Fan Girl (5 page)

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
DJ
s
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 the 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.

“Fine,”
she shrugs. “Suit yourself.” Zac resumes ignoring her. Bored, she hits refresh
on Scott’s Twitter page. There have been no new updates since last week, and
she is starting to get antsy. Without any knowledge of where Scott is and what
he is doing, she feels powerless—she doesn’t have his LA number, and
every time she tries to e-mail him, she receives a failure notification. Her
numerous blog comments and tweets and Facebook messages have all disappeared
into cyberspace, swallowed up by the countless blog comments and tweets and
Facebook messages he probably receives from his other fans. So she has no
choice but to troll the Web for anything she can cling to, anything that will
link him to her in some way; these days, even the most insignificant bit of
information about him gives her a sense of control, weak but satisfying.

And there it is, suddenly: a new tweet from Scott,
announcing the title of his new album. “I’ve decided to call it
Summer Love
,”
he wrote. “It’ll be epic.”

In college, Summer played tug-of-war with her
expectations, managing them one second and letting them run wild the next. She
learned to read Scott’s facial expressions, learned to understand what his
specific tones meant, learned to decipher his one-liner texts and decode the
things he said to her over the phone. But now that their relationship has taken
on an entirely impersonal level, she can no longer spot the subtle changes in
his eyes or smile, no longer listen for clues in his voice. She can no longer
access the part of him that she believed for years only she could access.
   

And
perhaps it is because of this complete lack of connection and contact that she
has recently—just this week, actually—started to overcompensate by
assuming everything Scott posts online is a secret cry for help, a secret cry
for her. Perhaps it is because of this absence of intimacy that she is so
willing to believe that Scott is harboring feelings for her. When you’re
desperate, it is easy to blindly, recklessly throw your hopes out into the
open; to rely on luck when there is nothing else to rely on. It is easy to risk
failure, really, when you don’t even know what to measure your life against
anymore.

Besides,
it is right there:
Summer Love
.
What more proof does she need? And when she receives a call from Meg informing
her that Scott has broken up with Roxanne (“I figured I owed this much to you,”
she begins, before even saying hello), Summer can almost picture Scott sitting
by the windowsill, pining for her, can almost hear him saying he loves her. It
is implausible and borderline delusional, but it brings a smile to her face.
She imagines the myriad of serendipitous events leading to their happy
ending—she and Scott will get there, no matter how long it takes. “They
weren’t right for each other,” Meg says, and although Summer is fully aware
that her ex-roommate is only buttering her up out of repentant obligation, she
agrees. “That’s true,” she says, taking advantage of Meg’s remorse and the
chance to feed her ego. “They weren’t.”

Over the next
several days, Summer
keeps herself busy. But no one is too busy to escape those few fleeting moments
when you’re lying in bed at night, your body on the verge of sleep but your
mind wide awake and running a million miles an hour. Those moments are when you
strip the day—and your life—down to the very core, making a mental
tally of the good things versus the bad things, and deciding which side wins.
Those moments are when you’re at your most honest with yourself, and as you
drift off to sleep, you ultimately decide whether or not something is lacking,
and whether or not you are going to do something about it tomorrow.

In
those moments, Summer thinks of Ellie and Ken and Nick. She thinks of Zac. Then
she thinks of Scott, and the way she waited and waited and waited for him to
fall in love with her. She thinks of how her life has been a series of
incidents where she always ends up falling short, hoping for something
wonderful to happen but not quite getting there. Her life must have been
interesting and fulfilling or at least bearable at some point in the years
before she met him and the months after he left, but right now, she just can’t
seem to make herself think otherwise.
 

One
night, after a full day of work, she lies in bed and tells herself,
I
don’t belong here anymore. There is nobody here who will ever make me feel the
way he made me feel.
It is something she has
been mulling over for a while, but it has always been a question, a vague
possibility, a hazy, hasty thought—she has never allowed it to go beyond
that. But on that night, it is a statement.
And if I don’t
belong here
, she thinks,
maybe I belong
somewhere else
. If she can’t find herself here, then there
must be another place in the world where she can.

The
next day, she e-mails Scott, “I miss you. How are you? You haven’t tweeted in
days. I don’t even know where you are. I miss you and I can’t stand it
anymore.”
It’s worth a shot
, she
thinks, the way she does every time she clicks Send.

After
about two minutes, Scott tweets, “Working on a new song called ‘Come Find Me.’
And that’s exactly what I want you to do. Yes, you.”

She
hears his voice in her head, as clearly as if he were right beside her and not
half a world away. She remembers him writing last year,
See
you around
. She found it discouraging at the time, but
maybe that line meant it was only a matter of time for them—that just
because they couldn’t be together
yet
didn’t mean they’d never be together.

A
week later, Summer packs her suitcase for Los Angeles.