Fan Girl (2 page)

Chapter
2

What on Earth
do you wear to a gig when you kind of like the frontman and you kind of want
him to like you back but you don’t want it to be too obvious that you exerted
effort dressing up for him?
This is what Summer
would like to know, and she finds it unsettling that she has been frantically
yanking clothes out of her closet and tossing them back in for the past
forty-five minutes. It bothers her that a casual, offhandedly flirty invitation
could mean so much to her, if only because invitations of any kind were rare
occurrences in her life. It also bothers her that there is absolutely nobody
she can ask for help—not Roxanne or Meg, not the other girls in the dorm
who all seem to be such good friends with one another (they organized Girls’
Night Out every Friday, blasting Ke$ha and Lady GaGa from their speakers and
lending each other flat irons and eyelash curlers and fire-engine red lipstick
and sparkly sequined tops and six-inch heels), and certainly not Ellie, who
would either freak out and forbid her from going, or drive her straight to the
mall and fuss over her until she looked halfway decent.

She
settles on a black tank top and dark jeans, pulls her hair into a messy bun,
and trades her pearl earrings for the small silver hoops Ellie gave her for her
sixteenth birthday last year. She doesn’t even attempt to put on proper
makeup—she sees how Meg does it every day, and it does not look like a
simple, straightforward process—but she swipes on unflavored lip balm and
some clear mascara, and sprays her wrists several times with a vanilla-scented
perfume she rarely uses. There is a girl in one of her classes who wore a
similar black tank top and dark jeans every day; she would sashay into the room
ten minutes late with her guitar in tow and a half-smug, half-sorry smirk on
her face, and all the boys would turn to look, their eyes lingering on her
creamy shoulders, her slender arms, the words tattooed on the left side of her
neck. Summer would give anything to get the same reaction.

She
is studying herself in the full-length mirror beside the door when Roxanne
walks in. “Big date tonight?” she asks, almost sarcastically. She kicks off her
sneakers and throws her backpack onto the bed.

“I’m going
to Liberty,” Summer says. When Roxanne’s eyebrows shoot up, Summer adds, “Scott
Carlton invited me,” and instantly hates herself for doing so. Why does she
always have to feel like she has something to prove?

“Huh,”
Roxanne says, yawning and stretching her arms over her head. “I might drop by
to check them out too, but I’ll take a nap first. I’m exhausted.” She doesn’t
look exhausted—her skin is clear, her hair is sleek and shiny, and her
eyes are as bright as they were this morning.

Summer
glances at her watch. “Aren’t they supposed to start playing at eight?” She
checked the band’s website twice, and it definitely said eight. It is now
seven-forty.

“They’re
supposed
to,” Roxanne replies.
“But they won’t. I doubt they’ll even start setting up by nine.” She pulls a
blanket over her legs and yawns again. “You’re not going there right now, are
you?”

“No,”
Summer says, too quickly. “I mean, yes, I’m leaving now, but I’m grabbing
dinner somewhere else.” More than an hour earlier, before she brushed her teeth
and washed her face, Summer had already eaten a cup of instant noodles and a
pack of crackers. She had to force down every bite, and now she can still taste
the salt on her tongue, feel the oil settling unpleasantly inside her mouth.

“Good
call,” Roxanne tells her. “The food in Liberty sucks.”

Summer
nods like she knew this all along. “I guess I’ll catch you later, then?”

Roxanne
mumbles something into her pillow. Summer takes one last look at herself in the
mirror and heads out the door.

One of the
things Summer likes about her campus is that everything she needs is within
walking distance—classrooms, libraries, photocopying centers, cafeterias,
restaurants, groceries, convenience stores, coffee shops, book stores. She
doesn’t mind walking, even when the sun is beating down harshly and everyone
around her is frazzled and trying not to bump into each other as they rush off
towards some important destination. She likes the steady stomping sound her
shoes make on the pavement, the sight of green and brown leaves littering the
road, the busy chatter of other students enveloping her, the way her heart
pounds faster and faster as she quickens her pace. She likes walking at any
time of the day, but she likes it best in the evenings,
especially on weekends, when the corridors are
hauntingly quiet and the university is peaceful, when the
only people she comes across are joggers and janitors and
the occasional professor working overtime.

