The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (28 page)

I didn’t have anything else to say, so after I sent the email I looked up a bunch of Australia facts that I could ask him about until they called me to come back in and help them fight one of the Emperor’s minions. We played another hour before Callie came home and the car service picked us up. Callie and Walter were weird again when they spoke, since he had to tell her he’d cooked pancakes for them and she was maybe pissed that he’d made them breakfast for dinner, and she looked doubly pissed in a more serious way when Walter said good-bye to his daughters, and Pris and Danny grabbed his legs and said they didn’t want him to go. He put both their heads in his palms and pretended to pick them up by their heads. Sally stayed on the couch and kept playing Zenon.

Walter sat with his eyes closed and was quieter than usual on the drive back. I didn’t want to break the silence, but eventually I asked, “How did you and Callie meet?”

“High school,” he said. “I thought she was way out of my league, but I asked her to the senior prom, she said yes, and there you go.”

I was surprised he thought she was out of his league, but I just said, “I guess I’ll never go to the prom. I’ll just sing about it in ‘The Big Dance.’ ” I don’t even sing it much. It’s a crap track from before the label figured out my voice.

“Never know, maybe you will.” I hadn’t told him Jane’s idea about school. I bet she hadn’t, either. Nadine could’ve. I didn’t want to discuss it with him.

He was quiet for another minute. “I fucked that one up, didn’t I?” he said.

“That was a fun night. You didn’t fuck anything up.”

“No, not tonight,” he said, and I understood what he meant.

“Then why’d you leave?” I’d never really asked Walter before about why he left his family. Jane told me not to once when I asked her.

“I didn’t,” he said. “She kicked me out. But I had it coming.”

“Why?”

He did this half-smile/half-frown thing he does sometimes. “We had creative differences.” He added, “Sometimes I forget you’re ten years old,” but instead of reminding him I was almost twelve, I said, “Do you wish you could go back?”

“Nah. I like working for you guys, and getting to hang out with you, and I’ve got my friends in L.A. and everything.”

He didn’t have that many friends in L.A. besides the guys he knew at his gym, though. He mostly hung out in his bungalow when he had time off, and if the label hadn’t recommended him as a bodyguard from a connection he had, he’d be a trainer in some bottom-shelf Hollywood gym.

“I read a fortune cookie just after I moved to L.A.,” he went on. “It said, ‘To live in the future you must break with the past.’ And I know these cookies tell you whatever you want to hear, but still.”

“So that’s why you came to L.A.? To break with the past?”

His eyes were still closed. “Yeah. But it’s more like a break in your head. Like that song of yours, ‘I Loved a Girl’? Where you realize it’s over, so you have to let it go?”

I’d always thought that song, which was actually called “Once Loved a Girl,” was just about an ex-girlfriend who didn’t love you as much in return. The chorus goes, “Once loved a girl, in the past tense, she never committed, stayed on the fence.” Maybe Walter was right.

“I had to keep telling myself, ‘I don’t love Callie anymore,’ ” he said. “Because when you really love someone, it means they can hurt you. I even had this picture of us kissing, from a photo booth, and I tore it apart in the middle. Like that other song of yours.”

He meant the chorus from “Heart Torn Apart”: “Before I felt whole, now there’s a hole in the part, where my heart used to be, ’cause you’ve torn it apart.” It’s not a hack rhyme because it’s
the part
and
apart
.

“So you did it enough that you really don’t love her anymore?” I asked.

He opened his eyes for the first time. “I’m tired, brother.”

He closed them again, and I left him alone and listened to MJ on my iPod until we got home. Walter told himself Callie couldn’t hurt him anymore, but anyone could see she was still his Major Vulnerability, right in front of him, even if she was halfway across the country most of the time. Maybe that’s what it was with most people, the person closest to them. I always figured Jane and my father both wanted to end things because of creative differences, but maybe he had it coming, too, and they were each other’s Major Vulnerability, and so she kicked him out. My songs are always about a girl dumping me and I still love her and want her back, but dating is different from people who have a kid. Except it could be that he wants to come back now, like Walter does, even if he won’t admit it.

