Chapter 16
CHAPTER 16
DO YOU NEED TO GO BE ALONE AND DO SOME ED WARD Scissorhands stuff?” I ask when we’re lying in our twin beds. The lights are off, but there’s a little bit of moonlight coming from the window between us. We’re both lying on our backs, covers pulled to our shoulders.
“No, this is fine.”
“I’m not used to sleeping with another person in the room,” I say after a while.
“Am I breathing too loud?” he asks.
“Definitely.”
“I’ll try to hold my breath,” he says.
“Ha,” I say. It’s the world’s dumbest syllable.
He’s quiet for a while and then, “We missed Dateline. It’s on at eight and ten, but it’s eleven thirty.”
I turn toward him. “I love Dateline.”
He laughs. “So that’s going to be what we agree on. Dateline and True Story,”
“I find it totally relaxing.”
“Same,” he says. “Why is that?”
“It’s because the bad thing has already happened, sometimes like ten years ago. So you can just relax and watch the pursuit of justice.” Dateline is basically the opposite of dating, where I walk through it waiting for the blowup.
“True,” he says. “And I like how they try to trick us into thinking the murderer didn’t do it by dressing him in a nice polo shirt for his interview.”
“Well, the orange jumpsuit is a dead giveaway.”
He turns on his side and the moonlight illuminates his cheekbone. Part of me feels like I’ve been caught staring, but I don’t blink. We’re lying here little more than a foot apart, but the darkness provides some protection, as if we are half hidden in it.
“Tell me about the frame,” I say.
“What frame?”
“The arbor out back.”
He turns onto his back, so I do too. “It’s just something I’ve been doing since I was a kid. I made Aidan help me move our old swing set one night. And then I bought potted ivy and figured out how to train it. Sort of a hobby.”
“I like it,” I say.
“I do too. I always wanted to paint something important there, or take exactly the right photo with that ivy edge. My dad thinks I’m a little . . .”
I laugh. “Yes, he told me. Does that bother you?”
“It used to, but I’m fine with it now. He loves me. There’s a difference between someone loving you and agreeing with every single thing you do.”
This is an unexpectedly deep thought, though nothing about Dan is what I expected. We’re quiet for a bit, and I stare at the shadow that the ceiling light casts in the moonlight. “I like your family.”
“They’re a trip.”
“A happy trip.”
“But you see that I’m different, right?” He turns his head toward me and I meet his gaze.
“Oh, you’re different all right.” I mean it as a barb.
“I am.”
He doesn’t say anything more, so I go on. “I was kidding, but I can tell that you’re different, quiet where they’re loud. Intense where they’re loose.”
“Yeah. My dad, poor guy, is still trying to get his head around it. Me being in my head a lot. When I was a kid, he thought I was just really distracted, because I wouldn’t focus in school or soak up the thing he was showing me how to fix. I mean, my interest in fixing a toilet is nothing. Use it, flush it. I’m out.”
“Same.”
He smiles, just a little. “The thing my dad still doesn’t totally get is that I’m not at all distracted, that when I find something that I think is interesting or true or beautiful, I’m hyper-focused.”
“I can see that.” To prove me right, he locks his eyes on mine, and I have this flash of what it might feel like to be interesting or true or beautiful to Dan. I’m grateful for the dark, where words can bounce around without consequence.
“Aidan helped me with the arbor, but he also marketed it to my dad as construction rather than art, which is why we got to keep it.” I can only see his eyes now, the way the light’s coming in. They move around my face, like they’re looking for something. Dan says, “I have the feeling being Janey Jakes wasn’t your favorite thing.”
“It was and then it wasn’t.”
“Today, when you were playing the keyboards, I was watching you. It was like playing that song kind of hurt. I was waiting for you to smile, but you never did. Not once.” He’s looking right at me, his eyes in shadow.
“It’s just a dumb love song. I don’t really believe in romantic love like that.”
His eyes go soft. “So do you not date? You were going to go out with me,” he says, and the corner of his mouth, which I happen to be staring at, curves up the tiniest bit. I smile back at his mouth because I don’t want to look in his eyes.
“I was, before I found out you’re the worst.”
He smiles like he loves being the worst. “So you date but don’t believe in love?”
“I’d like to have a partner, I’m not a robot. But I’m just not all starry-eyed about it. I’d like to meet a solid guy, like a guy with dental insurance who shows up when he says he will and picks up milk when you need it. A guy who will stick around.”
He laughs. “That’s so hot.”
“Right?” I don’t know why it feels okay telling him this. I should be embarrassed. “So I go on dates, I wear the right thing. I blow my hair straight and try to act datable.”
Dan laughs, and it fills the room. He turns all the way on his side, his arm outside the covers and his bicep catching the light. “What does ‘datable’ mean? Of course you’re datable.”
“Well, when I focus on it, I am. It’s a whole thing. My dating protocol. I act the right amount interested and the right amount bored. I mentally track his word count so I’m not blabbering on more than he is.” Dan’s smile fades a bit, like he’s more concerned than amused. “You have to remember I was an actress. So when I’m dating, I use that. I act like a woman you’d want to date.”
Dan shakes his head.
“No, I don’t mean you. I mean anyone. A woman anyone would want to date.”
We’re quiet for a second. I’ve totally overshared and I don’t know how to claw it back.
