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by Mia Castle

  ‘That’s where I was born,’ drawled Jazzy. ‘In the Fort Oxygen. Jason explained it to me,’ he said when I turned to him in astonishment.

  Aggie, meanwhile, was as mute as the waxy man with her hand over her mouth. ‘Does … does my dad know?’ she finally managed to stammer.

  ‘No. Not yet. I’m not sure he ever should, to be honest.’ That was a whole different discussion for when there was much, much more time. ‘For now, there’s work to do.’

  Right then, Aggie seemed to pull herself together. ‘Okay then. What are we doing?’

  I was about to protest that we weren’t doing anything, that I was going to de-create Jazzy and go home as if nothing had happened, but then I remembered how useful Aggie could be. ‘Have you got keys to the lab?’

  Aggie thought for a moment, then raised a finger. ‘The emergency stash! Dad keeps spare keys here in case there’s a fire or anything.’ She dragged a black metal box out from under a floorboard, and hauled out a jailor’s set of keys.

  ‘And is your dad’s car here?’

  ‘In the garage.’

  The car would stop us being noticed, hopefully. I put a hand on Jazzy’s shoulder to stop him bouncing around the room, and spoke directly into his face as if to a toddler. ‘Jazzy, we’re going to the lab now.’

  ‘Great!’ he said, winking at Aggie who still swooned even though she knew he was a Fake Jason. ‘Soon there’ll be lots of us.’

  ‘Yes, soon there’ll be … what?’

  No no no no no. That wasn’t the plan at all.

  ‘Jason said I wasn’t quite ready for the band, so I said, Dude, I’m gonna make my own band, in the Fort Oxygen.’ He struck some kind of Divvy pose in the mirror and then nodded at his reflection as if to say, yeah, see you in a minute.

  ‘Holy crap,’ screamed Aggie, and in the circumstances it seemed like the right thing to say. ‘We can’t do that!’

  ‘No no no no no. We’re going to …’ I dropped my voice to a whisper. ‘… de-create him.’

  ‘How?’

  Good lord, what was it with this girl and her sensibleness? ‘I don’t know exactly. Put the machine in reverse. That’s bound to shrivel him up, or something.’

  That time I forgot to whisper. Jazzy spun round. ‘You’re not shrivelling me up. We’re going to make more of me. Yeah.’

  For the first time, Jazzy suddenly appeared to be thick in the body as well as thick in the head. I mean, there was an awful lot of him for two teenage girls to wrestle into a Vortexicon. Aggie appeared to be thinking exactly the same thing, and was backing away at speed.

  ‘Well, Jazzy …’

  ‘Just call me Divine.’

  Dear Da Vinci, he’d gone bonkers. ‘Okay, Divine, we’ll just see about getting you …’

  And just at that point, my phone rang.

  It was Jason.

  ‘Don’t you answer your texts? I’ve been messaging you for half an hour! Jazzy’s sort of escaped and he’s a bit mad…’

  ‘You’re telling me.’

  ‘He’s a bit mad at me. I’ve been training him to be in the band, but he’s not quite ready.’

  ‘And now he wants to make his own band. Of Jazzies.’

  ‘Yes, exactly, and …’ Finally. Jason caught on at last. ‘He’s there?’

  ‘Yes, with me and Aggie, at her house. Near the You Know What.’

  There was a long silence. A loooooong silence. It was one of those weighing-up-the-pros-and-cons silences like I’d just done. Then Jason sighed.

  ‘Okay, there’s only one thing for it. You’ll have to bring him to me.’

  ‘To the music awards?’ I squeaked.

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ Jason sounded very flustered and sort of adorable. ‘Err, I could send a car or … I don’t know …’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said quickly, ‘we’ve got transport.’

  I glanced over at Aggie and she nodded immediately.

  ‘Catherine Melissa Andrews, you’re …’ Jason didn’t actually say what I was. ‘Thanks. See you in a bit. Don’t let him near the lab!’

  Then he rang off. ‘Right, everyone,’ I said cheerfully and entirely fakely as I had no idea how we were going to pull this off. ‘Let’s get in the car and we can take you to the lab, oh Divine one.’

  Excited, Jazzy hurdled some furniture and headed towards the garage.

  I pulled Aggie back.

  ‘Child locks on in the car. I presume you have child locks?’

