It was a new day. A new weekend day, actually, I noted as I leafed through the sports and business sections in search of the entertainment news. Maybe there would be a good movie out to go see with the Acronymphomaniacs, or else we could just bum around Wister, drinking Moonpenny’s in the nice fall weather. Or I could do homework, but that was more a soul-crushing necessity than a spiritually fulfilling recreation. I yanked a paper towel off the roll to use as a plate and settled back into my seat to nibble at my waffles and read through the boring paper.
And then I froze, my bite of Eggo going tasteless in my mouth.
“What are you reading?” Sam Huang peered over my shoulder. His hair was kind of sticking up from his head.
“Jeez!” I squeaked. “Sam Huang, give me a little space.”
“Nattie,” Mom said. “Be nice to Sam. And why aren’t you using a plate?”
“Sorry.” I bunched up the newspaper. “I have to, um . . . go.”
I sprinted up to my room, abandoning my waffles. Not bothering with a text message this time, I whipped out my phone and speed-dialed Tess. Each successive ring made my heart rate spike a little more.
“Come on,” I said out loud. “Pick up. Pick up. Pickuppickupickup.”
“Nattie?” Tess’s voice sounded thick. “Whuss up? I was asleep. . . .”
“It’s an emergency,” I butted in. “A Sebastian-related emergency.”
“What, did he call you or something? Is he in town?”
“No,” I said. “Look, just go get your newspaper—”
“The newspaper? Nattie, we don’t get the newspaper.”
“—on page—wait, what?” I stopped. “Who doesn’t get the paper?”
“I dunno, everyone who has the internet? This isn’t the 1960s. What’s with the paper?”
“Okay, well, there’s this . . . thing? But if no one gets the newspaper maybe it’s not a big deal, but, like, we get the newspaper even if my mom doesn’t want to read it, but my dad brought it in this morning, and I bet a lot of other people get it, and—”
“Nattie,” Tess said. “What are you talking about? You’re babbling.”
“There’s an ad,” I said finally. “Of the Young Lungs. In the paper. And it’s huge.”
There was a pause, and for a minute I thought the line had gone dead.
“Oh my God,” Tess said, her voice utterly serious. “Don’t move.”
I heard a couple shuffling sounds and then Tess’s voice away from the phone, calling up at someone.
“Mom, I’m taking the car. It’s an emergency. Nattie? Do. Not. Move.”
“I’m in my pajamas,” I said, feeling very helpless all of a sudden. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Good. What? No, Mom, no one’s dying. Yes, I’ll put gas in it. I’ll be right there, Nattie.”
“Thanks,” I said, and then was struck with an idea. “Actually, Tess? Do you think we can run an errand, too?”
Twenty minutes later, Tess and I were waiting in line at the FedEx store, with five giant and apparently “FRAGILE” boxes of frames.
“Okay, so?” Tess raised her eyebrows expectantly. I’d refused to show her the ad at my house, mostly because my mom, though grateful, had insisted on closely supervising the loading of her packages into the belly of Tess’s dad’s BMW.
I looked around us, trying to determine if we were any safer here. Except for the soccer-mom-looking woman behind us and the two old, hat-wearing guys in front of us, the Main Street FedEx store was mostly deserted. The nearest bystander to me was a speaker disguised not-very-convincingly as a ficus plant.
I let out a long breath and pulled out the page from where I’d tucked it into my jeans pocket. Tess snatched it up before I’d even fully unfolded it.
“Well, have a look, then,” I muttered. Tess ignored me, studying the ad intently and saying nothing for what felt like forever.
“Well?” I said at last.
“Wow,” Tess said. “Full color.”
“Is that bad?”
“But not full-page.”
“Is that good?”
“Next,” called the guy at the counter. The first old guy left, and I began to shove each of the packages forward, unaided by Tess, who was still absorbed in the ad.
“I’m not sure,” she said. She frowned a second time, and, packages moved, I leaned over her shoulder to peer at the scrap of paper. After the initial shock of recognition, I hadn’t been able to look at it alone, just ripped it out and gone upstairs to get away from it and also get dressed. It felt like too much to handle.
