Jenna & Jonah's Fauxmance (4 page)

The waiter walks away, and I pretend not to notice as people pretend they’re texting but actually hold the phones way too high and snap our pictures.

Confident that we’ve been photographed looking intimate, Charlie moves and sits across from me, and I hold her hand across the table while we wait for our food. My phone vibrates as a text from Jo comes through:
Dinner shots look great. Don’t forget script.

I gaze longingly into Charlie’s eyes. “Got the script?”

“Of course, darling,” she says. “Want to hold hands across the table and read it while we wait for our food? Won’t that be adorable?”

“Certainly.” I say, resisting the urge to check my phone to see what time it is, how much longer till I can get home.

We spend the next five minutes looking adorable, faces close together in the faux-Moroccan candlelight and reading the fake script, or rather pretending to read it, since it’s mostly just stuff Jo’s assistants cut and pasted from old scripts. It’s not really that much worse than the usual scripts they give us.

Outside the window, a glint of reflected streetlight catches my eye. I see that the light’s reflecting off a telephoto lens sticking out of Bret Huckley’s car.

“Huckley in the house,” I say, relieved that we’ll be able to stop snuggling.

“Thank God,” Charlie says. “I was about to pass out from sitting next to you. When’s the last time you showered?”

She’s probably got me there. I didn’t have time to shower after biking home. I can’t sniff my pits in public, but it wouldn’t surprise me if I was a little ripe. “Yeah, your mom got me all sweaty. Sorry.”

Charlie gives me a smile that appears genuine. “What’s really funny about that is you think you’re man enough to handle my mom.”

“Ouch!” I say. The dead bird with preserved lemon and couscous arrives. Charlie has a roasted vegetable salad with a dainty portion of free-range organic chicken perched on top.

I take a bite of the stuff around the chicken. I guess it’s good, but, you know, there’s a dead bird in the middle of the plate. It kind of grosses me out. We did get some sweet mint tea, though, and I take a sip. It’s delicious. I let it sit on my tongue, and then I’m glad I did. It’s the last thing I’ll ever taste as America’s Top Teen Idol.

My phone rings at the same time as Charlie’s, and we both pick up.

“What the hell do you mean, they know it’s fake?” I hear Charlie saying in one ear, while in the other I hear Jo say this: “Great. We’re into twenty-four-hour damage control. You’ve just been outed as part of James Linden’s gay entourage.”

“His what?” I ask. Jo tells me about pictures and e-mails that have just surfaced, obviously forwarded from James’s computer by Devin, that out both James and Casper pretty convincingly. And since I was photographed with them all over town and I can sing and dance, well, as far as the gossip blogs are concerned, it’s case closed.

I look at Charlie. She looks completely lost, and all I want to do is laugh. It’s over. At last, it’s finally over.

5
SNAPSHOT OF MY HEART

Charlie

“And this room here is the school set, which I’m sure you recognize,” I say and motion toward the chairs-with-desks-attached all in neat rows in Mr. Spencer’s global studies classroom. Global studies is the kind of class that only exists in television shows about high school, because it serves virtually no purpose except to give Jenna and Jonah a reason to tour the world and sing about it “for extra credit,” which is kind of what I’m doing right now, with whatever her name is. “Sorry, what is your name again?”

“Nicki Kenny,” she says and fixes her purple beret, the kind that Jenna wore this fall, making it an immediate hit at Target and all the chain stores. “It’s easy to remember because it’s two first names, really.” She laughs and sits in one of the set desks as though she, too, is about to hear Mr. Spencer (played by Emmett Vestergaard in a somewhat humiliating return to the small screen after his previous award-winning turns on screen and stage) make some of his verbal quips about Scottish Highland plays and the “cool tunes” from Argentina.

“Nicki Kenny,” I say and commit it to memory, if only for the next eight minutes, which is all I have until hell breaks loose. Or, correction, more hell breaks loose.

“Is this real?” Nicki asks and picks up a piece of chalk from the classroom set.

“Yes.”

“And is this real?” She holds up a globe.

“Yup.”

“And what about this? What is it?” She gushes about everything.

“That’s an apple, and, no, it’s not real. It’s the one I bring to Mr. Spencer every day.”

“So they just recycle the same apple?” She taps the side of it with her fingernails, amazed at the hollow sound. “I always thought it looked so good, like it made me want an apple to eat right then and there!”

I sigh and nod, wishing I could be elsewhere. Even pretending to care about this isn’t challenging, just annoying. “Well, the prop department is excellent—they were up for an Emmy a while back.”

