Alright (Still) - (1/6)
Title: Alright (Still).
Author: pr_scatterbrain/Professional Scatterbrain.
Disclaimer: Reference to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libellous, defamatory, or in any way factual. As this work is an interpretation of the original material and not for-profit, it constitutes fair use.
Primary/Eventual Pairing: always a girl!Spencer/Ryan
Secondary Pairings: always a girl!Spencer/Bob, Lily Allen/Brian, Frank/Gerard, Mark Ronson/Patrick, Bob/Patrick, Valentino (Garavani)/Giancarlo Giammetti.
Rating: R
Warnings: Lily Allen's miscarriage is mentioned. Drug use, sex, language.
Word count: 52, 382
Set: 2006 - (an imagined) 2010
Summary: She’s in London when her friends decided to be idiots. Specifically she’s in London, in this bar she doesn’t really want to be in, sitting with a group of people she doesn’t really know, listening to this brunette - Lily, Spencer vaguely remembers her introducing herself as - drunkenly explaining her theory of whatever between tongue-raping the guy her friend came with, when instead of calling Brent, her best friends contact her.
Or the Model AU!fic where Spencer gets kicked out of Panic! and instead of going home to lick her wounds, she stays in London, grows a foot or two and becomes an haute couture model. Includes Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti, Karl Lagerfeld, various models, fashion people, Bob being awesome, and Spencer and Ryan redefining how to be SpencerandRyan.
Masterpost
Character primmer.
2006
She’s in London when her friends decided to be idiots. Specifically she’s in London, in this bar she doesn’t really want to be in, sitting with a group of people she doesn’t really know, listening to this brunette - Lila, Spencer vaguely remembers her introducing herself as - drunkenly explaining her theory of whatever between tongue-raping the guy her friend came with, when instead of calling Brent, her best friends contact her. Or their manager does. The call feels long, but when the line goes dead, the same song that had been playing when she answered was only halfway though. It’s not even finished by the time her phone (her stupid sidekick that Pete got them all addicted to using, that the record companied paid for) is shattered across the floor.
She doesn’t remember much after that.
Which maybe is ironic, or maybe just her taking her allotted turn at playing the idiot because when she snaps out of it the tour is in another country and she is no longer on it. No longer part of anything. Because her best friends aren’t complete assholes the hotel room is paid until the end of the week. So is her return flight. Or maybe that was just the record company trying to avoid (more) bad press. Nothing sends sales falling faster than a crying fat girl story.
The only person around to see it, said crying fat girl story or lack thereof, is this Lila girl - ‘Lily,’ she corrects Spencer flippantly as if it means something. ‘As in Lily Allen.’ - on whose bathroom floor Spencer wakes up hangover the next day and who spends what remains of the pre-paid week hanging around Spencer’s hotel room, working her way through the mini bar and the room service menu while trying unsuccessfully to offer Spencer some form of comfort when it becomes more than apparent that Spencer is unwilling to accept any from anyone else (Fuck sympathy calls and misspelt emails, she’s Spencer Motherfucking Smith, not Matt Pelissier). She also steals Spencer’s favourite (and only) pair of stilettos and returns them scuffed, with one heel broken.
“I’ll buy you another pair,” she says, looking at the waiter seating them rather than Spencer, flipping her glossy hair over her shoulder and smiling sweetly.
The waiter responds accordingly.
They spend next five minutes being faux coy and flirting. When Lily decides she’s had enough, she turns to Spencer and tells her the shoes - red, green and gold Jimmy Choo’s that Spencer saved and saved up for after wearing them once (and falling in love with them) during a photo shoot - looked horrendous anyway, totally two seasons ago, and besides, it wasn’t like Spencer really, honestly liked them.
“I mean, you could only really wear them for Christmas parties with looking like a complete and utter joke,” she muses. “You really need something classic, something that would work with everything.”
Spencer feels like telling her to fuck off. Or something. Anything. She liked those shoes and she liked wearing them everyday with jeans and faded band t-shirts and what the fuck was a girl who was wearing a cocktail dress and dirty combat boots doing talking about fashion anyway? But Spencer doesn’t say any of that. Doesn’t say a word actually. Instead she makes herself take a sip of orange juice and push her breakfast around her plate.
“Good,” Lily says pleased, taking Spencer’s silent as assent. “I’m glad we’ve got that settled. I hate having stuff lingering. Fucks a friendship up.”
Spencer makes herself nod. “Yeah,” and looks at her plate. Somehow all the food is gone.
Lily makes a comment about carbs.
Spencer thinks about saying or doing something to make her stop. She thinks after years and years of fucking fat girl jokes she is due for a break, if only for a day. But the only thing she ends up doing is tightening her grip on the cutlery. Lily, of course, is oblivious and even if Spencer had opened her mouth and said something, Lily’s interest had already shifted. To be specific, it had shifted about five metres back to the right to the bar.
The waiter manning it winks at them both.
Lily flips her hair over her shoulder again, just to focus his attention. It works. The waiter brings the check and a piece of paper that looks like it had his number on it. Lily takes both and smiles, all wide doe eyes and parody of innocent charm.
“My treat,” she tells Spencer. “I think you deserve it.”
Spencer stops herself from rolling her eyes, but only just (maliciously, Spencer wonders exactly what Lily thinks she deserves). Lily catches her though, and she smirks. The expression seems to suit her more than the sweet smiles she had tried on the waiter. But that doesn’t stop her from throwing one over her shoulder at him as they leave.
“So, I was going to wait until you’d, like, mourned this shit and moved on, but Spence,” Lily says, she lead them into the first of what looks to be many boutiques. “I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but I have a record deal, and my label is ignoring me. I think together we could change that.”
Spencer picks up a cobalt blue Marni pump and pretends that it fascinates her.
Lily sighs, dramatic and a touch too loud. “Seriously Spence, think about it.”
Making a sound that is neither one of agreement or dismissal, Spencer put the pump down and lets Lily direct her towards a section of the store which contains a dust rose peep toe Valentino heel that doesn’t really suit Spencer half as much as they look like they’d suit Lily. Spencer tries them on anyway and they don’t look too bad. Lily agrees but her compliments have a certain tone to them. Spencer doesn’t have a lot of girl friends, but she does have two younger sisters. She knows the tone and she knows she doesn’t want to deal with it. Not today.
By the window, there is a pair of matte black Gucci Helena cut out boots. Obediently, Spencer makes a comment about them, and takes the shoes she’s wearing off. Lily puts them on.
She doesn’t take them off.
Later, after handing over her credit card to pay for Spencer’s replacement shoes and her own new ones, Lily gives in and starts talking again. About her music, her label, the stupid fucking A&R people who were focusing all their limited brain cells on promoting Coldplay and Gorillaz and not her. Lighting up a cigarette she blows smoke rings in-between sentences and forgets to offer Spencer one but des invite her out to some new bar.
"You should meet some of my friends tonight. We can talk more about us working together.”
Spencer thinks not. But she doesn’t count on Lily’s charm and/or determination (it all depended on the light) working on the concierge to wrangle a second key card out of him, nor the Brit’s uncanny ability to make a habit of stopping in on Spencer’s suite and making herself completely at home there. Both things results the complete and utter lack of time Spencer gets just to herself.
Lily rolls her eyes whenever Spencer comments on this fact.
“I’m more interesting than sitting alone in the dark watching a soap opera,” she tells Spencer. “Way more interesting, and for the record, so are you.”
Spencer thinks Lily is a liar. But she also is ignoring the hotel phone, her ever exploding email inbox and the notes the hotel staff keep telling her are piling up at the front desk. She doesn’t want to think. So Lily ends up getting her way every single time she turns up at Spencer’s door that week. Her rotating group of friends don’t seem to get her or Spencer’s name right half of the time (or even part of the time), but they always buy them both drinks. The combined effect works wonders on Spencer’s wish not to think at all.
Then the week comes to an end.
With it ends the free ride, and her mother’s patience. But Spencer doesn’t want to go home. Can’t. Or maybe she just won’t. Lily invites her to crash at her place instead.
By then Lily (with only the slightest amount of assistance from Spencer) has worked her way through the hotel’s mini bar twice over. So when she makes the offer it sounds like a wonderful idea for all concerned. Her place however isn’t so much hers, as it is her family’s home. Her brother is a bit of a - Spencer knows exactly the sort of words she’d use to describe him, but she hadn’t known Lily long enough to have the right to say them so she doesn’t.
Everything is going very nicely until one day, after a few weeks have passed, Panic! plays a show in Chicago and they announce at the start of the show that the temporary drummer they hired (the old drum tech who used to bring Spencer bottles of chilled water after every single performance and always say ‘You’re welcome’ to Spencer’s ‘Thank you’) will officially become part of the band.
Spencer closes the door to the guest room Lily gave her and doesn’t open it for three entire days. And then, she only opens it to allow Lily to come in with a nicely made sandwich she must have gone and bought (because lord knows the girl can’t cook to save her life) and glass of water. In exchange, she makes Spencer come out from under the covers and pushes back her lank hair with one hand. Her huge brown eyes look so sad; Spencer doesn’t want to look at her.
She stares down at the messy bed sheets.
“Oh Spenpenny,” she says.
“Shut up,” Spencer tells her.
Lily’s eyes get wider and sadder.
Spencer feels like the bitch everyone said she was. Maybe that’s why she lets Lily get her grubby fingers all over her laptop and shows her all the demos and mix tapes she had up on her myspace page.
“They could be so much better Spence,” Lily explains, and Spencer finds herself agreeing even though everything inside her tells her this is a bad, bad idea.
Lily talks about English music and music in general, and girls playing it. She uses big words without ‘like’s’ or ‘totally’s’ peppering her speech. It’s a sales pitch. Spencer knows it is. She knows why and something about her opinion of the other girl changes when Lily admits it without being prompted.
“I know you don’t think you are, but Spence, you’re sort of famous. Together we could make something out of this. I have a record deal. It isn’t worth much but it is one album. Guarantied.”
Spencer will give her that. She’s got a deal. She’s also got fuck knows how many people following her myspace page. The silvery blue light of the laptop screen illuminates her face and for a second it feels like Spencer is in LA one year ago. It’s so familiar Spencer’s shoulders ache. Lily’s grin is bitting; all excitement and unshakable ambition. That’s familiar too.
“Come on,” she pleads, unrelenting now she’s gained an inch. “We’re in exactly the right place at exactly the right time Spence. Fuck Brit pop and emo boys. This is fate.”
The fucked up thing is, Spencer thinks Lily really believes it.
Really.
And when Spencer opens her mouth the only thing that comes out is an, “Okay.”
