Page 35

JOLLY MON SING, the Jimmy Buffett tribute band, bobbed back and forth happily as they sang about lost shakers of salt and bad decisions.

Sasha and I sat in the tiny balcony, sharing a cheeseburger basket and fries from the local fast-food joint.

It was my favorite kind of night at the Revelry, especially after a day in the sun, beach sand and salt still crusted to my edges, my hair smelling like sunscreen.

It wasn’t the most glamorous look for me—if I was in LA, I’d never be caught dead with sand between my toes.

But here, in the Revelry, which had seen me at my worst, I felt safe with my hair falling out of its braid, my cheeks and shoulders rosy with sun.

That surprised Sasha. “I thought you’d like the headbangers more. This place packed from wall to wall.”

“I like those nights, too,” I conceded, “but this?” And I leaned forward against the railing and watched the crowd below.

There weren’t many people here tonight—maybe fifty, drinking and singing along with their beach friends they hadn’t seen all year, and there at the corner of the bar were Mom and Dad, slow dancing to “Come Monday.”

This is what I miss when I get homesick , I told him, a secret between us.

He leaned forward, too, his chin on his hands, and watched the crowd below us.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been homesick for a place.

Mom and I switched apartments so often, I never really got attached to the one in the Valley.

She always said that places weren’t what mattered, but the people in them.

So wherever my mom was, that was home. After she died, I never really called a place home again.

They were just that, places. One interchangeable with another. ”

I looked over at him, trying to make out his expression in the darkness of the balcony, but the lights were low, shifting from blue to green to teal as Jolly Mon Sing sang on about finding your way home. “How about now?”

“They’re all still places,” he admitted. “The closest thing that was …”

“Is the stage,” he finished in our heads. “Those big concerts—the music so loud you can hear your own brain in your skull vibrate with the bass. I miss that. But I think I miss it because with all those people singing along to us, I finally felt like I belonged somewhere again.”

He pushed himself away from the railing then and leaned back in his chair. “Then I remember that sounds too much like my dad, and I hate it.”

Whenever he talked about his dad, his face pinched. I remembered joking with Gigi about how tropey it was, for a bad boy musician to have daddy issues.

“Please don’t call him daddy,” he said with a sigh.

I winced. “Sorry.”

Then he leaned a little closer to me, his mouth twisting a little into a smirk. “Me, on the other hand …”

I rolled my eyes and tugged at his collar. “ Oh -kay, Vacation Dad.”

“Admit it, the Hawaiian shirts turn you on.”

“Terribly,” I deadpanned.

He barked a laugh. “Come Monday” morphed into another song, and the blues melted to soft pinks and yellows. He sat and listened, his foot tapping with the music.

“Sometimes I wonder who I would’ve been if I’d never met my dad,” he said after a while. “Never did the whole boy band thing. Never frosted my tips. Never cut a record. Never learned how much I could hate a song.”

I was stuck on the first thing. “You didn’t always know your dad?”

“Nope.” He scrunched his nose a little, thinking.

“I met him when my mom died. I was—what—thirteen? My mom had no living relatives or anything, so the state didn’t know what to do with me.

I was about to head into foster care when the bank told me my mom had a box there.

So I got it, and inside was her Social Security card, a few of my baby photos, and my birth certificate.

I’d never seen it before—Mom always said she’d lost it in a move when I was a baby.

” He was quiet for a long moment. He picked up a fry, about to eat it, but then tossed it back into the basket, and wiped his fingers off on his jeans.

“She’d always told me that he was a one-night stand.

Someone she didn’t even remember. But on the birth certificate it said Robert Fellows. ”

“I knew Roman was too cool a name to be his real one.”

He snorted a laugh despite himself. “I assure you, my name is actually Sebastian.”

“Mmh, I like Sasha better.”

That made him smile. “And I like when you say it. You’re the only one who does.”

“What does your dad call you?”

“I’m lucky if he calls me at all,” he replied, his voice aloof.

“I found out Mom used to tour in the Boulevard. That’s how they met.

I don’t think she ever told him about me, so he didn’t know what the fuck to do once social services showed up at his door with me in tow.

He just knew work, and that was it. Hell, he hadn’t even known she’d died .

” The words were darker and clipped. A muscle in his jaw twitched again.

“I was so angry. Here was this guy who could have everything—who has everything—when all the while my mom made ends meet by working two jobs. He never cared about her. But he had no choice with me. So I decided to make sure that every time he looked at me …”

And in my head, he finished, “He’d never forget her again.”

There was certainty in those words. The kind that told me that he’d already given up so much to make sure, that he would give up everything else, too.

He’d ruin himself to make sure of it—and he had.

I was front row to most of it, thanks to Gigi and her LiveJournal gossip group way back when.

He joined Renegade at sixteen, and had his face on merch a year later, and toured the world long before he could even vote.

And while he was onstage, relishing music so loud it rattled his brain in his skull, he started drinking a little too much and made a name for himself with one too many one-night stands with other celebrities who often found themselves on Page Six.

We were so wildly different. While he was off dating every Taylor and Olivia and Sabrina in Hollywood, I was staying up too late learning about music theory and talking with Van on the phone until we both fell asleep, and having movie nights with Gigi on the weekends.

“I also kept studying piano,” he noted. “My mom worked two jobs just so that we could have money for rent, food, and my music lessons. So I kept it up. I didn’t want it to go to waste.

It did anyway.” His mouth twisted a little, like he tasted something sour.

