‘You’ll still be here in June, won’t you?’ Sam asked.
I sat down on a milk crate and nodded. ‘Only just.’
Carter motioned to the rowing boats stacked behind me. ‘Academy has a team – Rich used to be on it, before he got hisself expelled.’
I filed ‘hisself’ beside ‘toffs’ and ‘poshos’ to tell Ellie about later. When she called, she affected her best British accent to make me laugh and I’d promised to make her a list of English phrases for ammunition.
Richie shrugged. ‘I don’t miss it. It’s bloody cold in the mornings.’
‘Sure you don’t, mate,’ said Carter.
‘Regatta is the end goal, Liliana,’ said Sam, offering me a packet of chips.
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Carter, taking a seat next to me. ‘I’ve got plans for world domination.’
I crunched through a chip and licked the salt off my fingers. Carter was sitting so close I could feel the heat of his arm. ‘What plans?’
‘Fame. Adoration. Millions of pounds.’
Richie added: ‘All the groupies you can handle.’
Carter laughed, but it didn’t sound like Richie was far from the mark. He got up and took his guitar from its case, and I let out my breath.
He looked at me. ‘What about you, Jimi?’
It looked like the flattering nickname was here to stay. ‘You can keep the groupies,’ I said. ‘I’d settle for a Supernova award.’ I’d never said it aloud before, even joking around.
‘You help us write a song like that one about the passport, you’ll get it.’
So my songwriting had got me over the line. All my worry about choosing the right audition piece was for nothing – Carter had already made up his mind in the rehearsal room. I looked up at the flyer. Set list of two original songs plus two covers … all local schools are welcome to enter …
I ignored the fact that we hadn’t mastered any covers yet, let alone written any originals, and asked, ‘How are we meant to enter if the academy doesn’t even know we’re a band?’ I looped my guitar strap over my body and played the opening bars of Bowie’s ‘Ziggy Stardust’ to check it was tuned.
‘Oh, the academy wouldn’t enter the Battle,’ said Carter. ‘They’re above such things.’
‘We’ll enter under Tish’s school,’ said Sam. ‘Reading Comprehensive hasn’t fielded a band in ages.’
‘That’s because every instrument at Reading Comp that wasn’t nailed down was stolen years ago,’ said Carter.
Tish looked like she might kick off, but Sam just laughed. ‘Lucky for you,’ he said. ‘Otherwise they might be more precious about making sure the band actually did go to the school.’
•
We hid the equipment under a tarp in the corner of the boathouse so that the academy rowing team wouldn’t find it in the morning. Then Sam helped Tish clamber into Richie’s speedboat and Carter and I stood on the riverbank, the fronds of the willow sweeping behind us.
‘Same time tomorrow,’ said Carter.
‘And when are we going to get any sleep?’ Richie complained, his hand on the throttle.
Trent had told me about guys like Richie, who assumed talent was more important than hard work. Loads of bands had faded on the basis that their members just couldn’t be bothered. They didn’t call it the ten thousand hours for nothing.
‘All those groupies don’t come for free, you know,’ I said, and Carter’s face lit up. He hooked his arm around me and crushed me against him: he smelled of cinnamon and leather and fresh sweat. The hairs on my upper arms rose and it wasn’t just from the cold.
Richie tossed his cigarette butt over the side of the boat and I felt sorry for the ducks. ‘Same time tomorrow, then,’ he said, and the motor drilled out in the night as they sped away.
After Carter went into the schoolhouse, I hung back on the verandah and called Ellie, but it went straight to voicemail. I rang Phoenix instead, who was surgically attached to their phone. Sure enough, they picked up on the first ring.
I’d known Phoenix since before I could remember. Our mums had met in the Classics department at university, helped each other through their exams, then travelled through Greece and Malta together geeking out at artefacts in museums. When my mum left the first time, Phoenix’s mum, Beck, had come round and stocked our freezer with homemade lasagne and pasta bake, which was thoughtful even though Dad had always done the cooking anyway. When Mum took off the second time, Beck sat on my bed for hours and held me while I sobbed, and when Mum returned, she and Beck never spoke again. When she finally left for the last time, two years ago, it was Phoenix who’d sat with me, though I was too used to it to cry by then.