Tonight,
a cool breeze has replaced the sticky heat of the afternoon, and Summer feels
the wind caressing her cheeks and the back of her neck. She has been walking
around the campus for an hour, killing time before going to Liberty, debating
with herself whether or not showing up at nine would still make her seem too
eager. She clutches a bottle of mineral water she got from one of the vending
machines; it is now empty but her lips are still dry and her throat is still
parched. Her tummy feels strange and fluttery, and she cannot seem to calm
herself down. She checks the time—ten minutes to nine—and decides
walking in circles is not doing her any good. She tosses the water bottle into
a nearby trash can, wipes her wet hands on her jeans, and exits the university
gate.

Outside
the campus, the roads are lined with headlights and tail lights: people on
their way to parties or family dinners or romantic dates with their boyfriends
or girlfriends. The sidewalk buzzes with Friday night excitement, another
weekend crashing in. Summer sees a group of teenaged girls emerge from a
chauffeur-driven SUV dressed to the nines, all glitter and gold, fluffing their
salon-treated hair and teetering on their designer high heels and brandishing
their expensive purses like weapons as they strut towards an overflowing bar
with a menacing bald bouncer at the door. They remind her of the girls at her
dorm, and for a moment she wonders what they are up to tonight. Two skinny,
stylish boys pass her by, and it takes her only a second to figure out that
they like each other—like
like
each
other. She tries to get a glimpse of their faces, tries to listen in on their
conversation, but they are walking too fast and she cannot keep up, and soon
they are several people away. As they stop at an intersection, Summer cranes
her neck to see over the many heads separating her from them. She just wants to
check if they will hold hands when they cross the street. They do.

Chapter
3

As Summer steps
into
Liberty, she is relieved that it is dark and noisy and crowded, that there are
very few seats, that she can stand in a corner and sort of blend in. She takes
out her mobile phone and starts playing with it, trying to look like she is
texting her friends and asking them what time they were planning to come.

There
is no sign of Scott anywhere, and after a few minutes she has shoved her phone
back into her bag and no longer knows what to do with her hands, so she goes to
the bar, taps a bartender on the shoulder, and asks for a beer. She almost
expects him to ignore her, or demand to see an
ID
, but
he simply holds out a hand and stares her down impatiently as she fishes out a
crumpled hundred-peso bill from her pocket. He slams a bottle and her change
down on the counter, and she says thank you even though he has already turned
his back on her. She grips the bottle and lifts it to her lips, feeling the
cold numbing her fingertips and the bitter, icy beer sliding down her throat.
The first and only time she drank beer before this was right after her high
school graduation, when Ken and Ellie took her out to dinner. They had
sisig
and
bagnet
and
heaps of steaming garlic rice, and Ken, running on zero sleep after a shift at
the hospital, ordered a five-plus-one promo bucket of beer “to celebrate.”
Ellie was already pregnant then, and by five bottles, Ken was beginning to talk
too loudly, laugh too easily. “Why don’t you have the last one, Summer?” Ellie
had asked. “Ken still has to drive all three—four—of us home.” More
than the conspiratorial wink that followed, it was the word “four” and the way
her sister glanced at her belly that did it for Summer. The beer was lukewarm
and made her head spin. She intended to finish the whole bottle, but ended up
leaving more than half of it untouched.

After
several sips, she hears a voice behind her. “Don’t you want something stronger
than that?” She turns to see Scott smiling at her. She smiles back, forgetting
to answer the question. Scott signals for the bartender, who hands them each a
shot of vodka. “It’s on me,” Scott says, waving her money away and slipping the
bartender a few fifties. He takes the beer bottle from her and sets it down on
the counter, then raises his shot glass. “I’m glad you came,” he tells her, his
eyes traveling from her hair to her shoes and back again before settling
somewhere near her collarbone. “Cheers.”

Summer
raises her glass silently and gulps down the clear liquid, trying not to wince.
She musters a weak smile as the alcohol burns painfully in her chest. “I’m glad
I came, too,” she says.

Thirty
minutes later, she is watching him singing onstage, gripping the microphone
with both hands and fixing that piercing gaze at nobody and everybody. His hair
is constantly falling into his eyes, and he has to brush it out of the way in
between stanzas. Summer recognizes a few girls around her; she often sees them
around school with books in their arms and their noses in the air. They are all
staring-but-trying-not-to-stare at Scott, and she almost laughs out loud. In
the light of day, these girls probably wouldn’t even take a second look at him.
They would probably go out of their way to make him feel that he is nothing
special—he is a student, just like the rest of them, and he shouldn’t be
skipping around acting otherwise just because he has one measly hit on national
radio. But right here, in this dark, noisy, crowded bar where the atmosphere is
filled with tipsy chatter and cigarette smoke, while the spotlight is shining
on him and his voice is seeping into their skin, these girls can allow
themselves to be attracted to him. Right here and right now, as Scott croons
about forbidden love and stolen chances and slow dancing underneath the stars,
it is quite easy for a young girl—for any girl, really—to believe
that his music is specifically for her.

