Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

“I was, but Jason surprised me with this trip, and we realized it was our one-year anniversary, so… Anyway, I wanted to talk—”

“What’s he do? In business?”

“He’s a consultant for an investment bank.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means — I’ll explain another time. I wanted to ask you a question before I left,” she said. “I know you’ve got a lot going on, but I was wondering if you’d made a decision about what you’re going to do in terms of school. Jane said she’d pay me either way this semester, and I’d be helping you out after school, but it’d be good to know so I could start my job search. If I need to find one, I mean.” She seemed uncomfortable, like she didn’t want to have to ask this.

Then leave, Nadine. That’s what you want to do. Everyone wants to do what’s good for them and they don’t care how it affects anyone else. Just leave. Tell the police I’m guilty and watch out for yourself.

“I’m thinking about going back to school,” I said, but I still didn’t really know. Maybe she’d feel sorry she brought it up.

“You are?”

“Yeah. I should probably have a bunch of different teachers who each know a subject instead of just one.”

“Right. Right.” She nodded a few times. “Almost forgot,” she said, and took a greeting card out of a folder. It was a get-well-soon card, and she’d gotten everyone in the crew to sign it for Jane and was saving me for last. I picked up a pen, but because I was imagining Nadine teaching in a real school, with all these other students who weren’t me, I wasn’t concentrating and wrote a big loopy “Songs, Smiles, and ♥ JV” on the card. Everyone else just wrote their name or “Feel better!” or something like that. If I crossed it out it’d look worse, so I left it like it was.

When I handed it back to Nadine, I turned my head like I was distracted and kept my hand going forward until it touched one of her breasts. She doesn’t have big breasts, like one-tenth of Sharon’s, and I didn’t feel much, but they were still soft and like super-nice chub. She made this quick gasping sound, but I think she couldn’t tell if it was an accident or not, so she didn’t say anything. She gathered her stuff real fast and didn’t hug me like she usually does when she leaves on vacation. When she walked out she let the door close on its own, and hotel doors always swing shut hard so that you don’t accidentally leave them open, and it was like a hard bass beat that closes out a song.

The hotel shut down the gym for forty minutes so me and Walter could sneak in a workout. Walter has me spot him even though he doesn’t need the help, and he lets me lift the five-pound dumbbells. He doesn’t push me on the cardio the way Jane and Rog do, he just tells me to go for it, but it’s funny, I usually end up working out harder with him.

Walter had a voice mail from Rog, who said Jane was ready for visitors but was staying in the hospital at least another night to play it safe, and we could see her tonight after dinner. It was supposed to be Walter’s day off, so I told him I’d hole up in my room. I was on Level 98 now anyway, and I wanted to finish bad.

I had a hard time focusing on the game because I was wondering what I’d say to Jane. Like, should I tell her it was stupid to drink so much without eating? Or did she already know that and she didn’t need to get yelled at? I hate it when Rog criticizes a vocal glitch in a concert that I knew about, or when Jane says I shouldn’t have answered an interview question the way I did when I already realized I messed up. When you mess up, if you’ve got any brains, you know it and you don’t need someone reminding you. It almost makes me want to mess up again. So I wouldn’t say it to Jane, in case she was like me that way. But if I didn’t say anything, she’d think I was okay with it. Maybe the best thing to do would be not to go. Then she’d be wondering what I thought, and she’d be so embarrassed and sorry she wouldn’t do it again.

I screamed through Level 98 in a few hours and had no trouble at all with the minion at the end. I wish Nadine tested me in Zenon instead of history. It was like working out with Walter. No one made me do it, so I was good at it. I wish I did more stuff like that, where no one else cared but me.

I ordered room service for dinner, pad Thai with mashed potatoes on the side, and didn’t care that it was a double-carber because of my good workout with Walter and also since Jane was in the hospital and Rog never checked up on me in person, except he was calling every hour now to make sure I was all right. I even found a jar of mayo in the minibar and smeared a glob on the mashed potatoes to make it like potato salad. I watched a TV channel playing songs while I ate, but they weren’t any of mine, only derivative pop.

Walter knocked on my door at six o’clock and said, “You ready to go, brother?” I was about to tell him, “I’m really tired, I think I’ll stay in tonight and see her when she gets out.”

But the channel with songs was still on, and I heard the first few notes of the track Rog convinced Jane to leave off my first album because it didn’t fit organically, “Baby, Please Don’t Ever Leave Me,” where the piano quietly tinkles up a little like raindrops on a roof and then my voice drops in like sunshine through the rain. I should sing it more in concert. It’s an underrated song in my library.

All of a sudden I got worried that Jane might have to stay two more nights in the hospital and she’d miss my concert in Detroit. She’d never missed a concert once. I grabbed a Detroit Tigers hat. “Let’s go,” I said to Walter.

Rog had arranged it so a hospital rep met us and took us straight to Jane’s room. She had a room on a floor with all private rooms. There were concierges in the halls, and it even looked like a hotel, and the food coming into a few rooms was room-service caliber. If I had to go to a hospital, I’d want it to be a place like this. Definitely not the children’s hospital. That was like a bad school where you don’t even get to stay at home if you’re sick. Walter told me he’d wait outside and said, “Unless you want me to go in.”

“No, you can wait,” I said. I don’t know why he thought I’d need crowd buffer inside a private hospital room.

I thought the private rooms would get prettier nurses, but Jane’s was around fifty and shaped like a snowman. She reminded me I could only talk to her for a few minutes, and opened the door and softly called inside, “You have a visitor.”

Jane was in bed, watching network entertainment news. She didn’t look all that bad. Her face was like she’d been putting on not moisturizers, but de -moisturizers. I’d seen worse hangovers on her, though.

She tried to smile, but could barely lift up the sides of her mouth. She muted the TV and said, “Hi.” Her voice was pretty weak.

“Hi.” I walked up to her bed, and didn’t know if I should sit on it or if I should let her hug me or if she even could hug me, so I stopped about a foot from the edge. It was as awkward as it was with Dana after she gave me the blow job. I bet even Zack wouldn’t know how to handle this situation.

I nodded at the TV. “Anything about you on that?”

“No. Thank God.”

Her voice was super-weak, like it was filtered and the decibel level was cut by seventy-five percent.

“You getting out tomorrow?” I asked.

“I hope so,” she said. “The doctors haven’t cleared me yet.”

I didn’t ask how she’d catch up to us when we drove to Detroit if she didn’t get out in the morning. I hadn’t really thought about telling her about my father emailing me before, but this could’ve been the time to do it. She owed me, and she didn’t have the energy to fight, and there was a chance she’d say it was okay. I could tell her I wanted to see him on my own when we traveled to New York, and if it went good, I wanted the two of them to meet again, and maybe when she saw him she’d change her mind. I bet she never even talked to him on the phone.