Everybody Knows Your Name (22 page)

I'd barely set foot on campus when Mrs. Corinthos spotted me. I was drinking a smoothie I'd picked up at McDonald's on the way over to school. She was holding a travel mug in both hands and walking out of the main office.

“Magnolia, I want to talk to you!” she called. The first bell had already rung.

I pointed, trying to look busy. “I was just going to English.”

“As am I.”

So we started walking together because there really wasn't much choice. Mrs. Corinthos's stilettos echoed dimly on the concrete. She started shaking her head, curls bouncing on her shoulders. She said, “Honey, it's really been bothering me that your dream was derailed.”

“Well, honestly, it wasn't my dream—”

“Sweetheart, don't do that ‘I don't care about anything' teenager move. I've been doing this long enough that that doesn't work on me.”

“Okay.”

“But maybe it's good you got away from that boy. I got the sense that he was distracting you. Maybe now you can pursue your dream without him keeping you—”

I looked at her. “Mrs. Corinthos, when you watch a movie and it has a love story in it, do you root for the two people to not end up together at the end of it?”

She gave me a confused glance. “Which movie?”

“I don't know, any movie that has two people in it who fall for each other.”

“What? Why?”

“Because even if I hate a movie, I'll root for the two people to end up together. I don't think it's me buying into a message about life being about getting the guy. It's just what's uplifting about romance. You know? Romance fulfilling itself. Like it's supposed to, if everything goes right.”

Mrs. Corinthos returned to shaking her head at me like I was making some kind of big mistake. “That's what you
think
you think.”

“But isn't that actually just what you think?”

“Huh?”

“Huh?”

“I like a good adult love story as much as anyone else.” When Mrs. Corinthos said
adult
, I was pretty sure she meant that a good story is about grown-ups and not that she was admitting to watching porn. She was telling me that your romance doesn't really matter until you hit a certain age. Maybe it's the age that she got married. Maybe it's older than that, and she thinks she gave into romance too soon. I didn't know, but I also didn't want to know because life through her eyes was just kind of getting me down.

So I said, “Never mind.”

My cell phone rang from my backpack. I suddenly had the fantasy that Ford must have seen my mom on set with Jazz and managed to get her to give up my private number. I had to return the cell the show gave me an hour after I was eliminated.

Jazz was shaken by my elimination only because she thought my mom was going to drop out of her life, and that night she asked her to be her manager. My mom has been going back and forth between LA and Orange County since then, but she's up in LA much more than she's not. I have mixed feelings. On one hand, it's honestly a relief to transfer my mom's happiness over to Jazz. On the other, my mom's absence has probably just made me angrier that being closer to fame is more important than being closer to me.

“Sorry, I have to take this,” I told Mrs. Corinthos, and fell back for some privacy.

What I hadn't told Lucien this morning was that I had watched the show last night. Or, I'd watched Ford's performance. It had been “love song” night. He stepped onto the stage. He looked directly into the camera, and I could see how that kind of stare becomes confusing when you're on the other side of the screen. You forget there's a screen. It's easier than you think to feel a real connection, even if you don't believe in it at the same time. Because you tell yourself,
No, that's silly. He's on TV.
But still you feel that you know him somehow.

Ford sang the song “First Day of My Life” by Bright Eyes. I knew the song and the words. He kept his eyes straight on the camera in front of him, and he sang about being blind before he met you—the “you” on the other side of the screen. He sang about how he wanted to let you know that it had taken forever. That he was especially slow. But he had a realization that he needed you, and he wanted to know about coming home.

I hit the answer button on my phone. It was the pharmacy's automated machine telling me that my Xanax was ready.

Scott is standing under the hanging lantern on my porch, holding a bottle of champagne. He's wearing the same blue poncho from when he visited me at the mansion.

“Hey,” I say.

“Heyyyy,” he says, more drawn out. He smiles. His face has that talented way of convincing itself that nothing has ever gone wrong.

This is the first time Scott's been over to my house since the night he broke up with me at the beginning of summer. You could look at his presence on my doorstep as the result of a moment of weakness, but I don't feel like that's necessarily the whole truth. Yes, I was taken aback to run into him at Del Taco two days ago. Yes, that surprise might have given him the opportunity to say, “Please hold on, please don't blow me off,” and just start talking.

Some of the things he said were “It was totally unfair of me to say I was jealous. I know now”; “It bums me out that we were so important to each other but I went and ruined that and turned it into nothing”; and “What do you think about trying to be friends, Tiny? I mean like
real
friends?”

While I was standing there listening to Scott, I was also thinking about change. About how the last time I saw him, I considered that change wasn't a tumbler that just finally clicked into place. That it was more likely small movements that added up with you barely noticing. So change could be almost invisible, unknowable.

In Del Taco I watched Scott trying to bring me over to this friendship idea, tucking his hair behind his ears in agitation. I kind of zoned out, trying to pay attention to what I was feeling. The discovery was that I wasn't feeling horrible about this friend idea. Bad feelings had changed into tolerable ones. I'm sure that falling for someone else had helped that along. Also, maybe I only had so many bad feelings to go around, and they had collected over in the parts of my brain responsible for caring about Ford and my mom.

