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Copyright
First published in the USA by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. in 2016.
First published in Great Britain in paperback in 2016 by HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd,
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Copyright © Alloy Entertainment and Vivi Greene 2016
Jacket art © 2016 by Natalie C. Sousa ; Jacket Design by Elaine Damasco; Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2016
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008173920
Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780008173937
Version: 2016-04-14
For the fans
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1: 92 Days Until the Lily Ross Forever World Tour: June 12th
Chapter 2: 92 Days Until Tour: June 12th
Chapter 3: 91 Days Until Tour: June 13th
Chapter 4: 90 Days Until Tour: June 14th
Chapter 5: 87 Days Until Tour: June 17th
Chapter 6: 86 Days Until Tour: June 18th
Chapter 7: 84 Days Until Tour: June 20th
Chapter 8: 84 Days Until Tour: June 20th
Chapter 9: 81 Days Until Tour: June 23rd
Chapter 10: 80 Days Until Tour: June 24th
Chapter 11: 77 Days Until Tour: June 27th
Chapter 12: 76 Days Until Tour: June 28th
Chapter 13: 70 Days Until Tour: July 4th
Chapter 14: 67 Days Until Tour: July 7th
Chapter 15: 65 Days Until Tour: July 9th
Chapter 16: 59 Days Until Tour: July 15th
Chapter 17: 58 Days Until Tour: July 16th
Chapter 18: 52 Days Until Tour: July 22nd
Chapter 19: 51 Days Until Tour: July 23rd
Chapter 20: 48 Days Until Tour: July 26th
Chapter 21: 48 Days Until Tour: July 26th
Chapter 22: 47 Days Until Tour: July 27th
Chapter 23: 46 Days Until Tour: July 28th
Chapter 24: 46 Days Until Tour: July 28th
Chapter 25: 36 Days Until Tour: August 7th
Chapter 26: 35 Days Until Tour: August 8th
Chapter 27: 33 Days Until Tour: August 10th
Chapter 28: 30 Days Until Tour: August 13th
Chapter 29: One Month Later: Los Angeles
About the Publisher
92 Days Until the Lily Ross Forever World Tour June 12th
THE NIGHT I get my heart broken for the last time, it’s over a bowl of soup.
The restaurant, some hip Nolita spot Jed has chosen—I would’ve been happy with takeout—is packed and the waitress tucks us into a cozy corner beneath a giant poster of Audrey Hepburn on the back of a scooter whizzing past the Colosseum. Jed is uncharacteristically quiet, but he’s leaving in the morning for three weeks of sold-out shows, so I chalk it up to stress.
Until he orders the soup.
Not soup as a starter, not soup-and-something-else, not a hearty soup, even, like bouillabaisse or bisque. Just a mug-size bowl of minestrone that, when it arrives, turns out to be tomato juice garnished with a few confused carrots.
This is Jed Monroe we’re talking about. The same Jed Monroe who eats an entire stack of pancakes when I make them for breakfast every time he’s in town. The same Jed Monroe who has “two dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts (or similar)” on his tour rider and who polishes off an entire bag of mint Milano cookies in one sitting. The first time we were photographed together, the caption read something like “Beauty and the BFG.” Everything about Jed is oversize, most of all his appetite, so the soup is definitely alarming. Which is why I spend the rest of the meal trying to decide if he isn’t eating because he’s anxious, or because he wants to fast-forward his way through dinner.
When we leave, I can feel the strained, nervous energy in his grip as he grabs for my hand, gamely smiling for fans between iPhone flashes outside the restaurant, and for the duration of the relentlessly quiet car ride home.
“I think we should talk,” Jed says as we ease into a spot across the street from my building. As if on cue, the privacy window slides slowly up. The driver’s blue eyes look disappointed in the rearview mirror before vanishing behind the clouded glass.
