“Mr Fisher…he was wondering where you were,” I mumble, suddenly feeling once again like Sarah’s gawky little sister and not Ben’s efficient PA under Angel’s disparaging gaze. And I resent that, just like I resent Pamela still acting all petulant and moody on me this week. It’s time I left all that juvenile behaviour and feelings behind. If things are changing for me, then it’s time I changed myself too.
“So?” Angel shrugs, willing me to sod off with her hooded-eye glare.
Angry bubbles of resentment froth in my chest, leaving me with a bitter taste on my tongue. I felt awful for Angel when I read her e-mail on Sunday, but it’s hard to feel sorry for her when she’s talking to me like I’m a lower life form than an amoeba.
“I know what happened at the party,” I hear myself tell her calmly.
Angel frowns at me, not sure what I’m saying; not sure if her sleazy secret is safe or not.
Hey, guess what, Angel – it’s not.
“I read what you wrote to Sarah,” I carry on. Something stops me from announcing that I saw her and Joel…together in Sarah’s room; maybe it’s that old shoot-the-messenger thing. If I say I watched Angel through the crack in the door, I come out looking like I was spying on her, doing the whole peepshow routine. If I miss that bit out and go straight to Sarah’s part in all this, then I come out smelling sweeter, if you see what I mean.
“And how exactly did you see what I wrote to Sarah?” Angel growls, turning away from the sink to face me. Her olive skin has turned grey and ashen, her eyes black and hard in her pale face.
“Sarah left it open on the computer we share. It was right in my face: I couldn’t help seeing it,” I reply, clutching my clipboard and taking a surreptitious deep breath to make myself stand taller.
“That was private!” Angel practically spits out.
“I’m—I’m sorry, but it can’t have been that private,” I hear myself ricochet back. “Y’see, the e-mail was from Sarah to Cherish. Your message just happened to be copied on to it!”
Angel has turned into a blur of blanched face and spinning, black plait pushing past me. There’s nothing I can do apart from run behind her, watching her feet stamp with every hurried step along the polished lino corridor towards the hall. In my head, all I can make out is the thunder of my own feet, my own frantic heartbeat and breathless panting outracing them.
“You complete cow, Sarah Collins!” I hear Angel curse, before I barge my way through the still swinging double doors of the hall. “You think it’s funny telling my business to the world? Like my life’s some big joke?!”
I see Sarah now, still hunched on the amp, as Angel scrambles up the stairs at the side of the stage. She’s got that expression on her face that I know so well – the Sweetpea face, the all-innocence face.
It’s not doing anything for Angel.
“Hey, everyone!” Angel bellows at the top of her voice, throwing her arms out wide to an imaginary audience. “I LOST my VIRGINITY on Saturday!! Did everyone in town HEAR that? Or did you all get an E-MAIL about it from Sarah ALREADY?!”
Sarah sits open-mouthed, like she’s watching a road traffic accident happen. Cherish has slapped her hands over her face and both the boys are gobsmacked. I swivel my head around quickly to see what Ben—Mr Fisher makes of all this, but he’s nowhere to be seen.
“You mailed her message to other people? Not just me?!” Cherish stares hard at Sarah, dropping her hands from her face and thumping clenched fists on to her hips.
“No! No, I didn’t! I only sent it to you, Cher! Honestly!” Sarah whines.
I always think of Sarah as model-tall and confident, but right now there’s no smug smile of confidence on her face and it’s as if she’s shrinking under the shocked and disapproving gaze of the rest of the band – including Conor, who looks like he feels nothing but disgust for my sister, and maybe for himself for falling for her in the first place…
“It doesn’t matter how many people you told, Sarah!” Angel starts sobbing angrily. “Don’t you get it? I asked you, I begged you not to tell anyone else!”
“She’s right! If she didn’t want anyone else to know, then you shouldn’t have told me!” Cherish snarls at Sarah, going over and wrapping her arms around a jerkily crumbling Angel.