“Okay?”
Spencer nods. “Yeah. Okay.”
In an instant Lily’s grin shifts from cautious to excited.
And maybe Spencer’s days start to be filled with more than hating her old friends.
Together, they stumble their way through a few gigs. Spencer drags a, drunken Lily home after them, more often than not. For most of the shows, Spencer drums on a crappy borrowed set, and Lily sings - sometimes off key, sometimes fucking beautifully - and for a very, very short time, it’s them against the world.
Over time, as Lily is very good at getting what she wants, those few punters buying tickets turn into more than a few, and the number of downloads on Lily’s myspace only grow and grow. In turn Spencer makes her music better and better, while keeping her in a state fit to record it. And somewhere in between that and stopping Lily from getting alcohol poisoning, Spencer cashes the first check from Regal Recording. It isn’t close to Lily’s, and even hers isn’t much really, but it’s a pay check which comes in handy as the royalties from Panic! aren’t nearly as much as Spencer originally thought they’d be.
“Fucking motherfucking fucks,” Lily offers when anyone asks her opinion on the matter and often when they don’t.
Spencer doesn’t say anything. She might have been the only member of the band with a cunt but she wasn’t really a bitch and she didn’t intend to become one anytime soon. There were more than enough people willing to take the walking wounded role and after two drunken emails from Tom fucking Conrad telling her about his experiences and all about how he (and thus, how he inferred she) felt, she was happy leaving others to fill it. Subtlety has never been one of Lily’s virtues so it is a sign of what good friends they have become that she chooses not to remind Spencer about the time she had been one.
Those three days she retreated into her locked guestroom were more like three months of Spencer, this girl Lily didn’t really know other than from interviews in teen magazine, not talking or eating and refusing to cry when her mother called and when the call she was waiting for never came.
For a while, that is that.
Spencer cashes the check and her plane ticket home, and with the proceeds she gets herself into out of Lily’s guest bedroom and into a shitty apartment in a shitty part of London. With what’s left over she buys herself a drum kit. She puts it in her shoebox apartment and tells Lily not to fucking touch it (Lily does; Spencer shouldn’t have picked the glitter finish). Then, to celebrate it all, they go out and get drunk. About a third of the people they sit with know Lily’s name. No one knows Spencer’s. Halfway through the evening Lily disappears on Spencer with the DJ. Spencer ends up waking home barefoot at four in the morning by herself.
She tells herself that she is okay.
She tells herself she’s not a kid anymore. She tells herself to suck it up. She tells herself to get with the fucking programme. She tells herself a lot of things and when she stops to breathe, she gets herself a new mobile number that she gives out to people who didn’t have the old one.
The thing about Lily, is that she is good at creating buzz.
And sometimes Spencer forgets Lily wants to be famous more than anything else in the world.
Sometimes Spencer forgets that before friendship there was another reason why Lily asked her to play music with her.
And maybe too much time passes and maybe Spencer isn’t taking enough notice because somewhere in between the drama, of maybe partly because of it, Lily becomes big. She’s still a bit of an annoying shit most of the time, but almost overnight people start writing about her and suddenly all these important people on the London music scene are playing her music and more and more people are tuning in to listen. Sure, sometimes they listen just to hear Lily make a huge fucking fool out of herself, but it’s exhilarating.
Spencer isn’t totally stupid okay. She’s always known Lily has grand plans. Or two things she wants above and beyond anything else; namely to be rich and to be famous and not necessarily in that order. By her side, Spencer watches with her mouth firmly shut. They’re not exactly a band - no matter what Lily says - but Spencer ends up signing some papers so she isn’t an employee or a groupie of Lily’s.
When the time comes to actually make the long delayed debut album, they get two weeks and Lily’s choice of producers. Out of the pack, she picks two. Their names are Greg Kurstin and Mark Ronson. Out of the pair of them, Spencer likes Mark the most. Or she likes working with him. Probably the latter.
“You know how this all works,” Mark comments one night when they are working late.
Spencer shrugs. There isn’t much she could say.
Mark laughs loudly. Like an asshole.
Spencer tells herself she doesn’t mind. After a while it’s true. They aren’t a band, not really. The music, just like before, is not hers. Before - Before, Spencer thought she was a reasonable drummer. Good at what she did. Not great or fucking fantastic, but good. Good at keeping pace and keeping everything together. Solid. It takes a while for that to come back. For her to believe in it again. On that topic too, Lily is silent. The session drummer the studio has on call is better than Spencer. But he never once drums on Lily’s album.
When the label starts organising the first real tour, Spencer initially plans on joining it.
Lily makes a fuss of course when the inevitable happens. She says a lot of things and pisses off a lot of people. Spencer does not. Maybe it all feels familiar. Maybe this time she sees it coming. But as long as the royalties from both albums are too, and the checks from all the shit she gets dragged don’t bounce when Spencer banks them, Spencer doesn’t mind as much. She read the fine print this time around. It’s okay. The bottom has already dropped out once; it can’t happen a second time.
She’s not a kid anymore.
She knows exactly what she is and what she’s not. Her name might get Lily’s myspace account a few thousand more hits, but out in the real world no one gives a shit about Spencer. No one takes a second glance when she walks by. The people she spends her evenings with get her name wrong more often than they get it right.
Though the first press they do, is done together, there is a reason the interviews that follow feature only Lily. Journalists like her. Spencer understands why. She might be good at saying the right things, but Lily is good at saying the wrong things and those, predicably, are the ones that make more money. That’s what the barebones truth is, whether Lily wants to acknowledge it or not. So instead of joining Lily on covers of magazines or on her tour, she offers to replace the session drummer Mark uses when the guy he normally calls first, quits.
And for a while that’s the way it is.
Occasionally she fills in on for a few of Lily’s local gigs when one of her many rotating roster tour musicians walks out on her; shitty half assed shows where Lily’s mere presence makes things different - ‘Better’ a traitorous part of Spencer’s brain whispers. Sometimes works with Mark. Sometimes Greg Kurstin even calls her up and about some work he might have for her. And sometimes, just sometimes, if she squints, she isn’t a fuck up seventeen-year-old has-been.
It’s mostly Mark who phones her at all times of the day and night, desperate for someone - anyone - to come and fill in the latest, and to his mind, greatest percussion sound he came up with or stole from someone else. Spencer pretty much always answers his call. She might be better off than a seventeen year old with nothing more than a high school diploma to her name should have any right to be, but London isn’t a cheap place to live. Not even with her half assed royalties cushioning her.
She makes an okay living as a studio drummer. She enjoys it even. Thanks to Mark and Lily dropping her name in one of two more conversations (also apparently, one Mark had held with his best friend who had one of the finest musical pedigrees imaginable), Spencer has contacts and is known by far more musicians and producers than an ex-emo kid rightly should. It just takes her a while to realise there’s really only room for one Meg White in this world.
That’s not to say she isn’t an okay drummer. She is. In a pinch.
It’s just, sometimes she stays late in his studio after the act Mark’s recording has left. Just sometimes. Mark loves music. It’s in his blood and bones. He can talk and talk for hours. She... she doesn’t know about herself. Maybe she isn’t a natural, or maybe she doesn’t put enough effort in, but - she does not know. A few people have started calling her up - friends of Mark, friends of Greg, friends of their friends - asking for her to do a day here, a week there, but... she doesn’t know.
Not anymore.
She goes nevertheless, but she doesn’t know. There is a different between her and the musicians that call her. Not a big one, but it’s there. She thinks they should be able to tell. Should be able to see. The calls keep coming though. She does not know why. She’s an okay drummer. She really is. But that’s about it. She’s not a good sight reader. She’s not even particularly good at reading sheet music when given time. Some people might be able to or have a way with words, but she does not. Maybe she might be able to play things by ear. Maybe she might have a good memory. But that only goes so far.
Between it all, Spencer finds herself rising up the food chain a little. Or at least becoming ‘that tall blonde girl’ in all the photographs sold to English tabloids. It’s a bit stupid, and a lot meaningless. It reaches its height at a Burberry after party Lily had been given front row tickets to. Spencer is around seventeen going on eighteen then, teetering between the two ages with no amount of grace, and when this guy tells her she should be a model she wants more than anything to laugh.
But instead she picks up another side job.
It isn’t much really (neither of them are, not really). She doesn’t even bother to advertise it, because really, her? A model? There was a reason she wasn’t halfway around the world drumming on Saturday Night Live. She has some pictures taken for her thin portfolio though. She even goes to the occasional casting calls when she has a free day. She dresses herself in dark jeans and logo-less tank tops and she stands in line with a hundred other girls who all look alike and sound alike and look like -
She goes to the casting calls.
The first one isn’t worth her time.
She arrives early and stands in line for over an hour. When she finally gets seen by the casting agent, she is barely in the door when he glances at her. A week previously she’d had some test shots taken. Lame and clichéd, they fill the first few pages of portfolio. The casting agent doesn’t even bother asking to see them.
“Too tall,” he say, blandly.
And - that is that.
The next one, she actually makes it into the room before she is labelled the three-letter word. And, okay, it’s not the first time she’s been called that, but usually people wait until her back was turned. The casting agent just says it, as if commenting on the weather.
Her agent is unsurprised.
“You could become a little more toned,” he says, which really means she could stand to lose more weight.
Okay, Spencer thinks. Fuck it, she can do that.
She stops taking public transport and starts riding her bike, then, when that isn’t enough she makes herself get some use out of her gym membership. She runs and she swims and she puts up with stupid perky trainers and their stupid dietary regiments. She does it all.
Except now, she’s too small.
“We’re not in Paris, Spence,” her agent relays.
The day before she was rejected by a cheap English high street brand. Spencer is well aware she isn’t working in Paris.
Over the next few weeks she is also made aware of the face she is too blonde, not blonde enough, has an awful posture, that her eyes are too far apart, then too close together, and that her walk is strange. Once, she is too short. At this she blinks. In the middle of yet another painful growth spurt, she is pushing 5’11. A month passes. She nears the 6’ foot mark. Still, that is the reason. Often though, she isn’t given one. Just summarily dismissed.
Meanwhile, the tanned, perfectly preened and presented girls that stand on either side of her at the meat market castings chatter and gossip in groups. One by one they are picked to advertise skinny jeans or feature in the fashion spreads of glossy tween and teen magazines. And Spencer, she just isn’t right. She never seems to be.
For reasons she doesn’t understand - stubbornness, maybe - she doesn’t know, she keeps going to those stupid cattle calls. She fits them between acting as Mark’s studio drummer, and being borrowed by his friends and Greg’s friends and suddenly time is passing and it’s winter in England and she ends up flying home for her parents 20th wedding anniversary. At the airport her mother hugs her tight and her father takes her luggage when her sisters (little brats) refuse. She flies back a week later.
