Chapter Four
Serena answers on the fourth ring, just before the call rolls to voicemail.
“Oh, thank the ever-loving god of sanity you called,” she says, out of breath. “I was just about to hurl myself into the sun.”
“Can I come with you?” I sigh. “On your journey to the sun?”
I’m staring in my closet full of outfits that do not scream first day of recording.
“Fuck no,” Serena scoffs. “If you come, who’s going to move in and help Leonora watch the kid after I bite it?”
As if on cue, I hear the headphones pick up a faint, very-toddler voice happily parroting, “Fuck no,” in the background.
“Don’t say fuck, Misha,” Serena says. And then, back to me, “What is the source of your sun hurling? Because the boss to beat is somebody —and I won’t name names—finding Mommy’s makeup drawer and destroying all three of her new eye-shadow palettes from some limited-edition whatever while I was trying to shower for two seconds. ”
I flinch. “The new- new ones? The Charlotte Tilbury ones she talked about for months ? Leonora is going to murder you.”
“Not if I get to the sun first.” Serena sighs. And then, to her offspring again, “ Misha: Absolutely not. Mama already told you once today that feet do not belong in bowls of cubed cheese. Sorry, Junie. You were saying? Sun hurling?”
I don’t even know where to start, but I do anyway because for all her chatter—and all her distraction with her three-year-old son—Serena is creepily intuitive.
“I called her. That lawyer.”
“ Misha! Feet. On. Floor. Thank you. And oh my god, Juniper. Are you fucking kidding me? I told you to do a two-way call so I could be there.”
“Fucking.”
It’s a testament to Serena’s enthusiasm—or maybe to her exhaustion—that she doesn’t bother to correct him this time.
“Did it go well? Did she get the pay up? Are you just completely over the moon and that’s why you’re going to hit the sun? Tell me it’s a good sun fling and not a bad one, please.”
I hesitate for all of two seconds.
“Shii—Shoot. Darn. It’s not a good sun fling, is it?” Serena sighs.
I shrug even though she can’t see me and kneel to the floor to retrieve a shirt that fell from its hanger.
“It’s not so bad,” I say, knocking off a dust bunny. “It maybe isn’t bad at all? Just…a little complicated. But it’s official now. I’m doing it.”
Serena’s sigh takes me back, like it always does, to the last semester of college.
She sighed a lot then, especially at me.
In my haze of grief, I couldn’t see what she was doing, how she was—in her disorganized but loving way—giving me space to talk about what was bothering me by opening the floor with what was bothering her.
Mostly what bothered her was Leonora and her stupid plants and her stupid blond hair that she tucked behind her ears and her stupid way of not revealing if she was straight or less-than-straight.
Spoiler alert: very much not straight if their happy marriage is any indication.
“Define complicated,” Serena says.
Serena knows about James and the night of Romeo and Juliet.
She knows about the slight with the agent, my breakdown on the dressing room floor, our weird reunion, and him coming to my house to give me his lawyer’s card, but she doesn’t know about the flash of future I thought James and I would occupy at the same time.
And she doesn’t need to.
“Well, first off, I was hoping I’d get a voicemail recording when I called his lawyer, but instead she answered, like, immediately with, Genie In A Bottle Entertainment Lawyer. Genie speaking. ”
Serena coughs out a begrudging laugh, and that’s without me even mentioning the bit where Genie said, Is this a prank call? I’m very busy, you know. New York might be the city that doesn’t sleep, but Tinseltown and the Big Smoke aren’t great nappers, either.
“You’re kidding,” Serena says. “And you’re sure she’s a real lawyer?”
“She’s the real deal. A little unhinged, maybe, but real enough that she was, and I quote, already expecting my call and went ahead and needled more money out of ’em for both James and me.”
“And what does that look like?”
“Same requirements as before,” I say, “but more money if we meet their desired metrics.” I pull up the note I made on my phone to read it to her verbatim.
“A minimum of two hundred thousand followers on TikTok, over ten thousand on Instagram, and she did make them get rid of their Twitter-X-Whatever threshold altogether because she said, and again I quote, You shouldn’t be beholden to that idiot musky man. ”
“All of that sounds great,” Serena says. “So what’s the problem?”
I finger the frayed edge of a sweater sleeve.
“James,” I whisper. And that’s all I say. Just his name.
But Serena has known me long enough that she knows everything she needs to from just the one word. And my tone.
Her sigh is low and long. I can hear her purposeful footsteps.
