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.”
We both laughed. I was shaking my head. “Trina,” I said. “Is every former B-Kid gay or what?”
Trina stood up from my bed; we could hear “Happy Birthday” being sung. Trina said, “Well, I’m not, for starters. And I heard about you and some not-so-subtle crush on Karl’s son, and I have seen you with that nice very white boy in the living room, so I’d wager you’re not. And I read that stealth date piece in, what, Teen Girl magazine? So I know you know Freddy Porter is all hetero dawg.”
Charles kicked open my door, carrying a birthday cake with candles nearly burned all the way down, wax dripping into the white frosting, with Mom, Henry, and Tig behind him. “Just cuz you’re a pop princess doesn’t mean you can keep us little people waiting,” Charles said.
Trina closed out the birthday song with an Arethaesque gospel ‘Happy birthday, dear Wonder, Happy Birthday to you,’ holding each note out, her voice so powerful and beautiful and pure, a complete contrast to the thin manufactured voice of Kayla that I’d truly gotten sick of hearing lip-synched during every performance of her tour. It gave me genuine birthday girl goose bumps on my arms.
Forty-four
I blew out
the candles on my birthday cake and followed everybody into the living room. I was cutting the first slice of cake when Tig said, “So I think you’ve thought long enough. I already talked to someone high up at one of the majors out in LA. They’re interested in hearing your new sound—think you can fly out there next week?”
Trina kicked Tig’s leg. There was this silence hanging in the room, like everyone was waiting for me to make some big press conference announcement.
The pop princess answered, “Tig, remember that time when you picked me up at Kayla’s to take me for a recording session and I was a little . . .”—I looked at Mom, couldn’t quite say ‘hungover’ in front of her—“under the weather, and you told me my irresponsible behavior was strike one? That I was a kid working in an adult world and I couldn’t afford to mess up like that?” Trina kicked Tig’s leg again. I continued, “Well, can we just skip right over to strike three? I think I need to be out! For now, at least. I’m seventeen, and I wouldn’t mind just being my age for a while. I’m kinda liking life as it is now. I don’t want to sell my soul for record sales. I want to earn whatever I get, make myself in my own image, not some record company’s. I think I need time to, like, figure out how to be a musician and all, figure out who I am.”
Tig said, “Don’t be all wise like that! You can’t just walk away from all the opportunities a performer in your position has. It just doesn’t happen.”
Trina latched on to Tig’s elbow. “It just did,” she said.
Trina and Mom were in a lockstep beaming and nodding moment, a could-we-be-any-prouder-of-our-little-girl look on their faces. It was too sickening to witness, so I excused myself to the kitchen to get a glass of water. Get over it, Trina and Mom!
Henry followed behind me and handed me a plate with a slice of birthday cake on it. I took a bite standing in front of the kitchen sink. “Oh, yummy!” I said. “This one’s a teeth tingler.”
“A teeth tingler?”
“You know, when the frosting is so ridiculously sugary that your teeth tingle.”
Henry just looked at me: a little admiring, a little nervous. I realized it was the same look he used to give me back at Devonport High—how come I’d never noticed it then?
He said, “That guy you stayed behind to talk to at the cafe. That was him, right? The Liam guy you told me about?”
“Yeah.” I didn’t want to lie.
“He looked like he wouldn’t mind the chance to become your boyfriend again.”
“He didn’t want to be my boyfriend. And he wasn’t ever my boyfriend. I’ve never had a boyfriend, at least not a proper one.”
“What does ‘a proper one’ mean?”
The sugar from the cake and frosting must have shot right through my veins, because I went into rant mode: “It means, one who takes time to get to know me, who likes me for me and doesn’t care whether or not I am or have been a pop princess, a guy who doesn’t think it’s the end of the world if we’re seen in public together, who looks me straight in the eyes, one who doesn’t expect to skip right to fooling around before he asks me out on a proper date—”
“Wonder,” Henry interrupted my rant.
“Yeah?”
He looked me straight in the eyes. “If you want a proper date with a great guy, maybe you ought to ask him out.”
Oh, he was really going to make me suffer for all those years of taking him for granted. And as Henry stood over me at the kitchen sink, all lanky and smiling, our first kiss might have happened right then and there if Charles hadn’t skateboarded into the kitchen.
I said, “Don’t ride that in here, you’ll scuff the floor tiles.”
“Shut up, butthole,” Charles said. He handed me a gift. “Here, this is from Dad.”
I unwrapped the present. Dad had sent me an exquisite music composition book made of Japanese rice paper. “Wow,” I said. “This is really nice. I’m surprised Dad sent anything at all for me.” Since I’d been back in Boston, I’d been to Devonport to visit a few times, but mostly Dad and I worked very hard at being polite with each other while I was there, or ignored one another.
Charles opened the fridge to pull out a beer. I went over and took Mom’s Sam Adams Light from Charles’s hands and replaced it with a can of Coke. Charles rolled his eyes at me but popped open the Coke and took a chug. Then he said, “You and Dad are so similar it’s scary. You’d better be the one to make up with Dad, because you’re both the same way, stubborn, but he’s like really old and settled in his ways, he’s never gonna be big enough to do it.”
