Everybody Knows Your Name (21 page)

Three
Weeks
Later

I feel like I'm forgetting something. Bags are packed. Voices echo in the mansion as production people shout about cleaning it out and shutting it down. Every few minutes I'm hearing the beep of a walkie-talkie bouncing off the hallway. In the two hours since elimination, this place has already gone from home to the county fair on its last night in town.

“Car to the airport will be here in five.” I look over my shoulder, and Jesse is in the doorway wearing his usual stressed-out expression, but tonight he's even more wound up. He doesn't wait for a response before he splits.

I look around my room one last time.

Don't know what I feel like I'm forgetting since I brought almost nothing with me, and I'm leaving with the same. The sheets with the high thread count aren't mine. The big terry cloth robe in the closet isn't mine. The spa slippers at the foot of the bed were there when I showed up, and I've decided they're staying. I'm just not a spa or a slipper kind of guy.

My lone new item is the expensive leather jacket I'm wearing that Robyn gave me to travel home in for good luck. She said it was for luck, anyway—I realize that mostly it's so I look less like a hobo if anybody takes a photo of me.

Somebody should shake me,
I think, turning around in this room that's been mine for the past couple of months. I'm not getting it. I mean, look, I know what's happened, I'm not a total idiot. I understand that tonight I've made it to the final three. I, Ford, am in the final three. Ford Buckley is included in the final three. That's me. Ford Buckley, finalist.

I know I'm supposed to be packing up, getting on a plane within the hour.

But I only ever pictured leaving in defeat. I never really thought about how I'd feel if I made it through.

Just three weeks ago I thought I was done for. When my mom called the radio station to talk about me being an awful son, and America wanted me out during double elimination week, I was sure that was it. Without Magnolia, it would have been over.

I expected my parents to keep talking and dragging me down. I fully expected to be booted the following week. But then things went quiet on that front. Mysteriously quiet. And a few days after they left town, I found out that my mom, dad, and Cody were in a Texas jail. Sissy called me to break the news.

They had been chugging down the highway in that RV loaded with weed, living their version of the old American dream of striking gold in California, when two officers pulled them over for speeding. It was a drug corridor. The officers got suspicious. They smelled something, did a search. Fortunately for Sissy, she'd hopped out at a truck stop near Vegas because she wanted to do some gambling. She took a Greyhound home, and on the way she received a collect call from an inmate in Amarillo.

So that was that. They were back inside. You can expect to be disappointed by certain people, and you can tell yourself they're always going to do what they're going to do and it's time to learn to accept that you can't do a damn thing about any of it. But it's just not so easy.

Family has a weird power over you. They implant something way down inside while you still have that wide-open little kid heart. They're in there somewhere, chiming in with their opinions all through your life, whether you like it or not. They can hurt you worse than anyone, and then make you feel guilty about it.

Yet here I am, still standing in this contest.

So I'm just a little bit stunned.

You're going to go to the airport and get on the plane,
I tell myself, thinking maybe the way around being stunned is to take baby steps. Mental baby steps. Forget figuring out what it all means and just do the next thing on the list.

But the next baby step goes to hell because next on the list is
fly to Calumet
. You can't even fly right into Calumet, though. The only airstrip we have is for dusting crops. So now I'm attempting to picture the production crew driving a long line of white rental vans all the way from Memphis and past that airstrip, with its sad orange wind sock flapping over the cotton fields. And then picturing them whipping onto Main Street, turning sleepy Calumet into the crazy beehive that is a Hollywood production. All with me at the center of it.

My brain just can't fit those two worlds together.

I wonder if the production crew understands how small Calumet is. If they're expecting a big crowd, they're going to be disappointed. They could probably rouse, like, thirty people to stand with their arms crossed in a half circle, hanging back as far from the stage as possible. That's how things at home usually go. Maybe the producers could pay some extras to show up and look alive.

I check under the bed just to make sure that the nagging feeling isn't due to something I've left there, and I spot a squashed trash bag between the bed frame and the wall. It's one of Cody's “luggage” pieces. He left it here that afternoon before we went to the party and never came back for it.

I guess he doesn't need any of this stuff now that he's back in a jumpsuit. I consider dragging his stinky clothes onto the plane with me. But then I think,
Why would I do that?
Why would I want to go out of my way to watch out for his stuff when he didn't even give a second thought to destroying mine?

I'm reminded of my pile of dirty laundry waiting in the corner of my bedroom back in Calumet and all the other little things I left unfinished. Bills in the mailbox, dishes in the sink, the stray cat I always feed (I've got Leander refilling a huge butter tub with kibble, just in case the little guy's still coming around): that's my real life. There's no way people back home are going to buy into me as some kind of wannabe celebrity. Although they might line up just to laugh in my face.

Back when I used to get dragged to Sunday school by my grandma, they told this story about Jesus returning to his hometown and preaching. Everybody there was like, “Isn't that Mary's kid? Who does think he is, coming back here and acting like a big shot?”

