Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

It’s a perfect pop song. The tempo is 117 beats per minute, which I think is the best for a dance song, right about where your heart rate should be for low-intensity fat-burning cardio, and the spare instrumentation highlights the vocals while still driving the song, which is a tough combo. It would be nice if I ever had a song like that, which a broad-spectrum audience will remember forever and which anyone with a pulse loves, instead of singing for tween girls and having them forget about it six months later.

It took ten thousand hours, and I checked outside my door a couple times. After twenty minutes Walter knocked. “Mr. Valentine, a fan of yours would like to meet you,” he said in a serious voice after I unlocked it, but he didn’t do it in a winking way.

Behind him was a girl who was fifteen or sixteen. She had a cute face, but she was also kind of chubby. Like, really chubby. Even under her winter coat, I could tell. I didn’t know if because Walter was such a big guy she seemed thin to him, but I bet there were skinnier girls in the crowd who would’ve come to my room. Except maybe he’d picked someone who, if she blabbed on the Internet about this, no one would believe them since she wasn’t hot enough. That was probably it. “Hello,” I said.

“Hey,” she said, and she walked past Walter and into my room before I could invite her in. She looked around. “So this is it? I thought it’d be fancier.”

Walter made eye contact with me, and I nodded, and he closed the door from the hallway. “Most of the time they are,” I said. “This venue sucks.”

“This city sucks,” she said. “Where do you live?”

“L.A.”

“I heard L.A. sucks, too. The second I turn eighteen, I’m moving to New York or San Francisco.”

“For college?”

She snorted. “I’ll work in a coffee shop or something. I’m friends with this older girl? Amanda? She moved to San Francisco and makes enough at this yuppie teahouse to pay rent and go to shows. That’s all I want.” She took off her coat and threw it on a chair. She wore a skirt with black fishnet stockings, and her chub muffin-topped out under her T-shirt. “What do you have to drink here?” I listed all the diet sodas and chilled teas. “I meant like alcohol.”

“There isn’t any,” I said. “Tonight. ’Cause the venue sucks. Usually there’s whiskey and beer.”

“Whatever.” She went over to the food spread but didn’t touch it, and was like, “So, we gonna turn the lights off?”

“Okay,” I said, and I went over to flip the switch, and when I turned around she was right next to me in the dark and leaning down to cleave her mouth to mine. My lips were closed at first, but they opened up when her tongue pushed between them. It was like a wet worm darting around inside.

She cleaved our mouths again, the other meaning. “I used to think your music was shit,” she whispered, “until I heard this band here, the 99 Percent Dilution, do a punk cover of ‘Guys vs. Girls.’ ”

“Thanks,” I said, before I realized she’d also insulted me.

The beanbag chair was near us, so she pushed and lowered me onto it, where it made a crunching sound. “Have you heard it?” she asked.

“No. What’s it like?”

“It has this, like, angry energy?” she said. “And so then I listened to your song. I mean, I’d heard it before, at the mall or on the radio or whatever, but I wasn’t really listening. And I still think it’s a shitty pop song, but I heard all this pent-up anger from you, too. It’s like you’re punk and you have no idea.”

I said thanks again, but it was another insult, like I was too stupid to know who I was. At least she sounded smarter than most of my fans. She reminded me of the girl in the hospital who said I sounded sad when I was singing about happy things. Everyone sees what they want in songs, the way Walter said they do with fortune cookies.

She climbed on top of me and kept kissing me and licking my neck. I wasn’t hard yet. I got boners every two minutes except when a girl was actually humping me. I thought of the things Bill had said to Jane, and got a little bit of something. Maybe if I said something he’d said out loud, I’d get fully hard. “You like being my—”

I couldn’t say the final words. She stopped and pulled her head back a few inches. “Yeah?”

“You like being my fan?”

“I told you, I only like that one cover of your song. I just want to give you the best blow job of your life.”

That did get me sort of hard for a second, hearing the words blow job, or maybe it was blowjob, one word. My computer dictionary wouldn’t have it, and I couldn’t ask Nadine. Maybe Walter would know. It was right in time, because she unzipped my jeans and stuck her hand down my pants as my half-boner was going up. A half-erection would be an Eric . She grabbed it and wrenched her hand around it a few times like she was unscrewing a stuck jar. It didn’t feel too good. Like, except for the fact that a girl was touching my penis, it would’ve been better to do it myself or not have anything happen at all. If I asked if she had moisturizer, or checked if they had butter or olive oil in the fridge, she might have thought it was weird.

It hurt so much, actually, that my Eric turned into a no-ber, and though my eyes were closed, I could tell it was shrinking a lot. The more I concentrated on getting it hard, the softer and tinier it got. Pretty soon it was going to become like negative size and turn into a vagina. She moved her hand faster, which only hurt worse and made me more nervous that she could tell how small and soft it was.

She stopped. “Are you even old enough to get a hard-on?”

“Yep,” I said. “It’s just that I already had a bunch today.”

“Oh.” She went back to trying to jerk me off.

I wished Zack could somehow see me doing this. Not like a video or being in the room, but knowing I was getting a hand job now, even if it wasn’t working and was mostly painful.

Suddenly I got hard again, and she pulled my pants down to my ankles and tried to do the same to my boxers. But I didn’t want her to see that I only had one pube, so I stopped her from doing that and instead poked my penis through the fly.

She put her mouth over it, which felt a ton better than the hand job, and if all hand jobs were the same as that one, then I was fine never getting another in my life. The blow job was the opposite. It was like melting inside the heat of her mouth, and I didn’t feel anything else on my body, except when her teeth hit it a couple times. I’d be okay getting some more of these in my life. I bet real sex is like your body completely disappearing inside the girl’s body.

After a minute she took a break. “I’m Dana, by the way.”

“I’m Jonny.”

“No duh,” she said.

She went back to the blow job, but I could tell there was no way it was going to happen. I wasn’t even getting as close as I got when I masturbated by myself. Finally she asked, “Are you gonna come soon?”

“Probably not,” I said. “I already comed a couple times today.”

She stopped and I stuck my erection back inside my boxers and pulled up my jeans and was careful not to zip up my penis. She sat down on the beanbag chair to my side, but there wasn’t enough space for us both to lie down, so I sat up on it, too.

“Have you done that before?” She smiled like she had a little secret. “I feel like I totally corrupted you.”

“No, I do it all the time.”

Her smile went away. “You really know how to make a girl feel special.”

I could have told her she was the first girl I’d even kissed except for Alyssa Hernandez in a game of Spin the Bottle in fourth grade. But I’ve heard that you never want to tell girls you like them too much. When you sing about how much you like them, it’s okay, because you’re not singing to one girl, you’re singing to all of them, so they’re all competing with the others. It’s like Jane giving access to the glossies, just enough but not everything, and they all want to nab an exclusive.