The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (15 page)

They’d set it up so we had access to the grounds and field without anyone watching. I walked around and talked to the camera and the interviewer, a blond lady named Robin, and said things like, “Here’s where we used to have recess and gym and where I got into baseball,” and when we came by a rock near a tree, I lied and was like, “I had my first kiss here,” and when the interviewer asked who the girl was, I said, “I don’t want to say her name, but she’s in every song of mine in some way.”

I’m usually good at tuning out what a taped video appearance will look like when it airs, because if you think about it in the middle of filming you screw yourself up, just like you can’t think about how you’re singing onstage, but I realized my father might see it. He’d be on his couch watching me in my old school, except he might have left before I started there.

“When I was a student here, I used to have a fantasy about traveling around the world, singing my music,” I said. “I most wanted to go to two places: Pittsburgh and Australia.”

Robin laughed for the camera. “Pittsburgh and Australia? Why those two?”

“I did geography reports on them both,” I said, and I looked straight into the camera, which is a no-no. “I’ve played Pittsburgh, but I still haven’t made it to Australia.” If it really was my father emailing me, there’s no way he could think I was an impostor now. And if Jane asked why I chose those cities, I’d say I thought it would help with my domestic-brand extension and foreign-market outreach.

They made some calls and said it was time to go inside. I spend half my life waiting for someone to tell me it’s time to do something. They’d
arranged it so we went in while everyone was in class, but to make it look like school was still going on, a few kids who’d won a lottery could be in the halls at the same time as me. A couple years ago, I used to walk down those same halls afraid that an older kid might push me into a locker or something.

When I got onto the main hall I was supposed to walk through, there were like forty kids hanging around, and they started screaming, which meant all the kids stuck in the classrooms pressed their faces up to the windows in the doors. I wished Walter didn’t have the day off. The security guard the TV crew had hired didn’t look big enough to prevent a stampede.

The producer Kevin was like, “If you guys want to be on TV, you have to act normal and like it’s no big deal Jonny’s here, all right?” Which was idiotic, because why would I be walking through a school hallway with the students acting normal? But it was Jane’s idea, and maybe she was right that it branded me as a regular kid.

The school only went up to fifth grade, so there was no one I would’ve known from before. The kids tried to pretend to be normal, but almost everyone who walked by looked at me. Only really they looked at the camera. They weren’t too obvious about it, since they probably knew they’d get edited out if they did, and the smarter ones just walked by with their faces and eyes visible but without staring directly in. Everyone wants to
be
famous more than they want to
see
someone famous.

I walked down the hallway and another one. The walls all had artwork by the students and stupid posters like one that said
BEE-LIEVE IN YOURSELF!
with a picture of a bee reading a book, though I had a track called “This Bird Will Always Bee There for You” so I couldn’t call it too dumb.

I kept looking over at the kids behind the glass windows of the doors, which was unprofessional camera protocol, but I couldn’t help myself. If I went back to school, and a celeb came to visit, I’d be one of those kids behind the glass. Except I wouldn’t cram my face up against it like they were doing. That’s one of the ways I could never really be like them again.

I made up more stuff, like “I had this locker” or “That was my third-grade classroom.” The truth was I didn’t remember much, except for the smell, which was chalk and hissing radiators. I knew I’d been there before, but I couldn’t place any details, and when we got to the end of the hall, Robin said I should take them to the cafeteria. I didn’t even know where it was anymore. So I said I thought they moved it after I left, and they escorted me. After we finished in the cafeteria, Robin stood next to me on camera and said they had a big surprise. “We know what you miss most about St. Louis is all your friends,” she said.

Into the cafeteria, about thirty feet away, walked a boy.

“So we found your best friend, Michael Carns,” Robin said.

He looked how he used to, same pale skin like he’d been scared and lived underground, but a few inches taller and his hair was shorter now. He’d become sort of funny-looking, with his ears sticking out, and was wearing dark blue Champion sweatpants and a sweatshirt, same as before, at least the way I remembered it. People always wear the same thing in your mind, like Jane in St. Louis is the Schnucks black polo shirt and khaki pants, but in L.A. it’s a black skirt and top and stockings because black is slimming.

