by Robin Benway
“I saw James talking to you today during English,” Sharon said as she sidled up to me. “Did he give you something? I saw him hand you a CD.”
“Oh, James?” I said, as if flocks of guys had been coming up to me all day and I was having trouble remembering who was who. “Yeah, James, he just gave me a mix CD.”
“A mix CD?” Sharon repeated, like she was a mynah bird or something. I was trying really hard not to get annoyed. The situation wasn’t made any easier by Sharon’s posse, one of whom, Natasha, was a mouth breather and kept exhaling right over my shoulder.
“So is he your new boyfriend?”
“No!” I said a little too quickly. “He’s not.”
“And that’s why he gave you a CD? Because he’s not your boyfriend.” Sharon had this look on her face like she was trying to win something, like a game show contestant trying to guess the lowest price on cleaning fluid, and now I was annoyed. And then I felt annoyed at James for putting me in this position, and then I was annoyed even more with Sharon for making me annoyed at James, and then I just wanted to knock both their heads together and be done with it.
“Look, I have to go,” I said, my hand on the door to the building. “I’ve got this oral report for Spanish in two weeks and I haven’t done anything for it yet. I’ll see you later, okay?” I ducked into the building and didn’t get to hear where Sharon would be “eating” lunch that day.
I mean, enough already. Right?
So suffice to say when I went home at three, I was already in a pretty craptacular mood. I had this stupid Spanish report to do and I hadn’t done anything for it yet because my best subject is and always will be Procrastination 101, but all I wanted to do was go play James’s mix CD and read Evan’s message board to find out what total strangers were saying about me. Besides, I had read rumors about a possible music video, and as much as I hated myself for being curious, I had to know what they were planning and whether or not I would somehow be involved.
The hopes of lurking the message board were dashed, however, when I pulled up to my house and saw both my parents’ cars in the driveway. This never happens except on weekends, so of course I went to the first random thoughts that came to mind:
Oh my God, we won the lottery. Now, my parents don’t even like going to Vegas, much less buying lottery tickets, so I don’t know where that one came from. I chalk it up to either optimism or greed.
Then the next thought: Oh, my God, Bendomolena finally attacked the postman. Enough said.
Then, Oh, my God, someone’s dead.
By the time I got into the kitchen, I was having a mild panic attack. “Ohmygodwhodied?” I said breathlessly as I skidded to a halt in the kitchen.
“Someone died?” my dad said. He and my mom were both standing next to each other with a pile of newspapers. The L.A. Weekly, to be exact. Fourteen copies of the L.A. Weekly.
Oh. Oh, dear.
“No one’s dead,” my mom interrupted. “But did you give an interview to a reporter?”
“Um, maybe?”
“Here’s a hint,” my dad continued. “There’s only one correct answer, and it’s not ‘maybe.’”
I set my bag down very carefully on the floor, as any courteous and innocent daughter would do. “It was just this woman from the Weekly,” I said, thinking of ways to make it sound like it was something that happened every week, like getting a manicure. “It was just a couple of questions.”
My dad raised an eyebrow, then picked up one of the papers. “Ahem,” he said, reading aloud. “‘But Audrey has found a bright side to all the attention that her ex-boyfriend’s song has brought her. The best thing, she says with a giggle “All the sex!”’ My dad set the paper down. “I can’t believe I just said that sentence out loud.”
Guess where I get my sarcastic streak from.
“I can’t believe that you said that,” my mother said, pointing to me. “What were you thinking?”
“I was kidding!” I shrieked. “Oh my freaking Lord, I was kidding! She didn’t really put that, did she?” I grabbed a copy for myself and began scanning the article. “We were just talking about the song and…I was being sarcastic and…” I trailed off as I read another paragraph.