  Aggie laughed. ‘Have you met my dad?’

  ‘Great. We’re going to need them. We’re taking the big oaf to the music awards, and he cannot, repeat cannot get out of the car.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Aggie, sounding more confident than her face appeared.

  ‘Don’t worry. We’ll put something in the car to distract him.’

  And so we piled into the Volvo and screeched off towards town. Towards the bra shop for the bigger boobed.

  Because if we were going to pull this off, we needed Dolores to come too.

  Chapter 18: Halfway There (Big Time Rush)

  Funny thing was, I no longer had to watch what I was saying to Dolores about Jazzy (or Divine as he now liked to be known) as she was really into Freddie. Sure, it might have been her day-dream to get together with the lead singer of the lead band Double Vision, and be Queen of the Divvies and have a wedding in Hello and beautiful babies called Berlin and Dubrovnik, but she never really believed it. It was just something fun to pretend. Meanwhile she had the real live Freddie the Ferd Nerd to adore her properly and in person.

  Anyway, as he’d been MY Freddie the Ferd Nerd first, she could hardly have a go at me for turning up at Busty Betties with the Divine Jazzy D in the back of the car, could she?

  True to form, she screamed like a banshee when I appeared at the shop window and pointed to the back of the car, where Jazzy was waving like the Queen. In seconds, she had grabbed her bag, shouted something to the boss lady who looked rather disgruntled, and pegged it out of the front door.

  ‘Omigod, you have got a lot of explaining to do,’ she said breathlessly, waving back at Jazzy D and then quickly at Aggie in the driving seat.

  ‘I’ll let Jazzy tell you himself, only call him Divine.’ I shoved her into the back seat with him, whispering, ‘And he’s completely insane, so don’t tell him we’re going to the Music Awards and not the lab.’

  ‘The Music Awards?’ shrieked Dolores.

  Jazzy stirred lazily. ‘Are we at the lab?’

  ‘Not yet, Divine,’ said Dolores quickly, hardly missing a beat. ‘Be there soon. Tell me all about it.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Everything.’

  Happy to talk to anyone with pretty pink and blonde hair and an enormous chest that actually obstructed her seat-belt, Jazzy then filled Dolores on being born in the Fort Oxygen and training with Jason and wanting to be in a band like Jason, while Dolores nodded along with increasingly round eyes and Aggie and I argued about the best way to get to the venue.

  ‘I’ve never driven on a motorway before,’ she wailed. ‘Isn’t there an easier way?’

  I was going off the Sat Nav on my phone. ‘How would I know? I don’t even drive, Aggie. What’s easier than the great big road that goes straight there?’

  ‘I don’t know! One without three lanes?’

  ‘I’ll see if I can find one.’ Much stabbing of the phone and muttered swearing. ‘There’s another road,’ I said as the motorway roundabout loomed ever closer. ‘But it takes an hour longer. We’ll never make it in time.’

  Aggie glared at me and then gritted her teeth. ‘You owe me, big time.’

  ‘Don’t call me Big Time.’

  ‘Cat, shush. This is not the moment for jokes. I’m completely terrified.’ Then she swung off the roundabout onto the slip road.

  ‘Me too,’ I said.

  I was too. Utterly and totally terrified. Of this drive. Of getting there on time. Of Jazzy Divine Mental Person in the back with Dolores. Of seeing Jaso
n again.

  Dolores shouted from the back. ‘Can you put the heating on? I’m literally freezing to death back here.’

  ‘That’s not possible!’ shouted Aggie and I at the exact same moment.

  We stared at each other in the brief nano-second that Aggie dared to take her eyes off the road.

  ‘I can’t work the heating and drive at the same time,’ said Aggie by way of explanation.

  ‘Oh, I thought you meant it’s not possible to be literally freezing to death in fifteen degrees.’

  ‘That too,’ said Aggie, and she laughed then screamed as a juggernaut skimmed the front bumper. ‘Omigod, I hate this!’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. Important to keep the driver calm when you have a fugitive rock star clone in the back of the car and an actual rock star awaiting his safe delivery in about forty five minutes. ‘Just keep your speed down, let everyone else do whatever they want to do, and we get off the motorway in three junctions.’

