My 90s Boy Band Boyfriend: A YA Time Travel Rockstar Romance (Teen Queens Book 2)

by Jennifer Griffith

  “You do?” He sounded pleased.

  Heck, yes. Possibly because he smelled like Irish Spring and nice young man right now in a distracting combination. Piano benches really weren’t built for two people.

  “The melody is great. Really catchy.”

  “I’m glad you like it. The basis of the music is a tune I wrote and gave to the label for our album.”

  “Wait. You wrote it?”

  “Just the melody. They improved it and gave it some cool instrumental depth.”

  “Wow.” She liked it even better. But she shouldn’t tell him so. At least not the extent of how much more she liked it now.

  “Unfortunately,” he said glumly, “they added lyrics.”

  “Unfortunately?”

  “Those lyrics are beyond bad.”

  Oakley pulled away from him and turned around. “Don’t tell me—” She slid away from him, just to regain her senses. “That’s not …”

  “Yep. ‘Lunch Lady.’” He did a flourish with some chords, and then broke into what had to be the most useless, non-pop lyrics she’d heard in all her born days. “I saw you across the lunch room, your plate piled high with salad.”

  “No.” She cringed, even though his voice sounded amazing. Those words! “Stop. It’s too awful.”

  He didn’t stop. And the verse went on, getting worse and worse, until he hit the chorus. “Where’d you get that smile? Buffet cart number three?”

  “No. No! It has to stop.” Oakley jammed her palms over her ears to block it all out. “That is just …”

  “I know. Terrible. It’s baby-orangutan-screeching bad.”

  He wasn’t overstating the horror of those lyrics. Oakley looked for anything good to say about it.

  “The part with ‘pass me the ranch dressing’ is okay, where it rhymes with ‘I know you’re thinking about the ACT and stressing,’ but other than that—”

  Hudson snort-laughed. “I’m appalled that you memorized them that fast.”

  “Some things are like a cattle brand. They burn into your memory like a scar after only one contact.” Like his kiss.

  Hudson huffed out a sigh of frustration. “It feels like they stole it and ruined it.”

  Oakley couldn’t help agreeing. The words danced through her head again until she groaned. “Oh, Hudson. Really? Lunch lady, lunch lady, give me some ham?” Oakley repeated a line from further into the song, shuddering. “You’re sure this wasn’t originally some kind of parody? Parodies definitely have an audience. I mean that one guy with the crazy hair has been making a living off them forever.”

  “You mean Weird Al is still around?” Hudson lit up. “He’s all manner of brilliant at lyrics.” Jealousy tinged his voice.

  “You bet he is.”

  Hudson’s face sank. “It’s not a parody. It’s simply the worst album of all time.”

  “Come on. No one has found out about your secret terrible album.”

  “Is this your buck up, little camper speech?” Hudson tapped his foot on the damper pedal of the piano a few times. “But you’re right. The album staying hidden is the only reason my band’s reputation didn’t die with us. If we’d lived, it would have been released, and our careers would have died faster than my boys did in the plane wreck.” His face clouded, and Oakley knew he was thinking of the band, his forever-lost brothers, and all they were missing out on.

  “I guess every cloud has a silver lining,” she offered weakly, then wished she’d just kept it to herself.

  “Totally.” Hudson exhaled, not mad at her after all. “Because believe it or not, ‘Lunch Lady’ was the best song on the album that we were touring with.”

  “Oh.” What the—? Her horror must have shown on her face.

  “Yep.” Hudson voice sounded more dejected than Eeyore’s. “And there was no way to change.”

  “How did you even record them? I mean, didn’t you know they were bad when you were in the studio?”

  “Of course.” He heaved a dejected sigh. “We were led to believe they were placeholder lyrics, just meant to test the melodies out, and that there would be real lyrics that we’d record and add later. We never dreamed the album and the tour would contain ‘Ode to the Lunch Lady’ as its underpinning hit.”

  “How did the, er, audiences respond?” She had visions of rotten fruit aimed at boy band super-gelled hair, sliming together in the neck-yoke of the stocks in medieval days. “I can’t imagine it was going to go well.”

