1999

The Jones Beach Amphitheater stands beside a polluted bay. On a stretch of asphalt, cars speed along, sand shuddering in the wakes of tires. Our van slows for speed bumps. I can already see the girls in the parking lot. Swarming together in excited clumps, flies around sugar.

There is nothing that sets us apart other than circumstance. These past few weeks, I have learned more about Wes by reading about him in the magazines I buy in mini-marts along the highway. I have learned that his star sign is Leo, which tells me lots of things. He’s afraid of heights and forks. Why forks? He says he stabbed himself accidentally in the hand during dinner when he was a kid. Through this research, I am circling around some deeper truth about his personality. Maybe what I want more than anything is his nature defined in clear language, as compressed as a horoscope. It’s all very banal and obvious: he is a real person, ugly and selfish at times, just like every other human being on the planet, but I don’t want to know this yet. I want the ephemera, the wisps of a person that make them palatable.

I read about myself, too. I’ve done plenty of interviews over the summer. A few were placed by Lolli’s in-house publicist, Cara. Other articles about me are in response to the “Sweat” video. Headlines like “SEXY AND SPICY: Inside Amber Young’s Video,” “AMBER YOUNG’S HOT SUMMER FLING: On Tour with ETA.” I don’t read all of them, only a small fraction. But now that I’ve been introduced in teen magazines, the persona is being steadily built. Lolli’s Pygmalion statue has a naughty smile. She’s a guy’s girl, one who roughhouses and hangs with the boys on tour while maintaining her sex appeal. She calls them her brothers, her friends, but they all secretly want to fuck her. Her neuroticism is reframed as aloofness.

A question: Am I who other people say I am, or am I who I say I am? Lolli’s version of me would take Wes’s face in her hands. She won’t be rejected—she can’t even conceive of that kind of terror.

The five boys are clipped into harnesses because during one song, they fall to the stage on wires. Ty is up front, correcting the others. After their rehearsal is over, he waves me over. Sweat runs down his nose. He folds over and takes a sip from his water bottle. A cool breeze skims across the water and touches us.

“I’m done with Alex. Done. We have to rehearse this part again and again because it went wrong in Maryland. Guess whose fault that was?”

We both glance over at Alex. He’s ignoring the choreographer speaking to him, twirling a toothpick around in his mouth. His hair is in cornrows, even though he’s blond and Polish. Ty shakes his head, turning away. I wonder if the fissure between them will widen and become large enough to fall into.

That night, for the first time, most of the crowd knows the words to “Sweat.” But the sun hangs low and cruel. During the second-to-last song of my set, I start to cramp up, clutching my ribs. The world spins. How much have I eaten? I can’t remember. The heat has taken advantage of my emptiness. I sway on stage, blinking up at unyielding light. Darkness falls like a blade.

Sonny tells everyone it was the sun that made me pass out. I lie on the couch in the greenroom, a pack of frozen peas on my forehead. “Who thought an amphitheater tour was a good idea in this weather?” he complains.

I am afraid he will understand what really happened. But men only notice the result, never the progression of hunger. In his eyes, my metabolism is a miracle. I eat oily fries, breaded chicken fingers, hot dogs, and it all seems to disappear inside my body as if tucked away in a drawer. A miracle! But when he’s gone, I pick at baby carrots and cheese cubes. I run and run and run, and the destination is his praise.

Mike offers to fetch me some food. I ask what it is today, the hunger a knife in my stomach. He says they have barbecue ribs, corn, mashed potatoes.

When he returns, we’re alone. Sonny is out in the hallway on a call. Mike hands me the plastic plate, sitting beside me on the couch. I shift away slightly, undetected by him. He thinks he has his own charisma, since he’s surrounded by so many talented people.

He bites down on his own sandwich. “Huh. When I was watching you perform, I was wondering if you were.”

He nods. “That’s what I thought. It’s hard to tell sometimes, though.” He snakes forward to take another bite, chewing and smiling at me with his mouth open.

I don’t raise my head, trying to avoid his eyes and the thick tone he’s shifted to. And I’m relieved when the boys return, sweaty and exhilarated from their performance.

“What happened?” Ty sits beside me on the couch and pulls my feet onto his lap. As Wes hands his jacket to a wardrobe assistant, he glances over at us.

“I fainted,” I say quietly. “But it’s no big deal. I’ll be fine for tomorrow. I was just in the sun for too long.”

