Pop Princess (27 page)

“Both.”

“Because of that whole Kayla thing? I think you misunderstood about all that.”

“Then maybe you owe me an explanation. If you liked Kayla so much, why didn't you just go for her?”

Deep exhale from Liam before he started in. “Right before I met you, see, there had been this night with Kayla and me; we were both drunk and we started fooling around but it never went anywhere. The next morning she acted like it never happened—I don't know, the way she drinks, maybe she didn't even remember. I was into her, I admit it. I mean, she's not just gorgeous and talented—even though her music sucks. She's
smart,
like smart in a really hot way. But the whole thing was just too much of a
Chasing Amy
situation. And then you came along and things just . . . happened between us and then Kayla got involved with Dean and I was confused about who I—”

“What are you talking about, ‘
Chasing Amy
situation'?”

“You know, that movie with Ben Affleck, about the guy who falls for a lesbian. What's that look for? Kayla. She may date guys in public, but she prefers girls.”

“How do you know?” It did kind of add up, if I thought about it.

“You can't possibly be that naive. Jules? Lucky?”

“LUCKY!” I stood up from my chair. “You don't know what you're talking about.”

Liam stood up too, dragged me by the hand outside onto noisy Mass. Ave., away from the folks at the nearby tables who were leaning in to hear our conversation. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I really thought you knew.”

He tried to pull me into his chest—for comfort?—but I squirmed. What the fuck! I paced around, my mind whirling. When I went back to Mom's, I would get the story from Trina. She would know whether what Liam said was true; of course it wasn't. Liam took my hand and led me to a bus stop bench. We sat in silence a good long while as I got my head back together, calmed down. That was one thing I liked about him—he never forced conversation; he could appreciate a good silence.

A church bell rang in nine o'clock. Liam groaned. “Ah! I really am so sorry, I just assumed you knew. God, I feel stupid. Dad is all in this love-bliss stage with Mom again. Him and his stupid inspiration. He called me today and gave me this talk about me being some ignorant jerk, how if I had any brains left after what Dartmouth had sucked out of me I would show up to see you tonight, to see what . . .” His voice trailed off, his sentence, with whatever intentions it may have held, unfinished.

I waited, thinking he had more to say, and when he didn't continue, I spoke up. “Thing one,” I said. “I'd have a hard time wanting to be with you right now after you just listed the reasons why you found Kayla so attractive. Gross. Thing two, you say all this to me, and yet you don't even have the guts to just ask me out for a proper date, to say out loud that you could want more from me than just random fooling around.” His face looked downcast. He had the courage to come all the way to Boston to see me, yet he still didn't have the courage to state his case that maybe, just maybe, he wanted to be my boyfriend.

“Are we at least gonna be friends?” he said. His hand reached for mine, and this time I let him take it. His hand was sweaty, shaking. That only seemed fair.

I didn't answer, because I couldn't. I could never be just friends with Liam. I could be friends—and possibly more—with Henry, because we had a lifetime of friendship to draw on; with Liam, I just had unbearable physical attraction and, until now, a painfully unrequited desire to know him better, to know that he shared the longing I felt for him. I wanted the whole deal from Liam, the real deal,
romance,
and until he was ready to all-out ask me for it, I wasn't going to wait around for him to step up to the plate.

A loud bus passed by before Liam stood up to leave. He smiled a little, and my heart worked extra hard not to just jump into his arms. “Man,” Liam said. “My number one favorite song of all time is ‘Welcome to Paradise' by Green Day, and you know I never hear that song anymore without thinking of you. Congratulations—you're gonna haunt me for a lifetime.”

“Good,” I said. I let go of his hand and walked up the street, toward home.

Will the real Wonder Blake
please stand up, please stand up? Who was she gonna be—the girl at the DQ longing for escape, the pop princess, the aspiring real deal singer-songwriter?

