Everybody Knows Your Name (4 page)

“I missed the flight,” I reminded him. Now, I had some idea that I could call the producers and beg them to get me another ticket. Maybe they could do it. I didn't really know. I'd heard that out in Los Angeles, people in TV just threw money around like it was confetti.

But I couldn't bring myself to pick up the phone. Asking for another ticket felt the same as saying that I was just some backwoods guy who had messed up before anything even started. What was I gonna say?
Hey, sorry I missed the flight, got arrested for being at a drug party. Can you just send another four hundred dollars?

I told Leander, “It's over.”

“There's more than one way to get to California.”

“Maybe I don't want to hear what those people think of my singing anyway.”

Leander nodded again, like I was making some kind of sense, but then he said, “I think you're lying to yourself. I think you do want to know. You think it's common to have the kind of talent you have? That promise, it's in your bones, and if you don't let it out, it's gonna burn you up. And I don't feel like sitting around watching it happen. So you're fired.”

I smiled, assuming that he was joking. “C'mon.”

“That's right.” He gave me a look that said,
Cut the bull
. Then he pulled the car up to my house and held out some cash. “Here's two hundred dollars severance pay. That should be enough gas money to get you to LA. Don't think it over another second. You get out of my truck, and you leave town right this minute.”

When he wanted, Leander had a way of talking that cut right into me. So when he looked at me with those wise hard eyes of his and told me to
leave town right this minute
, that's what I did.

Twenty hours later I wish I'd at least stopped by a store to pick up some new shirts and maybe some provisions for the trip. Still, just driving through all that empty space has made me feel like I'm expanding. I want to keep driving. I don't really ever want to arrive.

It's one a.m. when I walk through the doors of the hotel, only thirty-eight hours later than I was supposed to be here. It's definitely not the Motel 6. The lobby reminds me of the inside of one of those science labs where they solve crimes on TV, except there are a bunch of cute girls hanging around instead of nerdy scientists. I mean, there are more good-looking girls in this one hotel lobby than in all of Calumet put together.

The desk clerk looks me up and down before he types my name into the computer. “Mr. Buckley, you're with
Spotlight
?”

Nobody's ever called me Mr. Buckley before, outside of school when I was in trouble. “Yes, sir,” I say. “That's me.”

He picks up a phone, dials, and has a quick conversation. “. . . no, he's here now. Yes, he's standing right in front of me. Okay.” He hangs up. “The producer will be right down, Mr. Buckley, if you want to have a seat on one of the lounge chairs.”

The last part of the drive out I'd been filled with weird confidence. Felt like the whole city was waiting out here just for me. But now, looking around at this crime lab with the attractive girls and the DJ playing his bleep-bleeps and boops, I start feeling pretty nervous.

They aren't gonna let me in this thing
. I didn't even call to tell them that I was making the drive. I didn't even call them after I missed the plane. What if I'm disqualified already? I probably am. Stupid. What was I thinking anyway? I don't even have enough money to make it back home. They're probably sending a security guard down to throw me out of here.

“Ford?” A woman's standing in front of me in a silk robe, like I woke her from sleeping. She doesn't look as old as I thought a producer would, but she does look pretty annoyed.

“Sorry I'm late.”

She puts two fingers to her eyebrows like I've given her a headache. “Where the hell have you been? You made me feel like some soccer mom who lost her overgrown kid at the mall, you know what I'm saying? I had a PA talk to the guy at your work—”

“Leander?”

“I guess? He said you were ‘going to be here, he guaranteed it.' But there was no way to reach you. There are these things called cell phones.”

“Yeah, I don't have one right now.” I shrug, then ask, “What's your name?”

“What?” She seems to awaken, and looks at me in surprise.

“Your name.”

I swear she's acting like I asked her what she wants for Christmas. Finally she gets over the surprise and says, “Catherine.”

“Hi, Catherine, nice to meet you. Like I said, sorry I'm late. I got held up on account of some family stuff.”

“We've been trying to decide on a replacement for you all day. You know, I was one of the ones who really fought for you because I thought the show could use a little hayseed—no offense,” she tells me. “You made me look bad.”

I look her in the eyes. “I'm real sorry, and that's the best I've got. If you let me compete, it won't happen again. I'll be punctual.”