  I lied. It was nine junctions, but she was too busy to notice, what with staring in horror at the traffic and clutching the steering wheel so hard that it might cry.

  Or so I thought. ‘It’s more like ten junctions, isn’t it?’

  Pros and cons, pros and cons. ‘Nine, actually.’

  ‘You know your mum does that, too?’

  She did not. My mum? ‘What, lies about how much motorway is left?’

  Aggie nodded. ‘Dad hates motorway driving. Because of Mum.’

  ‘Wow.’ That made total sense. ‘So … your mum died in a motorway accident?’

  ‘No, she was a coach driver.’

  I don’t know whether it was meant to be funny – it was probably actually a smidge on the sad side, especially for Aggie – but suddenly we were both laughing so hard that there was a danger Aggie could swerve into the middle lane, blinded by the tears rolling down her face or foxed by her death-grip on the steering wheel. We whooped and flapped our hands around a bit until we’d calmed down, and then swapped stories about our parents that would make their ears bleed, particularly when we revealed them all at the wedding.

  She really wasn’t so bad. Really, actually, was kind of nice. Fun. Eventually she said, ‘It’s weird, our parents getting together when we’re this age, isn’t it?’

  Hmm. So she though it was weird too! ‘Don’t you like the idea?’

  ‘I didn’t at first.’ She glanced at my face and then laughed. ‘Any more than you. But I haven’t seen Dad that happy in forever, and what’s not to like about your mum?’

  ‘Me?’ I said, only half-joking.

  And she didn’t say, no, no, not at all. She just smiled and said, ‘Well, I decided to give you a chance.’

  Like the chance you didn’t give me, is what she didn’t say. So she hadn’t found it all easy, and instead had decided to be mature about it.

  Ouch. Should have made me hate her even more, but somehow it didn’t.

  Anyway, chatting made the journey go a lot faster and pretty soon we were actually at the correct turn-off and threading our way through the outskirts of the city, on the way to the national music awards to see the country’s favourite boy band.

  It was almost like being normal teenagers.

  Finally, thanks to my trusty Sat Nav, we pulled up about a mile from the venue with the traffic already starting to clog up, just as my phone rang again.

  ‘Are you nearly here?’ Jason sounded more than a little panicky.

  ‘Yes, and don’t worry. Someone hasn’t noticed yet.’ I checked the phone display. ‘We’re only a mile away, but there’s heaps of traffic.’

  There was a bunch of crackly noises, and then Jason snapped back onto the line. ‘The road’s jammed. You’ll be too late. We’re opening the show in less than an hour.’

  ‘Well, what are we going to do? I can’t actually fly, in spite of the hair wings.’

  ‘You don’t have … well, as long as he’s in the car I don’t suppose he can do too much damage.’

  Sadly this was not true. Jazzy Divine Idiot was now staring out of the window, pointing at the billboards advertising the awards, saying, ‘That’s me. Hey, that’s me!’ I suddenly realised that when he’d said it before at the cinema, he’d been asking the question IS THAT ME? But now he was pretty clear that the picture was of him, even though it was actually of Jason. ‘Are we at the Fort Oxygen?’

  ‘He’s getting antsy,’ I hissed into the phone.

  ‘Okay, okay.’ Poor Jason. He sounded really desperate, bless him. Lovely Jason all flustered like that because of a naked idiot. It didn’t seem fair. ‘I sort of had a plan, but he has to be here.’

  And suddenly I had a plan. ‘Jason, can you hide for a while?’’

  ‘I’m going into make up! They’ll notice if I’m not there.’

  ‘That’s not as bad as what will happen if they notice there are two of you.’

  Without me having to say anything else, he totally got it.

  ‘Right! Yeah. They’ll think I slipped out. Okay, I’ll meet you at the back of Gate X where all the catering vans are parked. Twenty minutes?’

  Twenty minutes we could do. Twenty minutes until I saw Jason again. Twenty minutes until I saw Jason again and handed over his double to be locked in a catering van for a few hours until Jason could talk him round and I saw Jason again. Actually Divine Nonsense might not even notice. He might mistake the SMEG fridge for Fort Oxygen and climb inside for a while.

  Twenty minutes. This had to be instant.

  I handed Dolores my phone. ‘Double D, you’re in charge.’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ she said. ‘What am I doing?’

