Katie Cox Goes Viral

by Marianne Levy

  “I have to pretend it’s Okay,” said Lacey, “or I think they might throw me in too.” She sighed. “I can handle the occasional dunking. But not every day. Not on my own.”

  Which made perfect sense. Man, life can be hideous sometimes.

  “I’m not much enjoying the bus,” I said.

  “But you and Mad Jaz are total besties these days.” She said it in this flat, sad way and I felt very, very bad.

  “We’re friends, I guess. Just about. Sometimes I even really like her. I mean, she’s funny, and she’s exciting and she’s…” I stopped, because this didn’t seem to be going over so well. “But, Lace, she’s like an unexploded bomb. I just never know what she’s going to do next and it’s really…”—I searched for the right word—“tiring. Like, just now, she was the one who wanted me to sing. And then she talked right through it! You’d never do that.”

  “No way,” agreed Lacey.

  We had this nice moment, Lacey blinking at me from beneath her bangs, which were looking pretty good since she’d straightened them for the evening. Which I was about to tell her that when she said, “I missed getting ready with you tonight.”

  “Me too! Oh, Lacey.”

  We hugged, properly this time, and it was the best of the best.

  “I’m so sorry I lied about the video. I’d do anything for us to be friends again. All I want to do, literally, is for us to watch Mean Girls and have pizza. That is my complete vision of happiness right now.”

  “Mine too,” said Lace.

  “I need you in my life.”

  “And I need you,” said Lacey. “I hate before and after school now. They used to be my favorite parts of the day.”

  “And how am I supposed to cope with all this fame stuff on my own? I need our friendship. To ground me. Otherwise, I’ll probably turn into one of those crazy people who only eat blue M&M’s and won’t let anyone make eye contact.”

  “Katie, just stop.”

  I was so busy thinking whether it was the blue M&M’s I’d eat or whether the orange ones were actually better or whether M&M’s were a little too American and it would be more patriotic to have Smarties, in which case I’d definitely go for the orange ones, that it took me a second to realize what she’d said. “Stop what?”

  “It’s not that your songs aren’t good. You know I like them. But all this stuff about a record label—”

  “It’s called Top Music.”

  “Is it?” She fiddled with her zipper, then looked me in the eye. And I could kind of see why some celebrities didn’t like having friends. “Is that really what it’s called?”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, because I didn’t.

  “You don’t need to pretend. Or maybe you do, to everyone else. If you want to stay on Planet Savannah, then, Okay. But don’t pretend to me. Not if we’re friends like you say we are.”

  “Pretend what?”

  “Come on, Katie. There wasn’t a recording studio, was there?”

  Which is when I began to think that things were even worse than I’d realized.

  “Of course there was.”

  “It’s Okay. You’ve let it all go too far, and it’s embarrassing to admit it’s made up, I know, so I’m not going to make a big thing of it. But I don’t get why you need to tell all these…”—and I saw her reach for the word “lies” before stopping herself and saying—“stories about a label and a single and a tour and whatever. I think we’d all respect you more if you just told the truth.”

  “But I did. I was.”

  “It’s over, Katie. You’ve had your five minutes, and now it’s done, and we can all get back to normal.”

  She said it so kindly. And I did think, as a series of shrieks from the other side of the canvas told me that the tent was about to fill up again, that maybe I could even go with it. I could nod and not talk about it again and wait until the single came out. And in the meantime we could be true friends, like before.

  But I mean, really—how could I be friends with someone who thought I was a liar?

  Then there was Sofie, standing, framed in lights, the garden dark behind her, shouting, “Look! It’s Harltree’s number-one superstar!”

  And Lacey laughed.

  “You don’t know anything,” I said. “You’re the world’s most ignorant person. You think I’d make up something like that?”

  She stopped laughing, and a distant part of my brain noticed that I was talking very loudly.

  “I have recorded a single. A real single in a real recording studio. In real London.”

  “You lied about getting Jaz to take the video down. You wouldn’t let me come with you to the studio. You couldn’t even get Savannah her Karamel tickets. I mean, you’ve got literally no evidence whatsoever. Not even a photo. Why should we believe you?”

  “Because…” I searched through my head. “They had special pencils, and giant bowls of candy everywhere, and you could have as much as you wanted. And the room was this bizarre soundproofed box and there was a sort of thing over the microphone that looked like a stretched pair of tights and—how can you think I’m making this up? It’s true. All of it. I recorded a single. My single.”

  “Then why can’t we listen to it?” said Paige.

  “Because it’s not out yet!” I shouted. “There is a reason that this stuff takes a while, and you wouldn’t understand because, unlike me, you are not in the music industry. But there is a single and I am going on a tour, really, really soon. To Madison Square Garden. In New York.”

  “Of course you are, babes,” said Savannah.

  “And Wembley!” I said. Now everyone at the party was standing and staring at me, and a tiny part of my brain chose to inform me that I now had the audience I wanted, just ten minutes too late. “I am playing Wembley Arena!”

  “Let it go,” said Lacey.

