The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (17 page)

I asked Kevin if I could go in. I hadn’t even been inside a supermarket in forever, and I’d been in this one hundreds of times. He said, “You can put on your hat and sunglasses and go in, but stay away from your mom, okay?”

Kevin walked inside with me and the hired security guard. The doors dinged open. Everyone knows how music can make you remember something, but even a sound like that double-ding brought me
back to how I imagined the double-ding sound was saying, Jon-
ny,
when Michael’s mother used to drop me off after school before she took Michael to his violin lessons or his tutor or his speech therapist, and I’d do my homework in the staff room, and when her shift was over Jane would let me choose a candy bar to use her employee discount on. For a long time I always picked Butterfinger, but when I was old enough to know Jane was allergic to peanuts, I switched to 3 Musketeers in case the crumbs fell in her car and made her depart the realm, and then we’d drive home together.

I hung around the front fruit displays as Jane went down the main aisle, not saying anything while she walked ahead of the camera guy and Kevin and the security guard. A few people turned around because of the camera, but not all that many, since it was a small handheld and it’s not so strange to see a camera out in public, even in a St. Louis Schnucks.

I followed a little farther in, ducking behind the other displays like in Zenon when projectile weapons or spells are coming for your head. She made it about three-quarters to the end of the aisle when a woman from an empty checkout register in one of the Schnucks polo shirts intercepted her.
“Jane?”
she asked. “Jane Valentino, is that you?”

Jane stopped. The woman was around her age, with a lumpy body like a potato and her hair in a bun. “Yes?” Jane said.

“It’s Mary Ann. Mary Ann Hilford?” She pointed at her name tag. “Remember?”

Jane looked blank. “Of course. Hello, Mary Ann.”

I barely remembered her, or any of them, except for this one black guy named Vaughn who snuck me M&M’s when Jane wasn’t looking. Mary Ann reached out to hug her, and Jane kept her arms mostly by her side and didn’t hug her back. “Vanessa and Lillian and Phil and me, we all follow Jonathan’s career. Or Jonny’s career.”

“That’s nice of you,” Jane said. “I hope you’re all doing well.”

Mary Ann said, “Look!” and she went back to her checkout line and came back with something. “He’s on the cover.”

I couldn’t see it, except that it was a tabloid and definitely not the glossy we’d contracted with. She handed it to Jane, who looked at the
cover for a few seconds, and turned to the camera guy and said something. He took the camera down off his shoulder and pointed it at the ground. “Is he here?” Mary Ann asked.

I crouched lower behind the cantaloupes and watched through a small space in the pile. They smelled rotten. Bottom-shelf supermarkets are always kind of sad, with all the D-list merch they’re trying to get rid of that no one wants. “No,” Jane said. “But we have to get running. It was great seeing you.”

She walked away. Mary Ann said, loud enough for Jane to hear, “I’m sure.”

Jane turned. “Excuse me?”

“I see how it is,” Mary Ann said. “Thought you were better than everyone back then, still do.”

Jane’s face twisted around. She seemed a little hurt, even. I didn’t know how this woman from Schnucks with a bun could say anything to hurt her feelings. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said quietly.

Mary Ann looked like she hadn’t expected this. “Wait.” She shook her head and sighed. “Jane. That was bitchy of me.”

Jane smiled at her. I couldn’t read if it was a fuck-you smile or an I-forgive-you smile. “That’s okay. All this stuff”—Jane pointed to the camera guy and waved the tabloid—“makes people say and do things they don’t actually mean.”

“Yeah.” Mary Ann didn’t say anything else because you could tell she
did
mean it but just felt bad about it.

“And it makes it hard when you meet people who knew you before,” Jane said, even though it wasn’t like Mary Ann asked her to keep talking about it. The camera guy was still there, and he was itching to turn the camera back on and catch this, but he couldn’t do it. “So I understand why you’d feel the need to say something hurtful like that.”

Now Mary Ann
really
didn’t know what to say. She nodded, and Jane said, “Anyway, it was so nice seeing you again, Mary Ann.”

Mary Ann mumbled something that sounded like she was apologizing. Jane’s a natural at spinning.

I rushed out through a different aisle and an empty checkout line so Jane wouldn’t see me running out ahead of her.

