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Me: Hey, you up?
I don’t expect a reply since it’s so late, so when my phone dings less than a minute later, my heart beats fast and my hands instantly reach for the phone I’d already placed back on its docking station.
Becka: Surprisingly yes. Can’t sleep. Why are you still up?
Me: Same reason. Just a lot going on in my head.
I don’t tell her a lot of what’s going on in my head is about her.
Becka: Do you have cable?
Becka: What am I asking? Of course you have cable. I bet you’ve got every channel known to man.
I let out a laugh, a smile already wide on my face and my body relaxing against my pillows as I respond.
Me: Yeah, I’ve got satellite TV, why?
Becka: Turn to channel 47.
I quickly change the station, following her directions, and find myself on a popular cable station that we used to watch all the time growing up. They’re playingWhen Harry Met Sally,and I have to laugh again when I see it’s at the diner scene. I’ll never forget the first time we saw this playing on this exact channel so many years ago, and Will and I had to awkwardly explain to an eleven-year-old Becka what Meg Ryan was doing. We barely understood it ourselves since neither of us had even had a girlfriend at that point, but we knew enough about sex from things our friends had said and what we’d seen on TV to know what she was doing. Becka, however, was less clued in to those details.
Becka: When’s the last time you saw this movie?
Me: I honestly can’t remember.
Becka: Do you remember the first time we watched it together? You and Will thought you were so cool because you knew more than I did.
I stare at my screen, my whole body sparking to life at the idea that we’re reliving the same memory, one not at all tied to the life I currently live. The urge to hear her voice becomes too strong, and I quickly click on her contact info. It rings twice before she answers.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” I say. “I thought this might be easier than texting back and forth.”
“Much easier. So, what’s keeping you up?”
I hesitate for only a moment, letting out a heavy breath and deciding to give her a partial truth, just leaving her out of it. “I’m always keyed up the closer we get to tour. I trust Robbie implicitly, but there’s also a part of me that’s a bit of a control freak, so I’m always running through different scenarios in my head and wondering if we’ve planned for this or that. I think it’s just fresher in my mind because of the documentary. That adds a whole different layer to the tour.”
“Are you nervous about it? The documentary, I mean?”
“Not really. It’s an incredible promotional opportunity, and it’s exciting to think people care about us enough to want to see behind the scenes. I guess I’m just not used to my life being filmed 24/7.”
Her voice gets softer. “Does it ever exhaust you? Being this huge rock star with fans everywhere you go? Having to take a bodyguard everywhere?”
My sigh this time is filled with all my familiar burdens that I try to shove down, but that have been scraping the surface more often than not lately. “Truth?”
“Always,” she says.
“Yeah, it does.” We’re both silent for a minute, and I can faintly hear the movie playing in the background that matches what’s playing on my screen. Clearing my throat, I say, “You know what I was thinking just before we ran into each other last week?”
“What?”
“How much I missed the quiet, simple life we had back in Texas. Back before everyone knew who we were.”
“It wasn’t always simple,” she says.
There’s a world of meaning in that sentence. She could mean growing up without her dad, or how my mom overdosed when I was thirteen.
“No, I guess it wasn’t, but some days it felt a whole hell of a lot simpler than life now.”
