Chapter 7: Trending

The phone was ringing on the nightstand, face up, throwing light on the ceiling, and he got to it before it stopped, mostly by luck.

“Bernie.”

“Hey.” A pause with an apology being weighed in it. “Did I wake you? I told myself ten. Then I told myself eleven.”

He was on his back with the phone against his ear and his eyes still shut. He’d gotten in at a quarter to four. He did that arithmetic and then stopped doing it.

“It’s ten,” he said.

“I know. I waited.” A beat. “I wouldn’t call you for nothing.”

“What is it.”

“You’re trending. You and Calloway.”

“What.”

“Somebody got the whole thing from the balcony. All of it. Him coming over, him saying whatever he said to that guy, him taking his hat off and handing it to you. By four this morning the internet had a name for your face. It’s been up there since.”

“Okay.”

“Okay nothing. That is more people looking at you today than have looked at you since you debuted, and it happened while you were asleep.” Paper moved on the other end of the line. “There’s a corner of it saying you set it up. There’s a bigger corner that likes your face. Guess which one keeps you employed.”

He sat up.

“I didn’t ask him for anything.”

“I know you didn’t. That’s why it’ll run a week.” Bernie let that sit. “The part I can’t get past is him. Calloway doesn’t do that.”

“Do what.”

“Help people.” A short breath. “Go look at it. I’ll hold.”

He opened the app.

The top of the list was Calloway five times in a row, spaced evenly enough to look like an ad buy: #RhysCalloway. #RhysCallowayNightingale. #RedCap. #RhysCallowaySmoking. #RhysCallowayNewAlbum. And under those, at six, #CallowayHalliday.

[ FOUND HIM. the guy Calloway helped at the club last night is an actor. his name is Halliday. he played the villain in THE PLAYBOOK. do they know each other? they do not. Calloway saw a guy getting cornered and did something about it, and then he saw the hat sitting in a puddle on the floor and handed over his own. HIS. the red one. nine rewatches and counting. ]

[ I AM NOT OKAY. if that had been me i would have gone down on the sidewalk. he never raises his voice. not once. the hands. ]

[ taking this clip to my grave. he didn’t shove that guy. he shoved my heart. ]

[ going to say the obvious thing. he’s beautiful. standing next to Calloway. on a phone camera. and that’s his bare face. ]

[ no wonder the guy wouldn’t take no for an answer. have you looked at him. ]

[ Calloway. honest question. one second of eye contact. was there a moment. ]

[ ok i’ll be the one to say it. chart-topping artist x actor nobody’s heard of, meeting at two in the morning because a stranger wouldn’t leave him alone. that’s a first act. i’m not sorry. ]

[ they met in a CLUB. at two in the morning. i’m going to be thinking about this until i die. ]

Below that it came apart the way these things come apart. Somebody called it the meet-cute of the decade and got told to log off. A separate fight started over whether Halliday had paid for the trend, which turned into a fight about whether it mattered, which turned into somebody with a handle full of numbers asking why anyone would pay to be seen getting harassed.

[ ← this. he’s been in the business for years. you found out about him last night. sit down. ]

[ he’s not famous yet. he will be. ]

He read about a third of it, and then his phone started buzzing in his hand.

[ Mina ]

[ ok so you’re on the list ]
[ don’t freak out. i’m sending you something and you are going to be normal about it ]

The screenshots came in four at a time. Walls of text with paragraph breaks, the occasional line in caps, one of them with a rhythm to it that suggested somebody had written it at two in the morning in the dark.

[ i’m not the only one anymore ]

He wrote back: How long have you been up.

[ all night ]
[ i have no regrets ]

He held the phone over his face. Sometime in the last eight hours Mina had gone and found the other six people on earth who cared about this, and she wanted him to say something about it.

“Don’t send those to anyone else,” he wrote.

[ i don’t send. i archive. ]

“Bernie,” he said. “You still there.”

“Whole time. Are you reading or are you listening to me.”

“Both.”

“Here’s what you’re doing,” Bernie said. “You follow him. Then you post something thanking him.”

“For the hat.”

“For the hat, for the favor, for everybody who’s going to look you up today because he did it. Short. Don’t write a paragraph.”

“That’s what everyone’s already saying I did. That I’m using him.”

“You’re using him a little. He did you a favor in front of every phone in that building. Say thank you, and if someone’s got a problem with it, they can be the one saying you’ve got no manners.” The sound of a man doing something else with the other half of his attention. “I’ve got two accounts lined up. If you want, they can write the night up without his name in it.”

“Then it looks like I’m dodging him.”

“That’s the business.” A beat. “Post it and go back to sleep. Call me when you’re actually awake.”

The line went dead. He stayed sitting on the edge of the bed with his feet on the floor.

The cap was on the dresser where he’d left it, folded in half, red side up. He looked at it for a second. Then he opened the app.

He hit Follow first, because Bernie would ask for it. The button turned into Following, and that was that. Then he typed the whole name into the box and looked at it. Calloway was what a statement said. He deleted it.

Rhys was worse. Rhys was what a person wrote when they could get away with writing it, and there were four thousand strangers doing exactly that this morning as a joke.

He sat with the cursor in the empty box for a while.

Thanks for the hat. @rhyscalloway

He sent it before he could go back in and add a name.

It was short enough to fit on one line above the timestamp.

[ he POSTED ]

[ halliday posted. he hasn’t put anything up since THE PLAYBOOK finished shooting, and that was months ago. ]

[ found him forty minutes ago and i’ve now watched everything he’s been in, and i need everyone to know he can actually act. the face is not the whole thing. ]

[ @rhyscalloway matchmaker of the year. halliday and i are very happy together. ]

[ the villain in THE PLAYBOOK is the one good thing in that whole production and i’ll say that to anyone’s face. ]

Two or three of them were the usual kind, the ones that didn’t like the look of him and said so. They went under before he got through one, replies on top of replies. Some of the replies came from handles with Calloway’s name in them, and it took him a minute to work out what they were doing there. Calloway’s people, keeping the peace on his behalf: be nice to the guy, don’t be the reason this turns ugly.

The notifications didn’t stop. He put the phone face down on the bed, then picked it up again, and the numbers had moved, and he read twenty more and then twenty more, and at some point his thumb stopped moving and he was just holding it with both hands, and he’d been smiling at his own phone long enough that noticing it was embarrassing.

He put it down for real.

He stretched. The sleep he’d missed was gone and there was nothing on the calendar.

He turned on the projector.

It was what he did with empty days. He’d done it since he was a kid, in a house where nobody was around much: a screen, a whole afternoon, nobody checking.

It still did the job.

He watched from the middle of the day into the evening. Somewhere in the afternoon it crossed his mind that he had gotten very good at not working.

The last one ended at seven-something. He sat through the credits instead of skipping them, the way he always did, and then he got up and switched the projector off.

The room went dark except for the windows on the back of the building.

He went to the kitchen and drank a glass of water standing at the counter, without turning anything on.