It’s a Love Story

Chapter 7

CHAPTER 7

I WAKE UP TO A SUNDAY MORNING EMAIL FROM NA than’s assistant. She wants to know when the details of the soundtrack will be firmed up so she can schedule a meeting with the green light committee.

I lie in bed imagining all the dramatic ways people walk through fire to get the thing they want. Going to law school, for example. Training for a marathon. Or actually walking through the fiery shame of their adolescence to ask for a favor. I grab my phone and pull up Hailey’s contact.

It takes me five minutes to compose this text: Hey Hailey! Hope you and the girls are good. I’m working on a new project and the studio wants to get in touch with Jack Quinlan, any chance you’re in touch with him still?

I cannot press send. I leave my phone on my bed and grab a Pop-Tart and bring both it and my phone into my closet. When the door is shut and it’s mostly dark, I eat the Pop-Tart and hit send.

Bubbles pop up immediately: Omg I just laughed out loud. How great would it be if we were still in touch with him

My heart sinks. This is so stupid. Me: I know, right? Will or Dougie probably aren’t either?

Hailey: Ha! Will’s trying to get on one of those reality Realtor shows, and Dougie works at a restaurant in Anaheim, so probably not. I love that you’re still trying to make it in the industry!

Oof. That hits like a sucker punch and a pat on the head all at once. And she didn’t even break a sweat. This conversation is making me feel like I’m time traveling and losing twenty years of progress along the way. I need to change the subject, so I say: How are the girls?

Hailey: Loud, but good. Nelly screams all night and I actually think I’ve had some hearing loss because of it. I’m not complaining, enough hearing loss and I could sleep

That was her Instagram post this morning. I saw it just before I texted her. People thought it was funny and asked where her sweater was from (link in stories). I feel embarrassed for both of us that she’s recycling a joke on me.

Me: Ha!

I refuse to lie and say LOL .

Hailey: You should reach out to Angelica’s office, she might know how to reach Jack. I bet he’s still managed by his weird uncle

When this conversation has come to its natural end (We should get together!), I get out of my closet and find Clem sitting on my bed with her tea and my coffee.

“What’s going on?” she asks. I wipe a crumb from the corner of my mouth. “I heard the closet door close.”

I accept the coffee and get into my bed, holding the quilt out for her to join me. I straighten the covers over our legs before I say, “Thank you. I was texting with Hailey.” I close my eyes and brace for the blow.

“Jane.”

“I just wanted to see if she could get in touch with Jack?”

“But let me guess, she can’t, and you left the conversation feeling terrible about your life.”

Hailey is a little bit like that black light they use to detect traces of blood at crime scenes. Just her presence shines a light on my less-than bits.

“She thinks I should ask Angelica how to get in touch with Jack. Which actually isn’t a bad idea.”

“Or maybe you could come clean to Nathan, find another script, and quit living in the nightmare of your early teens?”

I love the sound of that. Just come clean and move on. “I can’t,” I say.

“Because you’re in a committed relationship with this script now?”

“Sort of,” I say. It’s the truth. Some part of my heart is weirdly attached to this story. “I’m going to call her.”

Angelica was the showrunner on Pop Rocks, and calling her isn’t such a huge emotional leap. I call her from my bed in the broad light of day and without the help of any additional sugar—that’s how easy it is.

“Hello?” she says, hoarse. And it’s then that I realize it’s Sunday morning and people don’t call people on Sunday morning. “Janey?”

“I’m so sorry. I totally forgot it was Sunday. Go back to sleep.” I shoot Clem my oof face and she takes my hand. “What do you need? Say it fast.”

“I need Jack Quinlan’s manager’s number. Or some way to get in touch with Jack.”

“It’s still the uncle, I think.”

“Okay, great. Do you have that number?”

“I’ll text it to you when I’m awake.” She hangs up. What adult doesn’t know it’s Sunday when it’s Sunday?

*

I’VE GONE TO the store and dipped a batch of chocolate- covered pretzels for Clem to bring to the hospital tomorrow by the time Angelica texts me Lyle Anderson’s number at ten o’clock. He’s a stranger and should be easy to call, but the whole thing feels like the world’s biggest can of worms. Clem comes out dressed for her hiking date.

