“I know!” Al said, sitting bolt upright and knocking his hat off his head. “Then we’ll perform them live, and no one will know the album is awful. They’ll just buy it and think they got a bad copy or something.”
“Uh, or something.” Chris smirked and pushed the dangling black strand of fabric from his face again. “Think about it. If our live lyrics are different from the words on the CD, they can’t sell them as the same product. The label will be out a ton of money. It’s risky. We could get sued, depending on the contracts we signed.”
“Yeah,” Nick said, still closing his eyes and tapping out a melody. “Especially if our lyrics are better.” His eyes popped open. “Which—they have to be, right? I doubt they could be worse.”
“I didn’t look at the contract, did you?” Hudson looked around, but got nothing but blank stares. Roman had been the one to make sure their contracts with the label were safe to sign. None of the band members, other than maybe Chris, were going to know what that legal stuff meant. Maybe he should have looked more closely at the contract. But it had been about ninety pages long, and Roman had said to trust him.
“I was going to run it past my dad, but I couldn’t get to a phone to call him.” Chris looked grim. “I should have been more insistent. I might be on the outs with my parents like all of you, but I should at least take what my dad taught me: never sign a contract you haven’t read.”
“Roman read it. He’s our agent.” Al shrugged. He put his hat back on and pulled it down over his eyes. “We can’t sing those lyrics and we all know it.”
“Should’ve thought of that before we cut them onto the album.” Chris raised one olive-drab shoulder. All for the persona.
Hudson cringed. He had to save these guys from those lyrics. They’d given up a lot to propel themselves to stardom, even their identities, in a way.
“I can’t believe you tried to call your dad, Chris.” Nick stopped air-drumming. “I thought you were never speaking to them again. Just like the rest of us.”
Hudson didn’t choose this moment to mention that he’d been thinking lately about calling home, too. He’d been feeling guilt for not giving them the money they’d been asking for. If they really needed it, he didn’t want to be stingy with what he’d earned through their two hit songs. That was why he’d put some of his earnings in a safe place today. When they finished with the press event tomorrow, he could get word to them about where they could go and collect it, no matter how undeserving some people around him seemed to think the Oaks family might be.
We’ve seen it a hundred times, Roman had said. The second their kids hit the big time, the parents go ape. They start thinking of the kids’ earnings as their own. Greed turns them into different people. You watch. The calls will come, then the official letters from lawyers, the demands. Don’t worry. I’ll handle all that.
“Well, he’s a lawyer.” Chris shrugged. “I figured I could at least hire him, if not rebuild all the bridges. He’s a good lawyer, guys.”
“Is there such a thing?” Nick cracked a cheap lawyer joke. No one laughed except Nick. Another reason for keeping him the strong, silent type.
Before Chris could put up a defense of his dad though, their seats began to tremble, and the plane bucked. Hudson yanked his seatbelt off and lunged toward the window, his heart pounding like he’d just competed in the decathlon.
“Something’s not right!” he called. This was no run-of-the-mill turbulence. “I hate flying!”
With a scary hiss, the cabin pressure dropped, and the oxygen masks all simultaneously fell from the ceiling, Hudson’s slapping him in the face. He sat back hard in this window seat, shoved the seatbelt across his waist and clicked it in place.
“Guys, put on your oxygen!” He watched them all scrambling for their masks, fumbling to pull the strings tight against their mouths and noses.
He clutched the armrests of his chair, just as the plane took on a dangerous tilt.
“Guys! It’s going to be fine,” he lied, faking calm leadership when his insides were going berserk.
The boys were looking wild-eyed at him over the tops of their clear plastic face masks. In the deafening snarl of the engine, something changed. As Hudson watched, Nick, Chris, and Al got smaller and smaller, drifting farther and farther away from him.
They shrank—even as the shrill whine of the plane’s descent deafened Hudson. Aircraft engine fuel fumes and smoke filled his nostrils, despite the protection of the mask. The lights in the cabin blacked out.
