Mean Season - Heather Cochran

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next ninety days are going to be some sort of slumber party.”

      “Judy,” I said. I was embarrassed she would think such a thing. “I’m twenty-five. I’m not nine.”

      “Oh, I know, dear, I know. It’s just that you’ve only really known J.P. for a week. Maybe it seems like you know him better, because of your work with the fan club. But you don’t. Not really. He’s a stranger. And Lars and I, well, we’d prefer that you keep that in mind.”

      “That he’s a stranger?”

      “You know, don’t be too accommodating,” Judy said. “Keep your distance.”

      “But he’s stuck here,” I said. “For the summer. You’re saying I shouldn’t be nice to him?”

      “I’m saying you don’t have to be. He hasn’t earned it,” Judy said. “He got himself into this mess,” she said. “You call me for any reason at all. Okay? You have all my numbers.”

      I nodded.

      “I’ll be back in the next month or so, as things with the production start to heat up.” She looked at me. “Trust me, someday this will make sense,” she said.

      Chapter 2

      The Joshua Reed Fan Club

      I was fifteen when I first fell in love with Joshua Reed. Okay, so maybe love is a strong word, but it was all I knew at that age. Joshua had just joined the staff of General Hospital—not a real hospital, but the one on the soap General Hospital. He played Colin Ashcroft, a cardiology resident. He ran on-screen in order to save Miranda’s life with mouth-to-mouth, and I sat there, stock-still, staring at him. I called Sandy Wilson, my best friend since third grade, to ask if she’d seen what I’d just seen, but she wasn’t home yet from her job at her family’s service station. I watched him, wishing that I was Miranda or at least that I’d be given the chance to swoon in his general vicinity. Not that such swooning was likely—I lived outside of Charles Town and General Hospital was filmed in Los Angeles, about as far as you can get from West Virginia and still be in the States.

      I knew that Joshua Reed wasn’t really a doctor. I knew he was an actor. For one, I’m sharper than that, and for two, he was way dreamier and younger than any doctor I’d ever seen in the town clinic where we went for shots and checkups. Even the night of Beau Ray’s accident, when we went to a real hospital, and even in the weeks that followed, I don’t remember seeing anyone who looked like Joshua Reed. Most of the doctors I knew were older and tired-out-looking, or young and scared-looking. I figured the young ones were scared that their patients were going to die on them. There were always a few drunks and some really gray-looking people in the waiting room at the clinic, so maybe those skittish doctors had reason to be scared. I felt so bad for them that I used to pinch my cheeks before a checkup, to look particularly healthy. When I was twelve, I pinched myself a little too hard and scared one of them into thinking I had scarlet fever. That put an end to such nonsense.

      Colin Ashcroft was never scared, but there weren’t any drunks at General Hospital, or old guys up from center state where all the mines are, the ones who were constantly coughing and spitting. And even if there had been, technically speaking, his character wouldn’t have seen them, because he specialized in cardiology. Colin Ashcroft, as written, was a prodigy, in line to become the head of the cardiology unit, and I hoped he would someday, because it meant that Joshua Reed would keep showing up on my television screen.

      Joshua Reed had also been on The Young and the Restless for a short time, playing Copper Malabar, a drifter who seduced a number of the leading ladies before leaving town. That was his breakout role, but I never watched The Young and the Restless (although back when I was fifteen, I fit the description well enough). Later, of course, I’d learn all his roles, from Copper to Colin to Nate to Stormy, and so on. But that’s because it became my job to know them.

      The fan thing was new to me. I’d never been a devoted fan of anyone before, except maybe my brother Beau Ray’s friend Max Campbell, whom I had one doozy of a crush on, pretty much from the word go, which is to say, when I was eight and he was twelve. Sandy always liked Eleanor Roosevelt. And my sister, Susan, had a thing for Bo Duke, the blond one on Dukes of Hazzard, but I was always keener for dark-haired guys. Maybe that’s why I got hooked by Joshua, that day he ran on-screen to save Miranda. Even in green scrubs, he looked like I imagined a prince would—with short dark hair, deep green eyes and the end of a long day, shadow of a beard. He didn’t wear glasses. He didn’t smoke. He didn’t drink. He didn’t swear. And he was a doctor. He saved lives. I mean, it’s all fine and well to bag groceries at the Winn-Dixie (like Max, my longstanding crush), or build houses (like my oldest brother Tommy, who could lift me by his forearms alone), or even sell life insurance (like Dad did, before he died). That’s what normal people do, and it’s fine, but Joshua Reed seemed like so much more.

      So there I was, fifteen, then sixteen, then seventeen, grinding through high school in Pinecob, West Virginia, starry-eyed over the actor Joshua Reed. I wasn’t obsessed. I did all the normal things a high-school girl does. I did my homework. I did my makeup. I went on dates. I got to first, then second base with Butch MacAfee, then broke up with him. I got to third with Howard Malkin, then broke up with him.

      I didn’t break up with Howard because I was holding out for the likes of Joshua Reed. I’ve always been pretty realistic. You learn to be when you’re the youngest of five, and every day after school, you have to make sure your older brother hasn’t died during the day from a seizure or a clot or something. But I remember that it was around then, around the breakup with Howard, a low time even though I’d called it quits, that Momma found her autographed picture of Pat Boone.

      She was being surprisingly nice to me about Howard, saying things like “that Loreen can’t hold a candle to you.” I didn’t expect the sympathy. For a few years after my dad died, Momma held back a lot of her mothering, as if she’d forgotten that I was still mostly a child, one that might need a parental sort of guidance now and again. I don’t mean to say that I suffered from it. Not more than anyone else. Besides, I had Sandy, and I was always welcome at the Wilsons’ house for dinner.

      And every so often, Momma would muster her energy, and there’d be all sorts of activity as she hurried to catch up on the months she hadn’t been paying attention. One such time coincided with my breakup with Howard Malkin. Momma was down in the basement, knee-deep in boxes of her and Dad’s old papers, when she looked up and told me that Howard Malkin was a pissant who would never amount to much. A minute later, she found the Pat Boone picture, and rattled off the story behind it: how she’d had a crush on Mr. Boone back when he was first starting out, how she had written to him and been sent a signed photograph in return.

      Early on, I had found a picture of Joshua—a really good one in Soap Opera Digest where he was in a tank top—and I stuck it inside my locker door at school. I always kept an eye out for him in Soap Opera Digest and Daytime Drama Weekly and even People magazine, but in those first years, he didn’t get much coverage. He was certainly handsome enough, but that was back when the whole country was obsessed with the Jasper and Helen storyline and whether or not Jasper would come back before Helen married Bart. All that buzz drowned out Joshua for a time. When my mother held up her picture of Mr. Boone, I realized that if all it took was asking nice in a letter, then, sure, I’d like a signed photograph, too. The cutout in my locker was getting a little ratty by then.

      So I wrote to General Hospital. I sent my letter to Joshua Reed’s publicist, not to Joshua himself. Momma told me it would get forwarded to the publicist anyhow, so I’d get faster results that way. Besides, I didn’t want Joshua Reed to think that I was the sort of girl who wrote to stars and expected a response. Publicists, they’re supposed to write back. That’s their job. At least, that’s what I thought it was. I wrote about how I was a big fan, ever since the day Colin Ashcroft first saved Miranda. I wrote about how I’d watched the show consistently, how I had Joshua’s picture in my locker and how I would like to know more about him—where he was from, what he liked, what he was like.

      That’s what started it all. It was the second semester of my senior year

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