Author's note: Inspired by James's little wave during the Worldwide video. Title from the song of the same name by Explosions in the Sky. Thanks to Christina for the beta!
James Diamond is used to pretending. When Mother leaves on extended stays in Milan or Berlin for ad campaigns, to make sure that the make-up artists in Dior's fashion shows are applying her products properly, James plays with the dolls his mother bought from some fashionable boutique in Copenhagen for him. He combs their hair, telling them in a sing-song voice he's heard Mother using on people she's about to destroy emotionally that their hair will never match that terrible complexion if they don't dye it or, better yet, try some Diamond Grit Cleaner, only $39.99 plus shipping and handling for a 12 ounce bottle!
"It's proven to clean your pores until they are clean!" he repeats the slogan cheerfully, dabbing some of Mother's shaving cream on their tiny faces. "If it burns, you're gonna be pretty!"
It's easier to deal with these dolls and their invented skin problems than think of the way his own skin burns when he uses that same cleanser, the barely-contained gasps of pain echoing in his empty bathroom. Everything echoes in that big house. Even when Mother is home, her lair is sequestered on the first floor, and he is Absolutely Forbidden from Disturbing the Master at Work.
It's lonely, but not as lonely as going to Daddy's, with his new family he's had before the divorce came through six months ago. Sitting on Ms. Monica's couch, a creation not quite the navy blue the factory advertised, in the living room, with cartoons he's not allowed to watch at Mother's house playing in loud Technicolor across the screen, James never feels at home. Sitting next to Ms. Monica's four children (introduced to him as Boris, Vivian, andthetwins Gin'n'Tonia) James yearns for an empty, echoing house.
On today's visit, Ms. Monica sits them all down on that sagging couch with herself and her enormously pregnant belly as the centerpiece. James is wearing his Tuesday outfit, the one with his favorite pair of boots and the best scarf known to preteens, sandwiched between Boris and Ms. Monica. She and Daddy still aren't married, even though James's half-brother is growing with startling speed in her stomach.
A cartoon about a sponge is on the TV, with his annoying laugh and a nose like a flute. Boris probably hasn't bathed in a couple days, and his Cheeto-and-jalapeno smell is over-powering. (How does anyone even start to smell like that? he wonders.) Gin'n'Tonia stare at the TV with mouths gaping in stupefied attention. A little bit of drool oozes from Vivian's mouth. She's only two and a half, but James thinks she's old enough to wipe away some spit.
James knows he doesn't belong here, just as much as he doesn't belong in Mother's house. But when Daddy's entrance causes the screen door to slam against the ugly goldenrod wallpaper in the kitchen resulting in a stampede of children, James just wants to pretend. He hovers at the door as the other four gallop around the small kitchen, cheering and cooing like baby birds waiting for their meal.
Daddy's hands, streaked with grease from fixing rich people's cars all day, hold plastic containers of delicious, greasy chicken that Mother would never let him eat. At ten, James is all angles and not enough meat on his bones, but Mother says that's not an excuse to eat all sorts of (excuse her French) bullshit to stop looking like a toothpick with a comb over.
Ms. Monica's hand is gentle as she urges him into the kitchen, and that push ushers him into a fictional world where he has always been used to this half-family.
He doesn't play with those dolls ever again, but in his darker moments, he remembers their dark-eyed placidity, their silent malleability to events they couldn't control. It was a comfort to know he had a tight control on something.
-
Even though Mother swears that if he ever plays hockey like his Daddy, she'll scrub his mouth with her special Scouring Soap for Naughty Boys Named James Diamond (he doesn't doubt that she's actually placed this in her product line-up), James signs up in the seventh grade to play hockey. This kid in his homeroom class, Kendall, convinces him to do it, along with his friend Hortense (who has the ugliest glasses, a fondness for cardigans with missing buttons and braces) and the one person James knew from elementary school, Carlos Garcia.
By some luck, he makes it. His pretty face is still intact, along with his future modeling career.
Kendall claps him and a very queasy-looking Hortense on the back, "Congrats" just past his lips before Carlos barrels into them all, overjoyed at being in hockey with the three best friends anybody could have.
Kendall Knight never has to pretend. His Daddy died in a car accident after Katie was born. Kendall and his Daddy had a quick, clean separation, with none of this schizophrenic business of switching between one house and the other that James is accustomed to. The secrets to Kendall's happiness are in the gaps between his crooked teeth and in the broken bones of his index finger from teaching Hortense how to play tetherball in first grade.