“Guys?” And what about the pilot—Manny, their buddy, was he okay? Had something tragic happened in the cockpit?
A thousand questions whipped through Hudson’s brain.
In a feeble attempt for answers and a glimpse of light, Hudson lurched toward the porthole window. To his shock, below them in the dark and rain he swore he saw a parachute opening and a shining river below.
The Camas River. They were at the Gorge. He’d been here once on a hiking trip with his family.
His family! Their faces all flashed into his mind. His mom, his dad, his sister Giselle—a succession of loving smiles, of tear-filled goodbyes.
“Guys!” Hudson screamed. The plane screamed. He couldn’t see the boys anymore. Orange light glowed through the far window, like a flame was licking it. The engine was on fire on the starboard side. They were going down.
But what about my eleven-eleven wish? What about the songs? The boys? The future! A thousand regrets flooded him.
What about my family?
At one point when their demands for money had gotten relentless and Roman had told Hudson about the predicted official financial demands letters, he’d thought he never wanted to see them again. Now that he really wouldn’t, it was all he ached for. He didn’t care what they’d done or how clichéd they’d become. He loved them.
And it’s all over.
A crackling thunder of impact slammed into Hudson’s ears as the nose of the plane hit the trees. Strange, he’d expected he’d feel the pain of every bone in his body breaking, of his skin bursting into flames.
But he felt nothing, just a crazy-strong force, like a giant hand, lifting him above the wreckage, yanking him upward, and through a dark tunnel. From his vantage point in the soundless, windless night, he saw the plane hit the trees, and the tail splash down into the fierce and powerful river—with his brothers still aboard.
And then it was gone. All of it. In the black of night.
Part II: Oakley’s Story
Present Day
Scene 1: “All or Nothing”
“You’re up. Go, go, go!” The stage director’s assistant, a beefy guy dressed all in black, shoved Oakley’s back hard, making her stumble in the stupid old shoes she shouldn’t have worn and that had ruined her life on more than one occasion before this day. This was a serious audition—her first—and Oakley should have at least tried to look like this mattered to her.
Because, in truth, it was all that mattered to her at this point in her life: winning a spot to compete on The Next Radio Star.
“Be gentle with her, Farley.” The backstage director, someone called Blue who had a huge corkscrew hairstyle, grabbed Oakley by the hand and helped her up the three steps to the Portland City Orpheum’s main stage, the biggest venue Oakley had ever set foot in, let alone opened her mouth and let out an a cappella solo in while onlookers stared. “Sorry about Farley’s roughness.” She beamed, her white teeth almost aglow against her dark skin, and the smile making Oakley feel a little better. “Come on, the cameras are set. You’re on. The judges are waiting.”
That was the problem, hello. Fear made a clutching lurch at the back of Oakley’s throat. She couldn’t even take in a breath, let alone eke out her version of “Sweet Sixteen,” the hit from that 90s band who’d died so tragically back in the day. Oakley had changed the words slightly to make it less weird being sung by a sixteen-year-old girl, rather than being sung to one. She’d been working on it all autumn, ever since her mom had
told her about for the Seattle-based program TNRS holding auditions in Portland, just an hour away from her house in Wood River.
With a last glance at the heavens for help, she prayed her lyric switch-up was enough. Then, more fervently, she prayed she was enough—for the judges, for herself, for her mom.
This song meant a lot to Mom.
Mom and Sherm waited backstage in one of the dressing rooms with a live feed of the stage showing on a TV set. There, she’d received her last hug from Mom, and a break-a-leg punch in the arm from her stepdad. They’d both taken off work on a weekday to come down here and support her since it was so important to Mom.
Okay, really, Oakley knew it had started out as being for her mom, but now, standing here with the blue, red, yellow, and white lights practically blinding her and making her sweat, she knew it wasn’t all for Mom. It was for herself, too.
I can do this. I’m going to have a song on the radio—played not just all over Portland, or Seattle, or the U.S. It’s going to be a worldwide hit.