Fans filter out of the amphitheater and into the parking lot, gushing about the show. Flickering red taillights wait to turn onto the highway. The crew begins to disassemble the stage and load it onto the trucks, until the amphitheater is bare.

A knock on my door. Wes’s knuckles against the wood, and his voice whispering my name.

We are at a Marriott in Maine. It is one of the last stops on this leg of the tour. On the other side of the room, I can just make out the shape of Gloria’s body beneath the covers, her silk hair wrap, the undulation of her chest. I wonder if I will wake her if I change—I’m wearing Greg’s old T-shirt and mesh soccer shorts—but then I hear Wes step away, so I run to the door, wrench it open. It bangs against the wall. Behind me, Gloria turns over onto her back.

I whisper his name into the hall, which smells like cigarettes smoked years ago. Wes’s retreating figure pauses by the elevator. He’s wearing an oversize Old Navy hoodie and track pants. His hair is tousled, as if he’s just had sex.

He shrugs. “We could try it.” And he tugs on the elastic of his pants to reveal swim trunks.

I ask him to wait and slip back inside my room. Quietly, I search for a swimsuit in the piles of clothes I’ve left on the floor, then realize I didn’t even think to pack one. I settle for a bra and my underwear instead.

In the elevator, through the lobby, we’re quiet. There’s only the sound of our sandals smacking against the hard floors. On the lowest level, the moist air builds and thickens. Wes pulls on the door and overhead lights snap on. He turns back to me, raising an eyebrow.

Our shadows beam across the turquoise water, textured with ribbons of yellow light. The tile floor is slick. Towels are stacked neatly on top of each other above the garbage can, still hot from the belly of the dryer.

Wes dips a toe into the water, and after declaring it warm enough to swim, he takes his shirt off, then his pants. I look down, embarrassed. Hearing a splash, I glance up again. He’s dunked under. Seconds later he emerges, shaking out his hair, whipping water toward me. Maybe this is my problem: I don’t want just any man, I want the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. His gaze really is a lighthouse, a searching, hot beam. Under it, I’m drawn in. Under it, I’m always onstage.

He takes beers out of his backpack and pops a can, leaving it by the rim of the pool. Then he grabs my arm, pulling on me gently. Come in, he says.

I shake my head, swirling my feet through the water. “I have this song in my head. It goes like this.” And I hum it for him.

As he listens, I draw shapes on my thigh with water, because I don’t want to look at him, I can’t. He reaches forward to wipe a diamond off my leg.

I have never thought about it seriously before, only toyed with it. Voicing my ideas. Control. Raising my arm and lowering it, like Gwen said. Because now, I sing about sex in the form of various euphemisms, and this doesn’t feel wrong to me, necessarily, because I do think about sex a lot. I just want it from my perspective, not theirs. I want it to feel like this.

I tell him. In Your Eyes is trying to be many things at once. It’s trying to seduce. It’s playing against what Savannah and Gwen have already accomplished; at the same time, it’s trying to mimic their success. It’s withholding; it’s giving too much. It doesn’t know what it is, or what it should be. It is a teenage girl.

“Basically. That’s what frustrates me. No matter what, I was signed because of Savannah and Gwen. You know? I’m still proud of the record, I guess, but I hope I can make something better one day.” I laugh helplessly. “Hopefully Lolli lets me.”

“You will. Every time, you’ll know more about yourself. You’ll know more about the process.” He bobs in the water, blinking up at me. “We wrote more on this upcoming album. I think I cowrote two, maybe three, songs. If I ever try to—” And he interrupts himself, starts to laugh. “Have I told you about the Clinton song I wanted to write?”

His chin skims the surface of the water. “I wanted to write this song about the Lewinsky scandal. It was calling out Bill Clinton a bit. I mean, I’m a Democrat, I just think Bill deserves a little healthy criticism.” He ducks under again, then swims over, brushing his hand against my knees. “But I get why Axel didn’t like it. It was a bad song. I had done coke that night in Stockholm, so I was up all night, and I thought it was brilliant and edgy at the time, but Axel looked at me like I was insane when I sang it for him.”

Something about this name is familiar. After a moment, I remember: Axel Holm. Gwen works with him, too. “What did he say?”

“He just said it wasn’t an ETA song. Which is fair.” He laughs again, louder this time. “He’s very decisive. When he says no, it’s no.”

“Oh, it was like . . .” He closes his eyes for a moment. “It went something like, I’d give it all up for the girl in the blue dress.”

