Chapter Forty-Four – A Most Unremarkable Man
To show to the world – but mostly to the contestants – that LiveFeed was a big, happy family, the powers that be had loaded everyone on three different buses, while the most important people behind the show were traveling in their expensive cars. Angus had offered to have Jamie as a riding partner, but Jamie had politely declined. In his experience, traveling over long distances in a sports car could lead to backaches and grouchiness; also, knowing Angus's style of driving, he didn't want to entrust that guy with his personal safety.
Or other matters. Jamie was curious about the other contestants, now that they had been forced into closed quarters, and he didn't want to look like the guy who received favoritism from the executive producing the show. Why Angus wanted to join them so much on the tour from the very start, instead of enjoying the air-conditioned comfort of his office – Jamie imagined it had to be as gaudy as his car – was a complete mystery to him.
"Do you mind if I sit here?" A frazzled girl asked while fiddling with a carryall and glaring at Jamie fiercely.
He recognized her as the young woman who'd been bullied because of her eating disorder.
"I don't mind it at all." Gallantly, he offered her the seat next to the window and, after a short, hesitant nod from her, picked up her carryall and placed it in the rack above their heads.
"I'm Anna," she said, offering her hand in an awkward gesture. She had seemed a lot more composed in her short videos, but Jamie could swear he could ferret out all her vulnerabilities in a single glance. Or was he being influenced by that image of her, portrayed by the reactions in the comments, all of those nasty people telling her she should watch her figure more or sabotaging her blatantly by asking her to eat cookies live?
"I'm Jamie." He shook her hand and offered her a warm smile.
"The sexy drummer," she said and grinned. "It must be nice to be you," she added with a small sigh, as she turned her head to glance out the window.
"What's so nice about being me?" Jamie asked.
Anna waved. "You're the kind of guy who always gets on top of things. You seem to instinctively know how to deal with all this stuff."
He didn't have to ask to know what she meant. For a moment, he wondered if he really wanted to get involved, but it was ingrained in him to try to help out whenever possible. "I saw those shitty comments on your feed."
Anna turned her head to look at him. The stare she gave him was guarded, as expected.
"Fuck them," Jamie said with a shrug. "That's all you have to think about it. You don't owe anyone anything."
Anna's face lit up. "That does sound like a good idea," she said softly. "If I only had your arms. Then I'd feel pretty strong." She flexed her nonexistent biceps, and then snickered and hid her face in her palms. She was pretty in a conventional way, with pleasantly symmetrical features, straight black hair cut to her shoulders, and smoky eyes that were helped to stand out by the right type of makeup. Only her constant aura of watchfulness undermined her efforts to be more popular with the LiveFeed audience. Confidence could be taught, as Jamie knew so well.
"Thanks for the compliment," he said. "I'd offer to lend them to you, but I think you'd look weird wearing them."
Anna snickered and covered her face again. "You're a lot nicer than I imagined, Jamie."
That surprised him. "How so? I'm always nice," he drawled.
"I thought it was an act," Anna said. "Not because you seemed fake or anything," she hurried to add in an apologetic tone, "but because that's what everyone does on this type of show. Everyone acts like someone they're not."
"Are you?" he asked, watching her closely.
She shook her head. "I'm trying, but I don't think I'm doing a good job. My mask keeps slipping."
What Anna said made perfect sense. Celebrities weren't supposed to show their vulnerable side, unless it was part of a well-thought-out marketing campaign, meant to bring them even more popularity. Not everyone was cut out for that kind of existence; no matter what certain salespeople said in their efforts to convince the unaware wide-eyed dreamer, having it all wasn't possible. Act too much and for too long, and you risked becoming that persona on screen instead of your own person. Jamie planned on not losing himself.
He gave Anna another reassuring smile. "It gets easier. It's like riding a bike. The more you do it, the better you get at it."
"Thanks." She remained quiet for a few moments, then talked again. "I'm not sure I can get used to it, though."
"You don't have to if it's not something you want," Jamie replied. "There are things better than becoming popular on a reality show."
"I guess," Anna said with a sigh. "I'm curious how people on the street see us. This tour is supposed to be about that, right?"
"So it says on the tin," Jamie offered. "I'm curious about the same thing."
They were chatting, getting to know each other, when Jamie felt a presence hovering close. At first, he thought it was someone walking randomly down the aisle between the rows of seats, but when Anna looked over his head, at the person standing there, he realized it couldn't be the case.
He turned and looked at the guy. He was about to ask him if he needed something, when he realized that he looked familiar. "You're that guy, at the bar, who didn't finish his drink," he said, wagging a finger at him and narrowing his eyes. His only interaction with the stranger had been weird as fuck, so he didn't hide his surprise at seeing him here.
