The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

CHAPTER 7. St. Louis (First Day)

At the end of the grueling first leg of the Midwest stretch of eight shows in eight nights, the glossy came out but without anything about me and Lisa in it. The label told us it was bumped till next week. The glossy would never bump a Tyler paparazzi spread, if they were lucky enough to get him in the first place.

Even though we were all traveling together, I didn’t have any downtime to hang out with the Latchkeys again, and I was so tired each night that I didn’t need anything, I just fell asleep after doing my homework and writing my first slavery-unit essay, on Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. She didn’t write her own autobiography, though. A white woman who knew her did the actual writing. Her own Alan Fontana.

There was no chance to check email, and I got worried that maybe the guy was an impostor and I’d given him a candid and some info on Jane, not that the photo or info were so private. But the guy could think that I was an impostor, too, pretending to be a celeb by acting like I didn’t want him to know who I was. The idiot impostors on the Internet announced right away they were me, like it was no big deal to confab with possible child predators.

I hadn’t played a show in St. Louis since we moved to L.A., to distance my image, so I’d never been back. Jane had gone three times, to visit Grandma Pat on her way to meetings in New York. Now that the heartland was a major plank of our new marketing strategy, Jane wanted to ramp up my Midwest connection a little more, at least here. So she’d set up a feature profile with a national morning show that was traveling to St. Louis and filming me here, and then we’d do a live interview the next morning with an abbreviated outdoor concert.

I didn’t recognize the city much when we got in. I probably never really knew it except for our neighborhood in Dogtown and my school. The Four Seasons where we were staying, for instance, could’ve been any city and I wouldn’t have known the difference. But most places in America are like that, so it’s not St. Louis’s fault. And I was young when we left so it didn’t have the time to get into my memory.

We had a few hours to kill before we filmed the feature in the afternoon. Jane told me she was going to visit Grandma Pat in her old-age home. “You can rest up,” she said in my hotel room.

I hadn’t gone there the last year we were in St. Louis. It was hard to remember what Grandma Pat even looked like. She wouldn’t remember what I looked like, either, unless she followed me through the media. And maybe there’d be a chance to ask her about my father.

Before Jane left, I said, “Wait, I think I’ll go.”

“You sure, baby?” She almost seemed like she was going to cry for a second, like she didn’t really want to go by herself and couldn’t believe I was offering to do it with her. “You don’t have to.”

“I know. I want to.”

“She may not know who you are. Her mind isn’t all there.” She calls her once a week, and the calls have been getting shorter and shorter.

“I don’t mind,” I said.

Jane thought about it and said okay. The car service drove us to a place that was more like a hotel than an old-age home. I forgot we’d switched her to a luxury one after I signed with the label. Everywhere we went were old people with wheelchairs and walkers and canes. A lot of old dancers have to use canes because of arthritis and injuries. The one cool thing was I didn’t have to wear my hat or sunglasses, since no one knew who I was. Old people don’t know anyone famous unless they’re their own age. The best would be an old guy who used to be a businessman and didn’t have any grandchildren. I wonder if the tweens today will remember me when they’re old. They’d remember someone like MJ, but that’s a deeper level of cultural penetration I haven’t achieved yet.

Grandma Pat’s room was what you might get in a two-star hotel, with a small bed and an armchair and a TV and bathroom but not much else. I’ve asked Jane before if we could send her memorabilia, but she said it’s a hazard to have small objects around because she might try to swallow them, like a baby. At least when you’re a baby you don’t realize everyone is running your life for you. I guess some old people don’t realize it, either.

She was sitting in the armchair. She has Jane’s nose and forehead, except Grandma Pat’s has all these age spots and wrinkles and red splotches like zits for old people. Jane had to tell her her name a few times, and Grandma Pat said, “Jane is my daughter,” and Jane was like, “Yes, Mom, I’m Jane, I’m your daughter.”

Grandma Pat saw me for the first time and said, “Hiya, boy.”

It was strange how she didn’t know what the hell was going on but she could speak fine. Jane asked, loud, “Do you remember Jonathan? Your grandson?”

Grandma Pat looked longer this time. She finally said, “Michael?” I guess she’d met Michael Carns a lot of times when she used to babysit for me. I didn’t know if it was more sad or weird that she’d remember his name and not mine.

“No, Mom, not Michael, Jonathan,” Jane said. She seemed really upset by the mistake, like she was watching her mother’s brain depart the realm in front of her. “He’s Jonathan.”

Grandma Pat didn’t say anything. I probably should’ve been upset or scared by her because she had early onset dementia, and it would’ve been nice to have a grandmother who gave you gifts and played with you, but in a way it was relaxing. She didn’t know about “Guys vs. Girls,” she didn’t know about Tyler Beats, she didn’t even remember what my name was. I was just a boy to her. And not even a boy, only boy. But I definitely wouldn’t be able to ask her about my father, even if Jane left the room.

“So we made a lot of additions to our house in L.A.,” Jane said.

“That’s nice,” Grandma Pat said.

“It’s going to be featured in a big magazine in a few months.”

“That’s nice,” she said again.

