I Was Born for This

by Alice Oseman

She laughs in agreement.

  You know. Trains.

  They small-talk for an exasperating two minutes before I’m introduced.

  ‘Oh! Yeah!’ says Juliet, spinning round in absolute amazement to find that I am, in fact, still there. ‘So this is my friend Angel.’

  I feel another flash of weirdness at being introduced as Angel, not Fereshteh. Then again, that’s who I am with these people. The internet people. Angel.

  Mac drags his eyes away from Juliet and properly focuses on me.

  ‘Hey, you all right?’ he asks, but his eyes say, Why the fuck are you here?

  ‘Hi!’ I say, trying to sound cheerful. I hate it when people say ‘You all right’ instead of ‘hello’.

  He looks a bit like an older version of the boys who bullied me on the school bus.

  After a long pause, I clap my hands, stop looking at them, and say, ‘Well! Painful introduction aside, let’s get back, because I want to put pizza in my mouth.’

  I half expect Juliet to make some sarcastic comment, or to at least agree with me, as she would do if we were talking online, but she doesn’t. She just laughs politely with Mac.

  ‘Oh, Radiohead are so good,’ Mac is saying on the walk back to Juliet’s nan’s house. I am walking slightly behind Mac and Juliet. Can’t fit three people in a row on the pavement. ‘I know they’re kind of old now, but they’re still relevant. I think you’d really like them.’

  Juliet chuckles. ‘Well, you know me, I’ll listen to anything that’s mildly miserable.’

  ‘I’ll have to send you a link to “Everything In Its Right Place” so we can talk about it,’ he continues, and runs a hand through his hair. ‘It’s so creepy.’

  His accent isn’t far off Juliet’s – posh, like the people on Made in Chelsea, but it sounds so much worse coming out of his mouth. Juliet sounds like the kids from the Narnia films but Mac sounds like a movie villain.

  ‘Yeah, do,’ says Juliet, nodding enthusiastically.

  I wouldn’t have thought Juliet would be at all interested in Radiohead. Obviously her number one is always going to be The Ark, but overall she’s more of a fan of pop rock and upbeat stuff. Not miserable old Radiohead.

  ‘I just really like that sort of classic nineties indie stuff,’ Mac continues. ‘I mean, I guess it’s unusual to be into that sort of music, but, you know, it’s better than being too obvious.’

  ‘Oh yeah, definitely,’ says Juliet, smiling at him.

  ‘Anyway, I’m glad I have you to talk about music with,’ Mac continues, grinning. ‘No one at my school is really into the stuff I like.’

  ‘Like The Ark?’ asks Juliet.

  ‘Yeah, exactly.’

  Mac launches into a monologue about the similarities between The Ark and Radiohead and how he’s sure that they must have been inspired by Radiohead in some of their less upbeat songs but I switch off from the conversation. This guy talks nearly as much as me but has ten times more opinions. I’m sure Juliet sees him as a quirky music nerd, and I’m sure I’m only being negative because I thought I was getting Juliet all to myself this week, but I can’t stop myself imagining him getting some sort of emergency phone call, having to rush back to the train station, get on a train, never to see either of us again.

  Not even the presence of Juliet’s nan prevents me from feeling like a third wheel. There’s no avoiding it. Mac and Juliet are Ferris Bueller and Sloane, and I’m Cameron. Except they’re lame and I don’t have a fancy car.

  I’m extremely relieved when I retreat upstairs to perform my evening prayers, just because I get to stop listening to Mac’s voice for ten minutes. I ask God to give me strength to be kind and not judge him too hard when I’ve known him for, like, an hour, but a girl can only listen to so many monologues about obscure old bands before she snaps.

  Eleven p.m. rolls around and Dorothy has long gone to bed. We’ve had food, and now we’re sitting in the living room, Mac and Juliet on one sofa and me on an armchair, TV playing something on Netflix I’ve never seen before, waiting to watch The Ark walk the red carpet on a livestream at 2 a.m. I’m used to having to lead conversations with most people, but Mac and Juliet seem to be doing perfectly fine now that they’re together.

  At five past midnight, the worst happens.

  Juliet goes to pee, leaving me and Mac alone in the living room together.

