Katie Cox vs. the Boy Band

by Marianne Levy

  “Morning all,” said Adrian. “Um, Zoe said to apologize, but she’s on an early shift today, so she’ll see you all later.”

  “I thought her early shift was next week,” I said.

  “No,” said Adrian. “It’s today.”

  “It’s definitely next week,” I insisted, because it was.

  “Avoiding me, is she?” said Dad.

  Adrian gave me a look, and I decided I’d shut up for a while.

  “Nasty leak you had there,” said Dad, nodding at the weird marks on the ceiling above the fridge. “You’ll want to get that repaired.”

  “Yup, it’s on the list,” said Adrian, and I guess it was because it was so early that he sounded a little bit exhausted.

  Dad went back to his bagel for a while. Then, he said, “Hey, Katie, want a lift to school?”

  “Total yes!” I thought about it for a second. “Do you have a car? Already?”

  “Nah, I’ll take Adrian’s. You don’t mind. Do you, Ade? Give us a chance to do some father-daughter bonding.”

  “But you’re not insured, Benj.”

  Dad gave him a playful smack in the stomach. “Just this once.”

  “But—”

  “Oh, go on,” I said. Because, really, a chauffeured ride to school with Dad versus a bus trip watching Nicole waxing her arm hair with duct tape—it wasn’t much of a contest.

  Adrian made a grab for the kitchen counter, but Dad’s hand was already there. Then Dad was holding up the car keys.

  “Ready when you are, Katie.”

  So we whizzed past the bus stop and zoomed along by the fields, and Dad drove far too fast, and it was awesome. And then, way too soon, I was getting out at the drop-off by school and heading for the classroom, with a whole six hours before I’d see him again.

  • • •

  “Katie,” said Lacey, staggering in and plunking herself down into her chair. “Why aren’t you answering your phone?”

  I wrenched my mind back from the Amazing Dad Show and tried to focus. “I’ve been…very…busy.”

  “You’re sulking about your birthday, aren’t you? I knew you would, and you are.”

  “Am I?”

  “Honestly, Katie, get over it.”

  “I’m over it,” I said. Then, as I really digested what she’d said, “It’s been kind of a mess at home, that’s all.”

  “Ri-iiight.” Lacey folded her fingers under her chin and sighed, and I gradually became aware she was waiting for me to ask her something.

  I wasn’t sure what, so I just said, “So…what’s the…you know…?”

  Lacey sighed. “The concert was just…” She searched for the right word. “Like…I mean, when they sing, Katie. I thought I’d die. Honestly, I did. We were in the middle of the front row, and when Kurt did ‘Beautiful Girl,’ he looked straight at me and—”

  “Ah,” I said as it all came back to me, like a boomerang comes back and smacks you in the face. “Karamel.”

  “Yes, Karamel.”

  Now that I was remembering, I preferred it when I’d forgotten.

  “I cried,” said the idiot who had apparently taken possession of my best friend. “I actually cried.”

  “Right.”

  “When you see them, live, it’s…it’s…” She shivered. “I’m shivering just thinking about it.”

  “Maybe you should go see the nurse.”

  “So, afterward, we went backstage—we had these wristbands that they gave us. I’m never cutting mine off!”

  She waved it at me.

  It was just a wristband. “Well go on,” I said.

  Lacey went on. And on and on. Stuff about dance moves and photographers and after parties and blah-blah-blah-de-blah.

  “And then as we were going back to the limo, I listened to that song you sent me, which you clearly wrote just to irritate me, and it isn’t going to work, all right? We are going to rise above this.”

  “Are we?”

  “Katie, I know you have Karamel issues, but it was the best night of my life. So thank you for getting me the ticket, and I’m sorry it clashed with your birthday. There. That’s it. Over. Okay? And did you find anything at all to say about that poem because I didn’t, and I basically wrote a whole page about nothing, and English is next, and I’m worried McAllister will notice.”

  The bell rang.

