Unrequited

by Emma Grey

Kat’s glad he can’t see her flush bright red. And she wants to kill her sisters.

  Sushi? Just the two of them? She’s shaking with nerves already, and has to remind herself that, just eight days ago, she was ignoring Angus at his own concert. Rudely. It was easy to be confident then. Note to self: He’s just a normal boy! Albeit an extremely famous one, with whom practically everyone she knows is thoroughly infatuated. Everyone except her, of course.

  ‘All right,’ she says. ‘I’ll be there around one-thirty.’

  ‘Good. And don’t worry,’ he says, ‘if you get caught I’ll write a note for your teacher . . .’

  She finds herself laughing out loud to no one, because he’s hung up.

  Okaaay, then. It’s on.

  She, Kat Hartland, is about to break a school rule . . .

  She’s still staring at the phone when it rings again and she answers it before checking the number.

  ‘I know, I know,’ she says. ‘You forgot to write down her name. It’s Miss Berger. And she’s big on cross-country running and punctuality . . .’

  ‘Kat?’

  Oh!

  ‘Joel! Sorry. I thought you were . . . someone else. I was just on the phone with Angus.’

  There’s a momentary silence at Joel’s end, and then he says, ‘Kat, are you allowed out at lunch? We need to talk.’

  WE NEED TO TALK. Awful, awful sentence.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong, but there’s something I want to tell you about. Talk with you about, really. I thought maybe I could pick you up and we could grab something to eat at the shops near your school? Sushi, maybe?’

  ‘I’m going to kill those two!’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The Twitter thing! But Joel, the problem is, I’m going to see Angus at lunchtime. He thinks we’re running out of time to get this song recorded.’

  ‘How are you going to get there and back in a lunch hour? Don’t you have classes?’

  ‘I’m not going back to school.’

  More silence.

  ‘I could meet you in the city at four?’ she suggests, hopefully. ‘Angus has sound check.’

  ‘I can’t at four, Kat. That’s partly what I wanted to talk about. I’ve got another meeting. Maybe tomorrow after school?’

  ‘I’m in rehearsal then. With Sarah. We could catch up quickly afterwards? Maybe with Sarah, too?’

  He pauses for a second. ‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea. We’ll figure something out. I’ve got to go. Lecture at eight. Kat. Be careful, okay?’

  She wants to ask him why it isn’t a good idea that he meet her at the Seymour Centre with Sarah, but he’s gone. For someone who isn’t in a relationship with Sarah Elliott, Joel is extremely weird about her. There has to be something going on and, if there is, then he’s been lying to her.

  And that doesn’t make any sense.

  Chapter 34

  Chemistry is hard enough at the best of times. It’s even harder when your eyeballs are glued to the clock and you’re counting the minutes before checking out of school for ‘lunch and a free period’, i.e. skipping school and sneaking around with the hottest singer in the most scorching boy band on the planet. Or so Jess and Annie’s latest edition of Total Girl describes him.

  Kat’s partnered with Lucy for the in-class experiment. She nearly drops a test tube of acid when the girl on the bench behind them starts humming one of Unrequited’s songs.

  Lucy looks at her suspiciously. ‘What has gotten into you, Kat?’ she whispers.

  ‘Lucy! Katherine! Silence, please. These are test conditions.’

  Kat looks at her friend and smiles apologetically, wishing she could tell her how little her nerves have to do with passing chemistry and how much they have to do with her life spiralling spectacularly out of control in a big, exciting, terrifying way. But she can’t.

  She gets to the bit where they have to balance the equations in the lab report and the letters start swimming on the page. Is this an alien language? She can do this. She’s good at chemistry, usually — just not when she’s fifteen minutes away from catching a train to the Quay and asking the concierge at the Four Seasons Hotel to let ‘Bryce Donovan’ know she’s downstairs.

  The last few minutes before the bell rings are excruciating. Has time actually stopped? Is it going backwards? And then when it does ring, she panics. Why did it have to ring! Chemistry suddenly feels like the safest place on earth, despite all the chemicals and the fact that her mind is so scattered she’ll probably mix said chemicals and blow up the school by accident if she lingers here much longer.

