“Kale,” I whisper.
“You know what,” he cuts me off before I can say another word. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this past week. I am twenty-two. I don’t know anything. I don’t know what to do now that my dad’s dead. I sure as hell don’t know what to do now that I’m crispy fried chicken. So how the hell do I think I know what I’m doing with us? How the hell do I think I actually know what love is? I’m twenty-two, Whit. You’re twenty-two. What the hell do we know?”
“Kale,” I say as I shake my head. “You don’t mean that. What this is between us, it’s real. It is everything. And you know it.”
“I don’t know anything!” he yells. “We’re living this fantasy of being big and famous. It’s all inflated with hot air. How could any of it have real substance to it?”
“Don’t say that!” I actually yell. Tears are streaming down my face. “Don’t say that, cause I love you, damn it! I love you, Kale McCain.”
And for a minute, his expression falters. His eyes soften for just a moment.
“We are not broken, just because you got hurt and your dad is gone,” I say, my level coming down. “We are still us. We’re still Kale and Whitney. None of that hot air matters. Cause it’s here.” I place my hand over my heart. “I know it, and you know it.”
But his eyes harden again. “No, you don’t. We don’t know anything. We’re not playing house anymore, and I’m not going to be jet setting around the country on a whim. Take away the man who always told me what the right thing was my entire life. Take away the one thing I was good at, and hell, it was just standing in front of a camera; and I have no idea who the hell I am anymore. How can you love someone who doesn’t know who he is? How can I love someone else when I have no clue who I am?”
Tears stream down my face now, free and hard. My phone rings in my back pocket, but I don’t even hear it.
“You should go on that tour, Whitney,” he says as he lies back on his pillow and looks back up at the ceiling. “Go and get world famous, and go live the life you were supposed to live. Enjoy it while you’ve got it.”
“But I don’t have it without you,” I say, feeling desperate and pathetic. “You can still come with me. Meet me in London, come with me to Sydney.”
“Just go, Whitney!” he yells, his eyes once again hard on me. “Just bloody go and move on! You still have everything you want, so go and enjoy it and just go!”
It’s a knife to the chest, and I can’t catch my breath. I try to draw one in, but I can’t.
My phone rings again.
I take a step back, still holding Kale’s angry and hard eyes.
I feel the door behind me. My hands pull it open.
And finally, my eyes locked on his for one last time, I turn, and I go.
Just like he told me to.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“And just…wow…thank you, so, so much,” I breathe again. There’s a huge smile on my face, threatening to blind everyone in this giant room. The lights beat down on me so intensely that I can’t really even see the faces in the crowd. But I know they’re all out there. Smiling back at me.
I hold the award that I was just handed up into the air, its crystal gleaming brightly under the lights. Everyone breaks out in claps and cheers.
Best new artist of the year. And not ten minutes ago, I won best single of the year for “Angel On Your Shoulder.”
An escort helps me down off the stage, and I make my way back to my seat. I’m still freaking out over the fact that I’m sitting between Jessica Dawn and Anthony Hawkins. Holy. Freaking. Amazing.
They both congratulate me as I sit back down, the awards on the table in front of me.
I start to zone out the announcer as he continues rattling off nominees for various music awards. I look at my own and marvel how we got here. How I got here.
The album went platinum in the first week of being on sale. The single of “Angel On Your Shoulder” was played on every radio station around the country within a week of its release, sending the album skyrocketing up the pre-order charts. Within a day of the album’s release, the first five shows of the tour sold out.
And then there was the actual tour.
Show after show. Bus rides, airplanes. Blinding lights and screaming crowds.
Every night I’d get scared that I’d screw something up. And I wasn’t perfect. There was a time I totally tripped while walking on stage. There was another that I ran right into one of the backup dancers during the middle of “Glow.” Another that my voice randomly cracked when I was talking to the crowd.
But for some reason, the crowds loved it when I did that stuff. They’d laugh and then cheer and the next day the internet was exploding with that “adorably relatable” thing I’d done. For some reason, the world loved my quirkiness.
And the tour went better than any of us could have hoped for. We finished the US leg with all sold-out shows. While in the air headed to London, we got word that the show in Sydney was sold out, as well.
Before we even landed, Elysium was asking for the titles of the rest of the second album. I already had five songs. They wanted another nine.
Now, twelve weeks after the tour, my second full-length album is finished. It’s set to release in two months. Pre-orders are rocking the charts once again.
And here I am. At the music awards show. Winning things. Having people look at me like I belong here. Being happy for me and cheering. They’re talking about collaboration for movie soundtracks, and other artists are begging me to write songs for them. Or sing with them. Or do music videos with them.
I’m constantly surrounded by people.
And yet, I’m alone.
The lead singer of Suit goes up on stage for the award of best rock song of the year. And I’m trying to pay attention to his acceptance speech. But his hair looks so much like Kale’s. And I just can’t help it.
It’s been nearly five months since I left Kale’s hospital room. Five months since he said he didn’t love me. Five months since his life exploded. And five months since my heart felt anything.