  “Fine,” I screamed. “I don’t even care what you think. Because I don’t need you! You’re losers, you know that? Boring, pointless losers. And I have integrity and talent and dignity, and I am taking them somewhere else.”

  I turned around, tripped over the extension cord, and crashed right into Savannah’s stupid cake.

  I’ve had parties end badly before. There was the time when I was seven and we all went to an ice cream parlor and ate ten different types of ice cream, and I threw up ten different types of ice cream all the way home. Or the time I accidentally left in Paige’s coat and then had to spend the next semester trying to convince everyone I hadn’t been trying to steal it.

  Even so, standing outside Savannah’s house, wearing her cake, for a full half hour while I waited for Amanda to come and pick me up was a new low.

  “What?” she said, as I slid into the seat beside her, dripping gold icing all over the upholstery.

  “It’s nothing. I’m fine.”

  “Okay.”

  She crunched the gears and I remembered, as I only ever do when it’s too late, that it took Amanda four attempts before she passed her driver’s test, and even then she only scraped by. And then literally scraped through on her way home.

  “All right,” I admitted. “I’m not quite fine.”

  Her eyes darted to take in my jacket, which was slathered with frosting. And globs of pistachio and rose or lemon and cherry or diamond dust and unicorn tears or whatever it was that Savannah’s poor team of bakers had stuck in there.

  I’d eaten quite a lot of it while I was waiting. But that still left most of it.

  “Katie, have you been…?” Amanda tailed off. “What have you been…? How have you…?”

  “Savannah had a very large birthday cake. ‘Had’ being the operative word.”

  “Is that one of those monster ones from the place by the junction? I love those cakes! They were on TV a few weeks ago; they send them all around the country. They have ones with speakers i
nside them that play music, and they did this one full of live butterflies, so that when you cut into it—”

  “You get a load of cut-up butterflies?”

  “Yes, it’s pretty hard to see how that would work,” said Amanda. “But Savannah had one?”

  “She did. Until I fell into it.”

  “God.” Then, “It was an accident, I hope?”

  “Of course it was an accident!”

  “It’s just…”

  I felt the tears start coming. “Not you too.”

  “All right, all right, I’m not saying you did it on purpose. Don’t get angry while I’m driving, please.”

  I made an attempt at pulling myself together, which meant singing Shania Twain lyrics in my head. I had to do the whole of “Man, I Feel Like a Woman” and half of “That Don’t Impress Me Much” before I was calm enough to say, “They didn’t believe me. About all the Top Music stuff. They think I’m making it up.”

  “Really? Even Lacey?”

  “Even Lacey,” I said.

  “But you’ve got all those views!”

  “Apparently that’s not enough.”

  “Well, I guess it’s understandable,” said Amanda finally, after we’d got through a particularly scary one-way intersection. “I mean, it doesn’t seem very likely, does it?”

  “Why does everyone think it’s so crazy that I could finally make something of my life?”

  There was a long part where we just drove in silence. Well, Amanda did the actual driving, but I did quite a lot of pretend steering in my head, especially when we had to go down the narrow section at the end of the main street.

  Then, finally: “You are making something of your life,” said Amanda. “This is your life. Here and now. Your family and friends and school and home. We’re not…some waiting room that you have to sit in until you finally get called into the amazing place you think you deserve to be in.”

  We drove some more.

  “They’ll see when the single comes out,” I said. “I just wish Tony would tell me when that is going to be. And when are we shooting the video? Or will they use the one we recorded?”

  Amanda made a noise that somehow told me she didn’t know and also didn’t care. She was probably still wrapped up in all that store stuff.

  Finally, we were at the house. I opened the car door and there was that fresh, outside smell blowing in from the trees and the fields and the sky.

  And as we went up the driveway, I saw that the curtains weren’t quite shut. There was a slice of light, and in it, I caught a glimpse of Mom and Adrian curled up on the sofa. Their faces were lit gold by whatever was on the TV, and Mom was smiling at something.

  And I thought, At least I’m safe now.

  I’m home.

  • • •

  “Katie, hey.” Adrian got up the second he saw me. “Glad you’re back early. I was just about to have some nachos. Want to share?”

  “Actually,” I said, “I’m going to bed.”

  “You sure?” he said. “I’ll put extra cheese on. Just the way you like them. It’ll be a one-to-one ratio of cheddar to chips.”

  My stomach sent me a message to say that a load of squashed icing didn’t exactly constitute dinner, so I nodded and followed him into the kitchen. Where he shut the door with an expression that said this hadn’t been about triangular chips.

  “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “I was on the phone with Tony, asking about this tour.”

  Bubbles, gold and sparkly, came fizzing through my chest and out of my mouth in a giddy laugh. The timing could not have been more perfect!

  I saw myself unrolling a poster, maybe in assembly, Savannah and co. being nice, Lacey begging to be my friend again, and Jaz… Well, I wasn’t sure what Jaz would do. Hopefully something good.

  “Oh my God. Oh my God! Because he talked about it at our meeting, but then I didn’t hear anything, and I was starting to worry, but this means it’s all about to kick off, doesn’t it? Oh my God!”

