There was nowhere in Oceanside to celebrate. The tiny fucking town really wasn’t built for someone like me, someone whose popularity was already high but was about to skyrocket. “Let’s just fucking fly somewhere for dinner,” I said.

“But I’ve already made plans,” said Giselle.

“Plans? In Oceanside? They can’t be that important,” I said. “Break them. Toby, let’s go up the coast. Find us somewhere that’ll treat us like royalty.”

“I’m not breaking my plans just so you can go to dinner,” said Giselle.

“Are you kidding? You have never stopped harping on how inadequate this town is.”

She scowled at me. “You’re being very strange tonight. Pushy in a way I really don’t like.”

I hadn’t told them about Cave. Why would I? I didn’t want sympathy. I really didn’t want to hear gloating. I just wanted to get back to fucking normal, the kind of normal where people didn’t question my decisions, where they knew their place in the world was to carry out my orders, chop-chop.

“Fine,” I said. “Whatever. Stay here with whatever stupid plans you have. Toby, you’ll celebrate with me, won’t you? A forest full of fucking skunks and squirrels is going to belt out a song that took five hundred people to write. That’s something to celebrate, right? It’s like fucking Shakespeare or something.”

They both looked at me like I was speaking in a foreign language. Giselle picked up the stack of magazines she’d been flipping through, and left the room.

I started to say something to Toby, but he was already on the phone, making plans for somewhere for us to go. Good boy. That’s what I needed right now. Absolute obedience. And a fucking drink.

It wasn’t until we were in the air, headed to a fusion restaurant so exclusive it only seated one party a night, that he said, “Okay, want to tell me what’s going on?”

“I really, really don’t. We’re going to throw a two-man party over this song of mine, and that’s all we need to focus on. My great, great fortune, and your ten percent of that fortune. Hell, Toby, you’re going to be rich. Doesn’t that make you feel good?”

He laughed. “Read your contract. I’m now up to twenty percent, and yes, it absolutely makes me feel good. But I wouldn’t be earning that twenty percent if I didn’t notice when something’s going on with you. You’re jittery. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’d taken a bunch of pills.”

“Not me. Clean living is the only life for me. Gotta be nice and safe for all the soccer moms, right? And now I’m even safer. Extra safe.”

“Oh. Cave, then.”

“Cave. Of course I’m talking about Cave. You don’t have to worry about him anymore. It’s just you and me, bub. You, me, and Giselle. And Mr. Stone from the label. Just the ol’ gang, rolling in money and fame, the way we always wanted it.”

“Just so we’re clear,” he said, “Cave is no longer in the picture?”

“The picture has been torn into pieces, and the pieces thrown into the fire.”

“That is such a relief,” he said.

I didn’t agree. I didn’t feel relieved at all. I felt like punching someone. Everyone. The whole world lined up one behind the other. I really didn’t need to see how smug Toby looked about it, practically steepling his fingers in fiendish delight.

“Hopefully we can put all that behind us. There’s a bright future ahead, Ransom.”

Bright future. I looked out the window at the city lights below. Like approaching a galaxy full of alien stars. Maybe it was the other way around. I was leaving Cave’s planet and traveling far, far away to home.

“We should just stay,” I said a little later, as the plane began its descent. “Why go back? There’s nothing for me in Oceanside.”

“There’s the little matter of the parade tomorrow,” Toby said. “You are, after all, the guest of honor.”

“Parade. I don’t want to go to the fucking parade.”

“Your voice has improved to the point that you might even think of singing.”

I turned from the window, where the runway lights were streaking by. “I’m not going to sing for those people.”

“No, listen. It’s perfect. You’ll sing Come Get You to Giselle. Really stripped-down, just you and the guitar. Everyone will ooh and ahh, huge goodwill from the fans.”

“Where the fuck is Giselle, anyway? She should be here with us, celebrating. She said she had plans. She’s not allowed to have plans. You never have plans.”

A complicated look crossed Toby’s face. “No, I suppose I don’t.”

“Why should she? She’s as much my employee as you are. Call her up. Get her here on the next flight.”

Toby hesitated, as though he were having trouble thinking of how to say what he needed to. “We’d already planned on leaving town after the parade. She’s saying her goodbyes to Rhody.”

“I guess I’m glad you didn’t have anyone to say goodbye to, otherwise I’d be on the plane alone.”

We were ushered off the plane and to the car.

“You know what he told me?” I asked Toby. “You know what he said? He said I didn’t have to sacrifice anything to get where I am. That I didn’t understand what sacrifice was.”

I knew I was misremembering his exact words. Maybe it was on purpose. Maybe it was because I was mad.

Toby shrugged. “He’s incorrect. We’ve all sacrificed a lot to your career.”