For the first week, I tried calling him. Texting him. I talked to Kaylee, and Sage, and even Riley once. But they all said the same thing. He just needed time to heal.
So I decided to give him that. It was going to be four weeks before he got out of the hospital, so I decided to wait five until I tried again. To see if maybe he’d changed his mind. That he figured out that what we had was real. That even though we were young, we still knew exactly what love was.
Four weeks. That put us to the end of the tour.
I tried calling him. And in one heart stabbing, all soul crushing moment, I got his voicemail.
“Hey, you’ve reached Kale. Do your thing after the beep. And if this is Whit, you don’t need to call again. Just, let it be.”
And that was that. We were done.
I’d made Robert McCain a promise. He’d said that Kale needed me to be there when he came back. But Kale had made it crystal clear that he wasn’t coming back. So where did that leave me?
Hadley, Elysium, even Calvin ran publicity. During the tour, they all tried to cover up what was happening. Word was kept under hard, hard wraps about Kale’s accident and Shurrock letting him go. And the record label kept it quiet that we were less than perfectly together and in love.
But now I’ve been home from tour for months. And not once have he and I been spotted together. The tabloids are talking. There are entire blogs and Tumblrs dedicated to our relationship. They’ve all been speculating.
And five weeks ago, word finally got out about what happened to Kale.
Things were said. Harsh things. Things that paint me to look like a horrible person, who stopped loving the man I love—loved—I don’t know, because he was no longer perfect and world famous.
My PR team came back with vengeance.
If the stories were something to read before, they were nothing compared to what would come.
Me painted as t
he saint. The story of me taking off, unreachable because I was rushing to his side. Then they exposed the truth: how Kale disconnected cold and harsh. I wouldn’t talk to anyone at the label for a week because of that.
The truth is a harsh mistress.
Maybe that should be the title of a new song for album number three. Beause Elysium is already planning on it.
They’re going nuts over this new second album. They say it’s ten times more heartfelt and grown up than “Angel” was. They’re expecting it to go at least double platinum.
All the songs, except for the five I wrote before my fantasy world exploded, are darker. They’re full of angst. They’re full of hurt. They’re raw and honest in the most dishonest way. They’re the most real songs I’ve written since “Angel.”
My soul is on that record.
Which is fitting, since this album is self-titled—Whitney Ford.
Realizing how fleeting happiness is, how all of this could fall apart at any second, I finished my last semester online. I now have my master’s degree in microbiology.
Just in case.
Cause I never expected what Kale and I had to fall apart.
Who knows if this music thing will last either?
“Thank you for joining us tonight, we’ll see you next year,” the announcer says and the room breaks out in a round of clapping.
Sitting here in this room, living this life, I feel like a complete liar, living a fake life.
Later that night, when I’m in my house, a fantastic and beautiful, and far too big thing the label bought for me while I was on tour, I put the awards on the shelf that houses many others. I stare at them, wishing there was someone to share the excitement with.
Because who is there now? My parents have kept their distance. I haven’t talked to my brother in I don’t even know how long. Ming and I got into a fight a few months ago over the fact that I’d checked out on her and we never talked anymore. And she was right.
So, here I am.
“Congratulations,” Tony says from behind me.
I turn to him, my crazy beautiful, crazy expensive dress rustling as I move. “Thank you,” I say with a hollow smile.
And Tony just has sadness behind his own. But he is here. And that counts for everything.
Three and a half weeks later, I’m in front of a camera, a laughing crowd in front of me, and the funniest talk show woman at my side.
“Come on, be honest,” Nelle says. “Do you do all that clumsy stuff on purpose?”
“No,” I laugh with everyone else, shaking my head. “It’s awful! I swear I’m going to die up on stage one day cause I’m just going trip and impale myself on my guitar.”
“Please, try to be more careful,” she says with a dramatic cringe through a smile. “America and the world will die without their Relatable Girl.”
“I swear I do try to be more graceful,” I say with a smile for the crowd.
“Well, you won over the world’s hearts in a hurry,” Nelle continues, the mood instantly growing more serious. “Did you folks know that this woman holds a master’s degree?”
Half the audience nods. The other half looks blown away. People make assumptions about you when you’re in front of them all the time, they think that the only thing you can do is act, or sing, or look pretty. But I’ve made my peace with that.
“Yeah,” Nelle says, looking at me in awe. “In microbiology! You used to work at some sciencey facility, right?”
“I did,” I say with a nod. “You could say that I was a true nerd. I still am, really.”
“Who doesn’t love a nerd, am I right?” she calls loudly and with excitement. The crowd goes crazy with clapping and hollers. “On a different note, I hate to ask it, but we all want to know about the man who started it all. How did Kale McCain come into your life, and what happened?”
This is a beginning and an end question. Because how he came into my life and what happened are two very different things.
It takes me too long to answer. The crowd waits on baited breath. They all want to know the answer. Because up until now, I have not been able to talk about any of this. Everything that’s gotten out has either been from my PR team, or it’s all been speculation.