I
knew Tig was waiting for my answer about what
I
wanted to do next with my career, but
I
had other things on my mind.
I
hurried to Mom's apartment after leaving Liam. Charles, Mom, Henry, and Tig were sitting around the living room waiting to celebrate my birthday, with presents and a cake on the table. “Where's Trina?”
I
asked.

Charles said, “She's in your room looking for a CD to play. Tell her if she chooses Mariah Carey she's not invited here anymore.”

I
found Trina in my room, sitting on my bed, reading a tabloid with a headline that screamed: K
AYLA AND
D
EAN
: T
HE
I
NSIDE
S
TORY
B
EHIND
T
HEIR
S
HOCKING
V
EGAS
E
LOPEMENT
. Aretha Franklin was wailing from my stereo about how if loving him was so wrong then she was guilty of that crime because she was bewildered, lonely, and loveless without her man to hold her hand. Sigh. Sister Ree, can
I
come to Detroit and take singing and songwriting lessons from you?

I kicked the door closed behind me.

“What took you so long?” Trina asked. She slapped the tabloid magazine. “And did you know Kayla and Dean were married by an Elvis impersonator! Wacky kids, who cares about the sacred institution of marriage anyway?” Trina placed the tabloid on her lap. “Does this rag belong to you? I found it in your bathroom.”

“It's Mom's. She's always stealing tabloids from doctors' offices to throw away. Of course, she waits until after she's read them at home, but she doesn't like to see them in public places. Mom and I were reading that magazine in the checkout aisle at the supermarket a while ago when we turned to this ‘Caught in the Act' page of paparazzi pictures and there was an awful, overexposed picture of me coming out of dance class, with sweat stains and my stomach sticking out through my leotard, with a caption that read, ‘Wonder Bloat!' ”

Trina said, “The same magazine that over the summer had you pregnant with Freddy Porter's baby and marrying him in a secret fairy tale ceremony that made you two the hottest new power couple in the music industry?”

“The very one!” I sat down on the bed Indian style next to Trina, took the tabloid from Trina's hands, and tossed it to the floor. “Question,” I said to her. Deep breaths. “Is Kayla gay?”

Trina adjusted her seat to Indian style also, facing me, like she knew there were more questions on the way and she needed to settle in. “Honestly?” Trina said. She tucked her front head of braids behind one ear. “Who knows with that piece of work? I don't think it's a coincidence that she married Dean right as her new album was released to disappointing sales, and just a few weeks after some tabloid printed front-page grainy photos of her topless on some beach with her topless assistant lying next to her.” Looking at my wide-eyed shocked face, Trina added, “Don't think I don't also choose the longest line at the checkout aisle, girl.”

I said, “How come Kayla doesn't just come out?”

“Well, aside from being afraid that her fans and all the advertisers whose products she endorses won't approve, I don't think she's come out even to herself. I think she fools herself into believing it's all experimentation until the right guy comes along. The girl is driven by hard-core ambition. I guarantee you, Kayla and Dean's marriage is a career move for both of them. Dean is as confused as Kayla, and he wants to look like a stud. Kayla knows she's not that great an artist, knows she's a studio singer with no songwriting talent and a limited pop music shelf life and she'd better branch out into acting if she wants to sustain a longer career.”

“That's pretty cynical.”

“Well, you be in a relationship with Kayla's ex-manager and I dare you not to become a little jaded about that girl.”

I whispered the word, not sure how I would feel about the answer: “Lucky?”

Trina spoke low also, but her tone changed, from cynical to tender. “I wondered when you'd ask me about that. Do you really want to know?” I nodded. Trina paused, searching my eyes, as if she was trying to determine if I could deal with the answer. “Gay,” Trina proclaimed. “All the way gay—Indigo Girls, Melissa Etheridge, was-gonna-change-the-face-of-alternative-music-one-day gay.”

If there were tears streaming down my face, it wasn't because Lucky had been a lesbian. “How come she didn't trust me enough to tell me?” was all I could stammer in response. I couldn't believe that the sister with whom I had shared every day and every detail of my life had withheld something so fundamental about herself from me. I hurt enough from missing her every waking moment of my life, but now I grieved too for this piece of her that she had never let me know.

