Fan Girl (7 page)

Chapter
12

Scott sits across
from her at a rickety
outdoor table, one palm cradling his chin, his face concealed by aviator
sunglasses and a dark gray fedora. The café in West Hollywood seems to be an
extremely popular spot for rowdy teenagers in trendy graphic tees and shiny
neon sneakers and deconstructed denim cut-offs. They are all trying to be cool
while trying to look like they aren’t trying, and it is excruciating to watch them.
Summer says, “So what’s up with all the gloom and doom?”

“What
are you talking about?” he asks. He was faking it; he knew exactly what she was
talking about. She can tell because he used to do this all the time, answering
a question with another question in an attempt to stall for time.

“That,”
she says, pointing at him with her teaspoon, trying to keep her tone light and
friendly. “You have gloom and doom written all over you. There it is, see?
G-L-O-O-M
…”

“Written
all over me,” he says, smiling at her for the first time today. “Got it. I’m
sorry, I just have a lot on my mind.”

“Such
as?”

“This album,” he says. “The label execs want me to change
so much of it, I almost want to tell them to go write the songs themselves.
What’s worse is that they want to wrap up soon so I can go to Texas to start
the tour by mid-summer, but I can’t wrap up if they keep delaying the
recording. It’s driving me nuts.”

In Summer’s head, she is brave enough to tell him, “Then
stop doing this. Look at you; you’re a mess. Let’s get out of here—let’s
move out of LA, to some place quieter, where we can start a brand new life. You
know we’ll be great together this time around. It’s not yet too late to be with
me.” In her head, she is brave enough to tell him that she will do anything and
everything to make it work, if he’d only let her.

But
right here, in this noisy, humid café, surrounded by irritating teenagers
flirting with one another and devouring cookies and cake slices and slurping on
their green tea frappuccinos, all she can say is, “Really?”

“I
can’t stand all the details,” he says. “What does this song mean, and why did I
use this word, and do I really want to wear another leather jacket for the
cover shoot, and can I please change the title of this song to something more
commercial?”

“Don’t
you have a manager?” she asks. “Isn’t someone supposed to be defending you?”

“I
do, but Leon doesn’t want to interfere. He thinks negotiating with the label on
my own will give me a better grasp of who I am as an artist.” Under his breath,
he says, “It will also make me bat-shit crazy, but apparently that’s not an
issue to anyone.”

“Why
are you having trouble with your songwriting?” she asks. “I’m your biggest fan,
I know all your Violet Reaction lyrics. People sincerely love them. They’re
excellent.”

“I
didn’t write those,” he says quietly.

“What do you mean you didn’t write those?” She tries to
lift a forkful of pecan pie to her lips but her hands are shaking and her
fingers feel clammy and slippery. She still has the lyrics of “V-Day” memorized:
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.
The other Violet
Reaction songs that went on to become hits in the Philippines also had earnest,
insightful lyrics—people often used them as Facebook status messages and
constantly quoted them on Twitter.

“I
mean
I didn’t write those
,” he
says, gritting his teeth. “Someone else did, and I’d really appreciate it if
you would get off my case about it. Right now I just need to figure out how the
hell I’m going to put this album together.”

“I
can help,” she blurts out, sidestepping the anger in his voice. “Not with the
negotiating, obviously,” she rushes to add. “But I can listen. I can listen to
you rant. You can even show me what you’ve written, and I can give you
feedback, as a fan. It may not solve all your problems, but at least you’ll
have a…” She cringes. “Friend.”

He
looks at her skeptically.

“We
can sit down and work on your songs every week,” she suggests. “Every Sunday,
if you want.”

He
says, “The label gave me exactly one month ‘to get my shit together.’ Are you
sure you can handle four weeks of this?”

“Yes,”
she says. “Positive.”

They
finish their coffee and pie and go, walking aimlessly, the sun on their faces
and the wind in their hair. If someone had told her a month ago that she will
soon be in
LA
with Scott Carlton,
she wouldn’t have believed it. It seemed impossible at that time, and she had
already resigned herself to never being able to speak to him again. She had
already resigned herself to downplaying her feelings forever, acting like she
is just a fangirl and nothing else. Scott smiles at her. “So what did you want
to talk about?”

Summer
can think of dozens of responses:
I want to talk
about us
. Or
I want to talk
about Roxanne, and to make sure that she is out of your life for good.
Or
I
want to talk about everything that happened before—every single hurtful
thing I let slide back then because I didn’t want to lose you.
Or
I
want to talk about why you left Manila, why you left me
. Or
I
want to talk about the real reason I’m here now.
But
thinking about all these possible responses deflates her spirit and makes her feel
like fleeing this café and this city and this country, and she doesn’t want
that.