  ‘You’re informing the world that the Divine Jazzy D has got himself stuck outside the awards venue, and the traffic needs to clear on the main road outside for him to get through.’

  She barely even blinked. ‘Easy,’ said Dolores.

  There was a flash of the camera, a quick question to Aggie about the car’s registration and make, about thirty seconds of the sound of her taloned thumbs tapping on the screen, and then Dolores handed the phone back to me.

  ‘Done,’ she said.

  And so we waited.

  For about ninety seconds.

  Then like Moses parting the Red Sea, Jazzy D and his muscly thighs caused the traffic to open up, with cars clambering up the pavements and across the central reservation to get out of the way, and millions of phone cameras snapping images of Divine Oaf as he waved and fist-bumped and blew kisses through the open windows where tearful girls screamed mercilessly. And quite a few boys.

  We reached the main gates to the stadium in about thirteen minutes, and leapt out of the car en masse. ‘Special delivery,’ shouted Dolores.

  It was Big Burly. He took one look at my buddy, my step-sister-to-be and me who towered above them both, and grabbed his walky-talky. ‘You three again? You’re banned,’ he growled.

  I reached behind me and dragged our friend forward. ‘Not this time. This time we’re not taking Jazzy D. We’re bringing him.’

  ‘Hi, Gordon,’ said Jazzy.

  Ah, Jason, I thought. You have trained him well, Wise One.

  Miraculously the great black gates to the back of the stadium opened at once, and we were directed round to the catering vans where I insisted we needed to go. Immediately. Because Jason had said so.

  Well, I wasn’t lying about that, was I?

  The “immediately” part wasn’t because Jason said so, though.

  It was because, for some mystifying reason, I suddenly couldn’t wait to see him.

  Chapter 19: Love Bug (Jonas Brothers)

  It was pretty quiet and actually rather dark round by the catering vans. No wonder Big Burly aka Gordon had peered at Jazzy, somewhat perplexed, when he’d insisted that was where we needed to go.

  Gingerly, we all clambered back out of the car, whispering, ‘Jason? Jason!’ as loudly as we dared.

  Behind us, the door of one of the vans creaked open - and there he was. Actually in a r
idiculously glaring white tracksuit like the suit Divine Prat was wearing. His hair was flattened to his skull and the guy was, basically, the victim of a fake tan attack. No wonder he was in a boy band. I was very, very tempted to introduce him to the others as: ‘This is Jason, orange’ and then they’d have wondered what band he was really in.

  ‘This way,’ he hissed, with a blinding flash of white teeth.

  So we all squashed ourselves between the deep fat fryers and the serving counter in a long line. I had to point to everyone down the queue. ‘Hi there. That’s Aggie; Jazzy you know, and that’s Dolores at the back.’

  ‘Hi,’ said the real Jason. ‘Thanks, guys. Thanks for doing all this.’

  There was silence from behind me, so I muttered, ‘S’fine’ before turning round to see what the matter was.

  I’d forgotten, of course, that the others had not had the privilege of meeting the real Jason before, and both Aggie and Dolores were pink and dumbstruck. Dolores definitely looked in imminent danger of a screaming session. On top of all that, there were two Jasons to view – Buy One Get One Free in the burger van – and this was proving very entertaining to everyone else as they compared Real Jason to Fake Jazzy.

  ‘Say hi,’ I said to the girls behind me. ‘It’s only Jason.’

  ‘Hi, Jason,’ they both said in tiny voices, before doing WOW faces at each other.

  For the briefest, tiniest second, a flash of annoyance crossed Jason’s face. Maybe because I’d called him ‘just Jason.’ Then he smiled and nodded. ‘Hey. Yeah, thanks heaps. We’ve got just enough time. Jazzy, can I talk you to on your own?’

  ‘Sure, dude.’ Divine Jazzy peered around him, confused. ‘Is this the Fort Oxygen? Are you another me?’

  ‘Sort of,’ said Jason patiently. ‘I’m the first one; the one you already know.’

  Jazzy looked like he was about to throw a major tant. ‘But I wanted to make a band!’

  ‘I know. Just let me have a chat with you, and we can sort this out.’

  I took this as the cue to leave them to it. If Jason was going to cosh Divine Jazzy over the head and then stash him in the deep freeze with the sausages, I didn’t want to see it.