The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (7 page)

Jane introduced us and handed Linda a wrapped gift, which I’m sure was my debut album and a concert DVD. Our basement has a room that’s filled with like a thousand of each.

About eighty adults and kids were standing around eating hors d’oeuvres from waiters in the main living room after the entrance. I recognized a few of the adults from the glossies, but no one was nearly as famous as me, which sometimes is a rush and sometimes you want someone else to take the attention off you, since everyone either looked at me or pretended not to when me and Jane walked to the bar. Except when there
is
a bigger celeb, after you relax, you get pissed, like, Why is
this
guy more famous than me?

Jane whispered that Linda got small roles on a few TV shows but her career would be in the toilet without her husband. After she got her prosecco, Matthew’s father came over and kissed Jane on the cheek and thanked us for coming and shook my hand and said, “Big fan,” and I said, “Love your work.” You’re not supposed to say anything else except “Big fan” or “Love your work.” He wanted me to meet his son, so he called Matthew over.

Matthew was wearing a button-down and nice pants. His father said, “Matthew, thank Jonny for coming to your party. I’m sure he’s very busy.”

He stared down at his loafers and mumbled, “Thanks for coming.” For having such good-looking parents, Matthew was pretty funny-looking. He had buck teeth and he already had acne and his stomach was a little chubby. I felt bad for him. I wondered if my father was good-looking, and if he was, why him and Jane made a good-looking kid, but Matthew’s parents didn’t.

His father said, “Make eye contact when you’re speaking to someone, Matthew.”

Matthew made eye contact, and this time, when he said, “Thanks for coming,” his eyes turned into tiny hard stones and I could tell he hated me. I didn’t know if it was because I was famous or cuter or more talented, which are the usual reasons, or because his father was embarrassing him, but I can always tell when someone hates me right away. A lot of times it’s easier to tell than when someone loves you.

I said, “Jane, can we get Matthew and his parents VIP seats to the concert tomorrow night? If they’re available and want to come, I mean.”

Jane seemed surprised but said we could probably do that, and asked Matthew’s father if that was okay. He said they had plans but they could easily cancel them, and I looked at Matthew sort of like, Fuck you, Matthew, now you’ll have to make eye contact with me for a whole night
and
sit through an entire concert
and
your parents are gonna love me even more, and I don’t even care that when you open Jane’s gift you’ll probably try to break the discs with your friends from school.

Jane saw someone else she knew and introduced me, and we spent the next hour schmoozing different adults in the movie and TV entertainment industry. A few mentioned they had a project in mind that I was perfect for and we should call their offices to take a meeting, and Jane said we’d be making the rounds when the tour was over. I was still tired and wanted to go home, so instead of talking shop, I ate every spinach-and-cheese-pie triangle and mac-and-cheese cupcake and all the other weird hors d’oeuvres from the waiters, most of which had dairy. Each time I did, Jane shot me a look like, Enjoy it, kid, because that’s your last one, but I knew she wouldn’t say anything in front of the others, so I kept pigging out. She owed me for making me take basically two different meetings in one day.

The kids were hanging out together on the other side of the room, playing with their iPhones and eating from the table that had Doritos and soda and gourmet caramel popcorn and sometimes glancing over at me. Most were around me and Matthew’s age, but some were younger or older. They all dressed about the same, in expensive jeans and T-shirts that were the in-store versions of what designers send me. When you squinted your eyes, it almost looked like a team uniform. But if I stood next to them, you could tell there was something just a little bit different,
like the stitching and buttons on mine are higher quality and tailored with new measurements every two months even though I haven’t hit my growth spurt yet.

I was a few feet behind Jane and this woman who was a network exec, but they didn’t know I was there. After Jane listed the highlights on the tour, the exec said, “It must be tough on Jonny.”

Jane asked what was tough, and the woman was like, “You know. Not having a normal childhood.”

Jane said, “What’s abnormal about it?”

The woman said, “Sorry, poor choice of words. I just mean I . . . I wouldn’t put my son through it, that’s all.”

