Please don’t do anything, I said to myself. Please, Jaz. Behave.
“Can I get you anything?” said Tony.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“What have you got?” said Jaz.
“Um. The usual, tea, coffee, juices—”
“Can I have a vodka?” said Jaz.
“Er, how old are—” he began, then, looking at Jaz, “A vodka it is.”
A very good-looking boy was sent off to get Jaz’s vodka, and we sat down opposite Tony and a big, heavy wooden desk. I glanced around. More pictures of famous musicians, a huge black-and-white one of a bridge, an enormous vase holding an even more enormous arrangement of white flowers, and a photo of Tony with his arm around a blond who I really hoped was his daughter because, otherwise, ew.
“Where’s Katie, then?”
“Mmm?”
Jaz waved at the posters: Karamel enjoying their antigravity haircuts; Crystal Skye huddling over a piano, all eyes and shoulders, like she’d just come through a famine. “There should be one of Katie.”
“I don’t want to be on a poster,” I said even though I really did.
“If you say so,” said Jaz.
“Anyway,” I said, wanting to get things feeling positive, “I told Adrian.”
Tony smiled and leaned in, looking at me with this intensity that, on anyone else, would have been slightly scary. “What did he say? What, exactly, did he say?”
“Not a lot,” I said. “It was fine.”
He seemed surprised. “Really? Tell me everything.”
“I just told him that we clearly had different ideas about where I was going and that it might be better if I was managed by someone else.”
“He must have been hurt though,” said Tony.
“Honestly? Yes, I think he was.”
“Good,” said Tony.
“You’re pretty twisted,” said Jaz.
I gave Tony a look that was supposed to say, Jaz is so weird, but don’t worry; she’s completely harmless.
“So…my tour, then. How long do you want me to play for? And will I have a backing band because I should rehearse with them, and I guess it’ll have to be pretty soon if I’m going off soon.”
“What do you want?” said Tony. He spoke slowly, carefully. Like he’d been planning it for a while. “Tell me, Katie. Tell me exactly what it is that you want. Tell me your dream.”
“Just…to make good music. To connect with people. I guess.”
“There must be more.”
“I…don’t know.”
“Then I’ll tell you,” said Tony, licking his lower lip, staring at me harder than ever. “You want the whole world to hear you. You want to stand on a stage and play to millions. You want the house and the pool and the cars. You want the girls, screaming your name. You want it all.”
“Girls?” said Jaz.
Tony’s eyes bored into mine. “You want it all.”
“Maybe.”
“Say it. Say, ‘I want it all.’”
“I…I want it all.”
“Louder.”
“I want it all.”
“And you’ll never have any of it.”
“Um, what?”
“Remember this feeling, Katie. Because I want you to tell him. I want him to see it in your eyes.”
“What’s going on?”
And Tony said, “There will be no single. There will be no album. There will be no tour.”
“But we recorded… You said… We agreed…”
“How does it feel?” said Tony. “How does it feel to be on the brink of something and have it snatched away?”
And then I knew, and it felt like falling down, down, down. “You can’t,” I said. “This isn’t…right.”
“What is going on?” said Jaz.
Tony smiled at her as though she’d asked him for the time. “A very long time ago, I was in a band. We recorded a single. We were going to make it very big indeed. But before we could, someone split us up.”
“But you said…you forgave him!” I stuttered. “You said it was all Okay!”
“Did I ever say that?” said Tony. “Did I ever say it was ‘all Okay’?”
And I could see that it really, really wasn’t.
My heart was fluttering around in my chest like a trapped hummingbird. Because if there was no single, no tour, no nothing, then what would I tell Lacey? What would I do?
And what had I done?
“I’m not him,” I pleaded. “You can’t…you can’t punish me just because… You can’t!”
“You will tell him, won’t you? How he ruined your life? I hope you will,” said Tony, the base of his neck flushing ham pink. “We were right there, Katie. The whole nation was going to see us, and he walks out without a care in the world. Well, this time, this time he’ll care.”
“He still cares!” I said. “For your information, he’s still upset about it now, like, a billion years later!”
“It was one song,” said Tony. “It was prerecorded. All he had to do was stand there and mime. But we’re in the studio, and the audience is sitting down, and the lights come on, and suddenly he’s all ‘What are we doing, Tony?’ and ‘Are we losing our way?’ and ‘We’re a live band, not puppets,’ and then he’s asking why we were there, what music is really for. And so I told him. It’s for making money! And we were about to make more money than we’d ever dreamed of. And then…he just walks off the set.”
“I’m glad he did!” I said. “Imagine if he’d spent the rest of his life with you!”
That got him. The hairy part between his open collar turned the color of minced beef. “That useless piece of… What’s he made of himself? Nothing! Just some pointless little store in the middle of nowhere, never married, beer gut like a—”
“Leave him alone!” I screamed.
