Fangirl (10 page)

Sandy came up to him as he walked across the tarmac to an awaiting car.

They hadn't exchanged a single word on the plane, but Peter knew he couldn't spend the next two months avoiding her like this. They would eventually have to talk.

Peter stopped and faced her as Bobby, Abby, Big Jim, and the rest of the touring crew pulled the baggage from the plane and the entourage filed out of the tricked-out 737 with
@P
ETER
M
AXX
N
OW
painted on the sides in red and black block letters.

“I'm sorry about last night.” Sandy flashed her blue puppy eyes. “I was probably a little harsh.”

“I'm sorry too,” he immediately melted. “Maybe I shouldn't have said what I did.”

“That's the thing,” she interrupted, grabbing his hand. “You were right. I think we might be better off as friends. It's just so intense, with the tour, and all the media attention, all the crazy girls always fighting for your attention.”

“It's not about other girls,” he quickly added. “It's about me, and what I want.”

“You're right. I didn't mean it that way. I mean, your fans are my fans. I appreciate them. I was totally wrong last night.”

Peter felt relieved. But, more than that, he was shocked. He couldn't believe Sandy was taking being, well, dumped so calmly. “Sandy, you know we'll always be friends.” He gave her a hug.

“I know.” She pressed her cheek against his.

The squealing fans got louder when they saw Peter and Sandy embrace as Big Jim eyeballed the crowd for any potential fence hoppers.

Sandy released Peter and turned her back to the crowd. She lowered her voice. “The only thing I'm worried about,
actually, is the fans. Look at them over there. They love all this Pandy stuff. They're already nuts about our duet coming out in the fall, and if the media found out we weren't dating—and like right in the middle of the tour—it could be a total PR nightmare. For everyone.”

He glanced over at a heavyset girl with frizzy black hair decked out in a Peter Maxx concert T-shirt about two sizes too small for her who was poking her camera through a hole in the fence. She was crying. Happy tears. Peter blew her a kiss and she nearly fell over like one of those just-healed churchgoers at the hands of a hyper televangelist.

As much as Peter wanted to make a clean break, he knew Sandy was right. To go public would just create a whole new set of headaches for him: tabloid rumors, the label execs' oldster blood vessels would stroke out, Abby would be fielding calls every day from reporters about who he was or wasn't linked to, and, not that he cared so much, but all those silly gay rumors that hounded him before he began dating Sandy would annoy the heck out of him once again. Plus, it wasn't like he had any other special girl in his life already. In fact, he was looking forward to being alone for a while.

Over and beyond Sandy's left shoulder, Peter could see a couple of paparazzi guys standing on apple boxes, focusing on them with their long-lens cameras just over the fence line. One of the shooters was a stocky guy with dark skin and the other was a white guy in his twenties who always wore a Dodgers cap backward. The two seemed to be everywhere he went.
Always in place to get their shots, taken from different angles from the other, which would immediately download onto their laptops and send to their photo agencies, who would then distribute them instantly to media around the world for purchase. These “exclusive” paparazzi shots (and, lately, one of them was shooting video from a hand-held camera while the other shot still images) often would be blasted all over blogs within a half hour after they were shot.

It was impressive, but scary. No matter how many times Peter asked Abby how the paparazzi knew where and when and with whom he would be showing up so far ahead of time, she never could come up with an answer. The best she could muster was that they were tipped off by “sources.” Peter's dad believed the paparazzi, and the reality that people who worked around a celebrity possibly tipped them off, was all just part of the price of fame and that Peter needed to just accept it.

As the paparazzi guys snapped away and the fans kept yelling, Peter gave Sandy another hug. “Maybe I'll see you and everyone later for dinner back at the hotel. Dad set up a group meal in Chinatown.”

Sandy pecked him on the cheek and joined the four other G Girls who were impatiently waiting for her in an Escalade. Halfway to the car, Sandy turned around and hopped back to Peter. “I just want to make sure of one thing, but please don't take this the wrong way. I wanna know if this is about you and me, or about your mom. I would hate to see you so haunted by the past for the rest of your life.”