She studies me, and I can sense she's starting not to be annoyed anymore. “Did you buy your own ticket?”

“No, I drove.”

“You drove out here?”

“On my motorcycle.”

She jumps up and down one time like a little girl. “We should get some footage of you on the motorcycle! It will kill in your video package, set up that whole personal narrative of an outsider rolling into town on a cloud of dust. I'm picturing dirt. Torn denim. Maybe we get a tumbleweed.” She seems so suddenly excited that I get excited too, thinking I'm back in.

But then her expression goes flat as fast as it lit up and she says, “I've got to talk to my executive producer. Hold on.”

She steps away to make a call on her cell phone. It's in a sparkling case. She looks over at me as she talks. Then she hangs up, and instead of coming back over, starts typing away.

Suddenly I want to grab her and beg for mercy and explain that this is life or death for me. A momentous feeling runs through me. The kind you get sometimes when you realize the weight of something while it's still happening. This lady and whoever was on the other end of that phone are about to make a decision they'll probably forget about in a week, but I'll be living with it forever.

She walks back over. Her expression hasn't changed. “Welcome to Hollywood,” she says. “Let's get you a room.”

The room is bigger than my house. It's a little weird, though. There's a chair shaped like a hand and a black-and-white photo of a nude girl shown all curled up on a floor. You'd need a pilot's license to turn on the sink. I guess in LA they just like simple things to be complicated. I throw myself on the bed, trying to calm down, but I can't, so I decide to go to the roof and look at the city.

A bartender getting off his shift tells me the whole roof is normally like an outdoor club, but now it's so late that everyone's gone home. When I get out there, it's quiet and abandoned.

I walk over to the long narrow pool that makes it look like you could swim right off the edge of the building. Except for the lights under the water, the patio area has gone dark. Beyond it, Los Angeles is hard to take in. Hard for me to understand. City lights go to every horizon. Where do you even start in a place like this? All those people, and for them Calumet may as well not exist at all.

“Hello, Los Angeles.” I say this out loud, not sure why. I lean on the railing and watch a helicopter fly off around the corner of a skyscraper.

“Sorry, it's not going to say hello back.”

I turn around. I guess she was there the whole time, a girl sitting behind me in a strange egg-shaped chair. Just sitting there. I can't help but think right off that she's pretty. But the kind of pretty where pretty seems like a wrong, too-soft word. Her hair is dark, long, with these two thin braids in the front of it. I think she might be my age. She doesn't look like I imagined girls in Los Angeles would, all platinum-blonde hair and diamonds in their ears or something, but she's nothing like the girls from home either.

“Hey,” I say. “I'm Ford.”

“Hi,” she says, but doesn't give me a name. It's seeming like people are cagey about that around here. But I'm not letting her off the hook.

“What's your name?”

She sits up and forward and gets this determined look on her face like she's suddenly decided to get involved with talking to me. I'm not sure what I did to open her up. “Magnolia.”

“Huh, that's a nice one,” I say. “I have a cousin named Marigold, but she doesn't look like a Marigold—she looks more like a thornbush, if you know what I mean. Rough. She's locked up for trying to blackmail a guy.” I don't even know why I'm telling her about anyone in my family. I should be starting out new.

“My mom named me after
Steel Magnolias
, the movie,” Magnolia says. “She loves Julia Roberts.”

“Why didn't she name you Julia, then?”

“Middle name.”

I laugh, and the sound of it in the air makes me realize I'm tired. “That's a mouthful, Magnolia Julia.”

“Your drawl just gave it another syllable.” I think I can see her barely smile in the dark. I've racked up some experience making girls smile, but this almost feels lucky. She twists the chair a little from side to side, like she's trying to shake more conversation out of herself. “Where are you from?”

“Arkansas. I just got here. I've never been before. I'm supposed to be on a TV show.”

“
Spotlight
?”

“You too?” Her too.

“Me too.”

“How nervous are you?”

“I'm going to approach this thing with a lot of energy.”

“What?” I look at her sideways. “Come on, that's a cop-out. That's like a robot answer.” I break into a robot dance for her for a second, doing a robot voice. “I-have-en-er-gy.”

She regards me with such seriousness. “Your robot is so bad that I'm not sure they have robots where you're from.”

