Everybody Knows Your Name (17 page)

There's a knock. I look over my shoulder, and Robyn's standing against the doorframe, holding up some shirts. The one in the front has a holographic pocket. She says, “Hey, Catherine asked me to come bring you some things for the party tonight.”

I can hear Cody sitting up on the bed. “There's a party?”

“Robyn, this is my brother Cody.” She waves. “Cody, this is Robyn, the show's stylist. And it's not really a party. It's work. Just a promotional thing.”

“Sounds like a party to me, man,” Cody says. “Sounds like a party where you get some free things.”

“Try this on.” Robyn hands me a shirt with the sleeves cut off. It looks like a real ragged, cheap shirt you might make yourself, which means it probably costs five hundred bucks.

“So I'm coming to this party, right?” Cody asks.

I stop in the middle of taking off my T-shirt. “I don't think that's really possible.”

Cody gets up from the bed and comes and stands real close to me. Like I said, Sissy invades your space accidentally, but Cody's definitely trying to remind me about something. “Yeah, brother, I do believe I'm including that as the last part of our deal.”

The final deal we make is this: if I take Cody to this party and get my family the per diem, then they will leave town tomorrow morning.

Before the party, I try to calm down. I try to stop looking at my phone, waiting for a text. I try to get in a good frame of mind. So I kick Cody and Sissy out to the RV, and I return to reading the fan letters.

Some of them are crazy. A teen girl in Florida sends a photo of my name tattooed on her shoulder; I cringe when I see she spelled
Buckley
wrong. A woman in Michigan says she thinks we should be married, and wants me to help explain this to her husband.

The letter that bothers me most is from a ten-year-old in Arkansas named Mason, who wants to know how he can be like me when he grows up. But it doesn't make sense for a kid to want to be like me. He just has some kind of idea about me that's not really me at all.

Reading about this kid's belief in this Ford person, I can't help it. I start feeling real lonely, even though you can always find someone in this mansion if you want company.

I can't help but wonder if Magnolia's no different from this kid. She had an idea about me that she liked, but then she saw the real me, she saw my family, and that was it. I mean, who did I think I was fooling anyway?

The sun goes down, and I pull on the shirt with the missing sleeves. It's dark soon enough. Mila comes into the bathroom while I'm shaving, and we don't speak. I hear Cody yelling from out the window that there's a “huge honkin' limo” in the driveway, but still, there's nothing on my phone from
her
. Jesse comes in and says it's time to go. So I do.

The party's in full swing when Cody and I get to the Aviary, which is some swanky private club in West Hollywood. On the way in they make us walk a photo line with paparazzi taking a hundred photos of us in front of a background with advertisements for Rocket Fuel: “One small drink for man, one giant shot of caffeine for mankind.” Cody strikes every big-shot pose he knows, yelling, “What magazine's this going to be in?”

The Aviary is not a dance club, really, even though a lot of people inside are dancing. To me it feels more like Sherlock Holmes's living room, if Sherlock also collected stuffed birds.

Cody hits me in the arm and yells into my ear, “Hey, isn't that the guy from that commercial where he rides a Jet Ski in the bathtub? I gotta meet that guy.” Then he's making a beeline toward the free bar without any hesitation, like this is just a roomful of his oldest pals.

I glance over, and it
is
the guy from that commercial. Actually, the whole place is full of people I sort of recognize. People from that show where you live together in a submarine for three months,
Sub-Humans
. And the one where sorority girls have to live like pioneers from the 1800s called
Little Sorority House on the Prairie
. And from that hit MTV show
The High Life
about kids working in a Colorado ski town who spend all day snowboarding and making out.

Everyone here has that reality show kind of fame, the kind you get not because you did something cool, but just because your face has been on enough TVs.

“Hey, Ford Buckley, right? Love this guy!” Some dude puts his arm around me while his friend takes a photo. “Thanks, bro!” He slaps my back as they move away. I nod a good-bye, trying to be friendly.

And then I get it. I
am
one of those reality show famous people. I spot people pointing me out as I move through the crowd. Hear my name being mentioned by strangers. This is something I always thought would be cool, but the truth is that I'm feeling a little embarrassed. Because I haven't really done anything good enough for people to be singling me out like this. And I don't know how they don't know that.

I see Cody and the Jet Ski guy doing shots together like they're longtime buds, and Cody tries to wave me over, but I don't trust myself around a bar tonight. I only feel that deep nagging to drink when I'm in the presence of my family. To save myself, I find a door to the balcony and step outside. Away from the crowd, into the night air.