And she would write it herself. Notebooks and notebooks full of lyrics lay in boxes under her bed. This was Oakley’s biggest and best chance at ever getting her words and ideas and poetry out to the world.
If she could get a spot on The Next Radio Star, she had a shot at that dream.
Without it, she was just another loser teenage girl with bad shoes singing in her bedroom in front of the mirror with a hairbrush for a microphone.
“Oakley Marsden?”
“Yes?” Her voice sounded like she’d been raised by frogs. “Yes?” she said again, after a nasty clearing of the amphibians squatting in her throat. Was she already being filmed? Oh, no. She’d be Frog Girl forever more. Frog Girl instead of Shoe Girl.
“How old are you, where are you from, and what will you be singing for the judges today?”
No amount of squinting through the lights allowed Oakley to see the faces of the judges who held her future in their hands. In a way, that comforted her.
The room smelled like that sweet leftover chemical of a smoke-machine, as if from a rock concert held here last night. She inhaled it, trying to be as calm as possible and banish her stage fright.
With a final shuddering breath, she began.
“My name is Oakley M. and I’m sixteen years old. I’m from a little town called Wood River, just an hour up the Camas River, and I’ll be singing ‘Sweet Sixteen’ by Girl Crazy.”
“Oh, a one-hit wonder classic,” a disembodied female voice said with a faint British accent. It sounded familiar.
“Two-hit wonder,” Oakley corrected then wished she hadn’t. Why had she corrected a judge? Intern or not, it was an idiotic move!
Luckily, the judge didn’t seem to mind. “So true. There was that other song, too.” She chuckled softly from her perch in the darkness. “Ah, we all mourned when the world lost Girl Crazy.”
She sounded like she was about forty, same age as Mom, and definitely the audience for “Sweet Sixteen.” Bingo. Oakley had chosen well. It couldn’t be the actual celebrity judges from the show. They wouldn’t be out combing the countryside for the preliminaries. They’d be at a day spa or frolicking on the beach with other celebrities.
The judge seemed still to be reliving the Girl Crazy demise, as if in a time machine of memory. “If I remember right, their plane went down not too far from here.”
“At the Gorge, ma’am,” Oakley answered. “Several miles east of Wood River.” Oakley didn’t add that she’d been to the Gorge to the site of the plane crash with her mom more than once as a really young girl, when it was just the two of them, before Mom met Sherm.
They had taken a lot of outings to that river.
“The song has special meaning for this area, then. I see. Well, Oakley, show us what you’ve got. Knock our socks off with your pipes.”
But those pipes were all clogged up with Frog Army!
A dam holding back all her fear broke, washing a wall of terror down on her in a rushing wave the size of an ocean. It choked her, and as she opened her mouth for the first line, it came out like the gurgling, drowning sound she felt inside her soul.
“Young and winsome in a long pink dress …” How could her voice be so similar to that of a sixty-year-old smoker? If only there were a track backing her up, hiding some of the gurgle. She pressed on, her face heating, and her hands turning to ice with every word. “Nothing impressing him more than this—Your carefree smile, your open style, the way you’re newly minted like a coin he’d walk five hundred miles for.”
It was as if the frog legion had mutinied and seized control of her vocal chords in some kind of scary, demonic indwelling. She offered a watery smile between verses, knowing her rendition sounded at least as bad to everyone listening as it did to her own ears.
This was an unmitigated disaster. If her feet hadn’t rooted to the stage, she would’ve made a break for it right then.
For the second verse, the lyrics stuck firmly in her mind, though, and she thanked not only her lucky stars but also her mother for playing this song practically on a loop every Saturday morning while they cleaned house for hours together. At least she didn’t have to contend with memory loss on the words. Oakley knew the words like she knew how to inhale and exhale.
Luckily, the guitar bridge hit after the second verse. The track only played in her mind, but during that, Oakley made a quick turn of her head, away from the microphone, clearing her throat to extricate the invasive frogs.
They left, and when she opened her mouth again, she recognized her own voice. Then, the chorus hit, and her voice came in strong.
