Chapter One
My ex-boyfriend is on the cover of this week’s
Rolling Stone.
He’s wearing a pair of Dolce & Gabbana
shredded jeans, a $300 Christian Audigier t-shirt and the dollar-store bracelet I gave him for his 17th birthday.
I know how this looks. I swear I’m not
a cheapskate. And, no, I wasn’t trying to turn him gay.
Noah asked
me for that bracelet. Demanded it, really. We were goofing around at Just-a-Buck in downtown Atlanta one day after school
when he spied it: a shiny, faux silver charm bracelet with the Pisces emblem dangling from the end. You know the one: two
fish swimming in opposite directions, one against the current, one with it.
It was
gaudy, oversized costume-jewelry – the kind of thing a little kid might wear. Or a drag queen.
But Noah
loved it anyway. “You know, my birthday’s next week,” he’d hinted, nudging me in the side. “You
keep asking for suggestions of what to get me…well, get this.”
So I bought
the bracelet. Against my better judgment, I might add. When he wore it to school a few weeks later, a couple of the jock guys
wasted no time pouncing on him.
“That’s
like advertising you’re a pussy,” one of them said, leaning over and tugging on the fish. “A full-fledged
girlie girl.”
I cringed,
but Noah laughed it off. He was such a geek back then, but he didn’t care. (Nowadays, I bet there’s a million
guys lining up to get those zodiac bracelets, just because they saw Noah wear it on the cover of RS.) It was one of
things that made Noah so unique – his ability to not care what anyone thought. Although, at times, he went a tad too
far. Like when, after being elected president of the French club, he started wearing a beret. To school. Every single day.
Kind of embarrassing, to be sure, but that was just Noah. He did his own thing: watched dorky cartoons, listened to geeky
music, played in the jazz band.
Of course,
you see where it’s gotten him now. A record deal with BMG. A Grammy nomination for best new artist (he didn’t
win). The aforementioned Rolling Stone cover, complete with the headline Can
Noah Fairbanks save pop music? Which is kind of stupid, since most people classify him as more folk than pop, but whatever.
His debut album, Conundrum, went platinum and he’s supposedly raking in eight
figures a year.
And to
think, I’ve seen this guy naked.
