Chapter Seven
“My job is to make sure each band member has their own distinctive look,” explains seasoned US stylist, Luna Thomas.
“Phillip’s style is tailored, posh, and British.
I buy him designer brands and classic pieces.
Contrasting our Brit is Aspen, our extroverted All-American boy, and I put him in bold, trendy outfits.
Leon’s the baby of the group and known for never making a fuss, so casual comfort you’d find on your boy next door’s key.
And Jake? Well, everyone knows he’s the resident rebel.
The eternally cool, mysterious one who talks the least in interviews, and who you might think twice about bringing home to your parents.
He’s got the monopoly on dark colors, leather jackets, boots, studded belts, all of that. It’s limited, but it works.”
—Excerpt from a Fire Fits interview
The Bargain Barn on Cardew Street had a decal of a cow wearing a tall black top hat on their front window.
This was not the choice I would have gone with, but I wasn’t there to judge the fine proprietors of the Bargain Barn, who sold me many things at a low price, and made it possible to buy a pair of Jimmy Choos for prom without paying an amount that made my wallet feel Jimmy Ew.
“Are you sure I shouldn’t take an Uber to the mall in Woodsborough?” Jake asked, eyeing the well-dressed cow and the slogan under it that said, Come in, our deals are bovine! “A department store isn’t that evil, is it?”
“You’ve been in LA too long,” I admonished, pushing the door open, then glancing behind me, daring him to follow. “Get in here. Don’t mind the cow. Cows are good. You’re from Texas, remember? You’re used to them.”
Jake gave me an unimpressed look, but followed me in anyway. “What exactly do you think I did in Texas?”
“I don’t know. Played Texas Hold’em poker? Rode bulls in rodeos? Drank whiskey while you sat by the bonfire, watching for outlaw cattle rustlers?”
“Okay, one: I left when I was eleven—”
“So no poker and whiskey, then? You were more of a root beer and Crazy Eights kind of guy?”
“And two: I was also not a character in a sixties spaghetti Western.”
I knew that. He knew I knew that.
On Jake’s first day at my school, he’d made the mistake of saying Howdy in his soft twang and got laughed at by the class.
“It’s not even something I say,” he’d confided to me later, banging his head against one of the café tables as the cats watched his mortification with rapt fascination. “I don’t know why I did. I guess I was trying to lean into the image I thought everyone expected of me.”
“Whatever you say,” I now replied, before gesturing at the racks upon racks of clothes surrounding us. “Go for it.”
I expected Jake to dive in with the same self-assuredness he had onstage, but instead, he held back.
In fact, if I had to put it into words, I’d say Jake looked lost.
Which was confusing, because this was the guy who once caught a snake outside of school, hid it in a box he stole from a classroom cupboard, and fed it bits of hardboiled egg in the cafeteria until he could release it by the creek, all because he was afraid the janitor would kill it. Surely he wasn’t daunted by this.
I tried to snap him out of his trance. “Jake?”
“It’s just . . .” He trailed off, looking at all the racks. “Where do I start?”
“The men’s section is over there,” I said, pointing.
Jake started toward the area, and I followed, before getting distracted, my eyes catching on a sleek, knee-length scarlet trench coat.
The coat reminded me of something I’d seen before, somewhere in the back of my memory, but I couldn’t put my finger on what.
I pulled it off the hanger, slipped it on, and tied the belt around my waist before catching up with Jake.
I found him staring at the rack of clothes in front of him like they were some kind of mystical objects instead of just, you know, items someone found packed away in Grandpa Morty’s attic.
“Find anything yet?” I asked.
“I don’t—” Jake turned around and did a double take. “Why are you dressed like Carmen Sandiego?”
Ah. That’s what the trench reminded me of.
“It’s stylish,” I argued, just because I wasn’t going to let Monsieur Designer Leather Jacket win this one.
“Sure, if you’re about to teach little kids geography via international heists.”
I glanced down, smoothed the suede over my thighs. “Well, I think I look good.”
“I didn’t say you didn’t look hot—”
My head jerked up. “I didn’t look what?”
“You didn’t look not stylish.”
“Oh.” I must’ve misheard him.
“You just look like you’re going to make me guess where in the world you are.”
“Well, what have you got?” I challenged, gesturing toward Jake’s empty hands. “Do you not like anything here?”
An odd expression crossed his face, like he was trying to figure out how to word something.
Oh.
Maybe Jake considered thrifting beneath him. I suppose it made sense with him being a celebrity now.
