Everybody Knows Your Name (8 page)

Tonight I'm singing “Wonderwall” by Oasis. Stacy the vocal coach isn't a fan. The past few days she's been telling me every chance she gets that it's too depressing, it's too abstract, it's too British. Now I find out that the producers think it's drippy. But out of all the songs on the list from the year I was born, this is the one that speaks to me.

The recorded version starts off kind of bratty, with singer Liam Gallagher sounding like he's ready to abandon whomever he's singing to. Like he hopes she gets the trouble she deserves. You think he's angry and maybe even uncaring, but then he comes to the line about no one else feeling the way he does about her. And all of a sudden, you understand he's just said those first few lines because he's hurt.

So in a way, the song starts out as a lie because he's trying to hide how deep his feelings run for this girl, but as he sings, his defenses break down. He can't keep up the lie anymore. I know exactly what that's like because I have a tough time with pretending to be something I'm not too. That's why I've had to stop talking to Scott.

It's been almost two weeks since I hung up on him, and I've successfully resisted picking up the phone at least three times. I came closest to calling him after the first day of introductions. I just wanted to talk to someone who knows me. Because I want to believe he knows me under the good face I put on for him this summer, trying to seem like I was a mature person who could handle separations without getting too upset. But I've reminded myself that that's the reason Scott couldn't stop calling me—because he wanted to feel known too, even if he didn't want to admit to the strangeness that had settled between us—and that it's not enough.

So anyway. Then you come to the chorus.

Liam's voice loses the brattiness, and it's initially replaced by what I hear as helplessness. Helplessness that sets in because he wants to get through to this girl so badly, and he wants her to grasp what she means to him, but he's really nervous that he's not going to be able to do it. And then finally, at the end of the chorus, he desperately says that she's his wonderwall. And what's so moving is that there's actual wonder in the way he sings that word. He's trying to show her the wonder he associates with her by dragging that experience out of himself, by turning it inside out. That's what gets me.

I really like the idea that love can have so many complicated layers.

When I was printing out the lyrics to learn them, I found an interview in which Liam's brother, Noel, the writer of the song, described it as being about “an imaginary friend who's gonna come and save you from yourself.” And isn't that something that everybody wishes they had in their lives? And doesn't that make the song the very opposite of abstract?

Mila and I hustle to the backstage area, where people in headsets and a bunch of guys in faded concert shirts are yelling and pointing and just generally being the embodiments of stress. You can hear the hum of the audience and the bass from the hype music playing on the other side of the walls. We squeeze by and continue down a more muted hallway to the row of rooms with our names posted on the doors.

Earlier today I heard that the skylights are back in, so we're moving into the mansion after the after-party tonight. Mila's about to go into her dressing room when I feel like I should do something to cement what I think is a burgeoning friendship. Talking to her has reminded me that hanging out doesn't have to be this massively pressured group thing. You can just like someone's company. You can just sense that you don't have to perform for each other because everything's already there.

“I wanted to ask you something,” I say.

“Sure.”

“Do you want to be roommates?”

It's an optimistic feeling to have accidentally stumbled into this friendship.

She looks like she might be thinking the same thing. “Yeah,” she says. “Definitely.”

“So do I.”

“Done. See you out there.” Mila presses the lever to go into her dressing room. But as I'm turning from the door, she pokes her head out. “One more thing. Don't think differently of me as a person after you see me onstage.” Then she shuts the door.

“What?” I say to myself.

The contestants haven't been allowed to watch each other in individual rehearsals, so I have no idea what Mila or anyone else actually sings like. We're going to be seated on the side of the stage during performances because Catherine says they want to “capture the experience of newness on your faces. Like those videos on YouTube where a fat-headed baby gets a load of a sneeze for the first time.”

“Maggie,” Ford calls as I'm continuing down the hallway. I look over.

“No one really calls me that,” I say, but in a friendly way. I'm feeling very friendly all around this evening.

“Well, maybe I'll be someone by the time this whole thing is over.” He catches up to me. “Look at you,” he says, meaning my hair.

“Well, look at you too.” They've put him in a jacket, kind of like the shape of a letterman one, but in black satin, and a pair of jeans that are tighter than what I've seen him wear of his own choosing. His hair is also maybe a little higher than usual in the front.