Jane said, “Actually, we’re living in a halfway house.” There was silence for a few seconds, and you could see Jane feeling bad that she’d messed around with her. She asked in a cheerful voice, “What did you do last night?” Grandma Pat didn’t answer, so Jane repeated, “Mom, what did you do last night? Can you remember?”

Jane pointed to a DVD case of a movie next to the TV. “Did you watch that movie?” Grandma Pat nodded, but she had no clue. “We met him, Mom.” Jane grabbed the DVD case and showed her the cover. It was one of those comedies where the lead actor and actress are back-to-back with their arms folded, like they can’t stand each other, even though you know they’ll get together. It didn’t make any sense for Grandma Pat to watch something like that. Bad content-demo pairing. “We met the star of it a few months ago at a party. Isn’t that exciting? That your daughter is meeting movie stars?”

Grandma Pat shrugged. She really didn’t care about celebs. The nurse who gave her her meds each day was more famous to her than the movie star everyone in America knew. A celeb is only a celeb if you remember them. It’s like we disappear if no one is paying any attention. We think we have all the power, but it’s actually the public who decides, just like with politicians. Except it’s really the record and movie execs and probably a few guys in a room in Washington, D.C., who control the purse strings and give the public the next number-one Billboard singer and movie star and president, but they make it seem like the public chose it so no one gets too upset.

Out of nowhere, Grandma Pat said, “My daughter put me here. She works at the supermarket.”

“Mom,” Jane said. “I’ve been telling you, I don’t work at the supermarket anymore. We have a lot of money now. Jonathan’s a famous singer and I manage him.”

“My daughter failed a class in high school. But she didn’t want to go to summer school. So she never finished.”

I couldn’t imagine Jane being in high school, taking math tests and writing essays and talking with boys. It would’ve been over twenty years ago. Jane probably couldn’t imagine herself at that age anymore, either.

“I got my GED,” Jane said. “And it wasn’t that I didn’t want to go. You and Dad were pressuring me to—”

“Have you met Robert?” Grandma Pat asked.

“Yes, of course. He was my father.”

Grandma Pat turned to me. “Have you met him?”

“He died before I was born,” I said.

“That’s too bad. Robert was a very nice man.”

I wondered what she would say about Albert, if she remembered him at all. Jane snorted and said, “Pretty selective memory over here.” She asked a few more questions about how the staff was treating her, but Grandma Pat either didn’t give a straight answer or she nodded a bunch of times to herself. She wasn’t mean or anything now, but I got the feeling she hadn’t been the funnest person to be around when her brain was working right. If it was hard to imagine Jane in high school, it was harder to imagine Grandma Pat with a normal brain and Jane hanging out with her. I’ll visit Jane at least once a week when I put her in an old-age home.

Grandma Pat said she needed to use the bathroom, which meant we had to call a nurse. I got really sad watching the nurse hold her with her walker, that every time she went to the bathroom she needed help. Then I was like, Wait, if I ever use a public bathroom, I need Walter’s help for protection, too. Except with me, it’s because a million people would try to get in there with me, to make out with me or molest me or take a picture of my penis. No one wants to be in the bathroom with Grandma Pat.

Jane whispered that we should go. She kissed Grandma Pat on top of her head and told me I didn’t have to say good-bye and could wait in the hall. But I squeezed Grandma Pat’s arm anyway when she stood up in her walker since I was afraid a hug might knock her over.

Jane was quiet on the ride back to the hotel and didn’t multitask. She scoped out the Scottrade Center and took care of other business while the film crew drove me to Carson Elementary. The school looked really small when we drove up to it, a couple short redbrick buildings with a soccer field behind them. I remembered it being humongous, but that’s what happens when you get older, the things that used to impress you now seem stupid, like how even though I still get nervous before performing I don’t think it’s a huge deal, but if you’d told me two years ago that I’d be playing Madison Square Garden on Valentine’s Day, I’d have had an accident in my pants.

They’d set it up so we had access to the grounds and field without anyone watching. I walked around and talked to the camera and the interviewer, a blond lady named Robin, and said things like, “Here’s where we used to have recess and gym and where I got into baseball,” and when we came by a rock near a tree, I lied and was like, “I had my first kiss here,” and when the interviewer asked who the girl was, I said, “I don’t want to say her name, but she’s in every song of mine in some way.”

I’m usually good at tuning out what a taped video appearance will look like when it airs, because if you think about it in the middle of filming you screw yourself up, just like you can’t think about how you’re singing onstage, but I realized my father might see it. He’d be on his couch watching me in my old school, except he might have left before I started there.

“When I was a student here, I used to have a fantasy about traveling around the world, singing my music,” I said. “I most wanted to go to two places: Pittsburgh and Australia.”

Robin laughed for the camera. “Pittsburgh and Australia? Why those two?”

“I did geography reports on them both,” I said, and I looked straight into the camera, which is a no-no. “I’ve played Pittsburgh, but I still haven’t made it to Australia.” If it really was my father emailing me, there’s no way he could think I was an impostor now. And if Jane asked why I chose those cities, I’d say I thought it would help with my domestic-brand extension and foreign-market outreach.