  “We performed in Portland on Wednesday night.” He looked at the ceiling. “It feels like it was just a couple of days ago, you know? But also a lifetime.”

  Which it was—Oakley knew. Her entire lifetime, and then some.

  “Couldn’t you come up with something to replace it—at least for the stage performances?”

  “That was my plan, trust me.” Hudson pulled away from her, and got up to pace around the room. “I just don’t have strength at lyrics.”

  From her spot on the piano bench, her knees hugging up to her chest, Oakley thought of her secret notebook of lyrics, waiting, unread by anyone alive besides herself. She almost told him about it, but then she bit it back.

  Who was she to think she could help a singer like Hudson Oaks with lyrics? She was sixteen and a total amateur.

  “My plan was to rewrite them during the plane ride from Portland to Seattle.” He walked from the couch to the wall and back. “They said we had three hours.”

  Three hours! But it was barely a three-hour drive. Where were they stopping on the way? Denver?

  “But …?”

  “But the plane crashed.”

  Oh. “A plane crash is a valid excuse.”

  “I even thought about it obsessively while I was lost in the Gorge for so long, but then a need to find food and shelter kind of took priority over lyrics.”

  “Makes sense.” Oakley pictured him lost and disoriented, wandering the banks of the Camas River alone and out of his time. It plucked a tight string in her heart. “How long were you out there? I mean, days-wise, not twenty-three years.”

  “At least two nights. I know that much. When I ran into you, I really was pretty disoriented and weak and hadn’t slept or eaten for a while.”

  No wonder he’d been so eager to take her Little Debbie. No wonder he’d looked at her like a savior that day. “But you still carried me home.”

  “I said I was weak—but I meant, weak for me.” He flexed. “In general I’m pretty buff.”

  Oakley’s eyes strayed to his shoulders and the place where his bicep strained at Sherm’s t-shirt. A memory of his post-bath stance in her bedroom in only a towel and a few water droplets popped into her mind, and she flushed red.

  “I don’t think I ever told you thanks for helping me get home after you saved me from that car.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I think at this point, words are a little late. You’d better show me how thankful and how sorry you are.” He’d stopped pacing, and he took two strides toward her. “I’ll decide whether I am going to accept your apology.”

  “Show you?” She looked up. He was looming over her now, his eyes hungry. She weakened in their powerful grip. “How?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” He leaned down and put his face close to hers. He wants to kiss me. Her breath caught. She couldn’t. No! She couldn’t do this.

  “You—” She pressed a finger to his nearing lips, pushing him back as her mind hit a snag. She couldn’t let him do this, not in her living room, not when Mom was so nearby, for one thing. And not when her heart might get tied in knots over him. He’d already told Brinn and Clyde that he was her boyfriend, and soon her heart might believe it. He was leaving soon. She had to protect herself, and not end up like Mom, pining over this dreamy guy for decades to come. “You came out of the Camas River Gorge and into Wood River on Wednesday, was it?”

  Hudson let out a mildly frustrated sigh and his eyes opened. “Yeah. Why?”

  “Wood
River is quite a ways downriver from where the plane wreck was discovered.”

  “So?”

  So, how had he gotten this far down the Camas? Why hadn’t he drowned, and how long had he really been missing? She hit him with a barrage of questions, all ending with, “What all do you remember, exactly? From the beginning.”

  Hudson went over to the sofa, where he sat down, grabbed a throw pillow and hugged it. Oakley followed him, sitting on the edge of the coffee table, even though Mom might not approve, since it was her purported favorite gift Oakley had ever given to her after she’d refinished it for her last Mother’s Day. “Did you hit your head or anything?” she asked.

  “I must have.” He squinted and got a faraway look. “I remember I was walking into Wood River, and—”

  “I need you to start farther back.”

  “I saw Manny the pilot jump, and—”

  “Farther.” Oakley needed to know all of it, try to piece it together. All those years her mom had been scouring the Camas River Gorge for clues, and now Oakley could get the details straight from a victim of the wreck himself. Hudson would be able to put a lot of doubts and questions to rest, including the fact that the plane crash was simply an accident, and not foul play, like Mom kept insisting.