I'm pretty sure it's going to be worse for me. I haven't even performed any miracles.

I lean against the windowsill, looking out. It's not like I'm cocky about my chances of winning this thing—I know it could all still amount to nothing. I know singers come and go all the time. They get forgotten. I know I haven't won anything I can take to the bank. But I suppose I'm the kind of happy you get when you feel like you proved something to yourself, something you can always keep with you. Even if I turn out to be the only one who remembers it.

Even so, something is bothering me. I always thought if I could just win this thing, my life would line up straight and make sense for once. Instead I feel like there's a missing component.

In this momentary stillness, I know what it is. I can't stop thinking about Magnolia. This whole spectacle feels borderline empty without her.

I remember how hard it is to find someone in this world who really understands you. And how hard it is not to be afraid once you realize that means they can see right through you.

Catherine yells from the hallway, “Ford, I swear to God if you don't get in the car right now, I'm giving you ‘Wind Beneath My Wings' in the finale!”

“Coming,” I say, and head out of the room.

There are lots of people on the first floor already working on getting the mansion back to its original state. The recessed lights are on their brightest setting, like a bar that's turned up its lights at closing time. A production assistant is removing some giant neon letters from the wall they brought in for filming to make the house look younger and cooler. Another girl is tagging the furniture for storage.

“Don't forget to empty the fridge!” Catherine calls to the staff, her voice vaulting off the high ceiling.

Mila and McKinley, the other two finalists, have already left in their limos, headed back to their hometowns. I'm the last one out. It's odd, the mansion coming undone like this, like seeing something you're not supposed to. Or seeing something that never really existed.

Catherine continues out to the front, but I stop for a second in the entryway and just look back at the house. I was here. This is where I first really kissed
her
, just the two of us alone. I make myself walk out, leaving the big doors open behind me.

Whatever happens now, I went into this house one person, and I'm leaving a different one.

Urgent honking blares from the limo. Catherine is over there, holding the back door open. She gestures like she wants to strangle me. “Chop, chop, let's go!”

As I walk toward her, the headlights of the limo wink off metal in the open garage. It's the chrome of my motorcycle propped against the wall. I hadn't stopped to consider how I would get it back home. I think,
Maybe that's what I felt like I was missing
.

But it isn't that, I know it.

“What about my bike?” I ask.

“Don't worry, it'll get to you.” Catherine's a woman of her word, so I don't doubt it. I head over to the limo, and she gives me the rundown. “I thought I was going to die before I got you off this property. Anyway, Tiffany will be accompanying you to Arkansas—”

I look in the limo and Tiffany, who's a junior producer, is already sitting in there, typing on her iPad. She gives me a tired smile.

“And I'm staying here to set up the LA performance, but I'm reachable. Do you have everything you need?”

Catherine's asking that as a joke because I've taken so long to get out of the mansion, not really expecting that I'm going to pause and consider if I do have everything I need.

Her face starts to go from impatient to alarmed when she sees the look on mine. “Ford, no.”

“But I don't,” I say, and I start to back away from the limo.

“Ford!” she calls.

“It's true! I really don't.”

Her increasingly loud threats turn into background noise as I turn and walk toward my motorcycle.

I've been back in school for three weeks now. At first I kept going through the same three interactions. The first was that someone I'd never talked to before would pass by my locker and say, “You seem to be glowing. . . . Is there a
spotlight
on you?” And I'd say, “Hey, good one,” even after I'd heard it for the hundredth time.

The second one was specific to Mrs. Corinthos. When she'd see me in the English building hallway, she'd say something along the lines of, “That Superstar was
yours
. Not his! You didn't have to give up your power!” And I'd say, “Got to run, late for class!”

The third was that every time I passed near one of the American flags on campus, another fellow student I'd never talked to would stick a thumb out at me and make theatrically nervous eyes, or tell the teacher that she should take it down before I made the flag a picnic blanket. I would also say, “Good one,” to that. So in the beginning, it was basically “Good one, got to run, good one” for a few days straight.

It's always people I didn't really know making the comments. Acquaintances and former friends just watch me carefully, like I've come back from TV as something else, like I'm only in disguise as myself. It's been very weird.

In the midst of this heightened scrutiny, there have been three saving graces. The first has been the Xanax that my new psychiatrist, Dr. Turnbull, prescribed me after I came home from the show and had my first panic attack. My mom still isn't especially speaking to me, so I had to find him myself.

But the thing I've learned about modern psychiatrists is that they only want to give you medication, and they don't actually want to talk to you beyond checking that your dosage is effective. So my second saving grace has been Lucien. We video-chat a few times a week about how my script is coming along, but there's always time for him to go into his mode of fatherly analysis.

The second week home I had another panic attack while I was alone one night, writing up in my room. I wasn't feeling panicked about anything in particular, I didn't think. I Skyped Lucien once I didn't feel like my chest was going to crack in half, and he answered with Scottie sitting on his lap.

