The Pop Star's Invisible Roommate

1. Gerard

Gerard

Running away was easy if you’d fantasized about it for as long as Gerard Wells had.

A year and a half he had spent longing for a life unexamined, asking himself, Where would I go? What would I do? Who would I be?

In the dimly lit, sparsely filled cabin of an overnight, long-haul bus rattling through Maryland, he contemplated those questions again. Four hours deep without a phone, what else was he to do?

He used the fold-down tray to organize all the cash he’d withdrawn from the bank over the course of many months and stowed in his trusty fanny pack.

He had no wallet. He’d left that behind in the lavish hotel suite.

All he had was a single, stuffed-to-the-brim suitcase of clothes tucked in the bus’s cargo hold, and his favorite guitar—which he called Pascal because of the lifelike chameleon painted on the body—strapped into the seat beside him.

A nondescript baseball hat was pulled snug over his head of short dark brown wavy hair, and sunglasses covered his hazel eyes, even though it was dark out.

From a second pocket in the fanny pack, he produced a fifth-generation iPod Touch with a partially cracked screen and a pair of wired earbuds.

Going off the grid required esoteric technology.

Untrackable technology. He scrolled through his music library until he came upon the one song that always quieted his racing thoughts: “Island State of Mind” by Hallowitz & Hart, a one-hit-wonder folk duo from the 1970s that quit the rat race long before their fame fully set in.

Boats and houses built on beams,

Slowly sinking into streams,

Scraping crabs and scraping by,

Beneath the pearly Chesapeake sky

The finger pluck of the guitar and the light drumbeat lulled Gerard into a state of calm. He put their entire debut album on loop and rested his head against the window. Pilled seat fabric scratched at the back of his exposed neck as he closed his eyes and dreamed of what lay ahead.

Eventually, the intense overhead lights rudely ripped him from sweet dreams. The bus pulled into a parking lot somewhere in Salisbury, Maryland.

Sunshine struggled to break through on the horizon as he scuttled off the bus and hauled his belongings toward the taxi stand.

A soccer field faintly glimmered with morning dew in the distance.

A shopping mall sat dormant at his back.

“Where to?” the cabbie asked him once he was settled in the back seat with cushion stuffing poking out of concerning tears by his thighs.

Gerard hadn’t spoken since boarding the bus in Port Authority over six hours ago when the world was still dark, so his words came out in dry, croaking puffs. “Crisfield harbor, please.”

The car jolted into jerky motion. He was used to limos, town cars, tour buses, private jets, and helicopters. Standard modes of transport were rockier than he remembered.

Maryland blinked by out the window. An auto shop, a post office, every fast-food chain Gerard hadn’t been allowed to eat at on his trainer-created meal plan. Even a music store called to him like a siren.

“What’s waiting for you in Crisfield?” the cabbie asked. He had a thick accent that Gerard guessed was German.

“The ferry,” said Gerard, not meeting the cabbie’s eyes in the rearview mirror. He slipped his iPod back out of his bag. A loud plunk came from behind. He hoped Pascal in the trunk would survive the trek unscathed.

“Ferry to…?” the cabbie asked.

“Iping Island,” Gerard said. The Hallowitz & Hart melody floated back through his mind.

The freshest catch, the longest line,

Romance sans a drop of wine,

Bike rides to the ice-cream shop,

Past the graves with stones on top

“Iping, eh?” said the cabbie, performing an overblown shiver. “When I hear that name, most people are venturing the other way. Have you been before?”

“I have,” Gerard said. Because “Island State of Mind” was the sort of song that transported you. The kind of song Gerard wished he could write.

“Family out there?” the cabbie asked.

“Yes,” Gerard said, lying unconvincingly. He needed this interaction to end. Small talk made his skin prickle.

The cabbie humphed before turning up the radio.

Gerard heard his business team talk about radio all the time—the DJs, the airplay, the spins, the charts.

He’d sat in radio studios and answered inane questions about who he was dating and which of his brothers would win in a hot-dog-eating contest, as if any of them were even allowed to eat highly processed meat.

But when was the last time he’d listened to the radio for pleasure?

Judging by the beaded crucifix jangling from the cabbie’s rearview mirror and the number of churches they’d passed already, Gerard expected a contemporary Christian station, maybe even gospel music, to curl out of the speakers.