Despite
herself, this is precisely what Summer thought when she first heard a Violet
Reaction song on the campus radio station. Scott was singing about being lonely
on Valentine’s Day (
so maybe on this day/ we can
all be lonely together/ and maybe on this day/ because someone else is lonely/
in exactly the same way I am/ in exactly the same way you are/ it won’t be as
bad/ as it is on the other 364 ones
), and Summer
immediately identified with him.
Whoever wrote
this song wrote it specifically for me
, she thought. She
looked up the lyrics on the band’s website, decided it was her new favorite
song, and played it over and over again. Several months later, she listened to
Scott perform “V-Day” live at the university’s Valentine concert—she had
volunteered to man the ticket booth; it wasn’t like she had made plans with
anyone for that night—and was instantly smitten with his sweet, silky
voice and the way he closed his eyes and lowered his voice in the middle of the
refrain, almost as if he had a secret he was reluctant to share. She was
suddenly overcome with the urge to make him trust her with all his secrets, to
let him discover all of hers, but she knew back then—with a certainty
that made her sick to her stomach—that he was way, way out of her
league.
  

Summer
spots Roxanne a few feet away, flirting with the bartender, probably convincing
him to sneak her a Rhum Coke or two on the house. She touches her neck coyly
and giggles as she talks to him, and he seems fascinated with whatever it is
she is telling him. Roxanne catches Summer looking in her direction and lifts
her chin slightly in acknowledgement. Summer tries to smile at her, but Roxanne
has already looked away.

Between
sets, Scott would appear beside her, asking if she is having fun, resting a
hand on her shoulder, on her arm, on the small of her back. He keeps refilling
her vodka shot glass, and by the fifth time, she has to push it away and shake
her head forcefully, and when this doesn’t stop him, she has to lean in to
whisper in his ear, “I’m sorry, I can’t. I don’t really drink a lot. But
thanks.” He smells like sweat and liquor and cigarettes and soap, and when his
hand travels down to her waist and stays there, she wants to un-drink those
four shots of vodka so she can think straight, or at the very least say
something witty and charming and memorable. She wants him to laugh at her
jokes, to find her stories interesting, to feel like he has to get to know her
better.

Before
Summer began packing her things for college, Ellie sat her down and gave her
the alcohol-drugs-sex talk. Summer barely paid attention; she hated her first taste
of beer, had no extra money to blow on drugs, and had no one who liked her
enough to even consider making out with. But Ellie reminded her about Fred, an
officemate she had a huge crush on for months. At a work party, he poured her
red wine and fed her compliments all night long, and the next day, Ellie woke
up on his bed, her clothes and shoes strewn all over the floor. They never
spoke to each other again, but word got around the office, and she stopped
attending parties and eventually stopped going to work, unable to handle seeing
him every day. “I’ve been plastered enough for the both of us,” Ellie said. “So
don’t you even bother.”
   

Summer
can feel the vodka swimming around in her brain, clouding her judgment, and
although she knows she will regret leaving Scott’s show early, she also knows
she will regret it even more if she doesn’t. She wants to be aware of their
conversations, to be sure that she doesn’t tell him anything weird or stupid or
embarrassing. She wants him to remember her the following day, and perhaps more
than anything else, she wants him to want her when it is no longer dark and
noisy and crowded. So she says, “I have to go.”

“Go
where?” he asks.

“Home,”
she says. “Sorry.”

“Don’t
you want to stay?” he asks. His hand slips off her waist, and she has to fight
the needy disappointment—the panicked desire to make him want her
again—away from her voice when she replies, “I want to. I really do. But
it’s late.”

“It’s eleven-thirty,” he tells her matter-of-factly.

“It’s
late,” she says again.

He
looks like he is about to do something to stop her, but his bandmates are
already back onstage, ready for the final set. He shrugs and says, “Well, if
you happen to change your mind, you know where to find me.”

She
realizes he never asked for her number or gave her his, and for this, she is
annoyed both at herself and at him. She has no idea how to bring it up without
sounding desperate, so she just nods wordlessly, hoping he can find another way
to get in touch with her—there has to be a lot of other ways, even if the
only thing he knows about her is her first name and her year level. But as she
ducks out of the bar and into the night, she can’t seem to think of any.