Her first night back is spent with Lily at some party she insists they go too.
Lily gets drunk. Spencer does not. Alcohol fucks her up. Or fucks her weight up. ‘Up’ being the important word in the sentence. ‘Up’ being the word that stops her from getting booked and has guys asking ‘Glamour model?’ whenever someone mentions Spencer’s part time job.
Except somehow one drink becomes two and two drinks becomes Lily making some guy with a rancid looking tongue piercing shouts everyone drinks and the whole ‘Spencer not drinking and not getting drunk’ thing becomes a huge lie because she does both. It’s stupid and irresponsible and it makes Spencer a liar.
Squished in between two of Lily’s new adoring friends, Spencer feels like a fool. Everyone around her and Lily spends the night treating them as if they - her included - are something special. They talk and talk and Spencer doesn’t have any answers or even anything to say, not really, but they keep talking and talking and in her six inch heels Spencer’s feet ache and ache and ache.
With the recording process cames what Spencer hoped (but judging by the hollow pain in her joints, wrongly) to be her last grow spurt. Now Lily needs her highest heels to look Spencer in the eye, and Spencer doesn’t need any at all when she talks to Daisy Lowe (one of Lily’s new best friends) at the bar while waiting for the bartender to get her a fresh mineral water.
Daisy’s very pretty in an incredibly English way and her strangely childlike eyes track Spencer’s every movement.
They don’t talk about anything in particular. Just how quickly the year has gone. Then when the bartender finally gets around to handing over their drinks, they clumsily make their way back to the VIP area where Lily accosts Daisy. Throwing an arm over her shoulder, Lily talks to Daisy as if they were best friends - no, sisters. But Spencer can spot the look in Lily’s eyes. At the beginning of the night, William Cameron Jr.had given Spencer his number. He had been sweet, and maybe a little unsure of himself. Spencer had given it to Lily. Now, with Lily eyeing Daisy as if she were an animal of prey, she gives it to her with a laugh and a promise that ‘He, like, couldn’t keep his eyes off you.’
It’s a bit of a pathetic lie, but in general most things that come from Lily’s mouth are.
When she turns to Spencer later, she laughs at the look Daisy’s face had gotten tangled up in, the way her mouth had fallen open and her eyes had widened. Lily’s drunk and soft by then, smelling of sweat and whiskey and sex. Equally made a little more agreeable and a little less indiscreet by mixed drinks. Spencer can’t be bothered ignoring her.
“He looked like he could be fun.”
Spencer rolls her eyes.
Lily makes a face of her own.
“I don’t want fun,” Spencer gives in. “Fun is boring.”
“No,” Lily says, eye make up smudged. “You want someone with a girlfriend.”
She laughs when she sees the expression on Spencer’s face.
“I see you,” she whispers, raising one hand to point a finger in Spencer’s general direction. “One guy with a girlfriend is a mistake, two is a horrid coincidence, but three? Three is a pattern.”
It’s more than three.
Spencer doesn’t say that - would never, she’s not that sort of girl, no matter what people say - and thankfully Lily lets the conversation die.
But not other things.
While in America for her first transatlantic showcase Lily gets way too much attention and talks far too much about everything and unfortunately one of those topics is Spencer. Apparently finding time between insulting Bob Geldof -
(“I didn’t say anything,” Lily argues.
“You called him a cunt on myspace.”
Lily looks at Spencer, clueless, and Spencer, well, she knows how to choose her battles)
- and getting into a war of words with Katy Perry (one of many people stupid enough to use Lily for cheap laughs and cheaper publicity) after the girl had called Lily fat, Lily says a lot of stuff about Spencer that, Spencer probably would find been endearing if it wasn’t so annoying.
Since she says it all in America, of course it gets airplay.
When Lily says Spencer was abandoned in London, Spencer tries to correct her and say it wasn’t like that. Not many people listen, or care to listen, but Spencer tries and when Lily says they kicked her out of the band in the time it took for a Ramones track to play start from finish, Spencer counters and says it had been a long time coming. What she didn’t say was maybe it was true. Maybe it had been a long time coming. Maybe it took so long to get there, was so gradual she didn’t see any signs because she had become so desensitized to them.
She had gotten used to a norm that wasn’t normal. That shouldn’t have been.
She tells herself this on the taxi ride back to her apartment. She tells herself this instead of looking at her mobile inbox filled with Happy Brithday messages from everybody but the people that never once rung. Not even once. Over and over she tries to tell herself that they don’t have her new number. That’s why. But touring - strike that - knowing Pete Wentz makes that stupid wish impossible. Fuck if Spencer can help Lily can get Katy Perry’s number to blackmail her with, then they could have gotten Spencer’s.
In time, she comes to accept she’s not particularly good at anything. Good, not great on drums, passable back-up singer, and an okay model. And everything is fine apart from the fact she doesn’t want to be a part of it anymore. She doesn’t want to drum or tour or join any stupid band Mark knows through a friend of a friend of some guy or girl who happens to be looking for a drummer. She doesn’t want to go to University or College or whatever the hell higher education is called in England and she doesn’t want to go home either and she - she just doesn’t know.
It’s around this time, Spencer meets Giancarlo Giammetti at a party Lily takes her to. He is tall, silver haired and has eyes that are sharper than anyone else’s in the room. He asks her if she is a model.
She nods.
“I’m a cliché,” she adds, even though with eyes like that he probably knows.
Just like she knows she’s only there to make up the numbers in Lily’s entourage, and like she knows Lily’s only there because of the freebies, and that the PR people only invited Lily because the press trail after her frothing at the mouths, cameras attached to their hands.
Giancarlo looks at her. She does not know what he sees.
Her Givenchy pumps pinch at her toes. They have been doing so for the last hour she has been on her feet. They are half a size too small, but Lily’s stylist only had that one size spare. A waiter drifts past with a tray full of champagne glasses. Giancarlo takes two. He hands her one.
She thanks him.
They talk a little about various things. All obvious topics: fashion, the party’s host, London, business, politics. The party is loud and filled with too many faces that seem familiar but really aren’t (at least, not to Spencer). They talk about them too, but only in passing. At the end of the evening he gives her his business card. She takes it. He eyes her again. Clever and knowing and - quick. She looks back at him.
“Do you have one?” he asks after a moment too long.
She had not known he had been prompting her.
She shakes her head.
“No,” she answers him, not that it mattered. “I don’t.”
As it didn’t mean anything either way, she takes a pen out of her envelope clutch and writes her number on the back of his card and gives it back to him. His expression shifts. In her peripheral vision, Spencer searches for Lily. She cannot find her. This is not surprising.
Giancarlo smiles.
“It was a pleasure making your acquaintance,” he tells her.
His tone sounds honest.
But most do. Even hers, when she echoes the sentiment.
About a week and a half a week later, he calls and asks her out for lunch. It comes as a surprise.
He is polite and articulate when he extends the invitation.
“I am returning to Rome in two days,” he explains. “I would very much enjoy your company.”
There are many reasons to agree. Spencer sees them all. Of course he does too. He isn’t the type not to. Nonetheless, together they conduct a conversation that needn’t be performed. They perform it; he, because he is clearly a gentlemen and Spencer, because for better or for worse, she’s always been that sort of person. When they finish, the manner in which he excuses himself speaks of grace and good breeding. She does not know how she comes off.
They dine at a restaurant she is not familiar with.
She takes a taxi and arrives five minutes early. She had planned to arrive earlier. Traffic is bad because traffic in London always is. But she’s use to it by now, and even if she wasn’t, there was no way in the world she is turning up to lunch in clothes stained with the smell of the underground and hair battered from the stink and strain of public transport. She isn’t completely useless. Giancarlo is already waiting for her. Without the crowds of ‘Someone’s’ and ‘Somebody’s’ occupying the space around them, he cuts an even sharper figure as he stands and helps her take her seat.
For a while they canvas the same topics they had discussed the first time they met. Though the talking points are the same, Spencer chooses her words more carefully and watches each response they draw. Giancarlo’s gaze is very knowing; it makes her - she tries harder, only pausing at the appropriate interval to take a sip of her mineral water.
Together they fill time until the waitress makes her way over to them.
She is older than Spencer, and understands the language Giancarlo order’s the wine in. When she returns to the table with it, Spencer doesn’t know what to order so she chooses something at random. One of the specials perhaps. It doesn’t really matter. The waitress nods, and nods again when Giancarlo decides what he wants.
When he turns back to Spencer, the expression in his eyes is different once more.
Spencer doesn’t understand.
She listens though, when he starts to speak. He tells her about his business in London and about this painting he had his eye on that was in the next auction at Christie’s and nothing he tells her is particularly private or revealing, but when he speaks she listens and when he turns the conversation around, she answers his question to the best of her ability.
They part an hour later.
Giancarlo kisses her goodbye and wishes her well. He also expresses a desire to see her when he is in London again. Spencer responds appropriately. She doesn’t care what that makes her. Honestly and truly, she walks away liking him. It is something she holds onto tightly once her agent catches wind of the lunch date.
He talks and talks and sends her on more and more casting calls.
One or two pay more than the usual amount of attention to her.
People talk.
The girls in the waiting room flick their eyes over her. Spencer meets their gazes. Spencer isn’t stupid.
With indifference she had stopped straightening her hair and let it grow long for the first time in years. She had also stopped dressing like a boy and learnt how to wear red lipstick without getting it on her teeth. Now every time Spencer sees her agency they look happier and happier with her. Though it isn’t exactly under their direction - she isn’t signed for any reason other than the obvious - she knows points have been scored in her favour.
Image is important.
It’s easier to sell a girl if she looks like something a guy would want to fuck rather than someone he’d play baseball with on the weekends. People she gets sent to see on go sees seemed to agree. For the most part. One photographer spends the entire casting session staring at Spencer’s mouth. He offers buys her a drink afterwards and puts his hand high up on her thigh. He doesn’t call her a fat once. Or a loser. He does call her a future super model which sounds stupid to her.
Over the next month she is offered around half a dozen jobs. She takes them all (except that one). She takes them and she does her job. She turns up on time and she is polite and professional and she gets things done. Fuck what she hears people say behind her back.
None of it is new.
The next time Giancarlo is in London, he sends a car to pick her up.
It’s painted a dark glossy colour and it surprisingly discreet for a man who drove around Rome in a bright red Mercedes during the days of the Red Brigade. The driver doesn’t attempt to start a conversation. Spencer idly smooths the fabric of her pencil skirt and looks out the window.
