Things had been crazy since almost losing my life in that elevator, and then watching my whole life blow up in front of me. And then I came here and adopted a weird dog and was now starring in a reenactment. The past week had been this wild rollercoaster ride, that I didn’t even remember getting on. My thoughts drifted to those two other women in the lift. I wondered if the one with the great eyebrows was okay. And the one with the smiley emoji shirt—was she smiling, or had her life also taken a strange turn like mine? I felt a kinship to them for some reason, even though I had no idea who they were.
“So, you know my secret,” Mark said. I looked at him and felt a stomach flutter. The man in front of me was my childhood crush, and now that I was looking at him, I couldn’t quite believe I hadn’t realized it before.And wait . . . I had kissed him!I had kissed M.J. Taylor from Step To That! I sipped my beer quickly, mainly to cool myself down, because something was boiling inside me. I looked at Mark and he was picking at the label of his beer nervously.
“Why is it a secret?” I asked.
He stopped the nervous picking and looked up at me. “How much of our story do you know?”
“I know that at the height of the band’s success, you left. And when they tried to bring out an album without you, it tanked and the band fell apart. And then your brother made a solo album a few years ago and that . . .” I stopped talking, I needed to tread lightly here. “It wasn’t very well received,” I said.
“It wasn’t well received!” He gave a strangled, forced laugh. “That’s an understatement if I’ve ever heard one.”
I nodded. I remembered his attempt at a comeback. How the whole thing had backfired, and he’d been lambasted and ridiculed in the media. I remembered reading something online about it; the headline had been: “The comeback we hope isn’t back for good.”
“They tore him apart in the press,” Mark said, with an edge to his voice. “Tore apart his songs, his voice, his looks. They destroyed him. They pushed him to breaking point. They dragged his name through the media like it was dirt, they mocked him, they made him the laughing stock. And that’s when he started down the path that led to that night.”
I listened with horror to the story. To be honest, and I wasn’t going to say this out loud, I’d been one of those fans who’d downloaded his album the second it came out. It hadn’t been great. The magic that the band had when they were young was sadly gone.
“He was so high when he drove off the road that night that the coroner said he wouldn’t have known what was happening, or felt it.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered again. And in my head, I scolded myself for reading all those sensationalized stories about him and his death. And the mocking in the media that had happened before it.Washed-up ex-boy-bander with no talent, I remembered seeing.
“He should never have tried to make that comeback,” Mark said. “But he was so desperate for fame again. He hated me for walking away from the band and destroying it.”
I sat up straight. “No. I don’t think so.”
Mark shook his head. “No, he did. He loved being a part of Step To That. It was his dream. He loved everything about it. The money, the girls, the fame, the touring, the screaming fans, he loved all of that. And I . . . hated it.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t do it anymore. I did it for as long as I could, I hung on for two years and finally I just couldn’t.”
“Why did you hate it?” I asked. It was so strange hearing this, because every interview I’d seen, every poster I’d looked at, he always had that smile on his face.
He shook his head and then let out a loud sigh. “You already know that my mum and dad had stores in the mall. My brother and I grew up listening to music in Dad’s shop and watching MTV. When we were about ten, we decided we wanted to be musicians. My dad bought us a guitar and a small keyboard for Christmas, and we learned to play and started writing our own songs.” He smiled at the memory. “They were so bad. We knew nothing about love and heartbreak at that age, but we were writing songs about it anyway, since that’s what everyone on MTV was singing about. We started getting gigs, and when I say gigs, I mean we played in my dad’s store and in the mall on holidays. That kind of thing. We started getting well known in our area and one year a local news station did a segment on us singing Christmas songs in the mall. I was fourteen and my brother was sixteen at the time.” He paused and took a sip of his beer and continued. “I remember that day so well, a group of girls had gathered around and they were shouting and screaming so loudly, we were hardly able to play. Anyway, this producer saw the footage and a week later, the guy contacted us and wanted to know if we wanted to be a part of a band he was putting together. Obviously, we jumped, I mean, this was the dream.” He stopped talking for a while and really picked at his beer sticker, pulling the whole thing off and then tossing it to the floor.