I told him, “It's weird because I actually felt more consciously anxious when I was on the show, but I didn't have panic attacks then.”

When Lucien is about to help me toward a realization, he looks like he's biting on an invisible pipe.

“What's today?” he asked me.

“Wednesday.”

“What time did you have the panic attack?”

“It was probably . . . a little bit after eight,” I said, understanding what he was getting at. “Oh. Okay. Right.”

That would have been show time. I haven't been watching the show because I'm trying to separate myself from it. But I talk to both Mila and Lucien, so I always know who's gone home. I hear it around school too. After me, it was Nikki. After Nikki, it was Ricky.

“I'm thinking these attacks might be a delayed response,” Lucien said in a baby voice to Scottie.

“Like maybe now I'm feeling the weight of performing because I have the time and space?”

“Maybe something about the experience hasn't been worked through.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Oh, man, this kid just took a shit that came out the sides of her diaper,” Lucien said, and then he had to hang up abruptly.

The third saving grace has been the rediscovery of Jenny Irving. Jenny used to be in the group of thirty that grew from my group of fifteen in middle school that grew from my group of five in elementary school. In the group of thirty, there was always so much going on that it was easy to not actually know some of your friends. I never had a real sense of what Jenny was like.

But the second week back, I saw Jenny rolling her eyes at Sebastien Rodriguez when he jumped on the flagpole during our run in PE and yelled over at me, “I see you eyeing your new gym towel!” I rolled my eyes too, and it was like when you're a little girl and you hold hands with a new friend, this tandem rolling of Jenny's and my eyes.

Jenny and I started running together during PE. It was so easy to start doing this, it was almost—almost—hard for to me to remember how stuck within myself I'd felt. There was this role I was assigned, and I just couldn't leave it, until I could.

After a fourth panic attack, Lucien had suggested I try dyeing my hair back as further separation from the show, to see how it felt. I thought that was a decent idea. Jenny's hair is bleached platinum, and all I had to do was ask, “Do you dye your own hair?” She did, so I asked if she would help me go back to brunette. That night she came over with a box of Garnier Nutrisse in Sweet Cola. Yesterday Jenny and I had lunch together at the wall across from the lockers.

This morning when Lucien and I were Skyping before school, he had me virtually babysit Scottie for a few minutes so Amy, his wife, could take a shower and he could make himself breakfast. This just meant that I watched Scottie gum her teddy bear in her playpen via Lucien's laptop. If there was a freak accident with the bear, I was supposed to scream at the top of my lungs so Lucien could hear me in the kitchen, and dial 911.

Scottie was still happily gumming the bear when Lucien sat back down with his waffles in front of the computer.

“So tell me how things are going with Jenny Irving,” he said, chewing. “Sounds like you two are simpatico.”

“Seems like it,” I agreed.

“I saw promise when you told me about the dual eye rolling. You know, lasting bonds are often built out of mutual antipathy for something. Does it surprise you that you're going to end up being friends with her?”

“It just seems weird that that we weren't friends before.” I was sitting at my bedroom desk and put my head down on my arm. “I guess I feel kind of stupid that all these hurdles I felt weren't real.”

“They were real.”

“They probably didn't exist outside my head.”

“There's a distinction. I know you had a shitty—” He looked at Scottie. “Sorry,” he said to her. “Sorry,” he said to me. “I know you had a bad time on the show, but maybe you could make your peace with it by thinking about it as the place that started transforming your inner reality, right? It's where you became friends with Mila.”

“True.”

“And where you profoundly bonded with me.”

“Yes, yes. I mean, what do you want to hear, that you've changed my life?”

“And Ford.”

I was quiet.

“And Ford,” Lucien said again.

I was still quiet.

“Should I go for a third?”

“I heard you.”

Lucien made the look like he was biting on an invisible pipe, and I thought,
Here it comes
.

He said, “Remember what I first responded to in your writing, what I said about your understanding of characters?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That when it comes to motivation and personality, you don't see the world in black and white. You're able to see . . .”

He paused. He wanted me to fill it in.

“Really?” I asked.

“Tell Scottie. She hasn't heard it.” Scottie was lying facedown on top of the bear.

I sighed. “Gray.”

“There is it. You're able to see gray. In people that don't exist. You can't do that in real life? You have to keep Ford in the black cowboy hat?”

“But I think I
can
do it in real life,” I say. “I don't hate my mom, right? I still can see the gray in her, even though she's ignoring me. I would never say she has only terrible qualities even if things are terrible between us right now. And, hey, Scott's supposed to come over tonight and we're actually going to try being real friends. When I came back home and I was able to say to myself, maybe there's something worth preserving—that's gray, right? I haven't made him all bad in my head, or I wouldn't be giving this a shot.”

“But Ford's still not gray? How long do you want to carry that around with you?”

I lifted my head up and shook my backpack in front of my computer's camera. “Well, conversation has to end here for today,” I said. “Got to get to school.”