“I feel weird leaving,” she says. “Are you just hanging around stressing yourself out all day?”

“That’s my current plan, yes. But I’d do that whether you were here or not,” I say. “Go. Frolic. Make out in a cave.” I usher her off the porch and down the front walkway.

When she’s gone, I pace on my front porch. I need to make this call. I can’t shake this feeling that I’m about to be exposed, filleted right open for all of Santa Monica to see. Wherever I’ve been burying this shame is well insulated because it’s still red-hot.

“Jump-Start Love Song” didn’t happen right away. In the first season of Pop Rocks, our characters were just four middle schoolers who started a band. We were twelve, and I was on the slower side in terms of puberty. My hair was short, a light brown version of Little Orphan Annie. I felt like a kid still, and I liked putting on my Janey Jakes costume and joking around. I liked the roar of the studio audience. I liked how there was always something to eat on set and how I didn’t have to race to the grocery store on Tuesdays after school before the sale milk ran out. I liked the way Hailey, Will, Dougie, and I were a foursome—”the kids,” as we were called on set. Send in the kids. The tutor’s here for the kids.

The series plan was that we were going to get discovered by a record company at the end of that first season. This set us up for the second season, when I was thirteen, and we were traveling locally to perform in small venues. I was on the keyboards and was constantly birthing ideas that would make us dangerously close to missing our gig or booking us transportation in a wacky vehicle that would run out of gas. This all happened in a world where a bunch of thirteen- year-old recording artists were booking their own travel and managing logistics.

Recording a real song and releasing it as a single was a l ast-minute decision in the middle of the third season. In the first few seasons, our songs were just a few lines and a chorus—enough that we could end each episode with a performance and some applause. But then Angelica commissioned “Jump-Start Love Song.”

The song was a duet between Hailey and Will, who had just become a couple on the show. It was up-tempo in a way that would make you turn it all the way up in your car, but also romantic enough that you might tear up at the end. Or maybe that was just me. I really loved that song. Hailey and Will spent two full days at the recording studio before Angelica realized “Jump-Start Love Song” wasn’t going to work. The song itself was a home run, but Hailey and Will’s voices were wrong for it—Hailey’s wasn’t quite strong enough and Will’s was too high. They sounded like two girls in a karaoke duet. The door to my dressing room was open the day Angelica passed by and heard me singing it. I’d just removed my prosthetic braces and had taken a second to look at myself. I was fourteen, close to fifteen, with perfectly straight teeth. My skin had cleared up and my face was thinning out. I made direct eye contact with myself and felt ripe and ready for something that I didn’t quite know the name of. I knew that tomorrow I’d put the braces back on and contort myself into some comedically awkward position, but for that moment, the mirror and I had a secret: underneath Janey Jakes, there was someone else.

So I started to sing. I sang “Jump-Start Love Song” the way I heard it in my head. I sang as I brushed my hair, longer and falling around my face in a way that felt new. When I turned around and saw Angelica in the doorway, I wasn’t embarrassed at all. I could see that she saw it too. I’d grown out of my embarrassing phase into this new, ripe self.

“Hi,” I said. It was a one-word replacement for Look at me, see this for the first time. Can you believe it? I might be beautiful.

“I have an idea,” she said. And then it all happened. I was going to record the song for Hailey along with someone who was going to sing for Will. I wouldn’t get a recording credit, but I’d get a bonus and royalties and, more importantly, they were going to rewrite my character so that putting me behind the microphone would make sense going forward. I’d be a new version of Janey Jakes, all grown up and cool.

My duet partner was Jack Quinlan. He’d been trying to get a part on our show since it started. I still wonder if he thought recording this song would be his big break. If only he knew what was coming.

It’s hard to explain the way I felt the first time I met him. You’d have to understand what it was like to only know three other kids. When Jack walked in, he wore jeans and a T-shirt with a California flag on it. His hair was cut short but longer on the top, and he had freckles on his cheeks that seemed like they were about to fade away. I had the sense looking at those freckles, and later running my finger over them, that they were a precious thing made for my eyes only.