“Talk?” I try to keep the hurt out of my voice. I want to remind him that I’ve been talking all night. He was the one sulking into his soup. But I don’t. I take a breath, and I smile. “Sure,” I say. “Let’s talk.”
Jed stares at his reflection in the window, his perfectly pouty lips twisting to one side. I remember the night we met a year ago, at a party at my manager’s Brooklyn loft. Terry swore he wasn’t trying to set us up, but to this day I have no idea why Jed was there. I didn’t even want to be there. Sammy had dragged me out on a pity mission less than a week after we moved to New York from LA, after Caleb and I had finally called it quits. I was hovering near the sashimi bar, swearing to anyone who would listen that I’d never date another famous person again.
But then I saw him.
Jed was alone on the balcony, staring out at the city lights like they were blinking a code he was trying to decipher. His large frame was hunched over the railing, dark against the twinkling bridge. Right away, something about him seemed different, like he was above the party and its meaningless chaos, the empty small talk, the industry pressures to always be searching for the Next Big Thing. Sure, he’d been on the cover of Rolling Stone just a few weeks before, but something about him appeared almost … normal.
I knew I shouldn’t go out there. I knew I should stay inside, where it was warm and safe. Where I would be immune to the flop of his hair as it brushed across his forehead. The shy, crooked tilt of his smile. But I didn’t stay. I went outside and fell in love. Again.
Big mistake.
“I don’t think this is working anymore,” Jed says now. He says some other things I’ve heard before, too, about “timing,” his “priorities,” his “career.”
I stare into his amber eyes. I know he’s in there somewhere, the one person I thought truly understood me. Understood this life, and how we’d get through it together. Jed is the first man I’ve dated. Caleb, Sebastian—they were boys. Jed’s older than they were, older than me, but it’s more than that. Being with him is so easy, because there aren’t any games. He knows what he wants, and he knows how to get it. I just never thought he’d stop wanting me.
“It’s … it’s a lot of pressure,” he tells me, his eyes suddenly hard and focused. “My fans are crazy. Your fans are really crazy.”
A sick, hollow feeling sweeps over me. “My fans?” The one thing Jed and I always agreed on is that our fans come first. They are the reason we get to do what we do, and if that makes it harder for us to buy our own groceries, or take a leisurely walk in the park, or have a quiet dinner out, that’s the price we pay. It makes having a relationship harder, but we’ve found a balance between going out and staying in, being accessible while still living our lives. It’s not always easy, but it’s worked. At least, it’s worked for me.
Jed rubs the sides of his forehead, a telltale sign that he’s feeling run-down. I try to convince myself that he’s just tired, that all he needs is a good night’s sleep. But I know Jed. Once he’s made up his mind about something, there’s no turning back. “I thought I could do it, but I can’t,” he says.
There’s a lump in my throat and I want to scream at him: Why are you giving up? We can have all of it! But a part of me, the part I try to keep hidden, knows he’s right. After all, we chose this. We get to make music and sing our songs and live our lives in front of millions of people. We don’t get to be normal.
I’m just the fool who keeps trying.
Jed holds my gaze and for a moment I see something flicker in his eyes: regret, maybe, or disappointment. But he quickly looks away, digging in the pocket of his thoughtfully distressed jeans and slipping the keys to my apartment into my palm.
There are three keys: a thick, magnetic one for the front door; one for the elevator; and one for the private stairs to the rooftop deck. They’re on an I ♥ NY keychain—a gift from Tess when I moved to the city—and when I think about how many times I’ve done this, handed over my heart, the keys to my home, to my world, I feel dizzy. Over and over again—it’s not enough. I’m not enough. The keys come back, warm from somebody else’s pocket, and I’ll stash them in the end table drawer, with the stray bobby pins and spare batteries and other orphaned objects, until I’m able to forget just how much this hurts. Until the next party when I can convince myself that it’s worth it to keep trying. To step out onto yet another balcony, where the next guy is waiting, and start all over again.