I lean out over the balcony. Cars wind bumper-to-bumper down below on Sunset. A group of girls in tight dresses dodges between them, laughing and holding hands as they cross the street. Across from me there's a huge billboard of Pat Graves riding a zip line with explosions going off behind him.

Pat Graves's giant head reminds me of the movie premiere, and of Magnolia. I check my phone. There's a text from Catherine telling me about an after-party. That's it.

“I totally thought I was going to scream when you walked in tonight.” I glance over, and a really good-looking athletic blonde props an elbow onto the banister next to me. She seems familiar.

“Huh?”

“I was, like, no way, that's Ford Buckley, my future boyfriend. Oh God, aaaaaaand now I'm embarrassed.”

A different person might be annoying talking like this, but she has this real playful high-energy way about her. Her hands never stop moving. So she seems like a real person, like she can't help but show you what's going on inside her head.

“You watch the show?” I ask.

“Uh . . . yeah.”

“I'm probably more embarrassed than you are. Still not used to the attention. You look real familiar, though. Are you on a show too?”

“Maybe you'll recognize this.” She busts out a funny little breakdance move and then laughs at herself.

“You're a dancer,” I say, snapping my fingers. “You were on that dance show.” I remember her now. My ex-girlfriend the Mattress Princess used to love those dance shows.

“I'm Rey.” She shakes my hand. “
So You Think You Can Dance
. I came in second. This close.” She holds her thumb and forefinger an inch away from each other.

“You're really good at dancing. As much as I can tell.”

“What about you?”

“One of those things I just don't do.”

“Then you need to learn how.”

She takes my hand and literally drags me back inside and into the crowd of people dancing to some dance track I've never heard before. I kind of nod to the rhythm, but Rey's dancing has this whole kind of vocabulary to it. Like one second she's sexy; the next, funny. Dancing with her is like having a conversation without saying a word.

The music feels good. Dance music isn't usually my thing, but its heavy beats overwhelm my brain. It's too loud to hear thoughts about Magnolia, my family, alcohol, myself—all of it. I think I might be having fun.

Then within a minute Cody is dancing near us with a girl from the sorority pioneer show, waving a drink in the air. His eyes meet mine with a look of drunken camaraderie, and I see him yell, “Whoo!” but I can't even really hear it over the music.

I give him a full-blown “whoo!” back.

A new song comes on without me even realizing when it started, and a sharp ball of light appears right to our left. It's a news camera crew. The reporter holds up her mic and starts talking about the party right in front of where we are.

Still dancing, Rey leans in my ear and says, “This is so great. We're in the shot.”

That gets me thinking about what Catherine said. I guess this is the sort of scene she wanted. I try to look comfortable, like a guy you'd vote for.

Rey leans forward again. “You know what wouldn't hurt?” she shouts over the beat.

“What?”

“Drawing some attention to ourselves. You have to make people care about you! Because they stop.”

She pulls back, and she's giving me this look like we're in on something together, but it's also a look that says I should kiss her.

We're right behind the reporter and right in the path of that ball of light. I cup Rey's head and lean down.

Lucien and I are sitting in a sports bar slash restaurant in Burbank. There are a bunch of guys and a few girls yelling at TV screens so huge that the players are the actual size of seventh graders. Normally, I'm not allowed to leave the mansion except for show stuff, but Lucien told Catherine maybe it would be easier to get me to open up in a more relaxed setting. She bought it. We ran out the gate and to his car like two kids ditching school.

“Get yourself together, you lump! You piece of garbage!” a guy in a beanie violently yells as he brings his fist down in a bowl of peanuts. He's upset at a football player on the screen. It makes me glad that people don't get
so
invested in us on the show. Well, I guess sometimes they do, but mostly in a gentler way.

“That's a lump calling the kettle lumpy,” mutters Lucien, briefly looking up from poring through the notebooks and pads of paper I've brought him.

I try to eat my fries, despite all the space the butterflies in my stomach are taking up.

It's Tuesday, and I've successfully spent the day out of the house in wardrobe fittings and voice-over recording and vocal coaching. Lucien and I were supposed to meet back at the mansion, but I called him and asked if we could have our meeting somewhere, anywhere else.

Today Ford tried a new tactic; he started texting me. I've turned off my phone. For me, there's no conversation. Because there is nothing that I want to hear him say. I don't have imaginary moments going through my head where I fantasize about him coming to me and begging, “Please forgive me. I'm so sorry.” I'm not walking around inventing monologues that a mental hologram of him delivers when I lie down at night. When I think about Ford, I see a blank space. I don't know him. So there's nothing for him to say now that can reverse and change how he represented himself to me.