Both would’ve been welcome. His love of music had blossomed in his Catholic upbringing when he took organ lessons and sang tenor in the church choir, but it’s hard to rejoice in the Lord when everyone around you thinks your sexuality is a certain sentence of damnation.

Nobody knew, but when he left the church, he maintained his love of the hymns.

Because music was meant to be interpreted. You could listen between the notes, tune out the lyrics. You could find meaning in chords. You could unbury clarity in song. If it was all founded on love anyway, that was something Gerard could believe in.

Yet the cabbie clicked the radio volume up another notch, and Gerard was dismayed by vapid pop rock. Worse yet, vapid pop rock sung by him, underscored by more synths than should be legal.

Crowded dance floors, world tours,

Bass so good it shakes the floors

In went Gerard’s headphones. Up, up, up went the Hallowitz & Hart.

The tides will rise and claim the land,

Darlin’, come and hold my hand,

And once there’s nothing left behind,

We’ll keep our island state of mind

Hours later, the ferry whooshed through the Chesapeake Bay and tossed around Gerard’s decadent lunch of crab cakes, fries, and a Coke (not even a Diet) from a restaurant with checkerboard floors, a retro jukebox, and filthy, oversize menus.

The tenacious nausea was still better than the alternative: an incessant, personal-trainer-sanctioned starvation that constantly cried out from his abdomen.

Inhaling a salty tang as they charted a course away from the shoreline, he gripped the rail separating him from the crushing blue-green water beneath.

Halfway through the hour-and-fifteen-minute journey, he tumbled back into the cabin of the lengthy, slightly dingy boat.

If he couldn’t see the sway of the surf, maybe he could trick his body into thinking he was on dry, motionless land again.

He slid into an empty blue-vinyl booth. The cranking air-conditioning despite it being the first day of October chilled his clammy skin as he popped in his earbuds, music acting as Dramamine.

Two songs in, a white family of five barreled through, voices booming in the compact space.

They settled across the aisle from him, starting a game of Head’s Up!

on one of their phones. The category was pop culture.

The names of Gerard’s acquaintances flashed across the screen as the kids shouted clues and the parents scratched their heads.

It was fine—nothing a few clicks of the volume button couldn’t quiet—until:

“Oh, oh, he’s, um … he’s in that band!” said the oldest girl, no more than sixteen with strawberry-blond hair and the most pronounced freckles, like they’d been cosmetically applied. Gerard’s body flicked to high alert.

“The youngest of three. I think?” a different girl said while adjusting her plaid bucket hat, which appeared far too big for her head. Her eyes barely showed under the brim.

“No, yeah. He’s the youngest.”

The mom shook her head and shrugged.

“They sing that song you hate. The one about the bass shaking the floor and the na, na, nas.”

Gerard didn’t wait for recognition to dawn on anyone. He beelined for the bathroom, where he immediately retched.

Soon enough, from his vantage point on the port deck, Iping Island dazzled in the distance as the sun continued its ascent.

Ribbons of clouds practically emblazoned the word FREEDOM across the blue sky.

The ferry came to a stop. A tall white man who looked to be in his early thirties greeted the ferry passengers as they disembarked.

Gerard nearly teetered over, both from the solid beams beneath his feet and the handsome gaze of the bearded man with the rough-looking hands.

“Welcome to Iping,” he said in a thick accent that had characteristics of both the American South and southern England.

Each word sounded as if it started in the back of his throat and was almost too big to push out of his mouth, which barely opened as he spoke.

“Steady there,” the man said. The th came out as a harsh d sound.

Involuntarily, Gerard pitched into the man, whose sturdy frame provided ample cushion for his uncooperative legs. “Thanks,” Gerard replied, nearly saying danks instead in an unintentional mimic of the salt-of-the-earth man’s peculiar accent.

Out of embarrassment, Gerard put as much distance between them as politely possible. He’d rinsed his mouth out with tap water on the ferry, but without a mint or a stick of gum, he worried his breath reeked of vomit. Though why was he concerned? The whole island stunk of sunbaked fish.

“Name’s Kellen. What’s yours?”

“James,” Gerard said. Which wasn’t a complete lie. It was his middle name.

“You stayin’ on for the weekend with us at the inn?” Kellen asked when the family had gone on ahead.