They made some calls and said it was time to go inside. I spend half my life waiting for someone to tell me it’s time to do something. They’d arranged it so we went in while everyone was in class, but to make it look like school was still going on, a few kids who’d won a lottery could be in the halls at the same time as me. A couple years ago, I used to walk down those same halls afraid that an older kid might push me into a locker or something.

When I got onto the main hall I was supposed to walk through, there were like forty kids hanging around, and they started screaming, which meant all the kids stuck in the classrooms pressed their faces up to the windows in the doors. I wished Walter didn’t have the day off. The security guard the TV crew had hired didn’t look big enough to prevent a stampede.

The producer Kevin was like, “If you guys want to be on TV, you have to act normal and like it’s no big deal Jonny’s here, all right?” Which was idiotic, because why would I be walking through a school hallway with the students acting normal? But it was Jane’s idea, and maybe she was right that it branded me as a regular kid.

The school only went up to fifth grade, so there was no one I would’ve known from before. The kids tried to pretend to be normal, but almost everyone who walked by looked at me. Only really they looked at the camera. They weren’t too obvious about it, since they probably knew they’d get edited out if they did, and the smarter ones just walked by with their faces and eyes visible but without staring directly in. Everyone wants to be famous more than they want to see someone famous.

I walked down the hallway and another one. The walls all had artwork by the students and stupid posters like one that said BEE-LIEVE IN YOURSELF! with a picture of a bee reading a book, though I had a track called “This Bird Will Always Bee There for You” so I couldn’t call it too dumb.

I kept looking over at the kids behind the glass windows of the doors, which was unprofessional camera protocol, but I couldn’t help myself. If I went back to school, and a celeb came to visit, I’d be one of those kids behind the glass. Except I wouldn’t cram my face up against it like they were doing. That’s one of the ways I could never really be like them again.

I made up more stuff, like “I had this locker” or “That was my third-grade classroom.” The truth was I didn’t remember much, except for the smell, which was chalk and hissing radiators. I knew I’d been there before, but I couldn’t place any details, and when we got to the end of the hall, Robin said I should take them to the cafeteria. I didn’t even know where it was anymore. So I said I thought they moved it after I left, and they escorted me. After we finished in the cafeteria, Robin stood next to me on camera and said they had a big surprise. “We know what you miss most about St. Louis is all your friends,” she said.

Into the cafeteria, about thirty feet away, walked a boy.

“So we found your best friend, Michael Carns,” Robin said.

He looked how he used to, same pale skin like he’d been scared and lived underground, but a few inches taller and his hair was shorter now. He’d become sort of funny-looking, with his ears sticking out, and was wearing dark blue Champion sweatpants and a sweatshirt, same as before, at least the way I remembered it. People always wear the same thing in your mind, like Jane in St. Louis is the Schnucks black polo shirt and khaki pants, but in L.A. it’s a black skirt and top and stockings because black is slimming.

The last time I saw Michael was the night before we left. Jane let me do one final sleepover. With Nadine I once figured out that I probably slept over at his house about two hundred times. We tried to stay up all night together, watching TV and eating junk food in his room like we always did, but we couldn’t do it, and we both fell asleep around five a.m. When Jane picked me up in the morning, I didn’t want to wake him up on so little sleep, so I just left without saying good-bye. I guess I thought I’d be seeing him again soon. I felt like running over to him now and telling him I wished I’d woken him up, but maybe he didn’t remember it anyway.

They must not have told Jane about this, because she would have definitely leaked it to me, and the surprise would be ruined. Most of the time that stuff is faked on TV, which I know from doing it a few times, and when I see it on reality shows I can always tell who’s pretending to be surprised. You have to be a high-caliber enough actor to pull it off. I’m just good enough to do it, but I guess they didn’t know that.

Michael glanced at Kevin like he didn’t know if he was supposed to stay at the door or come to me. He was pretty uncomfortable with all the cameras on him. Those lights are hot, and it’s hard when you’re not used to it. Kevin motioned to him to come over, so Michael walked up to me and said, “Hi,” all quiet, and I said, “Hey, Michael.”

It was weird. I knew it would read bad on TV if I didn’t do something, so I slapped him five like Dr. Henson and said, “It’s awesome to see you!” and he said, quietly again, “You, too.” Then we stood around waiting for something to happen and he looked at his feet with his face angled away from the crew. I couldn’t tell if he was so quiet because of the cameras or because of me or because that’s what he was like now. Robin looked at Kevin, who said they’d clean it up in editing and told me they were taking us someplace special.

Kevin said me and Michael would go in a car with each other so we could catch up off-camera. It was a town car, not a limo, so the crew guy who drove us could hear us in the backseat.

“What’s new?” I asked Michael as we pulled away from the school.

“My parents adopted a baby boy last year,” he said. “From Ethiopia, in Africa. His name is Justin. He’s pretty fun, actually.”

I couldn’t imagine Michael with a younger brother. We always said we were like brothers and it was better than having a real brother since we got to choose each other.

“From Africa,” I said. I didn’t really want to look straight at him, and I tilted my head down. Under my unzipped winter coat and jacket, my black graphic T-shirt had a picture of Brangelina as farmers standing in front of a house with a pitchfork, but they’ve got white makeup and jet-black hair and lipstick and mascara, and it says AMERICAN GOTH. “Cool. Like Brangelina.”

