Page 16 of Nanny for the Rockstars

“She was making it pretty clear that she’s not doing this for any of us, and only for the money,” Caleb says. “But you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if she is romanticizing being with us again, and doing this because she wants to bask in the memory of what we supposedly had.”

“Supposedly?” Terry asks. “What do you mean by that? We didn’tsupposedlyhave anything with her. We had it. Things were so good our junior year, I haven’t had sex that good or liked anyone the way I liked Jeanette back then.”

“I meansupposedlyin the sense that I don’t know if she really loved us the way she said she did, since she wanted to have control over us too. In my mind, it’s not love to control your partner, and that’s exactly what she was doing,” Caleb says.

Terry and I both nod. That was true, and it was the thing that had caused us to turn on her back in high school. We did a lot for Jeanette when she was our girlfriend, but there were some things none of us would allow anyone to do, not even Jeanette—and control our choices was one of those things.

“I still can’t believe the ultimatum she gave us,” Terry says. “That wasn’t fair. And I don’t know why she seemed so surprised with the way things turned out for her during our senior year. I mean, what did she think was going to happen? She tried to make us choose between her and our dream, and she ultimately broke our hearts.”

“It might not have been the most mature decision in the world for us to get back at her by bullying her. But still, she had to realize how much she was hurting us,” Caleb says.

“I don’t know if she even sees it that way,” I say.

“What do you mean?” Terry asks.

“I mean, you know she hates us for the way we acted toward her senior year. She hated us back then, and it’s pretty clear she’s not changed her mind since then. I don’t think she thinks of it as her giving us an ultimatum and then not liking our choice. She sees it as us being man whores and not caring about her,” I explain. “She sees us as the ones who were being unreasonable. Not the other way around.”

“I guess that makes a little bit of sense, though I can’t for the life of me see how she thinks she was in the right when she’s the one who told us to pick,” Terry says.

“It’s one of those things where everyone has their own perception of reality, and I can’t see her being willing to say she was wrong. It’s really hard to find anyone who’s willing to admit that, and as we all recall, Jeanette is pretty stubborn,” Caleb says.

And she was. She had been incredibly stubborn about not wanting to tell the kids at school that she was with all of us, making it clear more than once that she didn’t want our relationship to be common knowledge. She didn’t want the other girls at school to brand her as a slut or a tramp, and she feared that’s what would happen. It wasn’t until we were bullying her in our senior year that she herself told the other students we had all broken her heart. She called us all her exes, and she tried to paint us as major man whores to anyone who would listen.

It was that same stubbornness that caused her to hold her ground when she told us that we essentially had to pick either pursuing our career or being with her.

She laid it out to us the summer before our senior year, telling us that she didn’t want to go on tour with us, as she was working on building her career in Philadelphia.

She wanted to make something of herself there, and if she stayed she could move to higher positions in whatever company she was working for—I don’t even remember now which company it was—and she wanted to take that experience to move up in the world.

If she traveled with us on tour, she wouldn’t have the chance to gain the experience to progress.

But she also didn’t want us to go on tour without her. It was rooted in the insecurities she felt at the time. She wanted us to stay in the city and try to make ourselves locally famous, but we had bigger dreams than that and we weren’t going to give up traveling to pursue those dreams just because she was insecure.

She could deny it, but the truth is, despite the fact that she had been our girlfriend for a year, she didn’t want us out there where other hot girls would be throwing themselves at us, and didn’t want us out where we could cheat on her without a chance of her knowing.

It went downhill for us after that.

At the time, we never had an official breakup, just as we had never had an official label for our relationship itself.

Instead, we distanced ourselves from her. We had almost nothing to do with her until school started, and then we bullied her. I know we did it for a couple of reasons. We wanted her to back off. We wanted her to get the message that we weren’t going to stay in Philly for her.

But I also think that we wanted her to push us away too. It was our dream to pursue music and make ourselves big, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t kill us to have to make that choice and leave the other thing we loved behind.

By bullying her, we were able to put that wedge between us.

By the time we graduated, the wedge was certainly in place and the damage had been done. We left to pursue our dream of being rockstars, and Jeanette stayed behind. We went on to bed as many women as we could during our time on the road, and I was sure Jeanette had gotten word of that through the news if nothing else.

But the way we saw it, she had chosen to stay behind, and we weren’t going to be controlled by anyone. We had effectively split, and there was no reason for any of us to think that we would ever see her again. Let alone have her back in our lives.

So, given the way fate has so clearly brought us back together, I don’t think the universe would allow her to back out on us at all. And, if she does, I’m sure my brother is right—it would be pretty out of character for her to do that and ghost us on top of it.

“Do you think we should text her to make sure she’s coming?” I ask as I look at the time on my phone. “We’re going to have to hit the road soon, and there’s not been word at all from her. I would think she would at least want to check to make sure things are running on time, don’t you?”

“Give it a little while longer,” Caleb says. “I think she liked Hendrix, so based on that alone I don’t think she’s going to ghost us.”

“I fucking hope not anyway,” I say. “It was a pain in the ass to get through those nannies to find her. I don’t want to go through that again.”

“You say that as if we would have a choice,” Caleb replies.

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