“None of the above, Sands. It's about me.”

As the crew loaded his baggage into an SUV, Peter walked over to the fence, shaking hands and saying hi to the fans. “How's Sandy?” the curly-haired girl asked.

“She's great. Real great.”

“Oh, yeah?” the video-razzi guy asked as he peered down from above. “When's the wedding?”

“Good one,” Peter said with a nod, signing a flurry of autographs.

“I want a hug like that girl!” another fan yelled.

Peter looked up from the magazine cover he was signing. “What girl?” he asked the fan.

“You know, the high school girl in Bakersfield you hugged.”

“Oh,” Peter said, adding, “Well, yeah, I'd hug ya if it weren't for this silly fence!”

Big Jim delivered the bad news to the fans that it was time for them to head out and hustled Peter to the car, jumping into the backseat with him and Bobby.

“How'd that fan know I hugged that girl in Bakersfield?” Peter asked Big Jim, who shrugged his beefy shoulders.

“'Cuz they know everything, Petey,” Bobby chimed in as they cruised up onto the majestic Bay Bridge. “That's why I always say if you're gonna hug a fan, do it with one arm. One and done. If you do it with two, you stir too much trouble. Just my advice. Take it or leave it.”

“Speaking of Bakersfield,” Bobby added, “Before Abby
went back to L.A. , she wanted me to remind you to Tweeter about the promotion at the school today. Hot Hollywood asked for it.”

“You mean ‘Tweet,' Dad,” Peter corrected.

“Huh?”

“You told me to ‘Tweeter.'”

“Oh, yeah, right,” he guffawed. “Tweeter, Twitter. You know what I mean.”

Peter had been looking forward to the Oakland tour stop. He had been to the San Francisco Bay Area a couple of times before, but never for a big show like this. He loved the enormous steel bridges, the dramatic views of the water, the moody fog, and the amazing hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurants. Even though the concert was the next night in Oakland, he'd made sure his dad booked them in the historic Fairmont hotel atop Nob Hill in downtown San Francisco so they could enjoy a night in the city. Since they usually stayed at whatever hotel was closest to the venue, this was a treat for everyone on the tour.

As Peter made his way to the hotel, a road crew was inside Oakland Arena setting up the stage for the next day's show while a second crew was already up in Seattle assembling the stage for his show there. They saved money by having two stage crews working at the same time, avoiding down days in which everyone on the payroll—from the sound engineers to dancers to musicians to security—was being paid to wait for the roadies to construct the set.

By the time Peter plopped onto the bed in his suite on the twenty-third floor it was six o'clock in the evening. He sat up against the elaborately designed backboard and flipped open his laptop to check some e-mail, get on Twitter, check some blogs, and cyber-stalk his buddies. His three best friends—Denny, Roger, and Will—still lived back in Nashville. None of them were in the entertainment business, and with him living in L.A. and being on the road so much, it was easiest to find out what “the good ol' boys” were up to by flicking on Facebook.

Denny would post random pictures of himself in various states of weirdness. Roger, ever the ladies' man, changed his relationship status on a daily basis, his girlfriend changing from one day to the next from petite brunettes to tall blondes. And then back again. Will would post links to the most random videos he could find on YouTube, like the one of the baby telling his landlord to go to hell. During the most intense travel and work days, sometimes his friends' comic relief provided Peter's only laughter of the day.

After stalking his buddies for a few minutes (yes, Roger was suddenly now “in a relationship” with yet another blonde named Britney), he logged onto his Twitter account. Peter had built a loyal following because he actually posted messages himself and didn't use it as a billboard to endorse products. He didn't want his fans to feel like they were constantly being sold something. He wanted at least one forum where he could simply connect.

