by Oli White
THE VERY BAD THING
I came home to find Mum and Dad still up talking in the living room, and as it was after two in the morning, I knew I was in for a grilling about where I’d been and what I’d been up to. OK, so I’d literally had about four mouthfuls of champagne that evening, so they certainly couldn’t have a go at me about being drunk. Then again, I guess I couldn’t blame them for being a little bit pissed off at me. I mean, I’d done my best to avoid them as much as possible since the video debacle; in fact I’d barely seen them for the past week, and aside from a couple of texts I hadn’t even been in contact that much. I sneaked in quietly and was halfway up the stairs, thinking I might just have got away with it, when they came out into the hallway. Dad jumped in first, sternly as he always did—bad cop.
“You’re having a laugh if you think you can start wandering in at this time every night, son. Can you come down here and speak to us, please?”
“Ah, Dad, I’m seriously knackered.”
To be honest, I just wanted to get into bed, go to sleep and forget the whole evening. I was gutted about what had happened with Ella, and the sooner I was unconscious and didn’t have to keep turning it all over in my mind, the better.
“Now, please,” Dad said, in a tone that made it clear there was no argument.
When I faced them in the living room, it was Mum’s turn, this time with the softer approach—good cop.
“Jack, we’ve hardly see you for the last few days; what have you been doing with yourself?”
“I’ve just been staying at Austin’s and hanging out with the GenNext team,” I said, shrugging. “Surely you haven’t waited up this late just to ask me that?”
“No, we were up talking anyway,” Mum said, “but we have been a bit concerned about how fast all this GenNext stuff is moving, and let’s face it, your behavior hasn’t exactly been in character lately, has it? Staying out late, and all that stuff in the video: partying, drinking and running around like a mad thing.”
“I told you about that; my drinks were spiked,” I said, defensively.
“Yes, but the fact is you shouldn’t really have been drinking so much in the first place, should you?” Dad said. “Look, I know it’s normal for blokes your age to be experimenting with drinking—I get that, Jack, I really do. But given that this company of yours has thrust you into the public eye—really quite unexpectedly—you do need to be careful about how you conduct yourself. At the end of the day, you’re still a teenager who has a year of school left to go.”
This was a reasonably calm demeanor for him, and I was quite surprised he wasn’t going nuts at me. As I sat opposite them on the armchair, clocking the deadly serious looks on both their faces, I knew they meant business. Mum sighed, and shifted in her seat.
“Look, I know your project is going really well and we are really supportive of that, but Jack—”
“The thing is, Mum, it’s not really a project anymore, it’s a business,” I said softly. “We’re actually earning some serious cash, I’ve told you that. I can’t think of another job I’d be able to walk into at the moment with these kinds of prospects.”
“What prospects?” Dad said.
“Dad, I spend almost all my time working on GenNext. We’ve got a company account now and we’ve even taken on management because we can’t do it on our own anymore.”
“How much cash is ‘serious’?” he said. “Because your idea of serious cash and mine are probably—”
“Almost forty thousand last month.”
They both sat in stunned silence for a few seconds.
“For what?” Mum said. “Are you doing something illegal?”
“No, Mum,” I laughed. “It comes through featuring certain products on the channel. We get people reviewing stuff, or just name-checking it, and we get paid by the companies who make it.”
“Well that all sounds very impressive, but you’ve got to keep us more in the loop,” Mum said.
“And can we agree that you’ll cool it with the playboy lifestyle from now on?” Dad added.
“OK, Dad.”
I smiled and nodded. I knew how lucky I was to have the parents I did. They were pretty cool and so easy-going compared to a lot of my mates’ parents. I mean, Sai’s mum and dad were super-strict, and Ava was always having stand-up shouting matches with her mum.
“Well I’m glad we’ve cleared the air about that, Jack,” Mum said. “Your dad and I do worry about you and we want to know what’s going on in your life, especially with all these big developments happening every five minutes. It’s just because we love you and we care, you know that, don’t you?”
I nodded and gave her the best smile I could manage given the evening I’d had, but just as I was getting off the sofa, ready to hug her goodnight, she spoke again, almost in a whisper.
“The thing is, Jack . . . well, there’s something else that your dad and I need to talk to you about. Something important.”
I sat back down again. There was something about the look on her face that set alarm bells off in my head. She looked pale, and Dad mirrored her expression with his own look of dread.
“I told you I’d been feeling extra tired with all the long hours at the salon,” Mum said. “I suspected something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.”
I nodded slowly, a sense of dread creeping over me like a black fog.
“Anyway, when I went to the doctor, he suggested I went to see a consultant at the hospital. Now, I’ve still got a couple more tests before anyone can say anything for definite, but—”
“Anything definite about what?” I said, swallowing hard. “And how come this is the first I’m hearing about you having to go for hospital appointments?”
“There was no point in worrying you if we didn’t have to,” Mum said.
The fact that she was telling me about it now told me that there wasn’t going to be a good ending to this conversation.
“The thing is, if it was just the tiredness, I might not be so worried, but then . . .”
