Famous in a Small Town(27)

“How’s the Megan project going?” he said.

“Nooooo.” Brit groaned. “We just decided to chill on the Megan Pleasant thing for a little bit.”

“Technically you decided to chill on it,” I said.

“You said we could enjoy summer!”

“We can do both.” I looked at August. “We just need to gain some momentum.”

“Do you really think you can get her to come?”

“For sure. It’s not like it’s some random town. It’s her town. She loves Acadia.”

“Loved Acadia,” Brit corrected. “Past tense.”

“You make it sound like she’s dead,” August said.

“Yeah, she definitely is.” Brit backhanded the ball, and Terrance missed. “That’s what all this is about. We’re trying to track down her ghostly specter. Barring that, Megan Pleasant’s hologram is gonna play the fall festival.”

“I’m just saying, you said it in like a cryptic way.”

“Aren’t all specters ghostly?” Terrance asked, retrieving the ball.

“She’s not dead,” I told August.

“She just hates Acadia,” Brit added, and easily returned Terrance’s serve.

“She doesn’t hate it. All that stuff has been super exaggerated.”

“What stuff?” August asked.

“Well.” Brit got another point off Terrance and put her paddle down while he went to collect the ball. She always said that celebrity gossip was stupid, but at the same time, Brit enjoyed other people’s drama inherently. “First of all—her family up and left town out of nowhere.”

“That’s not super weird, is it? People move.”

“Yeah but she built this big-ass mansion right outside of town for them to live in. Or, they started building it, and then suddenly they stopped building it, and then suddenly her family’s old house was for sale, and they were gone.”

“Should I be taking notes?” August said.

“Careful, that’s like foreplay to Sophie,” Brit replied, and I rolled my eyes. “So she abandons the house. Her family leaves town. Then her third album comes out, and the lead single—the biggest song off it—is all about leaving home and never going back.”

August frowned. “So? Songs can be fictional.”

“Soooo, naturally everyone asked her about it in interviews, like, ‘Hey, Megan, didn’t you write that one song about how your hometown is great? Tell us more about how you’ve followed it up with one that says you want to burn it to the ground.’”

“What’d she say?”

“That the message in the song is pretty clear.”

“What’s the message?”

“You heard the ‘burn it to the ground’ part, right?” Brit said.

“Why does she hate it, though?”

“No one knows.”

“Hm.” August glanced up at the ceiling, a little wrinkle between his brows. For a few moments, there was just the thwack of the Ping-Pong paddles and the hollow sound of the ball hitting the table. “Could be worth investigating,” he said finally, glancing over at me. “Don’t you think?”

“Why?”

“Figuring out why she doesn’t want to come back here … if that’s the case”—he added, when he saw my expression—“seems important to getting her back here.” A pause. “It’s like … the last prong. Of the multipronged approach. Right?”

I had the sudden urge to grab both sides of his face and kiss him soundly.

Instead, I just nodded.

“Right.”



* * *



That night I took out my planning notebook and added a category to the Megan Pleasant fall festival page: Social Media Outreach

Local Contacts

State Fair

I wrote the word INVESTIGATION in big letters and underlined it twice.





eighteen


I began my research that night, starting with a profile of Megan from a while back titled A PLEASANT PLACE: THIRD ALBUM SEES COUNTRY DARLING IN A NEW STATE OF MIND.

At twenty-two, country star Megan Pleasant is poised to release her third studio album, Foundation. The follow-up to her sophomore album, Letters Home, Foundation is a departure for the breakout second runner-up of the first season of America’s Next Country Star. I sat down with Pleasant at a café in Nashville to discuss her career, her upcoming album, and a potential homecoming—or lack thereof.

“It’s been a wild ride,” she says of her journey from reality-show hopeful to certified-gold country star. “There have been moments along the way where it almost didn’t feel real. Like it’s all something that was happening to someone else. But it’s a dream come true. I’ve always wanted to sing country. There was never any doubt. That’s where my heart is.”

While some of Pleasant’s contemporaries have viewed country as a stepping-stone to more widespread commercial success in the pop genre, Pleasant has carefully skirted a full-on transition into pop. “No one would mistake these songs for anything but country,” Pleasant’s producer, John Humes, has said of Foundation. “Megan’s a hometown girl. She’s authentic. I think she’s drawn not only to the country sound, but to the kind of vibe that comes with it, where what you see is what you get.”