“You’re not going to like this, Nattie.”
“Next,” called the guy at the counter again.
“Let me see,” I said, my heart pounding. “Let me see. Tess. Let me see.”
“That’s us,” Tess said, nodding at the counter guy. “Maybe we should just send these packages. . . .”
I hefted the packages onto the counter and pushed them forward. “Let me—”
“Kansas City?” the counter guy said.
“What?” I said.
“Yes,” Tess said. “Here. I’ve got this.” She handed me the ad in exchange for the credit card my mom had given me to pay for shipping.
I took a deep breath, and with Tess and the counter guy and the annoyed soccer mom as witnesses, I gazed down at the ad and saw for what felt like the hundredth time that same picture of Sebastian with his arms crossed and leg on an amplifier, the rest of the band looking grim and gritty behind him. And then I began to read.
Sleepmore—the debut album from Brooklyn’s Young Lungs
“Vibrant and vivacious”—Jawharp Magazine
“14 carats of solid gold alt-rock”—Grandophone, Editor’s Pick
“Your new favorite band”—Vivian Violet
“Do you want these going express, Ms. McCullough?” the counter guy asked.
“Next-day air,” Tess said briskly. “Right?”
“Yeah. Whatever.” My eyes were still scanning the ad, the headline, the picture of the band, looking for what Tess said I wasn’t going to like, and then there it was, scrawled across the bottom corner of the ad.
Featuring the single “Natalie,” available for free download through November 15!
Oh.
“Nattie?” Tess looked at me with alarm.
“Ms. McCullough? Do you need delivery confirmation?” The counter guy raised a hand, which Tess ignored.
“Are you okay? Are you going to faint again?” She grabbed my shoulders, and I nodded. I swallowed and opened my mouth, knowing that somewhere inside me there was a noncrazy sound that I could make come out. The soccer mom harrumphed again behind us, the counter guy gave up and printed out a receipt, and I made a sound at last, but it wasn’t exactly noncrazy. Because I finally realized what was coming out of the plant speaker next to us, garbled and feedbacky but totally unmistakable.
“Well she’s tough and she’s cool and she’s in command . . .”
“Is she okay?” Soccer Mom asked.
“Do you want your receipt?” the counter guy asked.
“She’s fine,” Tess said. “She just has these dizzy spells sometimes, nothing to worry about, just need to get her out of a public area so she can recover.” She did a winning, tight-lipped smile, ducked her head politely, and grabbed me and the credit card in one swift motion toward the door, just in time for me to hear my name crackle out over the speaker.
Everything seemed slowed down and saturated, like one of those nightmares where you get stuck naked in the middle of the street and can’t make your legs move. It took a full ten minutes for my vision to cartwheel back into place and I realized we were now standing in line at Moonpenny’s.
“I got you a hot chocolate,” Tess said, handing the cashier my mom’s credit card. “It looked like you could stand to take a break from caffeine.”
“Yeah,” I croaked. “Probably.”
Tess bent down, signed my mom’s name with a flourish, and then grabbed our order
from the end of the counter.
“Come on,” she said, nodding toward our usual booth in the very back. “You look like you’re about to have an attack of the vapors or something. Again, I mean.”
“I do not.”
Tess smiled. “There’s my Nattie!”
I took a deep breath and followed her, trying to take in primary sensations: the warmth of the cup in my hands, the acrid smell of coffee beans, the unexpected relief of the all-franchise mandate that Moonpenny’s play jazz and jazz alone over its non-tree-form speakers.
“Okay,” Tess said once we were seated. I stared, watching her peeling the paper off a blueberry muffin, and then she stopped. “What, you want some?”
“I can’t believe you just used my mom’s credit card. You’re committing identity theft.”
“Fine, I won’t share,” Tess said, breaking the muffin in half.
“I didn’t say that,” I said. My single bite of Eggo felt like a lifetime ago, and I was pretty sure Mom would understand an emergency pit stop. “Besides, it’s not really her identity I’m worried about.”
“Whoa, whoa,” Tess said. “Slow down. Sebastian has not stolen your identity.”
