Fanmail

  Ouch. That hurt on any number of levels, but mostly on the level of deep, bitter shame: I’d been busted by the very person I was trying to impress, and he evidently thought there was nothing I wouldn’t stoop to in order to prise him and Dolores apart.

  Was he right? Double ouch. That was really the worst part. What if he and Dolores were meant to be together? How could I do that to my best friend?

  It was a loooooooooong, shaky moment, during which my face drifted from expression to expression as I tried to work out how to answer him in a satisfactory manner. If I overdid it, in a ‘How dare you!’ kind of way, he’d guess he was right, and if I said nothing, he’d guess he was right. Whatever I did, in fact, I was doomed to him guessing he was right (not about me hiring Jazzy as I hadn’t, but about the whole plan behind it all).

  Furthermore, Freddie, Nerdy Mate and even Dolores were now watching my facial contortions as if they were waiting for an alien burst out of my nose.

  ‘She didn’t, did you, Cat?’ said Dolores, with only the tiniest glimmer of doubt in her voice.

  And of course I could be very truthful, which saved me. I settled on an expression of superior amusement and said, ‘Freddie, what a mad idea. Jazzy – or Jason, as I call him – is an old friend from my primary school, and we were just catching up, that’s all.’

  The bystanders had pricked up their ears again, and there was a low hum of intrigue as the mutter went around the hall and the queue for the shop that Cat-astrophic in Year 11 actually knew Jazzy D (yep, I heard it).

  ‘And how was he?’ Freddie said it nicely with a bit of a smile on his attractive upper lip, but even so, there was something suspicious about the way his eyes hardened behind his glasses that made me slightly nervous.

  ‘He was …’ I gulped. ‘… fine.’

  ‘And muscly and singing and soulful and sensitive!’ said Dolores, clapping her hands prettily.

  Freddie smirked. ‘Right. Well, now I know you’re making it up. Soulful and sensitive? Jazzy D?’

  Yeah, actually it was a stretch. I could see why he’d struggle.

  I was just working out what to say next when I realised the rumour-rumble had got louder. Actually it got loud and sort of swelled, rather like a Mexican wave. Like the Mexican wave at the Double Vision gig, rippling through the hall from a dull murmur at the back, blooming and booming as it went through the middle, rising to a screeching crescendo as it reached the doorway into the corridor. I was suddenly transported back to the concert, to thousands of little girls screaming for their idol:

  ‘Jazzy D! Omigod, it’s Jazzy D! Jazzy!’

  All heads turned to face the doorway, and me being a bit taller than most of the girls (and quite a few of the boys), I could see quite clearly what they were all looking at.

  Resplendent in a black supermarket t-shirt which he’d ripped and layered over the white supermarket t-shirt, and Dean’s beloved 501’s sawn off (probably literally, given what utensils were in the shed) to expose two muscly thighs, was Jason Devaney. The Divine Jazzy D. In the hall of Trevellyan High School.

  He scanned the room quickly, then spotted me. Like I said, taller than most. Also scarlet and radiating heat from my furnace of a face, so there was probably a flaming glow all around me. Possibly my hair wings were on fire. The bloody idiot. What was he doing here? Now?

  ‘Cat!’ he called, and strode towards me through the crowd on those muscly thighs like Moses parting the Red Sea (although I’m sure Moses used a staff or something, not muscly thighs).

  He reached my side and tried to give me a kiss on the cheek, and I leapt out of the way quickly. ‘What are you doing here?’ I hissed. ‘I said 12.30pm. At the tree!’

  Jazzy shrugged as hundreds of teenagers started to close in around him.

  Around us.

  ‘I got bored waiting for the time to leave for the cab, so I ran instead. Got here quite quickly.’

  ‘You ran?’ That explained the shorts, then. ‘It’s about six miles!’

  At that, the Divine Jazzy D grinned, and half the room practically combusted. It could actually have been quite nice, watching the girls (and some of the boys) being affected by him in the way the guys reacted to Dolores, if it weren’t all so embarrassing …

  He pointed to his bicep as he flexed his arm and then put it around my shoulders. Not just his bicep, of course, because that would be weird. His whole arm. And that was even weirder.

