Rock My World (22 page)

“Is it okay
that I’m here? I mean, I can come back another time,” Jenna said, backpedaling
now that she was here.

“It’s a
beautiful day, isn’t it?” Noelle said.

“Y-yes, it
is.”

“I thought
I’d do a little snowshoeing. Care to join?”

Jenna’s eyes
widened. She’d never
snowshoed
before. “I don’t know
how.”

“If you can
walk, you can snowshoe. Come on, I have an extra pair in the garage.”

Jenna
followed Noelle down the spiraling stairs to the garage. The four-car garage
was mostly covered in bamboo flooring, except one concrete spot for a car to
park. The rest of the room seemed broken down into sections: one for sewing,
complete with dress form, shelves of fabric, buckets of buttons, and more
scissors and accessories than Jenna would ever know what to do with. Next to
the sewing section was a jewelry-making center, with hundreds of pegs full of
stranded beads, a table of bead boards, tiny tools, and a miniature kiln. The
other two walls were covered in pegboard familiar to many garages, organized
with tools, sports equipment by season, and accessories, and finally, a closet
just for outdoor clothing.

Noelle went
straight to the closet, pulling out lightweight waterproof clothes for Jenna, a
pair of low
Gore-tex
boots, and a pair of snowshoes
and poles. “Try them on in there.” She motioned to a bathroom built into what
would have been, in most garages, a utility closet.

Half an hour
later, they were sweating, snowshoeing across a field of gleaming white.
 
Jenna had already stripped down to her
t-shirt, and started to take the idea of wicking undergarments more seriously.
She never thought it possible to sweat so much in forty-degree weather.

Noelle set a
grueling pace and Jenna, who thought she was in good shape, struggled to keep
up in the altitude. Finally, they reached a low peak overlooking a valley below
of soft brown mountains blanketed in fresh snow, sparkling in the sunlight.

“It’s
beautiful.” Jenna said, panting.

“
Mmm
,” Noelle agreed, the corners of her mouth turning up in
a smile. “So, you ready to talk yet?” She looked over at Jenna.

Jenna fought
her instinct to deny it. She leaned forward, transferring the weight onto her
poles, looking into the distance, wondering how to begin.

“Do you have
a best friend?” Jenna asked.

“You mean
besides George?”

“Yeah, a
female best friend.”

“No.”

“Oh.” Jenna
couldn’t hide her disappointment.

“I did have
one, a long time ago.” Noelle said in a quiet voice.

“What
happened?”

“A boy came
between us.” Noelle’s jaw tensed as she said it. “The usual cliché.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It was a
long time ago. I haven’t thought about her in years.”

“Really?”
Jenna said, hopeful. “How did you get over it?”

“You make it
sound like a break-up.”

“Well, yeah.
It
kinda
is, don’t you think?”

“I suppose
you’re right. Different though. You can’t go crying to your boyfriend about
your best friend dumping you for another guy.” Noelle said. They stood there,
silent together.

“I’m so
lost.” Jenna admitted. Noelle didn’t respond. Jenna plowed on, hoping she
wouldn’t cry. “For so long I thought I had it all figured out. I thought my job
was to be a good wife, friend, mother, and daughter. I was good at it. I made
sure everyone had all the love and support they needed. I gave them everything
I had. And now I have nothing to show for it and no one to turn to. It’s not
fair.”

“It’s not
about life being fair.” Noelle said, without a hint of cruelty. Whatever Jenna
had hoped to hear, that wasn’t it. Noelle saw her stricken face.

“It’s about
what you do with the life you’re given. It’s about you being the best version
of you,” she said. Jenna didn’t reply, she felt stung. Noelle tipped her head
in a gesture that said “take it or it leave it” and started the trek back to
the car. The weather hadn’t changed, but the sweat on Jenna’s body turned cold
and she sped up to get her circulation pumping again.

The
bitterness she’d felt quickly evaporated through the exertion of stepping and
pulling the bulky snowshoes in and out of the slushy afternoon snow. By the
time they reached the car, they were both exhausted and sweating.

They
stripped off their layers, throwing their equipment in the back of Noelle’s
hybrid S.U.V. Noelle pulled out two thermoses and handed one to Jenna.

“Hot toddy?”

“Yes,
please.”

They sat on
the back bumper, sipping their thermoses, looking out at the lake.

“How do I
know if my marriage is over?” Jenna asked.

Chapter
37

Alex Anders
sat alone, in another anonymous lobby of a five star hotel somewhere in
America. The marble floor was cold. A chandelier hung in contrived
grandeur.
 
He faced the front desk,
sitting on the only couch not looking out through the wall of windows. He
wasn’t there for the view.

He tapped
the keys of his laptop furiously, face obscured between a baseball cap and the
top of the screen. He wrote a daily travel blog for his social networking fans
full of all the crap they wanted to hear; regaling them with anecdotes about
the terrible food on the road, the more interesting banter between he and his
band mates, their mustache growing competitions and bizarre superstitions,
leaving out the unpalatable things like the bet between Joe and Pete to see who
could sleep with the most skanks per zip code.

Alex did as
he was told. He went through the motions, but to what end? He didn’t know
anymore. That was the worst part. He created for the sake of creating, because
he had no choice. Not because some rich puppeteer got off on it, but because
making music was how he knew he was alive.
Well
then why not just make music in your garage and call it a day?
His father’s
voice sounded in his head.

What else could I do? Could I be happy
without music?
He knew the answer to that.
 
No. He didn’t want to face what that
meant, though. Could he choose between music and his family?

“Is that
him?” whispered a teenage girl from a nearby couch.

“Ask him!”
said the girl sitting next to her. They giggled, unaware that Alex could hear
everything they said.