He expected a denial judging by the way the stranger stared back at him with disdain in his eyes. How could he have thought this guy looked like Cottontail? Whenever he was close to his bunny boy, Jamie felt like hugging the hell out of him. For some reason, this dude looked like he deserved a nice punch in the face.
"Can I help you with something?" Jamie added, once it became obvious the stranger wasn't going to talk, and Anna shifted behind him, sensing the growing awkwardness.
The guy produced a clipboard from behind his back. "I need a few details," he said curtly.
"Who are you, exactly?"
The stranger smiled for the first time. It was a closed-face smile, hovering between arrogance and shrewdness. Like before, he wore oversized clothes in which he seemed to drown. Jamie had a mind to let him drown if that was what it was going to take to make him disappear.
"I'm Wencel Smith. I'm an assistant; I'm helping contestants with various tasks."
Jamie shrugged. "I don't need any help. And we're on the move. Shouldn't you sit down? What if you fall and break your neck?"
They were assessing each other, and it was painfully obvious that neither liked the other.
Wencel – that was one weird ass name if Jamie had ever heard one – gave up the staring contest first and grimaced as if he'd just been offered a bitter lemon. "Some things can't be postponed. Please, step into my office, Jamie." With that, he turned on his heel and began marching toward the back of the bus where, presumably, his 'office' was. He was clutching the clipboard to his chest as if his life depended on it.
Jamie gave Anna a confused look, only to be met with a mirror reaction.
"This guy's sus," she mouthed at him. "Don't go."
Jamie snorted. "I'm not scared of pencil pushers. I'll go see what he wants."
Anna nodded and pushed herself up so she could stare at Wencel in the back of the bus. "He's perusing that thing like it's highly confidential," she whispered to him.
They had only met minutes ago, and they were already in the same jokes. She gave him a thumbs up and an encouraging smile as he got up and walked down the aisle.
"Well?" he asked, displaying his growing irritation when Wencel didn't deign to give him a look. Instead, he continued to stare at the clipboard resting against his forearm. Jamie was damn sure the guy was ignoring him on purpose.
"Take a seat, Mr. Wicklow." Wencel patted the empty seat to his left. "I'm dying to get to know you better."
***
Hearst groaned and rubbed his eyes. Wencel did have something on Jamie, after all, but it was only in his dark, twisted mind that this discovery of his made any sense. Sixteen years ago, Jamie had been ten years old, way too young to be considered an actual accomplice. But Hearst was no fool. The Wicklows had kept busy in the first decade of the century, and they hadn't minded using their own children to do their bidding.
Looking at those pictures of Jamie as a ten-year-old made Hearst feel things he hadn't felt before whenever he thought of the heart-mender-slash-bad-boy doing his rounds on the Sunny Hill grounds. One of those things was shame; it was only after being boyfriends for at least two years or so that he was supposed to see pics this old. It was as if he was intruding on a secret room in Jamie's house, without asking for permission to enter it first. The boy in the picture was skinny and kept his arms by his sides, as if he didn't know what to do with them. He held his chin up, defiant the way kids were when they needed to pretend that they were strong all by themselves.
Different families, different lives. Hearst followed where his research took him, until the pics trickled to nothing. No wonder Jamie preferred using a stage name and wandered from one place to another. He had no roots, and he had learned not to care about not having them. The fact that he had a family, even a sister and a brother, didn't matter to him. Or, at least, he had forced himself to believe that.
Wencel kept on telling him that Jamie was a leaver. Who wouldn't be, under the circumstances? But what was Wencel trying to prove with that? All of those things, the adults in the family had been responsible for them, not their children.
Of course. Hearst crossed his arms and balanced himself on the hind legs of his chair. It was the prurient curiosity of onlookers whenever an accident took place that always made heroes into villains and the other way around. It was the same reason why Wencel had started Xpress. If someone had something unpleasant in their past, exposing it, blowing it out of proportion, could break them, at least temporarily. What did it matter if you only got drunk once and vomited out of the window of your dorm room? You might just get to go down in history as 'Puke Girl'. Or maybe you slept with the wrong person, and now the whispers did more damage than a night of bad sex.
Or you were the youngest in a family of crooks, and when they went to jail, you had to roam from place to place, from distant relative to distant relative who wasn't interested in having a child to care for, until you built your own narrative and decided to become the person you wanted to be, not whatever someone else chose for you.
Hearst threw his pen on the table. He had been playing with it for the last half hour, although all he had done was to read about Jamie's family of fuckups on the Internet. Now, the question was: how to warn Jamie about what Wencel – and LiveFeed – intended to do? Maybe Jamie would shrug it all off; that wasn't him, at the time, he'd been nothing but a victim, forced to take part in all sorts of small-time scams that eventually built into quite hefty prison sentence for Mr. and Mrs. Wicklow. Jamie's brother and sister, being older, had had to face the juvenile court. In all that maelstrom, it seemed like Jamie had been the only one who managed to get away.