Anyway, that's why it was okay to invite him over to my house. Tonight we're going to start our attempt at a friendship.

“Come on in,” I say.

He steps in and shuts the door behind him. He seems to be waiting for my mom to come out and wrap him in a bear hug, but it's just us, and the house is quiet. “Your mom isn't home?”

“She's at
Spotlight
.”

As I said, my mom has been spending a lot of time up in LA ever since I got off the show. It's not like she hasn't been taking care of basic things—there's food in the fridge and take-out money on the kitchen counter when she's going to be gone past dinner—but she's definitely been absent.

Mila tells me that Jazz disappears from the judge's table during commercial breaks and huddles in the green room, whispering with my mom. I don't know how they spend their time together during the day. Maybe they shop.

A couple of nights ago I asked my mom, “What do you and Jazz talk about?” and at first she looked surprised that I was asking her a conversational question. From my end it's been a lot of “Do you mind if I turn on the heater, getting kind of cold,” and “Is there any more detergent in the garage?”

My mom looked like she was wrestling with herself about whether to give a normal answer or keep up the cold shoulder. Finally she said, “Stuff you wouldn't care about.” But her tone was more sad than icy. Before there had been a distance between us because I wasn't being completely honest with her about how I felt. Now we're actually separate.

“Well, let's celebrate that you're not there anymore,” Scott says. He starts unpeeling the foil from the champagne bottle.

“None for me. I'm going to try to write later tonight. The writer who's helping me wants to show some of my pages to some Hollywood executive this week.”

“Always thinking things through, Tiny.”

He disappears to go get my mom's champagne flutes from the glass cabinet in the dining room. He knows where everything is in our house, down to the first-aid kit. I drop into the reproduction eighteenth-century France chair my mom moved from her bedroom down to the foyer. It has always made me feel like I'm sitting in a linen version of the buggy from the Haunted Mansion ride.

I hear clinking. Scott calls back, “When did your mom buy all this new fancy china? It looks like royal kind of shit.”

I say, “Her most recent attempt to get on
Real Housewives
.”

Soon he reappears holding a couple of her new flutes by their stems in one hand and a can of Diet Coke in the other (also my mom's; he's been to the fridge). “We're going to have a toast, yes we are,” he says.

Scott pours Diet Coke into one flute and champagne into the other. Then, before he hands me the Diet Coke flute, he pours a little champagne into it. “Ceremonial splash.”

“I give in,” I say.

We tap our flutes together, and I take a sip of my champagne Diet Coke. The champagne just makes it taste even more diet.

“Where'd you get the champagne from?” I ask.

“Someone rang my doorbell and when I went outside, the bottle was just there in a bassinet with a note that said,
Please take care of me
.” Scott laughs. Everything feels so familiar. I could have almost predicted that answer from him.

We take our glasses and the can and the bottle and sit in the backyard with our feet up on my mom's iron patio table. It has so much scrollwork, it's actually uncomfortable to get your legs under it. The air is crisp.

The first time we kissed, two winters ago, it was out here. We sat in my yard while my mom was at Sundance (for fun) and drank wine coolers, pretending like we were just going to be friends. I wanted him to understand that I was tipsy so that if there was a pause, and I looked at him, and the moment became awkwardly but also perfectly charged, we could write it off the next day if we had to. But we didn't write it off.

Now I tell Scott a little bit about being friends again with Jenny, how she's decided she's going to be Buddhist now, just to piss off her parents. “I think I remember seeing that girl with you when you were a freshman,” he says.

“You noticed me before that day behind auto shop?”

Scott just jokingly gasps and covers his mouth with his hand, like he accidentally let that slip. I didn't know this. My cell rings.

“One sec,” I say.

I get up from the table and walk around the side of my house. It's an LA number on the screen, but I don't recognize it. My chest tightens.

“Hello?” I answer.

“I did it!” yells Mila. “I finally did it!”

I look through the window at the time on the microwave. The elimination show has just ended. “Oh my God. Oh my God!” I say.

“They picked me over Felicia. The people watching.” She sounds like she's maybe teary.

“Is it better now because you waited all these years for it to happen? How does it feel?”

“It feels totally magical. Better than I thought. I'd dreamed of it too. But it's better.”

“You could easily win this whole thing. Oh my God, what are you going to do right now?” The final three give their finale performances in their hometowns this weekend. Lucien told me the network is giving the show a two-hour special on Sunday because they're choosing to make a big deal out of it. There's more money in the commercial time. But Mila's from Sherman Oaks, so she won't have anywhere to travel.

“Uh, I'm going to go take care of Fel,” Mila says in this almost insulted way. Her tone says it should be obvious where her priorities lie now. “She's wrecked. I'm getting everyone out of my face and being there for her.”

Gray,
I think.

She hates her sister and she loves her sister. She always wanted to beat Felicia, but she never wanted to see her hurt. I remember how before our first performance, Mila warned me that I was going to see a different person up there on the stage. There's gray there too, in the way a person can be one thing in public, but that can also not be who they really are.