He looked at my shirt and the rest of my outfit. “They give you those clothes?” My jeans were distressed and my jacket under my winter coat was shiny black leather with metal studs and my sneakers were custom-made red Nikes with heart shapes on the tongue.

“Who?”

“The TV people.”

“No. This is from home.” He didn’t say anything, so I added, “Well, the designers give them to me. They send me stuff and pay me to wear it. There’s a lot of contracts involved. I have to wear certain pieces a certain amount while out and at photo ops.” As I was saying it I was wishing I wasn’t, but I couldn’t stop myself. It got quiet again, so I asked him, “Is Jessica Stanton still the hottest girl in our class?”

“No, she got fat. Luann Phelps is now.”

“Luann?”

“Yeah. She got contacts this year and became hot,” he said. “She has a crush on you.”

“For real?” I got a little tingle. I don’t know why I was so into the idea of Luann Phelps having a crush on me. She used to be this dumpy girl with thick glasses and a lisp. For a second it was like she was the celeb and I was the fan.

“All the girls do. Whenever you say your songs are about this one girl, they all say that they’re your ex.”

I had to stop using that line so much. Or maybe I should use it more. “They didn’t used to,” I said. “Have a crush on me.” I knew I could date any girl at one of my shows, but somehow it seemed cooler to be able to go to a school and date any student I wanted to. If there was ever a dance, I could ask whoever, and I wouldn’t call attention to myself with a dance-off or anything, but everyone would know I was the best dancer there.

“You left in the middle of fourth grade. They didn’t get crushes till the fifth grade. The boys didn’t get crushes till this year.”

I wondered if he’d hit puberty yet, or if any of the other boys did. If I asked him in the back of a town car if he had any pubes, though, then I’d be like a child predator.

“Who do you have a crush on?”

He played with the string on his sweatpants. “No one, really.”

“Does anyone have a crush on you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Girls don’t talk to me much. Except when they want to know about you.”

“Oh.” Neither of us said anything. The more I tried to come up with things to say, the less I did. All I could think of was, “My record label wants me to date this actress and singer Lisa Pinto. You know her?”

“She’s on that show,” he said. “So what do you do? Like, go to a movie or something?”

“No. Not real dates. Fake ones, for publicity. That’s how most people do it in L.A. Celebs, I mean.”

He didn’t respond but he sort of smiled to himself, so I closed my eyes and pretended to fall asleep. Soon the crew guy told me we were there. I looked out and we were at our old apartment. And I got that feeling I don’t get when I come home in L.A., times a million, but right after, for some reason, and it’s not like I would really do it, I felt like I wanted to throw a rock or something at the windows.

I wondered for a second if maybe the third surprise would be that they’d found my father and brought him to meet me where we all used to live together, but then I saw Jane standing outside, stamping her boots in the cold while talking to Kevin, and there was no way she would have signed off on that. She said, “Hi, Michael, what a nice surprise,” and made a little face to me that meant she’d just found out I was hanging out with him, but she didn’t say anything because he was still there. She probably wished my old best friend was more telegenic. Me and her were going to do a quick tour of the apartment before I’d throw a football with Michael in the park like we used to.

Our apartment was in a row of buildings that all looked the same, two floors each with pinkish concrete on the outside and a short walkway leading up to a red door. We were on the upper floor. Kevin said we had to be careful not to mess anything up inside or the family that lived there now would charge the show even more. I would’ve thought they’d be happy enough that their apartment was on TV and they could say they lived in Jonny Valentine’s old apartment, but people are always trying to find ways to monetize you.

Robin took me and Jane inside with a few crew guys. I was glad Michael stayed outside. The place looked different with the new furniture, but it felt familiar, with the pipes clanking and the way the floor creaked under your feet when you took your first step inside and how it always smelled like something had burned a little.

Jane showed them around, fast, since there was only the bathroom, the living room, the kitchen, and the bedroom. Nothing in it was that nice. They’d put in an ugly tan wall-to-wall carpet that wasn’t there before. Jane said to the camera, “So, obviously, the new tenants have decorated it their own way.”

It felt like I was a burglar in our old home, and I was scoping it out to steal from the younger Jonathan and Jane from two years ago. I could almost see myself sleeping in my bed, with me from now creeping around the room and taking sports equipment and schoolbooks and clothes from Jonathan Valentino and replacing it with Jonny Valentine merch.

The whole strategy with footage like this was stupid. It was like, Let’s see how you’re like a normal person behind the scenes, but the more we want to see you acting regular in private, the more you have to hide there and throw up a bunch of public buffers, so if we really saw you behind the scenes, it wouldn’t look normal at all, that’s why we have to show you pretending to be normal in your old apartment.

There was one picture up on the wall near the kitchen. It was a man and woman in their thirties, and they were holding a baby between them in the hospital bed after she’d given birth and was all sweaty and tired. There was a crib in the corner. The baby was cute, but for a second I thought, Fuck you, baby.