This was the moment that would make or break his character, Hearst decided. He wouldn't betray his brother, because families were supposed to stick together, but he wouldn't leave Jamie in the wind, either.
With that decision in mind, he reached for his phone. First, he needed to send a benign text, something to establish the link between them once more. After all, they had had an unpleasant goodbye before Jamie's leaving, and that had to either be remedied or ignored.
How's life on the road?
There. Sent. Hearst returned to the screen, trying to imagine the various scenarios that could be arranged to put Jamie in a bad light. They might say he's bound to be a con artist because he was shaped by the art of scamming people when he had been under the supervision of his parents. That might be a tenuous play because Jamie was too young to be considered anything else but a victim in all that. Still, for people who sold gossip like hot cakes, that would matter little.
Something told Hearst that they wouldn't be interested in selling Jamie as a sob story. Even if his life after the imprisonment of his parents had been a never-ending string of moving places – and Jamie deserved the pity of people who knew nothing about him – that sort of story wouldn't be the most appealing. After all, Jamie didn't look like someone shaped by trauma; he was handsome, he was a musician, and overall he seemed pleased enough with his life.
Of course, that wasn't the whole story. It was never the whole story, was it? Who knew if Jamie had cried after being forced to part from his parents and siblings? Worse, what if nobody had been there to comfort him?
Hearst swiveled his chair around, staring at the ceiling. Success stories, people who succeeded against all odds, were bestsellers, but never as good as a sleazy affair. No matter what most said, the attraction to the bad and the ugly lived fine and dandy in their petty souls.
Xpress wouldn't exist without an audience, Wen had lectured him in the past. The same applied to all of the tabloids in the world and those thriving on selling crap that wasn't even true. As long as it was shocking and had the chance to destroy someone's reputation, everything was fair game.
They would twist it. They would put a spin on it that Jamie wouldn't see coming. What was going through Wen's mind right now? Hearst picked up his phone and stared at the screen. His text continued to remain unread.
He rubbed at his eyes and yawned. He was tired, and while he needed to study, he would be better off catching a nap. Maybe sleeping on it for a bit would help him figure out how LiveFeed would use the information they had on Jamie to paint him as the villain.
First, he had to close all his textbooks and put them back in their rightful places. They would have to wait. His bed was a mess, and if he wanted a restful sleep, he needed to be a little disciplined and put everything in order.
Something was missing, he realized, as he finished gathering up all his textbooks. He had no idea what, and it struck him only when he rubbed his eyes again.
His glasses were nowhere to be seen, and in his hurry to read about Jamie and his family, he hadn't bothered searching for them. Where could he have put them?
***
Jamie felt the phone buzzing in his jeans but made no move to see who was texting him. His whole attention was trained on Wencel Smith, who studied his clipboard with self-importance. At some point, he had made a pair of glasses appear and was wearing them down on the tip of his nose. Jamie frowned as he noticed the style of those glasses. He had seen them before; well, not those-those, but a pair that looked exactly like them.
"So," he started, as silence stretched between them. The bus was abuzz with conversations, as the other influencers were busy getting to know one another. Despite the noise around them, Jamie could feel the quiet he shared with the show's assistant louder than everything else.
Wencel removed his glasses and made them disappear in one of his pockets. "Jamie, has anyone ever told you about the importance of not letting your past catch up with you?"
He shrugged. "I don't see how that's relevant in any way."
Wencel tapped his clipboard. "Unfortunately, we've learned of a lot of unsavory things regarding your past. There will be people who will start digging them up and painting you in a bad light."
Where had he heard that tune before? Jamie frowned. "Now, listen," he started in a tone that did nothing to hide his irritation, "if this is about my side hustle as an adult entertainer, I have nothing to hide."
"Sure, you bared it all for the camera," Wencel said in a suave tone. "But that's not what I'm talking about."
"What are you talking about?" Jamie asked. He looked straight into the asshole's eyes. The uncanny familiarity that kept popping up whenever he stared at this dude went through his mind right away.
"Your family. Your mom and pop. Rumor has it they are about to finish their sentences."
Jamie looked straight ahead. What the fuck did he care about that?
"And?"
"And," Wencel said slowly, "wouldn't be interesting if you were reunited with them and LiveFeed covered the happy event?"
Jamie worked his jaw. Those people could burn in hell for all he cared. And this show was supposed to allow him to show the world he was one hell of a musician, not the spawn of con artists.
"Who did you say you were, again?" he asked without sparing Wencel a look.
"Oh, I suppose you don't mean my name. Well, I'd say that I'm just a most unremarkable man, doing his job, and nothing else."
TBC