Through the phone, I hear a door shut and then soft crying. “Got to go, talk to you later,” Mila says, and hangs up.

I walk back over to the table, where Scott is working on carving the champagne cork with a Swiss Army knife he keeps on his key chain. He holds it out to me.

“I made you a little microphone.”

I take the cork. It's pretty good. I talk into it. “That was my friend Mila from the show. She made it to final three.”

Scott says, “What about the guy who kissed you?”

I realize if Felicia was the one eliminated, Ford went through. He must be out of his mind with happiness. “Yeah, him too.”

“I'm glad you got out of all this bullshit, Tiny.”

I put my feet up on the table and look at Scott. “Why didn't you leave for college when you were supposed to?” I ask.

Scott tries to act like the question doesn't bother him by messing around with the knife. Then he laughs. “I didn't know who I wanted to be.” He's playing it off like a joke, but I don't think it is.

“Like on the inside?”

“In life.”

“But isn't that the point of college? I don't think you have to go there knowing everything.”

Scott stretches his arms up in the air. “I'm hungry. You wanna go inside?”

I humor him because I guess that's the courtesy you can give to your friends: more humor and more patience. And that's why friendships can last so much longer than romances. Everything's less urgent. We pick up our glasses and go into the kitchen.

We take Dixie cups (Dixie . . . the South) and fill them up with snacks from the pantry. This feels familiar too; we used to do this after school.

“You want some yogurt raisins?” Scott asks, searching on the top shelf that I can't see without a step stool.

“Yeah, definitely.”

We take the cups and sit on the floor and look through my mom's cabinets. In one of the cabinets under the island, she's storing a box of all the former tassels that have held back our dining room curtains. She changes them out with her mood.

Scott pulls out a lilac one with pom-poms hanging from it. “These go up when she's feeling old. She thinks they're fun and flirty and girlish.” His voice is a little draggy from the champagne, but he's right. He knows these things about us. He takes the tassel and starts wiggling it back and forth on the floor. “You guys totally need a cat. Here, kitty, kitty. Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.” I laugh.

I take one of the aqua tassels with beads out of the box. It matches his poncho. I scoot back to tie the cord so he's got a low ponytail with a gigantic tassel hanging out of the bottom. “This one looks like it was made for you.”

Scott turns and kisses me.

Our mouths are together for one second before I understand what's happening. The smell of his skin takes me back in time again. I pull back. I say, “I'm not doing this. The whole reason you're over is that we're actually going to be friends.”

Scott tries to kiss me again. I get up from the floor.

“We're not just going to fall back into old patterns!” I yell. “That isn't the point of tonight.”

I expect Scott to laugh to diffuse the tension, but instead his face is so angry that it's like I'm seeing a new him. “‘The point of college,' ‘the point of tonight.'” He kicks the cabinet door, which is unexpected. “Does every goddamn thing have to have a
point
? Does everything have to be explained to death? Can't a person just exist? Can't things just be different and we don't have to talk them into the ground?”

I'm taken aback. “Well, things are different. We're trying to be friends.”

“I don't need to label everything, Magnolia! I can just be different than I was before! You can too.”

“Huh? How do you know I'm
not
different? We've just spent months barely talking.”

Scott pops up from the ground to stare me wildly in the eyes. “You think about everything too much—that's why I couldn't be around you over the summer. It was always pressure, you being with me. It was like make sense of this, make sense of that. Why can't you ever just let whatever's going to happen, happen, without thinking it to shreds? Why can't you just go with the flow, huh? Why can't you, why can't you,
why can't you?
”

The way he's asking me this is full of so much desperation, I'm too stunned to begin an answer.

The doorbell rings.

“Who is that?” Scott asks, almost accusingly, as if I've planted someone to get myself out of this exact moment.

“I don't know,” I say. I live in a gated community, so no one ever really just stops by.

We stand in silence for a second.

“I'm going to go get that.” I leave the kitchen, feeling Scott watching me. I feel dizzy from that interaction, like it physically took me by the shoulders and shook me. I'm not the one who's not ready to be friends. It's Scott. Sadness starts to overpower the dizziness—the sadness is about giving up the idea that we could pull off this new kind of relationship. But it's also clear to me that that's what I have to do.

In the foyer, I stand on my tiptoes so I can see out the beveled diamonds of glass my mom recently had installed in the front doors.

Ford is standing on my doorstep. He looks up, and our eyes meet. He's squinting from the lantern hanging above his head.

My chest tightens again, but along with fear, I'm not going to deny that there's relief and happiness clamping down on it too. A few weeks ago I believed there was nothing Ford could say that would change what he did. But it looks like I'm ready to be a little more open-minded because now I open the door.

Ford is wearing his old white shirt with his old jeans. But a new jacket.

“I never really got to thank you for saving me with the Superstar,” he says.

It's like I can feel every molecule of air on my forehead, on my cheeks. Jenny hasn't been seriously adhering to Buddhist beliefs, but she has been talking about looking at anger and transforming it. From what I understand, this doesn't mean you have to ignore it. It just means that you learn how to turn your anger into something less destructive, something new.