Trina rubbed my knee. “Lucky was only seventeen when she died. She'd just figured it out for herself, and she was just about to get around to telling you. If you really want to see that side of her, look at her songs; read deeper. I'm sure it's all there. She hadn't even told your parents.”

“Was that weird for you, being part of Trinity when . . . Lucky and . . .
Kayla?”
In the here and now, I could get the possibility that Jules was more than Kayla's leech of an assistant, but it was hard to wrap my head around the idea of my sister and the Kayla monster.

Trina said, “Tig had told us that if he was gonna represent us to the record company, Lucky and Kayla either had to be ‘in' or ‘out.' He said if he was going to take us to the record company, Trinity had to come packaged with an image—either wholesome pop girl group—or alternative chick singers; there was no middle ground there. He said he didn't care which direction we chose, but we were a risk either way: If we choose ‘in' as a wholesome pop girl group, we would always worry that Lucky would be outted, but if we chose ‘out' and went the alternative chick singer route, we would never achieve the mainstream success that Kayla craved. We were talented as a group, we sounded great together, but Tig really just took us on because of the family connection. I know he was ambivalent the whole time.”

“Which direction did Lucky want?”

“Lucky wanted to go with ‘out.' Kayla wanted ‘in.' ”

“And you?”

“I was getting pretty tired of being a third wheel to Lucky and Kayla's relationship, if you really want to know. I mean, it devastated me at first. My two best friends from when we were kids chalking up the sidewalk in Cambridge for hopscotch games, and then skip over to a few grades later, I arrive early for rehearsal in the basement at your old house and find them on the sofa kissing. I got to be okay with it eventually, but I come from a family of Baptist ministers, and that was not the type of thing I was raised to be around. I wish I could tell you I was all ‘Oh yippee, you're girlfriends' cool about it, but the truth is, I wasn't. I didn't speak to them for weeks—I was freaked out. But Lucky brought me around. She always did. She could have brought the Pope around.”

“So you were okay with it, you were going to stay in the group?”

“Um, probably not. The thing to remember about Trinity was that we were on the
verge
of signing a record deal, but it never happened, and not just because Lucky was killed. I think I ultimately could have dealt with a Trinity in which Lucky was gay, but I couldn't deal with Kayla's attitude that it was all just some experiment—and neither could Lucky. We never would have signed that contract; it just was never going to work out.
We
were never going to work out as a team. The dynamics were just too weird.”

“Do you think that's why Kayla got to be so mean? Cuz she feels all this pressure to deny who she is in order to have her career?”

“Kayla's not mean—she's complicated. For all the nasty things she's done, let's also remember she was the person who looked out for you when you went to New York, who gave you a place to stay, who you may not realize was behind the scenes getting on Tig's case to not work you so hard, to give you some room to grow up. And for all that she and I don't speak anymore, do you know she still sends me a handwritten birthday card every year? That she still sends flowers to my mom every Mother's Day? I mean, this is a girl who had a first-floor apartment custom-built for her grandmother because of her heart condition, who calls her grandma every day, no matter what part of the world she's in. Kayla's a tough one. You can't just put her into this box of Wicked Opportunist Shrew, much as I'd like to, for all the grief she brought to Tig. But she made him a rich man. He's not complaining.”

Ech; enough about Kayla. Maybe Kayla was “complicated,” but for all her generosity to me, which I truly did appreciate, I knew my lasting memory of her would always be her playing for me Liam's lovesick voice mail to her—when I know she knew I cared about him.

I really wanted to hear more about my sister; birthdays and holidays were the days I especially hurt over Lucky. I asked Trina, “If Lucky were here today, what do you think she would be doing?”

Trina's face brightened. “I think she would be doing something similar to what you're doing. She would be singing in coffeehouses, honing her craft, writing songs, going to school, being Phi Beta Kappa president of the Smith College Proud to Be a Lesbian Society or something like that.”