Katie Cox Goes Viral

by Marianne Levy

No, there it was, along the pavement, a needle-thin sliver of yellow.

  I thumped on the cold metal, once, twice, thrice—whatever the word for four times is, I did it. And I shouted, “Hey! It’s me! Open up!”

  After a couple of minutes, I heard a shuffling and then about thirty different bolts sliding open before the shutter thunk-clicked upward, and Adrian was unlocking the door.

  What I saw was so surprising that I actually forgot why I’d come.

  Because it was just lovely in there. Every last inch of the wall was covered in posters, and fairy lights were strung around a little wooden platform, stacked high with shelf upon shelf of vintage vinyl. The record racks were labeled with these awesome fluorescent signs that said things like, “Groove Is in the Heart” and “Dance Baby Dance” and “In the House” and someone had done a huge mural on this monster speaker of instruments and microphones and notes and hearts all twined together.

  It was cozy, and it was cool.

  Vox Vinyl was ace.

  He watched me stare. “Your sister did all this. We were just this scuzzy record shop before, but she completely transformed the place. Look at that!” He waved at the fairy lights. “She’s even made a little stage so we can do live stuff!”

  “I bet everyone loves it.”

  “I’m sure they would…if they just knew about it.”

  A clubber staggered past, thrown out of Heaven, and by the sound of it was on his way down to hell.

  “Come into the back,” said Adrian. “I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

  I followed him through a door behind the counter and into what must normally have been the stock room. Not tonight, though. Tonight, the boxes had been shoved to one side to make room for a drum kit, stacked precariously in the corner, a keyboard, a couple of guitars, and, on the tiny area of floor that was left, a sleeping bag and our spare duvet. The one used by Auntie Jean’s dog.

  “Can’t really afford a hotel,” said Adrian. “Thought I’d sell my instruments to tide me over for a while, but no one wants them. I’ve made sort of a mess of things, really.”

  Hearing him say it just made things worse.

  “I’ve made the mess,” I said, hearing how lost I sounded. “You were totally right about Tony. He didn’t want to make me a star. He just wanted revenge on you.”

  Adrian had been looking pretty bad to start with. This didn’t help. “The old—oh, Katie. Katie, I’m so sorry.”

  “And now my music career is over. And I don’t care, really, only I’ve made Manda hate me, and I’ve lost all my friends and…”

  Credit where it’s due, he didn’t put his arm around me, and he didn’t tell me it was Okay. He made some tea and then listened while I told him about the conversation in the office and Jaz tipping a vase of flowers over Tony’s head.

  “Good for her.”

  “Yeah,” I said, smiling at the memory of Tony blinking pieces of wet leaf from his eyelashes. “I sort of wish I’d done it.”

  We both laughed.

  “Are you sure you don’t care about a music career?” said Adrian. “If I were you, I’d be pretty upset.”

  “No. Not really. I mean, I get scared when I sing to more than three people at a time, and I haven’t done any real playing in ages. No. I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad the video’s gone, and I don’t want to go on tour. It’s a relief, really. I’ll just go back to school and forget this ever happened and—”

  And then I surprised myself by bursting into tears.

  “What?”

  “It’s just…it was my song. And people liked it… And I was so proud. And now it’s ruined.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I thought of everything that had happened. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure.”

  “Well. You’ll write more.”

  “I guess so.”

  Somewhere upstairs, a toilet flushed. And outside, another set of clubbers staggered off to find the taxi stand.

  “You’ll have more chances.”

  “And so will you,” I said.

  He laughed in that way people do when something is the opposite of funny.

  “I mean it,” I said.

  “I don’t think so,” said Adrian. And from the way he spoke, I could tell we weren’t just talking about his music.

  If I’d felt bad when I’d arrived, well, now I felt bad times one hundred. Times one thousand.

  I’d had lots of worst moments recently. This, though, this was the worst of worst. It was even worse than that encounter with Mom, which is crazy, because she was Mom and he was just Adrian. Adrian, who had a creaky leather jacket and hairs coming out of his nose.

  It was worse because at least, when all this was over, Mom would have me and Amanda.

  Adrian wouldn’t have anyone.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “If it wasn’t for me, you and Mom would still be together.”

  He did this little twitch. The very tininess of it showed me just how much it hurt.

  “I should never have made us go to Top Music behind her back. I knew it would drive her bananas, and I did it anyway.”

  “But I let you,” said Adrian.

  “Still,” I said. “It really was my fault. And I know you won’t be able to forgive me. But at least…at least I’ve said it.”

  He was smiling, very slightly. “I can forgive you.”

  “I don’t deserve it.”

  “Probably not. But I’ll do it anyway.”

  The fairy lights shone and suddenly it was like Christmas. Hope was swooping through me like birds, and if we’d been in a movie the soundtrack would have been rising as I said, “I’ve talked to Mom already. She knows it was me. She’s pretty angry at the moment, but she’ll get over it. At some point.” I knew I was babbling, but honestly, I couldn’t help it. “So, if you really can forgive me, and if Mom understands that this was really nothing to do with you, then…then…”

  “Then what?”