“Why should it be me?” I said. “What am I gonna do, be all . . .”—and in a flash I was singing to the Chew it, blow it, lick it, pop pop pop “Bubble Gum Pop” melody, performing the old choreography, hands to knees to booty roll to twist, the signature move that girls at the mall were always asking me to show them—“Forgive me, Dad, 1 was wrong wrong wrong?”
Charles literally snarfed Coke out of his nose, he laughed so hard. When he finally caught his breath, he gave me this affectionate look that I don’t think he’d used on a big sister since Lucky. He said, “I didn’t know you could be so fun.”
“I didn’t either,” I said. I danced the rest of the routine back into the living room to finish our birthday celebration.
Forty-five
My life as a pop princess officially ended at the Dairy Queen.
I seem cosmically unable to escape that place.
With my new driver’s license (FINALLY), I had dipped into my modest “Bubble Gum Pop” earnings (modest by pop princess standards, at least) to buy a ten-year-old, mint-condition black VW Jetta with 80,000-plus miles on it and an awesome sound system. I was driving the Jettababy through Devonport when I recognized a familiar gray-haired figure sitting at an outdoor table at my old DQ.
I parked the car, kissed the steering wheel (I’ll never get over loving that car), and walked over to where Dad was sitting. He was reading a Jane Austen novel and had a cup of hot chocolate in front of him. The ocean wind was whipping through what was left of his gray hair, but I don’t think he even noticed that he was shivering in the December cold.
“Dad!”
He looked up. “Oh, hi.” He didn’t act surprised to me, just business as usual, like we hadn’t been checked out of each other’s lives ever since I checked into the pop princess lifestyle. He may possibly have been rude enough to be about to turn his eyes back to his book, but I took the book from his hands and shut it. Men who think they’re feminists because they’ve read Sense and Sensibility just make me wanna be crazy. I read that book, and not just the CliffsNotes. Lucky loved that book. But trust me, it’s just another book about a corset-wearing English girl obsessed with marriage and money. Boring. Mostly.
“I have another book for you,” I said. I took a book from my backpack, held it up for Dad, and ran my hands along the bottom and sides of it like I was one of Barker’s Beauties caressing a brand-spanking-new La-Z-Boy chair on The Price Is Right. “Ta-da,” I sang out.
“What’s this? I don’t understand.”
“It’s a G.E.D. test-prep study book. If you want me to take that test so badly, Dad, then you’re gonna have to help me study for it. I’ll be staying here two nights a week, beginning tonight.” Charles said I had to be big in this situation, and this was as big as I got.
“Really?” he said casually. But I could see in Dad’s eyes that he was pleased, that I was registering with him for the first time in a long time.
“Yeah, if I’m gonna go to Boston University one day and be a music major, then yeah, I gotta start here.”
“Mom said you were thinking about giving up your career for a while, but I didn’t realize it had progressed to this stage. Are you really serious about this?”
“I bought the book, didn’t I?”
“And the career?”
“On permanent hiatus, to be continued, whatever.”
Lecture face from Dad. “You know, it’s very difficult to come out from the stigma of having
been an adolescent star as you were. I find it hard to believe you will be content with having just one hit song and then simply walking away. Are you really prepared for the implications of your decision?”
“What, have you been tuning into Behind the Music now that Mom’s not around to hog the TV?” Dad blushed—he was watching TV! Shocker! The man who once unsuccessfully tried to ban Lucky and me from having a TV in our room because it was all “brain-rotting smut” was getting down with the cable hookup. I suppressed a laugh and said, “Yeah, I’m aware that this will be hard for me.”
Dad must have been mad that I was on to his dirty secret, because he dug deeper into lecture mode. “If you’re truly serious about going back to school, going to college, you know that you can’t just have that life handed to you like the singing career was—there’s no Cinderella angle for a proper education. Once you’ve taken the G.E.D., and assuming you pass, you’ll have to go to junior college before any reputable university will consider you, and you’ll have to excel at that junior college. Your high school academic record was not exactly stellar. This will be a real challenge, Wonder—hard, very hard, work. Are you sure you’re up for this?”
Oh, I wanted to strangle him. Give him an inch and he takes a mile. “What are you saying, Dad, that you don’t think I can do it? Because I don’t appreciate that attitude! Show a little faith in me, will you? I mean I’ve earned enough money to pay for my college education myself. That took work, you know, and it took persistence and some smarts to get myself this far on my own, and maybe I won’t have much money left over if I use what I’ve got for college and to keep that Jettababy running—”
Dad stood up from the table and snatched the Jane Austen book back into his hands. “That’s not what I was implying at all.”
I followed him as he stormed off toward our street. “Then what are you saying, Dad?”
He stopped, faced me. “If you really want to know, I was going to tell you I’m going back to work. I’ll be teaching at the community college in Devonport starting in January, and I was thinking we could spend some time together going through the college’s catalog, choosing some courses for you. It would be an excellent place for you to pick up with your education. But if you want to just assume the worst about my intentions like you always do . . .”