I climbed into the limo before she could see that I’d been inside the supermarket. When she got to the car I heard her say to Kevin, “We’re not using the end of it or else we’re canceling the interview tomorrow, and that’s final.” She got inside and slammed the door and said TV people were paparazzi with fancier job titles.

She was holding the tabloid Mary Ann gave her against her chest. My photo was splashed on the cover. Central real estate. “What are they saying?” I asked as the driver pulled out of the parking lot.

She turned it away from me before handing it to me. “You may as well see it.”

The cover was me getting into the car with Lisa as I stuck my tongue out at the camera. But it was a tabloid, which is much less valuable to your image than a glossy for gossip. The headline said G
UY
AND
G
IRL
: J
ONNY
V
ALENTINE AND
L
ISA
P
INTO
.

A few pages inside, there was a short article with a few more photos:

According to raven-haired songstress
Lisa Pinto
, 12, when
Jonny Valentine
, 11, asked her out last month, he did so by quoting a line from his hit single “Guys vs. Girls”: “Will you be my girl today?”

The two young lovebirds have become a serious item and were recently photographed canoodling outside an ice cream parlor in Denver, where JV passed through on his
Valentine Days
tour and Lisa was promoting her upcoming debut album,
School’s Out!,
before its Feb. 14 release.

“What I love most is hanging out with him away from the spotlight, when ‘The Jonny’ comes off and he’s simply Jonathan—that’s what I call him when it’s just the two of us,” says Lisa, referring not to her new boyfriend’s angelic halo of golden locks, but his public image. “He’s a normal kid who doesn’t take himself too seriously.”

Which means what, exactly?

“Jonathan’s a huge dork,” she says with a trilling laugh. “A total nerd. Yet so am I. And I love that about him.”

The feeling is mutual, according to a person close to the young “Breathtaking” songster. “Jonny’s completely obsessed with Lisa,” says the source. “I’ve never seen him like this with another girl.”

“I can’t believe they sold it to a tabloid without my consent,” Jane said. “ ‘I’ve never seen him like this with another girl’—Jesus. Not to mention this
Jonathan
garbage.”

I didn’t know why she was acting like it was a character assassination when it was all positive press. I closed my eyes to pretend I was trying to nap, but what I really was doing was imagining that Lisa replaced Jane in the limo, and there were paparazzi outside but the windows were too tinted for them to see into, and Lisa looked at me and said, “Door’s
locked,
” and we humped each other and I stuck my tongue inside her mouth. I turned on my side so Jane couldn’t see I was getting a boner. As I was picturing this, I kept wondering why she called me a dork and a nerd. She called herself one, too, I know, and female celebrities always do that so ugly girls don’t hate them, except they never admit to being what a dork actually is, which would be like saying to an interviewer, “Yeah, I’m a huge dork, I have bad social skills and no one likes me.” But you don’t need to call male celebrities one. I
really
shouldn’t have asked her on a date. The way she kept calling me Mr. Something would’ve annoyed me after a while. I bet if she ever met Mi$ter $mith, she’d call him Mr. Mi$ter $mith.

Jane tapped one heel hard on the floor a few times like she does when she’s pissed and took out her phone and made a call. “This is Jane Valentine calling for Olivia. Yes, I’ll leave her a voice mail,” she said. “Olivia, this is Jane. I saw the story about Jonny and Lisa, and I’m not happy that it was sold to a tabloid without my knowledge. If this is Stacy’s doing, please tell Ronald that I never signed on for it and this is not the way I want to run things in the future.”

I opened my eyes. She hung up and turned to me and shook her head. “You’re eleven years old,” she said, wiping some snot from my
nose that had turned crusty from the cold air. “They forget that you’re eleven.”

“I’m almost twelve,” I said.

She pulled me close to her and hugged tight. She had on more of her Chanel No. 5 than usual that this movie actress told her she should wear after we moved to L.A. My boner was going down but it was still there, and I had to adjust my hips so it wasn’t uncomfortable.

“Not just yet,” she said.

T
he morning after my concert, which was a straight A, me, Jane, and Walter hustled down to the Arch. I was worried the show had invited Michael to watch, but even if they’d been thinking about it at first, they’d have to be blind not to see how bad he played on camera.