  He pulled me a bit closer but sadly, didn’t lower his voice. ‘I told you, Cat. Big muscles.’ Then he wiggled his eyebrows up and down as if we had some secret joke between us.

  And just as I stared at him wondering how much it would hurt to punch him in the shoulder or possibly the mouth, and he smiled down at me like some kind of dreamy teen idol, about a thousand stars appeared around us.

  Camera phones.

  Flashing.

  Triple ouch.

  I’m not sure how long it took to be all over, well, EVERYWHERE. As I’d said to Jason in my letters, I don’t really like all that Facebooking, Twittering, Tumblring, messaging stuff. I don’t understand it, I don’t need it, and I don’t use it. There are just a few people on the planet I ever wanted to talk to: Mum, Dolores, Freddie, Gemma. Dad, maybe. When you’re not very happy with who you are, why would you want to go telling the world?

  But suddenly, in just seconds it felt like, the world knew who I was. They knew I was the Cat-Astrophe who was apparently going out with the Divine Jazzy D. Everybody on the whole planet suddenly wanted to know more about me – anything about me – and how Jazzy and I had got together.

  Though nobody ever told me for sure that it was being said, I’m sure most of them also wanted to know what the most famous teen idol on the continent, who could have any girl he wanted in the big wide world, could possibly see in me.

  And meanwhile, nearly all of the only people I ever really wanted to talk to were not talking to me.

  Even though I was EVERYWHERE, I’d never felt more alone.

  Stephen Scowl

  Talentfactory

  PO Box 47863

  London SW19 8DR

  Dear Mr Scowl

  You didn’t come and get him! And now he thinks we’re ‘meant to be’ or something, and nothing could be further from the truth! He keeps singing and I hate it!

  You see, he’s meant to be for Dolores – they’d be perfect together. And I’m meant to be for Freddie, who incorrectly believes that he and Dolores should be together.

  Now Dolores isn’t talking to me because she thinks I deliberately stole Jazzy D (Jason) from under her Double Ds. And Freddie isn’t talking to me (not that he was much anyway) because he can see that not talking to me will get him onside with Dolores. He’s actually COMFORTING her, for crying out loud.

  Even my mum isn’t talking to me because she found out he’s been staying in our shed and that we’re apparently going out, even though we’re not, and we always promised I’d talk to her before I got a boyfriend. Do you know what she said? A few weeks ago I told her there was a boy at school and she guessed that I liked him, but after Monday and Facespace and everything she told me she was very disappointed with me, and thought I’d at least try to find someone with the same values as me, not a pop star.

  She’s also a bit cross, I think, because Aggie (she’s the daughter of Dean who my mum plans to marry, and a bit of a Divvy, I’m sorry to say) … Aggie’s older than me and met Jason on Friday too, and would really have liked to go out with him at least a little bit. Her mum died a few years ago, and this was the happiest she’d been in ages blah blah blah.

  So not only do I NOT want to go out with Jazzy D, but having him in my shed has made me NOT go out with the person I’d like to go out with, and has made my BFF and actually only F decide not to talk to me any more, and has made my mum side with my soon-to-be evil step-sister who’s so perfectly nice it’s infuriating.

  Please, Mr Scowl. You’re a manager. You’re used to this stuff. Please put it right.

&
nbsp; Cat Andrews (although I might go back to Catherine now I’ve found out they all call me ‘Cat-Astrophe’)

  Chapter 10: All Time Low (The Wanted)

  Disaster Zone #1: the Mum situation

  I’m not putting these into priority order, or anything. I’m just numbering them so I can sort them out in my head, like breaking down an experiment into stages so you can tackle it. Believe me, there was just disaster on top of disaster at the side of another disaster, and overall it was just a big, ugly mess. But anyway, here goes.

  First of all, Mum was told to come to collect me from school. This was not easy as she was in Glasgow and had to rearrange her flights and so on, so guess what happened instead? Yep, Dean came to get me. Not only did I have to undergo the shame of having brought the school to a standstill by having my famous boyfriend turn up in the hall (and how had THAT happened? Any of it?!), I had the terrible terrible shame of being hauled up to the principal’s office for the first time in my life … at Trevellyan, at least … and on top of all of that I had to be signed out and taken home for a serious think about the consequences of my actions with my mother’s new fiancé.