The four of them are impervious to the harassments of the world, one of James's fantasies become three dimensional.
Mother approves of them, despite their hockey-head ways and Hortense's name, which she bullies him into changing right quick. Kendall and Carlos try monumentally hard to call Logan by his new name, and he has seen Logan start the second stem of a capital H on his homework, but James never falters. It's just something to add to his list of things to pretend.
Every night, though, Mother makes him practice saying "I'm James Diamond, pop star" like some moms make their kids say prayers, probably so he won't go off and get the Wrong Idea about this hockey business. When he says those words, he imagines blondes almost as tall as he is in their freakishly high heels leaning on him as he struts down a red carpet, camera bulbs flashing like the fireflies. He thinks of Mother seeing his face, a million times more gigantic than it really is, slathered on a billboard down the street from her office in Minneapolis. He's composed a hundred million letters to his step-siblings about how the paparazzi won't leave him be and if he comes home to find them pestering for autographs for their little friends, well, that's just selfish; isn't he still their big brother?
The night before their auditions in front of Gustavo, although he doesn't know it then, Mother pats his cheek in an uncharacteristically maudlin way. "You're going to leave a scratch on the world, James." He smiles up at her, not understanding. "Some people leave marks, but they're not Diamonds."
She doesn't say much else, just leaves him to think about school dragging eternally on until he's emancipated, finally, at eighteen to live in an apartment Mother will pay for until he's established his modeling career. The dreams of parents for their children are reckless within four walls; they hide underneath the bed next to the stacks of outdated porn magazines that Carlos sneaks away from his house, or they sit like dust on top of last winter's unfashionable boots.
Even after they go off to LA, leaving Mother and Daddy in their separate lonely houses, it's not skin off James's back. The lights, the pressure, the training – just one step towards Mother's, no, his dream, another fact to tuck into his imagination. If you never wake up, you never stop dreaming, right?
There's a bit of give and take between the four of them, of course; even though James and Carlos usually hang out together more than they do with Logan and Kendall, there is no defined separation between two sets of friends in a group of four. Like the cells in Logan's biology textbook, their group is constantly morphing, dividing; new combinations seem to spring out of the ether depending on what hijinks happen that day.
But Jo changes everything.
James likes blondes, maybe because he likes to think they're kindred spirits or perhaps siblings of the Danish dolls he used to pamper. And Jo is the best blonde he's ever met, with her fearless smile, good fashion sense and sweet-smelling perfume. She's not unbalanced in the great many ways that Camille is, but she's got the same amount of fire burning beneath her perfect breasts.
Without trying, without meaning to, she splinters their friendship. Not irreparably, but the dynamics change subtly. It's one of those things you wake up one morning, whispered into your mind by the capriciousness of your dreams, telling you something has gone awry, but no clues to go by.
He thinks of her sometimes when he's in the shower, as he's lathering soap on his chest. In his mind, her hair is a little damp, curling up at the ends so that the tips don't quite reach her nipples. He's caught himself, once or twice, reaching out to cup an imaginary breast, just to feel the weight of it, heavy and adult in the palm of his hand. He imagines her smile as she kisses her way down, past the definition of his abs and maybe a hand on his –
It's never awkward when he steps out after those shower sex scenes. The steam covers the mirror, his reflection off in a world of foggy intrigue. Every muscle is simultaneously sated and jangling. It's not like the time he'd accidentally thought of Jenny Tinkler from homeroom going down on him; he hadn't felt at home in his skin for an entire week afterwards. No, this is definitely nothing like that.
They kiss, once, him and Jo. It's the first party he's ever gone to without knowing what every face there looks like with a Sharpie penis drawn on. Carlos is here somewhere, probably frolicking through whatever apartment they're in with a bowl of Cheetos, getting orange dust on the picture frames that line the dreary halls. Logan and Kendall are presumably back in 2J baby-sitting Katie, but they all know who is baby-sitting who.
He calls her name from his strategic position at the wall behind the drinks. A pink flush spreads over Jo's nose when she looks up at him over the punch bowl. There's a bit of eye liner smudged to the side of her eye, so he does what any good friend would do. Licking his thumb, he reaches out to gingerly wipe it off. Her eyes go a little soft and when she follows the movement slightly, something cramps up inside him.
He knows that she's only here with her dad, and even though it seems like every kid here is holed up in apartments with dreams tacked onto the walls like Dak Zevon posters and only one parent, James thinks she's got two houses to split her life between, like he does.