The last time I saw Michael was the night before we left. Jane let me do one final sleepover. With Nadine I once figured out that I probably slept over at his house about two hundred times. We tried to stay up all night together, watching TV and eating junk food in his room like we always did, but we couldn’t do it, and we both fell asleep around five a.m. When Jane picked me up in the morning, I didn’t want to wake him up on so little sleep, so I just left without saying good-bye. I guess I thought I’d be seeing him again soon. I felt like running over to him now and telling him I wished I’d woken him up, but maybe he didn’t remember it anyway.

They must not have told Jane about this, because she would have definitely leaked it to me, and the surprise would be ruined. Most of the time that stuff is faked on TV, which I know from doing it a few times, and when I see it on reality shows I can always tell who’s pretending to be surprised. You have to be a high-caliber enough actor
to pull it off. I’m just good enough to do it, but I guess they didn’t know that.

Michael glanced at Kevin like he didn’t know if he was supposed to stay at the door or come to me. He was pretty uncomfortable with all the cameras on him. Those lights are hot, and it’s hard when you’re not used to it. Kevin motioned to him to come over, so Michael walked up to me and said, “Hi,” all quiet, and I said, “Hey, Michael.”

It was weird. I knew it would read bad on TV if I didn’t do something, so I slapped him five like Dr. Henson and said, “It’s awesome to see you!” and he said, quietly again, “You, too.” Then we stood around waiting for something to happen and he looked at his feet with his face angled away from the crew. I couldn’t tell if he was so quiet because of the cameras or because of me or because that’s what he was like now. Robin looked at Kevin, who said they’d clean it up in editing and told me they were taking us someplace special.

Kevin said me and Michael would go in a car with each other so we could catch up off-camera. It was a town car, not a limo, so the crew guy who drove us could hear us in the backseat.

“What’s new?” I asked Michael as we pulled away from the school.

“My parents adopted a baby boy last year,” he said. “From Ethiopia, in Africa. His name is Justin. He’s pretty fun, actually.”

I couldn’t imagine Michael with a younger brother. We always said we were like brothers and it was better than having a real brother since we got to choose each other.

“From Africa,” I said. I didn’t really want to look straight at him, and I tilted my head down. Under my unzipped winter coat and jacket, my black graphic T-shirt had a picture of Brangelina as farmers standing in front of a house with a pitchfork, but they’ve got white makeup and jet-black hair and lipstick and mascara, and it says
AMERICAN GOTH
. “Cool. Like Brangelina.”

He looked at my shirt and the rest of my outfit. “They give you those clothes?” My jeans were distressed and my jacket under my winter coat was shiny black leather with metal studs and my sneakers were custom-made red Nikes with heart shapes on the tongue.

“Who?”

“The TV people.”

“No. This is from home.” He didn’t say anything, so I added, “Well, the designers give them to me. They send me stuff and pay me to wear it. There’s a lot of contracts involved. I have to wear certain pieces a certain amount while out and at photo ops.” As I was saying it I was wishing I wasn’t, but I couldn’t stop myself. It got quiet again, so I asked him, “Is Jessica Stanton still the hottest girl in our class?”

“No, she got fat. Luann Phelps is now.”

“Luann?”

“Yeah. She got contacts this year and became hot,” he said. “She has a crush on you.”

“For real?” I got a little tingle. I don’t know why I was so into the idea of Luann Phelps having a crush on me. She used to be this dumpy girl with thick glasses and a lisp. For a second it was like she was the celeb and I was the fan.

“All the girls do. Whenever you say your songs are about this one girl, they all say that they’re your ex.”

I had to stop using that line so much. Or maybe I should use it more. “They didn’t used to,” I said. “Have a crush on me.” I knew I could date any girl at one of my shows, but somehow it seemed cooler to be able to go to a school and date any student I wanted to. If there was ever a dance, I could ask whoever, and I wouldn’t call attention to myself with a dance-off or anything, but everyone would know I was the best dancer there.