When she arrives, Giancarlo greets her with a smile and warm embrace.
They eat outside with one security guards seated a discreet distance away. Giancarlo enquires about her schedule for the upcoming fashion weeks, one of the two busy periods in the fashion year. A little time too, is devoted to Giancarlo’s questions about her latest studio gig - she does not like way she sounds when she names Names, but Giancarlo asks politely so she tells him. For a little while after that, they talk about Sean Lennon.
Spencer does not know how he is friends with Mark, neither does she know how he is friends with Giancarlo. All she knows is she just finished working on Sean’s third solo album and that the time she had spent in the studio with him had been like nothing she had experienced before.
She does not like being subject of pity.
But Giancarlo, he - she doesn’t feel like that around him.
She should. She knows she should. Her agent dressed her for the lunch. The combined cost of her outfit he bought for her would have been enough to leave Spencer short for her month’s rent. However, her agent insisted. He said one only looked a certain way (read; an expensive way) when one dressed it. He told her that he’d take it out of her next job. She hates being in debt to anyone. She feels as if she is in borrowed clothing; its expiry date looming on the horizon. Except this time the clothes are not Lily’s but her middle-aged agent.
The label at the back of her neck itched against her skin.
Giancarlo doesn’t look at her shoes or her blouse though. Not once. They talk about the state of the market, something Spencer has been paying a great deal of attention too.
(It is neither a tasteful topic of conversation or is it a particularly interesting fact, but money doesn’t last forever, not now. Figures add up. Or subtract, as the case may be. Early on she had gotten in touch with her bank and organised herself an appointment with a financial advisor. She had jumped though all the hoops and hurdles, and made sure to reads the fine print. She asks all the dumb questions and she takes notes and she pays attention. She doesn't know what it's worth, or if it's worth anything at all, but she's trying her hardest to do it the right way this time around. She doesn’t care what that makes her. She doesn’t. It was only when that was all over and done with, she had signed a lease to that shitty share apartment in the shitty part of the city and told her mother to stop worrying.
She knew Ginger wouldn’t, but Spencer said it anyway. She still says it.
Ginger doesn’t believe her. Spencer can hear it in her voice whenever they speak.
They don’t speak that often.)
Giancarlo visits London at least once every month. Spencer finds herself getting used to politely expressed invitations and having a car sent to pick her up. She even, maybe, starts becoming accustomed to Giancarlo and the way he focuses so completely on her when she speaks.
She still watches her words.
She doesn’t have a way with them. She has to be careful. They get her in trouble. They always have. If she doesn’t keep an eye on what she says, they get away from her. She knows they do. She knows. So she’s careful. She likes Giancarlo. She likes the time they spend together. She likes him. So she’s careful. She is careful and polite and, she hopes, agreeable.
She comes to rely upon their time together.
The next time Spencer goes home (for Christmas this time), she lets herself stay there for more than a week.
While she’s there, the sort-of band Mark had been trying to get her to join breaks up.
It never had been much. She had never let it be. Spencer just had a few free evenings now and then. They meet for drinks once or twice, talked a little and played together a little less. All it had been was a couple months of haphazard (and half hearted) wooing and half a dozen practices that no one really bothered to attend. No one has made any promises.
The news doesn’t feel like a surprise. Mark calls her to talk, but Spencer doesn’t have anything to say.
“Something else will come along,” he tells her, in that roundabout way of his. “You’ll see.”
“Yeah.” she replies, just to say something.
She hadn’t even bothered to tell her mother she was sort of in another band.
From across the other side of the ocean, Spencer hears rumours that the lead singer has gone off to do some solo stuff; in other words, Victoria will get to do what the fuck she wants without anyone getting in her way. The other two members, Marie and Lucy, return to making real music. They call and talk once or twice - their intentions obvious - but Spencer finds that she is indifferent to such proposals.
As if on school break, she hangs around Vegas by herself for a while, killing time while everyone else goes crazy trying to fill it with all the last minute Christmas crap they’d left too late. Just before her mother gets that look in her eyes, Spencer runs into a few people from high school that, if she squints, were almost friends. They’re more interested in gossip than in her, but it gets her out of the house.
On the third night out this kid, who can’t be out of high school yet comes up to her and tries to pick her up. He tells her all these things; that she’s hotter than fuck and that he’s a musician in a wicked cool band and that, hey, if she could buy him this drink he’d totally pay her back. And the people she’s with laugh, and she looks over the kid’s head (which is easy to do given the last grow spurt and her most recent splurge on heels) and there are all these tiny little boys looking at them with wicked little looks on their faces.
“I play base guitar,” he tells her. “I’m hella good.”
She looks down at him from under dark lashes.
In the background, the littlest of his little friends burst out laughing.
“If you want, you can come and see us play,” he offers, undeterred.
She flicks her hair over her shoulder and lifts her gaze so now it’s him looking up at her.
“Oh,” she replies.
“We have a gig this Saturday,” he says, pulling out a photocopied flyer and shoving it at her.
Before the night has ended, she loses it.
As luck has it, Spencer sees the kid again, the next night at another bar they are both too young to be in.
“I looked you up.” he says instead of a ‘hello.’
“Really?” she drawls, pulling the word out disinterestedly.
“You used to be in Panic! at the Disco.”
She used to be a lot of things.
“You still know Pete Wentz?”
There are many things she could say to that. But he is young, annoying and will probably blog about whatever she says on buzznet or something equally insipid. So she watches her mouth. She’s over being part of the myspace generation.
“Of course.”
The sarcasm is lost on him.
“Could you give him this?” he asks, shoving a demo into her hands. “I mean, we’ve left messages on his myspace like you guys did, but it’d be really, really fucking awesome if you could give him a copy, like, in person.”
He looks at her and - Fuck.
Fuck.
The demo’s handmade; the track title, band name and contact details all scribbled onto the CD with purple magic marker. Spencer - she doesn’t plan on listening to it. She doesn’t intend on anything except as it turns out, Las Vegas is a kind of boring town if you live, rather than holidayed there. And for some reason it’s even boring enough for Spencer to load the kid’s demo onto her iPod so she can have something new to listen to on her morning run.
They’re good. Surprisingly.
Something inside Spencer allows her sisters to convince her to take them to see the kid’s band perform live (even if it means going to a fucking youth centre hall in the middle of the afternoon). Halfway through the set, she calls up Mark and holds her cell up towards the stage so he can hear.
“These kids,” she yells when they tumble off stage. “You have to sign them.”
Against her ear, she hears Mark laughs, bright and a little too loud.
“They could be golden,” she tells him, because she can see it. See it in the beat and the metre of their music.
They can be great - they can. They have it in them. Mark can bring it out of them. He can. Spencer knows it for certain.
“Yeah,” Mark tells her. “Yeah.”
He flies out within the week.
The kids don’t know what’s hit them until Mark’s there, unannounced at the end of the bass player’s... Cash Money’s - wtf - driveway. Not a single one of them knows who he is, but by the end of his lightening quick stay they’re converted (and so are their parents), signed and flying to England with Spencer.
Along with signing them, organising their visas and flying them out, Mark finds them the crappiest little share apartment of all time, in a particularly awful part of town. It’s even worse than the one Spencer started in. But somehow, despite that, the five of them - all annoying, gangly teenager boys - latch onto Spencer, like little imprinted ducklings.
Mark doesn’t care either way as long as they don’t end up in a ditch.
But Spencer, she’s suck with them. 24/7; or so it feels.
Cash demands to be shown around London. One Alex makes Spencer treat him to coffee whenever he happens to see her (and he happens to see her a lot once Spencer makes the mistake of giving him the address to her apartment). Another Alex - Spencer thinks maybe it could be Singer, but she’s not totally certain - steals all her breakfast cereal when she isn’t paying attention.
The only sane one is Ian, and truthfully that isn’t saying much. He’s the newest to the band and neither Mark nor Spencer can figure out exactly how he managed to join up with The Cab until he mumbles something about how he used to go to school with Cash and stuff about his cousin and his cousin’s friend. He’s pink faced and refuses to meet their eyes and Mark thinks it’s fucking hilarious because he’s an arsehole like that. His laugh is a little forced though, when Ian furnishes out the story with a few details and a few names.
“Oh,” Spencer says, when Ian names Shane and then Brendon. “Okay.”
Ian is deathly embarrassed now; his chin tucked into his chest and cheeks red now instead of rosy pink.
“It’s nothing. Just, like-” Ian mutters a few more things and Spencer stops listening.
Later Mark summarises; which makes sense because they are Mark’s newest brightest things, not Pete’s and certainly not Brendon’s. But they could have been, Mark explains.
“They gave Urie a copy of their demo too,” he tells her in a halting manner, as if he isn’t certain he should be telling her at all. “About a month or so ago.”
Spencer takes a drag of her cigarette, then hands it over to Mark so he can do the same.
“They neglected to mention that.”
Mark winces. “I think that was their attempt at watching your feelings.”
Spencer feels like rolling her eyes.
“Stupid kids.”
“Stupid talented kids,” Mark corrects.
Spencer has to nod. Fuck, they are and fuck, Mark’s going to make them big. And fuck, she really shouldn’t be smoking. Sure, she grew those extra few inches that pushed her up to the almost six foot mark, but fuck, it’s so 90s. She isn’t Claudia Schiffer, and no one hires models with yellow teeth, and fingers that matched.
She makes herself shake her head when Mark tries to pass the cigarette back to her.
Enough.
“They don’t know what they missed out on,” Spencer tells him.
Mark pauses.
“No,” he says, his tone mediated. “They don’t.”
By this time, she’s spending more time doing the whole model thing than working with Mark, so when he invites her to see this band he’s heard about she joins him and a couple Cab boys to take advantage of the free tickets and drinks and tag along too. The band itself isn’t great. The lead singer’s out of his mind - either on a combination of prescription drugs or, just naturally out of his mind - but Mark’s good at working with people like him. She tells him this when he asks her opinion.
“They’d need work though.”
He nods.
“They’ll also probably need a new drummer.”
He winces, but nods as well. They both know she is right on that count.
On the other side of the room Cash is hooking up with another somewhat shady and very skanky looking girl, while Ian watched with that look in his eyes. Spencer knows it well. Snorting, she finishes what was left of her drink and orders a fresh one - this time a bottle of water (the photographer she is working with for this gig at the end of the week took any chance to bitch about her ‘sallow skin tone’).
“You could do this,” Mark says after a little while.
She screws the lid back onto the water bottle.
She could. But -
“I don’t want to.”
“Yeah.” Mark breathes or maybe sighs; sometimes it’s hard to tell with him, “Make sure you drop me a line when you figure out what you do want.”
