Fan Girl (8 page)

Chapter
14

Realistically speaking, Summer
should
hop straight on a plane and fly back to the life she left behind in Manila. But
she doesn’t want to—she feels like she should stay here for as long as
she needs to. She doesn’t want to go home, not like this, not with her tail
between her legs, not when she feels the world should stop spinning and be
miserable with her. She doesn’t want to go home, not when doing so would just highlight
the tragic fact that she was wrong and everybody else was right. She doesn’t
want to go home, not before she has the chance to prove that she
isn’t
going to spend the rest of her life being the poster girl
for all things pathetic.

She calls her mom’s older sister, Tita Elizabeth, who
owns a small restaurant in Sacramento, and borrows money to pay Ashley’s rent
and buy a plane ticket. Summer promises to return every cent and asks if she
can get a job in the restaurant as a waitress, conveniently forgetting to
mention that she is a huge, hazardous klutz. Tita Elizabeth generously agrees.

Summer
is alone in Ashley’s apartment, packing her bags the day before her flight to
Sacramento, when the doorbell rings. A guy with red hair and freckles gives her
a sour, strained smile. He is carrying a box of clothes—Ashley’s clothes,
Summer realizes after a few seconds.

“You
must be…” she says.

“Colin,”
the guy interrupts. “Yeah. You’re Summer? Can I leave these with you?”

“Sure,”
she says, holding the door open. “But Ashley’s not here.”

He
steps inside like he belongs there. “I know,” he says. His voice is
tremendously grating. “That’s why I came. I’m just dropping off her clothes.”
He sets the dusty box down on the floor beside the overflowing shoe rack, then
straightens up and wipes his hands on the back of his jeans.

“Do
you want me to call Ashley?” Summer asks. “I think she’s in a meeting downtown
with her producers right now, though.”

“That
won’t be necessary,” Colin sniffs, like this was all her fault. “I’m leaving.”

Good
,
Summer almost says. “I’ll tell Ashley her boyfriend stopped by.”

“Ex-boyfriend,”
he corrects her.

She
can’t say she’s surprised; she knew Ashley didn’t like him enough to keep him
around. “He’s holding me back,” Ashley told her. “At this point in my life, I
can’t be in a relationship with a guy who doesn’t understand, who demands this
much.”

Still,
Summer feels a tinge of sympathy for Colin, who stands in the middle of the
cramped living room looking angry and confused, like a kid in a toy store who
was just told not to touch anything. Although she isn’t sure whether or not it
would help, she asks, “What happened?”

Colin’s
face softens. “She didn’t want to be with me anymore,” he says, like breakups
were ever really that simple.

“Maybe you can still make it work,” she tells him, not
quite believing it herself. “If you wait for her.”

He
says, “I’ve been waiting for her my whole life. We’ve been friends since junior
high, and I feel like I’ve been hanging around her for so long, waiting and waiting
and waiting. There is only so much I can take.”

Summer
nods like she understands, and perhaps in some hidden part of her, she does.
Maybe she knows she made a mistake, waiting and waiting and waiting all those
years for Scott to be ready for something real, to swoop in and sweep her off
her feet for good. Maybe she knows that she should have known better.

Years ago, when Ellie told her she was marrying Ken,
Summer asked why. It was a valid question, and if Ellie had hesitated or
faltered on her answer, Summer would have told her to reconsider. But Ellie
said matter-of-factly, “He and I just add up.” It was a simple explanation, but
Summer ended up thinking about it for days. When do you know for sure that you
and someone add up—how do you compute for compatibility, how do you
decide that you are ready to spend the rest of your life together? When
something goes wrong, do you subtract a certain amount to the overall value of
your relationship, and do you keep subtracting until the value runs out, or does
forgiveness enable you to cancel out mistakes? When do you decide that you just
don’t add up anymore; when are you allowed to tell yourself that it’s no longer
worth
it?

When
are you allowed to give up on someone?

Before
she closes the door, Summer tells Colin, “I think you should let her go.” And
he smiles a sad little smile and says, “That’s what I’m trying to do.”

