, because he knew that I couldn't get rid of the part of me that connects with him.

“How did you know this address?” I asked.

“I talked to your mom earlier and she gave it to me.”

My mom loved Scott from the first time she met him because he always talks to her like she's his age. Early in the relationship, she started calling him my “brotha from anotha motha” until I told her to please stop because she was grossing me out. Sometimes, when he ditched his last few periods, he'd go to our house to wait for me, and I had a suspicion he'd heard things about my dad from my mom that I never had. When he cares about you, he makes you feel like you want to tell him things. It's a natural gift. When I told my mom we broke up, she cried.

He shook the bars of the gate a little. “But there's no intercom, which I didn't count on.”

“Why are you here?” I yelled suddenly, even surprising myself, my eyes going wide without any effort. “What do you want?”

Scott held his hands through the bars and made a step out of them by interlocking his fingers. “I just want you to come take a walk with me.”

I stared at him for a few seconds.

And then I gave up—not to him, but to myself. I pulled up on the bars of the gate, putting my bare left foot into his hands. There's a code to the keypad, but I don't know it. I swung my right leg over the top of the gate, avoiding the sharp parts, and then Scott helped me down on the other side. I could smell sunblock on him as he was lowering me.

Maybe change isn't a sudden lightning bolt that goes through you. Maybe it's small little increments that you don't even notice until one day you're on the other side.

Anyway, that's the story of why we're now walking slowly up the hill together when two weeks ago I told him we shouldn't talk anymore.

“This doesn't mean we're going back to talking,” I say. “This is just for right now.”

“Cool, whatever,” Scott says, and nods, then, “I saw two dolphins when I was out surfing this morning.”

I kind of laugh. This is an old joke between us. There have been a bunch of times when he's come back from early morning surfing and told me that he saw a dolphin while he was out there, and I've never believed him. I mean, he doesn't go out that far. I just can't believe there's this one rebel dolphin that likes to swim inland and watch the bros get up on their boards. Scott always used to say I should go out there with him so I could see this dolphin for myself, but I could never make myself get out of bed before six a.m. Now he's added another dolphin, which is really upping the ante.

“Can you have sunstroke when the sun isn't totally up yet?” I wonder.

He makes the sign of the cross, which doesn't do much for his credibility considering I know he doesn't believe in religion. It separates people, he says. “Tiny, I swear. Two free, beautiful dolphins.”

“Did they talk to you?”

“I think I heard a soft . . . like a soft
eeeeeee
.”

“And no clicks? Not a single click?” My voice chatters.

“Hey, are you cold?” Scott asks. “Do you need my poncho?”

“Yeah,” I say, and he takes off the poncho and hands it over. When I put it on, it's like putting on a time machine, the way it smells and feels to be in it.

We shoot the shit like this for a while. We come up under a streetlamp. The light shows the creases he's getting around his eyes from being such a squinter and spending so much time at the ocean, and it's like I can see an older version of him for a second. I think,
I wonder if we'll know each other then.

“So I watched the show,” he finally says. “You were good up there.”

When I sang my last note, I thought I'd been good too. Meaning that I thought I had really connected with the audience, even though I couldn't see them. It was just this feeling. I sang to a bright green light far away at the back of the studio, a glowing green little planet. I was hit with this quick exhilaration that I had just
been
different. That I'd just experienced some new adaptation of myself that was going to mark the beginning of everything easy and simple and light. I looked down, and my high-tops were blinking under me like when you reset a clock.

Davey Dave was the first judge to speak. I couldn't see his eyes. He took a sip of his Big Gulp and said, “I found your performance style strangely depressing. Even though you're dressed in shininess and white, I still felt as if I was watching”—he thought—“a sad little bat in a cave.”

Chris James looked at me hawklike, making the whole show suddenly seem very serious. He ran a hand through his big hair as if he were a weary philosopher. “You're the girl I have to coax out of the coatroom at a party. There are many parties for which you couldn't be blamed for feeling that way, but the fact is, you needed to show up big to this one.”

The air hummed like it had before I went onstage, but the quality of the humming was totally different. Instead of feeling excited, I began to feel as if the air was squeezing me.

Last were the comments from Jazz Billingham, who's so young, she makes me feel like I'm babysitting her and we're just playing at being a judge and contestant on a singing show. She said, “I find you interesting. . . .” The in-studio audience gave a lukewarm clap to this, as if they were saying,
Yes, interesting is a good, safe word for this performance we were not very interested in
. She waited for them to go quiet before she spoke again. “But also alienating, and alienation brings about a darkness of the soul that I do not believe is in the realm of the artist.”

Lance was holding his microphone in my face like I was supposed to say something back to that. I was so stunned by this feedback that all I could think to say to Jazz Billingham was “I enjoyed your Christmas special last year.”

I honestly had. It was kind of charming, what with the puppies in snowflake sweaters and the number from the penguin exhibit at the zoo.

Jazz leaned in delicately toward her microphone. “Thank you, but this is not about me,” she said.

I think that tomorrow night there is a very good chance that I'm going home. Mostly this has made me feel heavy with disappointment directed toward myself. I would have said there's no chance of me staying except for how Belinda barely made it through her song.

“Thanks,” I say to Scott.

He looks into my eyes. Deep down in his, I can detect something unsettled. “And you must have been pretty shocked when that guy kissed you out of nowhere, right?”

And then there's the matter of the kiss, which I have barely even begun to process.

I look back into Scott's eyes, and I know he's here partially because he's jealous, and partially because seeing me on TV just made him realize that I've entered a new phase of my life that has nothing to do with him. He's realized I wasn't kidding on our last phone call. Even though he will pretend like I was.

“Right,” I say. “Shocked.”