“And how do those dates play out?” he asks.
“Fine, mostly. I usually nail the first three dates, but it fizzles by the fourth. I don’t really know why.”
“Maybe you need to work your old-school bathing suit into the mix.”
“Great idea.”
“I’m kidding, it’s terrible. But you should leave your hair curly. It’s soft around your face. I like it.”
“Oh,” I say and press my lips together.
There’s something happening here, and it’s unfamiliar and frightening. It’s a thing I’m opening up to because of this script and the humidity and all the reckless laughing I’ve done tonight. I need to change the subject.
“I came up with a backup plan,” I say. “About the movie.”
“Don’t know why we’d need one of those. This whole plan to ambush a pop star so he’ll write you a song seems foolproof.”
I smile and look back to the ceiling. I need to not be staring at his mouth if we’re talking business. “If he won’t write us a song—I know it’s a big ask—maybe he’ll just license us one of his early songs. Like ‘Fresh Eyes.’”
“I don’t know that one.”
“No one does probably, it was on the album before his breakout. It goes with the vibe of the story, the small-town feel of it and the innocence every time they try again.” I hum the beginning. “Know it?”
“Not from that.”
“Come on, it goes, Look my way so I can see you, fresh eyes on us.”
“Nope.”
I hum the beginning again, and he still doesn’t know it. So I start singing, just quietly. It feels perfectly natural because we’re in the dark, sort of out of space and time. I sing half of the first verse before I remember to be embarrassed about it.
I turn to the outline of him lying on his side in the dark. “What?” I say. “Do you know it? It’s a good song.”
“I’m confused,” he says.
“About what?”
“You sound just like Hailey Soul.”
“No.”
“You do. You’ve got me all worked up over here.”
I cannot overstate how much I like the fact that he’s all worked up. Even if it’s over his teenage crush on someone else. I want to claim that crush for myself, reach right into his head and make it me he was thinking about all those years ago. So I do.
“Yeah. That was actually me. I recorded the songs and Hailey lip-synced.” Once I’ve said it, the secret is out. You cannot unring a bell, as they say.
“What?” He swings his legs off the bed and sits up, expertly avoiding hitting his head on the top bunk. “And she got famous, and you got to sit in the background? This is outrageous.”
“This is my life.”
“Why don’t people know this?”
“It was a secret. I signed an NDA. No one would care now, but keep it to yourself. At the time it was a big deal. The studio was worried we’d have a whole scandal on our hands.” This is the time for me to tell him about Jack. And I almost do. It’s a natural segue: Jack sang Will’s part, actually. But I like the way I’m feeling right now. I like the way Dan listens and responds like I’m the main character in this story. I don’t want to let him see whatever my face would do if I told the Jack story. I don’t want him to see all my embarrassing parts.
“Why didn’t they just put you up-front and let it be your song?”
“Because I was Janey Jakes.” I think of the moment I looked in the mirror and thought Jane Jackson might be different from Janey Jakes, a person worth looking at. I remember catching Angelica’s eye and knowing I was right. That feeling flutters inside me as Dan holds my gaze. I want to grab onto it and make it true. “They’d gone to a lot of trouble to geek me up.”
“This is insane.” He runs his hands through his hair and shakes his head.
“Hailey couldn’t really sing the song. She could sing, but she couldn’t hit the high notes. But she was the one you guys were lusting after, so they wanted it to come from her.”
“I feel totally duped.”
“Well, it worked, two top forty hits.”
“Two?”
“I sang ‘Can’t Find My You’ too.”
“Okay, this is madness! Were you paid extra at least?”
“Yes. And I got royalties from both songs until people stopped listening. I put myself through college and own a house in LA.”
He leans forward with his forearms on his knees, and the space between us is impossibly small. There’s a fizzy little energy between us that is not familiar to me. I’ve never felt this sort of thing before, and I want to keep him leaning in close like this so I can swim around in it for a while. He starts to lean away and I want to bring him back, so I tell him.
“Jack Quinlan sang Will’s part.”
“Oh my God. What?” Dan grips his knees. “This is just unreal.” He stands up and walks over to the TV, completely foiling my plan to keep him close. “You and Jack Quinlan had a hit song, and no one knows?”
“Well, everyone on the show knew, and now you. Clem knows. You really can’t tell anyone.” I’m sitting up in bed now, and he comes and sits by my feet.
“So you must know him well?”
“I knew him for twenty-four hours and that was it.” Dan’s just sitting there, not nearly close enough, looking at me.
Dan shakes his head. “You pretend not to be funny and you pretend not to be a recording star. What else are you hiding?”
“I’m currently trying to hide how bad I am at tracking down celebrities.” And how much I wish you’d climb into this bed with me so I can smell you up close, I don’t say.
“I can’t believe that was Jack. And I can’t believe that was you.” He gets up again and lies down on top of his covers with his hands behind his head. I lie back down and turn onto my side so I can run my eyes down the length of his body from the safety of darkness. He turns his head toward me. “Maybe it was you I was lusting after all that time.”
“I doubt that very much,” I say and roll onto my back so he can’t see me smile.
We’re quiet for a while. And I think he’s gone to sleep. I am smiling at the ceiling in the dark, thinking of Dan, crammed in this room with his two brothers, dreaming of me.