They’d set up a circular outdoor stage underneath it, and the crowd was already surrounding it and hollering when the show’s security guys escorted me onstage. It was my usual audience, girls with their mothers or sometimes fathers, plus a few stragglers. When people see a crowd, they always feel like they’re missing out if they’re not part of it. Kevin reminded me they’d air the video from yesterday, Robin would do the ten-minute interview, and then I’d sing three songs over a musical track. They estimated a 3.2 and twenty-two share, with a 1.1 in the twelve-to-seventeen demo, solid numbers for morning TV.

They showed the video on a small screen near us. It was all the regular stuff, video and photo clips of me with voiceovers talking about my career, spliced with shots of St. Louis and me walking around the school. I could be a TV director. It’s pure formula.

They cut to me and Michael meeting, and they edited it as B-roll so it didn’t seem awkward. We walked to the park like a weirdo pair,
with him in his Champion sweats and me in my sponsored wardrobe. But they cut it so it seemed like we were having fun, and with “Kali Kool” in the background instead of a love song, it didn’t look too gay, even though it didn’t make any sense to play a song about partying on a beach in California over shots of an empty park in St. Louis in the middle of winter. If you didn’t know, you’d think we were still best friends. I let my eyes get blurry like when I’ve been playing video games for a long time, so I had a sense of what was happening on the screen but didn’t have to watch.

After I could tell they were done with me and Michael, they ran a few shots of our old apartment before the segment wound down. They’d cut the whole Schnucks thing.

I wasn’t nervous for something like this, because I’ve done plenty of live TV, but when they were counting down, it was the last thing I wanted to be doing. I wasn’t tired, so I didn’t want to be sleeping, and I didn’t want to be playing Zenon, either, or hanging out with anyone in particular. What I suddenly wanted was, I wanted to be back at our old apartment, and I wanted to tell Jane to buy it back. We could afford it easily, and we could decorate it the same exact way it looked back then. We wouldn’t stay there or anything, because it was still a crap apartment, but when we came back to St. Louis for shows we could just pop in and remember that it was still around.

But she’d say it was a wasteful expenditure and these kinds of purchases were what bankrupted musicians with stupid business instincts.

Being a consummate professional means doing your job when you don’t want to, so I sucked it up and pasted on a huge smile when the camera light blinked and Robin introduced me as America’s Angel of Pop and the girls screamed like they were getting attacked and I got ready to give answers in Auto-Tune mode, where they sound right but have nothing behind them.

She asked me how I got my start, and I’d gone over this story so much I could recite it in my sleep. I talked about my music teacher in second grade and how I won second place in a local talent competition that year, and like every other interviewer in the history of the world, Robin asked what the kid who won first place was doing now, and I
said what Jane coached me on, “I hope she’s still singing, because she was hella good.” You can say
hella
on TV, even at seven in the morning, Jane told me, but not
hell
. Networks are idiots.

I talked about how me and Jane decided I was old enough to busk on weekends in the Central West End, and a couple videos of me singing exploded on YouTube one week and my record label called, and a couple years later, with God’s help, here we are. I’m supposed to mention God once in a while, but after Jane’s lie the day before about us praying, it might have been too much Bible thumping.

“Everything happens for a reason,” Robin said.

Something about the TV-host smile on her face made me want to be like, No, it doesn’t, that’s the coastal way of believing in God without actually believing in him, and it’s a stupid thing morons like Mrs. Warfield tell themselves when bad things happen so they feel better about it, that’s why The Secret Land of Zenon is so good, things happen and no one’s keeping track of if it’s for a reason or not, experience points either come or they don’t and you can never totally predict why and sometimes it’s the opposite of what makes sense, like Jane can’t sing and my father probably can’t but I was born with a perfect voice from good luck, and if Jane had gotten an abortion then everyone here would be watching someone else get interviewed right now, or if YouTube hadn’t been invented I might never have been discovered and would be a normal kid in St. Louis who was the star of his school choir but nothing else and Luann Phelps wouldn’t have a crush on me, and there’s a girl in the audience in a wheelchair and if you think
that
happened for a reason, you have a fucked-up idea of why things happen.