  ‘So,’ he says, once Juliet has left the living room. He smooths his hair back with one hand and looks at me. So? What am I supposed to do with ‘so’?

  ‘So,’ I say.

  Mac looks at me, smiling. He’s got an awkward sort of smile. Clearly fake, but at least he’s trying to be nice, I guess. And I can see why Juliet’s got a thing for him. His hair’s swishy, his awkward smile is kind of cute, I suppose. He’s almost got some Ark vibes about him, if you put him in some ripped black jeans.

  ‘Tell me about yourself, Mac.’

  He laughs, as if what I’ve said is really weird. ‘Wow, a big question!’ He leans forward, putting his elbows on his knees. ‘Well, I’m eighteen, I just finished sixth form, I’m off to Exeter Uni in a few weeks’ time to do History.’

  I nod as if I am super interested in these facts.

  ‘And, er … well, I guess I’m just a big music fan!’

  He laughs and scratches his head, like this is a really embarrassing thing to admit.

  ‘That’s so interesting,’ I say. I’ve learnt absolutely nothing about him at all. ‘So you and Juliet started chatting on Tumblr?’

  He grins sheepishly. ‘Oh, yeah, well, I messaged her a few months back, just to start up a conversation, you know? And we got talking. I think we’re quite similar.’

  ‘Mmm, yeah, totally!’ I try not to say this in a sarcastic way. Juliet and Mac couldn’t be more dissimilar. Juliet likes memes and dissecting fandom theories. Mac looks like he posts #like4like selfies on Instagram.

  ‘How about you?’ he asks. ‘Tell me about yourself.’

  ‘Okay then,’ I say, eyebrows raised, as if I have accepted a challenge to duel. ‘I’m also eighteen, I’ve also just finished school, and I’m going to uni to study psychology in October.’

  ‘Psychology? That’s pretty cool. Do you want to be a psychologist? Or, like, a therapist or something?’

  I hold up my hands and shrug. ‘Who the heck knows, man!’

  He laughs, but he looks a little panicked, not knowing whether he should laugh or not. Easier than telling him the full truth, anyway, which is that I chose psychology because it’s the only subject I’m even slightly good at or interested in at school – I’m below average at everything else – and I have no idea what I want to do with my life.

  Which is a bit shit, to be honest, especially when your older brother is in his third year of a medicine degree at Imperial College London, and your mum and dad are both teachers, and really you should have ended up with better genes than this.

  But I don’t need to think about any of that right now. This week is for The Ark. This is what I’ve been waiting for. I can deal with the rest of my life after.

  ‘Honestly,’ says Mac, ‘I barely know what I want to be after uni. I mean, I chose history because I find it interesting, but, like, it’s not the sort of subject that leads you into a straightforward career path, unlike what Juliet’s doing, which is so brave obviously, not going down the lawyer route like her parents and going for backstage theatre stuff instead …’

  He rambles on for a couple of minutes without leaving pauses for me to speak, and I find myself switching off again. I can actually see why he and Juliet get along. She’s more of a listener.

  ‘Hey,’ he says suddenly, ‘we should follow each other on Tumblr!’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Yeah, cool, sure.’

  We both get our phones out of our pockets.

  ‘What’s your URL?’ he asks.

  ‘jimmysangels.’

  He laughs. ‘Like Charlie’s Angels? That’s cool. What a classic.’

  I’ve actually never
seen Charlie’s Angels. ‘Well, my name’s Angel, and you know, I love Jimmy, so, there you go.’

  ‘Is your name actually Angel? Because that’s really cool.’

  I pause, but I end up saying with a smile, ‘Yep!’

  Not technically a lie.

  ‘Mac’s short for Cormac, which is so stupid, because Cormac’s an Irish name and I’m not even slightly Irish–’

  ‘What’s your URL?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, it’s mac-anderson.’ I assume that’s his full name. Cormac Anderson. His Tumblr mobile description reads ‘mac, 18, uk. i live for good music and cool shoes’. This makes me have a look across the room to see what shoes he was wearing earlier, and I’m disappointed to find that they’re Yeezys. Why does everyone have Yeezys? Aren’t they like £800?

  ‘There,’ he says.

  ‘Cool,’ I say.

  We sit in silence for a moment, nodding at each other.

  The door opens, and Juliet comes back to us. Thank actual God. Mac looks up at her with immense relief.