We met at the recording studio. I’d come straight from home, so I was in my own clothes, jeans and a fitted black top my mother hadn’t wanted me to buy. I was free of the braces and liked the way my lip gloss looked in the glass of the engineer’s booth. Jack walked in and saw that person, Jane Jackson. I felt him see me, and it was like I was born right then.

He took one hand out of his jeans pocket and gave me a wave. “I’m Jack. We’re singing together?”

“Yes. Jane,” I said. I ran my hand through my hair, and he watched me do it. I’d later learn that he was sixteen, which didn’t surprise me. He seemed like he was on the other side of something, and I wanted to go there with him.

The record producer came in and started talking to us, and I kept looking at Jack. We ran through the song once and then a second time. Jack was more comfortable in his skin than I was, like he’d spent a lifetime being cool and didn’t know another way to be. I was still trying on this new skin, being a person who was not the punch line, a person who could be looked at the way he was looking at me.

On our third take, the producer told us to sing the entire song staring into each other’s eyes. He wanted feeling, as if we were really j ump-starting something. So we did. We sang face-to-face for three minutes and fifty-four seconds. And every second of that song, every word we sang, made the room smaller and smaller. I felt like he was singing directly to my heart. It is an understatement to say that I’d never felt this way before. My body was electrified, and I allowed it to take over. As I sang the last few words of the song, “to be in love with you,” and as my lips made the u in “you,” he leaned in and kissed me. That was my first kiss.

We finished early, so I texted my mom that Hailey’s housekeeper was taking us to the movies and would drop me home after dinner. It was the first lie I’d ever told my mom, though I’d soon find out she’d been lying to me forever. It was shocking how easy it was, how little it tugged at my heart. Jack wanted to hang out. With me.

He said, “Let’s go to Beverly Hills,” as if that was just a thing people did. I can still feel the crispness of the November air and then the oven-warm feeling of the inside of his car.

We walked around Beverly Hills and looked in the windows. No place was off- 1 imits to him. He didn’t hesitate when he spoke; he didn’t pause before he walked through a door. I should have known then that Jack would be a star— the world really had no choice. We wandered through Nei- man Marcus, where everything seemed foreign and one of a kind. We made our way to the little café on the top floor and ate fish tacos and popovers. He held my hand as we walked through the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and kept holding my hand on the deepest, plushest lobby sofa.

“You think we’ll be famous?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said because it felt like the right answer.

It had been a day of firsts: the kiss, the feel of his hand in mine. I ran my fingers over the inside of his hand like it was a gift that had just been given to me and I wanted to learn how it worked.

He squeezed my hand, and my heart fluttered in my chest. I knew then that this was the thing my mom had been telling me about—this bigger-than-yourself feeling of true love. For the first time I could feel the thing my parents had, and I felt like I was part of it. He drove me home and kissed me in the car, and the windows fogged up like the air knew we needed our privacy.

The next day on set, everyone was excited about the song. Angelica was thrilled, and even Hailey was excited. The lie of it didn’t bother her a bit—she was going to be an actual recording star. Jack and I sat offstage while Hailey and Will tried to get the lip sync right. We were supposed to be looking through the next song we would record, “Can’t Find My You,” but mostly we were pressing our legs together as we sat, entwining our hands under the sheet music. He stood and took my hand with him, leading me toward my dressing room, where he pulled me toward him and kissed me again. His hands on my neck, his chest up against mine. The magic I’d felt on my lips the day before spread throughout my body and I thought, This. This is the thing they write love stories about. Something in my heart told me this was forever, and because I was fourteen and only knew three other kids, I believed it.

“I love you,” I said.

I know.

He pulled away immediately and said, “What?”

“I love you,” and I leaned in to kiss him again, forever.

He removed my hands from around his waist and reached to turn the light on. “Jane, don’t be weird. Gross.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, wiped me away. And I knew right then that I’d broken it. There was this thing starting to grow, and I’d smashed it before it even had a chance.