“Oh, now I will,” said Tony, suddenly calm as anything again. He picked up a phone. “Security?”
“But…he said you were old friends. He was at your wedding…”
“Yeah,” said Tony, as two men in dark jackets appeared behind the glass doors.
“It’s my song. You can’t just—” Then one of the men had his arm around my shoulder.
“Come on,” said the security guy.
“Tony!” I shouted, then, to the security guard, “Get off me! Tony? Tony!”
He was standing, watching me, his arms folded.
“Take it easy,” said the security guy. “Let’s get you downstairs.”
So I turned around. Which was a real shame, since I missed Jaz throwing the vase of flowers into Tony’s face.
• • •
And then we were back outside, with the rest of Covent Garden carrying on as if no one’s life had been ruined.
Jaz checked her watch. “It’s still early,” she said. “Let’s go steal stuff from Zara.”
I was scrolling through the contacts on my phone, up and down, up and down. Not Amanda—I’d only get a lecture. And not Mom—no, no. Not Dad either—he’d probably start telling me the latest about Catriona’s Pilates studio.
I went right the way back around until I got back to A.
Adrian.
Adrian would figure it out.
He was on my side. He’d know what to do…
Only his phone went straight to voice mail. I went to redial, and as I did, I saw I had a text from Amanda.
WHERE R U??? Skool called. Ur in LDN???
And Mom found out about record deal.
My hands were shaking as I typed my reply.
Record deal is off. R u with Adrian? Need 2 speak 2 him ASAP
A second, standing outside the tube, with all of London whirling on by, and then—
Mom and Adrian split up.
So I’d gotten my wish.<
br />
Adrian was out of my life.
The house would go too, I guessed, what with it being half his. Another home gone. The third one in a year. Surely some kind of record.
I was facedown on my bed when Mom came in. If she noticed I wasn’t in my uniform, she didn’t say so.
“Katie, love, please don’t cry.”
I started making this scary whooping, howling noise, and she held me and rocked me, and when that didn’t work, she got me a glass of water. You can’t drink water and howl at the same time. When I got to the bottom of the glass, I still wasn’t feeling any better, but at least I’d stopped sounding like I needed to be in a mental institution.
“Mom,” I said. “Oh, Mom.” My head found its way onto her shoulder, smelling that familiar mix of the special detergent she used for her uniform and Elnett hairspray.
“We’re better off without him,” she said.
“Are we?” I couldn’t see her face, but I felt her body go stiff.
“A man like that…”
“Like what?”
“Forcing you into a career to make up for his own failures…”
“It wasn’t—”
“Knowing you weren’t sure, knowing I didn’t want you to have any part in this. And then, when I confronted him, you know what he said?”
“No…”
“He told me he couldn’t do ‘family stuff.’ That he’d come to it too late in life, that he’d tried and tried, and he knew you’d never accept him. Where did that even come from? Sounds like a coward’s way out to me. Which I told him.”
Or, I thought, feeling another howl making its way up through my body, the perfectly natural reaction of someone who’d just been informed by his potential stepdaughter to leave her family alone.
And he’d been right about Top Music. He’d been right all along.
“Mom,” I said. “It’s not… It’s not just him. I wanted to do the record-label stuff.”
“But he pushed you—”
“I pushed him.”
“He lied to me—”
“I made him lie.”
She drew back. “How?”
What would I have given to leap out of my body and into someone else’s? I’d have done anything not to be me.
And yet there I was.
Mom was waiting. “How could you make him lie?”
“By…by saying that I’d start being nice to him. He was so desperate for us to be friends. And, and we were, we were hanging out and going to London together. Only then, last night, I was horrible. I said some bad stuff.”
Mom was standing away from me now. “What did you say?”
“I told him to get out of my life. But that was only because he’d been telling this record label that I wouldn’t go on tour during school—”
“Of course you’re not going on tour during school.”
“And he kept saying that something was wrong. And he was right! He was completely right, and I should have listened to him, but I didn’t.”
I was crying all over again now, but this time it was clear that there’d be no more hugs from Mom. Not now, maybe not ever.
“So you’re telling me that Adrian is not the villain here. That the villain is you.”
I nodded and sobbed.
“That you forced him to go against my will, against his own better judgment, just so that you could get what you wanted.”
More nod-sobs.
“That a good man came into our lives and you, Katie Cox, drove him away.”
I couldn’t even say I hadn’t meant to—because, honestly, I had.
My eyes were firmly pointed into my lap as I said, “We don’t need him, Mom. We don’t. He’s got us living in this awful house—we don’t even have Wi-Fi!—and his store’s a disaster. Poor Mands is really upset about it, and that isn’t fair because it’s not her fault. And it’s not my fault this happened. It’s his, for introducing me to Top Music in the first place!”
“Enough.”