  He put his hand to his forehead. “You can’t go, Katie.”

  “What?”

  “It’s everything we said you wouldn’t do. Foreign travel. Missing your classes.”

  “So? I don’t care if I miss some school. I can catch up easily enough.”

  “No.”

  “Can’t they send a tutor or something?”

  “Oh, and you think you’ll be able to concentrate on quadratic equations in the back of some bus?”

  “I can’t concentrate on them when I am at school,” I said truthfully. “So maybe a change of venue would be helpful. Worth exploring, anyway.”

  “No,” said Adrian.

  “Let me just speak to Tony,” I said. “I’m sure there’s a way—”

  “There’s no point,” said Adrian. “I told him that it wasn’t going to happen.”

  “You did what?” I said, and if it had been a movie, the music would have gone frightening and slow.

  “I told him it was a no-go.” His voice was completely certain, but his eyes, they were looking at the floor, the microwave, the unopened bag of nachos—anywhere except at me. “We agreed that you would be responsible.”

  I hated him, this man, this nobody that Mom had picked up in the pub who was now ruining my life.

  “We did not agree,” I said.

  If it hadn’t been for Adrian, I wouldn’t be riding the bus. I’d still be friends with Lacey, I’d have a house that wasn’t on the verge of falling down, my sister wouldn’t be in ultimate depression mode, and most of all, I’d be going on tour with Top Music. Instead, I'm stuck here, trapped, in this stupid house, going to stupid school surrounded by people who hate me, basically just waiting to die.

  “We had a conversation, Katie. Don’t say you don’t remember because you do.”

  “You had the conversation, and you told me that I wasn’t taking time off from school. I don’t remember getting a say.”

  “You can’t just go running off.” His mouth had little white blobs of spit in the corners.

  “You can’t go telling Top Music what I will and won’t do. It’s not your place, Okay?”

  “It is exactly my place,” said Adrian. “I’m your manager. It’s what I’m here for. I’m the one looking out for you here; you’ve got to see that. I’m in your corner! Record labels, they pretend they’re your friends, but—”

  “Just because your career was a complete failure, you think mine’s going to be too! Well, it’s not, Okay? And you are not on my side. If you were, then you’d have actually asked my opinion before you said no.” The words came tearing out my mouth before I could stop them. “If you were on my side, then we would have Wi-Fi! If you were on my side, then you wouldn’t have dragged my sister into your pathetic failure of a so-called store! If you were on my side, then you would leave us all alone!”

  “I—”

  I must have been pretty loud because in came Mom.

  “What?” she said.

  He glanced at me, a sad, hopeless kind of a glance.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Are you giving Adrian attitude?” said Mom.

  “No,” said Adrian. “Katie’s Okay. It’s all Okay.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I was just…upset about the party.”

  “Why?”

  Honestly, can’t a girl suffer in peace?

  “I fell into a cake,” I said. Which was enough to send Mom back into the living room.

  “Katie,” said Adrian. “Katie.”

  “I am going to bed,” I said. “Good night.”

  “Can we talk tomorrow? We’ll talk about this tomorrow!” His words followed me up the stairs, floating up on a cloud of we’re still friends, aren’t we?-ness, so I shut my bedroom door and left them bobbing ab
out in the hallway.

  • • •

  There had to be a way of undoing this.

  If I really did have an actual tour lined up and ready, and Adrian had only spoken to Tony a couple of hours ago, then maybe there was still time.

  I got my phone out, ready for a text from Lacey, maybe, or Jaz. Or anyone.

  Nothing.

  Fine fine fine fine, I said to myself. I do not need them. I do not need anyone. If…

  Hi Tony. Heard you spoke to Adrian earlier.

  I hesitated.

  Ignore him! He’s just a stupid

  Not very professional. I deleted and tried again.

  He does not have the authority to decide my schedule

  A little too professional. Delete.

  We got the dates muddled up. I can totally do the tour. Excited!!! Kx

  I plugged my phone in to charge and then lay on my rug, noticing, in a sort of vague way, that I had stopped noticing the water stains on my ceiling.

  There was something hard just under my head, its corner poking at my skull. So I reached back and flicked whatever it was across the floor.

  My lyric book.

  I hadn’t looked at it in days. It was like seeing an old friend. A genuine friend, not a two-faced canal buddy accuser-toad.

  The pages were semitransparent, some of them with grooves from the end of my pen, lines of ink running this way and that as the words crossed and scribbled and sometimes fought with each other and sometimes flowed, up the margins and down into corners, around the staples and jumping between lines like when me and Lacey played Ironic Hopscotch.

  There were the lyrics to “Just Me” in three different colors of pen.

  And then, a blank page.

  There were so many things to write about: horrible parties, renegade managers, so-called friends, miserable sisters. A billion songs’ worth of stuff.

  I sat up, took a pen from my desk, and began…

  Then stopped.

  I tried again, the tip of my pen sitting on the paper, pouring out an inky blob. More and more blue, until the paper was wet. Until the point of the pen went straight through the page.