“Sweet sixteen, and never been kissed. I’m just a young girl, one you always missed. But this is my night, my party, my date. I’ll find your lips and give you a taste.”
The bouncy melody fit the lyrics for a girl hoping for her first kiss, and Oakley couldn’t help feeling like they described her life perfectly. Sixteen, overlooked, wishing for the right guy to finally notice her.
Not likely to happen in Wood River. Not for Oakley Marsden, school pariah, Shoe Girl. The girl who might as well have on an invisibility cloak, except when it came to occasional insults and mockery of her footwear. Even in a school of only two hundred students she was overlooked. In a community where sports were so dominant that no one had ever even heard of a school choir or orchestra, at least not since the programs had been cut during the last recession, she’d never shine. She didn’t have a niche in her town, and she never would.
“Sweet sixteen and never been kissed, I’ve never been awake like this …”
Which was why this audition is such a travesty.
This was my one chance to show myself—and maybe them, too, a little—that I have something, something worth noticing, whether they value it or not. I’m worth something.
The second verse went better. Still, it was never going to be enough to make up for the whole first verse’s disaster.
But, the biggest point was, she hadn’t quit. When she’d wanted to run for her life, she’d stayed on stage, she’d stuck it out and shown them that she could actually sing. They wouldn’t choose her for the show, but they’d know she could sing. And she knew it too. That alone made her feel like it was a win.
The final chorus came, and by a frog-free miracle, she hit the high note, the one the tenor of the original song had scraped the ceiling for, and that had always made her mom sing loudest and clean fastest.
By the time the last bass guitars of the track in her mind thunked the last beat, Oakley knew she’d rescued herself from going down in this history books as Worst Audition of All Time for a Reality TV Appearance.
Sure, she’d never make it through to the live show, or even get a callback. The beginning was awful enough that she couldn’t waste an ounce of energy to hope for that, but she could at least hold her head up when she saw Mom and Sherm.
Her mom would never want her to quit. There was nothing Mom hated more than people who gave up. People like Dad.
> At least that’s what Oakley had assumed was the root of Mom’s dislike for that.
And so Oakley refused to give up. For Mom’s sake.
“Thank you, Oakley. We’ll discuss and let you know.”
The harsh lighting relented, and Oakley glanced out into the audience. There, she saw seated a balding, overweight man with thick glasses who was scribbling on a paper; a black woman in her late thirties or so, all glammed up; and a skinny guy with a skinny tie, drinking from a tall, skinny champagne flute.
Holy crud! Turn the stage lights back on. Blind me, people! Those weren’t stand-in judges. Those were the judges for The Next Radio Star. What were they doing on an early audition?
Oakley’s legs went weak, and she had to lock her knees to keep them from buckling.
Three souls held her future in her hands.
The stage director came up and hustled Oakley off into the wings. She glanced at her watch. Ooh! Eleven eleven. Instead of going straight to the waiting room to see Mom and Sherm and to get the hug she needed, she stopped, closed her eyes and made a lucky wish.
I wish ... Well, her heart wished she’d be able to sing on television in The Next Radio Star, but she didn’t put it that way exactly in her mind. I wish for mercy for my mistake.
A minute later, she was in the back room being showered with kisses on the top of her curly head by her mom. Sherm was patting her back, and the three of them were hugging and jumping up and down, not even caring that microphones were taped to their backs.
“You did it! You were beautiful! I can’t believe you’re so brave and amazing.” Her mom had tears, and they had streamed in black trails down her cheeks. “Oakley, I’ve never been so proud of you. I know how strong your stage fright is.”
“We weren’t sure how you’d overcome it,” Sherm said, “but you did.”
“Thanks, guys.” Oakley knew they were just being nice. They’d heard her opening notes. They’d witnessed the complete disaster she created. “At least I didn’t quit.”
My 90s Boy Band Boyfriend: A YA Time Travel Rockstar Romance (Teen Queens Book 2) Page 2