There was something in his voice. Toby was never wistful and sad, but that’s how his voice sounded right now.

I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to feel anything about anyone else. No sympathy. If I started feeling sympathy, if I opened that door...no. I couldn’t. An image of Cave came to mind. What was he doing right now? I pictured him wandering from room to room of his small house, like a ghost. Haunting it. Lost without me.

Of course he wasn’t doing that. He was probably gossiping about me to all his friends.

Except you know he wouldn’t do that either.

I shook my head. No more voices. No more ghosts.

“Nobody has sacrificed as much as I have,” I said with certainty, the kind of certainty you inject in your voice when you’re trying really hard to believe something you’re no longer sure of.

Finally, Toby steeled himself and said, “Look, Ransom, I appreciate that you’re emotional right now. I’m glad we’re past the Cave era, but while I understand it was hard for you, you’re acting a little sullen right now. Sulky.”

“I am not sulky. It’s just when it comes to who has given things up--”

“Ahem. That’s what I’m talking about. When it comes to people who have given things up, I win,” he said to me. We were stopped at an intersection, and the red glow from the traffic lights streamed in, making Toby look positively demonic. “I am on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Do you know what that does to one’s social life? I do not have deep conversations with people because, in the middle of them, there will be a sudden emergency from the label that we’ve got to handle. I do not have a romantic life because I can’t put someone else in my life first, when I might have to drop everything at a moment’s notice because you have a song idea you want to talk about right that minute. If anyone has sacrificed for your career, it’s me, Ransom, and I’d appreciate it if you would keep that in mind while you bemoan the outcome of your Oceanside fling.”

I glared at him but didn’t argue. He was right, after all. His personal life was whittled down to nothing. I’d asked the same from Giselle--well, I hadn’t asked, he had, but she’d come nonetheless, putting everything else aside to help me.

Puzzling, the way that all these people giving up everything so that I could be happy didn’t make me happy at all.

“In any case,” continued Toby, “I don’t think Cave was ever going to understand your lifestyle. I get why you were attracted, I even understand why you felt you needed a little affair to add interest to your life, but in the end, what could a man like that really offer you? There’s a limit to how far domesticity will take you. You would be on world tours, while he did...what, exactly? Stay home and make casseroles?”

Toby was inviting me to make fun of Cave. To laugh at his small-town lifestyle, the simplicity and the emptiness of it.

I felt a black rage welling up in me. “You have no right to say anything about Cave. Not a single word.”

“Whoa, whoa, what’s wrong? I thought we were commiserating?”

“I’m mad at him. I’m furious at him. But you’re the last person to comment on his life. We’re the empty ones, not him. We’ve bent our entire lives to the force of a contract. My entire life is a lie, an illusion so that we can make more money for a company that in the end will let me disappear into a bargain bin. Cave may not have money and glamor and fame, but he’s got a real life, in a way that I don’t.”

“Bullshit,” said Toby. “What makes his life any more real than yours? Society? The fact that our culture just loves a guy with kids, a guy with a house, a guy in a small town? Who the fuck laid down the law that small towns are so great? It sounds like a bunch of middle-class straight-people propaganda to me. There’s more than one damned way to live your life, Ransom, and it’s not fair to any of us to pretend Cave’s little picket-fence world is more valid than ours.”

There comes a point where you have too many thoughts--or maybe it’s just the same couple of thoughts--spinning around your head so fast that you can’t get the words out. How could I explain to Toby that Oceanside was real to me, because that’s where I came from, that’s where I grew up? It wasn’t society telling me how I wanted to live--hell, society loved celebrities, loved to watch them burn themselves out in the pursuit of pleasure. I was a fucking pop aristocrat, wasn’t I?

Toby wouldn’t understand any of that. He’d grown up in the city, his parents in the industry. He knew everybody, he’d worked with everybody. To him, music--not the making of it, but the packaging of it, selling it--was his whole life.

There were things I couldn’t say to him. Over the past years I had been around him more than anyone else in my life, and yet there were whole aspects of my life--my thoughts, my fears, my wishes--that I couldn’t talk to him about.

I’d been more honest with Cave over the course of a few days than I had been with a man who was making millions organizing my life for me.

You gave up the wrong things. I could hear Cave’s voice saying the words.

This wasn’t a matter of selling out. It wasn’t a question of the music world being fake. Not really. It came down to something simpler than that.

What did I want, and what was I willing to give up for it? Did I want love? Did I believe I deserved it at all? Maybe that wasn’t even an option for me. Maybe my choices had led me down a path where there was no love. Endless pleasures...but nothing lasting. Nothing that could endure.

Dinner was eaten in silence. I’m sure it was very impressive. I know it was fucking expensive. The moment it was done, I couldn’t remember a bite of it, I was so far away.

You gave up the wrong things.