  She freezes in the doorway and grins, moving her head from me to Mac.

  ‘You two look like you’ve had … a conversation,’ she says.

  ‘That is accurate,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah, we’re BFFs now,’ says Mac, smiling. ‘We don’t need you any more, Jules.’

  Jules? I want to die. First ‘You know, trains’ and now ‘Jules’? Jules?

  She walks into the room and sits back down on the sofa next to Mac. ‘That’s too bad because it’s only a couple of hours until we see The Ark and you will literally have to kick me out if you think I’m gonna miss that.’

  He nudges her and murmurs something I can’t hear from my armchair. She laughs. I get a weird thought that they’re laughing at me, but obviously they wouldn’t do that right in front of my face. Would they? No. They continue their flirty banter and I open up Twitter for the hundredth time in an attempt to escape from the romantic comedy I seem to have ended up in as the comic-relief ethnically diverse side character.

  I miss the Juliet from earlier already.

  By 1 a.m. I’m constantly refreshing @ArkUpdates for any sign that The Ark are on their way. The red-carpet livestream doesn’t start for another hour, but you never know when someone might get a quick shot of them in their car, or leaving their hotel, or whatever, wherever.

  You can never really guess what’s going to happen next in The Ark fandom.

  The fandom is one of the biggest on the internet and I’ve been here since the beginning. It’s everywhere – Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, YouTube and pretty much every other major social media website – and it’s spreading by the day. Fans range from ten-year-olds who just tweet the boys with ‘FOLLOW ME BACK!!!’ to fans in their late twenties writing fanfiction longer than five novels put together and fans my age, constantly discussing and theorising and loving and hating and always, always thinking about our boys.

  I got into it when it started, four years ago, back when The Ark were just posting covers on YouTube. I was there when they got their record deal after one of their videos went viral. I was there when they first performed on Radio 1 and when their first single went to number one in the UK.

  I was there through the media shitstorm that occurred when Jimmy, aged sixteen, revealed that he’s transgender – he was assigned female at birth. I was there through all the think pieces. The good ones:

  Jimmy Kaga-Ricci: A New Trans Icon.

  And the many bad ones:

  Has ‘Diversity’ Finally Gone Too Far?

  The Ark: A Black Guy, a White Guy and a Mixed-Race Trans Guy.

  Is The Ark’s Newfound Fame a Response to Millennials’ Obsession with Diversity?

  Is Political Correctness Destroying the Music Industry?

  Most of it was a load of middle-aged whining, but there were a few sensible people that could see the good in the fact that a trans guy was becoming one of the most famous and well-loved musicians in the history of the world.

  I was there through the GQ magazine cover and their first festival gig at Glastonbury. I was there when the Jowan shipping began – people wanting Jimmy and Rowan to be in a relationship – and I was there when the Lister is bisexual rumours began. I was there through the Jimmy-and-Rowan-friendship-origin discussions and the second-album-bonus-track theory and, of course, the ‘Joan of Arc’ video discourse.

  Maybe not always physically. But spiritually, mentally and emotionally, I was there.

  There’s a new picture of Jimmy on @ArkUpdates, posted on Twitter by one of The Ark’s stylists. Jimmy’s smiling, looking off to the side. He’s wearing all black, as we thought, but he’s in a denim jacket, which is new. It looks good against his skin. His hair, silky and brown, is buzzed at the sides now, making his face look even more elfin, but older, somehow. Hard to believe we’re almost the same age sometimes. Other times, I feel like we’ve grown up together.

  He’s my favourite. Jimmy Kaga-Ricci.

  I wouldn’t say I was attracted to him, to any of them, really. That’s not what this is about. But God, if anyone’s the angel around here, it’s him.

  ‘I am here tonight on the West Coast Music Awards red carpet with three of the UK’s greatest musicians – it’s The Ark’s very own Lister, Rowan and Jimmy!’

  The suited, smiley presenter – I don’t know his name – turns to us, and so does the camera. This area of the red carpet is specifically for interviews, and everyone wants to talk to us. We always just walk through and stop when Cecily points at an interviewer.

  I say, as upbeat as possible, ‘Hi, you all right?’, Lister says, ‘Hey,’ and Rowan just nods and smiles.