“He kind of has!” I cried. “I mean, it’s not like he asked my permission to write that song.”
Tess frowned. “I thought you thought it was cool, though. I thought he thought you were cool, and that was cool.”
“I mean . . . kind of,” I said, staring into my hot chocolate. “When it was just a stupid song that I was pretty much the only one to know about.”
“I’m pretty sure some of the people at Ruby’s had heard it before you did,” Tess pointed out.
“Yeah, but that’s different. That was practically nobody. Now it’s the people at Ruby’s, and the DJ lady on WPHL, and Tall Zach and Endsignal and the zombie girl at the haunted house and the FedEx guy just now—”
“Okay, okay. Whoa. Slow down, greased lightning.” Tess put up a hand. “You’re going to give yourself an aneurysm.”
“Not even eighteen years old and I’m getting aneurysms,” I said miserably. “This is the worst.”
“It’s not,” Tess said. “You know what you need?”
“A lobotomy.”
“A plan,” Tess said. “And I am the master of plans.”
“What am I supposed to do, hack into their website and stop people from downloading it?”
“Nattie, you don’t know how to hack,” Tess said patiently, as if this would otherwise have been a feasible solution.
“So do you have a better idea?”
Tess lifted an eyebrow. “Who do you think you’re talking to?”
She had a point.
“You’ve got a point,” I said.
“Damn right.” Tess nodded. “Even though I think it’s kind of ridiculous for you to be throwing away your chance at fame and fortune as international woman of mystery Natalie, as your best friend, I will, however grudgingly, act in the best interest of your mental health.”
“And?” I was drumming my fingers on the edge of my hot chocolate, itching for her to just get to the point.
“And here is the plan for Operation Natalie.” Tess took a deep breath. “Just lie low.”
“That’s it?” I cried.
“Sure,” she said. “I mean, first of all, it’s not like you ordinarily even listen to anything by living recording artists—”
“Joni is not dead, Tess.”
“—no one actually calls you Natalie, and no one besides me, you, and Sebastian know about the Face-Touching Incident.”
“Incidents.”
“Whatever. Point is, there is literally no reason for anyone to suspect that it’s about you.”
“You don’t think all that red-hair stuff will tip people off that it’s me?”
“No offense, Nattie, but I’m not sure that most of Wister Prep even knows you exist.”
“None taken, I guess,” I said. “I mean, look at Wister Wemembers.” I never thought I’d be this grateful to the yearbook kids for getting my name wrong.
“Which,” Tess said, “was in black and white anyway. So even if people want to look you up for purposes of cross-referencing, they’ll get doubly thrown off your trail.”
Look me up? That sounded simultaneously creepy and exactly like something Tess and I would do.
“Okay,” I said. “So I just play it cool.”
“Absolutely,” Tess said. “You can’t go all Pavlovian when you hear the song like you did in the FedEx store. Just ignore it like you’ve ignored every other post-1960 musical act.”
“You’re really intent on making me sound out of touch,” I said.
Tess sighed. “That’s the point. Or, okay, here. Every time you hear the song, just think something really unsexy, like . . . I don’t know, flossing, or getting a colonoscopy—”
“Or the Talent Show Incident,” I said, idly locking and unlocking my phone.
Tess shuddered. “Yes. Perfect.” She whipped out her phone, which was buzzing. “Ooh! And speaking of good news, here is an email from our brand-new, gay-friendly venue.” She tapped up the email. “Dear Ms. Kozlowski, pleased to confirm your blah blah blah, blah blah—oh.”
“Oh?” I stopped squishing the Moonpenny’s muffin. “What’s oh?”
“Shit,” Tess said softly, and then much more loudly: “SHIT.”
A lady at the table next to us put her hand to her throat, like she was literally clutching invisible pearls.
“Sorry, she’s, um . . .” I cast around for a justifiable reason for a seventeen-year-old to swear in public. “College decisions?”
The lady went back to her paperback with a little cough of disgust. Tess, meanwhile, slammed her phone so hard onto the table that my hot chocolate slopped over the side of the mug.