It wasn't just a lie. It was a real death, taken from my life, that he dredged up and pretended to understand and, more than anything, let me believe he'd experienced too. But the whole time there was a nauseating gap between us.

He was acting pained, and I was in pain. It sounds like a simpler difference than it is. But I guess that's how people can watch shows or movies and believe that the character on-screen is the same as an actual person who has to live with those feelings. How actors and actresses can meet with people who've undergone the heartbreak they're pretending at, and believe that they got a reasonable glimpse of it. A handle on it.

Even if they just believe that temporarily. Even if Ford got confused and for a second was doing such a good job of acting that he thought he was feeling what I was feeling, having lost a good dad.

No matter what, it wasn't the same. And he didn't.

When Lucien suggested that we go out into the real world to grab dinner, I asked, “But how are we going to do that without making a whole scene?”

“Context,” he said.

He told me that all we had to do was go somewhere a
Spotlight
contestant wasn't expected. “If you don't make sense in that context, you won't get recognized.” He brought me an Anaheim Angels baseball cap, and I borrowed a blonde clip-on ponytail Mila had, because the fuchsia really stands out.

We walked in, took a corner booth, and no one has looked at me twice. And now Lucien has barely glanced at me since he started going through my
Ships in the Night
notes. I don't have everything on hand to give him, but there's enough from the past few weeks.

He's flipping through pages while I'm nervously waiting. Nobody has seen any of my imaginary TV show except for Mrs. Corinthos, and she mostly cared that I was using the vocab right.

I look around the restaurant. Even though I'm not a sports fan, I have to admit it's kind of giddy and festive. I think it's because all the different-colored lights on the beer signs make it feel like we're inside a Christmas tree. Some of them are blinking.

Finally Lucien looks up, a piece of the hotel pad in each hand. His eyes are big and lit up. “Well, hell, you really have something here!”

The butterflies go faster. “What, you like it?”

“I didn't think you were going to have something here.”

“Thanks a lot!”

Lucien manically spreads out the pages across the table, moving our drinks. “Don't get all pouty yet. You've got the formatting all wrong. This is nothing like how a TV show is written. But you've just got the feeling of this world
down
. There's a real voice here, and believe me, I hate precious, shitty terms like—” He pauses. “I shouldn't be cussing.”

“I don't care if you cuss!” I shout, just wanting him to continue what he was saying. I have to hear what he thinks makes the pages
something
.

“No, I really shouldn't. Ever since I had my kid, I've been intending to watch my mouth. I look at you, and I think,
Lucien, this could be your daughter
. Not just meaning that if I'd knocked up my high school hookup, I would literally have a daughter your age by now. But would I want a mentor figure taking my daughter out to dinner and saying
shitty
this and
shitty
that? No. I wouldn't.” He seems to be getting sentimental, just thinking about his daughter.

I'm thinking,
But what about the voice? What about the voice?
but I don't want to interrupt his moment.

He's not done. “It's strange to feel so fatherly all the time. When Jay-Z announced he wasn't going to use the word
bitch
anymore now that he has a baby daughter, I thought that was a dumb reason. But I get his frame of mind now.” Lucien takes a sip from his gigantic glass of Coke. “I feel a little fatherly toward you, especially reading your writing.”

I can only wait a second, and then I have to ask, “But what about the voice?” It's like the butterflies could fly up and out of the top of my head.

Lucien goes back to leaning over the papers spread out before him.

“I hate the term, but it just means that the world you've created here has a distinctive feel. There's something under and between the words that's all yours.” He rubs his thumb and forefinger together like he's trying to test the thickness of the air. “It's nearly impossible to talk about. But you have that here.”

“Here?” I say, tapping on my scrawled notes. I want to make sure I'm really hearing this. Sometimes, on the show, the judges tell you something positive just to keep you from wanting to kill yourself before they flip it around.

“Let me tell you, this Warren Gettysburg character? Teenage rebel without a cause, except that his parents are tragically unreachable? I love him.”

“I love him too!” I say. Hearing Lucien's appraisal, I feel like a human exclamation point.

“What I like so much about your characters is that nobody's all good, or all bad. Warren does some shitty”—Lucien stops to correct himself—“messed-up things, but he's not a hopeless person. You understand gray.”

I'm feeling so extremely exuberant, like I'm made up of the blinking bar lights. “Yeah, I think I actually do. I mean, I've never thought about it like that before. But you just really simply explained what I want him to be. Gray.”

“And like I said, this isn't formatted right. But I think you could do something with this. I think I should teach you how to write a script, and then we should show it to people.”