Chapter
15

Summer found Tita
Elizabeth’s house in Sacramento positively charming. She was given a room of
her own, with a queen-sized bed whose sheets were embroidered with cherry
blossoms and a bookshelf stacked with meticulously wrapped hardbound novels.
There were fresh flowers on the bedside table, and every day, Summer woke up to
warm sunlight tickling her on the right side of her face and the sound of the
Miles Davis record Tita Elizabeth always listened to while making pancakes and
brewing coffee for breakfast. She loved how their neighbors were named Mr. and
Mrs. Darling (on some nights, she could almost swear she could see a thin green
figure with a pointy hat darting out the second floor window), and how they had
an actual mailbox of their own—it was barn red and rusty and brought her
handwritten letters from Ellie and Ken every other week. “We miss you,” Ken
would write in all caps, and beside that, Ellie would insert, “I really miss
picking on you.” Sometimes, the mailbox also brought her presents from Zac: a
mix
CD
with obscure indie
songs whose titles had her name in them, or a disturbingly disfigured stuffed
bear he had customized to look “just like her,” or an empty jar with a note
that says, “I farted into it so you’d remember how much I stink. PS: You’re
welcome.”

Summer
also loved working at Tita Elizabeth’s restaurant, where it smelled like
pumpkin pie and cinnamon sticks all day long and the guests all called her by
her first name. She loved the cheerful yellow curtains, the enormous cake and
pastry display beside the cash register, the hardwood floors and the way they
made music with her footsteps. She loved the way she felt every morning, when
she’d switch on the power supply and flood the restaurant with light, like she
was revealing a well-kept secret to the world, and the way she felt every
evening, when the door would slowly creak shut behind her, like it was disappointed
to see her lock up and leave.

She
learned to love telling her story, even to total strangers. The more she told
it, the less it hurt. And the less it hurt, the clearer things became: she
was
wrong. She
was
pathetic. And that was okay, because she won’t be anymore.

A
frequent customer, Mr. Brooks, usually came in after the lunch rush wearing the
same tweed jacket and bowler hat, his wooden cane proclaiming his presence with
its distinct tappity-tapping. If there was a line for the counter, he would
stand patiently in front of the cake and pastry display, re-adjusting his
spectacles and rubbing his chin with his long, wrinkled fingers. He would study
the handwritten labels, looking like he was struggling to decide what to get.
But when his turn came, he would always choose a slice of carrot cake and an
oatmeal cookie—basically the same items he’d been ordering for the past
decade. He brought a book with him sometimes, but mostly, he talked to Summer
while she refilled his glass with lukewarm water, always starting a
conversation like they were simply resuming a previous one. He was a widower, a
grandfather of six, and the coolest seventy-nine-year-old Summer had ever met.

When
she told him about Scott, he asked, “That night after you talked to him for the
first time, on your way to his gig, did you think he was going to change your
life?”

“I
did,” she said. “That’s exactly what I thought.”

“That’s
where it all went downhill for you, then,” he told her. “Young people these
days are always searching for something to change their life—a job or an
event or a place or a boy or a girl.”

“That’s
true,” she said. “But isn’t that natural? Isn’t it a good thing to be hopeful?”

“The
problem is that you never give yourself enough credit,” he said. “Why do you
need something or someone else to change your life? Why can’t you do it
yourself?”

Summer
didn’t have an answer, but it didn’t seem like Mr. Brooks was waiting for one.
He continued, “Young people are so reckless about change. So impulsive. They
chop off all their hair, they quit their perfectly fine, perfectly fulfilling
jobs, they marry someone they barely know, they pack up all their belongings
and move away from home. Everything is done on a whim.”

“We
welcome change,” Summer said, trying to defend her generation.

“Yes,”
said Mr. Brooks. “But you must welcome stability and contentment, too.”

Summer
didn’t want to be rude, but she had to ask: “Does it get easier? Does the urge
to chase change wear off as you grow older?”

“Sweetie,”
he said, laughing. “Look at me. I have been coming to the same restaurant,
wearing the same hat and jacket, and ordering the same carrot cake and oatmeal
cookie for the last ten years. And I have been in love with the same woman for
the last sixty. Does it look like I’m having a hard time?”

