Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

Jane stopped. The woman was around her age, with a lumpy body like a potato and her hair in a bun. “Yes?” Jane said.

“It’s Mary Ann. Mary Ann Hilford?” She pointed at her name tag. “Remember?”

Jane looked blank. “Of course. Hello, Mary Ann.”

I barely remembered her, or any of them, except for this one black guy named Vaughn who snuck me M&M’s when Jane wasn’t looking. Mary Ann reached out to hug her, and Jane kept her arms mostly by her side and didn’t hug her back. “Vanessa and Lillian and Phil and me, we all follow Jonathan’s career. Or Jonny’s career.”

“That’s nice of you,” Jane said. “I hope you’re all doing well.”

Mary Ann said, “Look!” and she went back to her checkout line and came back with something. “He’s on the cover.”

I couldn’t see it, except that it was a tabloid and definitely not the glossy we’d contracted with. She handed it to Jane, who looked at the cover for a few seconds, and turned to the camera guy and said something. He took the camera down off his shoulder and pointed it at the ground. “Is he here?” Mary Ann asked.

I crouched lower behind the cantaloupes and watched through a small space in the pile. They smelled rotten. Bottom-shelf supermarkets are always kind of sad, with all the D-list merch they’re trying to get rid of that no one wants. “No,” Jane said. “But we have to get running. It was great seeing you.”

She walked away. Mary Ann said, loud enough for Jane to hear, “I’m sure.”

Jane turned. “Excuse me?”

“I see how it is,” Mary Ann said. “Thought you were better than everyone back then, still do.”

Jane’s face twisted around. She seemed a little hurt, even. I didn’t know how this woman from Schnucks with a bun could say anything to hurt her feelings. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said quietly.

Mary Ann looked like she hadn’t expected this. “Wait.” She shook her head and sighed. “Jane. That was bitchy of me.”

Jane smiled at her. I couldn’t read if it was a fuck-you smile or an I-forgive-you smile. “That’s okay. All this stuff”—Jane pointed to the camera guy and waved the tabloid—“makes people say and do things they don’t actually mean.”

“Yeah.” Mary Ann didn’t say anything else because you could tell she did mean it but just felt bad about it.

“And it makes it hard when you meet people who knew you before,” Jane said, even though it wasn’t like Mary Ann asked her to keep talking about it. The camera guy was still there, and he was itching to turn the camera back on and catch this, but he couldn’t do it. “So I understand why you’d feel the need to say something hurtful like that.”

Now Mary Ann really didn’t know what to say. She nodded, and Jane said, “Anyway, it was so nice seeing you again, Mary Ann.”

Mary Ann mumbled something that sounded like she was apologizing. Jane’s a natural at spinning.

I rushed out through a different aisle and an empty checkout line so Jane wouldn’t see me running out ahead of her.

I climbed into the limo before she could see that I’d been inside the supermarket. When she got to the car I heard her say to Kevin, “We’re not using the end of it or else we’re canceling the interview tomorrow, and that’s final.” She got inside and slammed the door and said TV people were paparazzi with fancier job titles.

She was holding the tabloid Mary Ann gave her against her chest. My photo was splashed on the cover. Central real estate. “What are they saying?” I asked as the driver pulled out of the parking lot.

She turned it away from me before handing it to me. “You may as well see it.”

The cover was me getting into the car with Lisa as I stuck my tongue out at the camera. But it was a tabloid, which is much less valuable to your image than a glossy for gossip. The headline said GUY AND GIRL: JONNY VALENTINE AND LISA PINTO.

A few pages inside, there was a short article with a few more photos:

According to raven-haired songstress Lisa Pinto, 12, when Jonny Valentine, 11, asked her out last month, he did so by quoting a line from his hit single “Guys vs. Girls”: “Will you be my girl today?”

The two young lovebirds have become a serious item and were recently photographed canoodling outside an ice cream parlor in Denver, where JV passed through on his Valentine Days tour and Lisa was promoting her upcoming debut album, School’s Out! before its Feb. 14 release.

“What I love most is hanging out with him away from the spotlight, when ‘The Jonny’ comes off and he’s simply Jonathan — that’s what I call him when it’s just the two of us,” says Lisa, referring not to her new boyfriend’s angelic halo of golden locks, but his public image. “He’s a normal kid who doesn’t take himself too seriously.”

Which means what, exactly?

“Jonathan’s a huge dork,” she says with a trilling laugh. “A total nerd. Yet so am I. And I love that about him.”

The feeling is mutual, according to a person close to the young “Breathtaking” songster. “Jonny’s completely obsessed with Lisa,” says the source. “I’ve never seen him like this with another girl.”

“I can’t believe they sold it to a tabloid without my consent,” Jane said. “ ‘I’ve never seen him like this with another girl’—Jesus. Not to mention this Jonathan garbage.”

I didn’t know why she was acting like it was a character assassination when it was all positive press. I closed my eyes to pretend I was trying to nap, but what I really was doing was imagining that Lisa replaced Jane in the limo, and there were paparazzi outside but the windows were too tinted for them to see into, and Lisa looked at me and said, “Door’s locked, ” and we humped each other and I stuck my tongue inside her mouth. I turned on my side so Jane couldn’t see I was getting a boner. As I was picturing this, I kept wondering why she called me a dork and a nerd. She called herself one, too, I know, and female celebrities always do that so ugly girls don’t hate them, except they never admit to being what a dork actually is, which would be like saying to an interviewer, “Yeah, I’m a huge dork, I have bad social skills and no one likes me.” But you don’t need to call male celebrities one. I really shouldn’t have asked her on a date. The way she kept calling me Mr. Something would’ve annoyed me after a while. I bet if she ever met Mi$ter $mith, she’d call him Mr. Mi$ter $mith.

Jane tapped one heel hard on the floor a few times like she does when she’s pissed and took out her phone and made a call. “This is Jane Valentine calling for Olivia. Yes, I’ll leave her a voice mail,” she said. “Olivia, this is Jane. I saw the story about Jonny and Lisa, and I’m not happy that it was sold to a tabloid without my knowledge. If this is Stacy’s doing, please tell Ronald that I never signed on for it and this is not the way I want to run things in the future.”

I opened my eyes. She hung up and turned to me and shook her head. “You’re eleven years old,” she said, wiping some snot from my nose that had turned crusty from the cold air. “They forget that you’re eleven.”

“I’m almost twelve,” I said.

She pulled me close to her and hugged tight. She had on more of her Chanel No. 5 than usual that this movie actress told her she should wear after we moved to L.A. My boner was going down but it was still there, and I had to adjust my hips so it wasn’t uncomfortable.

“Not just yet,” she said.

The morning after my concert, which was a straight A, me, Jane, and Walter hustled down to the Arch. I was worried the show had invited Michael to watch, but even if they’d been thinking about it at first, they’d have to be blind not to see how bad he played on camera.