The purity of Peter's online pursuit had won him over eight million very loyal followers. If there was any bad news it was that he could easily get thousands of messages sent to him every day, making it virtually impossible—no, make that definitely impossible—to read them all. Instead, he would try to scan as many as he could to get an idea of what his fans were obsessing about at any given moment.

On this night, over a thousand fans had re-Tweeted a pic of Peter hugging a ponytailed girl at the Lawndale High event, and several fansites had posted the pic with racy headlines such as “Peter Hugs It Out with Hottie” and “Bakersfield of Dreams.” In the fan pic, Peter could see his face, but only the back of the girl. Something about his own face caught his attention. It wasn't the “Peter Perfect” face he usually wore at most fan events, the cool-guy stiff face with the serious eyes that he was told a gazillion times made him look like Ben Stiller striking a
Zoolander
-esque “blue steel” pose. No, he had a wide, almost goofy smile and his eyes were tightly closed.

To Peter, it was the face of happy. He cracked a smile just looking at it. He had probably met over a hundred kids that day, shook hands, posed for pics, signed autographs. He had gone through the machinations of a promo appearance just as he had so many hundreds of times before. More often than not, Peter would meet and greet with so many fans he couldn't remember any single one. But Peter didn't have a problem remembering the brown-eyed girl who had written that contest song, who had worn that “Music Is My Boyfriend” shirt, the
girl some twelve hours after the fact he was seeing in the picture. She on her tippy toes as he two-arm hugged her inside the classroom. There was a connection. And now his hyperobservant fans had noticed.

Peter had assumed that when he became a global pop superstar and people everywhere knew his name and face and he had become famous beyond even his dad's wildest dreams that he'd become the happiest person on the planet. Turned out, he was wrong. Turned out, he wanted to change it.

Maybe the emptiness came from spending so much time hanging around adults who in any other reality would have no business hanging around people so much younger than him. Maybe it was from dropping out of high school and getting tutored so he could work—and avoid being hassled by fans and media. He didn't know for sure.

What he did know was that in the last two years he had gone from being a kid on a TV show who could go to the movies and not be noticed, to being a household name and face who long ago stopped trying to do the normal things a teenager does because, well, it had started to become too dangerous: the mobs and the cops being called for crowd control. The hysterical fans couldn't let him just enjoy a frozen yogurt at the Hermosa Beach pier, so he had started to wear a wig and giant glasses and, suddenly, he felt like a freak, like a latter-day Michael Jackson—only not so weird. At least not yet.

Peter Maxx didn't want to become another child-star stat, another unsympathetic “victim” paying the so-called “price of
fame.” He didn't want his sanity to be a lamb sacrificed to the fame gods.

He instead wanted to follow a different path. He wanted to know what it was like to go to a high school dance, what it was like to date a girl who wasn't famous, what it felt like to be surrounded by kids his own age, what it felt like to make a love connection with a real girl—not Girl Group Barbie. Someone
normal
—a girl who had a life entirely outside of what his dad liked to call “Hollyweird.”

His hotel room's panoramic view beckoning, Peter got off his bed and walked to the floor-to-ceiling glass window that looked out on the Golden Gate Bridge. In the distance, even through the thick window, he could hear a foghorn blowing as the thick mist rolled in from the chilly Pacific waters. Other high-rise hotels and apartment buildings sprouted up below his window high atop Nob Hill. An antique brass telescope sat positioned on a tripod in front of the window.

Peter turned off the lamp in his suite. His heart began racing.

Cocking shut his left eye and placing his widened right eye in front of the viewfinder, he pointed the telescope in the direction of an apartment directly across the street from his hotel. It was Friday night. Real people went out on Friday nights, right?

He focused into a room on the corner of the twenty-second floor. He saw a couple of kids sitting on a couch watching TV. Peter panned over to the neighboring window into a bedroom and saw a woman—their mom?—standing in front of a vanity
mirror putting on makeup. She was dressed up in an elegant sleeveless black dress and in what appeared to be heels.