I slip out of Jed’s car in heartbroken silence, slam the door behind me, and watch his red brake lights bleed into the sea of cabs and limos on Hudson Street. I lean against my building, eyes still locked on the road. For a moment, I feel like I’m dreaming, like the real me is still in the car beside him. We’re on our way back to his apartment. We’re playing Ping-Pong and talking through his set list for tour. We’re pulling up our schedules and figuring out when we’ll be in the same city next, laughing about how crazy our lives are, how insanely difficult it can be to arrange the same nights off. We’re nestled together in his king-size bed, arguing over which bad reality show to watch while we—finally—fall asleep.
I climb the steps to my front door, waiting for the tears to spill over. But they don’t. It’s like something inside me has shifted, and all I feel is numb. Usually I’d be rushing upstairs, ready to mess around on my guitar and scribble into my journal. The louder songs would pour out first, in fits and angry starts, and then the melancholy ballads, and finally, the full-circle, girl-power anthems. I’d have an album’s worth of material jotted on napkins and notepads in less than a week, the quick-and-dirty chronicle of my latest doomed affair, from meet cute to up-in-flames to I’m-better-off-without-you.
Repeat.
I can already hear Sammy and Tess insisting that it’s not me. It’s him. But this time, I’m not so sure. Every relationship I’ve ever been in—from the big, sweeping romances that have spanned years and states to the little flirtations that were shorter but no less intense—has had two things in common:
1 The fact that they’ve ended, and
2 Me.
There are only so many songs a girl can write about being better off alone before she starts to believe she has no other choice.
I turn the spare keys in the lock and wedge the heavy front door open. It clicks shut behind me and I cross the lobby to the trash chute, chucking the keys inside. They clank along the sides and I wait for the satisfying sound of a final thud. But all I hear is quiet—quiet, and the bored, steady hum of the city that doesn’t care how many times you fall apart.
92 Days Until Tour June 12th
“HE’S AN ASS.”
Tess arrives bearing Jeni’s ice cream sandwiches and a flimsy book of matches from the bodega on the corner. We’re on the roof deck, overlooking the lamplit West Village cobblestones and the dark, reflective sheen of the Hudson River.
“A giant, hairy ass,” Sammy agrees. She’s sprawled across one of the chaise longues, her long strawberry-blond hair fanned out behind her. Mom picked the patio furniture on one of her visits last fall, before I’d officially moved in. Neither of us had any idea that “patio” meant something different in New York than it did in Los Angeles. Or back home in Wisconsin, for that matter. It’s almost impossible to squeeze past the matching glass tables and rustic lanterns and stocky potted ferns without tripping.
“I mean, not that his ass is hairy,” Sammy clarifies. “Though it probably is. I just meant that his hair is big.” Between her knees is a shoebox full of cards, photographs, and other Jed-related memorabilia. She flips through a small photo book I’d had printed for Valentine’s Day. “Not big. Gigantic.”
Tess kicks Sammy from her post on one of the cushioned benches that line the perimeter of the deck.
“What?” Sammy whines, rubbing the side of her ankle. “It’s not a secret that his hair is huge. There could be an entire colony of small creatures reproducing in there and we’d never have a clue.”
I laugh, even though I don’t feel like it, which is why Sammy has been my best friend since preschool. She will do or say anything to make me smile, even if it means making herself look bad, which—given her insanely long legs, porcelain skin, and freakishly shiny hair—is nearly impossible to do.
“I’m just not sure we’ve entered the trash-talking portion of the evening yet,” Tess says flatly. She fiddles with the piercing in the soft cartilage of her upper ear, a tiny silver barbell. “We still don’t even know what happened.”
“I told you what happened.” I groan, pulling my favorite gray cashmere sweater across my bare knees. It was the first nice thing I bought for myself when I signed to my label in LA Sammy helped me pick it out in a boutique in Santa Monica, and even though the sleeves are stretched and it’s worn around the collar, I’ve kept it with me ever since.