I hadn’t noticed up till this second, but Salman has come out from behind his drum kit and walked round to stand supportively close to Angel and Cherish, which is pretty funny, really, considering he seemed just about ready to bash out a drum roll on Cherish’s head a few minutes ago. And even Conor has taken a few steps closer to Angel and co.
Sarah, on the far edge of the stage, is shrinking away in front of my very eyes, as if she’s drunk from Alice in Wonderlands bottle and begun shrivelling to a shadow of her former irresistible self.
Weird. I’m watching these four people gang up on my sister; I can almost feel the waves of hostility from down here, in the darkened auditorium. How surreal – usually it’s a case of fans being trampled in the rush to fawn at Sarah’s feet. Should I say something? Stand up for her? The second I think of blood being thicker than water, I realise that I’m scratching at my right wrist, worrying the white bumps of healed skin with sharp, tearing nails.
Sarah, I think, is on her own…
“I was only trying to help, Angel! I didn’t know what to say to you! I thought Cherish might…” Sarah’s protestations slip-slide away in the face of blank, accusing looks.
Suddenly, she gets to her feet, letting her guitar fall to the stage floor with an agonised twang of strings.
“Fine. Believe what you want to believe,” she says in a shaky voice. “I quit.”
“Oh, great!” Mr Fisher’s voice booms down angrily in the darkness from the lighting gantry, as Sarah vanishes behind the black-out curtains backstage. “And what are we supposed to do now?”
What I’m going to do now is fumble for a seat in the gloom – I feel oddly light-headed and weak after witnessing that little scenario.
I’m catching my breath, trying to get the shivers to subside when I see Conor staring down into the darkness, searching for something or someone.
As his eyes settle on me, holding my gaze for an endless few seconds, few moments, few minutes, hours, days, weeks, whatever, I forget to breathe and get the shivers back twice as bad…
Chapter 9
Take a chance on me…
“Oooh-ooooh-ooh-ah-ooh, babeeeeeeeee!”
An under-ten football tournament – that was the last thing the Forestdean Arena hosted. And this afternoon – in an hour to be precise – it’s the turn of the Battle of the Bands competition. It’s already mobbed in here and that’s before the audience has been shipped in from the various schools taking part: band members, friends of band members, harassed competition organisers, stressed music teachers…they’re all milling around the auditorium and the two temporary stages as singers take turns warbling through their songs while lighting and sound engineers twiddle knobs and buttons and shout frantically into headset mikes.
While the organised mayhem swirls by, I’ve parked myself on a plastic seat at the edge of Stage 2. Now that my lot have already sound-checked, this is a great spot for people-watching, and the people I’m currently watching are the lace-collared goth band from Market Hall School (called Velvet Death, for God’s sake). They’re distracting themselves from approaching stage fright by scowling menacingly at the wannabe R&B girl group from St Thomas’s (Caramel), who are warming up their vocals on Stage 1. I don’t mean to be cruel, but I think it’s going to take a flame-thrower pointed at those girls for that to happen – their ‘harmonies’ are enough to make your ears bleed.
Speaking of flame-throwers, I could do with one now, to heat me up. This gaff is the size of an aircraft hangar and about as cosy. And then, if I wasn’t cold enough already, I hear something that makes me freeze.
“Listen – it’s like I told you, Mr Fisher! She can do it!”
“Now, come on; you don’t know that, Conor.”
“But I do – I’ve heard her. She sings along all the time, backstage, and she sounds as if she could harmonise just as well as Sarah. Actually, close your eyes and it could be Sarah singing!”
Instinctively, I throw the hood of my fleece over my head and huddle down into its cosiness. But I’m not just doing this to keep warm; I’m trying to make myself disappear. If I try and move away, it’ll be obvious to Mr Fisher and Conor – who must be standing practically behind me – that I’m here, within listening distance of their conversation. So I reckon it’s better if I just stay put and try to think myself invisible.
“I don’t know, Conor…”
“Look, you know and I know that it just doesn’t sound strong enough with only Cherish and Angel doing backing vocals. We definitely need that third voice!”
“But it’s a lot to ask of her. And it’s all a bit last-minute.”