  Hudson could help her mom see that it had just been an accident. Oakley had seen the headlines on some of those articles in the scrapbook. They had to do with conspiracies. They hinted at foul play. There was a whole section on them, with little strings and pins.

  “Okay, but I need you to sit beside me, not across from me.” He sounded serious about this odd request.

  “What?” She stood up from the coffee table. “Okay. But why?”

  “Because if I’m looking into your eyes while I tell it, I’ll get distracted.” When she blinked a few times, Hudson muttered the title of his other hit song. “The eyes really do have it, Oakley. I could have written that song about you.”

  Blushing and not sure how much she was caving when she should stand firm, she came over and sat on the couch by him. Just until he finished his play-by-play. Just until she had the facts.

  But then, he slid closer and put his arm around her. Instinct made her nestle under his embrace and close her eyes. “I’m listening.”

  “First off, it was raining—hard. And I was under this umbrella, and we’d just finished playing our concert in Portland.” He took a deep breath, like he was going into some kind of time machine. “I was in an argument with our manager.”

  “What about?” Oakley asked softly. “The lyrics to ‘Lunch Lady?’” He’d said something about that earlier.

  “Yeah, and that I didn’t think the album was ready, and that the concert had been a mess. Like you’d guess, the audience hadn’t been wild about the new songs.”

  “And you didn’t think the tour was ready.” She couldn’t blame him, considering they’d done a bait-and-switch on him at the recording studio. What could have been the motivation for that? She would have to tease that mystery out somehow, because it made zero sense.

  “Right. I shouldn’t have been such an upstart know-it-all. I know things were bad for the label he worked for, and he’d been yelling into his phone a lot over the last couple of weeks. Not a smarty phone like yours. A big one, with a huge antenna he had to slide out every time he talked, so it was more intimidating.”

  “So you got along with him?”

  “Oh, absolutely. When we started our careers a few months earlier, and we had those hits, he’d treated us like we were made of solid gold, you know? Like we were the best thing that ever happened to him.”

  “Well, your songs did make him a lot of money, I would guess.”

  Hudson sighed. “I guess. But I don’t get why he didn’t defend us better right before the album release. I mean, he swore he’d hired the best lyricists in the business, but you heard those words.”

  Yeah, she’d heard them.

  “I mean, did he have a drug problem? Was he bipolar or something? Like one way one day, when he was on his meds, and then a completely different person when he was off them?” Oakley had read about this in her psychology class the year before and it had fascinated her, so she’d studied up. “Did he have mental challenges? Because that can make people change on a dime.”

  “Not that I could see. It’s just weird that he’d throw us out there with nothing to shield us from being lynched besides buffet cart number three, you know?”

  It was definitely strange.

  Oakley thought about this for a while, but she came up with nothing. She didn’t have enough information to form any kind of explanation for such irrational behavior. “So you got on the plane. And it was stormy.”

  “Yeah. We were getting re-routed, Roman said. And we were in this little plane, not our usual jet that the label owned, since it was a short distance flight from Portland to Seattle, and he said it would take three hours.”

  “Three hours. But with no layovers anywhere. A direct flight.”

  “Yeah, I thought it was long, too. Plus, I hate to fly. Have I told you I hate to fly?” He hadn’t. She found she liked it when he told her little things about himself.

  She’d never flown, so she wouldn’t know if she hated flying. It sounded fun to Oakley. “Were you nervous because of the storm?”

  “Don’t make me turn in my man card like that, but uh, yeah. I may have wished on eleven eleven that I wouldn’t die in that plane.”

  Laughter burst from Oakley like a popping balloon. “You made a wish.”

  “Hey, give a guy a break. It was really stormy.”

  Oakley clipped off her laughing with an apology. “Sorry. I thought Mom and I were the only people who wished on eleven eleven.”

  “You do that, too?”