“Now, I thought we were being friendly.”

“I am being friendly! And energetic.”

I think about what a girl like her would think if I took her out with me in Calumet. The way the other girls would give her suspicious looks, how small potatoes it would all look to her. The difference is just in the way that everyone's come up. It runs through everything everyone does. A girl like this could barely grasp at the feeling you get when you're born and raised in a town so small that people still hold you responsible for shit your grandparents did.

“It's different where I'm from.” I look out over the endless lights. “That's for sure.”

“Different how?” she asks.

If I wanted to explain why to her and do any kind of a decent job, I'd have to get into my background and my family. And telling her about Marigold already feels like enough of a stumble.

“I really don't think you'd understand,” I say, and as soon as I've said it, I can hear how it sounds. It sounds like I'm blowing her off.

The look in her eyes changes, like she's suddenly given up on whatever she wanted out of our conversation. She gets up out of the egg chair. She does the Robot—and she's good at it.

Then she walks off, her high-tops squeaking on the pool deck. I watch her, outlined against the night, and I keep my mouth shut just in case being mysterious can save me.

The producers originally wanted the ten of us to meet while arriving at the mansion so cameras could be there when we took in the size of the bathtubs. But we have to do it instead at the vocal coach's glass house in the Hollywood Hills. Or at least what's supposed to be the vocal coach's house for the purposes of the show, since I don't know if this is actually where she lives. I'm kind of suspicious because I haven't seen personal photos anywhere. Also, she keeps saying things like “This is so cute” and “Cute, cute, cute, I love this” every time she notices a vase or a little statue on a shelf. Either she's just really, really appreciative of her belongings every morning or else she's never been here before either.

There's no filming yet, so Catherine, the head producer, says, “You can just be yourselves for a second.”

We've been asked to sit still on the white leather sectional while a cameraman checks the lighting under our faces. But the guy I met on the hotel rooftop, Ford, has gotten up to go stand at the window while he waits his turn. He was in my dream last night, and it was one of those dreams where your brain tricks you into thinking you're so close to someone you don't even know in real life that you wake up sort of devastated, like you've actually lost him. And all we were doing in my dream was collecting marbles together.

Anyway, this lingering feeling is making it hard for me to look at him, so I'm ignoring him instead.

Besides that, I think I'm doing great at coming out of my shell. Normally, I would be the one standing over at the window. But here I am, sitting on the couch with the group and keeping my eyes wider than usual so I don't seem withdrawn.

Catherine stands in front of us and claps her hands together once as if she's going to lead us in a prayer. I can smell her perfume, which is like oranges if oranges were mostly made out of metal.

“I'm going to need you all to pay attention to the rundown because I will open a wrist if I have to repeat it. Dress rehearsals are on Tuesdays. Live PST performance show is on Wednesday nights. Live eliminations on Friday nights. Do you know what it means that they've put us on Friday nights for a limited run? Hint: Friday night is the anus of the television week. It means we're plugging a hole until the network unfurls its new awkward genius crime solver. Do you know what
that
means? It means viewership expectations aren't very high. And what does that mean for me? It means I could really shine.”

When she says “shine,” she separates her hands like she's accepting rays of light from heaven.

“Bright like a diamond. But back to the schedule. Mondays through Wednesdays will be your heaviest days of scene tapings.”

The show's casting notice originally caught my mom's eye because the new idea behind
Spotlight
is that it's part singing competition and part reality soap opera. On the live shows, our performances will only take up half the hour. The other half will be scenes of us bonding and having fights. I'm more nervous about whether I'm going to bond than I am about getting up onstage and singing.

“You will know when the cameras are in the house,” Catherine says. “These periods will be limited, and you will not be taped without warning, because some of you are considered children, and I will have the child labor people deep in my Friday-night anus if they think I have kids on tape around the clock.”

“The ladies don't think I'm a child,” says McKinley, the youngest on the show. He's fourteen. His angelic mom, Shannon, is with him, and she keeps on fixing the curl that's supposed to fall over his right eye. (It wants to go straight down the middle.)

McKinley also has this habit of winking if anybody calls him by name. When a PA was taking roll to make sure that everyone made it over here from the hotel, the rest of the contestants said, “Here,” but McKinley just winked while the PA was looking at her clipboard, so for a second she got scared we'd lost him.

