Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

“I’m just cold,” I said. The temperature readout on the dashboard said seventy-five degrees.

“I can ask Denise to turn up the heat some more. I’m such a wimp about winter.”

“No,” I said quickly, because I didn’t want Denise interrupting us. “I’ll be fine in a second.”

She smiled, and when neither of us said anything, she asked, “So, I imagine the label is running you ragged on this tour?”

“It’s not too bad,” I said. She said things like mortified and running you ragged, and I said things like okay and It’s not too bad .

“I’ve only had to do a few press junkets for shows. I feel completely out of my element with touring.”

I couldn’t imagine how this girl could ever be out of her element. I could do media-training classes for a solid year, like I did for a few weeks when I moved to L.A., and I still wouldn’t barely be able to talk like her. “I wasn’t good at first,” I said. “It takes some practice.”

“Listen to Mr. Humility over here.” She hit my shoulder, and it probably would’ve given me a boner except it actually stung a little, even through my puffy coat. “You absolutely own the stage, Jonny Valentine.”

I had no idea what to say next. I wish I always had something funny or smart to say like Zack did. I don’t know how people like him come up with a line whenever they want. Maybe that’s why he’s a songwriter and I just sing other people’s words.

Denise bailed me out by opening the door for a second to say they’d cleared the ice cream place and we were going in in two minutes.

“Are your parents here?” I asked.

“Why would my parents be here?”

“They don’t work with you?”

She laughed. It sounded sort of like when an actress laughs in a movie. “My parents can hardly speak English,” she said. “I wouldn’t exactly trust them to negotiate royalties.”

“They didn’t get you into show business?”

“I don’t think they knew the phrase ‘show business.’ ” She laughed again. “A casting director came by my school one day for some parts in a TV movie, I signed up, that led to a few more spots, and now here we are. A parking lot in Denver in winter. Finally made it.” She blotted her red lips on a tissue. “This is a bit silly, don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Do you know what they want us to do?”

“I think walk next to each other with ice cream and get into the car.”

“And, like, kiss or something?”

“No, definitely not. That was clearly specified in the contract.”

All my excitement drained out of me like blood leaking out of my body in Zenon. “Right,” I said. “I forgot. That’s good.”

Denise knocked on the window, which meant I might not get another chance to ask if she wanted to hang out again. “Maybe we should do another date in L.A.,” I said.

“Smart idea. I’ll have Denise look at my schedule for another photo shoot.”

“No, like getting ice cream for a real date. On our own.”

“Huh,” she said. “Maybe in the spring? Things are totally crazy for me right now with the album dropping and my shooting schedule. Like I’m telling you something you don’t know, Mr. Double Platinum.”

It was triple platinum, but I didn’t say anything. “So, should my mother call your manager then?”

She grabbed the door handle and said, “Um, I prefer to keep my professional and social lives separate, you know?” It felt a lot colder in the car all of a sudden, and it got even colder when she opened it and a hard wind blew in. “We better move before Denise throws one of her famous tantrums.”

I felt like an idiot during the shoot, acting like this girl was into me when she’d just dissed me. I should’ve spun it like I meant we’d get ice cream on our own so the paparazzi would get real candids of us, but it was too late. The photographer stayed outside the ice cream place and shot us through the window. We pretended to order, but they already had a chocolate cone with rainbow sprinkles for me and vanilla with a cherry on top for Lisa. It was dumb to be getting ice cream when it was freezing out, but no one reading the glossy would figure it out, even with us in our winter coats. Your brain pretty much turns off when you read those things.

The photographer shot us from a short distance as we walked back to the parking lot, like he was trying not to get caught. As we approached the car, he said, “Now pretend you’ve spotted me and look back.”

We turned our heads, and when we were getting into the backseat, he said, “Lisa, I want you to shield your face, and Jonny, stick your tongue out at the camera, like, ‘Screw you, man, I just want to hang out with my girl.’ ”

I did it, and we got inside and shut the door, and Lisa opened the other side and dumped her ice cream on the ground when Denise called out that we were done. Since it was vanilla, it was like the ice cream disappeared into the snow, and the cherry was on top of the whole parking lot. She stuck out her hand for me to shake and said, “It was an honor meeting you, sir, and, of course, playing the illustrious role of your lady friend.” From her seat she did a fake curtsy and bow before tapping on her iPhone. I didn’t know if I should wait for Jane or what, but without looking up she said, “Door’s unlocked.”

I went back to our car, with Walter escorting me. Jane kept typing on her phone and said, “Well, that was a really good use of our time.”

Even if I was way more famous, Lisa acted like she was twice my age, and I should’ve known from the beginning she’d say no to going out. It’d be like me dating a six-year-old. She’d make it as an actress and as a singer, because she wasn’t a normal kid. She was an adult in a kid’s body. If you were just a kid in a kid’s body, you might make it, too, as long as you had good management. If you weren’t either, it was harder to tell.

At the end of the grueling first leg of the Midwest stretch of eight shows in eight nights, the glossy came out but without anything about me and Lisa in it. The label told us it was bumped till next week. The glossy would never bump a Tyler paparazzi spread, if they were lucky enough to get him in the first place.

Even though we were all traveling together, I didn’t have any downtime to hang out with the Latchkeys again, and I was so tired each night that I didn’t need anything, I just fell asleep after doing my homework and writing my first slavery-unit essay, on Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. She didn’t write her own autobiography, though. A white woman who knew her did the actual writing. Her own Alan Fontana.

There was no chance to check email, and I got worried that maybe the guy was an impostor and I’d given him a candid and some info on Jane, not that the photo or info were so private. But the guy could think that I was an impostor, too, pretending to be a celeb by acting like I didn’t want him to know who I was. The idiot impostors on the Internet announced right away they were me, like it was no big deal to confab with possible child predators.

I hadn’t played a show in St. Louis since we moved to L.A., to distance my image, so I’d never been back. Jane had gone three times, to visit Grandma Pat on her way to meetings in New York. Now that the heartland was a major plank of our new marketing strategy, Jane wanted to ramp up my Midwest connection a little more, at least here. So she’d set up a feature profile with a national morning show that was traveling to St. Louis and filming me here, and then we’d do a live interview the next morning with an abbreviated outdoor concert.