“Kale erupted into my life at exactly the time I needed him,” I start. The room is so silent I hear it when a cameraman scratches his elbow. “And I’m not talking about needing him to make that video or launch my career. He came into my life when I needed someone to believe in me. When I needed someone to give me confidence that I was more than just a weird, socially awkward nerd.”
“We’ve all heard that you used to have terrible stage fright,” Nelle says, her eyes caring and warm. “That ended when Kale came into the picture, didn’t it?”
My head goes back to that night of the wedding. When everything was scary but magic. “I still have terrible stage fright. It’s still terrifying going up in front of people who will judge you. But yeah, Kale helped with that.”
I pause and take a breath, feeling that sharp ache trying to scissor its way back into my chest. I’ve locked it away for a long time now, pretending like it wasn’t there and that it couldn’t hurt me.
But sometimes it makes pain easier to deal with when you share it. I have a lot of people to share it with. And I love them. I don’t know all these people out in the audience, and I don’t know all the people who will be watching this later. But I still love them.
And right now I could use a little more love in my life.
“Kale overheard me singing one day,” I say, for just a moment letting myself go back to that night and feeling the excitement and uncertainty all over again. “He scared me and I fell, and it was super awkward. But he told me how great he thought I was. And then he told me to not worry about anyone else that might listen. Cause he was the person I was most scared of there, and he already thought I was something special. So I could just go out there and do my thing.”
“Do you still use that thought process now?” Nelle asks.
Such a loaded question.
I look at her for a long moment. Too long, but I’m on a roll with that, so why stop now.
“People need to change and evolve constantly to survive this thing called life,” I somehow say without messing everything up and falling to pieces. The scissors are wreaking havoc with my insides. “You know, Kale was always so confident and happy and content with himself. He didn’t need anyone else’s approval. Cause he had his own. I…I try do that now. Just…be okay with being Whitney.”
“Why aren’t you two together anymore?” someone from the audience shouts.
My eyes dart to the dozens and dozens of people out in front of us. To the gleaming cameras and the bright stage lights. I swallow hard. Blink twice.
“Because people do what they have to in order to survive,” I say, my voice probably too quiet. “And sometimes that means letting go and moving on.”
Nelle looks at me with kindness in her eyes. She takes my hand in hers. “Well, the country loves you, and so does the rest of the world. Everyone loves that girl who is just Whitney. And now,” she says, excitement picking up in her voice in that energetic way of hers. “Who wants to hear Whitney Ford sing?”
The crowd goes wild.
Even as a crack might show in my façade.
I just hope that the cameras are facing the excited crowd as I walk over to the performance stage.
Cause my eyes are red.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The new album releases next week.
Seven days.
In seven days I’ll leave on tour again. I’ll be gone for eighteen weeks. Touring all over the US. Making stops in Canada. Heading over to Europe. One stop in Japan. Two stops in Australia. Then coming back to the US for one last, huge show in New York.
So, in this small lull, where I demanded some time before the storm, I came home. To my old apartment. In Seattle, looking over Lake Union, and my old job, and my old, safe life.
M
y little old white truck is gone. I’m sure it got towed away at some point. In the chaos that my life became, I kind of forgot about it. I have no idea where it is now. And I kind of miss the sad, old thing.
Tony wanders around, always checking our surroundings. The crowds don’t know I’m here. Yet. Somehow, they always eventually find out. But for now, I’m sitting alone on the deck. The traffic noises rumble through the air. The scent of saltwater is heavy. And I sit, wrapped in a blanket, a mug of tea in my right hand.
It’s nice to just be me for a few moments. I rolled out of bed, knotted my hair on top of my head. I’m wearing this long shirt as pajamas. I don’t always get to wear what I want these days. Yes, the stylists still try to generally stick with my quirky, vintage, and used sense of style. But they pick it all. So, here is beautiful. Just me. Just real.
A knock on the door surprises me, and I hear Tony shuffle to get it. My anxiety levels sky rocket, expecting Tony to have to talk down some reporter or photographer. It’s a common occurrence. And I just want to relax today.
But a minute later, I hear heels clicking across the hardwood floor. I turn to see Sage walking over to me.
“Hi,” I say, totally taken aback. “I wasn’t expecting to see you anytime soon.”
“What, too busy for us common folk now?” she asks in that confident, sarcastic way of hers.
“No, I just…”
“I know what you meant,” she says with a one-sided smile. She sinks into the chair next to me and looks out at the view. “This is a beautiful spot.”
I look back out toward all the boats and nod. “It used to be my grandmother’s. When she died, my parents rented it out to me. I bought it from them a few months back.”
“It’s different having a place be yours, isn’t it?” Sage says without looking at me.
“It really is,” I say. I take a sip of my tea, feeling it warm my insides. It’s May now, but the morning is still cool.
“Congratulations on all of your success, by the way,” she says. And it means everything that there’s admiration her voice. “We’re really proud of you.”