Weird and gross. Those words rang loudly in my head, unwinding the new version of myself I’d wanted to believe in. “Sorry,” I said. “I mean. I didn’t mean . . .” The shame started at my core and moved out toward my limbs. It made my heart speed up and my voice squeak. How could I be such an idiot.

He laughed an unkind laugh. “You’re so embarrassing, God.” He said this with a sprinkle of disgust that gave me the same thought I had the first time I saw him—that he saw me for exactly who I was. He opened the door to go but then turned back around. “And honestly, I don’t think you get who you are on this show. They’re all laughing at you. You’re the joke.”

Then he gave me a smile that sort of felt like You’re welcome. Like I should be grateful that he shared this insight with me. I turned back to the mirror and saw exactly what he saw.

I knocked on Angelica’s office door an hour later and told her in a too-chipper voice that I was thinking I’d like to sing “Can’t Find My You” on my own rather than as a duet with Jack. Her expression held a little panic, and I had a difficult time convincing her that he hadn’t done something horrible. I imagine my eyes held the expression of a person who had been irreparably hurt. I didn’t know how to tell her that I was the one who’d misstepped. Jack’s reaction was totally appropriate.

She leaned back in her chair. “Jane, maybe all this recording artist stuff is too much for you? How about you record ‘Can’t Find My You’ on your own—I know you can do that. And then we’ll get back to basics. You’re brilliant as Janey Jakes. You’re the heart of the show. We don’t need to go turning you into Hailey Soul.” I should have disagreed, but I couldn’t make the words come out. She was right: there was no turning me into Hailey Soul.

*

WHEN I HAVE rearranged Clem’s and my books alphabetically by the first name of the author, I know that I am out of places to hide. I grab a pair of sunglasses and bring them with me into the closet. When the door is shut and my knees are pulled up to my chest, I make the call.

It goes to voicemail. I panic and hang up. I hadn’t planned for that, and now the hot shame burns and flickers. Of course no one picks up an unknown number. I catch my breath and call again. It goes straight to voicemail.

“Hi, this is Jane Jackson from Clearwater Studios in LA. Los Angeles.” Okay, not a necessary clarification. I’m starting to sweat. “I called a second ago, but got disconnected, so, anyway, we’re making a film. A great film, True Story ? That’s the title. And we’d love a chance to talk with Jack about writing an original song. I knew him when we were young. We worked together?” I hear desperation in my voice, and it bounces around my dark closet. I picture Jack’s face when his uncle remembers me to him—he’ll laugh and then roll his eyes. Maybe he’ll tell the story; maybe he’s been telling the story this whole time. “Anyway, if you would call back or maybe pass along the message. Again, this is Jane Jackson. Okay? Bye.”

Honestly, someone should invent a way to take back a voicemail once you’ve hung up. I could have written something out, a script. Instead I defined the little-known term “LA.” I run my fingers along the hem of a pair of pants that’s at eye level. I pull the pants from their hanger and wrap the legs around my neck, like a shawl, and grab an Almond Joy.

*

I’VE SHOWERED, STRAIGHTENED the pillows on my made bed, and cleaned Clem’s room by the time my phone rings. I answer just as the closet door shuts.

“Hey, it’s Lyle Anderson. Jack’s manager. You called about that movie?”

“Yes, hi,” I say. “Thanks for calling me back.” Another strike. It sounds like I am a person who is not accustomed to being called back. Like I’m a cold-calling warranty salesman.

“Yeah, so, he’s pretty sure he’s not interested.” He’s breathing heavily, and I have the sense that he’s called me from a treadmill.

“If I could just talk him through the story, or talk to you actually—no need to bother him about it—”

He cuts me off. “Listen, Jane?” He says it like he wasn’t a hundred percent sure of my name. “I’m just calling back to say no. We get a lot of calls like this. I mostly ignore them, but you said you knew him, so I asked. And honestly, he doesn’t have any idea who you are. So.”

I hesitate. The thing I could say: We sang “Jump-Start Love Song” together.

And he would be intrigued. It would open up a whole discussion, and of course Jack would remember me then. That was his first professionally released song.

Lyle hangs up.

I couldn’t get the words out. I feel myself shrinking. “Okay, thanks,” I say to the silence.