Page 12 of It's a Love Story

“Hello?” she says, hoarse. And it’s then that I realize it’s Sunday morning and people don’t call people on Sunday morning. “Janey?”

“I’m so sorry. I totally forgot it was Sunday. Go back to sleep.” I shoot Clem myoofface and she takes my hand. “What do you need? Say it fast.”

“I need Jack Quinlan’s manager’s number. Or some way to get in touch with Jack.”

“It’s still the uncle, I think.”

“Okay, great. Do you have that number?”

“I’ll text it to you when I’m awake.” She hangs up. What adult doesn’t know it’s Sunday when it’s Sunday?

*

I’VE GONE TOthe store and dipped a batch of chocolate- covered pretzels for Clem to bring to the hospital tomorrow by the time Angelica texts me Lyle Anderson’s number at ten o’clock. He’s a stranger and should be easy to call, but the whole thing feels like the world’s biggest can of worms. Clem comes out dressed for her hiking date.

“I feel weird leaving,” she says. “Are you just hanging around stressing yourself out all day?”

“That’s my current plan, yes. But I’d do that whether you were here or not,” I say. “Go. Frolic. Make out in a cave.” I usher her off the porch and down the front walkway.

When she’s gone, I pace on my front porch. I need to make this call. I can’t shake this feeling that I’m about to be exposed, filleted right open for all of Santa Monica to see. Wherever I’ve been burying this shame is well insulated because it’s still red-hot.

“Jump-Start Love Song” didn’t happen right away. In the first season ofPop Rocks,our characters were just four middle schoolers who started a band. We were twelve, and I was on the slower side in terms of puberty. My hair was short, a light brown version of Little Orphan Annie. I felt like a kid still, and I liked putting on my Janey Jakes costume and joking around. I liked the roar of the studio audience. I liked how there was always something to eat on set and how I didn’t have to race to the grocery store on Tuesdays after school before the sale milk ran out. I liked the way Hailey, Will, Dougie, and I were a foursome—”the kids,” as we were called on set.Send in the kids. The tutor’s here for the kids.

The series plan was that we were going to get discovered by a record company at the end of that first season. This set us up for the second season, when I was thirteen, and we were traveling locally to perform in small venues. I was on the keyboards and was constantly birthing ideas that would make us dangerously close to missing our gig or booking us transportation in a wacky vehicle that would run out of gas. This all happened in a world where a bunch of thirteen- year-old recording artists were booking their own travel and managing logistics.

Recording a real song and releasing it as a single was a l ast-minute decision in the middle of the third season. In the first few seasons, our songs were just a few lines and a chorus—enough that we could end each episode with a performance and some applause. But then Angelica commissioned “Jump-Start Love Song.”

The song was a duet between Hailey and Will, who had just become a couple on the show. It was up-tempo in a way that would make you turn it all the way up in your car, but also romantic enough that you might tear up at the end. Or maybe that was just me. I really loved that song. Hailey and Will spent two full days at the recording studio before Angelica realized “Jump-Start Love Song” wasn’t going to work. The song itself was a home run, but Hailey and Will’s voices were wrong for it—Hailey’s wasn’t quite strong enough and Will’s was too high. They sounded like two girls in a karaoke duet. The door to my dressing room was open the day Angelica passed by and heard me singing it. I’d just removed my prosthetic braces and had taken a second to look at myself. I was fourteen, close to fifteen, with perfectly straight teeth. My skin had cleared up and my face was thinning out. I made direct eye contact with myself and felt ripe and ready for something that I didn’t quite know the name of. I knew that tomorrow I’d put the braces back on and contort myself into some comedically awkward position, but for that moment, the mirror and I had a secret: underneath Janey Jakes, there was someone else.

So I started to sing. I sang “Jump-Start Love Song” the way I heard it in my head. I sang as I brushed my hair, longer and falling around my face in a way that felt new. When I turned around and saw Angelica in the doorway, I wasn’t embarrassed at all. I could see that she saw it too. I’d grown out of my embarrassing phase into this new, ripe self.

“Hi,” I said. It was a one-word replacement forLook at me, see this for the first time. Can you believe it? I might be beautiful.

“I have an idea,” she said. And then it all happened. I was going to record the song for Hailey along with someone who was going to sing for Will. I wouldn’t get a recording credit, but I’d get a bonus and royalties and, more importantly, they were going to rewrite my character so that putting me behind the microphone would make sense going forward. I’d be a new version of Janey Jakes, all grown up and cool.

My duet partner was Jack Quinlan. He’d been trying to get a part on our show since it started. I still wonder if he thought recording this song would be his big break. If only he knew what was coming.

It’s hard to explain the way I felt the first time I met him. You’d have to understand what it was like to only know three other kids. When Jack walked in, he wore jeans and a T-shirt with a California flag on it. His hair was cut short but longer on the top, and he had freckles on his cheeks that seemed like they were about to fade away. I had the sense looking at those freckles, and later running my finger over them, that they were a precious thing made for my eyes only.

We met at the recording studio. I’d come straight from home, so I was in my own clothes, jeans and a fitted black top my mother hadn’t wanted me to buy. I was free of the braces and liked the way my lip gloss looked in the glass of the engineer’s booth. Jack walked in and saw that person, Jane Jackson. I felt him see me, and it was like I was born right then.

He took one hand out of his jeans pocket and gave me a wave. “I’m Jack. We’re singing together?”

“Yes. Jane,” I said. I ran my hand through my hair, and he watched me do it. I’d later learn that he was sixteen, which didn’t surprise me. He seemed like he was on the other side of something, and I wanted to go there with him.

The record producer came in and started talking to us, and I kept looking at Jack. We ran through the song once and then a second time. Jack was more comfortable in his skin than I was, like he’d spent a lifetime being cool and didn’t know another way to be. I was still trying on this new skin, being a person who was not the punch line, a person who could be looked at the way he was looking at me.

On our third take, the producer told us to sing the entire song staring into each other’s eyes. He wanted feeling, as if we were really j ump-starting something. So we did. We sang face-to-face for three minutes and fifty-four seconds. And every second of that song, every word we sang, made the room smaller and smaller. I felt like he was singing directly to my heart. It is an understatement to say that I’d never felt this way before. My body was electrified, and I allowed it to take over. As I sang the last few words of the song,“to be in love with you,”and as my lips made theuin “you,” he leaned in and kissed me. That was my first kiss.

We finished early, so I texted my mom that Hailey’s housekeeper was taking us to the movies and would drop me home after dinner. It was the first lie I’d ever told my mom, though I’d soon find out she’d been lying to me forever. It was shocking how easy it was, how little it tugged at my heart. Jack wanted to hang out. With me.

He said, “Let’s go to Beverly Hills,” as if that was just a thing people did. I can still feel the crispness of the November air and then the oven-warm feeling of the inside of his car.

We walked around Beverly Hills and looked in the windows. No place was off- 1 imits to him. He didn’t hesitate when he spoke; he didn’t pause before he walked through a door. I should have known then that Jack would be a star— the world really had no choice. We wandered through Nei- man Marcus, where everything seemed foreign and one of a kind. We made our way to the little café on the top floor and ate fish tacos and popovers. He held my hand as we walked through the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and kept holding my hand on the deepest, plushest lobby sofa.

“You think we’ll be famous?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said because it felt like the right answer.

---