Part two.
Author: pr_scatterbrain/Professional Scatterbrain.
Disclaimer: Reference to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libellous, defamatory, or in any way factual. As this work is an interpretation of the original material and not for-profit, it constitutes fair use.
Primary/Eventual Pairing: always a girl!Spencer/Ryan
Secondary Pairings: always a girl!Spencer/Bob, Lily Allen/Brian, Frank/Gerard, Mark Ronson/Patrick, Bob/Patrick, Valentino (Garavani)/Giancarlo Giammetti.
Rating: R
Warnings: Lily Allen's miscarriage is mentioned. Drug use, sex, language.
Word count: 52, 382
Set: 2006 - (an imagined) 2010
Summary: She’s in London when her friends decided to be idiots. Specifically she’s in London, in this bar she doesn’t really want to be in, sitting with a group of people she doesn’t really know, listening to this brunette - Lily, Spencer vaguely remembers her introducing herself as - drunkenly explaining her theory of whatever between tongue-raping the guy her friend came with, when instead of calling Brent, her best friends contact her.
Or the Model AU!fic where Spencer gets kicked out of Panic! and instead of going home to lick her wounds, she stays in London, grows a foot or two and becomes an haute couture model. Includes Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti, Karl Lagerfeld, various models, fashion people, Bob being awesome, and Spencer and Ryan redefining how to be SpencerandRyan.
Masterpost
Character primmer.
2006
She’s in London when her friends decided to be idiots. Specifically she’s in London, in this bar she doesn’t really want to be in, sitting with a group of people she doesn’t really know, listening to this brunette - Lila, Spencer vaguely remembers her introducing herself as - drunkenly explaining her theory of whatever between tongue-raping the guy her friend came with, when instead of calling Brent, her best friends contact her. Or their manager does. The call feels long, but when the line goes dead, the same song that had been playing when she answered was only halfway though. It’s not even finished by the time her phone (her stupid sidekick that Pete got them all addicted to using, that the record companied paid for) is shattered across the floor.
She doesn’t remember much after that.
Which maybe is ironic, or maybe just her taking her allotted turn at playing the idiot because when she snaps out of it the tour is in another country and she is no longer on it. No longer part of anything. Because her best friends aren’t complete assholes the hotel room is paid until the end of the week. So is her return flight. Or maybe that was just the record company trying to avoid (more) bad press. Nothing sends sales falling faster than a crying fat girl story.
The only person around to see it, said crying fat girl story or lack thereof, is this Lila girl - ‘Lily,’ she corrects Spencer flippantly as if it means something. ‘As in Lily Allen.’ - on whose bathroom floor Spencer wakes up hangover the next day and who spends what remains of the pre-paid week hanging around Spencer’s hotel room, working her way through the mini bar and the room service menu while trying unsuccessfully to offer Spencer some form of comfort when it becomes more than apparent that Spencer is unwilling to accept any from anyone else (Fuck sympathy calls and misspelt emails, she’s Spencer Motherfucking Smith, not Matt Pelissier). She also steals Spencer’s favourite (and only) pair of stilettos and returns them scuffed, with one heel broken.
“I’ll buy you another pair,” she says, looking at the waiter seating them rather than Spencer, flipping her glossy hair over her shoulder and smiling sweetly.
The waiter responds accordingly.
They spend next five minutes being faux coy and flirting. When Lily decides she’s had enough, she turns to Spencer and tells her the shoes - red, green and gold Jimmy Choo’s that Spencer saved and saved up for after wearing them once (and falling in love with them) during a photo shoot - looked horrendous anyway, totally two seasons ago, and besides, it wasn’t like Spencer really, honestly liked them.
“I mean, you could only really wear them for Christmas parties with looking like a complete and utter joke,” she muses. “You really need something classic, something that would work with everything.”
Spencer feels like telling her to fuck off. Or something. Anything. She liked those shoes and she liked wearing them everyday with jeans and faded band t-shirts and what the fuck was a girl who was wearing a cocktail dress and dirty combat boots doing talking about fashion anyway? But Spencer doesn’t say any of that. Doesn’t say a word actually. Instead she makes herself take a sip of orange juice and push her breakfast around her plate.
“Good,” Lily says pleased, taking Spencer’s silent as assent. “I’m glad we’ve got that settled. I hate having stuff lingering. Fucks a friendship up.”
Spencer makes herself nod. “Yeah,” and looks at her plate. Somehow all the food is gone.
Lily makes a comment about carbs.
Spencer thinks about saying or doing something to make her stop. She thinks after years and years of fucking fat girl jokes she is due for a break, if only for a day. But the only thing she ends up doing is tightening her grip on the cutlery. Lily, of course, is oblivious and even if Spencer had opened her mouth and said something, Lily’s interest had already shifted. To be specific, it had shifted about five metres back to the right to the bar.
The waiter manning it winks at them both.
Lily flips her hair over her shoulder again, just to focus his attention. It works. The waiter brings the check and a piece of paper that looks like it had his number on it. Lily takes both and smiles, all wide doe eyes and parody of innocent charm.
“My treat,” she tells Spencer. “I think you deserve it.”
Spencer stops herself from rolling her eyes, but only just (maliciously, Spencer wonders exactly what Lily thinks she deserves). Lily catches her though, and she smirks. The expression seems to suit her more than the sweet smiles she had tried on the waiter. But that doesn’t stop her from throwing one over her shoulder at him as they leave.
“So, I was going to wait until you’d, like, mourned this shit and moved on, but Spence,” Lily says, she lead them into the first of what looks to be many boutiques. “I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but I have a record deal, and my label is ignoring me. I think together we could change that.”
Spencer picks up a cobalt blue Marni pump and pretends that it fascinates her.
Lily sighs, dramatic and a touch too loud. “Seriously Spence, think about it.”
Making a sound that is neither one of agreement or dismissal, Spencer put the pump down and lets Lily direct her towards a section of the store which contains a dust rose peep toe Valentino heel that doesn’t really suit Spencer half as much as they look like they’d suit Lily. Spencer tries them on anyway and they don’t look too bad. Lily agrees but her compliments have a certain tone to them. Spencer doesn’t have a lot of girl friends, but she does have two younger sisters. She knows the tone and she knows she doesn’t want to deal with it. Not today.
By the window, there is a pair of matte black Gucci Helena cut out boots. Obediently, Spencer makes a comment about them, and takes the shoes she’s wearing off. Lily puts them on.
She doesn’t take them off.
Later, after handing over her credit card to pay for Spencer’s replacement shoes and her own new ones, Lily gives in and starts talking again. About her music, her label, the stupid fucking A&R people who were focusing all their limited brain cells on promoting Coldplay and Gorillaz and not her. Lighting up a cigarette she blows smoke rings in-between sentences and forgets to offer Spencer one but des invite her out to some new bar.
"You should meet some of my friends tonight. We can talk more about us working together.”
Spencer thinks not. But she doesn’t count on Lily’s charm and/or determination (it all depended on the light) working on the concierge to wrangle a second key card out of him, nor the Brit’s uncanny ability to make a habit of stopping in on Spencer’s suite and making herself completely at home there. Both things results the complete and utter lack of time Spencer gets just to herself.
Lily rolls her eyes whenever Spencer comments on this fact.
“I’m more interesting than sitting alone in the dark watching a soap opera,” she tells Spencer. “Way more interesting, and for the record, so are you.”
Spencer thinks Lily is a liar. But she also is ignoring the hotel phone, her ever exploding email inbox and the notes the hotel staff keep telling her are piling up at the front desk. She doesn’t want to think. So Lily ends up getting her way every single time she turns up at Spencer’s door that week. Her rotating group of friends don’t seem to get her or Spencer’s name right half of the time (or even part of the time), but they always buy them both drinks. The combined effect works wonders on Spencer’s wish not to think at all.
Then the week comes to an end.
With it ends the free ride, and her mother’s patience. But Spencer doesn’t want to go home. Can’t. Or maybe she just won’t. Lily invites her to crash at her place instead.
By then Lily (with only the slightest amount of assistance from Spencer) has worked her way through the hotel’s mini bar twice over. So when she makes the offer it sounds like a wonderful idea for all concerned. Her place however isn’t so much hers, as it is her family’s home. Her brother is a bit of a - Spencer knows exactly the sort of words she’d use to describe him, but she hadn’t known Lily long enough to have the right to say them so she doesn’t.
Everything is going very nicely until one day, after a few weeks have passed, Panic! plays a show in Chicago and they announce at the start of the show that the temporary drummer they hired (the old drum tech who used to bring Spencer bottles of chilled water after every single performance and always say ‘You’re welcome’ to Spencer’s ‘Thank you’) will officially become part of the band.
Spencer closes the door to the guest room Lily gave her and doesn’t open it for three entire days. And then, she only opens it to allow Lily to come in with a nicely made sandwich she must have gone and bought (because lord knows the girl can’t cook to save her life) and glass of water. In exchange, she makes Spencer come out from under the covers and pushes back her lank hair with one hand. Her huge brown eyes look so sad; Spencer doesn’t want to look at her.
She stares down at the messy bed sheets.
“Oh Spenpenny,” she says.
“Shut up,” Spencer tells her.
Lily’s eyes get wider and sadder.
Spencer feels like the bitch everyone said she was. Maybe that’s why she lets Lily get her grubby fingers all over her laptop and shows her all the demos and mix tapes she had up on her myspace page.
“They could be so much better Spence,” Lily explains, and Spencer finds herself agreeing even though everything inside her tells her this is a bad, bad idea.
Lily talks about English music and music in general, and girls playing it. She uses big words without ‘like’s’ or ‘totally’s’ peppering her speech. It’s a sales pitch. Spencer knows it is. She knows why and something about her opinion of the other girl changes when Lily admits it without being prompted.
“I know you don’t think you are, but Spence, you’re sort of famous. Together we could make something out of this. I have a record deal. It isn’t worth much but it is one album. Guarantied.”
Spencer will give her that. She’s got a deal. She’s also got fuck knows how many people following her myspace page. The silvery blue light of the laptop screen illuminates her face and for a second it feels like Spencer is in LA one year ago. It’s so familiar Spencer’s shoulders ache. Lily’s grin is bitting; all excitement and unshakable ambition. That’s familiar too.
“Come on,” she pleads, unrelenting now she’s gained an inch. “We’re in exactly the right place at exactly the right time Spence. Fuck Brit pop and emo boys. This is fate.”
The fucked up thing is, Spencer thinks Lily really believes it.
Really.
And when Spencer opens her mouth the only thing that comes out is an, “Okay.”
“Okay?”