He leans against the wall, his body turned toward me, and for some reason this reminds me of how guys will stand against a locker while they're waiting for you to get your books. It makes me start to run through a theoretical idea of what it would be like if we'd met at school. What would I think of him? What would he think of me? The answers are hard to sort out because we met on top of a weird hotel in the middle of the night in disorienting circumstances. So everything I come up with just seems imaginary.

“Do you have anyone out there to see you?” I ask. He's got to have someone in the world. I mean, relatives, friends, someone.

He keeps his eyes on me. “No. Doesn't matter. I'm excited.”

My mom's out there in the third row with McKinley's mom and one mature, leathery girlfriend of a contestant. I know she's got to be very, very thrilled right this second, the theater filling with people talking around her and the neon lights running along the stage and top 40 playing in surround sound, even from the rafters.

And I get this jolt of excitement too, this feeling of something really being about to happen. It comes over me like the world's most forceful crush. It makes me want to say crazy things to Ford that have no basis in reality. Things about how I wish I could have met him in what I'm imagining as his South (which in my head is mostly based on having read
Where the Red Fern Grows
in elementary school) because I wish I could already know him. That doesn't make any sense, I know, but it's kind of like that feeling of seeing something you really want in a window, so you just want the glass to drop away.

The air feels like it's whirring or buzzing around me.

“What's going on?” Ford kind of smiles and tips his head back to look at me out of the bottom of his eyes, like he does.

“If only we could . . .” is all I can think to say. That's it. I don't have the rest.

“Could what?” he asks, but now he's really smiling at me like he knows something I don't. The music in the theater gets louder in the background. There's applause.

I don't know how he could have some idea of what I was going to say when
I
don't even have a clue, so that makes me say to him, “What? What is it?”

The stage manager comes running down the hall, yelling that the show is about to start and she needs the girls lined up for our introductory walk and waves. The air is quivering, if air can quiver.

I ask Ford again, “Seriously, what is it?”

He comes off the wall, and I would swear he's looking at my mouth. I'm looking at his mouth back, because the way he's looking at me compels me to spend a few seconds on the shape of his lips.

Then the stage manager puts her hands flat on my back and practically does my walking for me. “Batter up,” she says, moving me toward the door to the stage. I look away from Ford because I have to. The stage manager and I step into darkness, but then, as I round the corner, I can see the stage glowing violet through the slots of the wings.

I'm put in the front left wing, and then I see the host, Lance Thrasher, run onto the stage with his mic in hand. He has a shit-eating grin that doesn't budge, and his suit is so tight, it fits almost like a woman's.

Over the music he says, “Turn on the spotlight!” It lights him up. It's so bright. And I think there's no way I could go out there and come back the exact same person.

My shoulders go limp as the final chord of my song rings out into the dark theater. From out of the black, rising applause swallows the chord, takes over the room. The house lights fade up a little, revealing the audience is actually on its feet.
This feels good
.

The audience's approval is like a ray of comic book energy hitting me in the chest, a supersizing beam causing me to grow gigantic right in front of everyone, like I could keep growing right through the roof of the theater, then stomp off through LA, an unstoppable hundred-foot-tall monster throwing buses and tearing through power lines, rampaging until the police, the Air Force, and maybe Will Smith are forced to team up and machine-gun me from the top of the Capitol Records building, the whole mess ending with Naomi Watts weeping over my giant dead body.

This feels really, really good is what I'm saying.

I look to my side because I need to share this with someone who isn't out there in the audience. I spot Magnolia. She feels so close to me. I've finished the song right next to where the other contestants are seated onstage. From her stool, she's clapping with a look that says,
All right, okay, not too shabby
. I walk the rest of the way to her, scoop my hand behind her head, lift her up, and see the slightest surprise cross her face before I kiss her.

Kissing her feels better than really, really good.

Lance says something in the background on the sound system about me being a ladies' man. I barely hear him. The audience makes catcalls and whoops, but they seem so much farther off than they are.

When I pull away, Magnolia's kiss lingering there on my lips, her eyebrows are raised and her mouth is almost open like she's about to ask me a question.

Lance sidles up to us. “I really hate to interrupt you two, but we do still have a show to finish,” he says into the mic. The audience laughs over the thumping music that has kicked in.

He escorts me over to the center of the stage, right in front of the judges. Oh yeah, the
judges
. What's wrong with me? How could I forget about the judges? Their four votes alone control 50 percent of my fate; America's call-in vote makes up the other half.