In “Audrey, Wait!” the Do-Gooders craft a three-minute-plus song of pop perfection that’s so sweet, you can feel your teeth rotting as you sing along. It’s a song for teenagers, written by teenagers, but damn if it doesn’t remind you of the one that got away, of every girl who has ever done you wrong, put you down, kicked you out. And what does the girl think about that? “It’s all good!” squealed sixteen-year-old Audrey, title heroine of the Next Big Thing. “I love being singled out in public—it’s the best!”
Listen up, kids. This ain’t your parents’ rock and roll.
That bitch. I don’t even like calling other people “bitches” but…that total bitch.
“I was kidding,” I said again to my parents. “I was being sarcastic. She called me when I was late to work a couple of weeks ago and she asked if I could answer some questions and she was nice—she was nice—so we were joking around and—”
I was interrupted by the ringing phone, but my mom just waved it off. “Let the machine get it,” she said. “It’s the tenth call since I got home half an hour ago.”
My dad pushed his glasses back up his nose and looked at me. “Audrey,” he said in his I’m-not-mad-but-I’m-not-particularly-thrilled-with-your-current-life-choices voice, “the article was syndicated. The story ran in some newspapers.”
It took a minute for me to realize what he had said. “Newspapers?” I repeated. “Plural?”
“Plural.”
“How do you know?”
“Your mother Googled your name at work.”
I chewed on my lower lip for a minute. “So the whole country didn’t get the joke?”
“Your humor doesn’t exactly translate in print, sweetheart.”
“Which papers?”
My mom stepped in as my dad began rubbing at his forehead. “Mostly smaller papers,” she said. “Local ones.”
I tried desperately to understand the scope of the problem. “Like, how many?”
Suddenly the machine clicked on and a male voice came over the tape. “Hi, this is Michael Anderson, I’m a reporter over at USA Today. We are interested in speaking to Audrey Cuttler for a few minutes for a story we’re doing on teenage celebrity and—”
I would tell you what else he said, but really, my mind shut off at that point. My skin felt fuzzy and warm and I knew I was doing that fish look again that Victoria can’t stand. “So far,” my dad continued, as if a reporter from USA Today wasn’t asking about me on our answering machine, “we’ve had calls from the L.A. Times, the New York Times, the Miami Herald, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Post—they’re insistent, three messages so far—ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, MTV, and many other media entities with three letters.”
“And People magazine,” my mom added. (She will never confess to reading tabloid magazines, but I know for a fact that she tears through them when she gets pedicures.) “Audrey, what is going on?”
I sank down in one of our kitchen chairs and began creasing a corner of the Weekly. “It’s like the article says,” I sighed. “Evan wrote a song. After we broke up. About me. And it’s good. People like it.”
I could see my dad’s eyes getting wider and wider until it looked like there were two golf balls in his head. “You’re Audrey?” he said. “That’s you?”
Now my eyes were pretty wide too. “You’ve heard the song? I thought you only listened to classical music in the car.”
“I’ve been hearing that song every ten minutes,” he said, ignoring that last bit about classical music. So my mom reads tabloids and my dad listens to Top 40 radio. This day was becoming more revealing every minute.
“How does it go?” my mom asked. “Hum a few bars.”
Now, I thought my dad only listened to classical music in the car, but this da
y was becoming more and more revealing every minute. “Oh, you know,” he said. Then he sang a few bars in a voice that, let me tell you, sounded nothing like Evan’s. “Audrey, wait! Audrey, wait!”
“That song?” my mom gasped. I swear to God, she actually gasped. “I’ve been hearing it every ten minutes. That song is about you?”
If there was one small mercy in this whole debacle, it was that Evan never explicitly mentioned sex in the lyrics. I couldn’t handle the mental image of my parents blithely singing along to a song that talked about me having sex. My brain would melt and run out of my ears. “It’s me,” I said. “Thanks for giving me such a catchy name that rhymes with every third word in the English language.”
Now my mom was humming the song to herself. “Evan wrote that?” she said. “I can’t believe it.”
“Join the club,” I told her.