“You left in the middle of fourth grade. They didn’t get crushes till the fifth grade. The boys didn’t get crushes till this year.”

I wondered if he’d hit puberty yet, or if any of the other boys did. If I asked him in the back of a town car if he had any pubes, though, then
I’d
be like a child predator.

“Who do you have a crush on?”

He played with the string on his sweatpants. “No one, really.”

“Does anyone have a crush on you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Girls don’t talk to me much. Except when they want to know about you.”

“Oh.” Neither of us said anything. The more I tried to come up with
things to say, the less I did. All I could think of was, “My record label wants me to date this actress and singer Lisa Pinto. You know her?”

“She’s on that show,” he said. “So what do you do? Like, go to a movie or something?”

“No. Not real dates. Fake ones, for publicity. That’s how most people do it in L.A. Celebs, I mean.”

He didn’t respond but he sort of smiled to himself, so I closed my eyes and pretended to fall asleep. Soon the crew guy told me we were there. I looked out and we were at our old apartment. And I got that feeling I don’t get when I come home in L.A., times a million, but right after, for some reason, and it’s not like I would really do it, I felt like I wanted to throw a rock or something at the windows.

I wondered for a second if maybe the third surprise would be that they’d found my father and brought him to meet me where we all used to live together, but then I saw Jane standing outside, stamping her boots in the cold while talking to Kevin, and there was no way she would have signed off on that. She said, “Hi, Michael, what a nice surprise,” and made a little face to me that meant she’d just found out I was hanging out with him, but she didn’t say anything because he was still there. She probably wished my old best friend was more telegenic. Me and her were going to do a quick tour of the apartment before I’d throw a football with Michael in the park like we used to.

Our apartment was in a row of buildings that all looked the same, two floors each with pinkish concrete on the outside and a short walkway leading up to a red door. We were on the upper floor. Kevin said we had to be careful not to mess anything up inside or the family that lived there now would charge the show even more. I would’ve thought they’d be happy enough that their apartment was on TV and they could say they lived in Jonny Valentine’s old apartment, but people are always trying to find ways to monetize you.

Robin took me and Jane inside with a few crew guys. I was glad Michael stayed outside. The place looked different with the new furniture, but it felt familiar, with the pipes clanking and the way the floor creaked under your feet when you took your first step inside and how it always smelled like something had burned a little.

Jane showed them around, fast, since there was only the bathroom, the living room, the kitchen, and the bedroom. Nothing in it was that nice. They’d put in an ugly tan wall-to-wall carpet that wasn’t there before. Jane said to the camera, “So, obviously, the new tenants have decorated it their own way.”

It felt like I was a burglar in our old home, and I was scoping it out to steal from the younger Jonathan and Jane from two years ago. I could almost see myself sleeping in my bed, with me from now creeping around the room and taking sports equipment and schoolbooks and clothes from Jonathan Valentino and replacing it with Jonny Valentine merch.

The whole strategy with footage like this was stupid. It was like, Let’s see how you’re like a normal person behind the scenes, but the more we want to see you acting regular in private, the more you have to hide there and throw up a bunch of public buffers, so if we
really
saw you behind the scenes, it wouldn’t look normal at all, that’s why we have to show you pretending to be normal in your old apartment.

There was one picture up on the wall near the kitchen. It was a man and woman in their thirties, and they were holding a baby between them in the hospital bed after she’d given birth and was all sweaty and tired. There was a crib in the corner. The baby was cute, but for a second I thought, Fuck you, baby.

Robin asked me if it brought back any memories. I knew I should come up with something, but nothing from the past hit me when I was in the main rooms. Nearly the first ten years of my life had happened there, so it’s not like it was easy to pick out one thing. When we went into the bathroom, though, I thought about the time I’d gotten sick from eating crab cakes at Ben Marton’s birthday party at Captain D’s, and I spent all night vomiting, and Jane stayed up with me rubbing my back and giving me water even though she had the six a.m. shift at Schnucks. Probably I remembered it because of my preshow routine with her.