I wasn’t great at meeting people, but Phoenix smoothed the way for me. They used to sign us up for activities in the primary school holidays – gymnastics or soccer or code camp, always something new – and when we hit high school they were the reason I was invited to parties. If it wasn’t for Phoenix, Ellie would probably never have looked at me – but Phoenix had decided to try skating, and that was how we found ourselves at the skate park one day after school, watching this gorgeous, graceful girl zooming around the bowl.
When Ellie and I started going out I made sure to include Phoenix as much as possible; I didn’t want to be one of those people who ignored their friends when they got a girlfriend. Luckily, they got along fine, and things between me and Phoenix hadn’t really changed. I still helped them out when they fell behind in Maths, listened as they regaled me with their drunken escapades even though I didn’t drink, and defended their pronouns even when I still sometimes accidentally thought of them as ‘she’.
‘Isn’t it, like, midnight there?’
‘It’s just after one,’ I said. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’ve fallen into an Instagram black hole. I’m so glad you rang. You can save me from myself.’
I told them all about the band, and how we planned to enter Battle of the Bands despite having only jammed together a few times. The story took longer than it should have because Phoenix kept punctuating it with questions and their trademark throaty laugh.
‘So tell me more about this Carter,’ they said. ‘This Richie bloke, I’m getting nothing off him, but Carter – now, he sounds interesting.’
‘You’d like him,’ I said. ‘He’s more my type than yours, though.’
‘Musical, charismatic, dangerous AF?’ they asked, and I could hear the smirk through the phone.
‘You got it. Seems like he’s constantly amused by something.’
‘That sounds unsettling. Does he know about the charming Ms Wong?’
‘Yeah, of course,’ I said, taken aback. ‘It’s not like that.’
‘You just said he was your type.’
I rolled my eyes. Phoenix was incorrigible sometimes. ‘To look at, not to touch.’
‘Well, at least you seem happy,’ they said. ‘I’ve been a bit worried about you.’ I’d thought I had managed to hide my loneliness from everyone back home, but if anyone was going to pick up on it, it would be Phoenix.
When we hung up, I tried Ellie again without success, then crept back up the stairs and into the dorm. In the bed beside mine, Freya rolled over, but she wasn’t awake. I slid down under the covers, the new blisters on my fingers singing, and grinned to myself in the dark.
CHAPTER 5
We rehearsed every night except Saturday, determined to be ready for Battle of the Bands. I barely got any sleep, but it didn’t matter: in Carter and Sam, I’d finally found people who loved music as much as I did. Keeping it a secret from everyone at the academy was easy because I had Ellie and Phoenix to debrief with after our late-night rehearsals, and I got a smug feeling of delight every time Verity complained that the band had been shut down.
Richie still didn’t like me, but I wasn’t his biggest fan either. He was easily bored at every rehearsal, giving up early and smoking on the beanbag while the rest of us kept playing. He reminded me of the snobby academy
kids who preferred talking about music to actually playing it. He acted as if no music could be both popular and good, where ‘good’ was defined by his personal taste, and listened to a lot of obscure prog rock without any vocals. ‘Wilderness Rock’, Carter called it – because the bands Richie liked all had day jobs and would never truly ‘make it’.
Carter was fixated on ‘making it’ – he was certain that we just needed to write a great song and we’d be an overnight success. He insisted we write songs together, as a band, which ruled out using my existing tracks for the competition. That was fine by me – everything I’d written about Ellie felt too personal for the band to hear anyway. When we broke for the night, Carter would devour interviews with his favourite bands on Kerrang!, Melody Maker or the NME as if he could unravel the formula for fame.