“Oh my gosh—is this where Fielding Withers stood during that serenade?” Nicki clears her throat and starts singing like everyone always does. “No matter what map we’re following, no matter which place we go, we’re always together and forever, you know …”

“You have a nice voice,” I say and I’m not lying for the first time in what feels like years. Probably
is
years. Nicki Kenny is the Family Network first-place award winner for some essay she wrote about how she’s the biggest fan and her hometown of Nowheresville, USA, is the perfect place for Jenna and Jonah to visit because they’re so something something—who knows. I didn’t have to read the thing. I only have to give her a tour of the set.

“So when’s Jonah coming?”

“Fielding,” I automatically correct and start leading her toward the lockers. The hallway scenes are good for filler of crowds of students or for drama—if only I had a dollar for every time I slammed my locker in a fit of teen angst.

“Here’s his room.” I give up the pretense of not being exhausted and plop down on Jonah’s bed. It was supposed to be me and Fielding giving this tour, but now that he’s supposedly gay and agents and managers and the network are all freaking out, he somehow has the morning off and I’m left pointing out the details of our delusional days: This is where we pretended to go to junior prom! Here’s my fake front stoop where my overprotective TV dad always interrupts us before I can actually kiss anyone and ruin the offscreen illusion of being pure enough to be sainted.

“So you guys share a bathroom?” Nicki asks.

“Well, I have my own—or Jenna has her own—but it’s on the other soundstage. We just share this one and see—” I turn a fake wall around so now the bathroom is pink. “And they just take shots of whatever they need.”

Nicki nods. “Me and my brothers do, too. Share a bathroom, I mean. I have three of ’em—they’re all super sporty, so they smell, but, hey, it’s kind of fun to go to their games.”

“I imagine it would be,” I say and lie back on Jonah’s bed. It’s actually comfortable, made up in neutral beiges that contrast with the navy blue rug and his teddy bear that he “just can’t give up” so it travels on the road when Jenna and Jonah are supposedly playing to sold-out shows in Japan. When we actually played to sold-out shows in Japan, they had about forty of the same bears that they’d haul in and throw out to the crowd.

“Imagine?” Nicki sits down on the floor right next to me. I roll my head to the left so I can see her. “You mean, you’ve never been to a Mustangs game? Of course you haven’t—what am I saying? The Mustangs are our local team and they’ve been league champs six seasons in a row and it would have been eight if Jake Dalton hadn’t torn his ACL.” She catches her breath and stands up. “What about your room?”

I sigh and feel sure that despite the quiet of the set, the closed lot, and the early hour, I can hear crowds swarming, photographers, newscasters, bloggers, everyone pooling because of him, because of me, because of us—or the lack of us. “Sure—it’s through here.”

“Not through the big hallway?” she asks and furrows her brow. Her bright red hair falls to her chin in an easy flip; her skin is lightly freckled.

“It’s a set,” I explain, deadpan and unable to hide my mood. “So, yeah, it’s supposed to look like all the rooms are connected, but they’re not. That hallway with the family portraits is way over there.” I pull her along so she can see it, then my room, and then we’ll be done. “A lot of the time they can’t fit cameras into a tight space, like a real bathroom or a hallway that connects the rooms, so they just use whatever they want for establishing shots.”

“Establishing shots,” Nicki Kenny repeats.

“Yeah, it’s a shot used at the beginning of a scene to establish where you are, or certain details—like, Jenna’s in her room crying, and we see her through the bathroom and see her rock star wig on the counter in a heap.”

“There are a lot of terms, huh?” Nicki Kenny picks up a bottle of shampoo from the bathroom. “Hey—it’s empty.” I raise my eyebrows. “Oh. A prop. I get it.” She laughs and is so sweet and genuinely clueless I have to laugh, too. “You know, I’m not an idiot. I’m a total Jenonah fan, but I do, like, know other things …”

I wave her over to Jenna’s dresser. On top are various school awards, a Grammy, and a heart-shaped picture of Jonah as a little kid. The set designers actually used a real photograph they got from Fielding. He’s sitting on top of a beat-up faded blue pickup truck with an actual piece of hay sticking out of his mouth. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was cute.

“I’m captain of speech team, for one. And I’m the top seller three years running for school fund-raising tickets. And I work part-time at the local theater.” She blushes. “It might seem small-time to you, but we put on some good productions—Ibsen’s
Ghosts
,
Singin’ in the Rain
,
Waiting for Godot
, which no one got and some people left partway through. We did
Guys and Dolls
, which was a huge hit even though Peter Frampton—who has the same name as some old rock star, but he isn’t a rock star, he’s a lame-ass sophomore—broke up with me the night before
Guys and Dolls
closed, so I was bummed.”