“I refuse to believe you broke up with Jed Monroe because he ordered soup,” Sam says. “But even if you did, I’m sure he deserved it. I mean, look at these.” She pulls out a strip of photo booth shots we took at a meet-and-greet with fans a few months back. I’m making all sorts of wacky faces and Jed is pouting, his big, handsome features arranged stoically and identically from shot to shot. “Would it kill him to smile?”
I sigh. “I didn’t break up with him. Stop trying to make me feel better.”
Tess and Sammy exchange what is supposed to be an undercover look of concern. “Sorry.” Sam shrugs. She puts the photos back in the shoebox and lays the matches beside them.
“Don’t be sorry!” Tess barks. She stands abruptly, gathering her brown hair into a knot on the top of her head, exposing a newly shorn undercut that makes her look part punk, part little boy. Tess is pretty fierce about breakups, not that she’s had many of her own. When she told us she was gay the summer after high school, I was relieved, figuring she’d finally start opening up about the girls she was seeing. But she didn’t. As far as I know, she’s never had a relationship longer than a few months. Independence is her calling card, sort of the way falling in love is mine.
I shake my head stubbornly. “I don’t want to keep doing this.”
“Then let’s go out!” Sammy says, bolting upright. Let’s go out is pretty much Sammy’s mantra. If they gave out advanced degrees for partying your problems away, she would have her PhD.
“No,” I say. “I mean, this.” I wave distractedly at the shoebox. “I don’t want to keep doing this to myself. Getting dumped, and pretending to be better for it. Writing songs about how much stronger I am on my own. Because what if the truth is that there’s something wrong with me? What if I’m destined to be alone?” I bite at the corners of my thumbnail, my oldest and grossest habit.
“That’s ridiculous,” Tess says. “The only thing wrong with you is that you have terrible taste in men.”
I roll my eyes. “You loved Jed,” I remind her. “You said he was so much better than—and I quote—‘the industry douchebags’ I usually fall for.”
Tess scoffs. “Hardly a glowing recommendation,” she jokes, before turning serious. “No, you’re right. Jed’s a solid guy and a kick-ass musician. You guys, your careers … it all made sense. But you deserve more than a business partner. You deserve somebody who gets the real you—crazy, silly, goofy you. That’s what you’re looking for. Right?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know,” I say, stretching out my legs and looking up at the starless sky. “All I know is that I’m tired of my own battle cry. It’s boring.”
“Your battle cry is Billboard platinum.” Sammy laughs, collapsing back onto the chaise. “You can’t give up now.”
Tess kicks her again and rolls her eyes. “That’s not what she means, Samantha.”
“I don’t know what I mean,” I say with a frustrated sigh.
“I have an idea.” Tess shifts closer to me on the bench. “Let’s get out of here.”
Sammy reaches down to pull on her sandals.
“No, no, I don’t mean now.” Tess raises her thick, dark brows. “For the summer.”
“The summer?” Sam looks confused. “Like, the whole summer?”
I shake my head defiantly. “I don’t want to go back to LA. Every time I leave the house it’s like a graveyard of zombie exes.”
“I didn’t say anything about LA.” Tess flashes a sly smile. “Remember that house my dad used to rent, up in Maine?”
I nod. Sammy and I met Tess when we were twelve, at a summer camp on Lake Michigan. Every year, after camp, Tess’s father would take her back east, to a ramshackle cottage on a tiny island in Penobscot Bay. “What about it?”
“Oh, not much.” Tess shrugs playfully. “Other than I just bought it.”
“You what?” Sammy shrieks.
“You bought it?” I ask. “You didn’t tell me you were thinking about buying a house!”
Tess smirks. “Just because you pay me an ungodly sum of money to hang out with you doesn’t mean I have to consult you on every business decision I make,” she says.