The whole point of coming here was to make Jake blend in, not shop for myself. I might as well take him where he’d have an easier time finding something.
“We can go to that department store if you need to,” I told him.
Even if it’s all terribly overpriced fast fashion.
“Nah, that’s okay.” Jake shook his head. “I’d have the same problem there too.”
“Oh.” I regarded him curiously. So it wasn’t the thrift store. “What’s wrong, then?”
“I mean, nothing, I guess,” he said. I waited for him to collect his thoughts.
“It’s just that it’s been so long since I actually thought about what I want to wear.
I’m not used to getting to pick out things like this,” he continued, his voice slow, careful, like he was not quite sure how to explain it.
“I’m used to my stylist telling me what to wear, or choosing from a few options they’ve already approved. ”
Oh. To me, style was a way to show the world who you are. Someone dictating what I could wear would be like someone controlling what I could say.
“That sounds hard.”
Jake shrugged. “I don’t hate what they give me, and I’ve never really wanted to go shopping myself.
” He scrunched up his nose. “But I guess now that I actually have to, I realize I’m always hearing the team go, Is this what Jake from the Usual Suspects would wear?
And I sort of started thinking in those terms too, instead of asking myself what I would wear. Even though, I am, you know . . .”
“Jake from the Usual Suspects?”
“Yeah. But now you’re not asking me to be Jake from the Usual Suspects, you’re asking me to just be . . . Jake.”
“Or Sylvester,” I said, because he needed some levity.
“Right. Good old Sylvester,” he quipped, but he had that look on his face—the one I remembered Jake got when he started retreating too far inside his head.
We wouldn’t get anywhere if he got caught up in overthinking.
“Here,” I said, pulling a wide-brimmed, weathered fedora off the hat rack and reaching up to set it on his head. “Try this on.”
Jake looked up, eyeing the oversized brim. “This thing is supposed to make me blend in?”
“No. It’s supposed to make me laugh,” I told him, reaching up to gently flick the brim.
But instead of making me laugh, it was Jake who laughed, sweet and low in the back of his throat, and all at once it dawned on me:
I hadn’t heard that laugh in over a thousand days.
I swept the thought away before it could really sink in, not trusting myself to sit too long with it. We needed to get back to why we were here.
“Stop thinking so much,” I told Jake, as if that wasn’t the advice I needed to take myself.
“It’s just clothes. Try stuff on. Have fun.
” My eyes flickered up toward the dramatic, downward dip of the hat on his head.
“I’m going to go ahead and veto this look, though. It might not be the best for subtlety.”
“Oh? Only might not?”
“Well, if you were searching for the lost ark or the temple of doom, you’d fit right in.”
“Unfortunately, I’m not doing that till next week.”
“Right. My bad.” I put the archaeologist-esque hat back and pointed out a baseball cap. “You could get another one of these, though.” I eyed the rest of the rack. “It’s that or the yellow one that says Ray of Sunshine, but I’d stick with the plain one, if I were you.”
He put his hand over his heart. “You don’t think I’m a ray of sunshine?”
I gave his all-black outfit a pointed look. “More like a dark and stormy night.”
“Harsh.”
I laughed, then led him over to the shirt section. “Come on, just pick something out.”
Instinctively, he reached for an all-black shirt that looked like a cheaper version of the exact thing he had on.
I suppressed a sigh. He couldn’t just buy more of the exact same style to walk around town in; that’d defeat the purpose of him not looking like his poster. I fished around in my pocket for a piece of watermelon gum.
Be cool, I told myself. He’s not used to this. You can work with him for the greater good.
“You could try wearing something that’s not black from head to toe, you know?” I reminded him lightly. “I mean, you don’t have to dress like you’re in the middle of a heist all the time. Try some color.”
“Does gray count as col— Wait, heist?”
“Yeah. Your wardrobe looks like you shop at Burglar-ington Coat Factory.”
Jake gave me a look so unamused that I had to keep going, just to see if I could get another genuine reaction out of him.
“You always do that,” he’d told me once, amid a peal of laughter, after I’d made a joke when he’d been sad after a failed audition.
“Do what?” I asked. “Get a reaction out of me,” he’d replied.
“Thieves-R-Us,” I added. He was starting to crack. “J.C. Robbery.”
There—his eyes glinted for a moment, and his lips twitched upward, unable to resist.
I still had it.
“Well,” he said, eyes purposely looking me all the way down, then all the way back up. “Guess I match you then, Carmen.”