Robin asked me if it brought back any memories. I knew I should come up with something, but nothing from the past hit me when I was in the main rooms. Nearly the first ten years of my life had happened there, so it’s not like it was easy to pick out one thing. When we went into the bathroom, though, I thought about the time I’d gotten sick from eating crab cakes at Ben Marton’s birthday party at Captain D’s, and I spent all night vomiting, and Jane stayed up with me rubbing my back and giving me water even though she had the six a.m. shift at Schnucks. Probably I remembered it because of my preshow routine with her.

“I used to come home from school every day and have a snack before starting my homework,” I said.

“What did you eat?” Robin asked.

“Peanut butter and jelly with the crusts cut off. Jane would make it.” That was another clue for my father, since she’s afraid to go near peanut butter because of her allergy. She actually made tuna sandwiches with a ton of mayo and the crusts on and left them in the fridge for me, but she doesn’t even let Peter buy mayo anymore since it’s so fatty.

Robin looked over at Jane, who was staring at the stove like she was watching something boiling. “Were you as involved in Jonny’s life back then as you are now?”

Jane turned back to her quickly. “Well, obviously. I’m his mother.”

“But now you’re his mother and his manager. Before, you were just his mother.”

“I consider it a blessing that we get to spend so much time together.”

“Does it ever feel like it might be too much time?” Robin asked.

Jane looked ready to kill her, but she adjusted and smiled huge. Never lose control.

“Of course, you have to give your child room to breathe,” she said, totally composed in a cheery talk-show voice. “But I do fear that parents aren’t spending enough time with their children these days and are just scheduling them for activities without them or letting them entertain themselves.”

“And was it a hard decision to bring Jonny into show business?”

“The hardest decision I’ve ever made.” She shook her head and made a small frown like it still tore her apart. Jane could star in a dramatic vehicle. “But it was really Jonny’s decision. He wanted it so badly.”

“It was always my dream,” I said, to help her out.

“Since he was old enough to sing,” Jane said. We were like a veteran shortstop and second baseman on joint interviews, me flipping the ball to her to turn the inning-ending double play. “So we prayed on it, and we felt it was the right time to share Jonny with the world.”

That was really smart brand strategy, because it was just enough religious stuff to make her look good after she’d snapped at Robin, and also coastal media never probes when you bring up religion, because the risk of controversy is too high.

Sure enough, Kevin said the family was gouging them on each ten-minute block and we had to leave. I was kind of surprised they hadn’t set up a museum, like “Jonny Valentine’s Childhood Home.”

When we left, we passed by the TV, which used to be on the other side of the living room, because they’d switched where the TV and couch were, since it was better to sleep in the other position but better for people to sit in now, but before even that, when my father lived there with us, I had a bed in the living room and Jane and my father slept in the bedroom. And it brought back another memory.

It must have been right before my father left or I couldn’t have remembered it. It was rainy and gray and cold out, and Jane had been staying with Grandma Pat for like a week. She must have been sick or something. The Cardinals were on TV, on the road because they couldn’t have played in the rain, and I guess my father decided I was old enough for him to explain the game to me. I bet I didn’t get much of it since I was so young, but he talked nearly the whole game, in this really fast way, and he was sweating even though he was only lying on my bed and getting worked up every time the Cardinals got a hit or something. But one reason it stands out is that the Cardinals got into a brawl with the other team, both benches clearing out, and my father called someone on the phone and asked if they were watching this shit. That must be nice, to have a friend you could just call up like that and know they were watching the same thing as you. Me and Walter don’t follow the same teams, so I don’t call him in his bungalow when I’m watching a game.

The Cardinals scored a few runs off the other team’s errors, and I kept asking what an error was because the announcers kept bringing it up. My father tried to explain. He was like, “It’s when you make a mistake, and it screws everything up for your team.” Then the Cardinals gave up a few runs after they made a bunch of errors, and the announcer said, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” and his color man said that was always true in baseball, and it was the first time I’d heard that saying so I asked my father what it meant, even though he was pissed the Cardinals had let the game get tied.

He said something like, “It means right when you get something good, you lose it.”

“Like the toy car?” I asked. They’d gotten me a remote-control car for my birthday, and I’d been all excited to use it, but it broke right away.

“No,” he said. “We returned that to the store when it broke, and we got a new one that worked.” He didn’t say anything for a minute as we watched the Cardinals lose, then he spoke real slowly so I can still mostly remember it. He was like, “What it means is what our neighbor Mrs. Warfield said to me the other day, which is that God has a plan for everyone and it’s not our place to question him.”

He turned the TV off. “So if anyone ever tells you that in the future, you’ll know they’re as big a moron as Mrs. Warfield.” Up till then Mrs. Warfield had just been this nice older lady who gave me candy, but after that I knew she was a moron.

Just as we went out the door to the apartment, I got this empty feeling in my chest, like this would be the last time I’d ever see it. I turned back to look inside, but the final crew guy had already closed the door. Maybe if I reconnected with my father we could visit it again together, without a TV show.

Outside, the camera crew walked with me and Michael to the park down the block. “Should we be talking?” I asked Kevin.

“If you want,” he said. “Or we can cut footage with music over.”