  ‘Kat, what’s going on?’ Lucy asks as soon as they’re out in the corridor, heading for the lockers. ‘And don’t tell me it’s nothing. You’re so jumpy!’

  Kat feels awful. Lucy is her best friend. They don’t keep secrets.

  ‘Something’s up. You can’t hide it.’

  She has to hide it, not that she wants to. She promised Angus. Hiding it is hard, though. It’s screwing with her brain. There was the ‘worst mark ever’ in this morning’s mock HSC maths exam. Then there was turning up in uniform on non-uniform day. And forgetting to hand in the art assignment she’d been working on for two entire months.

  ‘Is it that boy?’ Lucy asks.

  ‘What? Which boy?’

  ‘You said after the Unrequited concert that it was really intense . . .’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ It was. It is.

  ‘BTW, have you seen those tweets on Angus Marsden’s profile?’

  Kat recoils. ‘What tweets?’

  ‘With Elle.’

  Okay. ‘Yes, I’ve seen them.’

  ‘What do you think about Angus?’ Lucy asks.

  What do I think about Angus? ‘I don’t know?’

  ‘Surely you must have some standpoint on him?’

  Kat looks around her, desperate for a way out of this conversation. ‘Luce, come on. He’s not a political issue. I don’t need a standpoint on him, do I? I have to go. I have an appointment and I can’t get out of it. I wish . . .’ She was about to say she wished she could get out of it, but that’s not strictly true. She’s agitated about it, but she still wants to go ahead with things. ‘Everything’s okay. I promise.’

  Lucy looks hurt and Kat feels hideous. This is not how she wants things to be between them. And this is probably just the start of how complex things might become, if . . .

  If what? If her song with Angus takes off? If it turns into a multi-platinum selling single or even . . . the start of a debut album? She can hardly even put a voice to that hope. She’s still at school! It seems so out of reach: the daydream of someone who, until now, almost exclusively performs in the shower, with a bottle of Hair Sensations as a microphone. No matter how deeply and secretly she’s always wanted this, it still looks like such a colossal leap.

  Chapter 35

  Angus opens the door and smiles. ‘You’re here. I thought you might chicken out.’ He notices the House Captain badge on the white collar of her school uniform, nods in a mock impressed way and says, ‘I hope they’ll survive without you for an afternoon.’

  She must look as indignant as she feels. He tells her he’s teasing, and he’s sorry, and asks if he can take her school bag.

  But she’s already dumped it on the floor beside the front door, along with her PE bag, like she’s at home.

  ‘Sorry,’ she mumbles. Should she pick them up again? Does he have a special place for bags? Like her mum does?

  Angus tells her that Rule #1 of being a pop star is only to apologise for things that really matter. ‘Waltzing in here like you own the place isn’t a problem,’ he explains with a smile, before offering her a drink, like he’s a thorough gentleman. She’s offended again and he tells her he’s teasing. Again. So she ferrets around in her over-sensitive mind, trying to locate her sense of sarcasm and humour because she’s clearly taking this way too seriously.

  Angus is standing there, looking at her. Waiting for her to ge
t her act together, perhaps? Whatever. It only makes her more flustered, and when she’s flustered . . .

  ‘Can I use the bathroom?’ she blurts. He points down the corridor and she scurries into the bathroom and closes the door behind her. Breathing hard, she looks around. It’s ENORMOUS. It’s bigger than her living room, with a toilet, bidet, enormous spa bath, double shower . . . she imagines them together . . . STOP IT, KAT! Breathe!

  Okay. Operation SETTLE DOWN. She goes to the sink and splashes some water on her face, then looks at herself in the mirror. Gah! Could her hair be any worse? Did she even brush it this morning? What is she thinking showing up at a pop star’s hotel suite looking like she didn’t skip PE after all, and just ran three kilometres. Through a hedge. Backwards.