“I’m not sure if the songs I’m singing now would be any different from the songs I’d write. I mean, most of the time I am thinking about sex. Seriously. I really am.”

Heat strums through my body. He’s plucked chords and I am the instrument in his hands. I wonder if I should jump in the water to stifle the feeling. “Things I can’t have. That’s the best part. The distance between two things. That’s what I’d write about.”

“We haven’t talked about it. I mean, I’ve done it once with this guy, a year ahead of me in school. I just wanted to get it over with. I don’t know.”

He shakes his head. “I promise my first time was bad, too. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. I was worried this girl would judge me. You know? If I came too fast, or if I didn’t know how to put the condom on right. I didn’t really have a frame of reference either. I grew up in Texas. The only thing we were told about sex was to wait until we were married to have it.”

“All I remember from sex ed is this video of a girl giving her boyfriend a blow job. Cut to black, of course. They didn’t show anything. Anyway, she gets a cold sore, and it’s big and ugly and red, not like any real cold sore I’ve ever seen. It looked like a punishment. Right after we saw that video, a girl at my school got pregnant. Anyway, this girl—not the girl in the video, the girl from school—told a few friends, then everyone found out. One day, she threw up in the pool during gym class. Every day we had to get into the pool and swim laps, but that day, we were all so happy because the pregnant girl puked, and class got canceled.”

“She got an abortion. But I remember thinking girls carry sex on their bodies. That was the lesson I learned.”

He nods, and I get the sense he is really listening to me, so I continue, “What if the girl in the video enjoyed herself? Or, at least, what if she was thinking about sex each night before she went to bed? That’s when I think about it the most. Right before bed. You know?” I’m communicating something to him desperately, weaving my feet through the water, grazing his chest. I wonder if what’s between us has been clearly defined now, or if we can return to shapelessness.

“Because there’s no porn that’s exactly the way I like it, exactly the way I imagine it.” In truth: it is all too male. Sticky, salty, his alone. What I want is tension. When I imagine sex with Wes, we are usually talking at first. Just talking. We stare at each other, the frequency between us an earthquake monitor, ratcheting with every breath. Then I’m arched over his neck, biting his skin. His hands roaming up my thighs. His fingers inside me, so slow, and then faster. His mouth where his fingers were, and it feels different than it was with Nathan, because Wes knows what he is doing, has done it before. Eventually, my thoughts dissolve into sleep. The next night I imagine it all from the beginning again. I sit in the front row of this internal film for hours, my eyelids the screen.

Eventually we are kicked out of the pool by an employee who has come to clean it. We’ve left puddles all over the tiles. The elevator doors close on us, and we stand far apart as we’re propelled up through the hotel. Wes has a towel loosely wrapped around himself. He’s dripping water onto the floor; his hair is damp; he smells like chlorine.

When the door opens to my floor, he presses the topmost button to keep the elevator moving. He smiles at me sleepily. Steps forward, then stops. For a moment, he hesitates, waiting to see my reaction. All the former selves inside me stare up at him, wide-eyed and disbelieving.

He leans down. His lips are cold and wet from the pool. Our movement warms them up. He catches my bottom lip between his teeth and gently pulls, laughing when I moan. “You like that?”

I nod. I would let him untie me and untie me until something soft and hidden finally emerges, and now he knows.

The elevator is back in the lobby, the doors opening to an empty hall, then closing. We push a button, and the elevator rises again.

When I encourage him, his hand slides along my underwear, rubbing back and forth at first, then pushing it aside so he can slip a finger into me. I bang my head against the buttons, hitting five floors at once.

I nod again. Yes. How did he know? I need more space filled, it’s not enough, and when he pushes another finger in beside the first, I make a high-pitched whine I’ve only ever practiced alone, a noise hauled up from some depth I’ve never really explored.

Even faster now. His face is scrunched up, and his eyes are closed. I can feel how hard he is beneath his sweats. He presses his lips to my neck. A red oval blooms there in the shape of his mouth, but I don’t care about the hickey, even though it will have to be covered with concealer for over a week. I want this symbol, a reminder of where he touched me.

The next morning, mist rises thick and blue from the forest. The fleet of buses returns to the highway. It is the end of summer.

We know you loved “Sweat”—and you want to know what’s underneath Amber Young’s skin! The teen star filled out our test below.

Name: Amber Young

Birthday: July 3, 1980

Star sign: Cancer

Occupation: Singer