Fangirl (17 page)

“Did you listen to the mix I sent you?” Christopher said. “Maybe that will cheer you up.”

“I haven't. If I thought it would erase all the crap that's happened to me in the last three days I would have listened. But the last time I checked your mix isn't capable of doing that.”

Christopher got up and grabbed his backpack. “I better get going. Obviously, I'm not making you feel any better. When Josie
Brat
is gone, tell Josie
Brant
she should text me. I'll be waiting for her.”

Christopher stormed out the door before Josie could come back with an equally sarcastic retort. Regardless, Josie wasn't so sure she cared. There was only one person she felt like talking to, and it wasn't anyone in Bakersfield. Although the city had 350,000 people and was the ninth largest in California, those statistics were deceiving. Josie's world was a very small one. Just about everyone used to think she was a freak, and now, with her dad's shady farming, she was sure any remaining doubters had come to conclude the same thing.

If one could suffer claustrophobia just from living in a small town, she was feeling that. She needed to breathe, to get away. But to where? She was stuck. The only person she knew who didn't live in Bakersfield was Peter, and, well, she didn't exactly
know
him that well at all.

As Josie sat on her living room sofa, five minutes had
passed since Peter's last text. She assumed he had turned off his phone and she would have to wait for a few hours before hearing from him.

A watched pot never boils

A watched phone never rings

When you're feeling so low why's life so full of such frustrating things?

Peter's jet took off
and banked north over the Pacific coastline. A few minutes later, high above the rugged brown San Gabriel mountains east of L.A. and heading east on a straight shot to Kansas City, he looked down at the valley that opened up to the north—the valley where Bakersfield sat at the southernmost tip, an average little city with a not-so-average girl.

Peter didn't write many songs anymore. Starting out, he and his dad would write songs together all the time. But, nowadays, he was given songs by various producers and writers—so many, in fact, that he just had to decide which ones he wanted.

Most of Peter's recent hits were actually written by the producing/songwriting duo known as Tempo Team. The producers that comprised the team were Kara Cox and Mark Lemon, a hip couple in their thirties who lived and worked out of a home studio in Santa Monica. They had been on an unprecedented hit-making run, with fourteen top ten hits in the last two years—five of them with Peter.

Everyone wanted to work with Tempo Team, as doing so was tantamount to being delivered a fat lottery check. Right before he left for tour, Peter's label paid top dollar to have him work with Tempo Team, and they were the ones who came up with the lyrics for his duet with Sandy. Peter's fans assumed
Peter truly collaborated with them on all his songs, but the truth was that more often than not, he was handed a lyric sheet and sang from it, maybe changing a word here and there. Still, Peter got a shared songwriting credit on each song due to the legal definition of writing a song. In fact, the guys at Tempo Team had a saying about working with Peter. “Say a word, get a third.”

Peter didn't feel right taking credit for someone else's songs, but his father insisted that this was “the way it works.” And, by the way, he added, “Never look a gift horse in the mouth.” If Tempo Team was delivering the hits, Peter was the face and voice of them. Songwriting and producing being a collaborative process, this was just the system of making hits.

Even so, Peter wanted to write his own music. He wanted to stop the lie. Josie's songwriting talent only convinced him of this more.

As the plane scraped across the blue sky, Peter scribbled words onto a napkin. They flowed like water down a stream. He didn't have to think. He just had to transcribe his brain.

“Whatchya doin over there, Son?” his dad asked from across the aisle, somewhere over the Nevada desert.

“Writing,” he replied, then returning to strumming his acoustic guitar in between scribbling on the napkin.

“You got yourself a hit there, do ya?”

“I don't know, maybe,” Peter said, red-faced with embarrassment. “Just writing. Maybe I'll perform it. We'll see.”

“Writing is good for the soul. And the wallet. Keep it up.”

A half hour later, Peter put his pen down and guitar back in its case. The roar of the engines lulled him into a meditative state as he looked over at his dad dozing off in his reclined seat.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Huh?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Ask away,” he said gruffly.

“Why am I launching this stupid perfume? I mean, whose idea was that?”

“First of all, it's a fragrance, not a perfume,” Bobby said, his eyes fuming. “Every big star has one. Beyoncé, J Lo, Bieber. They've all done it. It's another way to connect with fans. Another revenue stream.”

“But I don't even like perfume,” he said deliberately. “I mean, fragrance.”

Bobby sat up and rubbed his blood-shot eyes and scratched his graying goatee, then unbuckled his seat belt and walked over to Peter's seat. He settled down beside his son.

“Look, Son,” Bobby said, resting his hand on Peter's knee. “It's a licensing deal and they're paying you a pretty penny for it. Two mill to be exact. And that's guaranteed up front, before a single bottle is sold. Don't make me out to be some big bad wolf. You can get off this train anytime you want. No one is making you do this. Any of this. But you need to know that once you hop off, there ain't no guarantee you can ever get back on.”

Bobby twisted the silver wedding band on his right ring finger.

“And, trust me, if anyone knows this, it's me. When I walked away from the business, I thought, ‘Aw, heck. I'll just take some time off and it will all be waiting for me when I get back.' Well, it wasn't. This business moves fast. Tastes change. The next Bobby, the next Peter, the next big, hot singer comes up and, well, people move on. You gotta strike while the iron is hot.”

Peter had heard all this too many times to count. He stared out the window down at the green, quilt-like patches of Midwestern farmland.