  Of course she doesn’t have a brush. Or, she does, but it’s in her school bag which is dumped at the door and she can hardly go and get that now. How would that look? Could she use his comb? Hmm. And her face? OMG! Is that a pimple? She wipes her chin with water. It comes off! Joy! Although, yikes — that means she came here with a tomato sauce splodge from the sausage roll she scoffed at recess, masquerading as a pimple. Really? That’s A-list material right there.

  She cleans her teeth with one of her fingers. She’s never done that before but people are always doing it in movies when they end up in situations like this one. Not that she’s ever seen anyone wind up in a situation quite like this in a movie before.

  Literally five minutes must have passed and she still needs to go to the toilet. But she can’t now. She’s missed the window. It’s impossibly late during this bathroom trip to start using the toilet. He’ll hear it flushing, and think she’s taken that long.

  ‘Everything okay in there, Kat?’ he calls softly through the door.

  ‘Sure! Yes. Sorry, I’ll be out in a minute. Or, maybe ten seconds. Just ah . . . washing my hands. Again.’

  Did she really need to give him a precise timeframe? She pulls her hairband out quickly and it snaps! No! He’ll think she’s let her hair down. For him! Dark brown waves fly every which way, and there’s an obvious dent where the hairband was. She’s like a ‘before’ shot in a shampoo ad! She runs her wet hands through it to try to tame some of the frizz, but it’s like moving deckchairs on the Titanic. Unsalvageable! And now she looks like she recently emerged from a downpour.

  She is not calm. And still needs the loo.

  She bursts back through the door and carries on as if nothing has happened, taking a large gulp of the orange juice and mineral water Angus hands her. She calculates that she only has to hold on for two hours and twenty-five minutes before she can use the bathroom in the lobby on the way out. Surely that’s humanly possible.

  Angus looks at her hair. He glances at her chin (great — he had noticed the ‘pimple’!). He asks if she’d like to see something special — whatever that means.

  He grabs the white security keycard for the room and says, ‘Come with me. You’ll love this!’

  They leave the suite and Angus leads her up a corridor to a locked door. His keycard opens it with a click. There’s a staircase, which they climb, opening another door at the top which leads onto the roof of the hotel. Where they’re alone.

  ‘We hired it!’ he says. Hired what, she wonders. Then she sees there’s a heap of camera equipment undercover in a cabana. Props. Microphone stands. ‘No one else can get up here. What about this view?’

  Oh — they hired the roof, as you do! She wonders why he brought her up here . . .

  He’s so relaxed. She gushes about the view — overenthusiastically, given the drastic fear of heights she probably should mention about now. Angus is right near the edge, beckoning her over because apparently there’s a festival on the grass in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art. ‘Come and see this! Wouldn’t you love to be down there on that Ferris wheel?’

  No, she would not. The last time she was on a Ferris wheel, she had a panic attack. The twins insisted on rocking the carriage and Kat had actually clambered off the seat and lain down on the carriage floor in the foetal position, shaking. Even thinking about it now, the world seems upended.

  The thought of actually walking over to where Angus is standing and looking down over more than thirty-four floors is so many kinds of terrifying, it’s just absolutely not happening. She’s glued to the spot.

  ‘I miss the times when I could have just done that,’ he says.

  ‘Ah, done what?’

  ‘I can’t walk out of the lobby without a bodyguard. Wouldn’t get five metres without being engulfed by it all. Fans. Cameras. There’s no “normal” any more. No breathing space. That’s why I love it up here.’

  She feels for him. She really does. But she has bigger fish to fry right now than Angus Marsden’s existential crisis. Like the very real crisis of vertigo, and the fact that she’s about to fall over from it. Even watching him standing near the rail is making her sway.

  ‘Kat, what are you doing?’

  Everything starts spinning. Fast.

  ‘Angus,’ she says quite urgently. ‘ANGUS!’

  She loses all sense of up and down, like she’s lost it on several occasions before. Ferris wheel, glass elevator in a sky rise in the city, treetops walk in the rainforest in Queensland . . . It seems to take him forever to get over to her. Then she feels his arms around her waist. She would protest against it because, honestly, how embarrassing is this? But it’s literally the only way she’s going to get inside without falling over. She wishes it was as romantic as it sounds, but it’s really not. It’s like all the blood has drained from her limbs.

