3:18 P.M., Saturday, April 16, 2022

PLUR-MAkKikM, just outside Honolulu, HI

Paul Macon had called a meeting, but hadn’t said what it was about, except it had something to do with a song. The call had gone out to Sally Carlisle, Jenny Inoguchi, and his girlfriend, Paula Akron. Jenny and Sally were girls Paul knew quite well: not only had they gone to school together since the middle of the third grade, but when he had been temporarily separated from Paula by a court order, these two had made themselves available as substitute girlfriends until he could be reunited with his real girlfriend.

Sally was the first to arrive (Paula, who lived there with Paul, was already present). After giving Paula a hug, she made an announcement.

“I’m going to kiss your boyfriend.”

“Well make it good; my Paul deserves the best.”

Sally made it good, and Paula knew that her friend had broken up with her latest boyfriend; she always got kissy with Paul when that happened. Who had it been this time: Bingwen? No, no it had been an older boy, Leroy. If it were a bad enough break-up, Paul would sleep with her, with Paula’s blessing. It had happened before.

A few minutes after the kiss Jenny arrived, and she hadn’t broken up with anybody. While she and Sam had been apart for brief periods, they did seem to be one of those couples which start in childhood and could last a lifetime. This was much more familiar to Paula, who found all the breaking up and switching around which went on in high school to be, frankly, bewildering.

Jenny also gave Paula a hug, and one to Sally, and one to Paul. There was no kiss.

“So,” Jenny asked, “what’s this all about? You trying to rekindle that f-f-f-m foursome from years ago?”

Paula smiled at this. If that were what her lover was wanting, she was willing to do it, and the recently broke-up Sally probably would, too. Jenny might not, but if she did, they could probably come up with a few ideas which hadn’t occurred to them when they were nine or ten years old. And Paul? Well, how hard could it be to convince a fifteen year old boy to have sex with three cute girls? But then, this was about a song.

“That’s not a bad idea,” Paul said. “But no, this isn’t about that.”

Jenny’s smirk made Paula think that her friend just might be willing after all.

Paul continued. “You see, I’ve written this song, and ... Well, let’s sit down. I’ve got it on the tablet.”

The four sat on the floor, and Paul lay the tablet in the center. Sally commented that the last song the young man had written had made the charts.

“Yeah,” the boy chuckled. “It limped onto bottom of the charts, and a week later it had limped right back off.”

Paula nodded. “It wasn’t a bad song, and it was about me. That’s what everybody expects a song you write to be about. If it had been about politics or butterflies, it might have done better, just because they weren’t expecting it.”

Paul grinned. “Then this one might do fine.”

He turned to Sally and Jenny.

“This song is mostly about the two of you, and I want to run it past you, make sure it’s OK with you, that it ain’t gonna cause any problems with ‘rents or boyfriends or anything.”

If the girls were interested before, they were much more so now. A song about them? Paula was interested, too. She knew her boyfriend had been working on something, but this was her first clue as to the subject matter.

Paul turned the tablet on, brought up the lyrics, and the three girls leaned in, reading. There were some wide eyes, one gasp, and Paula shed a tear.

“Cool,” Jenny said. “You even got my samurai ancestry in there.”

“Well,” Paul shrugged, “you made a point of telling me: you’re not just descended from Japanese; you’re descended from samurai. Your family has paperwork.”

The fifteen year old boy stood up, walked over to the piano, and sat down.

“Here, let me sing it for you, so you get the tune and all.”

As he began to play, Paula recognized the tune; she had heard snatches of it as, she realized, Paul had been creating this exact song. The boy sang it through, then stood back up to face his audience. Now Sally had a tear, and even Jenny, the tomboy, looked a touch misty. It was Sally who spoke first.

“You know, it’s still about Paula, sort of. I mean, you’re talking to ... the whole thing is addressed to her. But it’s about us, too. Does it really still mean that much to you, all these years later?”

“You bet your ass it does. You two were a bright spot in a very dark time. No parents, no girlfriend, the whole weight of the courts against me, and even the people on my side: Ted, Rosi, John ... I mean, I felt like I barely knew them. But I knew you, and Jenny, from school. And you were doing this incredible thing, just to make me feel better. You’re damn right it still means a lot to me.”

He turned to Paula.

“And you. I mean, instead of saying ‘don’t you dare even look at another girl while I’m gone,’ you arranged for me to have two girlfriends, well sort of girlfriends, just because you want the best for me. Only a girl who loved me would do that. It means a lot, all right.”

Now all three girls had wet eyes. Jenny did feel that a certain point needed noting.

“Those lyrics are going to have some people thinking that we had sex.”