I look to the three strangers who will probably decide how the rest of life my plays out. There's Davey Dave, the DJ record producer, eyes hidden behind his trademark aviator sunglasses. Jazz Billingham, who's already made a fortune selling records even though she's only eleven. When she stares at you with these eyes that are just too old for her face, it's kind of unsettling. And, of course, there's never impressed, brutally honest Chris James. It's strange to see that famous silver pompadour of hair right sitting right in front of you after all the years you've watched him tear apart movies on his review show.

“How do you think you did?” a bored-looking Chris James asks me.

And I'm back to reality. My hundred-foot-tall feeling shrinks down to nothing under that gaze.

How
did
I do? I desperately try to replay the performance in my head.

Seconds before my entrance, my usual nervous energy started to build, ratcheting up and up until I almost couldn't stand it. So by the time Lance took the stage and introduced me, I felt just like a slingshot pulled all the way back.

Leander tells me that when I make an entrance, it's always like there's some kind of emergency. This time, I started singing almost before I hit the microphone. It took the show's backing band half a line to kick in with me, so my first bit was a cappella. I think it sounded okay, even though it's not how we'd rehearsed it.

Then I think I did something weird. I was chewing gum, wasn't I? I'd forgotten to get rid of my gum from before, so I turned my head and spit it halfway across the stage without missing a beat. Why the hell did I do that?

My brain works different onstage, fires off new kinds of messages. It tells my body to do bizarre stuff. Leander tells me I get all convoluted, like I'm having a seizure, and maybe I am, because when I'm performing I partly feel like someone else is controlling my body.

But now the other judges are talking to me. I've been answering them on autopilot, lost in my own head. I can't focus on their questions, I'm too busy interrogating myself:
Was I terrible? Did I look stupid? Do I look stupid now? Is Magnolia going to be pissed?

“You might have chosen the wrong song, bro.”

You choked.

“. . . intense emotion. But out of control.”

You're going home.

“. . . natural talent, but no polish.”

Who did you think you were fooling?

“I thought you were going to hurt yourself up there.”

You don't belong here.

You don't belong here.

You don't belong here.

Then Chris James swoops back in once the other judges have finished giving their comments, and I hear him say, “I thought it was the best performance of the night.”

My head goes silent.

Cameras line the pathway into the after-party. The club is in an old theater on Hollywood Boulevard, and it's packed. Every person I squeeze by smiles at me as though we know each other. It takes about fifteen of those smiles before I stop trying to figure out if we do.

This isn't like any party I've ever been to. I guess it's more of a press conference, except for the bass-heavy music and snacks floating around every five seconds. The food is always something simple combined with one weird ingredient. Like mini grilled cheeses except they have shrimp in them. A waiter who looks about my age offers me one of those from a tray after a reporter asks me to say, “America, could I be your next superstar?” into the camera.

“No, thanks,” I say to the waiter. I'm thinking I could easily be him.

The lights on all the cameras make the rest of the club seem even darker by comparison, and I look around for Magnolia from where I'm pinned in this corner. One of the twins passes (not sure which one), and I bend close and ask if she's seen Magnolia so as not to make a whole production about it.

“She's back that way with her mom,” the twin says.

Before I can search for her, Catherine takes me by the arm and leads me to a corner where a bunch of entertainment reporters are doing interviews. I recognize most of them; they're famous for asking famous people questions. There are all kinds of famous, I guess. In person, they have the whitest teeth I've ever seen.

I just do interview after interview. The
Spotlight
camera guys, Skip and Hector, are filming the reporters filming us contestants, and almost all the questions I'm getting are about Magnolia. “Is this a new showmance?” “Is she a good kisser?” “What happens next?”

I don't know if there's a right way to answer any of this. I try to laugh it off.

I turn my head, looking for her bright, shiny top somewhere in the crowd, and then I realize that's not what she's wearing anymore. They changed all of us after the show. It's like my heart is seizing just a bit at every Magnolia-maybe girl I can make out between the lights in the dark. The next reporter steps in front of me and beams a gigantic smile in my direction. Finally I get a different question for the first time in an hour.

“Ford, is it going to be weird living in a mansion, considering the life that you came from?”

“Oh, man, it's crazy! It feels like I'm dreaming.” As I answer, I realize that while part of me is just being honest, another part of me is listening in and working hard to be what the interviewers want me to be. I have to say, I don't fully know which of those parts is running this show.