“I think I got caught up in … chasing things that made me feel. After a while, everything just began to feel numb. Then I had the wreck. I was all over the news. All the time. So, my dad did what he did best. He came for a photo op and then left on the longest world tour on record. And that was it. He was running, again. He was good at that. And I realized that it didn’t matter how much I tried to get him to see me—it was pointless. ”

“The tabloids claimed Renegade kicked you out after that,” I said, remembering that night, just after the senior prom. Gigi had been almost inconsolable. She knew it was the beginning of the end for the band.

“I quit,” he corrected me. “No one wanted to deal with the fallout of me . I didn’t even want to deal with me.”

“So what did you do?”

“Pretended like I didn’t fuck up my entire life,” he thought. Aloud, he said, “Went to rehab. Tried a solo career.”

“You did? I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, I know. No one did. The entire album bombed. Label pulled it. You can find a CD or two on eBay on a good day, but it goes for peanuts. Turns out, people cared more about the fact that I’m the son of Roman Fell than about my own talents, and that was a sobering realization.

After everything I went through, trying to make my dad remember me—remember my mom—it was the opposite.

My dad was the reason anyone remembered me . ”

Guilt ate at my stomach—because I was the same. I didn’t know much of anything about Sebastian Fell, except his dad. That was all I thought I needed to know.

“It’s not on you,” he replied, and reached down to run his thumb across the back of my hand, lost in thought.

“I just messed up, bird. I’d made it—I played in the biggest venues in the world.

It was my mom’s dream, she wanted to be a singer all her life.

I should’ve held on to it tighter. Done it the right way. For her.”

This was my mom’s dream, too , I admitted, turning my hand over, folding my fingers into his. She used to sing—in your dad’s band, too, actually.

“A lot of people did,” he replied absently. It was sort of a running joke in the Boulevard—Roman Fell was a hard person to get along with. Sasha rubbed his thumb against mine soothingly. “It’s a good dream,” he admitted.

But at what point, I wondered, was the dream too much? What if it stopped fulfilling you? What if … what if it made a deep, empty hole inside of you instead? I began to wonder. Was songwriting still my dream, or was I just too afraid of giving up something I’d already sacrificed so much for?

I didn’t know.

No one told you what to do after you made it to the top, after you accomplished what you set out for—no one told you that the grass wasn’t greener, that you didn’t feel any more whole, that whatever you were chasing and finally caught didn’t fill you with the permanent kind of happiness you expected.

The things that did bring me joy were so much simpler than that—like Sasha had said. I felt happiest when I was making melodies.

“What’s your dream?” I asked him.

He picked up my hand and gently planted a kiss on my knuckles. “It’s simple. I want to start over. Try something new.”

But in his head, his thoughts slipped into the truth. “Reinvent myself again and escape his shadow. I’ll be bigger. Louder. So he won’t be able to ignore me anymore. So he can’t forget her.”

There was a burnt and sour taste on the back of my tongue, like cheap diner coffee.

And for the first time, I think I saw him— really saw him—the angry teen and the sour adult, tied together with a hopeful kind of love that I was sure was his mom’s doing.

Someone who kept creating, kept looking for something more, in all the bitter places.

What would happen when the song was done?

A stone of dread dropped into my stomach.

I pulled my hand out of his. “Oh.”

“What’s wrong?”

I tried to think through my thoughts before I voiced them. I tried to pick through my words carefully, because I got the feeling that he rarely told anyone these things, and he was hurting. He had been hurting for a very, very long time.

“You said it yourself—music gives me joy. But … it just seems to make you feel so small.”

He looked startled.

I curled my fingers tightly into fists, searching his face, knowing that he could be so much more, so much bigger, if he chased songs for himself.

“I want to write this song with you, Sasha, but I want it to be for us . I want you to write it because you want to write it with me. And I want the song to be big and loud—something we can blast from the stereos and that makes us feel alive and real and here ,” I begged, motioning to the strange space between us, now filled with all my cowardice and all his anger and all our regret, where I knew something beautiful could be.

I caught glimmers of it. I knew he did, too.

“It can’t be for your dad. It can’t be for anyone else. No one but us.”

He tried to say something, but he couldn’t find the right words.

“That’s not—she’s not—she’s wrong,” I heard in my head. They were private thoughts, not meant for me, but they were much too loud to not hear. “I’m not small. I’m not.”

“I didn’t mean that you are small,” I quickly tried to correct myself. It was the wrong thing to say. “Just the way you create. It makes you feel small—”

He jerked to his feet suddenly. “I know. It’s my head. I need …”

“She’s wrong. She doesn’t understand. Of course she doesn’t. She loves my dad, of course she’d take his side.”

It was my turn to stand. “Sasha, I’m not taking his side.”

He held up his hands. Squeezed his eyes closed. “I know, I know . I just need”— “Space. Distance. A drink.” —“to leave. To go,” he said thickly.

“I’d get out of your head if I could.”

“I know,” he replied, dropping his hands. He blinked, taking a step back, then another, toward the stairs that left the balcony. “I just … I can’t think without you knowing.”

I reeled. I searched my thoughts, trying to understand where I had messed up so badly. What did I do wrong?

“Nothing, you did nothing,” he quickly added, retreating faster now. “I’ll—I’ll see you tomorrow. Good night.”

“Good night,” I replied, but he had already turned and was down the steps. I pursed my lips into a thin line to keep them from wobbling, and angrily swiped at the tears coming to my eyes.