  “Then you and Mom can work things out,” I said.

  He put his head in his hands. “I don’t know.”

  “But it’s way obvious! You should be together!”

  His face told me that maybe the soundtrack wasn’t raising in hope but had faded into sad, slow chords, falling like the misty rain. “Your mom and me… We’re not some loose end to be tied up, just like that.” He stared at me over the edge of the mug, dark hairs curling over those thick fingers, his chin prickling with specks of black and of gray. “I’m not an idiot, Katie. I know you think I haven’t noticed you rolling your eyes at me and telling your friends that you can’t stand me.”

  “No—” I began.

  “I’ve lived alone my whole life. I liked it. Doing my own thing, you know? Everyone paired up except me, and for a while I wondered what I’d done wrong. And then they started divorcing, and I realized I was fine on my own. Always thought I’d be on my own until your mom turned up. And it was good, for a while. But it’s difficult, being in a family. Especially when that family’s not yours.”

  I wanted to tell him that he was wrong. But I couldn’t. It was the three of us and him. It wasn’t the four of us. It never had been and maybe never would be.

  “I’m sorry,” I said for about the billionth time.

  “It’s not your fault,” said Adrian, sounding very, very tired. “But it is…hard. And it’s late. You should be getting home. I’ll call you a cab.”

  “You’re not coming too, then?” I said hopelessly.

  “Not tonight, no. Maybe I’m not supposed to be happy. Maybe Tony was right.”

  It was then, as I was going back into the shop, that I noticed the sign behind the counter. The sign that said “CLOSING DOWN” and all the other signs, saying things like “BUY ONE, GET ONE FREE” and “EVERYTHING MUST GO!”, which is also the name of an album by the Manic Street Preach
ers that I’d been meaning to get. Adrian was probably selling it cheap, but somehow I didn’t feel like asking.

  He saw me take it in. “Yeah. Gonna shut the doors at the end of the week. Bank account’s empty.”

  “But…I’ll tell people at school to come. Everyone loves a bargain, and maybe you could do one of those gigs Amanda was talking about, or—”

  “Katie, I don’t want to do this anymore. Any of it.”

  And that was that.

  What could I do?

  I wrote.

  I wrote and I played and I played and I wrote.

  When I wasn’t with my guitar, time ran slow, and it was like even the air hated me. It was only the music that made things, if not Okay, if not even bearable, then kind of maybe exist-able. Maybe.

  I played from when I woke up until it was time for breakfast, spreading butter on my toast with sore fingers, and it didn’t matter when no one spoke to me in school because the songs were talking in my head. My phone stayed switched off, and my curtains were drawn, and if anyone was worried, they didn’t mention it. Probably they didn’t even care. Amanda sat with Mom in the kitchen until late every night, but I didn’t know what they were talking about since every time I came close, they stopped talking. And in the mornings, we all three moved through the house like ghosts.

  “Aren’t you going to work today?” I asked Amanda, finding her slumped over the kitchen table, stirring some soggy cereal around and around and around.

  “I don’t think it would be appropriate. Do you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “And anyway, even if it was, it’s too late. The shop’s finished.”

  “It’s not! I saw how cool you’d made it in there. You’ve done amazing things. I bet if you went back in this week and did a really big push, you could get people back in, turn it all around…”

  “Too late,” said Amanda, more to herself than to me. “Too late.”

  You wouldn’t have known anything was wrong with Mom, not unless you knew what to look for. She was like a TV that had been set up very slightly wrong, her eyes too dark and her smile too bright. Her expressions didn’t stay on her face but sort of twitched across it like she couldn’t bear to hold the emotion for more than a second or two. I’d seen her like this before, in those weeks after the divorce. I did not want to see her like that ever again.

  And me? I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I’d been given something rare and special and that I’d thrown it away. As if they’d discovered one last dodo in the world at the exact moment I was eating it for dinner.

  So I wrote about it. I wrote about everything—Mom, Amanda, and Adrian. I wrote about how alone I was, on the bus, in art when we had to get into groups and everyone had someone except me.

  If living was difficult, the writing was easy. All those words and notes came rushing up to the surface, like the fat goldfish in the school pond, until my lyric book was full, and I was writing in Amanda’s old address books and on Mom’s bank statements and on the back of the wallpaper that had flaked off in the hall.

  “I want to apologize for trashing your cake,” I told Savannah. “It was an accident. But I’m really sorry. And I know I basically shouldn’t have shouted. It was a disrespectful thing to do.”

  “Babes,” said Savannah, “it’s fine.”

  Was she saying she’d forgiven me? “Are you saying you forgive me?” I asked.

  “Meh,” said Savannah, as though there was a patch of sticky stuff on the table in front of her, and she’d accidentally put her hand into it, and the sticky stuff was me. “Katie, you are so not even on my radar right now.”

  Lacey wasn’t much better.

  “I’ve, um, look, I know that I’ve sort of been a bad friend,” I told her, having gotten the early bus so that I could corner her as she came across the field.

  “Yup,” said Lacey.

  “Screaming at you was way out of order. I do care what you think.”

  “Okay,” said Lacey.

