The idea to wedge Emery between Aralie and myself wasn’t strategized, but I do believe it was a genius plan. She wiggles around next to me, craning her neck to see into the foyer. Every possible person from planet Saturn files in through our front door. I don’t recognize anyone else, so I assume they’re probably management teams, public relations staff, vocal coaches, and whoever else may tour with the band.
Team Saturn flows from the foyer into the living room, lining our living room walls like paint. Then Dad and Tank
rush for the door, and Emery’s arms flail with excitement. Aralie clamps her hand over Emery’s mouth the moment we see his blonde hair.
Benji Baccarini – the face of Spaceships Around Saturn – stands in our foyer, on our hardwood floors, breathing in our American air conditioning
.
Even
I’m
a bit star-struck.
He looks like he does on the posters on Emery’s bedroom walls. He has a perfect blonde surfer shag and bright blue eyes and looks like he was plucked right off of a sandy beach rather than somewhere in
Canada. He stretches his arms back while talking to Tank. The rings on his Saturn tattoo morph into a blur on his arm.
That hyena look in Emery’s eyes begins to creep me out. She can barely catch her breath, so her words come out in a crazed whisper. “Benji Bikini is in our house!”
“Baccarini,” I whisper back.
I admit, it used to be funny when Aralie called him Benji Bikini just to get under Emery’s skin, but now that he’s thirty feet away from us – in our freaking house – the nickname is so not funny.
Dad introduces the guys to Mom and Godfrey, then points toward the couch. Benji’s the only one in my line of vision, but he doesn’t smile when he glances up. I wonder if it’s because their summer tour has been ruined. Or maybe it’s because of that stupid purple pillow Emery is clutching. Either way, I don’t like his expression.
Dad motions them into the living room, telling them to grab a seat, and I swear, I feel the panic bubbling up in my chest. This must be how Emery feels whenever she watches their DVD and
squees like a fangirl. If my heart is near exploding, I can’t imagine how fast her little heart is fluttering right now.
This is crazy.
I’m not even a boyband kind of girl. Sebastian’s Shadow, my favorite band, is rock – screaming rock – with edgy guitar riffs and hardcore drum loops and metaphorical lyrics about ripping your heart out. Who knew the guys of Spaceships Around Saturn are actually ten times hotter in person than on Twitter?!
I may be able to tolerate lockdown just for the eye candy. Aralie, on the other hand, sighs dramatically and slouches on the couch. If any of us could pass for a rock
star, it’d be Aralie. She’s as much a poster girl for the punk rock scene as Emery is a Saturnite. Benji Bikini doesn’t rank very highly on Aralie’s list.
Fortun
ately for my and Emery’s cardiovascular health, Benji finds a spot on the loveseat across the room.
Noah, the tattooed brunette,
sits next to him. He doesn’t look like the boyband type at all. He has more of the emo, punk rocker vibe about him. He’s as out of place as Aralie is.
Tate settles in on the other side of Aralie, introduces himself to her, and says, “Welcome to the summer of hell.” How sweet.
He’s my age, but I swear, the guy looks fifteen. He has the kind of baby face that pre-teen girls are attracted to.
SAS’s resident bad boy, Jules, slams himself against the wall in true
jerkoff fashion. He folds his arms over his chest and shoots evil eyes toward Benji. He’s probably relaying some Saturn-ish telepathic message about how miserable this is going to be.
“Mind if I sit?” A voice breaks me away from deciphering the cosmic communication between the
bromance known as Jenji.
I glance up to see
Milo, the only SAS guy with any sense of maturity, standing over me. He nods toward the armrest, and I quickly jerk my arm back toward myself. He eases onto the armrest, and the scent of his body wash makes my head swim. Can you faint from awesome boy scent?
Emery never says much about any of the guys aside from Benji, but I feel like I know the basic gist of who they are from their tweets. Noah and Tate are goofy and immature. Jules tries too hard to keep up a badass image.
Milo is the one who stays calm and collected through everything. He talks the others down from the ledge. He gets visible tattoos although management wants to keep him wholesome. He’s only rude when he’s been pushed to the limits, and he adds a lot of extra letters to the end of words because Spaceships Around Saturn has “the best fans everrrrr.”
But he’s never once tweeted that he smells like heaven or has eyes the color of the caramel inside of a Milky Way candy bar.
These
are the kinds of things girls need to know, Milo! Especially before you sit down on the armrest next to them!
Dad clears his throat, takes his place at the center of the room, and introduces himself as Secret Service Agent Scott Branson. He uses his official government voice. Then he looks to Mom. She rushes over to the couch, behind us, and leans over.
“Emery, sweetheart, I need you to come help me,” she says quietly.
Emery’s face scrunches up like an ugly baby doll. Her eyes squint, and she
pouts her lips. Mom doesn’t buy the sad face, and even though tears drip down Emery’s cheeks, Mom carries her out of the room. That purple pillow remains in Emery’s grip. Thank God she took it with her.
That poor child has no clue that her precious Benji Bikini…Baccarini…had shots fired at him tonight. I zone in on Dad so I can avoid making eye contact with anyone else in the room, but
Milo nudges my shoulder.
“Slide down,” he mouths. He nods his head sideways.
I scoot over closer to Aralie, forcing her closer to Tate, and Milo eases down onto the couch with us. He wedges me tightly between himself and Aralie. He repositions as best he can for comfort, then glances at me and mouths, “Thanks.”
I remain as still as I possibly can because if I move the slightest inch, his skin will brush against mine, and I don’t think I can take it.
If Emery was ever right about anything, it was Spaceships Around Saturn. Yeah, it was lame and clichéd and totally stupid when she’d say they were ‘out of this world,’ but really, these guys aren’t from Earth. At least not Milo.