“That's why,” Bobby continued, “as long as you're playing the game, you do everything to score as many points as you can before the clock ticks down to zero. Because it will. It may seem like your fans will always be there, always wanna spend forty bucks for a T-shirt and five hundred bucks to get a picture with you. But they won't. So if you want me to go back to Abby and tell her to tear up that press release. If you want me to cancel all the deals we have in place. Heck, if you want me to cancel the rest of the tour, I'll do it. But I just want you to know that if you do, you would seriously be pissing away everything we've worked so hard for, everything that your mom would have been so proud of us for achieving.”

Peter faced his father. “Mom?”

“Yeah. Mom. She would be so proud.”

“I think Mom would be happy just knowing I'm happy. I don't think Mom would care how much money I was making off selling perfume to little girls. She would just want me to be happy.”

Bobby's left leg started twitching. He stuck it out into the aisle and kicked his foot up and down as if on a bass drum pedal.

“Well, I ain't disagreeing with ya, but exactly what about all of this . . .” Bobby threw his hands up and pointed at the private jet cabin, gesturing toward the attractive female flight attendant in the tight-fitting blue dress preparing lunch in the front. “What about all this doesn't make you happy? I'm trying to think what I can do to make you any happier. I mean, the truth is that you're treated like a king.”

“Maybe I don't want to be a king,” Peter said defiantly.

“Don't want to be a king?” Bobby raised his voice an octave. “Where I come from, if you don't want to be treated like a king, then, well, heck, you're more nuts than a peanut factory.”

The jet suddenly hit a pocket of turbulence, bouncing them both up out of their seats. Bobby, already a nervous flyer, snapped on his seat belt and pulled it tight across his lap.

“Tell me. Just how do you wanna be treated?” Bobby asked.

Peter shrugged his shoulders. If he would have given it more thought, he probably would have come up with a different answer, something more rehearsed. But he didn't. Instead,
he looked at his dad and, for the first time in a very long time, told his father exactly what was on his mind and said, “Like a kid.”

Friends or lovers

I need to know

On text, it's like we're unpeeling

The onion of our connection

I hope he doesn't add to my heartbreak collection

Josie kept writing. The song kept coming to her. She hummed them quietly on her bed as she scribbled them into her diary.

What did he mean, “text ya later”

What's he gonna ask next?

Does he want to know my favorite color

Or if I'll be his lover

Josie was starting to realize that if she was just getting to know a boy from, say, her geometry class, it would be easy to conduct background research. She could ask his friends, stalk him on Facebook, talk to her friends who know him—all in an effort to discern whether he liked her, like-liked her, or if he was just bored and flirting with her for sport and would crush her little heart like a grape.

But the normal rules couldn't be applied in this case. Her newfound friend was a global pop superstar, all the usual getting-to-know-you rules were thrown out the door. They
didn't go to the same school. In fact, he didn't even go to high school! They had no friends in common, unless she suddenly became incredibly dialed into the exclusive fraternity of global pop superstars. And since he was so adored and lusted after by millions of girls all around the world, she couldn't help but feel totally insecure, not to mention unconfident in her chances of Peter being into her—
only
her. Even if he was sweet on text. Even if she felt a special connection when they first met. Even if he was the one who had Tweeted her first. Even if he had given her nothing to assume he wasn't into her.

Josie checked Peter's Twitter, his Facebook, the celebrity blogs. Searching for clues. Looking to find out if there were any secret messages. Looking to see if, maybe, she could catch him in a lie. And her obsessive surfing eventually took her to the home page of
Oh My Celebrity
where the top-line story declared that Peter Maxx was “getting married” to his longtime girlfriend Sandy, the very gorgeous blond singer whom he had texted to Josie yesterday that he had broken up with.

And just when Josie was about to get so depressed she could speed-dial the suicide hotline, she checked his Twitter and read his denial: “For those of you wondering, I am not getting married.” Then for now, she could breathe a sigh of relief, because there was still a chance, however minor, that, as crazy as it would sound if she ever said this to anyone, she could be the one to marry him. Someday.

But he still hadn't texted her back.

And while she fantasized about the possibilities—because
it was a hell of a lot more fun than thinking about her dad being in jail, or her friends abandoning her, or facing a summer of being bored—she wrote songs. Because it was all she had ever done to sort through the maze of emotions that was her life.

People talking behind your back

You're under attack

all alone

Such a small town

Holding you down

She wrote so much into the night that she fell asleep with a pen in her hand. The next morning, she popped awake at six o'clock, a Tuesday. She had committed his tour schedule to memory, so she knew he was in Kansas City and that he was two time zones ahead. But when she checked her phone with her bleary eyes, she saw that he still hadn't texted. She collapsed onto her pillow and fell back asleep.

Three hours later, Josie woke up to a knock on her door. Her first day of summer vacation, and she was feeling exhausted. She pressed a pillow over her head.

Through the door, as usual, her mom shouted that her father might call anytime between now and noon, that these were his hours he would have access to a jail house phone, and he wanted to talk to her.

“Whatever,” Josie snipped at her mom before slipping out the front door, grabbing a pen, her tattered spiral songwriting notebook, and, naturally, her cell phone just in case the text
she had been awaiting for the last nineteen hours (but, really, who's counting?) entered her screen and made her life complete.

She walked the mile to the strip mall and sat down at Starbucks. She began to write and think (and obsessively check her phone) and watch other kids her age hanging out with their parents being all normal and stuff, while she sat alone and cheered herself up with thoughts like, “Hey, at least I'm not fourteen and pregnant!”