Page 2 of When I Picture You
“Did you tell them?”
Renee’s face puckered, but she didn’t dignify the question with an answer.
“They would freak if they knew you were going,” Kadijah said. “I’mfreaking and I’m just a regular adult Lola Gray fan. I’m still mad you didn’t get me a plus-one.”
“Plus-ones are for dates, not coworkers, even yourfavoriteco-worker.” Kadijah was the hottest polyamorous non-binary person ina twenty-five-mile radius, but Kadijah and Renee were strictly close friends. “I’d rather be there with you than with my mom and her boyfriend. Weddings are just a load of performative sexist traditions, like your father giving you away to another man, or—”
Kadijah cut her off with a dead-eyed stare. “Renee Feldman, you are not going to weaponize feminism to distract me from the fact that you are going to chill withLola Gray.Tonight. Without me.”
Renee held her finger to her lips and shot a glance at the Lo-Lites. “I am not going to chill with her. It’s been like ten years since we last talked, and even before that, we haven’t been friends since eighth grade. She probably doesn’t even remember me.”
“Yougrew up next door to her,” Kadijah said, as if Renee weren’t perfectly aware of that fact. “Of course she remembers you.”
“Even if she does, it’s her sister’s wedding. She’ll be busy.”
Kadijah sighed dramatically. “It’s just tragic that you’re getting a private concert from Lola Gray when I, an actual fan, have never seen her live. Her last tour sold out in minutes.”
“Lola’s not performing. I know I’m repeating myself, butit’s her sister’s wedding.”
“Exactly! She’s going to sing for their first dance. Youhaveto Face-Time me.” Kadijah swatted at Renee with a rag. “Don’t give me that look, MissI’ve Never Been a Fan of Anything. Lola’s the greatest pop star of our generation.”
“I don’t pay attention to that stuff,” Renee said.
“I need you to stop saying things like that if we’re going to stay friends. I’ve been following Lola sinceYou’re Next!I begged my mom to let me vote for her.”
“I barely remember that,” said Renee, who remembered it vividly. Lola’s run-up to second place on the talent competition show had been all anyone in Fellows could talk about their junior year. Kadijah, who’d still been a middle schooler in Dearborn, had missed the frenzy. “I have better things to do than keep track of Lola’s career.”
Sure, Lola was a chart-topping recording star who wrote all her own songs. She’d won the Grammy for Best New Artist at eighteen, then been nominated for every album since.Rolling Stonehad first dubbed her “The Patron Saint of Teenage Girls” and, when her later albums proved she had staying power, elevated her title to “The New Princess of Pop.”
In the same twenty-seven years on planet Earth, Renee had only managed to earn a BA from Kalamazoo College and admission to a documentary film MFA program (after a rejection the year before). She was hoping to add the MFA itself to that list, but she’d taken a leave of absence just shy of her thesis project, during which she’d moved back in with her mom. If you stacked up the achievements of the former neighbors against each other, the scales tipped slightly in Lola’s favor.
Not that it mattered, because Lola had probably forgotten Renee existed.
Renee slipped her apron over her head and grabbed her tote bag.
“I’ll take opening shifts for a week if you promise to tell me everything about tonight!” Kadijah called after her, but Renee was already out the door.
TWO HOURS LATER, Renee sat in her car outside a brick building that had once operated as a bottle factory, and now operated as a wedding venue called the Bottle Factory. Heat radiated off the asphalt of the parking lot. Under the hot, wet blanket of humidity, everything felt too bright and fuzzed out. Renee could visualize how she’d capture it on film: a touch of overexposure to convey the heat, the pair of men smoking at the edge of the frame, the focus on the older woman in asequined dress fanning herself on the steps. Maybe she could make her thesis documentary about how wedding venues served as liminal spaces, constructed to create the illusion that love stories were real.
What an insipid concept, the critical voice in her head muttered. Asinine. Plebeian. Anemic. The primary thing Renee had learned in film school was a new vocabulary of fancy insults. Not only did she now know what those words meant, she applied them to herself regularly.
Renee remembered the girls she’d seen at Prince’s earlier, the way they’d filmed themselves: smiling easily and crowding their faces into the frame. They’d turned their camera on everything and anything. If they were here now, they’d just be filming, not sitting in a hot carthinkingabout filming.
She slumped forward and set her forehead against the steering wheel. Had it come to this? Was she reallyjealousof teenage girls making content for social media?
Her phone buzzed.
MOM:Are you running late?
We have a seat saved.
Renee wanted a fast-forward button to smash and skip over the wedding altogether. Since her parents divorced when Renee was fourteen, she’d understood that real life wasn’t like a Lola Gray song, all drippy romance and happy endings. The tune might be catchy, but the words were ultimately meaningless.
Still, Renee cared enough about Claudia to set aside her doubts for one night. She’d known the Grigorians practically since birth, long before Lola swapped her legal last name for the stage-friendlyGray. Lola was Renee’s age, and Claudia two years older. When they were young, the Grigorian girls had taken the edge off the loneliness Renee felt as an only child. And there had been times Lola and Claudia practically lived at Renee’s, when their dad was away on a trucking job and their mom wasn’t quite keeping things together, often in the gaps between young Lola’s performances at churches and state fairs.
But as happy as Renee was for Claudia, she could not get over how freaking embarrassing this night was about to be.
Renee had been destined to get out of Fellows. Everyone knew it. She was too smart for her own good, resentful of authority, irritated by Midwestern blandness—and also a lesbian. She dreamed of moving to a city so big she could be whoever she wanted, making art that people connected with, living a life that was exciting and queer. As straightforward as Renee’s dreams were, growing up, she didn’t know anyone else who shared them—except for Lola, sort of. When Renee left for New York, she was supposed to return as an undeniably cool documentary director. Instead, she’d come crawling back to live in the garage apartment her mom had converted to list on Airbnb. Tonight, she’d have to explain her failure to launch every time someone asked what she’d been up to.