  Furthermore, Jazzy had to come with us. At least he had clothes on this time, although when Dean saw what Jason had done with his vintage 501s he nearly cried.

  There was a painful discussion with the principal in which I had to explain who Dean was and promise that yes, yes, of course I understood that school was not a disco and I couldn’t go inviting my boyfriend in during the day, especially when he was so darned famous. No amount of saying ‘He’s not my boyfriend’ and ‘I didn’t invite him in’ and ‘I haven’t been to a disco since Year 6 and have no plans to ever go to one again’ seemed to have any impact, and when Dean said testily, ‘Well, what is he then?’ when I said that Jason was not my boyfriend, I didn’t really have an answer.

  What was he, in fact? Someone I seem to have met at primary school, who had somehow become world-famous and then taken some illegal substance that gave him a bit of amnesia? Some guy I’d stored, naked, in our garden shed? A human being I’d borrowed, without his permission, to try to come between my friend and the guy I … you know, chemical reactioned? There was just no reasonable explanation and in the end it was easier just to say nothing.

  I was still a bit mute when we got into Dean’s car, which Jason recognised from Friday night. ‘Hey, Aggie’s car!’ he said, which just served to aggravate Dean all the more. First his jeans, then his car … was nothing sacred?

  ‘You get in the back, Mr Divine,’ he said, in an ultra-formal tone which I had started to recognise as Really Mad. ‘I’ll drop you off after I’ve taken Cat home to meet her mum. She should be home in about half an hour.’

  ‘Sorry you had to come and get me,’ I said to Dean in a small voice.

  ‘It’s what …’ He paused, and I could tell he was going to say “what families do” and then better of it. ‘It’s what your mum wanted,’ he finished.

  He rapped on the steering wheel for a while and then said, ‘You know what, Cat – you could have just said. Confided in Aggie. You’re old enough to have a boyfriend. Aggie would have understood, even if she’d been … well, a little jealous. He’s an old friend from school. That’s fair enough. Why hide it?’

  ‘I … didn’t … I don’t …’ Know how to respond to that, I thought.

  And anyway, when did this become about Aggie? Was this about me having a boyfriend before she did, or about the boyfriend being Jazzy Divine – none of which was true, anyway? Or was it about me not sharing stuff with Aggie?

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, which was the thing I said most all day.

  ‘Your mum thinks you’re reacting to our announcement the other day,’ he said, shooting me a little sideways glance. ‘I know it must be quite hard to take in when you and Rachel have been a unit all this time.’

  ‘Half a unit,’ I said quietly.

  He nodded sympathetically. ‘I know. And we have too. We’ll all have to work things through to see how we fit.’

  I looked out of the window, as for some weirdy reason I was wondering if I might cry. Did he have to be so nice? So like Aggie. Hate you hate you hate you …

  Jason just sat in the back humming to himself, and when Dean said, ‘Shall I drop you off near the campus?’ he replied, ‘Sure thing, bro,’ and went back to his singing.

  Dean glanced at me again with an expression that said: “Okay, apart from the obvious, what DO you see in him?’

  It was a fair question. What a good thing he wasn’t really my boyfriend. I might have expected a real boyfriend to stand up for me a bit more. At all, in fact.

  And then we were home, and Mum was jumping out of a taxi and rushing over to the car, and I knew the talking was just about to begin. We’d have to go over it all again: her and Dad, and Gemma, and me before Trevellyan, and me not having more friends, and me choosing weird boyfriends, and me just basically being a major disappointment from start to finish although she always tried to pretend otherwise …

  It went on long into the evening, and only ended when I’d convinced her that Jazzy was not my type (all that talk about values) but that Freddie was my type and unfortunately he thought that his type was Dolores.

  Then I cried about, of all things, my triangular head complete with hair wings, and she hugged me and promised me a decent haircut, and told me that I’m beautiful in an unconventional way (which is parent-speak for ugly).

  Only after that and a baked potato with cheese and sweetcorn was I allowed to go upstairs and start texting. I’d never been so perturbed at not being able to do texting – for the first time, I realised why everyone else is so obsessed by it. Beats talking, that’s for sure.