Jane was like, “Not everyone could handle it.”

“You’re right, he probably couldn’t,” she said. “I apologize if I misspoke.”

Jane’s voice iced over and she said, “Well, it was really nice meeting you.” She excused herself to the bathroom and wobbled off in her high heels, and the woman noticed me and fake-smiled and said she had to say hi to a friend, and I grabbed four more pigs in a blanket and stuffed them down while Jane was away. I didn’t know who the woman’s son was, but I looked around for the most normal-looking, average kid in the room. I found a boy with short brown hair, in a group of kids near the popcorn bowl. I tried to picture him growing up and staying normal-looking and average, going off to college, getting a job in an office, marrying a normal-looking woman, having a bunch of normal-looking kids who later went off to college and got office jobs, working another forty years, then departing the realm and having a funeral with just his family crying there because the public didn’t know who he was and everyone else forgot about him since he was so normal.

I went to the bathroom near the kitchen, but Jane was still inside. There was another room with the door open, a study, to one side, and Matthew’s father was inside at a desk with his back to me, on his laptop and making a phone call. I pushed the kitchen door a crack, and no one was there, so I walked inside to hide out.

All the extra food and drinks were on the tables, but I wasn’t even
hungry anymore, I was eating out of boredom, and Jane always says that’s who the real chubs are, people who fill up their guts with food because they’re missing something else. I sat on a chair and listened to the voices muffled by the door. You could separate different voices out if you strained hard enough, like isolating music tracks. Everyone was trying to be the one who was heard, making their voices louder or saying the funniest or smartest line they could think of. The stupid thing is that people always listen to me, even though I’m just a kid and I wasn’t even that good in school when I went and the only people I make jokes to are Jane and our staff, and my jokes suck.

Then I heard some voices outside, in the back of the house. There was a door in the kitchen to the backyard. It was unlocked and I opened it to a big fenced backyard with patio chairs and tables and trimmed grass and a small pool without water. The noises were coming from right around the side of the house. It was numbskull of me to be out there in the first place, and even more numbskull to go see what the sounds were with Walter grabbing shut-eye forty-five minutes away in his bungalow. But Jane was getting drunk, so it’s not like she was doing an A-plus job of watching me.

I walked to the side of the house and knocked into a recycling can filled with glass. Nothing broke, but it made a rattling sound, and I could hear whoever was around the corner going, “Shit, shit.”

It was the older kids who’d snuck out. The two boys’ hands were behind their backs, and the two girls had guilty looks. They were around fifteen or sixteen. That was about the oldest my fan base got, and they were always harder to talk to. Tweens were easy, since they only squealed and didn’t have any real opinions, and adults try to be polite, but it’s hard to know what to say to the teen demo, who do have opinions but don’t feel like they have to act nice. “Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” said one of the boys, who had a haircut that was influenced by The Jonny, even if he didn’t know it, with an asymmetrical sweep down almost covering the eyes. Everyone wants to think their look is their own, but it’s always coming from someone way higher up on the style food chain. The boy brought his arm out. He was holding an open bottle of wine. “Want some?”

All the kids were staring at me like, Is he gonna drink with us or rat us out? “That’s okay,” I said. “But you guys can do it.”

He smiled, mostly to himself, and said, “Cool, thanks for giving us permission.” The others laughed, and he took a swig and passed it to one of the girls.

“I’m seeing your concert tomorrow with three friends,” one of the girls said.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll give you a shout-out.”

“Except it’ll be like a joke,” she said. “Like, pretending we’re the kind of girls who are excited about a Jonny Valentine concert. No offense. It’s just, we would never go to it, for real.”

“Oh.” There’s nothing else you can really say to that, unless I said something like, “It’s just, you’re an idiot, spending your parents’ money and putting it in my bank account for a joke. No offense.”

“Don’t be such a bitch, you’re hurting his feelings,” said the first boy. He grabbed the bottle back and held it up to me. “Sure you don’t want some?”

“I better not tonight,” I said.

