Chapter 6 #2
She laughs. “Do you like it?”
“Like it?” He runs his hands through it, scratching her scalp affectionately. “I’m in love with you. And obsessed with this butch glow-up. Be my dad?”
She blushes even harder. “Thanks,” she says. “Don’t mess it up though, okay?”
“You look even gayer than before. I didn’t think it was possible.”
“Okay, okay.” She pushes his hands off her head. “Thank you. Yes. Tonight is actually my coming-out party.”
“Not no,” he says. “You’re coming out as the person you were always meant to be.”
“So would you say I’m kind of butch?” Susan asks.
It’s a word Susan has been turning over in her head for some time now, looking at it from every angle, as though it’s a prism refracting the light.
“Would you?” Jonny replies.
“Not no,” she echoes him. “Maybe I’ll try it on for a while and see how it feels.”
He beams at her like he’s been waiting a lifetime for her to say this.
When they turn onto Sunset Boulevard, Susan is confronted with a billboard that by now she’s seen hundreds of times advertising Ramona’s comeback album.
She’s ditched the band and is a solo artist now.
The album is called Problematic Favorite, and the ads for it show Ramona’s face, wearing what appears to be minimal makeup, looking pensively at the camera.
Jonny sees Susan eyeing it as they drive past. “That ghoul,” he says.
“I’m just surprised it took her this long to rebrand.”
“She was busy learning to do better,” Jonny says.
“What do you think her first single is going to be called? ‘White Tears’?”
“Savage!” he cries. “As if she could write a song that doesn’t begin with a first-person pronoun.”
“Sorry. ‘My White Tears’?”
Jonny laughs. “At least she didn’t launch a podcast.”
Susan shudders, knowing exactly what he’s referring to. Ben’s latest venture—a podcast for straight white men to complain to each other—feels like something out of a nightmare and also totally inevitable. No one, it seems, ever stays canceled forever.
“Listen,” Jonny says, “I have something for you.” He roots around in his pocket and then pulls out a thumb drive, pressing it into her hand.
“Oh my god.” She gasps. “Is this what I think it is?”
“For your ears only,” he replies. “I haven’t decided how I’m going to release it. Either for free or I’m going to charge people five dollars and give away all the money.”
“Wow.” Susan exhales. “I’m so excited and so honored. Thank you for sharing it with me.”
“Don’t tell me if you hate it. It’s really different from my old stuff.”
“I could never hate something you’ve made.” Susan cradles the thumb drive of Jonny’s first album in god knows how long in her hands. “I want to listen to it right now.”
“No, love, tonight is about you,” he says. “Let me be your biggest fan for a change.”
At this she grins. “Fine.”
The car pulls up to the theater, where Katie and Jake are waiting on the sidewalk.
They’ve flown out just for the premiere, leaving Allen with Katie’s parents for the weekend. Katie is five months pregnant, wrapped in a tight yellow dress to show off her baby bump, and Jake is wearing thick, black-framed glasses.
“You came,” Susan says, leaping out of the car and into their arms.
“As if we would miss it,” Katie shrieks at her. And then: “Oh shit, your hair!”
Susan and Jonny stop by the red carpet while Katie and Jake go into the theater. There’s a horde of photographers in front of it, blinding Susan with their flashes. They take photos together and separately, and then finally Eliza and Graham arrive.
Eliza is wearing a long cream-colored dress and Graham is in a white suit.
“Why do you guys look like you’re getting married?” Susan shouts from the Step and Repeat.
“Shut up,” Eliza calls back, but she’s laughing.
After they take photos with the whole team, Eliza says, “Now let’s do one of just me and Susan,” and everyone clears out.
Eliza puts her arm around Susan’s waist and pulls her close, putting her cheek on Susan’s and grinning.
“I’m so proud of you,” Susan says, overwhelmed with a feeling she can only describe as complete and total respect for Eliza and everything she’s done with her life, in spite of her trauma and the cards stacked against her. There is no one she admires more.
“You know I couldn’t have done it without you,” Eliza replies.
“See you inside?” Susan says when the photographers are done, but Eliza has already turned back to Graham.
Susan has seen the documentary countless times, but sitting in the theater with popcorn and soda and her best friends next to her in the darkness, it feels like the first.
She feels an intoxicating thrill as Eliza’s voice comes on over the big black screen. “It was 2005, and I was sixteen years old.”
Then there’s a montage of fuzzy early aughts archival footage: teens at shows, on computers, skateboarding, texting. Eliza’s voice says, “We had the entire world at our fingertips. Something no generation had before ours. And what did we use it for?”
