“Fair enough.”
“On your first day, right after I told you that we weren’t allowed to change the radio station? You changed it five minutes later and you knew all the words to all the songs for the entire shift. And then you did that little dance every time a song you liked came on. That was pretty cute.”
“That’s the happy dance,” I told him. “I do it a lot.” Had he liked me for that long? I thought about all the times I had left work early to go meet Evan, or to go to one of his shows, leaving James behind to close by himself. It made me feel a little sick to think of it, like I had done something wrong without even knowing it.
“Okay, so when did you like me?” James asked.
I didn’t even have to think about it. “When the song first came on the radio and I broke the ice cream scoop, and you said, ‘Scoop now, think later.’”
James’s eyes widened. “That? That’s what did it for you? I thought it was gonna be the mix CD!”
“Oh, that was the second moment,” I assured him.
“It took me, like, two days to make that for you. It was like a piece of my soul I was giving to you, and if you didn’t like a song, you were going to hate me.”
I nodded. “I’ve been there. I obsess over mixes all the time. If there’s one bad song on there, it kills the whole thing.”
“So did you like it?”
“I loved it. I played it all the time. I still do.”
“Really?”
“I swear.”
We would’ve kept smiling at each other like two hopeless dopes if I hadn’t realized the time. “Oh, half an hour in,” I said. “Gotta report back to the generals.”
“Yeah, you do that. I don’t want your dad to come after us.”
I waved the thought away as I called home. “If anything, he’ll just fuck with your head.”
“How reassuring. Thank you, Audrey.”
“Anytime.”
“Hello?”
“Hi, Mom, it’s me. I’m alive and sober. But there’s still time for things to get exciting.”
“Ha. Are you having a nice time?”
“Um, yes.” I rolled my eyes at James. “Can I go, please? Now that I’ve proven I’m unharmed?”
“Okay. Thanks for sticking to the deal, sweetie.”
“No prob, Bob.” I hung up as fast as I could. “Sorry about that.”
I was about to say more, but then “Audrey, Wait!” came blasting out of the jukebox at full volume, and for some reason, James and I both drew back from each other. “Sorry,” I said to him again. “Sorry, it’s only three minutes and forty-nine seconds. It’ll be over soon.”
James shrugged. “I don’t care. Be right back.” Then he stood up and made his way through the crowd over to the jukebox, digging a crumpled dollar bill out of his super-skinny jeans. I watched him go and saw a booth of people from our school, giggling and looking over at me. They were the ones who had picked the song, I knew it. So I examined my hair for split ends and picked at my veggie burger and waited for James to return.
James came back just before the song ended. “Okay, just had to balance out the music selection,” he said. He moved a lock of red hair out of his eyes. “I hope you like it.”
“If it’s not The Song, then I’m going to love it,” I assured him. “Trust me.”
The song finally ended and the next one came on. Some familiar jangly guitar notes were strummed, and then, “I need someone, a person to talk to. Someone who’d care to love, could it be you?”
The Violent Femmes. “Kiss Off.” Perfection. Sheer ultimate perfection. “Seriously, James,” I started to say, but I was smiling too hard to speak. Plus my throat felt a little scratchy, like when you get overwhelmed with emotion and can’t really talk.
“You can all just kiss off into the air! Behind my back I can see that stare!”
James was mouthing the words, nodding his head in time to the beat. When he saw me getting all emotional, he grinned and leaned forward. “Just so you know, it’s gonna play three times in a row.”
Looking back, it was absolutely the worst thing we could have done, attracting attention to ourselves, two music geeks singing along with a song for the whole restaurant to see. But it was just so much fun, and I was sitting with this awesome guy who obsessed over mix CDs he made for me and picked the perfect song at the perfect time. And he didn’t care about any of the other bullshit, like MTV or magazines or random boys trying to kiss me or the fact that while we were on our first date, we listened to a song written about me by my ex-boyfriend. I liked James and James liked me and we both knew it and if you think about it, that’s like a miracle. A real true miracle. Everyone says that babies are miracles, and don’t get me wrong, I love cute little pudgy babies, but if you think about it, me having a baby right now would not be a miracle. At all. But finding someone that gets me? That’s the real work. That’s where the miracles are.
And that made everything else less important.
“Do you want to go to RPM?” James asked after the song played for the second time. “It’s new music Tuesday, you know.”
“Oh, believe me, I know. Sure, let’s go.”
We were halfway to the record store and I was scrolling through James’s MP3 player, playing parts of songs before finding one I liked better, when he suddenly made a left-hand turn. “Where are you going?” I asked. “You have to go straight.” (I’m kind of a nightmare backseat driver. Jonah can tell stories about me that would make you cry.)
“Yeah, I know, but …” He kept looking in the rearview mirror and when he got to the next intersection, he made another left. “They say … that you’re supposed …”
Now I was trying to look in the rearview mirror too. “What’s going on back there?”
“I think … we’re being followed?”
“By who? If it’s Sharon Eggleston, I’m gonna rip her throat out and hand it back to her. You can help, if you want.”