  And I saw that I had a choice. I could continue being annoyed, or I could do the sensible thing and try to move on.

  Or I could pretend to move on while being secretly still a little annoyed, which is what I decided I’d do, because when someone offers you the Hand of Friendship, you have to take it, or they’ll just hate you forever.

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s over.”

  She nodded. “Good. Now, what do you mean, it’s all been a mess at home?”

  “Dad’s back,” I said, and hearing myself say the words was kind of a relief. Because while, obviously, as far as Dad was concerned, everything was 100 percent positive and completely fine, it was all getting a little complicated. And it might be useful to say everything out loud and untangle it with someone who cared about me. Yes, it would be good to double-check with Lacey that everything was as totally all right as I definitely knew that it was.

  “Your dad? Whoa. Has there been major drama?” Lacey did this exaggerated frowny face. “No wonder you’ve been so grumpy.”

  “Minor drama,” I said. Then, because that wasn’t quite true, I said, “I mean, medium-level drama. Anyway, the point is…”

  Only, I never got to tell Lacey what the point was because Savannah came drifting up and put her arm around Lacey’s shoulders, drawing her away.

  “Hi-hi.”

  For someone who’d stayed out very late at a celebrity party, Savannah was looking surprisingly fresh, her hair somehow glossier than usual, and even her eyelashes curled to perfection. Maybe she didn’t undress after she got home, but just climbed into some kind of Barbie packaging and slept standing up.

  “Katie, have you heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “Amaze,” said Savannah.

  “What?” I said. “Spit it out. We have to get to English.”

  “Should I tell her?” said Lacey, as though I wasn’t even there.

  “No, I’ll do it,” said Savannah. “Katie. Are you ready? Because this changes everything.”

  I was finding it very hard to be the chilled-out person I usually am. “What changes what?”

  “I’m going out with Kolin. From Karamel. Kolin from Karamel.”

  “Oh, right,” I said.

  This was clearly not the reaction Savannah had been expecting.

  “I am going out with Kolin from Karamel.”

  “Yes, I get it.”

  “She doesn’t care,” said Lacey. “You know how she feels about them. It’s like she’s missing part of her brain or something.”

  “Or you are,” I murmured.

  Savannah didn’t show any sign of having heard me. “So after the show, we all go to the party, and I can feel someone looking at me. And it’s him! It’s Kolin! And we talked and talked, and it turns out we like tons of the same things, and then he gave me his number, and I gave him mine, and now he’s my boyfriend.”

  “That’s great, Savannah,” I said. “You two sound perfect for one another. You like Karamel. He’s in Karamel. It’s a match made in heaven.”

  Once, Lacey would have laughed. Now, she said, “Maybe it is.”

  Then the two of them fell into step ahead of me, Savannah’s gold-plated phone glinting between them like a stupid expensive phone that had been covered in stupid expensive gold.

  “Our pics have been getting some major play,” Savannah said. “Like, major major.”

  “Wow,” said Lacey.

  I drop
ped back a little. They’d probably slow down and wait for me.

  “Oooooh, Kol posted the twinkle-lights one! I am so glad he is my boyfriend.”

  “Yay, me too!”

  It was almost as though they preferred to talk to each other than to me!

  “Oof, the Karamel fans are sooooo jealous,” said Savannah. “Total eeek. I’d probably better change my profile name.”

  “And maybe not have your avi be the one of you kissing Kolin,” said Lacey.

  “Let’s not go crazy,” said Savannah. “I mean, I’m, like, not going to let the haters control my life, you know? Just because I am lucky enough to have someone from a very major band as my boyfriend. I cannot live a lie.”

  “No,” said Lacey. Then: “Oh no. No, no, no.”

  “No! Nooooooo!”

  They stopped and turned, and a very pathetic part of me actually felt grateful for a little eye contact.

  “Katie,” said Lace. “You need to see this.”

  Savannah held up her phone.

  It was the feed from Kurt_Karamel.