Spencer nods. “Yeah. Okay.”
In an instant Lily’s grin shifts from cautious to excited.
And maybe Spencer’s days start to be filled with more than hating her old friends.
Together, they stumble their way through a few gigs. Spencer drags a, drunken Lily home after them, more often than not. For most of the shows, Spencer drums on a crappy borrowed set, and Lily sings - sometimes off key, sometimes fucking beautifully - and for a very, very short time, it’s them against the world.
Over time, as Lily is very good at getting what she wants, those few punters buying tickets turn into more than a few, and the number of downloads on Lily’s myspace only grow and grow. In turn Spencer makes her music better and better, while keeping her in a state fit to record it. And somewhere in between that and stopping Lily from getting alcohol poisoning, Spencer cashes the first check from Regal Recording. It isn’t close to Lily’s, and even hers isn’t much really, but it’s a pay check which comes in handy as the royalties from Panic! aren’t nearly as much as Spencer originally thought they’d be.
“Fucking motherfucking fucks,” Lily offers when anyone asks her opinion on the matter and often when they don’t.
Spencer doesn’t say anything. She might have been the only member of the band with a cunt but she wasn’t really a bitch and she didn’t intend to become one anytime soon. There were more than enough people willing to take the walking wounded role and after two drunken emails from Tom fucking Conrad telling her about his experiences and all about how he (and thus, how he inferred she) felt, she was happy leaving others to fill it. Subtlety has never been one of Lily’s virtues so it is a sign of what good friends they have become that she chooses not to remind Spencer about the time she had been one.
Those three days she retreated into her locked guestroom were more like three months of Spencer, this girl Lily didn’t really know other than from interviews in teen magazine, not talking or eating and refusing to cry when her mother called and when the call she was waiting for never came.
For a while, that is that.
Spencer cashes the check and her plane ticket home, and with the proceeds she gets herself into out of Lily’s guest bedroom and into a shitty apartment in a shitty part of London. With what’s left over she buys herself a drum kit. She puts it in her shoebox apartment and tells Lily not to fucking touch it (Lily does; Spencer shouldn’t have picked the glitter finish). Then, to celebrate it all, they go out and get drunk. About a third of the people they sit with know Lily’s name. No one knows Spencer’s. Halfway through the evening Lily disappears on Spencer with the DJ. Spencer ends up waking home barefoot at four in the morning by herself.
She tells herself that she is okay.
She tells herself she’s not a kid anymore. She tells herself to suck it up. She tells herself to get with the fucking programme. She tells herself a lot of things and when she stops to breathe, she gets herself a new mobile number that she gives out to people who didn’t have the old one.
The thing about Lily, is that she is good at creating buzz.
And sometimes Spencer forgets Lily wants to be famous more than anything else in the world.
Sometimes Spencer forgets that before friendship there was another reason why Lily asked her to play music with her.
And maybe too much time passes and maybe Spencer isn’t taking enough notice because somewhere in between the drama, of maybe partly because of it, Lily becomes big. She’s still a bit of an annoying shit most of the time, but almost overnight people start writing about her and suddenly all these important people on the London music scene are playing her music and more and more people are tuning in to listen. Sure, sometimes they listen just to hear Lily make a huge fucking fool out of herself, but it’s exhilarating.
Spencer isn’t totally stupid okay. She’s always known Lily has grand plans. Or two things she wants above and beyond anything else; namely to be rich and to be famous and not necessarily in that order. By her side, Spencer watches with her mouth firmly shut. They’re not exactly a band - no matter what Lily says - but Spencer ends up signing some papers so she isn’t an employee or a groupie of Lily’s.
When the time comes to actually make the long delayed debut album, they get two weeks and Lily’s choice of producers. Out of the pack, she picks two. Their names are Greg Kurstin and Mark Ronson. Out of the pair of them, Spencer likes Mark the most. Or she likes working with him. Probably the latter.
“You know how this all works,” Mark comments one night when they are working late.
Spencer shrugs. There isn’t much she could say.
Mark laughs loudly. Like an asshole.
Spencer tells herself she doesn’t mind. After a while it’s true. They aren’t a band, not really. The music, just like before, is not hers. Before - Before, Spencer thought she was a reasonable drummer. Good at what she did. Not great or fucking fantastic, but good. Good at keeping pace and keeping everything together. Solid. It takes a while for that to come back. For her to believe in it again. On that topic too, Lily is silent. The session drummer the studio has on call is better than Spencer. But he never once drums on Lily’s album.
When the label starts organising the first real tour, Spencer initially plans on joining it.
Lily makes a fuss of course when the inevitable happens. She says a lot of things and pisses off a lot of people. Spencer does not. Maybe it all feels familiar. Maybe this time she sees it coming. But as long as the royalties from both albums are too, and the checks from all the shit she gets dragged don’t bounce when Spencer banks them, Spencer doesn’t mind as much. She read the fine print this time around. It’s okay. The bottom has already dropped out once; it can’t happen a second time.
She’s not a kid anymore.
She knows exactly what she is and what she’s not. Her name might get Lily’s myspace account a few thousand more hits, but out in the real world no one gives a shit about Spencer. No one takes a second glance when she walks by. The people she spends her evenings with get her name wrong more often than they get it right.
Though the first press they do, is done together, there is a reason the interviews that follow feature only Lily. Journalists like her. Spencer understands why. She might be good at saying the right things, but Lily is good at saying the wrong things and those, predicably, are the ones that make more money. That’s what the barebones truth is, whether Lily wants to acknowledge it or not. So instead of joining Lily on covers of magazines or on her tour, she offers to replace the session drummer Mark uses when the guy he normally calls first, quits.
And for a while that’s the way it is.
Occasionally she fills in on for a few of Lily’s local gigs when one of her many rotating roster tour musicians walks out on her; shitty half assed shows where Lily’s mere presence makes things different - ‘Better’ a traitorous part of Spencer’s brain whispers. Sometimes works with Mark. Sometimes Greg Kurstin even calls her up and about some work he might have for her. And sometimes, just sometimes, if she squints, she isn’t a fuck up seventeen-year-old has-been.
It’s mostly Mark who phones her at all times of the day and night, desperate for someone - anyone - to come and fill in the latest, and to his mind, greatest percussion sound he came up with or stole from someone else. Spencer pretty much always answers his call. She might be better off than a seventeen year old with nothing more than a high school diploma to her name should have any right to be, but London isn’t a cheap place to live. Not even with her half assed royalties cushioning her.
She makes an okay living as a studio drummer. She enjoys it even. Thanks to Mark and Lily dropping her name in one of two more conversations (also apparently, one Mark had held with his best friend who had one of the finest musical pedigrees imaginable), Spencer has contacts and is known by far more musicians and producers than an ex-emo kid rightly should. It just takes her a while to realise there’s really only room for one Meg White in this world.
That’s not to say she isn’t an okay drummer. She is. In a pinch.
It’s just, sometimes she stays late in his studio after the act Mark’s recording has left. Just sometimes. Mark loves music. It’s in his blood and bones. He can talk and talk for hours. She... she doesn’t know about herself. Maybe she isn’t a natural, or maybe she doesn’t put enough effort in, but - she does not know. A few people have started calling her up - friends of Mark, friends of Greg, friends of their friends - asking for her to do a day here, a week there, but... she doesn’t know.
Not anymore.
She goes nevertheless, but she doesn’t know. There is a different between her and the musicians that call her. Not a big one, but it’s there. She thinks they should be able to tell. Should be able to see. The calls keep coming though. She does not know why. She’s an okay drummer. She really is. But that’s about it. She’s not a good sight reader. She’s not even particularly good at reading sheet music when given time. Some people might be able to or have a way with words, but she does not. Maybe she might be able to play things by ear. Maybe she might have a good memory. But that only goes so far.
Between it all, Spencer finds herself rising up the food chain a little. Or at least becoming ‘that tall blonde girl’ in all the photographs sold to English tabloids. It’s a bit stupid, and a lot meaningless. It reaches its height at a Burberry after party Lily had been given front row tickets to. Spencer is around seventeen going on eighteen then, teetering between the two ages with no amount of grace, and when this guy tells her she should be a model she wants more than anything to laugh.
But instead she picks up another side job.
It isn’t much really (neither of them are, not really). She doesn’t even bother to advertise it, because really, her? A model? There was a reason she wasn’t halfway around the world drumming on Saturday Night Live. She has some pictures taken for her thin portfolio though. She even goes to the occasional casting calls when she has a free day. She dresses herself in dark jeans and logo-less tank tops and she stands in line with a hundred other girls who all look alike and sound alike and look like -
She goes to the casting calls.
The first one isn’t worth her time.
She arrives early and stands in line for over an hour. When she finally gets seen by the casting agent, she is barely in the door when he glances at her. A week previously she’d had some test shots taken. Lame and clichéd, they fill the first few pages of portfolio. The casting agent doesn’t even bother asking to see them.
“Too tall,” he say, blandly.
And - that is that.
The next one, she actually makes it into the room before she is labelled the three-letter word. And, okay, it’s not the first time she’s been called that, but usually people wait until her back was turned. The casting agent just says it, as if commenting on the weather.
Her agent is unsurprised.
“You could become a little more toned,” he says, which really means she could stand to lose more weight.
Okay, Spencer thinks. Fuck it, she can do that.
She stops taking public transport and starts riding her bike, then, when that isn’t enough she makes herself get some use out of her gym membership. She runs and she swims and she puts up with stupid perky trainers and their stupid dietary regiments. She does it all.
Except now, she’s too small.
“We’re not in Paris, Spence,” her agent relays.
The day before she was rejected by a cheap English high street brand. Spencer is well aware she isn’t working in Paris.
Over the next few weeks she is also made aware of the face she is too blonde, not blonde enough, has an awful posture, that her eyes are too far apart, then too close together, and that her walk is strange. Once, she is too short. At this she blinks. In the middle of yet another painful growth spurt, she is pushing 5’11. A month passes. She nears the 6’ foot mark. Still, that is the reason. Often though, she isn’t given one. Just summarily dismissed.
Meanwhile, the tanned, perfectly preened and presented girls that stand on either side of her at the meat market castings chatter and gossip in groups. One by one they are picked to advertise skinny jeans or feature in the fashion spreads of glossy tween and teen magazines. And Spencer, she just isn’t right. She never seems to be.
For reasons she doesn’t understand - stubbornness, maybe - she doesn’t know, she keeps going to those stupid cattle calls. She fits them between acting as Mark’s studio drummer, and being borrowed by his friends and Greg’s friends and suddenly time is passing and it’s winter in England and she ends up flying home for her parents 20th wedding anniversary. At the airport her mother hugs her tight and her father takes her luggage when her sisters (little brats) refuse. She flies back a week later.