They wind up on the roof, a little tipsy, not that James will admit to it. There's an ache in his heart, one he's not used to, so he turns to Jo, mouth open to say something that he knows will be irrelevant. But he stops, because her face is turned peacefully toward the clear sky, and even though her skin looks terribly washed out beneath the glaring lights on the Palmwoods's roof, she's beautiful, more beautiful than when he'd seen her walking towards them her first day there.
Her eyes open just before he kisses her and he's afraid she's going to push him away and run for the hills. But her hand rests demurely on his shoulder, not guiding, but not stopping him either. Her lips taste like Dr. Pepper chapstick, but her mouth tastes of the sickening blend of vodka and too much artificially fruit-flavored shit from the party downstairs.
His hand makes its way to her hip and like it has a mind of its own, it seems to float higher, pushing up the fabric of her thin purple blouse, but only to her belly button. He mentally slaps away his hand, reaching instead to cradle her head as he deepens the kiss.
The stars shine on, silent witnesses to another fantasy become almost real.
Jo never mentions that party, not to him, not to anyone. It's just one more fact to sweep under the rug, an ugly one like what Mother has in her foyer, like it never happened.
He looks the other way when Kendall kisses her, remembering the way her nose felt pressed against his cheek that night under the stars. James knows it must feel different with Kendall, since his nose is like an elbow jutting out of his face, but every time they break apart, there's a smile on her face and something utterly content resting in the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes when he smiles back.
It never gets better, that ache in his chest. It doesn't get worse though, and for that he's grateful. But just like when he was little, he finds himself splitting time between being the outrageous James that everyone wants him to be and nursing that tender little spot in his heart, rubbing it gently like Ms. Monica used to do to Andy's improbably hairy head shortly after he was born.
James yearns, of course he does, because no girl at the Palmwoods treats him with the same paradoxical exasperated patience that Jo does, and no one's hair curls exactly like hers does after she's had it up in a bun for a few hours. Despite that, he's almost okay with living vicariously through Kendall, although he tries not to think of what they do up on the roof for hours past her curfew. He does wonder, though, if she ever thinks about kissing him when her lips touch Kendall's.
So it surprises him when that little tear in his heart rips suddenly when he thinks of her, gone to some foreign land for years, away from her and Kendall's happiness, away from his covetous view. It robs him of breath, tramples the teeny vain hopes he'd had of being with her shattered with the quiver of her lips as she turns to Kendall.
On her last night in America, Logan spends the night in Carlos and James's room. Kendall's with Jo; they all know that some goodbyes can't happen in public spaces. They huddle together under Logan's stethoscope-patterned fleece blanket, even though it's June. The cold plastic of Carlos's helmet rests against his jaw, the scratches from all his mishaps chafing him slightly. They don't say anything. He contemplates calling Mother and asking if, in the butler's last cleaning sweep, he had thrown out those dolls from Copenhagen. It'd be nice to save those glassy-eyed fools from their Lilliputian problems. Anything but this waiting for the other shoe to drop.
He can't speak for the other two, but James doesn't sleep at all that night, completely disregarding Mother's advice to always, always sleep at least two hours to maintain flawless skin. He could only think of mouthing three soft words into Jo's neck, leaving a sensory memory there so she would never forget that moment, would never forget him.
There's a tingling, uncontained buzzing in his skin as the four of them race through the terminal in search of her. It's like playing hide-and-seek with his step-siblings, when they couldn't contain their glee, panting into the back of his shirt as he urged them to shut up or they'll find us, but this time there's more to lose than who gets the first slice of red velvet cake when Daddy gets home.
James has endured a constant back-and-forth, ever since Mother decided she couldn't put up with the grease under Daddy's fingernails. But now, looking at Jo with her perfectly curled hair in this airport terminal (which might as well be utterly empty for all he notices) it feels like everything in him stills. Even the blood in his veins pumps reluctantly.
He has never minded her walking away before, because he has long admired the wash of her jeans and the way the denim clings to her upper thighs in the most flattering way. But this time, his view is obscured by her luggage rolling behind her, wheels clicking almost cheerfully along the tile.
Jo turns around, once, and though he waves, Kendall's body has already started to sag and there's a minute tremble running through him that James can feel from where they're pressed against each other.
Standing there in his fashionably ripped jeans, James doesn't know whether to wish for her show to be canceled just so Kendall will stand tall again or hope that she'll remember a kiss that tasted like spiked punch on a roof top. She doesn't see him wave.
His blood resumes its circulation, even as the four of them stand there, motionless.