“Nothing,”
she tells him. “Just that it’s really nice to see you again.”

“It’s
really nice to see you too,” he says, finally looking her straight in the eye.
“I missed you,” he adds, and nothing else matters anymore.

Chapter
13

If there’s one
thing Scott is
consistent at, it’s this: he always makes Summer feel like she is auditioning
for some sort of role. In college, the role was Casual Pseudo Girlfriend, and
she played that part the best way she could—she demanded nothing and made
excuses for everything. When he left, she was the Fangirl Stalker, looking up
to him and admiring him from afar and hunting for bits and pieces of
information on him just so she can still feel like he is a part of her life
somehow. And now that she is here, the role is Helpful, Supportive Friend and
she finds that this is the most difficult to portray; she has to drain herself
of all hidden agenda and all her other emotions so she can focus on being there
for him. She has to push all her uncertainty and resentment and eagerness and
infatuation out of the way; she has to pretend that she is completely okay with
friendship
and nothing more. She is learning
all over again, in harder and more pronounced doses, just how little a girl
like her is allowed to expect from a guy like him.

Entertainment
writers and reporters are always asking celebrities if they would ever date a
fan. The celebrities are always ready with some clichéd, cardboard answer,
like, “It doesn’t matter whether she’s a fan or not, as long as she supports me
and believes in me,” or “Of course I would. My fans are awesome; any guy would
be lucky to be with them,” or “We’ll see. Never say never.” But maybe at least
one entertainment writer or reporter should do the opposite: ask a fan if she
would ever date a celebrity. Maybe someone should ask, “Are you willing to have
your world turned inside out?” or “Are you ready to pull him down from that
pedestal and start seeing him as an ordinary, everyday guy who can break your
heart just as brutally as the next person?” or “Can you deal with the crushing
insecurity, the crippling self-doubt, the pressure to compete with every other
girl on the planet?” Or perhaps most importantly: “Are you ready to feel, every
single day, that this guy is way out of your league?”

Summer
didn’t know what to do or say so that Scott wouldn’t be out of her league
anymore. She didn’t see how this particular reality could possibly be altered,
tailor-fit to suit her needs; there seemed to be nothing anyone could do to
change the fact that he was Scott Carlton, Breakthrough Artist, and Summer was
just…well, Summer.

Sometimes,
when Scott was busy talking to someone on the phone while Summer was knee-deep
in songwriting, she would sneak glances at him and try to
will
him to see her in a romantic light again. She would summon
all her mental strength, focusing intently on transforming the sound waves
passing through Scott’s phone into brainwash waves:
You
are in love with me. You are in love with me. You are in love with me.
Sometimes,
Scott would catch her gaze and hold it, and she would think,
Oh
wow, it’s working.
But then he’d put down the phone and
say, “Crap. Leon says we have to write double-time,” or “I hate this stupid,
stupid day. Nothing is going right.” And Summer would want to say,
You’re
with me right now. Doesn’t that count for something?
But
she’d chicken out and feel like a complete loser instead.
 
 
 

Summer
wondered if it were possible to just take a shovel, dig deep into the ground,
and bury all these feelings. She wondered if she could put all these feelings
in a box, seal it shut, and send it far, far away to some exotic location where
it would be lost forever. She wondered if she could turn these patient,
persistent feelings into threads and start tying them together, making big
knots and small knots everywhere until she was left with a tangled, useless
piece of junk she wouldn’t even recognize anymore. She would stare off into
space as she pondered this, and Scott would snap his fingers in front of her
face and say, “Earth to Summer! Double-time, remember?”

Once,
she came remarkably close to telling him the truth: “I love you,” she told him,
but because she did her best to empty her voice of all emotion, and because she
looked away immediately after saying it, and because she didn’t say anything
more to make it substantial and significant, the idea barely took
shape—it crackled weakly in the air between them for the briefest moment
before fizzling out in a cloud of smoke.

“I
know you do,” he said dismissively. His phone rang, and he stood up and said,
“I better take this outside. I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.” Through
the window, she could see him smiling—not the cool, detached superstar
smile he usually reserved for girls like her—but a smile that radiated
warmth and joy, like he had a strong, solid connection with whoever it was he
was talking to. He looked like a different person.
   