As I listen in hard, I absent-mindedly doodle circles round the names Geeta, Neil and Omar on the sheet of paper on my clipboard. I flick my eyes up from the scrawl and see if I can actually see Geeta and the others: yep, over at the back of Stage 2, there they are, the so-called ‘artists’ working maniacally on the backdrop that they were meant to have finished weeks ago. The reason they’re suddenly working so feverishly on it is that they decided at the last minute to add the band name on, since one had finally been chosen. Working on changes this late is kind of mad, if you ask me. But then they’d spotted the backdrop Dunmore School’s entry had come up with – the name Seeker done out in tiny sparkles of light on a sheet of dense, black cloth – and panicked, I think.
“So what if it’s last-minute? If it means the difference between standing a chance in this competition or not, then what’s the problem?” Conor is arguing. “Anyway, it’s our turn for a run-through in five minutes’ time. We get her to rehearse with us then and if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out. And if it does, well…”
“But how will Cherish and Angel feel?” Mr Fisher continues finding problems with Conor’s suggestion.
“They want to win this thing as much as we do! Come on, Mr Fisher – let’s find her and ask her!”
“She might say no, Conor.”
Wrong, Mr Fisher; she might say yes.
God, am I acting really deluded here? It is me they’re talking about, isn’t it? I can’t stand it any more, and spotting that the millions of members of the hip-hop band from Kendale School are just about to strut by, I swiftly stand up and duck behind them, using them as cover to walk just far enough away from Mr Fisher and Conor to pull my hood down, turn back and casually join them without either of them sussing that I’d been anywhere within earshot.
“Megan! Just the girl we wanted to see!” Mr Fisher beams at me.
I knew it, I knew it, I knew it…
How? Call me deluded (again), but I did another spell last night.
I know…I’m not really supposed to seriously believe in that stuff, am I? But this particular spell, I got it in my head to do it after the sort of uncomfortable few days I’d just had, what with Pamela now going icy cool on me at school, and Sarah giving me the silent, dead-eyed glare at home. It was a spell for confidence – ie, having some – and, I’m not kidding, after I did all the staring at the candlelight and spell recitation stuff, I could hardly sleep last night for this weird ball of excitement burning in my chest. Something good, something amazing, was going to happen today, for sure. I just hadn’t known what it was until I’d overheard Conor and Mr Fisher just now.
“Megan, Conor and I have a big favour to ask of you…”
If Cherish and Angel had still been talking to Sarah, I guess their reaction towards me rehearsing with them would have been as frosty as if I’d landed on an iceberg wearing a bikini.
Instead, they’d just looked confused at this last-minute audition Mr Fisher had announced, which made the whole thing marginally less terrifying for me. (Only just.) I found that the only way to play it was not to look at the two girls; to stare straight out at the darkened hall, milling with rival bands and technicians, and do what I’d been doing in the privacy of my own room up till now, and backstage within Conor’s hearing, even though I hadn’t realised it.
“Good, good,” Mr Fisher had nodded matter-of-factly, once we’d run through the song.
(Suddenly, my mouth felt cotton-wool dry with nerves. How had I just managed to sing?)
“See? I told you it would work!” I heard Conor shout triumphantly across the monitors at Mr Fisher, before turning and giving me a beaming smile and a big thumbs-up.
“That…that sounded great. I mean, together; we all sounded great,” I suddenly heard Angel’s voice say.
My God, she was talking to me.
“Yeah, it really did,” I saw Cherish nod enthusiastically at Angel, then at me.
Wow – this felt like my own version of a fairytale: Cinderella makes friends with the not-at-all-ugly sisters…
And three-quarters of an hour later, this Cinderella is about to see if the fairytale is about to come crashing down around her ears. I mean, this is real now, this is it. I should be shaking, but weirdly, I’m not. I keep my eyes on Conor’s back as he leads the way on to the stage, and find myself wondering what the strange, overwhelming roaring sound is. Then I realise it’s the crowd from our school, cheering us on. Will Pamela be out there, do you think? She hadn’t made up her mind to put her name down, last time I spoke to her, and since she hadn’t been doing much speaking to me at all lately, I haven’t a clue if her face will be out there, staring back in the darkness at us. I tell you, if sheer jealousy is what her stupid moods are all about, then seeing me standing on stage with Angel and Cherish and everyone is really going to do her head in…
For a split second, before I take my place at the mike, I see Salman settle himself behind the drum kit, the huge, spray-painted art backdrop behind that. Geeta and everyone might as well not have bothered spraying the name on (Near Miss, Mr Fisher had decided, after the band nearly broke up when Sarah walked out on them); it’s impossible to read against the rest of the graffitied words and designs up there.