She was struggling to get the words out, and Dad moved closer to her on the sofa and put his hand over hers gently.
“I discovered . . . I found a lump,” she said.
“A lump? What do you mean?” I almost choked on the words, my breath quickening.
“A lump in my left breast, Jack.”
There was a certain way my mum used to look at me when I was a little kid, whenever I was upset or scared. It was a sort of warm-eyed smile designed to reassure me that I was safe and everything was going to be fine. She was giving me the exact same look now. Only it wasn’t working like it always had when I was little. It wasn’t working at all. I felt numb, like someone had just hit me really hard.
“So . . . so what does that mean exactly?” I said finally.
“Well, it’s not looking like it’s going to be good news, Jack. I’m sorry. I just wanted to let you know so you can prepare yourself.”
“Prepare myself, right,” I said in a daze.
This was insane. How could anyone possibly prepare themselves for something like this? I looked up at my loving, kind, beautiful mum and I wanted to shout out in anger and smash something. How was it fair that someone who spent their whole life caring for and looking after people could be facing something as terrible as this? I felt tears pricking against the back of my eyes, but I didn’t want her to see me cry. I wanted to be brave because I knew she would be.
“So it’s not definitely . . .”
“It’s not definitely cancer, no.”
Dad was the first one to actually say the word, and when I glanced over at him, he looked almost as wiped out as Mum did.
“Your mum knows her own body better than anyone, and she knows something isn’t right,” he said.
“I’m going in for a biopsy next week. Then we’ll know one way or another,” Mum said.
I looked down at the floor and watched as a rogue teardrop escaped from my eye and fell, hitting th
e carpet next to my foot.
“I’m sorry, Mum. I’m really sorry for everything I’ve done in the last few weeks. I feel like I’ve mucked so many things up lately, but it’s all going to be better from now on, I promise. Dad and I are going to look after you, aren’t we, Dad?”
Dad and Mum both got up from the sofa to come and sit next to me and put their arms around me, and I couldn’t help it—more tears welled up in my eyes.
“We certainly are, son,” Dad said.
“Don’t start, you’ll have me at it,” Mum sniffed, half laughing.
The three of us sat there, arms round each other, for several minutes, while I struggled to get my tears under control. Eventually Mum gave us both a gentle squeeze and pulled away.
“I think we should all get off to bed and talk about this tomorrow,” she said. “Let’s not get all drama queen about it until we know for definite.”
I stood up and gave her another hug, taking a deep breath and pulling myself together.
“You’re right,” I said. “It might not be as bad as we think.”
“Exactly,” Dad said. “Let’s keep positive.”
Up in my room, I lay awake until it was light with a hundred terrible scenarios rampaging through my head. To think that I’d come home imagining that blowing my chances with Ella that night was the absolute worst thing that could have happened, only to be faced with the possibility of something so much worse. I couldn’t even begin to get my head around it.
I must have dropped off about half eight in the end, and then I slept. I slept longer and deeper than I had for months, years even. I slept until it was almost dark again.
THE EXIT
With my body clock now completely out of whack, I spent that following Sunday evening in the living room with Mum and Dad, watching whatever they wanted to watch on the Sky planner and talking about everything apart from the actual thing we were all thinking about—the dreaded C word. Halfway through House of Cards I got a text from Ava asking me a) where I’d been all day, b) to call her, and c) if I’d seen the pictures from Friday night all over Twitter.
To be honest, I hadn’t seen much of anything that day. In fact the only time I’d even picked up my phone was to send Ella a couple of WhatsApp messages asking her to call me. I didn’t go into any detail; just said I had to talk to her. As Mum’s news really started to sink in, I knew it was Ella’s voice I needed to hear—and not even in a romantic way. Forgetting all the other feelings I had for her, Ella was my mate and I knew she’d know the right words to say and the right advice to give me, because she always did. Only my WhatsApp messages were going unread, and by 9 p.m., when Ava texted, there was still no reply from Ella.
To be honest, the last thing I needed that night was to get into a conversation with Ava, who would probably just keep telling me what an idiot I was when I really didn’t need to hear it. I’d see her and the rest of the GenNext team the following morning and whatever she had to say could wait until then. I did head straight to Twitter, however, only to discover that the pictures Ava was referring to were mostly of Sophia and me at The Abacus together: Sophia sitting on my lap, Sophia kissing me, Sophia’s selfie of us pouting into the camera, directly lifted from her Instagram feed. There were a couple of other candid shots of us holding hands on our previous date thrown into the mix, too. The general twist on the story was that we were the new hot couple, and there were plenty of quotes from her to confirm the rumors, plus with her profile being what it was, I was bound to find myself plastered over the cover of Heat or Closer the following week, even though our brief relationship was already done and dusted.
I dropped my phone on to the chair next to me and pondered for a minute how completely my life had changed in the space of a few weeks and how utterly bonkers it all was. I mean, was I really sitting there telling myself that my face was going to be all over the covers of national magazines in the next few days like it was nothing? How did that happen to someone like me—and with Mum’s news hanging over my head, should I even really care anymore?