My cheeks burn. Technically, Tess and Sammy are my assistants—it’s how we could justify them putting their lives on hold to keep up with mine. Sammy did a few semesters at Madison before dropping out to follow me, first to LA and then cross-country to New York. Tess was already at NYU when we got here, but it wasn’t long before she decided to take a hiatus. They both insist they wouldn’t have it any other way, and I know I couldn’t do it without them. But I hate when they talk about money—mine or theirs—even when I know they’re joking.
“It’s nothing fancy,” Tess continues, “just a tiny house in a real-life fishing village. I think maybe we could all use some real life for a change.” Tess looks at me, and I wonder for the billionth time when she got so good at reading my mind. “What do you think, Bird? Are you in?”
Bird, originally Songbird and sometimes Birdie, is the nickname Tess gave me at camp when we were kids. Over the years it has been adapted as an easy shorthand among family and friends, to differentiate from the other Lily Ross, the Lily Ross who headlines tours and cranks out albums and is forever at the center of a media cyclone and who, increasingly, has almost nothing to do with me.
I stand and lean against the roof ledge, looking out over the city. A police siren pierces the air and I feel my whole body tensing. There is nothing I would love more than to leave, to hide in some cozy corner of the world, away from photographers and interviews and studio schedules. All of it.
“It’s a nice idea,” I say wistfully. But I know this feeling, and I know it won’t last. Tomorrow it will be right back to business—there’s an album to finish, the first singles to put out, endless publicity, and in the fall, my next tour. There isn’t any time to feel sorry for myself.
“But …” Sammy prompts.
I smile. “You know I can’t take that much time away from work.”
Tess stares at me with her arms crossed. Sammy pretends to inspect her freshly painted, pale pink nails.
“What?” I prod. They both look like they want to say more, but don’t.
“It’s no big deal,” Tess finally huffs, waving her hand in the air between us. “We can stay.” She unpeels the wrapper from an ice cream sandwich and licks slowly around the dripping edges. “Summer in the city is delightful.”
I look out at the puzzle of inching cars and shuffling pedestrians. I moved to New York because I thought it would be a fresh start. After Caleb, LA was feeling claustrophobic, like it already knew me too well. I loved the way New York made me feel off-balance. I wanted the city to swallow me up, to consume me. And it did, for about a week.
Then I met Jed. I wasn’t looking for another relationship so soon, but it was almost a foregone conclusion. Our lives fit so perfectly together. We were so alike. And everything he was, I wanted to be. Successful, established, respected, grown-up. Right away, people loved us together. We were supposed to make it.
I wasn’t supposed to be here, again.
Suddenly, there’s an overwhelming rumbling in my chest. I turn on my heel and walk to Sammy’s chaise, standing over the shoebox. I hold out one hand and without saying a word, Tess is there with the matches. I strike one and Sam passes me the photo booth strip. I tilt the flame until it licks the photo’s glossy edge.
“It was fun, but now it’s done,” I say, the silly rhyme I stole from Sammy, the one she used to chant to get over high school breakups, back before I had any boyfriends of my own. I hold on to the burning photo, watching as Jed’s face contorts, melting into mine, until the whole thing goes up in an orange burst of flame.
91 Days Until Tour June 13th
RAY IS WAITING beside one of two black Escalades parked at the back entrance of Equinox. Despite the urge to stay cocooned in my bed for weeks on end, I dragged myself to my so-early-it-should-be-illegal private session with Leon this morning, intense interval training that consistently liquefies the lower half of my body. It was typically brutal, but it felt good to be distracted, and as I approach the car I even manage something that resembles a smile.
“Nice guns,” Ray teases. I lift the sleeve of my retro silk blouse to flex my wiry muscles, our post-gym comedy routine. Of the entire security team, Ray has been around the longest and is my favorite. He’s sort of like an older brother, if your older brother were an ex-Navy SEAL with biceps the size of watermelons. He holds the door open and I climb in, tossing my tote on the seat beside me.