  ‘Have you taken something?’ he asks firmly.

  ‘What? No!’ He thinks Kat’s taken something? Of all people!

  ‘It’s just, well. You were in the bathroom for a while. And now this?’

  This is becoming more embarrassing by the second. ‘No, it’s fear of heights. I’ve had this before.’

  He’s got her. There’s a timber pool lounge about a metre away. He helps her lie down on it as she attempts to get her bearings.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he says. ‘It’ll pass. Can I get you anything?’ He’s genuinely concerned. She’s genuinely mortified. She just wants to wind the last half-hour back so she can start over.

  ‘You know that floating stage in the concert?’ he says. ‘First few times we did that, I was petrified.’

  He was? No . . .

  ‘You’re just saying that to be nice. I’ve seen you on it. No hands!’

  ‘Trust me, the first few times I gripped hold of that microphone stand with both hands. I think I even grabbed hold of Alex at one point when it started swaying a bit. The show director was barking instructions in my ears about smiling at the fans and waving. Waving? Was he kidding? I wasn’t letting go of that thing!’

  Much as she really doesn’t want to imagine the floating stage right now, his story is comforting. The fact that he’s conquered it and is so confident now gives her hope. The fact that he’s opening up to her about it is disarming.

  ‘Thanks for telling me that,’ she says.

  ‘We’re all afraid of something.’

  They sit there for ten minutes or so while she straightens out her sense of up and down, and starts to breathe normally again. Maybe she starts to breathe normally five minutes in, but she doesn’t let on, because he’s telling her stories from his life as a distraction, and she could listen to him forever.

  He’s so unpretentious. He’s not telling her any of the ‘fame’ stuff. It’s all about his family, and his home town in England, and where he went to school in London. And how much he misses that time in his life, and those people.

  The sun is bouncing off his thick, brown hair and he has to keep shading his eyes from it. She wishes he wouldn’t cover them up.

  ‘Look up at those buildings,’ he says. ‘You can see people moving around in the offices sometimes, particularly at night. Don’t you ever wonder about other people’s lives?’

  She’s wondering
about his life, right now, and hears herself saying so. ‘Are you happy, Angus?’

  That trips him up slightly. ‘What a funny question.’

  ‘Are you?’

  He looks away to answer. ‘Yes, I am. This life is fantastic. The travel alone is beyond anything I ever thought I’d do. It’s such an opportunity . . .’

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘You said exactly those lines on the DVD documentary my sisters watch compulsively. Was it scripted?’

  He laughs. ‘You seem to be feeling better?’

  All right. He doesn’t want to talk about it. She lets him off the hook, but it’s a conversation she’d love to have with him some time. It’s one she needs to have if she’s even contemplating going down a similar path.

  ‘Let’s go back,’ he suggests, and he holds out his hand to help her up. She takes it, and he pulls her upright, where she finds that her balance is almost back to normal, but not quite normal enough to stop her tumbling into his chest a little bit. Not on purpose, honestly. He catches her upper arms — pushes her gently away from him, holding her arms through the thin, check fabric of her school dress and looking at her with green eyes that are unreadable. It’s just long enough, and intense enough, for Kat to wonder whether he’s thinking of . . .

  He lets her go. Okay, so he wasn’t thinking of kissing her, then. It’s like her imagination is on steroids!

  Downstairs, she excuses herself (again) and this time uses the bathroom for the purpose for which the trip was intended. Then she looks at herself once more in the mirror and decides that things can’t get any worse. She can’t actually embarrass herself any further. So, maybe she’s capable of relaxing now.

  Back in the room, Angus asks her to sit beside him on the piano stool. ‘You inspired me,’ he says. ‘On the rooftop. Just have to get this down . . .’

  Don’t you ever wonder

  About other people’s lives

  Wonder who they really are

  Looking in from outside.

  What would have happened

  If you’d made another choice

  If you thought of something different