The phone started ringing again. This time, we all listened, waiting to hear who it was.
“WHY ARE YOU NOT ANSWERING YOUR PHONE?!? OH MY GOD, DID YOU SEE THE ARTICLE? I AM FREAKING OUT, WHY ARE YOU NOT ANSWERING YOUR PHONE?!” Victoria took a deep breath and I could see her switching the phone from one ear to the other, like she always does when she’s so excited and her words can’t come out fast enough. “Please call me, I’m starting to act like Tizzy around here. It’s getting ugly. Oh, hi, Mr. and Mrs. Cuttler, in case you get this first. Everything’s fine, I’m just trying to get ahold of Audrey. Okay, ‘bye. AUDREY, CALL ME BEFORE I HAVE TO RESORT TO SKYWRITING.”
We all looked at each other after Victoria hung up. “Why do I not have a hard time believing that Victoria actually would hire a skywriter?” my dad said.
“The odds are 70–30 in favor of it,” I agreed.
My mom just shook her head and began restacking all the newspapers, even though they were already stacked. “Audrey,” she said, “this is kind of a problem.”
I didn’t know what to say. I felt like I was going to cry—my parents were upset, Victoria was apoplectic, and now everyone was going to think that I was some groupie whore. I hadn’t even finished reading the article yet, but I’d gotten a good idea of where it was going from that one paragraph. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know that it would be such a big deal.”
“Was this before or after you gave the interview without talking to us about it first?”
“Um…both?”
My dad sighed. “We’re not mad, it’s just…well, I don’t know what it is.” He looked to my mother. “Can we sue?”
She just rolled her eyes at him. I guess almost twenty years of marriage gives you the right to not take your husband seriously during serious moments. I filed it away for future reference. “Audrey,” she said again. I was starting to hate the sound of my own name. “Your father and I aren’t upset with you, but we just wish you had told us that you talked to a reporter. Or that Evan had written this song. Is there anything else we should know?”
I thought for a minute. Should my parents know some things? Like maybe the fact that Evan and I had had sex, or that we’d met because he was so drunk that he puked on me? Should they know about the time Victoria and I got sick off peach schnapps when we were fifteen?
Absolutely not. Like I needed more parental drama right then.
I faked innocence. “It says on Evan’s website that they’re going to shoot a video. Is that important?”
She blinked twice. “Are you going to be in it?”
“No one’s asked me to be.”
“Then I think we’re fine.” She glanced over at my dad. “Maybe?”
“What about the reporters?” he asked.
We all were flummoxed by that one. “Sic Victoria on them,” I offered.
“That’s what you should have done with this one,” my dad said, shaking a copy of the Weekly.
“She’s probably already on it,” I replied.
Finally, my mother had an idea. “I’ll talk to my friend who works in the PR department over at the magazine. She might have some ideas.”
“Who?” my dad asked.
“What magazine?” I said at the same time.
“You know, Evelyn?”
Now it was my turn to blink. “Evelyn works at the senior citizen center!” I said. “Her ‘magazine’ is the Leisure Ledger! It covers things like golf cart repair and produce sales at the grocery store! And she is the PR department.”
“You’ll be a hit with the sixty-five-and-older crowd by the time all of this is over.” My dad started to laugh. I could tell that he was much more content with that idea than one that involved male groupies.
“In the meantime,” my mother said over us, obviously a little annoyed, “you”—here she pointed at me—“are not allowed to give any more interviews or appear in videos or sign autographs or do anything that will cause reporters to start calling our home and/or Grandma.”
“Can I still go with Victoria to the concert next Friday?”
“What concert?”
“The Lolitas are playing with the Plain Janes at the Silver Cup in Hollywood. You said I could go last month,” I added quickly. “The Lolitas are gonna be huge and this is my last chance to see them in a small venue before all the wannabe fans get ahold of them.”
“No, that’s fine, you can go,” my mother said. “Just don’t inspire any more love songs, all right?”