“People?”

“Well you're only seventeen, so it's a long shot that anyone in entertainment would hire you to work. Yet. Besides a singing show. But that doesn't mean you can't get an agent.” He taps on the table. “We should also start talking to film schools.”

I lean back in the booth, blown away by the turn in my life that Lucien is suggesting to me. “Are you being for real?”

“I am.”

Suddenly the restaurant erupts in a wall of cheering because something amazing has just happened in one of the games on the TVs. At least fifty people are throwing both of their arms up for victory and yelling some version of “YEAAAAAHHHHHHH!”

Then the same kind of excitement tears through me, and I throw both up my arms up in the air and yell, “YEAAAAAAHHHHH!” too.

Lucien punches the air like he's an action hero in a freeze-frame at the end of a movie. “YEAAHHHHH!” he yells.

I stand up on the booth seat and do a kick, which really kills Lucien.

“YEAHHH!”

“And I format a montage using all caps: BEGIN MONTAGE and END MONTAGE,” Lucien says, “but some people just change the slug lines.”

He's got a bunch of napkins laid out on the table and he's written all over them. He's giving me a lesson in professional screenwriting. We've been at the sports restaurant so long that the first big game ended, and there's a whole new wave of fans at the bar. I only notice because they're wearing a new color. There's a ton of red.

“Got it,” I say.

“Some people also like to do all caps on sound cues for emphasis”—he scribbles,
As Magnolia walks into the house, a telephone RINGS
—“but that's kind of a personal style thing.”

I nod and make myself a note on my own napkin. I borrowed a pen from the bartender, and it has a tiny plastic guy who slides up and does a dunk when you turn it upside down. I feel like I'm psychologically dunking, if that makes sense. That's how happy I am, sitting here. Inside my head, it's like
swoosh brungwungwungwungwung
(that's the best I can do for a ball going through the net and the rim shaking afterward).

“And I think that about covers it in terms of what you need to know to get started.”

“I wish I could get started as soon as I get back to the house,” I say. We're not allowed to have computers in the mansion. While we're on the show, they want the house to be our whole world.

Lucien checks the time on his cell. “Speaking of the house, I've got to take you back. So we'd better switch gears and talk show. Have you given more thought to how you want to come off this week?”

I take a minute and think about how I want to seem. I could yell at Ford on camera and look tough and strong. Lucien could write me a few brutal insults to throw at him. I could write some. It could be like a movie. It could be this opportunity to say the perfect devastating thing at the perfect moment. And everybody watching at home would be able to see how perfectly I'd reacted to Ford having hurt me.

Or I could do a water-off-a-duck's-back kind of portrayal. Lucien would help me. I could just seem like the most happy and carefree spirit to ever walk the TV screen. This could be the culmination of everything I came onto this show to be. I could be the girl with the open face and the unstoppable heart and the sunshine in her soul! I could be her. And she would be the type who could actually, really win this thing. Because she would be all full of light and forgiveness. And everyone would just have this feeling like, obviously, they want to turn toward her.

Except sitting here with Lucien, looking at the writing in front of us, there's a new picture of what a future could mean. I look at him. Here's a person who doesn't want to be the center of attention—who isn't generally all that great with people, in fact. He's “rough around the social edges,” says my mom. At this moment in his life he's not doing
exactly
what he wants to be doing, but he's on his way. He's not, like, tap dancing on a cruise ship when actually he wants to be alone with a piece of paper.

“What? Why are you looking at me like that?” asks Lucien.

He has someone who loves him. He's not trying to be someone else. He has a well-rounded life.

Maybe this is so obvious to everyone else, and I'm coming to it late because I get so sidetracked by the small stuff, but here's what just now occurs to me:

It's not my job to make everybody else comfortable.

Not that I'm discovering that you should go through life being a huge asshole for the sake of it. More that it's dawning on me that the future isn't where you've finally trained yourself into being someone else. The future could just be me, older. Me following my own inclinations instead of looking at myself from the outside in. Instead of trying to scramble myself into what basically amounts to a pageant contestant.

How I want to come off is:

I just want to be myself.

I can finally answer Lucien. “I want to go home,” I say.

Just like that, I've said it out loud. The thing I knew in my gut from the second my mom told me we were coming on the show, the thing I've been working overtime to ignore. I wouldn't even admit it to myself. But hey, there it is.

This show is just not who I am. It's as simple as that.

It's what I wanted to want. Not what I really want.

Lucien sighs. “I know you hate talking about how we're going to depict you, but we have to have this conversation before I drop you off.”