But I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to ask Michael if he ever thought about our sleepovers, how we’d stay up late and sneak out of his room to watch the TV on low and raid the kitchen for cookies and chips and soda when his parents were asleep. His house always had a million snacks. I didn’t feel like it, though.

I used to lie in bed at night sometimes before sleep and I’d think about what if Michael died, and I’d imagine me being at his funeral and staring into his coffin like they do in the movies and seeing him in a suit even though he should’ve been in his Champion sweats, and knowing no one else knew the jokes we had together, like when we’d crack each other up by saying, “There was a weasel in here?” after Elinor Burt once asked that in the middle of science class when Mrs. Potts said the word weasel, and I’d make myself cry even. I wondered if I could even do that anymore. I could make myself tear up onstage when I sang “Heart Torn Apart,” but I didn’t have to think of anything to do it, I only had to tell myself to cry and the tears were waiting for me, like the song brought it on, not anything from real life.

It would sound pretty gay if I told Michael about that, or asked if he ever thought about anything like that for me.

No one else was at the park. It looked empty, just a swing set and a small field I also remembered being bigger that was all dirt now from the winter. Michael was always the QB and I was the receiver, so I tossed him the ball.

“Do you still play a lot?” I asked.

“I’m on the intramural flag-football team,” Michael said.

“I just play with Walter.”

“Who’s Walter?”

“My bodyguard.” I shouldn’t have brought him up. “He’s not here today, because it wouldn’t play good on camera.” Michael just picked at the grip on the ball, so I asked, “What was the name of that play we made up?”

“ ‘Oh Baby,’ ” he said.

“Right. Why’d we call it that again?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.” But it looked like he did. I couldn’t ask him on camera, though. I couldn’t even really ask him off-camera.

I ran deep. Like I’d practiced it every day the last two years, I thought, “Oh baby oh baby oh baby cut.” You cut left after the third “Oh baby.” I still couldn’t remember why we called it that. Michael’s pass sailed behind me.

“You’re supposed to cut right,” he said.

It was true. There used to be a seesaw to the left, the one with me and Jane in the photo in my bedroom, and I had to cut right. It wasn’t there anymore, so I forgot.

I said, “Sorry.”

We ran it a few more times until we completed a pass for the camera crew. I spiked the ball and did my trademark spin move when Kevin asked me. He said they had enough tape, and told me and Michael to say our good-byes before they drove him home. “Bye, Michael,” I said.

“Bye.”

“Stay in touch.”

He smiled. He needed braces soon. “Yeah,” he said. “Like when you left the first time.” He didn’t sound sad when he said it. It was like his eyes were seeing through me and through the seesaw that wasn’t there anymore.

I thought he was done, but he kept going. “My parents wanted to fly me out to visit. We couldn’t get through to you.”

“I never knew that.” I really didn’t. “The label doesn’t tell me a lot. They probably thought you were a fan. There are a lot of impostors who pretend to know me.”

He would’ve loved going into the locker rooms of any team and backstage at any concert we wanted. Maybe I could still invite him out to L.A. He could sleep in one of the extra rooms and we could finally try staying up all night, now that I knew how to make coffee.

“I know.” He shuffled into a car without looking back at me. “You’re busy with your label. And getting free clothes. And going on fake dates. Like all the other celebs.”

He shut the door. I stared at the tinted window he was behind. I wanted to knock on it, open it up and tell him I was sorry, I didn’t mean to talk to him like that, this is how people talk in L.A., I’m still the same kid who played football with you for hours after school and ate Doritos till three a.m. while we watched infomercials and used to cry imagining your funeral, and there was a weasel in here?

Except I wasn’t the same kid, and neither was he, and if he visited we wouldn’t have a fun time together and I wouldn’t be able to stay up all night because it would throw off my schedule for the next day and I wasn’t allowed junk food and he probably didn’t even remember the weasel joke.

Jane came over and asked how it all went as his car took off. “I think they’ll edit it good,” I said.

“Was it nice seeing your school?”

“I guess.”

“And Michael?”

I traced the pass route for “Oh Baby” on the ground with my red Nikes. “He was fine.”

“Just fine?”

“I don’t know. It was sort of weird. He said he tried to visit but couldn’t get through to me. I told him the label doesn’t pass on personal messages.”

She nodded. “I’ve explained to you before how it’s hard for people from your past to adjust to you. They can get jealous, or resentful, or try to use you. You know that’s why I cut everyone from St. Louis off.”

“Michael wasn’t like that, though.”

She stroked my hair out of my eyes and gave me a kiss on my forehead as if I’d fainted again. “I know, baby. I’m so sorry.”

“It wasn’t you who was acting weird, it was Michael.”

“Yeah, but—” She straightened up and got into her business mode and said, “They’re taking us somewhere else. It’s a surprise, so we have to be blindfolded. We’ll ride together.”

They had a limo for us, and Robin and a camera guy sat inside with us and made us put on blindfolds. In the dark, I imagined it was like a hostage situation. Me and Jane were being kidnapped, and the kidnappers told Jane they would only let one of us live, so she told them, “Fuck you, let my baby go,” and they let me out of the car, but then I found my way back to them because the car left a trail of gasoline, and I killed them all even though it was too late to rescue Jane, since they’d slashed her neck and blood was oozing everywhere.