“Maybe not,” Paula suggested. “I mean, ‘when we could not be together’ and ‘months without you’ lets everybody know when this happened, and they might just assume that there was no sex because we were so young.”

Jenny nodded.

“They might. They might assume that it didn’t go any further than ‘kisses, embraces,’ ‘held me while I was crying,’ and ‘stroked Sally’s hair’ because we were all nine years old.”

“You were ten,” the other three teenagers stated in unison. Then they all laughed, just a bit.

“That was so important to me,” Jenny said. “I was like, ‘I’m not nine, I’m ten,’ like that one week was such a big deal.”

“Some people are still going to think we were having sex,” Sally pointed out. “Some people have always thought you two were going at it, even when you were nine.”

“Yep,” Paul said. “That’s why I wrote it so you can’t tell. Let ‘em think whatever they want.”

He winked at his one-time substitute girlfriends.

“So, if you need me to change your names or something,” the boy continued, “I can do that. The song can be about Rita and Tammi, or whatever.”

“Don’t you fucking dare!” Jenny snapped.

Everybody looked at her, and the girl chuckled.

“Sorry,” she said. “But my name is Jenny, and you call me Jenny. God bless all the Ritas and Tammies in the world, but my name is Jenny.”

“Yeah, same here,” Sally said. “Let people think I was a nine year old concubine or something, but I’m OK with that. If anything, people will be jealous that I got to be with Paul.”

Paul Macon had the decency to blush, and the decency not to point out that Sally meant ‘envious,’ not ‘jealous.’ Two different things.

“What about your ‘rents?” he asked.

“They know,” Sally told them.

“Yeah, mine too,” Jenny said.

This was news to Paul and Paula, who had always assumed that the girls’ parents (and George and Sam’s parents, too) were clueless about the whole substitutes thing.

“I can’t say they approved,” Sally added, “but by the time they found out, you two were back together for about a year, so whatever I did was a year in the past, so what could they do?”

“You kept it mums longer than I did,” Jenny said. “They noticed I was ‘heading over to Paula’s place’ mostly when Paula wasn’t here, and figured out I was seeing Paul. They went along with it because they thought it was cute that I was holding hands with a little boy and letting him tell me I was pretty, and the whole thing a favor for Paula, and because I wasn’t really his girlfriend. They, um, still don’t know just how ‘cute’ it got.”

She shrugged.

“If they want to ground a fifteen-year-old for something she did when she was barely ten, let ‘em. For something that happened almost six years ago. Really, I ain’t worried.”

Everything being clear with everyone who appeared in the song, and the two named girls being cool with it, Paul stated that he would take it to the company Monday after school.

9:18 P.M., Wednesday, June 15, 2022

Chicago, IL

Paul Macon sat next to his girlfriend, Paula Akron, on a couch in front of several television cameras. The host asked for the third time, and in a third way, if the song “Sally and Jenny” made Paula jealous, and Paula answered in almost exactly the same words she had used the first two times.

“There was nothing to be jealous about. Paul wasn’t choosing to be with them instead of with me; he was with them because he couldn’t be with me. Also, it was my idea. I put Jenny up to it; I put Sally up to it.”

The host realized that she was getting almost the same words, so she decided to drop jealousy for the time being and ask another question.

“What do your parents think of this?”

“I’ll ask them the next time I see them,” Paul said. “I think this is the first they’ve heard about it.”

The host blinked. Of course: the parents were still in prison. All four parents. Time to try again.

“What does your, uh, legal guardian ... What do Sally’s and Jenny’s parents think about it?”

Paula chuckled.

“Sally’s parents found out a year after it happened, and decided it was water under the bridge. Jenny’s parents found out while it was still going on, and gave it their blessing because it was cute and sweet.”

“And it was cute and sweet,” Paul said. “A ten year old girl holding my hand and letting me tell her she’s pretty because I miss my girlfriend, who happens to be HER best friend. I mean really,” the teenage boy affected a little girl voice. “ ‘Paul, I’m sorry your girlfriend isn’t here, but I can be your girlfriend until she gets back.’ What isn’t adorable about that?”

The host decided to try one more time to find some hint of resentment on the part of the teenaged girlfriend.

“Paula, really: you have no negative feelings about this song at all? Nothing?”

“Nothing,” Paula insisted. “Except I feel I’m under a little pressure to write a song called ‘George and Sam.’ But that’s hardly negative.”

As the studio audience laughed, the host gave up, and the rest of the segment was about what it was like to be touring again after three years of COVID.

11:27 A.M., Thursday, July 7, 2022

PLUR-MAkKikM, just outside Honolulu, HI