Her first night back is spent with Lily at some party she insists they go too.
Lily gets drunk. Spencer does not. Alcohol fucks her up. Or fucks her weight up. ‘Up’ being the important word in the sentence. ‘Up’ being the word that stops her from getting booked and has guys asking ‘Glamour model?’ whenever someone mentions Spencer’s part time job.
Except somehow one drink becomes two and two drinks becomes Lily making some guy with a rancid looking tongue piercing shouts everyone drinks and the whole ‘Spencer not drinking and not getting drunk’ thing becomes a huge lie because she does both. It’s stupid and irresponsible and it makes Spencer a liar.
Squished in between two of Lily’s new adoring friends, Spencer feels like a fool. Everyone around her and Lily spends the night treating them as if they - her included - are something special. They talk and talk and Spencer doesn’t have any answers or even anything to say, not really, but they keep talking and talking and in her six inch heels Spencer’s feet ache and ache and ache.
With the recording process cames what Spencer hoped (but judging by the hollow pain in her joints, wrongly) to be her last grow spurt. Now Lily needs her highest heels to look Spencer in the eye, and Spencer doesn’t need any at all when she talks to Daisy Lowe (one of Lily’s new best friends) at the bar while waiting for the bartender to get her a fresh mineral water.
Daisy’s very pretty in an incredibly English way and her strangely childlike eyes track Spencer’s every movement.
They don’t talk about anything in particular. Just how quickly the year has gone. Then when the bartender finally gets around to handing over their drinks, they clumsily make their way back to the VIP area where Lily accosts Daisy. Throwing an arm over her shoulder, Lily talks to Daisy as if they were best friends - no, sisters. But Spencer can spot the look in Lily’s eyes. At the beginning of the night, William Cameron Jr.had given Spencer his number. He had been sweet, and maybe a little unsure of himself. Spencer had given it to Lily. Now, with Lily eyeing Daisy as if she were an animal of prey, she gives it to her with a laugh and a promise that ‘He, like, couldn’t keep his eyes off you.’
It’s a bit of a pathetic lie, but in general most things that come from Lily’s mouth are.
When she turns to Spencer later, she laughs at the look Daisy’s face had gotten tangled up in, the way her mouth had fallen open and her eyes had widened. Lily’s drunk and soft by then, smelling of sweat and whiskey and sex. Equally made a little more agreeable and a little less indiscreet by mixed drinks. Spencer can’t be bothered ignoring her.
“He looked like he could be fun.”
Spencer rolls her eyes.
Lily makes a face of her own.
“I don’t want fun,” Spencer gives in. “Fun is boring.”
“No,” Lily says, eye make up smudged. “You want someone with a girlfriend.”
She laughs when she sees the expression on Spencer’s face.
“I see you,” she whispers, raising one hand to point a finger in Spencer’s general direction. “One guy with a girlfriend is a mistake, two is a horrid coincidence, but three? Three is a pattern.”
It’s more than three.
Spencer doesn’t say that - would never, she’s not that sort of girl, no matter what people say - and thankfully Lily lets the conversation die.
But not other things.
While in America for her first transatlantic showcase Lily gets way too much attention and talks far too much about everything and unfortunately one of those topics is Spencer. Apparently finding time between insulting Bob Geldof -
(“I didn’t say anything,” Lily argues.
“You called him a cunt on myspace.”
Lily looks at Spencer, clueless, and Spencer, well, she knows how to choose her battles)
- and getting into a war of words with Katy Perry (one of many people stupid enough to use Lily for cheap laughs and cheaper publicity) after the girl had called Lily fat, Lily says a lot of stuff about Spencer that, Spencer probably would find been endearing if it wasn’t so annoying.
Since she says it all in America, of course it gets airplay.
When Lily says Spencer was abandoned in London, Spencer tries to correct her and say it wasn’t like that. Not many people listen, or care to listen, but Spencer tries and when Lily says they kicked her out of the band in the time it took for a Ramones track to play start from finish, Spencer counters and says it had been a long time coming. What she didn’t say was maybe it was true. Maybe it had been a long time coming. Maybe it took so long to get there, was so gradual she didn’t see any signs because she had become so desensitized to them.
She had gotten used to a norm that wasn’t normal. That shouldn’t have been.
She tells herself this on the taxi ride back to her apartment. She tells herself this instead of looking at her mobile inbox filled with Happy Brithday messages from everybody but the people that never once rung. Not even once. Over and over she tries to tell herself that they don’t have her new number. That’s why. But touring - strike that - knowing Pete Wentz makes that stupid wish impossible. Fuck if Spencer can help Lily can get Katy Perry’s number to blackmail her with, then they could have gotten Spencer’s.
In time, she comes to accept she’s not particularly good at anything. Good, not great on drums, passable back-up singer, and an okay model. And everything is fine apart from the fact she doesn’t want to be a part of it anymore. She doesn’t want to drum or tour or join any stupid band Mark knows through a friend of a friend of some guy or girl who happens to be looking for a drummer. She doesn’t want to go to University or College or whatever the hell higher education is called in England and she doesn’t want to go home either and she - she just doesn’t know.
It’s around this time, Spencer meets Giancarlo Giammetti at a party Lily takes her to. He is tall, silver haired and has eyes that are sharper than anyone else’s in the room. He asks her if she is a model.
She nods.
“I’m a cliché,” she adds, even though with eyes like that he probably knows.
Just like she knows she’s only there to make up the numbers in Lily’s entourage, and like she knows Lily’s only there because of the freebies, and that the PR people only invited Lily because the press trail after her frothing at the mouths, cameras attached to their hands.
Giancarlo looks at her. She does not know what he sees.
Her Givenchy pumps pinch at her toes. They have been doing so for the last hour she has been on her feet. They are half a size too small, but Lily’s stylist only had that one size spare. A waiter drifts past with a tray full of champagne glasses. Giancarlo takes two. He hands her one.
She thanks him.
They talk a little about various things. All obvious topics: fashion, the party’s host, London, business, politics. The party is loud and filled with too many faces that seem familiar but really aren’t (at least, not to Spencer). They talk about them too, but only in passing. At the end of the evening he gives her his business card. She takes it. He eyes her again. Clever and knowing and - quick. She looks back at him.
“Do you have one?” he asks after a moment too long.
She had not known he had been prompting her.
She shakes her head.
“No,” she answers him, not that it mattered. “I don’t.”
As it didn’t mean anything either way, she takes a pen out of her envelope clutch and writes her number on the back of his card and gives it back to him. His expression shifts. In her peripheral vision, Spencer searches for Lily. She cannot find her. This is not surprising.
Giancarlo smiles.
“It was a pleasure making your acquaintance,” he tells her.
His tone sounds honest.
But most do. Even hers, when she echoes the sentiment.
About a week and a half a week later, he calls and asks her out for lunch. It comes as a surprise.
He is polite and articulate when he extends the invitation.
“I am returning to Rome in two days,” he explains. “I would very much enjoy your company.”
There are many reasons to agree. Spencer sees them all. Of course he does too. He isn’t the type not to. Nonetheless, together they conduct a conversation that needn’t be performed. They perform it; he, because he is clearly a gentlemen and Spencer, because for better or for worse, she’s always been that sort of person. When they finish, the manner in which he excuses himself speaks of grace and good breeding. She does not know how she comes off.
They dine at a restaurant she is not familiar with.
She takes a taxi and arrives five minutes early. She had planned to arrive earlier. Traffic is bad because traffic in London always is. But she’s use to it by now, and even if she wasn’t, there was no way in the world she is turning up to lunch in clothes stained with the smell of the underground and hair battered from the stink and strain of public transport. She isn’t completely useless. Giancarlo is already waiting for her. Without the crowds of ‘Someone’s’ and ‘Somebody’s’ occupying the space around them, he cuts an even sharper figure as he stands and helps her take her seat.
For a while they canvas the same topics they had discussed the first time they met. Though the talking points are the same, Spencer chooses her words more carefully and watches each response they draw. Giancarlo’s gaze is very knowing; it makes her - she tries harder, only pausing at the appropriate interval to take a sip of her mineral water.
Together they fill time until the waitress makes her way over to them.
She is older than Spencer, and understands the language Giancarlo order’s the wine in. When she returns to the table with it, Spencer doesn’t know what to order so she chooses something at random. One of the specials perhaps. It doesn’t really matter. The waitress nods, and nods again when Giancarlo decides what he wants.
When he turns back to Spencer, the expression in his eyes is different once more.
Spencer doesn’t understand.
She listens though, when he starts to speak. He tells her about his business in London and about this painting he had his eye on that was in the next auction at Christie’s and nothing he tells her is particularly private or revealing, but when he speaks she listens and when he turns the conversation around, she answers his question to the best of her ability.
They part an hour later.
Giancarlo kisses her goodbye and wishes her well. He also expresses a desire to see her when he is in London again. Spencer responds appropriately. She doesn’t care what that makes her. Honestly and truly, she walks away liking him. It is something she holds onto tightly once her agent catches wind of the lunch date.
He talks and talks and sends her on more and more casting calls.
One or two pay more than the usual amount of attention to her.
People talk.
The girls in the waiting room flick their eyes over her. Spencer meets their gazes. Spencer isn’t stupid.
With indifference she had stopped straightening her hair and let it grow long for the first time in years. She had also stopped dressing like a boy and learnt how to wear red lipstick without getting it on her teeth. Now every time Spencer sees her agency they look happier and happier with her. Though it isn’t exactly under their direction - she isn’t signed for any reason other than the obvious - she knows points have been scored in her favour.
Image is important.
It’s easier to sell a girl if she looks like something a guy would want to fuck rather than someone he’d play baseball with on the weekends. People she gets sent to see on go sees seemed to agree. For the most part. One photographer spends the entire casting session staring at Spencer’s mouth. He offers buys her a drink afterwards and puts his hand high up on her thigh. He doesn’t call her a fat once. Or a loser. He does call her a future super model which sounds stupid to her.
Over the next month she is offered around half a dozen jobs. She takes them all (except that one). She takes them and she does her job. She turns up on time and she is polite and professional and she gets things done. Fuck what she hears people say behind her back.
None of it is new.
The next time Giancarlo is in London, he sends a car to pick her up.
It’s painted a dark glossy colour and it surprisingly discreet for a man who drove around Rome in a bright red Mercedes during the days of the Red Brigade. The driver doesn’t attempt to start a conversation. Spencer idly smooths the fabric of her pencil skirt and looks out the window.
When she arrives, Giancarlo greets her with a smile and warm embrace.