“I don’t think it’s Sharon.” He started to make his third left-hand turn. “If you think you’re being followed in a car, you should make four left-hand turns.”
I glanced at him. “How do you know that?”
“I read it in this cheesy spy novel once.”
I suddenly imagined James as this super-cute spy, which distracted me from the problem at hand. “It’s pretty cool that you know that,” I told him.
“I think it’s true, too. I mean, the four-left-turns part.”
Now I was trying to see out of the side mirror. “Is it just one car?”
“Um, no.”
“How many?” I could barely see a thing.
“I think … three? Maybe only two? And they might have cameras?”
I looked at him. He looked at me.
James spoke first. “So,” he said casually as he made his fourth left. “Have you ever outrun the paparazzi before?”
24 “You can’t be close enough unless I’m feeling your heartbeat….”
—hellogoodbye, “All of Your Love”
JAMES MADE IT to the parking lot of RPM Records and slowly parked the car in a spot close to the front door. “Okay,” I said. “I’ve seen this on TV plenty of times. We can’t run, because then they’ll chase us.”
“Right,” James said. We were about ten seconds away from having them trap us in the car with their cameras and we were both clumsily yanking our seat belts off and reaching for the car door handles.
“And don’t go all Naomi Campbell and try to hit them,” I continued. “They’ll sue you and you’d have to work at the Scooper Dooper for the rest of your life to pay the legal fees.”
“You sound like you’ve done this before.”
“No, I’ve just seen it on TV.” I grabbed my bag and started to open the door. “If all else fails,” I told James, “lie down and play dead.”
“Don’t run, don’t punch them, play dead. Got it. Let’s go.”
James and I must have looked like two crazy aerobicizers as we made our
way through the parking lot, not running but walking as fast as our legs would carry us. Still, that didn’t stop the photographers from trying to get our attention.
“Audrey, who’s your new guy?”
“Make out with him yet, Audrey?”
“What’s the name of his band?”
“Audrey, over here!”
“Is this your first date?”
“Audrey, have you talked to Evan yet?”
“What do you think of Evan’s success, Audrey?”
“Any comment about the Do-Gooders and the Lolitas, Audrey?”
By the time James and I made it to the front door of RPM Records, I could barely see. The camera flashes popped and popped until it looked like the world was filled with exploding stars, and if James hadn’t half-shoved me into the store, I don’t think I would’ve been able to see the front door.
Once my vision cleared, I realized that the entire store was staring at us. Well, us or the photographers, who were still taking pictures through the windows. Even the super-cool employees looked a little surprised. “Wow,” one of them said. He was wearing black square-framed emo glasses and pushed them back up on his nose. “Audrey. Cool.”
Now, I’ve been shopping at RPM since I bought my first Strokes record, but never has any employee there known my name, said hello, or shown any sign of recognition. So in a night of firsts, this was another one to add to the list. “Hi,” I said. “There’s kind of a problem in your parking lot.”
It ended up that the night manager had to come downstairs and, as James put it, “regulate those paparazzi bitches.” I know James said that to make me smile, and it did, but it was so hard to relax when everyone at the store kept stealing glances at me. We went to the import section first and I started flipping through the A’s, but I could hear the tiny clickclickclick sound of camera phones going off. Every time I looked up, though, they were nowhere to be seen. And then Mr. Emo Glasses came over and said, “Are you finding everything all right?” and I heard clickclickclick again and I knew it was only a matter of time before pictures of me and him wound up on the Internet. Maybe he already knew that.
Meanwhile, no matter how much regulating the manager did on those paparazzi bitches, he couldn’t stop more from waiting in front of the store. I could see them outside the door, cameras in hand, waiting for me and James to step outside again. “I’m fine,” I told Mr. Emo Glasses, then went down the aisle to where James was flipping through the L’s. “Hey,” I said. “Find anything?”
“Not really.” He released the stack of CDs so that they flopped back into the bins and then looked at me. “But I’m not really paying attention.”
“Yeah. Me neither.” Then I paused. Cue the awkward conversation. “You know your picture’s gonna be everywhere tomorrow morning, right?”
James went crimson. “My picture?”
“Well, yeah. That’s why they’re freaking out. They know we’re on a date.”
“Oh. Oh, wow. Um …” James glanced over my head toward the hysteria just outside the door. “That is, um … weird. Definitely weird.”
“Still want to be the wacky next-door neighbor on my reality show?”
“Well, hell, for this sort of inconvenience I want a pay raise and a promotion to ‘love interest.’ What’s that clicking noise?”
“Someone’s camera phone.”
“Great.”
“Let’s just go upstairs and look in the clearance bins,” I told him. “No one’s ever up there, it’s just crap CDs that they can’t even sell for a buck.”
So we hurried upstairs, where I was right—it was empty save for an employee who was reading a magazine behind the information desk. Obviously no one had filled him in on the brouhaha downstairs, because he didn’t seem remotely interested in me or James. (Side note: How awesome is the word brouhaha? I hereby resolve to use it more often.)
“Better,” James sighed once we had made our escape. “Much, much better.”