I know those footsteps.
She’s going for her notepad.
“ Not a list, Rena, ” I beg.
“ Yes, a list, Juniper, ” Serena says, matching my tone. “If anyone ever needed a list, it’s you. What even are you saying? This is the same boy that played what’s-his-name-Hamlet in college and you’re…what? In love with him?”
“What? No, ” I argue. “What is even wrong with you? Definitely not love. He’s…he’s nice to look at, sure, but—”
Serena sets her pen down with a decisive click.
“Um, come again?”
I wince. I’ve said too much. Another aspect of Serena’s superpower: She disarms you by talking so much that you talk so much and then she gets shit like this out of you.
“It’s not a big deal—”
“Is too, ” she cuts in. “The last time you showed even a modicum of interest in a guy’s looks was when you saw a picture of the dude who wrote the whale book.”
“It wasn’t a whale, ” I argue. “It was a giant marlin. The Old Man and the Sea. You remember that but not that the play from senior year was Romeo and Juliet ? And look, Ernest Hemingway could get it when he was young. Even you agreed!”
“I’m gay, not blind. He had nice hair. But he was very unavailable and quite dead, which apparently you’ve noticed is not the case with Mr. Neely.”
I didn’t even mention the part where he was practically straddling me in front of the studio when we mutually spooked each other. Or how he held my hand—well, pinkie—when I asked him about his checkbook cover.
Probably because I’m still trying to forget it happened.
“Well, he’s definitely not dead,” I agree. “If he were, he wouldn’t be such a pain in my ass.”
“Methinks Juliet doth argue too much,” Serena intones in what might be the worst British accent I’ve ever heard.
Misha doesn’t give me time to defend myself or to correct his mother that she butchered a Hamlet quote instead of a Romeo and Juliet quote. He lets out a happy toddler squeal followed by a string of, “ Mommy! Mommy’s home! Mommy’s home! ”
The ensuing chatter is like listening to a Hallmark movie. There’s kissing and laughter, a shouted Hi, Juniper! from Leonora when Serena says I’m on the phone, and ooh s from Misha when he discovers that Leonora has picked up burgers for dinner, and…
I end the call with a goodbye I’m sure no one heard. I tell myself I’m not lonely. I’m just let down that we didn’t get to the part where I begged Serena’s help in picking an outfit for tomorrow.
My phone lights up with a message minutes later when I’m dubiously holding up a blazer I think might be a size too small.
Sorry for the chaos. Call you tomorrow?
And then a shared message from her notes app pops up with the text,
You know what to do. Cross out what isn’t a priority and number the rest.
– Potential ~feelings~ (don’t argue with me, Green) for James Hamlet Neely
– Potential-future post-audio job
Does the social media help with this???
NYC still an ongoing concern?
– Resurfaced grief/Mom trauma re: meeting James shortly after her passing, re: this being the fucking Meadow, re: life is a bitch
– Podcast implications if there are any
– Come visit your fave lesbians and their half-tame toddler, please. We miss you.
I smile and swipe to put a line through the last one. I send a quick screenshot back.
Priorities, I type.
Serena sends back the middle finger emoji.
Serena has done this for me dozens of times. Any decision big or small gets a list. Brain dumps, she calls them. And as much as I hate making them, they are effective in that they make me put all my anxieties on the table and knock off as many as I can.
Usually it’s easy to eliminate a few bullet points, flicking them off the list and out of my head like gnats. But this time…not so much.
I mean, I don’t have feelings for James Neely, no matter what Serena says. Having a history isn’t the same as “feelings.” There is no reason to devote brain space to something so patently ridiculous.
Because even if I found him attractive and my stomach tightened when he didn’t let go of my hand, it literally doesn’t matter. I don’t have time to sit around pining for some guy when there are more important things going on in my life.
No, if I am to think about James Neely at all, it’s to be in relation to the rest of the list: how he can help me make this project a success and launch me into whatever comes after.
It’s the only item I completely cross out. The rest I number in order of importance with “this job” at the top and—after careful consideration—right underneath my amended, “Go to Oregon to help Leonora after Serena flings self into sun or Leonora murders her,” I put “missing Mom” in the final spot.
But even that, years later, feels like a betrayal and I can see the smoky grief curling its way through the bottom of the kitchen doorway.
I should be past this. I should be past this.
I close my closet door harder than necessary and let the weeks and months and years unravel in the span of an inhale.