  “No,” I said. “I do not want to hear about last night anymore.”

  “K! This is important!”

  “It’s not! It’s really not.”

  “Um, actually, Katie…”

  “How are we still talking about this?” I said in this sort of shriek. “Yay, you went to see Karamel. Woo, you partied backstage. Squee, Kolin and Savannah are now an item. I’m. Not. Interested.”

  “Is she okay?” said Savannah. “She doesn’t seem okay. Katie, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “But I would be even more fine if we could just talk about something else.”

  People were stopping and turning around. “Look at it, Katie.” Lacey’s voice was serious.

  “No!”

  “You have to look!”

  “No!”

  “Katie, you have to read this.”

  “Why?”

  “Read it.”

  The screen was right in front of my eyes, and I focused long enough to see:

  Kurt_Karamel:

  Hey there.

  Found out about this last night.

  Kinda upset as I was a big fan of hers

  Peace and love

  Kurt x

  And underneath was a link.

  The phone began to sing in my voice:

  Can’t stand the boy band…

  Kurt had posted my song.

  “Ha ha ha ha ha,” said Jaz. “You insulted Karamel. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.”

  There was quite a lot more of this, but it’s way boring written down.

  We were on the bus because despite promising me a ride home—“While I’m around, my princess will not be using public transportation”—Dad had failed to materialize. I’m guessing Adrian had wanted his car back, which is kind of selfish.

  Anyway, Jaz and I were in the back, watching Nicole trying to hack some false nails from her fingers.

  “She didn’t realize you have to pay to get them taken off again,” said Jaz as Nicole attacked them with the end of a compass.

  The bus went over a bump, and I looked away. The windows were smeary on the inside, and the outsides were coated with these vague gray spots of yuk.

  Then a cheer. “First one’s off!” said Fin.

  “Great!” I said, hoping there hadn’t been too much collateral damage.

  Then Jaz remembered about the Karamel thing again. “But how did he get ahold of the song? I thought you only sent it to Lacey.”

  “I did,” I said, a tiny area of my brain registering that Jaz sounded a little hurt, but really, there was no time for that now. “I sent it in a private message.”

  “Then how did he…?”

  I thought back to that terrible moment a couple of hours earlier, as we all stood outside the English room, staring at each other.

  “Lace, did you send it to Kurt?”

  “Of course I didn’t!” said Lacey. “How could I?” Long pause.

  “I did send it to Sofie, though. It was too noisy to hear it in the limo, so she wanted to listen when she got home.”

  We all turned to Sofie.

  “I only sent it to Devi Lester,” she said.

  “How did Devi Lester…? Why Devi Lester? And how did it get from Devi to—”

  “Okay, that would be me.” Paige let out this fluttery laugh. “So Devi has this really fun messenger group. It’s so fun, Katie, you should get him to add you. Anyway, he has this group, and whenever he finds something fun, he shares it, and normally it’s just Nicole squeezing zits or whatever, but this time, it was you, which is fun, so Devi sent it out, and I saw it, and I was all, like, ‘Ooooh’ and I kind of sent it to Mom because she’s a fan of yours.”

  “Yeah,” said Jaz, who was clearly starting to get a little bored with this story. “So that’s how it got from Devi to Paige’s mom. But how did it go from Paige’s mom to Kurt from Karamel?”

  “I’m getting to that,” I said. “So, Paige’s mom, apparently, sent it to Cindy, you know Cindy? She runs that shop, in town. Cindy’s. And Cindy sent it to…”

  “Savannah.”

  Savannah looked up from her phone and smiled.

  “What?”

  “Savannah, did you send Kurt from Karamel an MP3 of Katie being stupid?”

  “No!” said Savannah.

  “Then, how…?”

  “I sent it to Kolin!” She applied a little bit of Lancôme juicy tube and smacked her lips. “He’s my boyfriend.”

  I was brought back to reality by a bunch of Jaz cackles.

  “It’s not that funny.”