W
hen the wake-up call rang at seven in the morning and I said, “Thank you,” it felt like forks scratching away at the bottom of my throat. I hoped the coffee might soothe it, but it made it worse. I couldn’t find any Throat Coat in my suitcases, so I knocked on Jane’s door. She opened it in her towel.

“Jane,” I croaked, and she gave me a look like, What the hell is wrong with you? “My throat is really sore.”

“Do you feel sick?”

“No, only my throat.”

She ordered up a pot of hot water and some honey and steeped Throat Coat in a mug for me, but I still sounded like junk. “I bet it was that stupid impression,” she said. I’d shown it to her when I got in last night and she told me it was bad for my voice and to knock it off. “How long did you do it for?”

“Maybe two hours.”

“For Christ’s sake,” she said. “I can’t believe he let you do it for that long.”

“Who?”

“Walter. He knows you’re not supposed to strain your voice.”

“He didn’t know it hurt my throat.”

“It hurt, and you
still
did it?”

“A little. I didn’t think it would do this.”

“Jesus, how old are you? Okay, stop talking, just stop,” she said. “Don’t talk again, and keep drinking the tea. Can you sing tonight?”

I didn’t know if I was allowed to talk, so I shrugged. I could tell from a few minutes of this that it would be a pretty frustrating life if you were totally mute. I wasn’t sure what would be worse, being mute or deaf. For one, you couldn’t sing music, and for the other, you couldn’t hear it.

“Let me figure this out. In the meantime, get ready for your session with Nadine, and I’ll tell her you’re not supposed to talk.”

I just did writing and math exercises and a new vocab test with Nadine, but my performance was
subpar,
which means the opposite of
superb
. I wondered if that was like the word Zack used when it sounds the same but means the opposite. I broke the rule of not talking by asking Nadine if there was a name for words that sound like they’re mixed up and also mean the opposite, but she said she didn’t think so. It’s like those guys who can sing two different tones at once with their throats. I’ve tried a million times and can’t do it. The only way is like we did on an alternate take of “Breathtaking,” when they overlaid me singing the chorus in a lower octave, but my producer didn’t like it. You have to keep the emotional message in pop songs pure, or you confuse the audience.

When Jane picked me up in a few hours for sound check with a thermos of Throat Coat and honey, she asked me to speak, and I still sounded like a frog. “If you can’t sing by tonight, we’ll lip-synch it,” she said. “I had to fight tooth and nail with the venue to let us do it. They wanted to back out of various clauses in the contract.”

I suck at lip-synching. It always looks fake. I’ve never had to do it for a full concert before. “Where’s Walter?” I whispered as we got in the elevator.

“He’s got some appointments in town this afternoon. Stop talking and keep drinking.”

My voice was softening and I knew I could handle the banter interludes, but at the start of sound check, when I tested out the lines “Please don’t send a text, please don’t you depart, please send an RSVP to my
heart,” it sounded terrible and made my throat worse, and Rog told me not to sing anymore. I had to stand there like a numbskull and pretend to sing while they piped in my vocal tracks and I got worried that everyone would catch me faking it later. People get more upset over someone pretending to be good and lying to them than someone who’s horrible but open about it. Jane told me they wouldn’t, that concertgoers don’t hardly even listen to the singers, they only want to see you and feel like they’re connecting with the star by singing along, and I would’ve asked how they could connect with me if they’re not even listening to me, but I didn’t want to strain my voice.

Except for one time where I came in late to the line “I picked you flowers, you picked apart my life” in “Roses for Rosie,” which no one noticed because I was in the heart-shaped swing, I pulled it off during the concert. It kind of made me think there wasn’t much point in
actually
singing. Rog said I gave a powerhouse performance, and he always tells the truth after shows. Jane walked me to the star/talent room and joked that we should do it for our next concert in Cincinnati, even though my voice would be better by then.

I’d forgotten Cincinnati was next. I wondered if he was coming to the show.

“Get your stuff ready quickly, baby, so we can get out of here,” Jane said outside my room.

“Okay,” I said as I opened the door. “Where’s Walter?”

She whipped out her phone and said, “Hmm?”

“Where’s Walter? He wasn’t here all night.”