Another scene of teens at a computer, this time on AIM.
“We used it to torture each other.”
The words SCREEN TIME flash, and then Jonny’s music comes on.
The audience cheers. Someone near the front screams his name, and Susan puts a hand on his knee, squeezing it.
She has always wanted him to feel loved.
She keeps her hand there for the rest of the film, looking back and forth between him and Katie, watching them watch what she made.
The documentary is really good, and she doesn’t just think that because her name is in the credits.
All their original footage was shot on film, making it grainy and moody, like a night out caught on a disposable camera.
It’s thoughtful and sad and poignant, and it perfectly captures the feeling of the early 2000s.
Eliza is great on camera. She’s beautiful and smart and funny, and watching her is almost hypnotizing. It won’t be long before she becomes famous, Susan thinks. Just like she wanted.
When the credits roll and the lights come on, the audience stands to clap.
Next to her, Katie grabs Susan’s arm. “Jesus fucking Christ, Suze,” she says. “That blew my mind.”
“Dude,” Jake says, and to Susan’s surprise, his eyes are glossy with tears. “Yes.”
The after-party is down the street in the dark bar of a hotel. Clusters of people are taking cars over, but Susan walks there with Katie, Jake, and Jonny. She’s happy to move her legs, and besides, she knows her New Yorkers won’t understand the culture of taking a car four blocks.
She and Katie are holding hands while Jake and Jonny walk ahead of them, nerding out over the cinematography.
“So how’s motherhood going?” Susan asks.
“Piece of cake, for now,” Katie replies. “Allen just wants me to always have snacks and sometimes pretend to eat his toes. Otherwise, he’s like, See ya!”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“It’s possible that I’m just forgetting the hard parts at this moment because I miss him,” Katie says. “And who knows what’s going to happen when there’s two of them.” She glances up at the street sign. “Ha, look at that. From Sunrise Highway to Sunset Boulevard.”
“Sunrise, sunset,” Susan sings, a song from a musical she can’t remember seeing but whose melodies are kept in her blood like a prayer.
“Swiftly fly the years,” Katie joins in for the next line at full volume.
Jake turns around and grins at them, which prompts them to sing louder.
As their duet ends, they walk past a restaurant with a horde of paparazzi around the door, wearing all black and smoking cigarettes, presumably waiting for some celebrity to step out.
Katie shoots Susan a sidelong glance and says, “I’m so happy you’re happy here, but I do have to say, it is really fucking weird to me that you live in LA and not Brooklyn.”
Susan chuckles. “Girl, you’re telling me.”
“Do you miss it? New York, I mean.”
“Sometimes, yeah,” Susan says. “But the things I miss about it are gone. And then I feel like, do I actually miss New York, or do I just miss being in my twenties?”
“I do not miss being in my twenties,” Katie says. “Except when I look in the mirror. I’m like, Who are you and what have you done with me?”
“Is it weird that I like how I look better now?”
“No, because you do look better now,” Katie says. “Meanwhile my face is sliding off.”
“Oh my god, not true.” Susan laughs, aware of how the vowels of the word god stretch out more when she’s talking to Katie. Gawd.
Susan’s heart aches a little bit, noticing Katie’s smile lines and the new soft pocket of flesh under her chin.
When she looks at Katie, she sees every age they’ve been at once.
Behind those deepening grooves around her mouth, there’s still a seventeen-year-old girl giving Susan shit for chewing Sunchips too loudly while she paints her nails navy blue and daydreams about the future.
“Anyway, I love you,” Katie says. “I’m so impressed and not at all surprised that it turns out you’re brilliant.”
“I didn’t realize it was a secret.” Susan laughs, but she knows what Katie means. Her whole life has been oriented around other people’s art. This is the first thing that’s ever really felt like hers. Katie squeezes her hand, and that’s when Susan realizes they’re both crying.
“It’s the hormones, I swear,” Katie says, sniffling. “I just feel like, did you ever think when we were teenagers that we’d be here? Watching a movie you made?” Katie pauses to wipe her cheeks. “Fuck, my mascara.”
“A movie about Eliza, no less?”
“It’s not really about Eliza,” Katie says. “It’s about our millennial girlhood.”
“I guess that’s true,” Susan agrees. “In a lot of ways.”
Katie waits for her to go on.
“Everything I used to think was about Eliza was actually just about … me.”
Katie grins at her. “I think I just got to see the moment you became an adult.”
“Never too late, I guess.”
The tears have stopped as they approach the bar, which she’s thankful for, because as soon as they walk through the doors she’s whisked away by Heather, who needs her to talk to the press.