“But…we can do better! You can do better! You’re a strong, confident woman, and you could have any man you wanted. All right, maybe not a Hollywood film-star-type man, unless he was pretty old. But most of the other ones. Because you are really not bad-looking, you know. And anyway, you don’t need a man to complete you! I was thinking, we could use this time to do some family bonding, maybe. That we could maybe even do a quick trip to California and see Dad. That maybe—”
“Enough.”
I raised my head and looked into Mom’s eyes.
And oh God. What had I done?
She turned to go, unhappiness sort of swirling around her in an invisible cloak. Then she said, “We do have Wi-Fi. It was the last thing he did before he left. The man can’t afford a new pair of shoes, but he got you back online. The password”—and she hesitated, just for a second—“the password is ‘superstar.’”
• • •
It took a while before I was anything like together enough to open up my laptop.
But then, eventually, I did, and there was “Just Me.” With two million, one hundred and seventy-three thousand views, and pages and pages and pages of comments.
Need MORE said 49robep49
Cant live without her said Trouteyes
Feels shes like 1of us said PussInBo0ts
yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! said f862fg
Do u think shes 4real??? said NodgetheSplodge
yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! said f862fg
She is true said J8nny. That’s why I her
yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! said f862fg
This went on and on and on. I read how brave I’d been to show everyone my bedroom. How great it was that I was so ugly (why, thank you). How my lyrics were honest and how you could really see that I was close to my family and my friends. That they’d wanted someone who was good and real. How that someone was me.
If I’d been feeling bad before I’d logged in, well, now, I felt like I’d gone through bad and out the other side into a new place where bad was actually pretty good.
Back at the top of the page, Past Katie was singing as though nothing had happened.
Even though everything had happened.
I reached for a tissue, because, you know, unhappiness makes for mucus, and managed to knock the box down the side of my bed. A quick flail for it and I put my hand smack bang into the middle of that old pizza, which by now was doing something really interesting, meaning I needed a tissue even more. So I got down and reached carefully, and my hand closed on the corner of something hard.
Only it wasn’t the tissues. It was the little box Lacey had given me on our last walk together.
Very carefully, so as to avoid smearing it with pizza slime, I opened it. On the top, a pair of Dove Bar sticks, tied together with a piece of ribbon.
And then I knew what I had to do.
What I wished I’d done in the first place.
I took a deep breath.
And then I texted Jaz.
Please take the video down. It’s all over. K x
Then I shut the laptop and turned off my phone.
It was so still, and the house was so quiet. A light rain was falling from a heavy, gray sky, more mist than droplets. And I so wanted to hide or to run away.
Only, all the grim stuff, all the misery—it was me. Wherever I went, it would still be there.
And then, I looked across my bedroom and saw it.
Propped up behind my door, like it had been waiting for me to notice it, was my guitar.
What did Amy Winehouse do when she split up with her husband? She wrote “Back to Black.” When Dolly Parton’s guy started messing around with this girl who worked in his bank, she wrote “Jolene.” And when Morrissey was upset, he wrote pretty much all the stuff he’s ever done.
What I’m saying
is that there’s a rich history of miserable people writing really amazing music.
Not that my music was anything even close to amazing. Now that the Top Music fantasy had gone, I could see that. All the dreams about Wembley and the single, they’d melted away like snow in the sun, and I don’t know how I’d ever thought any of it was real. No way was I a star or anything like one. I was just some pimply schoolgirl who liked to play and sing. Savannah, Paige, and Sofie knew it. Lacey knew it. And now I did too. I wasn’t the next Amy Winehouse. I wasn’t even the next Crystal Skye.
But I certainly had enough heartbreak to join the club.
I picked up my guitar and it fit so nicely under my arm, a missing piece of the Katie jigsaw. Then I flicked open my lyric book with my other hand and wrote,
I was wrong. So wrong.
Wrong about my life,
Wrong about my song.
Then I sang it, and let the notes work themselves free, feeling the music ripple from under me, the hard catch of the strings and the way they bit into my fingers. My calluses were going. How long since I’d practiced?
Wrong about you,
Wrong about me.
And so I sang and scribbled and played, as outside the streetlights came on, and the world kept turning. Until it was finished, and I knew where I had to go and what I had to do.
• • •
Harltree High Street is not somewhere you want to be after dark. What with clubbers staggering in and out of bars and the kids that sit on the steps by McDonald’s, it’s all pretty edgy. Like, Okay, no one’s got a gun or anything, but you can do some pretty serious damage with a bottle of Smirnoff Ice.
As I passed the main group, a girl was screaming something, and for a second, I considered getting myself safely back home again. Then I saw that it was Nicole fighting with another girl over a shoe.
Deciding that more information would not necessarily make me feel better, I picked up the pace, until I was off High Street, down past the shopping center and into the row of charity shops and places selling pieces of Tupperware and cheap wrapping paper.
Vox Vinyl was the last one before the shops ran out altogether, and the shutter was down. I’d failed. I—
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