6

      In a hotel suite across town, Kevin Chase woke suddenly, his skin dripping with sweat and his heart hammering wildly. The room was pitch black. He had no idea where he was. His breath rasped dry and painful, as if he had swallowed razor blades. Groping in the dark, he fumbled towards a switch. When the room flooded with light, it was painfully bright. Images from the nightmare were still scorched on his mind: the red flames engulfing the jet, and the descent … the horrifying, inevitable descent towards death.

      Briskly he patted around to make sure he hadn’t wet the sheets. Mortifyingly, it had happened in the past. Joan had even gone through a phase of laying diapers on top of the mattress, until one day Kevin had lost it, yelling at her so loud and for so long that she had whined about tinnitus for a week—and Joan knew how to whine.

      Apart from a patch of hot perspiration, it was dry.

      Trembling, he closed his eyes. It seemed important to pick out the details.

      The nightmare had been real—real enough to touch, as if he had been there, as if it had happened! They said you couldn’t dream your own death; you woke before it ended that way—and Kevin was certain, certain, he had been about to die. Dark sky all around, thick black dark, and the ground rearing up to meet them—or rather the sand, for it had been a beach, yes, a beach, the contrast stark even in moonlight between the thick water and the alabaster shore. Kevin grasped at the people he had been with, for he had not been alone, but their outlines were dissolving, leaving only ghosts. All that was left were the screams of panic ringing between his ears.

      Fear swamped him.

      He was never setting foot on an airplane ever again.

      But even as Kevin thought it, he knew it was an absurd notion. International commitments meant he got thrown about the globe like a coin in a pinball machine.

      What choice did he have? What choice did he have about anything?

      The phone rang. It was Sketch.

      ‘Ride’s outside, buddy.’ His manager’s voice was drizzled thinly over a nub of hysteria. ‘You’re behind time. Again.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Everything OK?’

      Shit. Kevin checked the time. Double shit. He had a show at the TD Garden in an hour. These days his power naps were turning into induced fucking comas.

      ‘Be right down,’ he snapped, hanging up.

      A freezing cold shower slapped him to his senses. Afterwards, in the foggy mirror, Kevin grimaced at his reflection.

      Come on. Why did he look so goddamn young?

      Miserably he plucked at a single chest hair straining from his diaphragm. It was like a blade of grass in the middle of a barren desert. What the fuck? Where was his chest rug? Couldn’t he sprout just a few more?

      He was nineteen, for crissakes, and yet he had the torso of a ten year old.

      The grimace deepened. That wasn’t even the worst part.

      Glancing down, Kevin loosened the towel around his waist. He assessed the feathery covering of pubic hair scarcely concealing his miniature prick, and howled.

      It was a worm dangling between two berries. Shrivelled berries. The whole thing was shrivelled. Why wouldn’t it fucking well grow?

      Was he balding? But how could he be balding if he’d never had hair there in the first place? Kevin howled some more, and the phone resumed its grisly summons.

      Despite turning up ninety minutes late to the arena and enduring a cacophony of boos, the gig went down OK. Kevin knew how to charm his Little Chasers. Normally he refused to venture into the crowd—he didn’t want their sticky fingers pawing all over his designer outfits—but to appease the irate parents, and on Sketch’s counsel, tonight he made an exception. At one point, during a rendition of ‘Fast Girl’, he thought he was about to get torn limb from limb, his white suit strained into a crucifix by a pie-faced chick pulling him one way and a blubbing pre-teen the other.

      The noise was thunderous—’Kevin! Kevin! Kevin!’—and the venue alight with the glitter of camera phones. When he crooned his mega hit ‘Adore You’, the sparkle swayed back and forth, arms in the air, kids at the front crying into their Kevin Chase T-shirts and gripping, white-knuckled, crudely assembled banners that bore confessions of their undying affection: KEVIN CHASE PLEASE BE MINE; SARA & KEVIN 4 EVER; I LOVE YOU KEVIN; I’M YOUR NO. 1 LITTLE CHASER …

      After a hundred-minute set and two encores, he was beat.

      Backstage, Sketch congratulated him with the unwelcome announcement that they were expected at a children’s charity gala downtown—there was a galaxy of names attending and it was a wise gig at which to be seen. Kevin wanted badly to creep into bed and had to suppress the familiar flare of upset at this fresh injustice.

      He wished he had someone he could call, a buddy, a friend, anyone who’d listen and tell him it was OK, just to keep at it, all this was bullshit anyway and it didn’t really matter. He wished someone out there thought that he mattered—not his records or his hairstyle or the new mansion he was bought to live in like a fucking Ken Doll—just him, the real Kevin, the regular kid. But Kevin saw now that he would never be a regular kid, and he’d never have regular friends. What even was a regular friend? He’d watched movies about them, read about them as if they were exotic, elusive creatures prowling a distant landscape, but he’d never had one of his own. Kevin had the starring role in the movie of his life, and everyone was an actor.

      In the beginning, it had been fun. Signing the contract in Sketch’s old office on Santa Monica, then in the weeks that followed, a storm of crazy parties, premieres and photo shoots—but nobody had told him then what was being sacrificed. No one had said, OK, Kevin, it’s this or it’s this: which life do you want?

      He didn’t want this one.

      ‘They’re loving you on Twitter,’ reassured Sketch as Kevin changed out of his clothes. Sketch