“Are you OK?” Angel squeezes my hand as we group around the back-up mike with Cherish.
A breathless “uh-huh” is all I manage to whisper back.
I’m OK, and this whole thing will be OK, I tell myself. I managed not to mess up the harmonies at our rushed, shoehorned-in, extra soundcheck earlier, didn’t I?
“You look great!” Cherish mouths at me, looking pretty great herself, with her amazingly lush black curls glinting with a dusting of gold that she’s also brushed over Angel’s waterfall of hair and my own brown fizz of a hairdo.
Only it isn’t really fizz any more, since Angel and Cherish got to work on me. I couldn’t exactly claim to be the ugly duckling who turned into a beautiful swan, but I think I could pass for an almost cute duckling now, thanks to the hair-preening and make-up and the spare, black, stretch satin top of Angel’s that I’m wearing.
Me, Cherish and Angel…who’d have thought?
Then Salman begins to tap out time on his drumsticks: here we go. I glance quickly at Mr Fisher, poised and ready to play Sarah’s guitar part, and at Conor, who shoots me that look again – the fleeting glance that seems to have a chasm of meaning behind it.
I hadn’t understood it the other night, when he’d stared down at me from the stage after Sarah stormed off. But I do now; crystal clear. Apart from humming along backstage, he’d heard me singing it in my room, Conor said, the night we’d had the conversation in Sarah’s room, right after she’d more or less banished me to my own bedroom.
Now…now this look is telling me that it’s all right, he has confidence in me.
He needn’t worry – for just about the first time in my life I have confidence in myself and it feels so mind-blowingly, heart-soaringly brilliant that it’s all I can do to stop myself singing before my part actually begins.
Chapter 10
Luck…but which
kind?
No wonder I need a minute alone, to take it all in.
What’s it called again? The stuff that your body releases when you’re happy? Endorphins, that’s right. Well, it’s been so long since I felt this happy that I’m feeling totally dizzy with this endorphin rush. My skin is still prickling with it; I’m so giddy I could giggle out loud.
Me. Second-best Megan. I just sang in front of four hundred people. I harmonised and did this brilliant little dance routine with two of the coolest girls in school, and I didn’t mess up once. No one booed at me, no one laughed, no one told me I didn’t fit in. It was my hand that Cherish held as we bounced down the steps of the stage afterwards, laughing with relief; it was my cheek that Angel kissed when we rushed off-stage, it was me who felt the warmth of that bear-hug from Conor…
But you know, for one second when I was singing, my confidence nearly slipped. I’m sure it was my imagination – it was too dark to make out any one person in the audience – but I was almost positive I saw Sarah out there, glowering at me, willing me to fail.
Just as quickly as that thought squeezed its way into my head, I told myself she’d never show up here today; never put herself through the humiliation of watching the band play without her. Her precious pride wouldn’t let her.
But here comes someone I really do recognise, for real. Through the small crowd dancing in the middle of this huge, semi-darkened auditorium, I see a familiar figure wending his way carefully towards me, deftly moving from side to side whenever it looks like any of the dancers are about to barge into him.
“Brought you this,” says Conor, handing me one of the two white plastic cups he’s holding.
According to the teachers and the competition organisers, it’s supposed to be a non-alcoholic punch-type thing, but I spotted the hip-hop band from Kendale pouring what looked suspiciously like a bottle of vodka into it earlier when the teachers and everyone were still trying to shoo the audience out to their waiting coaches so the after-show party proper could begin.
In Sarah's Shadow Page 6