“Turned out it was a fucking nightmare,” he said quietly. “The whole thing was completely manufactured and controlled. We couldn’t be ourselves, at all. They even changed my name, Mark was too boring. They assigned us roles and we had to play them. We had to act and dress the part. I was the wild one, my brother was the shy one, Shane was the goofy one, Chris was the bad boy and Jack was the sporty one. They told us what to say and how to be and our lives were consumed with that.” He looked up at me. “So I know a little about living a life that is controlled down to the second and completely false and manufactured, Frankie.” He said that part with meaning, and that conversation we’d had over pancakes suddenly made sense to me. I nodded at him, took another sip of my beer, and it got caught in my throat. I coughed, feeling uncomfortable.
“I know a little something about putting on a show for someone else’s benefit, not doing anything for yourself. Losing yourself in something that’s not really yours. Not being your true self.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but had no idea what. So, I closed it again.
He took a massive swig of the beer now. “Those were two years of my life I absolutely hated.” He shook his head. “If I could take them back, I would. If I had a time machine, I would go back and say no to that producer and not become M.J. from Step To That.”
“Wait. NO!” I said emphatically. “You can’t say that. Do you know how much your music meant to me growing up? Do you know how many times I used to come home from school and be broken because I was the fat girl that had been teased all day and you were the only voice that made me feel better? Do you know how many times I listened to that song ‘Special Girl’ and wished, and hoped and pretended that someone was singing those words to me? Your music got me through high school. ‘Special Girl,’crap, I must have listened to it thousands of times and . . .” My voice tailed off and got a little shaky, and I totally hadn’t intended for it to happen, but tears pricked at my eyes. I looked down and twisted my fingers together, intertwining them nervously and anxiously as feelings flooded back to me. “All I wanted when I was growing up,” I said quietly, “was to be that girl you were singing about in that song. I wanted to be the person that someone would say those things about.” I shook my head. “So don’t say you regret those years. Because then you wouldn’t have made that song and girls like me around the world wouldn’t have felt less alone.” I forced myself to make eye contact with him. He was looking at me intently. “You can’t regret that.” I was almost on the verge of tears as I poured my heart out to him. “I wouldn’t have gotten through high school if it wasn’t for your music, so don’t you dare say that.”
He smiled at me. It started out looking somewhat forced, but soon I could see it wasn’t. It spread across his face and into his eyes. “I won’t then,” he said softly, looking at me. “That means a lot. You saying that.” He took another swig of the beer, a big one, downing the whole bottle in a few gulps.
“Is that why you came here?” I asked him. “Because of your brother’s death?”
He shook his head. “I came here because I had no choice.”
“Why?” I asked.
“The media is a fickle bitch, Frankie. It pulled him apart, and then after he died, it sang his praises. They must make up their minds.” He turned the bottle around in his hands and started working on the label on the other side too. “I couldn’t go anywhere without reading about him. Seeing his picture. Reading about us, and seeing my picture from all those years ago. And then the media started asking where I was and what I had to say about it all. I’d worked so hard to stay under the radar since leaving the band. And now they were after me too; they even implied that it was my fault, because I’d been the one who broke the band up and maybe if I hadn’t—”
“Bullshit!” I jumped up, and sat down next to him. “You know that’s not true. You know they only say things like that to sell papers and generate clicks.”
He didn’t look up at me. “Sure. I know. But still, it gets to you. I had to get away. So I came here. It was either here or a small town in America that is also a radio silent zone. But it snows there and as an Australian who hates the cold . . . it was here.”
“And your parents?” I asked. “Don’t they miss you?”
He shrugged. “I mean, I’m sure. But my sister is still there and they have three grandchildren who keep them busy and distracted, and they understood how much I needed to get away. Here, I can be myself. If people knew who I was, they would treat me differently, and it would start all over again. I needed anonymity.”