Chapter
16

One of Summer’s
favorite things about
working at the restaurant was sitting at a corner table before closing time and
counting her tips—by six weeks, she had enough to pay Tita Elizabeth back
for the rent and the ticket, and by three months, she had enough to buy her a
new
TV
, or a new microwave
oven. But Tita Elizabeth would just wave Summer off and tell her to set her
money aside for something more important.

“But
your television education and your consumption of bowls of microwaveable
popcorn cannot be put on hold,” Summer would say.

“Save it,” Tita Elizabeth would insist. “You never know
when you might need another plane ticket.”

And
Tita Elizabeth was right: One week before her twenty-second birthday, Summer
decides she’s going home.

“You
really miss Ellie and Ken and Nick, don’t you?” Tita Elizabeth asks.

“I
do,” Summer replies. “And I miss Zac.”

“They
miss you too,” Tita Elizabeth says. “I can tell. The mailbox doesn’t lie.”

Summer
goes to her room, pulls out her suitcase from under the bed, and starts folding
her clothes one by one. She does this methodically, her hands moving carefully
while her brain begins zipping all around the house, all around Sacramento,
heading straight towards Los Angeles and racing back again. She hasn’t heard a
single word from Scott since that fourth song-revising Sunday, and she doesn’t
expect to. She came across the wedding plans in a magazine—all those
gourmet caterers and high-end bakers and expensive gowns and designer
invitations—while sipping jasmine tea out on the patio on a weekday
afternoon, with the California breeze gently rustling the leaves scattered at
her bare feet. The article went on for two grueling pages, but Summer didn’t
need to reach the end to realize what she should have known years ago: she and
Scott lived in conflicting worlds, and just because these worlds collided once
doesn’t mean they had any real chance of merging. She didn’t need to finish the
article to know that she and Scott, whether she liked it or not, were done. It
wasn’t that they couldn’t be together
yet
—it
was that they couldn’t be together, period
.
  

When she drops Summer off at the airport, Tita Elizabeth
tells her, “Your mother did it too, you know.”

“Did
what?” Summer asks.

 
“Fell truly,
madly, deeply in love with a celebrity.”

“You’re
kidding,” Summer says. “Who was it?”

“You
may have heard of him—his name is Julio Iglesias,” Tita Elizabeth says,
laughing. “It was a few years before she met your dad. I’m telling you, she was
absolutely obsessed with him. She had posters on her wall, photos on her school
binder, and his albums piled on top of her bedside table. She practically
worshipped him. At one point, she was introducing herself to everyone as Mrs.
Iglesias and sounding like she believed every inch of it. Then he responded to
one of her letters, and she started asking me about cheap airfares and the
dollar-peso conversion rate. I was seriously worried I’d wake up one day and
discover she’d left to follow him halfway across the globe.”

“But
she didn’t,” Summer says.

“She
didn’t,” Tita Elizabeth agrees.

“I wish someone had talked me out of it.” Summer is
surprised that she actually said this out loud.

“Don’t
say that,” Tita Elizabeth tells her. “If you didn’t follow him to
LA
, you
wouldn’t have come here. And that would have been a shame, because I really
liked having you around.” She smiles. “You’re welcome to visit as often as you
want. Or if you change your mind, you’re definitely welcome to come back for
good.”

“Thank
you,” Summer says, and when they hug goodbye, she feels tears spring to her
eyes because she knows she won’t be seeing Tita Elizabeth again anytime soon.

One
transatlantic flight later, when the plane’s wheels touch the ground with a
definitive thud, Summer pictures her family and Zac waiting (one of them would
probably be holding up a tacky sign), grinning from ear to ear, genuinely happy
to have her back. She pictures them enveloping her in a big hug, crushing her
bones, making it too hard to breathe and making her laugh too hard. As the
plane slows down, she feels her heart soaring into the air, lifted up by
something resembling the hope she felt when she first met Scott, only much
steadier and much safer and much more peaceful.

Summer
thinks,
Maybe this is what it’s like to be
somewhere you belong.