They took our blindfolds off, Jane’s first, and I heard her say, “No way. Absolutely not.” I wriggled out of mine. We were in the parking lot of Schnucks. “Turn the camera off. Now.”

Robin said, “Phil, turn it off.”

“First, how did you know I worked here?” Jane asked.

“It’s not exactly classified information.”

“Well, I’m not going in, if that’s your plan.”

Robin sighed and said she’d talk to Kevin. The camera guy left with her. “This is ridiculous,” Jane said to me. “They’re deliberately trying to belittle me.”

“Won’t this help the heartland ID with us?” I asked.

“I don’t care.”

Kevin came inside. “Jane? You have a problem with this?”

“I’m not doing it.”

“Listen,” he said. “We made a lot of concessions already, namely not interviewing any family members or friends. We need more footage. So I’m afraid this is a deal breaker.”

“Me not agreeing to humiliate myself is a deal breaker?”

“What’s humiliating about this? It’s a job you used to have. I used to work at a hardware store. This is what people do. If you don’t want to do it, we won’t run the profile.”

I almost said out loud what I knew Jane was thinking, that this guy didn’t know what it was like to be a celebrity, even a backstage celebrity like Jane, that he might run a TV show but no one cared what dumb job he had before, but Jane had image maintenance to worry about.

She looked out at the Schnucks again, the big red letters over the brown front. “B-roll footage only. Robin doesn’t come in. If anyone I know works there, we’re not talking to them. Deal?”

He agreed. Jane’s good at bargaining. She always reminds me how the label tried to screw us on our first deal and her business advisers were pressuring her to sign but she knew she had leverage and used it when less sophisticated people would’ve just buckled. You extend a fair offer to the other party but make it clear you’re not giving them anything beyond that. People respect that you’re not conning them and you’re also not a pushover.

She put on her sunglasses as she got out of the car. “No sunglasses, please,” Kevin said. She took a sharp breath in through her nose and placed them on top of her head and walked fast to the entrance. The camera guy raced to catch up.

I asked Kevin if I could go in. I hadn’t even been inside a supermarket in forever, and I’d been in this one hundreds of times. He said, “You can put on your hat and sunglasses and go in, but stay away from your mom, okay?”

Kevin walked inside with me and the hired security guard. The doors dinged open. Everyone knows how music can make you remember something, but even a sound like that double-ding brought me back to how I imagined the double-ding sound was saying, Jon-ny, when Michael’s mother used to drop me off after school before she took Michael to his violin lessons or his tutor or his speech therapist, and I’d do my homework in the staff room, and when her shift was over Jane would let me choose a candy bar to use her employee discount on. For a long time I always picked Butterfinger, but when I was old enough to know Jane was allergic to peanuts, I switched to 3 Musketeers in case the crumbs fell in her car and made her depart the realm, and then we’d drive home together.

I hung around the front fruit displays as Jane went down the main aisle, not saying anything while she walked ahead of the camera guy and Kevin and the security guard. A few people turned around because of the camera, but not all that many, since it was a small handheld and it’s not so strange to see a camera out in public, even in a St. Louis Schnucks.

I followed a little farther in, ducking behind the other displays like in Zenon when projectile weapons or spells are coming for your head. She made it about three-quarters to the end of the aisle when a woman from an empty checkout register in one of the Schnucks polo shirts intercepted her. “Jane?” she asked. “Jane Valentino, is that you?”

Jane stopped. The woman was around her age, with a lumpy body like a potato and her hair in a bun. “Yes?” Jane said.

“It’s Mary Ann. Mary Ann Hilford?” She pointed at her name tag. “Remember?”

Jane looked blank. “Of course. Hello, Mary Ann.”

I barely remembered her, or any of them, except for this one black guy named Vaughn who snuck me M&M’s when Jane wasn’t looking. Mary Ann reached out to hug her, and Jane kept her arms mostly by her side and didn’t hug her back. “Vanessa and Lillian and Phil and me, we all follow Jonathan’s career. Or Jonny’s career.”

“That’s nice of you,” Jane said. “I hope you’re all doing well.”

Mary Ann said, “Look!” and she went back to her checkout line and came back with something. “He’s on the cover.”

I couldn’t see it, except that it was a tabloid and definitely not the glossy we’d contracted with. She handed it to Jane, who looked at the cover for a few seconds, and turned to the camera guy and said something. He took the camera down off his shoulder and pointed it at the ground. “Is he here?” Mary Ann asked.

I crouched lower behind the cantaloupes and watched through a small space in the pile. They smelled rotten. Bottom-shelf supermarkets are always kind of sad, with all the D-list merch they’re trying to get rid of that no one wants. “No,” Jane said. “But we have to get running. It was great seeing you.”

She walked away. Mary Ann said, loud enough for Jane to hear, “I’m sure.”

Jane turned. “Excuse me?”

“I see how it is,” Mary Ann said. “Thought you were better than everyone back then, still do.”