  Disaster Zone #2

  Dolores didn’t even reply to my texts, which is unheard of. And there’d never been a time when I needed to talk to her more. Eventually I called her phone, knowing she wouldn’t answer, and left a very long message:

  ‘Hi, Dolores, it’s Cat. Look, this has all got way out of control, but you have to know that there is no way I would be going out with Jazzy D, and I only ever wanted to introduce him to you because you’re right, you would be perfect together. It’s not true, all that stuff on Facebook, honestly. Well, apart from the bit about why a superstar would want to go out with a Cat-Astrophe. Do they really call me that? Anyway, I’m sorry it if was all a bit of a shock but I’m not going out with Jazzy D which means he is totally still available. And so am I,’ I added, in case she mentioned it to Freddie. ‘And I miss you and you’re truly my BFF and I’m sorry.’

  It took half an hour, then I got a text that said: REALLY?

  Which I took to mean did you really want to introduce him to me and would we really be prefect together and is it really all lies and is he really still available? And are you really still available? (Okay, I lied about that last bit as Dolores would not be at all surprised to find out that I was amazingly NOT going out with anyone).

  It might also mean do you really miss me and are you really sorry?

  So I texted back, ABSOLUTELY. Just to answer any of those reallies.

  A bit later she called me. ‘I don’t know if I’m totally ready to talk to you properly,’ she said. ‘You nearly gave me a heart attack this afternoon.’

  ‘I know. Sorry.’

  ‘And it sure looks to me like Jazzy D likes you.’

  ‘I know.’ Weird but true. I think maybe he’d just got confused over my niceness in putting him up in the penthouse shed. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘But you don’t like him? Not at all?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t say not at all …’ There were sluggy moments and stuff, after all, but then I heard her sharp intake of breath and re-thought it. ‘Sorry. No, I don’t. Totally not my type. In fact, talking of my type …’

  ‘I know, you’re waiting for someone who loves biology and plays Loot,’ said Dolores.

  ‘Plays a lute, not Loot the game.’

  ‘Whatevs.’ She sounded a little
shirty with me again for correcting her.

  ‘Sorry.’

  Dolores sighed. ‘Look, stop saying sorry. It’s getting annoying, and I’m already annoyed with you. Just … just don’t meet any more pop stars without telling me, okay?’

  ‘Okay. Sorr … Okay. So Dolores … are we all right?’

  I wasn’t sure I could bear it if we weren’t.

  ‘Probably,’ she said. ‘But don’t muck it up again. Oh, and by the way, Freddie’s nerdy mate wants to go out with you. I bet he’s your type.’

  Who? ‘What nerdy mate?’

  ‘The one he was with when Jazzy arrived. He thinks you’re really cool, and if you’re not going out with Jazzy he wants a date.’

  I slumped back on the bed with the phone on my forehead. Freddie’s mate? Why hadn’t FREDDIE thought I was really cool?

  ‘Cat? What do you reckon? Freddie said he’ll even go on a double date if it helps you relax,’ said Dolores. ‘Although I told him it’s only a pretend one as he is so not my type.’

  ‘No.’

  No, he’s not your type. No, you shouldn’t be his type. No, I don’t want to date his nerdy mate, who I’d barely even noticed. No, I didn’t want to double date with me longing for Freddie and Freddie longing for Dolores and Nerdy Mate apparently longing for me. Nobody was longing for the right person. These chemical reactions just weren’t working properly. Maybe it was Facebook that had made it all complicated, people dumping their partners by status and all that …

  Talking of Facebook. ‘Dolores … you know all that Facebook stuff about me and … Jason Devaney?’

  ‘I certainly do,’ she said frostily.

  Naturlich it was flipping everywhere – even to the extent of alerting the paparazzi so a dozen salivating journos turned up at our house, looking for “Jason’s Girl” to see if the rumours were true. I think some of them wanted to know if it was true I was actually a girl. Those Facebook snaps were not kind to someone tall and flat-chested with hair wings. Luckily Mum went all frosty on them, accusing them of harassing a minor and threatening to sue/call the police/turn the hosepipe on them. That dealt with them (I’m not sure which bit) but it didn’t do anything about the social media stuff.