  “Isn’t it?” said Jaz.

  “Lacey’s ready to kill me. And what about all their fans? I’m probably going to have to sleep with a baseball bat by my bed. And—”

  “Katie, calm down. These are people who like Karamel.” Jaz tried not to smile and failed. “I guess they might snuggle you to death…”

  “Seriously, though. I was thinking, if I call Tony, he can get them to take it down and maybe we can get the police on it or something, I mean, it’s stealing, isn’t it? Sticking someone’s song online without permission. Isn’t it?”

  For a second, she actually looked reasonably serious. “Seriously? I’ve listened to it, and I like it.”

  “What! When?!”

  “Just now. While you were talking.” She lifted up her hair to show an earbud, nestling deep in her ear.

  “Oh.”

  “And I think it’s cool.”

  Not that I was especially out to impress Jaz. But… “Do you?”

  “Yeah,” said Jaz. “I do.”

  I stared at Jaz’s face and thought how different she and Lacey were. With Lace, I know completely what she looks like, how she has a pointy chin and milky skin and freakily tiny ears. Jaz’s face, even though I saw it every day, was still kind of a mystery, with its hugely penciled brows and lumps of covered-up zits and angles of cheekbone that seemed to change according to her mood or my mood or the weather or maybe according to how much blush she was wearing.

  And she thought my song was cool. We’d reached my stop. So I got off.

  • • •

  With a house as vibrant and ever changing as ours, there’s always something new to enjoy. Last week there’d been the windowsill underneath Mom and Adrian’s bedroom falling off and landing on top of the porch. That weekend, Adrian had hacked away some of the ivy around the side, revealing that part of the house we’d thought had been made of bricks was actually just scraps of lumber held together by a few rusty nails and half a “For Sale” sign from 1996.

  And today, there was a huge black car parked outside. Huh.

  I took a couple of deep breaths and then went in.
To see Tony Topper, head of Top Music, sitting next to Dad, in our living room, being handed a cup of tea by Adrian.

  “Hi,” I said. “Would you like some tea? Hold on. You have tea. Would you like a cookie?” Stop talking, Katie. “We only have sugar cookies, and they’re mostly crumbs because I dropped the shopping bag.”

  Tony very sensibly ignored all this and just said, “Katie, I hope you’re well.”

  He was so sharp and tanned that he made everything else seem sort of insubstantial somehow. Like he was an actor, and our house was a film set, and if you gave the walls a push, they’d tip over.

  Which, come to think of it, they probably would.

  “I come bearing good news,” he said, smiling with his white, white teeth. “You’re aware of the Teen Time Awards?”

  “With the poppy bands and the cheesy presenters and the pathetic embarrassing concert at Wembley that’s supposed to be spontaneous, but everyone knows is rigged and rehearsed, and the speeches that are always really heartfelt and sappy and basically make me want to puke?”

  “Yes,” said Tony. “That. You’ve won a Teen Time Award.”

  “God, I hate them so much… Did you say I won?”

  “Yes. The People’s Act. The people voted, and they picked you.”

  “Whaaaaaaaaaaat?” If I’d been in a film, it would have done that thing where the background rushes past, and my face goes super close up. “I won an award?”

  “You won the People’s Act Teen Time Award, yes.”

  “I won?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t believe I won!”

  “Well, you did.”

  “That’s unbelievable!”

  “Believe it.”

  “I can’t!”

  Tony turned to Adrian. “Is she all right?”

  “In my experience,” said Adrian, “this might go on for a while. You can sometimes jolt her out of it by offering her a slice of pizza.”

  I calmed down. “It’s just, I don’t win things. I’m not a winning kind of a person. Like”—I tried to explain—“if there’s a raffle, say, I just know that I won’t pick the right number. I physically can’t. The winning tickets see my fingers coming, and they recoil.”

  “Maybe,” said Tony, taking a delicate sip of tea. “But this involved people casting votes. So it’s not chance.”