  “So, look, can we be friends again?”

  Lacey stopped to think about it, the wind ruffling her bangs. “The thing is, Katie, all we’ve done since you started riding the bus is fight. And I don’t want that anymore. So, yes, we can be not enemies. But it’s just easier for me if you do your thing and I do mine.”

  It was as though some invisible wall had come down between me and the rest of the world. And whatever I said, the words wouldn’t get across. Like words weren’t enough.

  “Yeah, well,” said Jaz when I told her in PE, supposedly fielding during softball, “Anyone can say anything. McAllister can fly. I’m the president of China. You have a weird nose.”

  “Do I?”

  “The point being, whatever,” said Jaz. “Why should they care what comes out of your mouth? Why should anyone?”

  Sometimes Jaz really bleaks me out.

  “I just wish Lacey would understand,” I said, watching as, in the far distance, Sofie chopped at the ball and then ran smack into Devi Lester. “If she could just hear how I feel, she might get a tiny part of what’s in my head. I’ve been writing all these songs and she won’t listen to them.”

  “Why not?”

  “Jaz,” I said. “You were at Savannah’s party. I am not just going to whip my guitar out and start serenading her in the middle of math.”

  “Where?” said Jaz. “And when? I want to be there.”

  “Um, that would be never,” I said. Lacey was standing in the batting lineup now, laughing at something Kai was saying, then bending down to tie her shoelace, all the time being careful not to look at me.

  And then I knew.

  I had to sing to her.

  Because singing is what I do.

  Only there was no way I’d be doing another bedroom concert. Singing at parties, Savannah’s or otherwise, was also out of the question.

  What I needed, I realized, was somewhere intimate. The kind of place where people would respect the music. Where they would actually hear me.

  Somewhere a little romantic. A little special.

  Somewhere like that little wooden platform in Vox Vinyl, all strung with fairy lights.

  Only it was closing at the end of the week.

  And the end of the week was now.

  Today.

  “Jaz, I have to do a gig.”

  She laughed. “You really don’t know when to stop, do you?”

  Maybe not. “Listen, I know it’s crazy, and I’ll look like a jerk. I just think that maybe this is my last chance to, well, not make everything Okay, but slightly less awful.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight.”

  “What?!”

  “I know! There’s no time, but the shop’s going to be closed tomorrow. Adrian will go away. It’s my last chance.”

  I thought through what I’d have to do. Get Mom and Adrian and Amanda and Lacey into the room together and keep them there long enough to get through just a few songs, songs like “Sorry” and “Autocorrect” and “Song for a Broken Phone.” And “Cake Boyfriend,” which, while not completely relevant, had turned out to be really catchy.

  “You want to arrange a gig for tonight?” said Jaz. “In the shop of a guy who has decided he doesn’t want anything to do with you anymore? And you’re going to invite your mom, who’s split up with him and doesn’t want to see him, and your sister, who doesn’t want to see you?”

  “And Lacey,” I said, watching her swing her bat and miss. “Who hates me.”

  “You’ll never manage it,” said Jaz.

  “Oh. Great. Thanks for the pep talk.”

  “Without me.”

  After all the surprising things that had happened, this was the most surprising. A million people watching my song, I could get my head around. But Jaz wanting to help?

  It just
goes to show that life is a journey which takes you to some very unexpected places.

  “You’re really saying that you can get Mom and Adrian and Amanda and Lacey into the shop to hear me sing?”

  “If you give me their numbers.”

  Which, under any normal circumstances, would have been complete insanity.

  Only I was starting to think that maybe something had changed. I’d gone so far down there wasn’t really anywhere left to sink to, but there was Jaz, still at my side.

  I handed her my phone. “Here.”

  “Am I allowed to lie?” said Jaz.

  “No! Well, maybe. Only a little bit.” I paused for a moment. “Just don’t say anyone’s dead.”

  “You are no fun,” said Jaz.

  • • •

  After that, I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t drink either for a while, only then my throat got really dry, and I found I could.

  Mainly, though, I couldn’t practice.

  Knowing I was about to play to all the people I loved most in the entire world froze my fingers and made my voice go froggy. After three attempts at “Sorry,” I gave up, opened my laptop, and put in my name.

  And the video was gone. It really was over. One minute, a million hits. The next, nothing.

  I tested out the feeling, like you do with your tongue after you lose a tooth. And…it was all right. Honestly, it was. A little painful, yes. But livable. Unlike some other stuff.

  Then I noticed the clock in the corner of the screen. I’d told Jaz to have everyone there for seven o’clock. That was in less than an hour.

  No time to brush my hair or put some makeup on or any of the things I’d been planning to do. Well, the people who’d be watching had all seen me without my eyeliner. They’d seen me wearing a cake. They wouldn’t care.

  If they even came.

  I slung my guitar onto my back.

  Six twenty-five. If I was going to leave, it would have to be now.

  “You can do this, Katie,” I said to myself.

  Even though I really wasn’t sure I could.

  The first person I saw was Adrian, unlocking the shop door with this look of complete terror on his face. His hands were shaking, and he dropped his keys. Twice.