No human boy smells this good or has eyes that caramel-
ish. I’ve never seen a guy fit so perfectly into a T-shirt. The dark gray fabric hugs every curve of his body, every muscle in his arm, every ripple of his abs. Ohmygod this isn’t happening. I am
not
checking out Milo Grayson of Spaceships Around Saturn.
I’m dreaming because something this insane would only happen
in my dreams. Or in Emery’s dreams. This isn’t real.
Part of me wants to take a deep breath and get myself together, but I know if I inhale too deeply, his body wash will rush through my sinuses and into my brain and down through my blood cells, and then my heart will erupt into little pieces of Saturn.
I settle on shallow breaths and remind myself that he’s just a guy – a human guy – who happens to be in an internationally famous Canadian boyband. He just happens to be even more beautiful in person than on Twitter, and screw this – he’s totally from Saturn. Earthlings don’t look like this.
Dad clears his throat, bringing me back to planet Earth, and explains the situation, repeating what everyone already knows – shots were fired, government is following leads, guys have to hide out
– as we all pretend like this is the first time we’re hearing it.
“But right now, we have to sort through what leads may be real and what may be rumors,” Dad says. “We have officials working around the clock to get you guys back on tour as quickly as possible. Hopefully this won’t take any longer than two weeks.”
“Two weeks?” Jules bolts off the wall with asteroid-like impact. “Do you know how many shows we have over two weeks? People schedule their summer vacations around us!”
Benji jumps up and grabs Jules’s arm, pushing him back toward the wall, but it’s useless. Jules pushes
Benji away and hurries across the room, into the foyer, and out the front door. Milo forces himself up from the couch to go after Jules, but Tank holds up his hand and halts Milo from going outside. Instead, the bodyguard goes after the bad boy, and Milo squeezes himself back in between me and the armrest. I wish he’d stop moving so much.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Branson,”
Milo says once he’s comfortable again. “Jules has a tendency to blow up about things.”
My dad says something about stressful situations and how it’s understandable to be tense at times like these, but I keep playing back “Mr. Branson” in my head and imagining what it’d be like if Milo was a normal Earthling who I could bring home to meet my dad. Thank the gods of Saturn I couldn’t see that moment when they first met in the foyer
. I might’ve faltered witnessing that initial fatherly handshake.
Dad waits a few moments before he carries on. Jules and Tank don’t come back inside, so we venture from explanations into the “rules ceremony.”
The guys have to remain at our house, either inside or around the back patio, at all times. They cannot venture off on the property and risk being seen by neighbors, media, or passersby. They cannot access social media accounts or be present online at any time. They must turn in
their cell phones so hackers cannot locate them through cell towers and reveal the coordinates of their location.
“But I met this really awesome girl tonight,” Tate says from the other side of Aralie. “She was like…the coolest girl ever. I met her at the hotel, before the show, and I promised I’d call her after the show was over.”
“You’ll have to contact her once this is all over,” Dad says. “If she was there tonight, she knows what happened and should understand the situation.”
“You don’t get it,” Tate says. “She was awesome and really pretty. Her name is
Hannah, and she almost didn’t give me her number because she didn’t believe I’d actually call.”
Milo
leans forward, looking past me and Aralie at Tate.
“Was she the blonde in the pink shirt?” he asks.
Tate nods his head, almost panicked.
“She reminded me of that girl whose number you got last night,” Milo says. “And the night before that.”
Tate sticks out his tongue. “I really was going to call this one, though,” he says.
Dad intervenes with some well-rehearsed spill about how this isn’t the ideal situation for anyone and having to make the best of it, but he’s just static to my ears.
Who does this
Hannah girl think she is? What makes her so special that a Spaceships Around Saturn guy would ask for her number? If Milo asked for my number at a show, I don’t think I could scribble it down fast enough for him. But from the way Milo talks, it sounds like Tate gets a lot of phone numbers.
There’s something said about prepaid phones and “agents will bring them
if you need to contact home” as well as management monitoring their phone calls to family members during lockdown. Luckily Aralie and I have to maintain as much of a normal life as we possibly can…just without much of a social calendar. At least we can keep our phones. I don’t know how Benji will survive a possible two weeks without Twitter.
“And we don’t want Emery, our youngest daughter, to know what happened tonight,” Dad says as Jules walks back into the room.
The bad boy walks behind us and posts himself against the wall behind the couch. He smells like rotten cigarettes.
“She’s a big fan, and she’s too young to fully comprehend why anyone would do something like what was done tonight, so if we could just keep it under wraps around her, that would be greatly appreciated,” Dad concludes.
With social media and today’s technology, Emery will know before sunrise. There’s no way to keep this a secret. Dad should know this.
The guys exit with their management team shortly after to get the last bit of their belongings from the cars outside and turn in their cell phones so we don’t have crazed lunatics shooting at our house. Or worse – crazed fans tearing our house down to get to their favorite Canadian boys.
Moments later, Godfrey shows the guys upstairs to our many guest rooms, and Mom returns to the living room. Aralie and I don’t speak when she sits down on the ottoman across from us.
“Emery is finally asleep,” she says. “Hopefully the guys can settle in some tonight before getting the full force of her in the morning.”
Mom’s the only one who laughs, though. Emery is the least of my concerns. My entire summer is now nonexistent, and I’m lusting after Milo Grayson. Seriously? I have bigger problems. Emery isn’t an issue – for once.
“Listen, Chloe,” she says in that sympathetic mom-voice. She had the same tone the night Deacon and I broke up. “You really need to call Paige and let her know that
Cancun is cancelled for this summer.”
She says all of the right motherly things – “I know how much you girls were looking forward to this.” “I hate that we have to cancel, but this wasn’t part of our plans.” “Maybe next summer you can go for even longer than we’d planned this time.”