  ‘How are you boys doing tonight?’

  I’m standing closest to the man, so he thrusts the microphone at me. I grin and glance at my fellow ‘boys’. ‘We’re doing good, I think! Yeah!’ Lister adds his agreement and Rowan nods again.

  ‘So The Ark’s been nominated for the ever-so-prestigious Best Newcomer award at the WCMA after your single “Joan of Arc” hit the top ten just three months ago. And tonight is only your second performance in the USA ever, is that right?’ The presenter doesn’t wait for us to confirm this before continuing. ‘How do you guys see your chances tonight?’

  He asks this with a sort of sly, cheeky grin, as if this is a dangerous question to ask. It’s not. We won the BRIT Award for British Group two years ago and none of us really gives a shit whether we win any awards any more. Being here and spotting Beyoncé from afar is reward enough.

  ‘Well,’ I say, ‘I mean, I think it’s pretty funny, first of all, that the WCMA’s been calling us a “pop” band in all their tweets, when we’re not really a pop band.’ I say this all with a laugh but I do actually wish people thought we were a rock band. We’re a rock band. Electropop at a stretch. I’m not a music snob. Shut up.

  The interviewer laughs too. ‘Oh really!? That’s so interesting.’ His eyes move away from me and he thrusts the microphone at Lister. ‘What about you, Lister? Any thoughts about how you’re going to do tonight? There are some big contenders!’

  Lister nods thoughtfully and starts to speak in his chirpy interview voice. ‘Oh yeah, well, you know, whether we win or don’t, we put our hearts into our music and it’s something our listeners love, and that’s really what matters, isn’t it? We’re all just honoured to have been nominated by the WCMA and we’re really excited to be performing here.’

  I resist the urge to laugh. Lister is so good at spouting this bullshit.

  ‘Now, about your recent single, “Joan of Arc”. Your fans adore it, don’t they?’ The interviewer turns to Rowan. ‘It’s sprouted some pretty crazy conspiracy theories, hasn’t it?’

  Rowan shifts uncomfortably beside me.

  Here we go.

  ‘What do you guys say about all these, I mean, frankly insane rumours about … what is it?’ The interviewer makes quotation marks with his fingers. ‘Jowan? I know a lot of these conspiracy theories have a lot to do with the “Jo
an of Arc” video.’

  Lister audibly sighs. I freeze, mid-grin, trying to work out what the diplomatic thing to say is. What to say that’s not going to make the fans angry but not directly lying. What to say that isn’t going to land us on the front page of every single gossip magazine again.

  The ‘Joan of Arc’ video. Somehow, the fans think the entire thing is a metaphor for my and Rowan’s supposed ‘romantic’ relationship. Which is a load of absolute bullshit of course, but the fans like to overthink everything we do.

  It’s only a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things, but it’s particularly annoying right now, when we’re trying to be proud of one of our best songs and yet all anyone cares about is Jowan.

  ‘Our fans –’ says Rowan, getting in there before I can start – ‘our fans are super passionate.’ I can hear the strain in his voice. ‘And we love them for that. But like, all fans throughout time, from the Bible to the Beatles, they can take some things kind of overboard, you know?’ He’s reaching a dangerous line. ‘And it’s all from a place of love, yeah?’ Rowan pats his chest. ‘It’s all love. It’s just because they love us. And if they wanna … yeah … tell these stories? Then I’m not gonna stop them. Because we love them back, don’t we, lads?’

  Lister chuckles and nods his agreement. I add a ‘Yeah, absolutely.’

  When did we get so damn good at this?

  ‘And Jimmy here,’ Rowan continues, clapping me on the shoulder in a manly fashion, ‘Jimmy’s like my brother, you know? The fans know that. The world knows that. I think that’s what’s so special about being in The Ark. We might not be related but the three of us are brothers, yeah?’

  Interviewer puts a hand on his heart and says, ‘That is so sweet to hear,’ but Cecily and security are already gesturing at us to leave this guy and he only has a few seconds to say ‘Thank you very much for joining us tonight, boys, and good luck!’ before we’re gone, onto the next one, time to do it all over again, and Lister is patting Rowan on the back as a silent ‘well done’ when we’re away from the cameras, and Rowan’s snorting and saying, ‘They’re gonna overthink that one as well.’