Sam was two years older than the rest of us, studying for his A-levels at East Reading College and working as a music tutor to pay the bills. He could pick up any instrument and spin gold from it. He and Carter first met when Carter needed a music tutor, and his teaching experience came in handy when he patiently showed Richie the basslines every night, long after Carter and I had torn at our hair in frustration. Sam said he needed music like he needed to breathe – he was there for the pure joy of weaving songs from thin air.
I skipped Chapel every day and hid in the rehearsal room where Carter had first found me, practising my finger work or trying out new song ideas, although none of them were good enough to share.
Tish came to our rehearsals most nights, still in her work uniform and smelling of Subway, but we jammed better without an audience. I was more confident when it was just the band, and Sam spoke more freely when she wasn’t there. She was in the same year as me and Carter, but more confident than most people my age. She brought sandwiches for us all, which we slammed before picking up our instruments, and she never let us leave without getting some photos for the socials.
One night, she recorded Carter and I singing Queen’s ‘Under Pressure’ a cappella and put it online.
‘Should we have videos on the internet when we’re not even allowed to be in a band?’ I asked, but Tish waved away my concerns.
‘Leave the publicity to me,’ she said. ‘I’m going to add a new song every week.’
In the clip, Carter and I shared the beanbag, his arm draped around my shoulders, my guitar abandoned on my lap.
‘I let her sing the Freddie Mercury part,’ he winked at the camera. ‘Because I’m a true friend.’
I watched the whole video, perched on the edge of the schoolhouse verandah after Carter had gone in. The production was rough but my voice was clear and confident. Carter didn’t have the chops for Mercury even if he’d wanted to sing it, but he was so photogenic that it barely mattered, and he spoke to the camera as if confiding in a friend.
My fingers were so torn that Sam had to tape them for me before each rehearsal, but I would have taken a thousand stinging blisters to be part of the band. In the dining hall one morning, Carter motioned for me to join his table and from that day on, I sat with his group – Austin, Benton, Verity, Freya, and him. They weren’t exactly welcoming, and Verity outright ignored me, but at least I didn’t have to eat on my own anymore. A few days after that, I played pool with them in the rec room, and it soon became a regular thing.
Carter started to wait for me on the verandah after Lights Out so we could walk down to the boathouse together. One night I asked how Richie got expelled, and he grinned and told me that they’d taken the train to London to see Arctic Monkeys at Wembley Arena.
‘That doesn’t sound like it’s worth expelling someone for,’ I said, my breath steaming in the cold.
‘It was a Wednesday. We didn’t get night passes and we didn’t make it back in time for class the next morning. Ms Marney called the police – and our parents.’
‘So why are you still here if he got expelled?’
He had the grace to look awkward. ‘My mum is one of the school’s biggest donors. And my dad’s a musician – the academy uses his photo in their advertising. They both think that’s what passes for parental involvement.’
‘Yeah, I looked up Liam Tanqueray online.’ Jazz wasn’t my thing, but the man playing trumpet in the videos was a white version of Carter: the same arched eyebrows, the same smooth jawline.
‘Have you been stalking me, Jimi?’ he laughed, and I was glad it was too dark for him to see me blush.
The more we jammed together, the more cohesive we became, until a sound started to emerge. We were less of a punk band than I had expected from our original conversations and our combined influences; while we were certainly guitar-driven, Sam favoured slick basslines and, as he was the one teaching Richie, that was what we got. I’d always loved mainstream pop alongside Bowie and old-school punk, and I was happy to smooth out the riffs. Carter liked to choose the songs we covered, but left it to Sam and I to decide how they were played. But while our cover versions were coming together, our attempts to write an original track as a group had so far ended in a few half-baked tunes.
A week before the Battle, I texted Ellie.
I watched the screen, waiting for her response.
But if we were going to get over the line, we’d need more than belief. We’d need a miracle.
CHAPTER 6
I was setting myself up in the rehearsal room during Chapel period, the muffled sound of hymns rising from the auditorium below, when Carter poked his head around the door.
‘I thought you might be here,’ he said. ‘I was wondering where you sneak off to every day.’