“Right,” he said. “Save it for tomorrow, before your concert. Like a fucking rock star.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said. The boy smiled to himself again like he’d won. The air was a little chilly, but looking at that kid’s smile, this heat rose up in my body, and I felt like if I didn’t say something, I’d set myself on fire.

“Or like a fucking no-talent nobody whose father pays for him to go to private school,” I said.

I didn’t wait for him to answer, but when I got back around the corner I heard him call me a douche bag midget and they all laughed. I nearly yelled another insult back, but you can’t control other people, Walter says. You can only control yourself, so it’s not how they act that matters, it’s how
you re
act. The most successful celebs never lose control.

I found Jane inside the party talking to a handsome guy in his early thirties. He had on a standard young-but-not-too-young-actor’s outfit, dark jeans with a slim gray blazer and a collared pink gingham shirt
under. Jane introduced me and said he was a detective on some network crime show. He said, “But don’t hold it against me,” and Jane laughed and grabbed his arm at the elbow and said I should totally do a cameo on the show, and the actor was like, “That’s such a bad idea it might actually be good. Imagine the ratings: Jonny Valentine, murder victim.”

Jane stopped laughing and said, “I was picturing more like a witness or something.”

Matthew’s father came by, and Jane grabbed
him
by the elbow, too. She’s always grabbing people by the elbows at parties, like if she doesn’t, they’ll all float away. “When are you bringing out the birthday cake?” she asked, and he said in a few minutes, and Jane said, “I thought—never mind,” and he said, “No, what?” and she said, “Well, I was thinking Jonny could sing ‘Happy Birthday’ a cappella, but if it doesn’t make sense . . .”

Matthew’s father was like, “Seriously? That’d be amazing. Jonny, would you be up for that?” I couldn’t tell if his father had no idea Matthew hated my guts, or if he picked up on it but knew that if I sang at his son’s birthday party, all the kids at school would be talking about it and Matthew would seem cooler to them.

Jane was telling me with her eyes to do it. It was supposedly a birthday gift for Matthew, but it was really a gift to Jane, for business opportunities down the road.

“If you think he’d like it, then sure.”

He smiled and said he’d tell his wife, and I should come in the kitchen soon so I could walk out with the cake. When he left and the actor went to get a refill, Jane leaned down and whispered, “This will make a huge impression on all the brain-dead execs here.” Jane says an exec is a businessman who’s convinced he has the soul of an artist.

“Fine,” I said. “But I want to leave right after.”

“Deal.”

“Like, call the car service now.”

“Okay,” she said. “One more prosecco first before they run out.”

Her face looked dried out and red from the alcohol, but she joined the actor at the bar and I went into the kitchen, where Matthew’s dad supervised one of the waiters lighting the candles on the cake. Before we
walked out, he said, “Thank you so much for doing this for Matthew, Jonny. He may not . . . he may not be able to express it, but I know this means a lot to him.”

Sometimes parents know their kids better than anyone, and sometimes they don’t have a clue, even if they’re the kind of parents who throw their kids fancy birthday parties. Maybe my father
would
understand me because he
hasn’t
been around.

Matthew’s father turned off the lights in the living room and asked everyone to stay quiet for a special guest performance. He opened the door and the waiter carried out the cake, with me right behind, singing. Matthew stood by himself in the middle of the room, and the other kids were all taking my picture, because once I was performing the regular protocol didn’t apply.

When I got to “Happy birthday, dear Matthew,” I stared right at him again. He seemed like he was sort of pissed I was hogging the attention but also happy for the reason his father might have wanted, that it made his party the juicy gossip item at school. And even though he hated me for no good reason, I still felt sorry for him. He’d probably get even funnier-looking as he got older, and these kids might not really be his friends, maybe they only liked coming to his house for his pool and all the other cool amenities he had and because his father controls the purse strings, and not because they like him.

He blew out the candles and the adults applauded, but it was like they were mostly clapping for me, and I found Jane standing next to the actor and told her I wanted to leave, now, and she said, “I’ll call the car service.”

“You said you’d call it before,” I said.

“They were busy.”