There was this weird silence then, which was strange, because my family’s pretty chatty, in case you haven’t noticed, and we don’t really let things hang. But then the phone started to ring again and I just wanted to go up to my room. “Can I call Victoria back now?” I said, and when my dad nodded, I went upstairs.
I didn’t call Victoria back right away, though, and not because I was curious to see if she’d follow through with the skywriting threat. Instead, I put my stereo on so I couldn’t hear the ringing phone, then laid down on the bed and put one arm over my eyes, making the world as black as I could. So many people were going to read that article. My parents. Victoria. Jonah. Sharon Eggleston. Tizzy. Evan. James. My stomach cramped at the idea and I rolled over, taking my pillow with me.
A few minutes later, I felt something tugging at the edge of my comforter, and I rolled over long enough to see Bendomolena meowing at me from the floor.
I’ll say this about my cat: She may weigh three hundred pounds and be a sloth, but she knows when I need her. So I lifted her up with an “Oof!” (me) and a “Meow?” (her) and put her next to me so we could lie nose to nose. Radiohead came on just then, and I sang “Karma Police” to her while petting her ears. Bendy’s the only person who doesn’t hate my singing voice, and I’m the only person who’s allowed to pet her ears, so it’s a fair trade. “For a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself,” I sang, and then the words began to pick apart my heart and I had to stop singing and just swallow hard for a minute and not think and put my hands over my eyes and make everything go black again.
And after it passed, after Bendomolena licked my face and I combed two tangles out of her fur, I took a deep breath, reached for the phone, and called Victoria. “Hi,” I said when she answered. “Call off the skywriters. I’m still alive.”
8 “I’m falling apart to songs about hips and hearts…”
—Fall Out Boy, “Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying (Do Your Part to Save the Scene and Stop Going to Shows)”
SO HERE’S THE FUNNY THING about newspapers: Aside from this whole “syndication” thing, they can also write whole articles about you without your permission. Like the New York Times, for example, which put in its Sunday Styles section a whole paragraph about me and how I “represent all that is different about Generation Z. Their lives are entertainment, their entertainment is composed of their lives. All the world’s a stage, if you will, with sixteen-year-old Audrey Cuttler in the role of Juliet.”
We all know how that worked out for good old Juliet, don’t we? (And Generation Z? That sounds like it should be the name of the world’s lamest clothing store in the world’s lamest
mall.)
Victoria, in a move that shocked no one, had a theory about the whole thing. “You give good interview,” she told me one afternoon when we were in my room, both of us cutting up magazines and newspapers. I was trying to finish one side of my collage, but Victoria was on an entirely different project: making a scrapbook of me. I’ll say this much: It was pretty funny to look down at our amassed pictures and see pictures of me spread out next to pictures of rock stars.
Oh, yes. The picture. That’s been great fun. On the Do-Gooders’ online message board (which added 539 new members yesterday, in case you’re keeping track like I am), someone posted my photo from last year’s yearbook, which then caused a debate about whether or not I’m pretty. Apparently the jury is still out, but the words sux and awww and ewww got used with hearty abandon. I still don’t know who posted it, but I guess it doesn’t matter anymore, because some paper in Arizona saw it and ran it, which opened the floodgates just in time for all the other papers’ Sunday editions.
Try reading the paper one morning while eating cereal and seeing last year’s yearbook photo staring back at you. It’ll take ten years off your life, I swear to God.
Plus, “Audrey, Wait!” was getting more and more popular. They were playing it in between innings at baseball games, according to different Do-Gooders fan websites, and potential video rumors were continuing to swirl around. “I heard they’re filming it at the L.A. Zoo!” one person posted online, but that turned out to be untrue. (Thank God.)
Victoria was carefully trimming around said yearbook photo as she talked. “You give good interview,” she continued. “All these writers and editors are sooo used to the same blah-blah-blah, and then here you come with your ‘I love being famous!’ routine—”