My mouth hangs open. Not only because she talks more than I do, but because, even though she’s here on the set of
Jenna & Jonah’s How to Be a Rock Star
, she speaks normally. To
me
like I’m normal. As if I could be.

She stares at me through the mirror. Standing side by side, we’re not that different. Not a different species. We even look little alike. My haircut probably cost more than her plane ticket here, and my clothing is cooler, and she should definitely lose the flared-sleeve cardigan and the beret, but otherwise …

“So what are you good at?” she asks me and bounces onto my twin bed. At home, I have a California king, which is pretty much like sleeping on a football field. Alone. I don’t answer. “Jenna? I mean, sorry, Charlie?”

“Good at?” I lick my lips. I swear I hear crowds. Shouting. My heart pounds thinking about everything that waits outside this set. It was a haven, an escape. Come here, be Jenna, slide through with straight As, be popular, have a close relationship with parents who don’t waste my hard-earned money on poker games or cosmetic surgery. It’d be an unrealistic family, maybe, these supportive parents, a brother who adores me, and the best boyfriend ever. So what if it’s fake? I’d still be pulling in a hefty paycheck. Only now this set is a literal escape from the real life of news and what’s going to happen to the show, to me and Fielding, to my future career. Beyond these walls is everything unscripted and I have no idea how to handle it.

“Come on, you must know something,” Nicki Kenny encourages. She has her hands on her normal-sized hips and smiles. She comes from a place where parents go to football games and cheer their kids on, or buy tickets to their daughter’s play even though she’s not even in it and is just selling tickets. Where people have brothers they’re truly proud of and normal things happen like getting dumped at a sucky time but without people recording your tears and broadcasting it on national TV that night.

“We should go,” I say. “That’s pretty much it. You didn’t see the graduation set, but that’s closed—they’re doing bleacher work or something.”

“You guys are graduating?” Nicki’s voice is loud, surprised, highlighting at once my mistake. You never tell what happens next. Confidential plot details.

“Nah, I was kidding,” I say convincingly. I pull her away, distracting her from the season finale details. Jenna and Jonah
are
about to receive their diplomas, which means we’ll lose the younger viewers unless we create a reason for keeping them around or we send everyone to the same made-up university that just happens to be down the street. It’s all too complicated, so what’ll happen is suddenly Mr. Spencer will announce to Jenna and Jonah that they never completed their final projects and missed too many classes, so they need to repeat senior year! What a surprise—one more season of big bucks and corporate sponsorship and kids falling in love with us.

We head to the back exit where I will hand Nicki Kenny from Nowheresville, USA, to my agent, Martinka, who will give her a signed poster and CD. She’ll pass her off to Fielding’s manager, who will get her a hat or something—maybe a T-shirt for each of her giant, sporty brothers to mop up their sweat or something.

“Here’s the end of the tour,” I say and give her a pat on the back.

Nicki Kenny does the unthinkable. She pulls me into a hug. She wraps her arms around me and says into my hair, “So what are
you
good at?”

I don’t push away, because it’s actually been a long time since someone hugged me who wanted to. “Besides this?” I take a breath. “I know every line in Shakespeare’s best play.” I take another breath. “And I make amazing pasta sauces and brownies. Or I used to.”

More noise from outside. Definitely not my imagination. I pull away and revert back to promotional mode. “Thanks for joining us on set!” Us? “I mean me.”

“No, thank
you
! It was great.” She grins and scribbles something down on a piece of paper. “Here’s my contact info—just in case, you know, you’re ever in the area and want to catch a show or a Mustangs game …”

I don’t even know what area she means. It’s just somewhere in another universe without film festivals and therefore not on my radar. The paper slides into my jeans, where it will live until I forget about it and it turns to shreds when my maid washes it. Then I hear more noise—this time, a clear shout.

“There is no access!”

There’s a thud against the metal door where I’m standing. Then the familiar buzz of Martinka bothering me with more bad news. She always writes in all caps, so her texts and notes read as though she’s yelling at me. Which she probably is.
THE PUBLIC IS OUTRAGED. LE BON SAC HAS DROPPED NEGOTIATIONS FOR HAVING YOU AS THE FACE OF THEIR SUMMER CAMPAIGN. THE NETWORK IS CONSIDERING DROPPING JENNA & JONAH FROM THE FALL LINEUP.