“Shit,” she said, emphatically. “Those ‘socially progressive’ robber barons at the hotel say that they have to enforce extra provisions because the nature of our event involves persons under the age of eighteen.”
“Meaning?”
Tess eyed my mom’s credit card, which was still sitting on the table between us. I snatched it away.
“More money,” she said. “A whole freaking lot more.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The mood at Tuesday’s bake sale was decidedly grim. Tess was silently chiseling oat bars out of a Pyrex, Tall Zach was jiggling his leg under the table, Zach the Anarchist was doodling in his math textbook, and the cafeteria was beginning to drain of potential customers. And me? I was . . . waiting. Watching. I’d been so worked up about the whole thing that I’d last-minute canceled on Zach the Anarchist the day before, leaving him alone to bake and struggle with his Latin and me to listen to Sam Huang play guitar, presumably with proper wrist technique, and stew in my own freaked-out-ness.
Coming to school didn’t help things, either. Maybe it was just because I spent my time with a small, semi-insular group of weirdos, or maybe it was because the Wister Prep cafeteria was a miserable place for people-watching, but today it felt mobbed. Had there always been this many people at our school?
“Nobody’s going to buy these.” Tess flung the plastic knife she’d been futilely sawing with onto the congealed mass of oat bars. “Our stuff is gross. We need to make a billion dollars, and our product looks like dog food.”
“Not all of it is gross.” Tall Zach primped the waxed paper around his fruity treats. “I already sold one of these to a guy today.”
“Was that guy . . . you?” Zach the Anarchist asked.
Tall Zach said nothing, but brushed at his mouth as a clot of semipopular upperclasspeople squeezed past us—girls and a couple skinny polo-shirt dudes I recognized as cross-country captians from last year’s Wister Wemembers. Tall Zach threw them a nod of greeting, which they returned—without stopping to make a purchase, of course—but I just stared, laser-focused as they trailed out together. Had anyone in this cafeteria—besides Tall Zach and Tess—heard the song? Did any of them follow Se
bastian on Pixstagram? Did any of their parents for some reason still get home delivery of the Wister Register and happen to have spotted the ad? I wiped a clammy palm on the front of my jeans. So far I’d been assuming that no one would ever put together that “Natalie” of the song could possibly be me, because besides Tess, no one knew about the Face-Touching Incident. Incidents, plural. But with the news of the album very much out there, maybe, terrifyingly, someone would put two and two together.
“Still. These chia-oat-goji bars, or whatever, that the Cruelty-Free twins dropped off?” Tess glowered at the pan. “I’d pay you not to have to eat this. No wonder we’re not getting any business.”
She picked the knife back up and stabbed it right into the heart of the pan.
“Guys?” Tall Zach ripped a little square of waxed paper from his box of fruity treats. “Do you ever think that maybe it’s not the oat bars?”
“Whatcha mean?” I asked, and dropped a dollar into the cashbox, because the fruity treats were calling to me. And then, for the billionth time that day, I checked my phone. Still nothing. No updates, no announcements, not even a picture of a taco.
“I mean, I don’t know.” Tall Zach tore the square of paper into tinier squares. “I just think people are kind of mad about the dance thing. Like Jake and Max said their girlfriends feel like we’re taking over.”
“Well, we are taking over,” Tess said. “Besides, I don’t care what a bunch of cross-country bros think.”
“I thought this dance was supposed to be for everyone,” I said.
“It is! This dance is so that everyone everywhere can show up and have the best time of his, her, their, or zir life.” Tess scrunched her lips into a little red circle. “It’s not my fault if no one understands that.”
“See . . . yeah.” Tall Zach dropped the little pile of confetti. “I’m not sure anyone outside of this club does understand that.”
“Wait, wait. Let me get this straight. Oh, it’s a figure of speech,” Tess said, when Zach the Anarchist chuckled. “Are you saying nobody likes us?”
Tall Zach slumped his big shoulders.
“Why wouldn’t people like us?!” Tess screeched.
“Maybe because you yell in their ears.” Tall Zach winced and scooched his chair away.
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