They eat outside with one security guards seated a discreet distance away. Giancarlo enquires about her schedule for the upcoming fashion weeks, one of the two busy periods in the fashion year. A little time too, is devoted to Giancarlo’s questions about her latest studio gig - she does not like way she sounds when she names Names, but Giancarlo asks politely so she tells him. For a little while after that, they talk about Sean Lennon.
Spencer does not know how he is friends with Mark, neither does she know how he is friends with Giancarlo. All she knows is she just finished working on Sean’s third solo album and that the time she had spent in the studio with him had been like nothing she had experienced before.
She does not like being subject of pity.
But Giancarlo, he - she doesn’t feel like that around him.
She should. She knows she should. Her agent dressed her for the lunch. The combined cost of her outfit he bought for her would have been enough to leave Spencer short for her month’s rent. However, her agent insisted. He said one only looked a certain way (read; an expensive way) when one dressed it. He told her that he’d take it out of her next job. She hates being in debt to anyone. She feels as if she is in borrowed clothing; its expiry date looming on the horizon. Except this time the clothes are not Lily’s but her middle-aged agent.
The label at the back of her neck itched against her skin.
Giancarlo doesn’t look at her shoes or her blouse though. Not once. They talk about the state of the market, something Spencer has been paying a great deal of attention too.
(It is neither a tasteful topic of conversation or is it a particularly interesting fact, but money doesn’t last forever, not now. Figures add up. Or subtract, as the case may be. Early on she had gotten in touch with her bank and organised herself an appointment with a financial advisor. She had jumped though all the hoops and hurdles, and made sure to reads the fine print. She asks all the dumb questions and she takes notes and she pays attention. She doesn't know what it's worth, or if it's worth anything at all, but she's trying her hardest to do it the right way this time around. She doesn’t care what that makes her. She doesn’t. It was only when that was all over and done with, she had signed a lease to that shitty share apartment in the shitty part of the city and told her mother to stop worrying.
She knew Ginger wouldn’t, but Spencer said it anyway. She still says it.
Ginger doesn’t believe her. Spencer can hear it in her voice whenever they speak.
They don’t speak that often.)
Giancarlo visits London at least once every month. Spencer finds herself getting used to politely expressed invitations and having a car sent to pick her up. She even, maybe, starts becoming accustomed to Giancarlo and the way he focuses so completely on her when she speaks.
She still watches her words.
She doesn’t have a way with them. She has to be careful. They get her in trouble. They always have. If she doesn’t keep an eye on what she says, they get away from her. She knows they do. She knows. So she’s careful. She likes Giancarlo. She likes the time they spend together. She likes him. So she’s careful. She is careful and polite and, she hopes, agreeable.
She comes to rely upon their time together.
The next time Spencer goes home (for Christmas this time), she lets herself stay there for more than a week.
While she’s there, the sort-of band Mark had been trying to get her to join breaks up.
It never had been much. She had never let it be. Spencer just had a few free evenings now and then. They meet for drinks once or twice, talked a little and played together a little less. All it had been was a couple months of haphazard (and half hearted) wooing and half a dozen practices that no one really bothered to attend. No one has made any promises.
The news doesn’t feel like a surprise. Mark calls her to talk, but Spencer doesn’t have anything to say.
“Something else will come along,” he tells her, in that roundabout way of his. “You’ll see.”
“Yeah.” she replies, just to say something.
She hadn’t even bothered to tell her mother she was sort of in another band.
From across the other side of the ocean, Spencer hears rumours that the lead singer has gone off to do some solo stuff; in other words, Victoria will get to do what the fuck she wants without anyone getting in her way. The other two members, Marie and Lucy, return to making real music. They call and talk once or twice - their intentions obvious - but Spencer finds that she is indifferent to such proposals.
As if on school break, she hangs around Vegas by herself for a while, killing time while everyone else goes crazy trying to fill it with all the last minute Christmas crap they’d left too late. Just before her mother gets that look in her eyes, Spencer runs into a few people from high school that, if she squints, were almost friends. They’re more interested in gossip than in her, but it gets her out of the house.
On the third night out this kid, who can’t be out of high school yet comes up to her and tries to pick her up. He tells her all these things; that she’s hotter than fuck and that he’s a musician in a wicked cool band and that, hey, if she could buy him this drink he’d totally pay her back. And the people she’s with laugh, and she looks over the kid’s head (which is easy to do given the last grow spurt and her most recent splurge on heels) and there are all these tiny little boys looking at them with wicked little looks on their faces.
“I play base guitar,” he tells her. “I’m hella good.”
She looks down at him from under dark lashes.
In the background, the littlest of his little friends burst out laughing.
“If you want, you can come and see us play,” he offers, undeterred.
She flicks her hair over her shoulder and lifts her gaze so now it’s him looking up at her.
“Oh,” she replies.
“We have a gig this Saturday,” he says, pulling out a photocopied flyer and shoving it at her.
Before the night has ended, she loses it.
As luck has it, Spencer sees the kid again, the next night at another bar they are both too young to be in.
“I looked you up.” he says instead of a ‘hello.’
“Really?” she drawls, pulling the word out disinterestedly.
“You used to be in Panic! at the Disco.”
She used to be a lot of things.
“You still know Pete Wentz?”
There are many things she could say to that. But he is young, annoying and will probably blog about whatever she says on buzznet or something equally insipid. So she watches her mouth. She’s over being part of the myspace generation.
“Of course.”
The sarcasm is lost on him.
“Could you give him this?” he asks, shoving a demo into her hands. “I mean, we’ve left messages on his myspace like you guys did, but it’d be really, really fucking awesome if you could give him a copy, like, in person.”
He looks at her and - Fuck.
Fuck.
The demo’s handmade; the track title, band name and contact details all scribbled onto the CD with purple magic marker. Spencer - she doesn’t plan on listening to it. She doesn’t intend on anything except as it turns out, Las Vegas is a kind of boring town if you live, rather than holidayed there. And for some reason it’s even boring enough for Spencer to load the kid’s demo onto her iPod so she can have something new to listen to on her morning run.
They’re good. Surprisingly.
Something inside Spencer allows her sisters to convince her to take them to see the kid’s band perform live (even if it means going to a fucking youth centre hall in the middle of the afternoon). Halfway through the set, she calls up Mark and holds her cell up towards the stage so he can hear.
“These kids,” she yells when they tumble off stage. “You have to sign them.”
Against her ear, she hears Mark laughs, bright and a little too loud.
“They could be golden,” she tells him, because she can see it. See it in the beat and the metre of their music.
They can be great - they can. They have it in them. Mark can bring it out of them. He can. Spencer knows it for certain.
“Yeah,” Mark tells her. “Yeah.”
He flies out within the week.
The kids don’t know what’s hit them until Mark’s there, unannounced at the end of the bass player’s... Cash Money’s - wtf - driveway. Not a single one of them knows who he is, but by the end of his lightening quick stay they’re converted (and so are their parents), signed and flying to England with Spencer.
Along with signing them, organising their visas and flying them out, Mark finds them the crappiest little share apartment of all time, in a particularly awful part of town. It’s even worse than the one Spencer started in. But somehow, despite that, the five of them - all annoying, gangly teenager boys - latch onto Spencer, like little imprinted ducklings.
Mark doesn’t care either way as long as they don’t end up in a ditch.
But Spencer, she’s suck with them. 24/7; or so it feels.
Cash demands to be shown around London. One Alex makes Spencer treat him to coffee whenever he happens to see her (and he happens to see her a lot once Spencer makes the mistake of giving him the address to her apartment). Another Alex - Spencer thinks maybe it could be Singer, but she’s not totally certain - steals all her breakfast cereal when she isn’t paying attention.
The only sane one is Ian, and truthfully that isn’t saying much. He’s the newest to the band and neither Mark nor Spencer can figure out exactly how he managed to join up with The Cab until he mumbles something about how he used to go to school with Cash and stuff about his cousin and his cousin’s friend. He’s pink faced and refuses to meet their eyes and Mark thinks it’s fucking hilarious because he’s an arsehole like that. His laugh is a little forced though, when Ian furnishes out the story with a few details and a few names.
“Oh,” Spencer says, when Ian names Shane and then Brendon. “Okay.”
Ian is deathly embarrassed now; his chin tucked into his chest and cheeks red now instead of rosy pink.
“It’s nothing. Just, like-” Ian mutters a few more things and Spencer stops listening.
Later Mark summarises; which makes sense because they are Mark’s newest brightest things, not Pete’s and certainly not Brendon’s. But they could have been, Mark explains.
“They gave Urie a copy of their demo too,” he tells her in a halting manner, as if he isn’t certain he should be telling her at all. “About a month or so ago.”
Spencer takes a drag of her cigarette, then hands it over to Mark so he can do the same.
“They neglected to mention that.”
Mark winces. “I think that was their attempt at watching your feelings.”
Spencer feels like rolling her eyes.
“Stupid kids.”
“Stupid talented kids,” Mark corrects.
Spencer has to nod. Fuck, they are and fuck, Mark’s going to make them big. And fuck, she really shouldn’t be smoking. Sure, she grew those extra few inches that pushed her up to the almost six foot mark, but fuck, it’s so 90s. She isn’t Claudia Schiffer, and no one hires models with yellow teeth, and fingers that matched.
She makes herself shake her head when Mark tries to pass the cigarette back to her.
Enough.
“They don’t know what they missed out on,” Spencer tells him.
Mark pauses.
“No,” he says, his tone mediated. “They don’t.”
By this time, she’s spending more time doing the whole model thing than working with Mark, so when he invites her to see this band he’s heard about she joins him and a couple Cab boys to take advantage of the free tickets and drinks and tag along too. The band itself isn’t great. The lead singer’s out of his mind - either on a combination of prescription drugs or, just naturally out of his mind - but Mark’s good at working with people like him. She tells him this when he asks her opinion.
“They’d need work though.”
He nods.
“They’ll also probably need a new drummer.”
He winces, but nods as well. They both know she is right on that count.
On the other side of the room Cash is hooking up with another somewhat shady and very skanky looking girl, while Ian watched with that look in his eyes. Spencer knows it well. Snorting, she finishes what was left of her drink and orders a fresh one - this time a bottle of water (the photographer she is working with for this gig at the end of the week took any chance to bitch about her ‘sallow skin tone’).
“You could do this,” Mark says after a little while.
She screws the lid back onto the water bottle.
She could. But -
“I don’t want to.”
“Yeah.” Mark breathes or maybe sighs; sometimes it’s hard to tell with him, “Make sure you drop me a line when you figure out what you do want.”
Part two.