She typed into her phone on my Twitter account, “
Thanx 4 the love and support, Nashville! Next stop: Cincinnati!
#ValentineDays,
” and linked to a candid stage shot of me.

“I told you,” she said. “He had appointments.”

“What appointments?”

“I don’t
know
. He used to live here.”

“Call him.”

“I’m not going to call him now. The venue security can escort us to the car,” she said. “Come to my room when you’re ready.”

She walked away. “Did you fire him?” I asked.

She stopped and waited there. Then she came back and pushed me into my room and shut the door. “He was irresponsible in letting you do that impression of him, when he should have known it would hurt your voice, and it almost caused us to lose a lot of money.”

“You
fired
him?”

“He’ll be paid for the rest of the tour.”

My legs turned to noodles. “You did this with the Latchkeys. You can’t do this with Walter.”

“Walter understands he made a fireable mistake. He’ll find someone else to work for.”

That almost made me more upset than her firing him, the idea of Walter being the bodyguard for someone else like it was no big deal. “He’s my best friend.” Saying those words made me feel like I was about to cry.

“You can’t be best friends with a man thirty years older than you.”

“Yes, I can.” I could feel tears filling up in my eyes. I tried holding them back.

She took a step closer to me and said, “Stop crying.”

“Hire Walter back,” I said.

“I said
stop
it, Jonathan.” She tried to put her hands to my face, I guess to wipe my tears away, but I pushed her arms away and she accidentally sort of rapped her knuckles on top of my head, which wouldn’t have hurt if it was only the knuckles, but the huge silver ring on her right hand caught me hard and it stung. I pulled back from her quickly and touched my head. It pounded like an echo.

Jane’s mouth was in an
O
and her eyes were stuck in place. I could tell she was
really
upset now, so I just let myself bawl, more than I do for “Heart Torn Apart,” a bunch of ugly heaving sobs.

“I’m sorry,” she said, still stuck.

I shook my head no and forced the tears out faster.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, and she moved her arms out a little to see if it was okay to hug me, so I pretended to flinch, and then I waited until she saw that before I hurled myself into her arms and cried the hardest yet into her chest. I didn’t even hardly have to force it, smothering my tears and snot into her dress over her implants, and she was
half crying, too, and said, “I’m so sorry, baby, I’m sorry, I’m a terrible mother.”

I waited a minute without letting up the tears. Then I squeaked out, “Bring him back,” and she said, “Okay, Jonathan, okay, I’ll get him back.”

I took a little while to calm down, since I really did get myself worked up even if part of it was acting at the end. Maybe Jane’s right. I
should
be in the movies.

W
alter joined us on the bus in the morning. He was quiet around Jane and kept to himself near the front of the bus, but later, when she went to the bathroom for like the fourth time in two hours, he came up to my seat and said, “Thanks, brother,” and fist-bumped me.

Jane kept talking to Rog about her fortieth birthday in two days, and he was telling her age is mental more than physical and the more she thought about it, the bigger a deal she was making it. The vicious cycle of aging.

“Look at me,” he said. “I don’t think about it or talk about my age, so no one else does.”

Jane looked at him like, Um, other people
do
think you’re old. But she said, “It’s different for women.”

I looked back at Nadine reading in the bucket seats. Jane was only about thirteen or fourteen years older, but from their faces, she looked like she could’ve been
her
mother.

Rog gave her a back rub like he does a lot when she’s upset. It’s also usually a way get her to stop talking. She went on for another hour, though. He’s a pretty patient listener. Jane thanked him for being her human Xanax, and it reminded me of that detective-show actor’s song
about Xanax. She said, “You’ll make a good manager someday, after you retire from dancing,” and Rog said, “Well, that’s a ways off, but I’ve had the best teacher.”

On our driver break at a rest stop, I went outside to get some air and Walter came with me. He said, “Mind if I smoke?”

This was the first time I’d seen him smoke on this tour. He’s always trying to quit but never lasts more than a few weeks. I said I didn’t mind. We didn’t talk, he just smoked facing away from me. Rog came walking back to the bus with a cardboard tray from Starbucks with two chais for him and Jane. He got her hooked last tour. “Walter, would you please smoke away from Jonny?” he asked.