Some
nights, he took her to his gigs, where she blended into the half-critical,
half-appreciative crowd. She would stand there, in the middle of the darkness
and noise, and listen to him. Every time she saw him on stage, it came
naturally for her to detach herself from anything personal and just lose
herself in the music—he may not have written his own songs, but they were
undeniably good, and she knew them by heart. When the show was over, they would
either go back to his place or head out to a party, where Scott would
demonstrate just how much of an expert he is at the fine art of schmoozing.
He’d flit from one spot to another, high-fiving or fist-bumping with some boy,
putting his hand casually on some girl’s waist, listening to some random person
hell-bent on impressing him. Summer wasn’t good at schmoozing at all—to
her, every party seemed like a flurry of names and faces and air kisses and
forced laughs—and she was so sure she stuck out like a sore thumb at each
one. Sometimes, Scott would stay with her for about ten minutes, asking her if
she wanted another drink or if she was having fun, but most of the time, he’d
introduce her to somebody and disappear, leaving her trying to make small talk
and trying to fill in all the awkward conversation gaps. For lack of a better
topic, they usually asked her how she knew Scott, and she would often smile and
say, “Oh, I’ve just been a fan for a really long time.” One time, she told a
particularly nosy guy, “I was roommates with Roxanne,” and the guy didn’t say,
“It was too bad they broke up,” or “Hey, how’s Roxanne doing these days?” All
he said was, “Yeah, she’s hot. I don’t know why she’s not here now.”

She
never asked Scott why. She didn’t ask him a lot of questions, scared that he
would tell her she had no right to be asking. So she never asked if he ever
thought of her when they were apart, if he ever felt sorry it didn’t work out
between them in college. She never asked about Roxanne—why they broke up
and where she was now and whether or not they were still friends. She never
asked if he was dating anyone else. She never asked him to define anything or
to clear anything up. She never asked what he wanted from her and how he really
felt about her. She couldn’t.

Before
she knows it, it is the fourth and last Sunday, and Scott is hugging her
goodbye inside a sushi bar along La Cienega and thanking her for all the help.
For four Sundays, while he lazily flipped through a men’s magazine or sipped on
a double machiatto or tinkered with his Blackberry, Summer practically re-wrote
the lyrics of the entire album—something she apparently did very well
because the label executives raved about all the changes she made. Of course,
they didn’t know she did them. Scott wanted to talk to Leon and arrange to pay
Summer a creative fee in private, but she waved it off. “I don’t need the money,”
she lied, even though her share of the rent for Ashley’s place was due in a
week, and her life savings were slowly but surely depleting.
I
just need you to want me
, she added silently.

“I’ll
revise the acknowledgments and put your name in,” he tells her as he pulls
away. “It’ll be there, in all caps, on the very first line.”

“You
don’t have to,” Summer says, but deep down, she thinks,
Is
that it?

“Your
name will be there,” he says. “I promise.”

“Thanks,”
she says. She doesn’t know how to ask him the questions that have been keeping
her up at night for the last four weeks—how much was too much? When do
you know you’ve tried hard enough? And when do you cross the line from meeting
someone halfway to being the poster girl for all things pathetic?

Summer
thinks,
When are you allowed to give up on
someone?

Scott
kisses the top of her head and says, “You’re the best, Summer.”

Outside
the sushi bar, a couple of tourist-y teens wearing floral sundresses and
carrying colorful shopping bags approach him for a photo. They look at Summer
expectantly, and she sighs and holds out her hand for their camera. Scott puts
an arm around each of the jittery young fangirls and smiles that superstar
smile Summer has grown familiar with.

“We
love you, Scott,” they tell him before scurrying off, obviously starstruck.

“I
love you too,” Scott says.

Summer
knows it is a blanket ‘I love you,’ directed at all his fans, therefore
including her. She pretends she’s okay with this, but as Scott stands beside
her looking pleased with himself, she knows it isn’t going to be enough
anymore.

When Summer receives
the brand new copy of
Summer
Love
in the mail, Scott has already flown to Texas
to kick off his tour. She tears the brown wrapping paper off the package, peels
off the gold sticker, and slides out the
CD
’s
sleeve, where Scott’s face smolders at her from behind the rain-soaked window
of a black vintage car. She opens it to the acknowledgments page and scans the
first paragraph for her name. It isn’t there.

She
notices a note card taped to the back of the
CD
.
“Here you go, Summer,” it says. “Sorry, the printers couldn’t wait for the
revisions for the acknowledgments page. Thanks again for all your help.” Summer
knew it wasn’t Scott’s handwriting—it was probably his manager Leon’s, or
that quirky receptionist girl’s. She flips the sleeve open again, taking in the
lyrics she already knows so well—too well. Out of curiosity, she reads
the rest of the acknowledgments. Scott wrote about his eternal gratitude to his
family, and to his producers, and to Leon and his band. He thanked his record
label for putting up with him, and his new friends in the music industry for
believing in him. He thanked the fangirls, of course. He has to. On the very
last line, he wrote, “This record is dedicated to Roxanne, my lovely fiancée.
We’re getting married next summer.”