We walked the aisles together, holding hands as he browsed one side and I browsed the other. But then it started getting more and more populated, and by the time we were halfway through the section, it was as crowded upstairs as it had been downstairs. The previously oblivious employee now looked annoyed. “I think,” I whispered to James, “if we went into the bathroom, fifty people would suddenly have to pee.”
By the time we were done shopping, James had found an old Smashing Pumpkins import and I had the newest CD from Qwerty, this wacky new band that consisted of three Canadian siblings and no drummer. “No drummer, right?” James said when he saw my CD.
“You’ve heard of them?”
“My brother saw them open for Doomsday Scenario last year.”
“Your brother saw Doomsday Scenario?” I was beside myself. “Why didn’t you go? And why didn’t you take me?”
James sighed heavily. “It was an eighteen-plus show.”
“I hate when that happens! Do you know how many good shows I’ve missed because of that?”
“Probably as many as me. But my brother said that Qwerty were better than Doomsday.”
“Not even possible.”
“He swears to it.”
We were walking downstairs while talking, which is probably why we didn’t notice the commotion at first, but when we got to the base of the stairs, screams erupted from outside.
Like, screams.
The flashes from the previous paparazzi shots were nothing compared to this time. There must have been at least thirty of them, and the exploding stars from before had become one big giant supernova of flash!click! I could also see girls outside, and some of them had on shirts that read IT’S ALL GOOD! and TEAM AUDREY. (Which, as the girl who was never going to be captain of anything sports-related, ever, was kind of gratifying for a minute.)
“Whoa,” James said under his breath and he let go of my hand, which fell heavy and slack against my leg. Both of us were just staring, and then we looked at each other, because it was painfully obvious that there was no way in hell we were going to get through those doors and back to his car. Not unless we wanted to be torn apart like turkeys on Thanksgiving.
Everyone was calling my name, their voices barely muffled through the glass doors, and the store’s security guard was standing in front of the doors with his arms folded. The store manager was standing next to him, and when he saw James and me, he came rushing over and began shoving us back upstairs. “Get away from the windows! Here, into the office,” he said as we both turned and ran up the stairs with him. “Don’t worry—the police are on their way to get you out of here safely.”
“The police?” I squeaked. “Really?”
“Really,” he said. “Don’t worry, this happened to us when we did a signing with those High School Musical kids. We’re well-trained in crowd control.”
“Your dad,” James said under his breath, “is going to kill me.”
“No, he’s not,” I promised. “This isn’t your fault.”
“Okay, in here,” the manager said, shuffling the two of us into a bare-bones windowless room that had stacks and stacks of CDs and promo stuff and rolled-up posters lying everywhere. The life of a record store manager was starting to seem better and better, I had to admit. Free CDs being mailed to you every day? Bands showing up to do signings and in-store performances? Being able to listen to music at work? Sign me up, please.
But at the time, it was just super scary. I was trying not to freak out, and I could tell James was trying to do the same, even though his cheeks were flushed and he kept shoving his hair behind his ears.
“Audrey, can I get you anything?” the manager said. When I shook my head, he turned to James. “James?”
“No thank—wait. How do you know my name?” “The press outside seemed to know who you were.” “How do they know my name?” Now James was starting to look alarmed.
“Whoever saw us at the restaurant and called them, told them,” I sighed. The pieces were far too easy to string together.
<
br /> “Oh, man.” James sat back in his chair, his legs akimbo. “Oh, man. Shit.”
Cue my guilt complex.
“I am so sorry,” I kept saying to him after the manager went back downstairs. “I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry.”
“No, wait, why are you apologizing?” James wheeled his chair over to mine so we could sit next to each other.
“Because I did this to you, and now everyone’s gonna start calling your house and your picture’s going to be everywhere and—”
“But it’s not your fault, right? I mean, you didn’t do any of this, did you?”
I looked at my hands in my lap. “I shouldn’t have dated you right now. This isn’t okay. It’s not fair to you or your family or just—”
James ran a hand through his hair and sighed heavily. “Okay, Audrey, look—”
“I like that, by the way.”
“Like what?”
“When you say my name. ‘Cause sometimes people just say ‘Aud,’ which sounds like ‘odd.’”
“Well, ‘odd’ is a good word for you, I have to admit. But seriously, Audrey”—we both smiled when he said my name again—“this isn’t your fault. And I’d rather be dating you and being chased by paparazzi than not.”
“Really?”
“Swear to God.”
“’Cause there’s probably going to be a lot of that. At least for the time being.”
“Do I still get to drive like James Bond? ‘Cause that was pretty cool.”
“That was cool.” I grinned. “You and your four-left-turns thing.”
“Thanks. I try.”
“And it was hot, too, you pretending to be all spylike.”
“Really?”
“Really. If it wouldn’t have endangered our lives, I would’ve totally made out with you right then.”
James’s blush went up into his ears. “Oh, yeah?” His voice sounded a little higher than normal.
“Yeah.” I rolled my wheelie chair closer to his. “Wanna reenact the scene?”
If kissing Simon had been like a wildfire, kissing James was something smaller and stronger. It was birthday and prayer candles, ones made for good thoughts and strong hopes and wishes and promises. I needed some of those right now.