“I don't think the sixth graders commenting on YouTube are ladies,” Catherine says. Then she continues, squinting one eye as she asks, “Are these scenes going to be real?” as if this is a really tough question coming from someone else. “Mooooostly. We're not going to invent story lines out of thin air, like a cancer scare, for instance. But there will be gentle guidance so we end up with something to use. And all that means is say if you, Dillon—”

She gestures to Dillon, who's twenty and comes out of some pretty big Midwestern Jewish temple where he sings rock songs, except he just swaps out lyrics about boyfriends or girlfriends for God. On the van from the hotel, he told us he got into rock singing when his temple decided to try to compete with all the local mega churches, but before that he'd personally been more into rap. The thing is, he looks a lot like Jesus.

“Happened to get into a fight with Belinda—”

To Dillon's right is Belinda, twenty-one, who definitely looks like a hippie on the outside, but then when you make eye contact with her, you're not so sure there's a hippie on the inside too. There's something sharp behind her pupils that's especially surprising after you first take in her long, flowing skirt with tiny bells and her long, flowing hair. The color of her hair is so soft, it's almost peach.

I used to go to Disneyland all the time as a kid, and often you'd see the same eye thing in the women they hired to dress up as the princesses. They would kneel down next to you (well, it was more like they'd kneel down
near
you because of their gigantic hoopskirts) and smile and say, “You're so beautiful, you must be a princess too!” in the most singsongy voices.

But even when I was little and was supposed to believe they were real, I could look into their wide eyes and see a college girl who was baking in the sun and tired and bored and maybe even resented you a little bit for putting her in that position. And I totally got where she was coming from.

With Belinda, it isn't so much that she seems tired and bored, but it still seems like she's in a costume.

“Nah, why would I get in a fight with Belinda?” asks Dillon, giving a gentle elbow in her side. He seems good-natured.

“Maybe I'm going to eat your food,” says Belinda.

Dillon smiles like he thinks she's making a joke, but at least to me, it's clear she's threatening him.

Catherine shrugs. “Maybe she's going to eat your food. Different personalities coming together, coming apart. Things are just going to emerge, like maybe Ricky is going to be the one who has a problem with you.”

Ricky, who is eighteen, shakes his head. “My personal philosophy is that anyone who has a problem with somebody else needs to look at the
man in the mirror
.”

Ricky has got on a shiny glove like Michael Jackson used to wear. He's also got the start of the same skin condition that Michael Jackson had, but Ricky isn't wearing the glove because he wants to hide the white patches. The first thing he told me at breakfast was that he's proud of them because they mean that he's closer to Michael than your typical fan. He said, “Sometimes I like to think of myself like Michael reincarnated,” which is tricky when you consider that Michael died after Ricky was born.

But I didn't point out that paradox because one, I didn't want to crush him. And two, when you're trying to change how others see you so you can see yourself differently, I think you have to start from scratch. Which means you have to be on from the very first impression.

Catherine pretends like she's a contestant interviewing to camera, using a different voice from her regular one. “Ricky spends all his time looking in the mirror. His ego has gotten
so
out of control!” She returns to her normal voice. “Just spitballing. But you see how there's a natural story to be pulled out of everything. We'll work with you. There are certain aspects of you that we might choose to emphasize, and then certain other aspects of you that we might choose to chop. . . .”

This chopping is already happening to Nikki from Hawaii, who I initially assumed was in high school because she showed up with a rough-looking woman who seemed to be her chaperone. But then we found out that Nikki's nineteen and that woman is her serious girlfriend, Rebecca.

I overhead the producers talking to Nikki about how she might want to keep Rebecca a secret while she's on the show. Not because she's in a lesbian relationship, but because Rebecca's pushing forty and kind of looks like the type who might accidentally set her house on fire when she falls asleep with a lit cigarette in her hand.

I mean, that's my best description of her, not theirs, but you can tell the producers are thinking along those lines because I've already heard them say things like “We're just suggesting that showing Rebecca might be . . . confusing.”

To that Nikki asked, “Confusing, how?” but all Catherine was able to explain is that trying to put the two of them together requires a whole back story that the show doesn't have time to explore.