  “Absolutely.” It hadn’t been long since she’d done so herself. Back at the audition, she’d wished for mercy. Ohh, and I got it. She gulped at the realization. “It works sometimes,” she said, downplaying the racing of her heart. “Look, I’m sure the weather was terrible. I totally would have been wishing on everything there was to wish on.”

  The storm ruled out foul play, despite the conspiracy-centered clippings she’d seen in her mom’s scrapbook, and the pilot turning up after the crash. Which was weird, since they’d found the pilot’s body and Mom had attended his funeral up in Tacoma. The funeral program was there in the book, too.

  But … how did that jive with what Hudson had said? “You said you saw someone bail out of the plane.”

  “Manny. The pilot. Come to think of it, that kind of sucks of him.”

  Yeah, a pilot should be like a ship’s captain, go down with the ship, right? “You knew him pretty well?”

  “He was always our pilot. Whatever he did, I’m so sorry he never got to fly again. He loved flying. Unlike me. But he always promised he’d fly safely, not let me get too worried. I liked him.”

  “There were no survivors, the scrapbook articles said. Manny died, too.” It was sad that he’d bailed out and still hadn’t survived. “I’m sorry.”

  “We loved that guy.” Hudson exhaled loudly. “I’m sorry his parachute didn’t take him safely down. Too many trees there in the Gorge, I guess.”

  Oakley didn’t remember seeing anything about a parachute in the articles she’d scanned. She’d have to ask Mom. That seemed like an obvious detail that would have shown up.

  “It was only a couple of sunrises and sunsets ago, you know, but with the crash and the hike and, you know, finding out my friends are all dead—it seems longer.”

  That tight string plucked in Oakley’s heart again. He’d lost his friends, irretrievably. Her mind rushed around, imagining what it would be like to lose loved ones suddenly, and to not even have a chance to go to a funeral or to cry.

  Hudson paused for a long while, and then he squeezed Oakley to him, pulling her head against his chest. She could hear his heart beating through the t-shirt, and she pulled her knees up and curled against him. He probably genuinely did
need a hug, or at least some kind of closeness, considering what he’d endured. She let him sit there a bit, not prompting him, just letting him breathe and think.

  At last, she said, “I’m sorry about Nick and Chris and Al.” She reached up and grasped his hand where it was resting on her shoulder. “We can go up there and visit the site if you want, so you can process it.”

  “Thanks.” He sounded solemn. “That would be great.” He threaded his fingers through hers. “I’d like to go find the families of the boys, too, after I find my own, of course. Tell them the guys died bravely. And Manny’s family, if I can.”

  It seemed like they were racking up things to do together—go see the crash site at the Gorge, find Hudson’s family, find the guys’ families and Manny the pilot’s family. Oakley had homework and tests and school and the callback to worry about. Could she add this stuff with Hudson, too?

  Her generosity spoke before her logic could protest. “I’ll be glad to go with you. All those trips will be hard.”

  “I don’t think I could do them on my own. Thanks. Again, not manly to admit, but I’ll need you.”

  “Me?” It just jumped from her mouth. “Why me?” What had she done that had made him attach himself to her so thoroughly? Earlier today he’d defended her from the Populars and told them she was his girlfriend. Add doing her algebra, praising her lyrics, telling her she was special. “But I’m nobody.”

  She was Shoe Girl. She was viral video screw-up girl. She was the scorn magnet of all the Populars at school. What could make a guy like Hudson Oaks lean on Oakley Marsden?

  “Nobody? Ha. Right now, you’re everybody to me.” His voice didn’t contain an iota of insincerity, and he pulled away so he could face her. “I know you’re asking a silent why. But it’s an easy answer. It’s because you care. You care about people. You want to do what’s right. You defend your mom. You want to do well in school. You are nice to old guys at your job—so nice, in fact, that they know your name and want to make sure you’re taken care of if you get hurt. You give homeless people in trouble your Little Debbie Snack Cakes and offer them what little cash you have. That’s who you are. Do you know how different you are from any other girl I met before or after I became part of Girl Crazy?”