Jane’s face twisted around. She seemed a little hurt, even. I didn’t know how this woman from Schnucks with a bun could say anything to hurt her feelings. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said quietly.

Mary Ann looked like she hadn’t expected this. “Wait.” She shook her head and sighed. “Jane. That was bitchy of me.”

Jane smiled at her. I couldn’t read if it was a fuck-you smile or an I-forgive-you smile. “That’s okay. All this stuff”—Jane pointed to the camera guy and waved the tabloid—“makes people say and do things they don’t actually mean.”

“Yeah.” Mary Ann didn’t say anything else because you could tell she did mean it but just felt bad about it.

“And it makes it hard when you meet people who knew you before,” Jane said, even though it wasn’t like Mary Ann asked her to keep talking about it. The camera guy was still there, and he was itching to turn the camera back on and catch this, but he couldn’t do it. “So I understand why you’d feel the need to say something hurtful like that.”

Now Mary Ann really didn’t know what to say. She nodded, and Jane said, “Anyway, it was so nice seeing you again, Mary Ann.”

Mary Ann mumbled something that sounded like she was apologizing. Jane’s a natural at spinning.

I rushed out through a different aisle and an empty checkout line so Jane wouldn’t see me running out ahead of her.

I climbed into the limo before she could see that I’d been inside the supermarket. When she got to the car I heard her say to Kevin, “We’re not using the end of it or else we’re canceling the interview tomorrow, and that’s final.” She got inside and slammed the door and said TV people were paparazzi with fancier job titles.

She was holding the tabloid Mary Ann gave her against her chest. My photo was splashed on the cover. Central real estate. “What are they saying?” I asked as the driver pulled out of the parking lot.

She turned it away from me before handing it to me. “You may as well see it.”

The cover was me getting into the car with Lisa as I stuck my tongue out at the camera. But it was a tabloid, which is much less valuable to your image than a glossy for gossip. The headline said GUY AND GIRL: JONNY VALENTINE AND LISA PINTO.

A few pages inside, there was a short article with a few more photos:

According to raven-haired songstress Lisa Pinto, 12, when Jonny Valentine, 11, asked her out last month, he did so by quoting a line from his hit single “Guys vs. Girls”: “Will you be my girl today?”

The two young lovebirds have become a serious item and were recently photographed canoodling outside an ice cream parlor in Denver, where JV passed through on his Valentine Days tour and Lisa was promoting her upcoming debut album, School’s Out! before its Feb. 14 release.

“What I love most is hanging out with him away from the spotlight, when ‘The Jonny’ comes off and he’s simply Jonathan — that’s what I call him when it’s just the two of us,” says Lisa, referring not to her new boyfriend’s angelic halo of golden locks, but his public image. “He’s a normal kid who doesn’t take himself too seriously.”

Which means what, exactly?

“Jonathan’s a huge dork,” she says with a trilling laugh. “A total nerd. Yet so am I. And I love that about him.”

The feeling is mutual, according to a person close to the young “Breathtaking” songster. “Jonny’s completely obsessed with Lisa,” says the source. “I’ve never seen him like this with another girl.”

“I can’t believe they sold it to a tabloid without my consent,” Jane said. “ ‘I’ve never seen him like this with another girl’—Jesus. Not to mention this Jonathan garbage.”

I didn’t know why she was acting like it was a character assassination when it was all positive press. I closed my eyes to pretend I was trying to nap, but what I really was doing was imagining that Lisa replaced Jane in the limo, and there were paparazzi outside but the windows were too tinted for them to see into, and Lisa looked at me and said, “Door’s locked,” and we humped each other and I stuck my tongue inside her mouth. I turned on my side so Jane couldn’t see I was getting a boner. As I was picturing this, I kept wondering why she called me a dork and a nerd. She called herself one, too, I know, and female celebrities always do that so ugly girls don’t hate them, except they never admit to being what a dork actually is, which would be like saying to an interviewer, “Yeah, I’m a huge dork, I have bad social skills and no one likes me.” But you don’t need to call male celebrities one. I really shouldn’t have asked her on a date. The way she kept calling me Mr. Something would’ve annoyed me after a while. I bet if she ever met Mi$ter $mith, she’d call him Mr. Mi$ter $mith.

Jane tapped one heel hard on the floor a few times like she does when she’s pissed and took out her phone and made a call. “This is Jane Valentine calling for Olivia. Yes, I’ll leave her a voice mail,” she said. “Olivia, this is Jane. I saw the story about Jonny and Lisa, and I’m not happy that it was sold to a tabloid without my knowledge. If this is Stacy’s doing, please tell Ronald that I never signed on for it and this is not the way I want to run things in the future.”

I opened my eyes. She hung up and turned to me and shook her head. “You’re eleven years old,” she said, wiping some snot from my nose that had turned crusty from the cold air. “They forget that you’re eleven.”

“I’m almost twelve,” I said.

She pulled me close to her and hugged tight. She had on more of her Chanel No. 5 than usual that this movie actress told her she should wear after we moved to L.A. My boner was going down but it was still there, and I had to adjust my hips so it wasn’t uncomfortable.

“Not just yet,” she said.