Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

Jane whispered that we should go. She kissed Grandma Pat on top of her head and told me I didn’t have to say good-bye and could wait in the hall. But I squeezed Grandma Pat’s arm anyway when she stood up in her walker since I was afraid a hug might knock her over.

Jane was quiet on the ride back to the hotel and didn’t multitask. She scoped out the Scottrade Center and took care of other business while the film crew drove me to Carson Elementary. The school looked really small when we drove up to it, a couple short redbrick buildings with a soccer field behind them. I remembered it being humongous, but that’s what happens when you get older, the things that used to impress you now seem stupid, like how even though I still get nervous before performing I don’t think it’s a huge deal, but if you’d told me two years ago that I’d be playing Madison Square Garden on Valentine’s Day, I’d have had an accident in my pants.

They’d set it up so we had access to the grounds and field without anyone watching. I walked around and talked to the camera and the interviewer, a blond lady named Robin, and said things like, “Here’s where we used to have recess and gym and where I got into baseball,” and when we came by a rock near a tree, I lied and was like, “I had my first kiss here,” and when the interviewer asked who the girl was, I said, “I don’t want to say her name, but she’s in every song of mine in some way.”

I’m usually good at tuning out what a taped video appearance will look like when it airs, because if you think about it in the middle of filming you screw yourself up, just like you can’t think about how you’re singing onstage, but I realized my father might see it. He’d be on his couch watching me in my old school, except he might have left before I started there.

“When I was a student here, I used to have a fantasy about traveling around the world, singing my music,” I said. “I most wanted to go to two places: Pittsburgh and Australia.”

Robin laughed for the camera. “Pittsburgh and Australia? Why those two?”

“I did geography reports on them both,” I said, and I looked straight into the camera, which is a no-no. “I’ve played Pittsburgh, but I still haven’t made it to Australia.” If it really was my father emailing me, there’s no way he could think I was an impostor now. And if Jane asked why I chose those cities, I’d say I thought it would help with my domestic-brand extension and foreign-market outreach.

They made some calls and said it was time to go inside. I spend half my life waiting for someone to tell me it’s time to do something. They’d arranged it so we went in while everyone was in class, but to make it look like school was still going on, a few kids who’d won a lottery could be in the halls at the same time as me. A couple years ago, I used to walk down those same halls afraid that an older kid might push me into a locker or something.

When I got onto the main hall I was supposed to walk through, there were like forty kids hanging around, and they started screaming, which meant all the kids stuck in the classrooms pressed their faces up to the windows in the doors. I wished Walter didn’t have the day off. The security guard the TV crew had hired didn’t look big enough to prevent a stampede.

The producer Kevin was like, “If you guys want to be on TV, you have to act normal and like it’s no big deal Jonny’s here, all right?” Which was idiotic, because why would I be walking through a school hallway with the students acting normal? But it was Jane’s idea, and maybe she was right that it branded me as a regular kid.

The school only went up to fifth grade, so there was no one I would’ve known from before. The kids tried to pretend to be normal, but almost everyone who walked by looked at me. Only really they looked at the camera. They weren’t too obvious about it, since they probably knew they’d get edited out if they did, and the smarter ones just walked by with their faces and eyes visible but without staring directly in. Everyone wants to be famous more than they want to see someone famous.

I walked down the hallway and another one. The walls all had artwork by the students and stupid posters like one that said BEE-LIEVE IN YOURSELF! with a picture of a bee reading a book, though I had a track called “This Bird Will Always Bee There for You” so I couldn’t call it too dumb.

I kept looking over at the kids behind the glass windows of the doors, which was unprofessional camera protocol, but I couldn’t help myself. If I went back to school, and a celeb came to visit, I’d be one of those kids behind the glass. Except I wouldn’t cram my face up against it like they were doing. That’s one of the ways I could never really be like them again.

I made up more stuff, like “I had this locker” or “That was my third-grade classroom.” The truth was I didn’t remember much, except for the smell, which was chalk and hissing radiators. I knew I’d been there before, but I couldn’t place any details, and when we got to the end of the hall, Robin said I should take them to the cafeteria. I didn’t even know where it was anymore. So I said I thought they moved it after I left, and they escorted me. After we finished in the cafeteria, Robin stood next to me on camera and said they had a big surprise. “We know what you miss most about St. Louis is all your friends,” she said.

Into the cafeteria, about thirty feet away, walked a boy.

“So we found your best friend, Michael Carns,” Robin said.

He looked how he used to, same pale skin like he’d been scared and lived underground, but a few inches taller and his hair was shorter now. He’d become sort of funny-looking, with his ears sticking out, and was wearing dark blue Champion sweatpants and a sweatshirt, same as before, at least the way I remembered it. People always wear the same thing in your mind, like Jane in St. Louis is the Schnucks black polo shirt and khaki pants, but in L.A. it’s a black skirt and top and stockings because black is slimming.

The last time I saw Michael was the night before we left. Jane let me do one final sleepover. With Nadine I once figured out that I probably slept over at his house about two hundred times. We tried to stay up all night together, watching TV and eating junk food in his room like we always did, but we couldn’t do it, and we both fell asleep around five a.m. When Jane picked me up in the morning, I didn’t want to wake him up on so little sleep, so I just left without saying good-bye. I guess I thought I’d be seeing him again soon. I felt like running over to him now and telling him I wished I’d woken him up, but maybe he didn’t remember it anyway.

They must not have told Jane about this, because she would have definitely leaked it to me, and the surprise would be ruined. Most of the time that stuff is faked on TV, which I know from doing it a few times, and when I see it on reality shows I can always tell who’s pretending to be surprised. You have to be a high-caliber enough actor to pull it off. I’m just good enough to do it, but I guess they didn’t know that.

Michael glanced at Kevin like he didn’t know if he was supposed to stay at the door or come to me. He was pretty uncomfortable with all the cameras on him. Those lights are hot, and it’s hard when you’re not used to it. Kevin motioned to him to come over, so Michael walked up to me and said, “Hi,” all quiet, and I said, “Hey, Michael.”

It was weird. I knew it would read bad on TV if I didn’t do something, so I slapped him five like Dr. Henson and said, “It’s awesome to see you!” and he said, quietly again, “You, too.” Then we stood around waiting for something to happen and he looked at his feet with his face angled away from the crew. I couldn’t tell if he was so quiet because of the cameras or because of me or because that’s what he was like now. Robin looked at Kevin, who said they’d clean it up in editing and told me they were taking us someplace special.