It was just
like being on stage. As soon as he was on stage people acted as though he was
in a bubble, impervious to sound. Like he was a hologram, visible yet somehow
oblivious to their whispering or throwing things or taking flash photos right
up in his face, making him feel like a caged animal at the zoo.

The first
girl chickened out of talking to him, and though she kept stealing long
glances, he knew it was the second one that approached him, even before he
looked up from his laptop.

She looked
like one of Felicity’s classmates, dark brown hair with unnaturally yellow
highlights, styled to look much older, wearing shorts too short to suggest
anything she should mean to, and a pair of tall shearling boots made popular by
surfers. The look was more Lolita than fashionable, he thought.

Unlike her
shy friend who squirmed on the opposite couch covering her mouth in delighted
horror, Lolita strut right up to him, forcing him to look up from his screen.
She tilted her head up in a “what’s up” gesture, without speaking. Alex raised
his eyebrows, amused by her audacity.

“You’re Alex
Anders.” It was a statement, not a question, and he kept his face neutral. She
took his silence as confirmation and plopped down next to him,
not-so-subtly
glancing at his open screen. He snapped it
shut. She shrugged, inching toward him.

“Could you
please respect my space?” he said, moving as far over on the couch as the
loveseat would allow. He was aware of the hotel clerk watching them, probably
with a camera phone at the ready. He set the closed laptop between them as a
buffer.

She turned to face him. “I don’t even use
Myspace
,” she said, pulling a rolled up magazine from her
impossibly small back pocket. “Can you sign this for me?”

“Sure,” he
said, keeping his eyes up.

This girl made him grateful they were in broad
daylight in a populated space. He took the magazine from her, flattening it on
the table. He recognized the photo on the opposite page as being one of the
shots taken for the
Rolling Stone
article, which he assumed is what he must be holding.

“Do you have
a pen?” he asked.

“Sure do,”
she said, standing inches away from him, her crotch at eye level. He looked
down at the magazine. She set the pen in front of him, brushing his hand as she
pulled hers away. He scribbled quickly, not asking to whom he should make it
out. He shoved it out towards her, mumbling, “Here,” under his breath.

She took it,
but stayed where she was until he chanced a glance up at her.

“So … is it
true?” she asked.

“Is what
true?”

“Are you
screwing your wife’s best friend?”

He didn’t
know if he felt more uncomfortable because of her language or the accusation.
He narrowed his eyes, mentally giving her a lesson in where her behavior was
leading and encouraging her to find some self-esteem. “Do you believe
everything you hear?”

“That’s not
an answer,” she said, shrugging.

“No,” he said,
his tone harsh.

“Geez, okay.
Don’t get
all defensive
. You could do better anyway.”
She said, turning around to leave slowly enough to give him the reverse view
while he picked his jaw up off the floor. He made a promise not to let Felicity
ever hang out with a girl like that.

The
encounter shook him up so much that it wasn’t until he got home from that
night’s concert that he realized he hadn’t heard about the
Rolling Stone
article coming out. He checked online. No emails. It
wasn’t on their website. He didn’t want to talk to Simon if he didn’t have to
so he called his publicist, Mindy.

“Hey Min,
sorry to bother you.” He never knew what time zone he was calling from so erred
on the side of caution that he’d just woken someone.

“Not at all.
What’s up?” a perky voice answered.

“Just
wondering if I could get a copy of that
Rolling
Stone
interview.”

“It’s not
out yet. It comes out next week. I can ask though.”

“No, that
can’t be right. I signed a fan’s copy today,” he said.

“I just
spoke to Kelly and we’re supposed to get a proof tomorrow. It’s not out. Maybe
it was an old edition?” She asked, not at all perturbed.

“Maybe.” A
knot wound itself up in his gut. “Thanks, Min. Talk to you later.”

He hung up,
the knot tightening. He couldn’t articulate why, but he had a sinking feeling
he was right about Rose McKenna.

Chapter
38

“Are you
going to the game tonight?” Trey asked Felicity as they walked down the long
hallway, lined with lockers on both sides. She spun the dial on hers, clanking
it open and draping her backpack over the bottom hook.

“Yeah, I thought
we were going together?” She said.

“Just
checking.” He grinned.

“How’d you
do on the
Chem
quiz?” She asked.

“Meh,” he
said, leaning back against the closed locker bank. He smiled. “Let me guess,
you’re pissed because you got an A minus.”

“No! Okay,
yeah, but it’s only because that last question was total BS!” She hated when he
made fun of her perfectionism. It was pointless to stay mad at him when he was
so cute and playful, though. “Meet you here after last period?”

He nodded,
pushing his lean frame off the metal lockers. His broad shoulders acted like a
hanger for his worn t-shirt, his scruffy caramel colored hair brushed a pale
strip on his tanned neck where, Felicity noticed, he’d recently had a haircut.

A driver’s
ed
class and a history test later,
they sat, cross-legged on Trey’s living room floor. Felicity loved how homely
his house was—unlike her own. With all her mom’s design obsessions,
everything was always shiny and new, unsullied by the normal messes incurred by
living in a home. Trey lived in a small two-bedroom house in urban-suburban
Silverlake
.

His mom, a nurse who worked nights, got the house
in the divorce long before it became a trendy neighborhood, and she’d furnished
it piecemeal over the years. Nothing matched but it was comfortable and
Felicity felt at home there.

They began
their pre-game ritual of ordering a pizza and watching B-grade horror flicks on
mute. The tradition started in junior high when Trey invited Felicity to watch
a zombie movie and, when she caught her first glimpse of the
gauze-wrapped-fake-blood-soaked zombie, she screamed and ran out of the house,
terrified by nightmares for months. She didn’t speak to him for two weeks.