‘I figured I need all the practice I can get.’ I didn’t need to tell him that the Regattle was only five days away. Whenever I thought about it, my breath came up short.
‘I have a favour to ask,’ he said, loosening his school tie and leaning against the piano. ‘I was wondering if you might help me with some of the riffs.’ His voice wavered a little. I was surprised – the rest of us usually treated his lack of musical proficiency as if he had shaving cream on his chin and we thought it would be impolite to point it out.
‘No-one else needs to know,’ he said, and he sounded almost helpless. ‘You’re so good,’ he added.
‘Hey, I’m only good because I’ve been having lessons since I was eight,’ I said. ‘And I’ve spent the last three years fixated on getting into the academy.’
He smiled. ‘And is it everything you thought it would be?’
I returned the smile. ‘Well, the extra-curricular activities are great.’
We drilled the solos, stopping every few bars. In between the songs, he talked about his dad, who had left his mum two years before, around the same time my mum had walked out for good. He had an older sister who was studying Medicine at university, following in his mother’s footsteps, and he dearly wanted to follow in his father’s – although his passion was rock music over jazz.
But our newfound friendship didn’t follow us into our rehearsal that night: he was just as focused as he’d always been. And while we were all frustrated that our songwriting attempts were failing, Carter took it the worst.
‘Sodding awful,’ he said, tossing my notebook back into my lap. We’d been trying to find some lyrics to go with an underwritten riff Sam had come up with and, idiotically, I’d let Carter flick through my notes. ‘Not a single decent line.’
‘I don’t see you coming out with anything,’ I said.
‘I’m not the one who’s been playing guitar since they were eight. You’re the one with all the experience.’
His words went right through me. I’d missed calling Ellie the last few nights because I’d been so knackered after rehearsals, and today I’d almost fallen asleep in my Classical Composition class. I wanted to remind him that I hadn’t spent my usual Chapel time today on songwriting because I had been busy teaching him how to play guitar, but I bit it back.
‘I told you, man, if we were going to have a bird we should’ve given it to Verity,’ said Richie fro
m his beanbag throne.
‘Shut up, Richie,’ said Sam. ‘You were outvoted on that one.’
My cheeks were hot. We’d never discussed the audition.
Carter turned to me. ‘Why don’t we just use the songs you’ve already written? The ones you were playing when I first met you.’
I hadn’t even shared those songs with Ellie – I hadn’t made it through one for long enough without crying. ‘Those are private. And aren’t we supposed to be writing together?’
Behind the drums, Sam was flicking his head between us like we were a tennis match, his sticks on top of the snare.
‘You wanted to be the frontman, you should act like one.’ Carter’s eyes darkened. ‘That Supernova award you want so much isn’t going to happen on its own, you know.’ He marched out the door, pulling his cigarettes from his back pocket.
Richie rolled his eyes. ‘Just when it was getting interesting,’ he said.
My tears were just below the surface. I thought of the knowing glances he cast me at breakfast; the way his gaze followed me when I sang, like he was trying to figure me out. We’d shared a real buzz as we’d unknotted the songs together in Chapel period today, too. Had I really been stupid enough to think it meant we were becoming friends?
I flipped the notebook open to reveal pages and pages of my sodding awful lyrics. One couplet leapt up at me:
You have always been Mr Cool
And I am an extraordinary fool
God, how embarrassing. Did Carter see that? Turned out he was right. I tossed the book onto a milk crate. ‘I didn’t think it would be this hard.’
‘He needs to be more patient.’ Sam looked over at Richie. ‘Maybe we all do.’
Richie threw him a look. ‘We don’t have that much time,’ he reminded us. ‘Regattle is on Saturday.’
Even without that deadline, it wasn’t like I had all the time in the world. I was already nearly halfway through my exchange. ‘Whenever I try to write anything in front of you guys I get self-conscious,’ I admitted. ‘And my lyrics are … sodding awful.’
Stars Like Us Page 3