Now Nikki just shakes her head at Catherine and looks over at Rebecca, who's standing in the kitchen, talking with my mom. And maybe Nikki sees herself in her girlfriend, meaning that in her eyes, Rebecca is a dream hula girl straight from a movie beach party. Or maybe she sees Rebecca in herself. Like maybe Nikki looks at herself in the mirror and sees a lady bus driver who's starting to resemble the vinyl on her seat.

I really like the idea that love can transform you.

Catherine goes on. “That's where our story consultant will come in, to help make sense of what we're seeing of you. If there's been a fight, he might ask you to have it all over again when we're doing scene taping, which I think could be very healthy and cathartic. But no one's going to ask you to start a fight you weren't already going to have. No one's going to ask you to be the good twin”—Catherine's eyes sparkle with the next possibility—“or the evil twin.”

She's talking about the eighteen-year-old twins with long weaves in pigtails, Mila and Felicia, but I can't tell them apart yet. It's not that they're wearing completely identical outfits (although they're both in denim cutoffs), but they do have the very same face. They went in the other van, so I haven't really met them yet, although one seems to be more the type that bounces off walls, while the other seems pretty quiet.

“And no one's going to force the two people in the house who are obviously the most dark and tortured into a satisfying dark-and-tortured romance.” Catherine is not subtly staring between me and Gardener, who's wearing all black. On top of that, his hair is dyed black and it goes to his shoulders.

Today I'm wearing a white bustier top with blue jeans, on purpose, for America. It's not like Gardener and I are an obvious match, not like we're two Goth kids peering out at Catherine from under a shared velvet cape. And how about my last boyfriend, who looked like a goddamn ray of sunshine? But I'm not here to think about Scott.

“You think I'm dark and tortured?” I ask. “I'm not dark and tortured.”

“Yeah, no, she's a ball of energy,” Ford suddenly pipes up from over at the window.

To that I say, “If you want tortured, you should ask Ford what it's like where he's from.”

Catherine blinks at me and then she says, “Bunch of characters on my hands. What, are you trying to junior produce? We'll get to that in his video package. Which reminds me . . . Madison?” She calls to a junior producer talking on a cell phone in the dining room. “Did we secure the ocean?”

Madison calls back, “There's a chalk festival on the boardwalk.”

Catherine laughs. “I'm sorry, what?” To us she says, “Sit tight,” and she goes to talk to Madison while still laughing about chalk.

“I swear, I don't think I'm going to fight with anybody,” Dillon says to the group.

“Of course you aren't,” I say, like a comforting presence would. The group starts talking about what it's going to be like once we get in the mansion, and it's not that I'm not interested, just that there are so many people talking. Rebecca's excited and one of the twins talks a mile a minute and Ricky keeps making those “Ow!” and “Whoo!” Michael Jackson sounds when he agrees with something.

It's like when you're on the Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland, and you enter into the pirate town part. The ride has this soundtrack of overlapping voices piping in from speakers in all directions so it feels like you're in the middle of a lot of hubbub. But you can't really make out what's being said.

Hubbub
is such a weird word. If you just repeat it over and over.

Hubbubhubbubhubbubhubbubhubbubhubbubhubbubhubbub.

And hey, what's with all the Disneyland memories resurfacing today? My dad used to take me all the time up until the year before he died because the brokerage he worked for gave out corporate passes. I think the place is deeply knit into my formative understanding of things. . . .

And just like that, I've gotten lost in my own head and haven't participated in the conversation for at least five minutes. At this point it seems too unnatural to just jump in, so I decide I'm going to start over with the next one.

I look over at Ford by the window, and he's got his head tipped back a little, like he did when he was looking out from the roof. He seems to only take in views from the bottom of his eyes.

His hands are halfway slid into his pockets and he's got a grin on his face as he looks out at the panoramic view. It's like he's alone with it, like none of these other people are around and someone just gave him the whole valley as a present.

Now that I'm getting a better look at him in daylight, I can tell he keeps his dark hair combed back with a little bit of gel. He's got the very beginning of a widow's peak. I heard he's only seventeen, but I'd assumed he was older, because he showed up without a chaperone and also, he has this sort of bruised quality around his eyes. I don't mean that he's actually got bruises, like he's been fighting. Although he does have a small bruise on his right cheekbone. So maybe he has been.