When I got out of bed that Monday morning, my eyes and my head felt heavy. In fact my whole body felt as though it was being dragged down with lead weights. The fact that there was still no reply to my messages from Ella wasn’t helping matters either. I spent twenty minutes in the shower, just letting the water run over my body as hot as I could take it, and while I was shaving I told myself that however bad I felt, and however worried about Mum I was, I couldn’t let myself go under. Dad said we had to stay positive until we knew for sure what Mum was going to have to deal with, and he was right. I just had to try to carry on as normal, whatever the hell that was these days. I also had to talk to Ella . . . as soon as possible.
When I arrived at HQ, Austin and Sai were buzzing around like crazy while AJ was pacing around in a slim-cut suit with his Samsung glued to his ear, yapping away and sounding very animated. In the midst of it all, Austin’s brother Miles came bounding down the stairs, followed by his mum. “Sounds like a lot of noise and plotting is going on this morning,” she said, laughing, as she set down five cups of tea and a huge plate of bacon rolls on the coffee table.
“Yeah, it’s like CSI Hertfordshire down here,” Miles added.
“So what is going on?” I said, after Austin’s mum had gone back upstairs. “Can somebody fill us in, please?”
In the end, Austin did the honors.
“So last night, AJ gets a call from CTA in LA . . .”
“Are you talking in code, mate?”
“It stands for Creative Talent Agency, which is a massive talent agency in Los Angeles,” he clarified. “Anyway, they have this artist, Harriet Rushworth, who’s sold, like, a hundred billion records . . .”
“That many?”
I knew of Harriet Rushworth but I’d only heard one or two tracks. I vaguely remembered watching a bit of one of her super-high-budget videos on Vevo, but that was as much as I could tell you about her.
“Yeah, she’s like cool pop, a bit like a slightly more edgy Taylor but with red hair. She’s huge over there and in most of Europe . . . but she’s not as big here yet . . . and they want to build her profile, so . . .”
Austin sounded like he could hardly breathe, so Sai shoved a bacon roll in his mouth and took over while AJ continued his ever more urgent-sounding phone conversation.
“They want to promote Harriet in the UK, but they want people to discover her rather than forcing a whole cheesy marketing campaign down everyone’s throats . . . and they think GenNext is the perfect tool.”
“They think the direction we’ve taken is sick and they’ve asked if we could fly over and film an interview with her for the site ASAP,” Austin said, his mouth still full of food.
“Seriously?”
“Totally!”
“We’re going to LA?”
“We’re going to LA!”
It took a few seconds for the data to unscramble in my brain, and when it did, I could hardly believe what I was hearing. This was huge. The chance for GenNext to actually go global and really make its mark—our little project that we’d started right there in that basement. It was incredible, only . . . I wasn’t exactly sure how I was supposed to jet off to America with Mum’s health hanging in the balance. OK, so maybe that part required some thinking, but right then and there I was simply going take a moment to bask in the glorious news and drink a cup of celebratory PG Tips. Surely I deserved that after the last couple of days, right?
“It’s all set,” AJ announced, finally off the phone and grinning like a fool. “We can fly out on Thursday morning. My people at Metronome will coordinate the details with CTA and we’ll do the interview with Harriet on Saturday. It’s going to be big, fellas, in front of an audience going out live online worldwide.”
“Get in!” Austin said, fist-pumping the air.
Miles wasn’t quite as thrilled. “You guys are so lucky—I want to go to LA.”
“Maybe next time, little bro,” Austin smiled, ruf
fling his brother’s hair.
“Somebody needs to phone Ella,” I said—and yeah, that was pretty much where my happy moment ended.
“I wouldn’t bother phoning her, guys.” Ava had just arrived and was standing at the bottom of the stairs, hands on hips, looking like she was about to burst into tears.
“What’s going on, Ava?” I said, worried by the expression on her face. “Where’s Ella?”
“She’s gone, Jack. I spent half of yesterday trying to persuade her that she was making a massive mistake, but she wasn’t having it.”
I put my cup down on the desk in front of me and stared back at Ava, my heart rate rising by the second.
“What do you mean, she’s gone? Where’s she gone?”
Ava sighed and sat down on the bottom step, running her hands though her bleached hair nervously.
“Come on, Ava, this is important,” Sai said urgently.
“You know her dad was about to go to Canada on business? Well, he asked Ella if she wanted to go with him, and she said yes,” Ava said. “At the moment she feels like she’s done with GenNext; it’s all been too much. She knows she screwed up big time with Hunter and she feels like an idiot, and then there’s the whole situation with . . . well, you know.”
“We don’t bloody know,” I snapped. “The whole situation with what, Ava, what?”
“Look, don’t shoot the messenger, right?” Ava yelled, jumping off the step and striding over to face me. “She felt stupid because she was trying to let you know how she felt about you, and there you were with Sophia all over you like chickenpox, and now she just wants to run away from it all, OK? Do you understand now?”