I’m pretty sure I’m avoiding Denver for the same reason.
“I know,” I tell him. “I’m sorry. I’ll do better, okay? Just not tonight.”
Shane looks somewhat mollified. “All right. I’m going to put some things on your calendar for next week then. And you’ll show. You promise?”
“Yeah,” I tell him. “I promise.”
The truth is, I know I should be hanging out with the guys more. Shane’s been there for me since we were in kindergarten. He may be a pain in the ass sometimes, but he’s my best friend, and he’s still going to be there for me when Maya inevitably decides she’s sick of me.
Though that thought makes me more heartsick than I’m ready to admit.
Afew hours later, I’m kicking back on my couch with my guitar when Maya Skypes me on my laptop. I answer and grin at her when her face appears on the screen. She’s got her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and she isn’t wearing any makeup. I think she stopped trying to impress me way back when she decided this wasn’t going anywhere. I like that, though. It’s nice to feel comfortable with someone, to not have to worry about keeping up appearances.
“Hey, gorgeous,” I say. I always answer her calls this way, and she seems to like it.
Maya grins at me. “Hey,” she says. “I know the show doesn’t start for another hour, but I’m just so excited. Do you think Alec and Jillian are going to get back together?”
I laugh.This is the question being debated across America, and it’s a small part of the reason I wasn’t ditching our joint viewing of theStarving with the Starsfinale for a random party. I was there at the VMAs when Alec Andreas got shoved off the stage by Felix Mays—who weirdly happens to be the brother of the best friend of Shane’s ex-girlfriend, Anna-Marie, because the entertainment industry is a small and very strange place. Alec got busted that night for a bunch of lies he told—chiefly for pretending that he and the co-headliner of his band were married, when really they’d broken up a year before. Alec apparently tried to revive his career by going on a reality show, and promptly got caught trying to pick up a new girlfriend and use her to improve his image.
“Come on,” I say to Maya. “Do you really want them to? Jillian totally deserves better.”
“I know,” Maya says. “But over the last several episodes he’s just seemed sosad. I think he really loved her.”
So goes the theory.The viewing public has sorted themselves into two camps. Maya’s in one, and I’m in the other. “And I still say he’s trying to salvage what good press he can. If he looks like he got his heart broken on air, that’s a lot more sympathetic than admitting that he was never actually interested in her in the first place.”
“I don’t know,” Maya says. “I don’t think you can fake that kind of pain.”
I strum a chord on my guitar. I’m supposed to be working on the guitar line to some new lyrics Shane wrote.They aren’t perfect yet, but if I can get a rough melody going, then I can go back to Shane with specific requests for fixes, instead of just a general sense that the rhythm is off.
“How’s the song coming?” Maya asks.
“It’s not. Because I spent my afternoon Googling all the spoilers about Alec Andreas and Jillian Fall.”
“Cheater!” Maya yells, and I laugh.
“I didn’t read anything about the end of the show. But you know he’s been photographed in DC, right? And the rumor is that he’s living there?”
“Oh my god, stop,” Maya says. “No more spoilers!”
I grin.This is another way that Maya and I differ. She likes to hear as little about a film orTV show as humanly possible so she can have what she calls a “pure experience.” And I like to read up as much as I can, so I know what to expect. “All right,” I say. “If you insist.”
“I do,” Maya says. “You shouldn’t have told me that much. And you definitely shouldn’t have been Googling.”
I just shrug and give her a cheeky grin. Maya tried to make me promise not to learnanythingabout the show if we were going to watch it together. I told her I’m in the same industry as Alec—even though he’s in pop and we’re in punk—and there was no way I could completely avoid spoilers.
She reluctantly agreed that was probably true, and since then I’ve made it abundantly clear that I’m not even trying, just because of how adorable she is when she pretends to be annoyed.
“Fine,” Maya says. “If you already know what’s going to happen tonight, then I don’t want your opinion. I’ll find out myself in an hour.”
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” I say. “For example, that promo where he’s stomping a fish to death? I have absolutely no idea why that would happen.”
“YOU KNOW I DON’T WATCHTHE PROMOS!” Maya shouts. “He stomps a fish to death? What the hell is this we’re watching?”
I laugh, and when I don’t answer, Maya mumbles something about not talking to me about this anymore before I spoil the entire thing, and I hear her shuffling through her backpack. We stop talking, but the silence is companionable. And not actually all that silent, because I’m working out the melody to this song and doing a crap job of it.
“Oooh,” Maya says, after I’ve run through a couple of possibilities. “I like that last one.”
“Yeah?” I say. I play those chords again, trying to work out a riff. “What are you working on?”
