What do you think about visiting me??
I think I could get mom and dad on board We could pool our money for a ticket And ask for advanced Christmas and birthday presents lolol Maybe in August?
There’s lots of fun stuff we could do here Ciara:
ANOTHER MULLET I SWEAR TO GOD
Is this a thing?
Are they coming back?
How much would you pay me if I convinced Ravi to get one?
Ciara:
I talked to mom about the visit What do you think? Are you super busy?
Just let me know what you think Ciara:
Hope band and stuff is going okay Miss you lots
thirty-three
It’s not that I was avoiding everyone on purpose. But I picked up some extra shifts over the next few days. I dived into SAT prep as per The College Collective’s recommendation. I didn’t go by Teen Zone 2. And I didn’t see August either.
Not until Wednesday evening. I was riding my bike back from work, and he was getting out of the car with Kyle as I pedaled up to our driveway.
We made eye contact, so it was impossible to get away without at least acknowledging each other.
“Be there in a minute,” August told Kyle, and then crossed the lawn to where I stood. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey, stranger.” I tried to smile. I could be totally normal.
“How’s it going?”
I shrugged. “I had work tonight. There was this whole expired coleslaw fiasco.”
“Cool.” It was like he hadn’t even heard what I said, like he had rehearsed what he was going to say so my responses were negligible. “So, uh. Look. About the other night—”
He paused here, like he was expecting me to interrupt. It’s okay, or Nah, forget about it. But I just blinked at him.
August smiled a little, forced sheepishness. “I, uh, I was pretty drunk,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets, looking off down the street. “Don’t really … like I wasn’t really thinking about … what I was doing …”
Something dropped in the pit of my stomach, hard like a stone. “I didn’t know that. I wouldn’t have … I’d never …”
The fake smile evaporated, and a wrinkle appeared between his brows. “What?”
“If you were drunk, then we shouldn’t have done anything. I didn’t know, I would never—”
He shook his head. “I wasn’t that drunk,” he said, frowning. “I actually … wasn’t drunk at all, okay?”
“Which was it, were you or weren’t you?”
“I wasn’t.” He met my eyes. “I was just trying to make it … less …”
Oh.
You … seem really nice. He had said it all at the Movie Dome, what felt like ages ago. My mom always said, Given the chance, people will tell you exactly how they feel. You just have to be willing to listen. And August had told me. He had. I don’t know why I was surprised.
“It’s fine,” I said. “We don’t have to talk about it anymore.”
“Sophie—”
“I would like it if we acted like it never happened. Okay?”
I didn’t wait for a response. I gripped the handlebars of my bike harder, started walking it toward the garage.
“Soph, wait.”
I looked back.
“Can we—Are we still okay? Like are we friends?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and he looked inexplicably upset. That made me angrier. He didn’t have the right to be upset. His eyes shouldn’t be the ones going sad, his mouth turned down at the corners.
“Friends don’t lie to each other,” I continued. “Or say they’re drunk if they’re not. Or say they’ll be right back and then never come back. They don’t do that to each other.”
He opened his mouth to speak, let out a breath instead, looked away, looked back. “I’m … sorry,” he said finally. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I wasn’t trying to.”
“Don’t give yourself so much credit,” I replied, and walked away. He didn’t stop me.
I stowed my bike in the garage and paused at the back door, squeezing my eyes shut against the prickle of tears. I thought about texting Ciara: This sucks, everything sucks, wanna call, wanna come visit.
I told myself she wouldn’t have experience in this kind of thing anyway. Ciara didn’t date until she got to college—not that this was dating, or anything close to dating. She met Ravi at their freshman orientation, and that was it.
I have met a very cute boy, Sophie.
The Very Cute Boy became her boyfriend.
I liked Ravi. We talked on the phone occasionally. His parents had moved from India to the US, and he was born in Maryland. He liked tabletop gaming and rock climbing, and he was always quoting depressing British sitcoms that he insisted were funny. He wanted to go to grad school like Ciara, to study biology.
Maybe Ravi had done stupid things in their relationship—I wouldn’t know. Maybe he and Ciara both had. But they were in a relationship, a real one, whereas August and I were nothing.
That much was clear.
thirty-four
That night I read a profile of Megan from a few years ago, just before her third album was set to release. It was one of the many I had sent to WWYSE over the last few weeks, to little result. I had almost resigned myself to the fact that no one was going to be as into the Megan Pleasant mission as I was, but it didn’t hurt to try.
I skimmed the description of the album, the facts about Megan and her start on America’s Next Country Star, to get to the meat of it.
Pleasant cites traveling and meeting new people as two of the best parts of being famous. “Being able to take care of my family a little, that’s really nice too.” Pleasant’s parents recently moved to Nashville, while her only brother, Connor, is a freshman at Indiana University.
As for the worst parts of fame, Pleasant is not short on thoughts: “Sometimes it feels like people expect you to be different. Like there’s this notion that you’re not a real person anymore. That you don’t like the same things you liked before, or even feel things the same way everyone else does. But I feel the same on the inside. I still want McDonald’s breakfast sometimes, you know? I still watch Friends reruns before bed. I still get nervous before a performance. I’m not different inside just because people know who I am. It still hurts if someone says I suck at singing. It still feels good when someone says that my music has helped them in some way.”
I mention the theory in physics that posits that by observing a phenomenon, you’ve inherently changed it. Does it not apply here? Pleasant doesn’t disagree. “I’m not saying it hasn’t changed me at all. Of course it has. I just mean, people think it makes you into something else. Something above—or below even, I don’t know—just something apart from everyone else. I’m different, yeah, but like the core of me and who I am and what I think and feel is the same as it was before. And I’ll be the same when all of this is over.”
It bears noting that Pleasant has often spoken in absolutes over the course of her career. ANCS was “the best possible introduction to the industry” she could have had. Her hometown of Acadia is “the best small town in the world, bar none.” Here, the absolute is marked—it’s not if this ends, it’s when all of this is over. As if it’s a certainty.
“My mom always says you have to know when to leave the party,” Pleasant says. But with two gold-certified albums, three CMA nominations, and a hint of Grammy buzz for Foundation under her belt, it seems like for Pleasant, the party continues. At least for now.
* * *
My phone dinged late that evening. A message from Brit, although it wasn’t in the chat.
Megan’s brother goes to IU, right?
Yeah, I replied. But how do you know that?
It was in one of those articles you sent us
You read them?
Don’t sound so shocked
She was trying to apologize, I think. For the thing at the party. I started to type a response but a string of messages popped up: I’ve got a lead
His friends are throwing a party in Bloomington on Saturday He’ll be there
Got all the details
I responded with a run of exclamation points.
thirty-five
It was about two hours to Bloomington from Acadia. I told my parents I was going to Brit’s, and that I’d probably sleep over. I felt bad lying, and told Brit so as we sat on her front steps, waiting for Dash. She had a duffel bag at her side.
“That’s good,” she replied.
“Why?”
“If you feel bad about it, it means you’re still a good person.”
“I don’t think it works like that.”
“No, it does. How can you know you’re a good person if you’re never tested?” She knocked her shoulder against mine. “We should all lie more often, just to make sure.”
* * *
Dash pulled up with August in the passenger’s seat.
Brit stood, saying “Nuh-uh, nope, no way,” like she was voicing my inner monologue. For one brief moment I thought maybe she knew what had happened between us, despite the fact that I hadn’t told anyone. “Not gonna fly.”