My 90s Boy Band Boyfriend: A YA Time Travel Rockstar Romance (Teen Queens Book 2)

by Jennifer Griffith

  “That audition was only made more despicable by the fact you wore the shoes.”

  “Uh …” Oakley fumbled with her books, not looking up, wishing she’d worn a long skirt so she could have hunched down and covered her shoes with it.

  “Funniest thing I’ve seen all week. Like a car wreck you can’t look away from.” Then the girl laughed maniacally, and Oakley recognized her as the star of not only the varsity girls soccer team, but the state championship volleyball team as well. The tall one, the setter. “Who ever told you that you could sing?”

  Another maniacal laugh followed, and up walked a guy—another one of the Populars. He placed a big, wet, gross kiss on the girl’s mouth.

  “Why are you talking to this loser?” He eyed Oakley. “Oh, hey, isn’t this that Shoe Girl? Saw the awful video going around. Way to go, loser.” He spit on Oakley’s shoe. “Nice shoes. Heh-heh. Hey, everybody”—he was pointing at her now, calling out to the whole hallway of brain-dead zombies—“Shoe Girl here just had a video go viral. Pass it on! I’ll forward it to ya on the group text.”

  Group text! The Populars had a group text? Of course they did.

  And she thought she’d been socially DOA before. Titanic had nothing on her, sinking-wise. Oakley’s blood iced in her veins. She might as well have been in the morgue.

  Fifteen or twenty Populars, heeding the meanness leader’s call, jostled past her in the hall, bumping against her with their shoulders in some kind of ritual hazing tactic that probably dated back millennia. Oakley tried to break away from it, but there were too many of them, and she kept dropping her books, and she was going to be late for her algebra II test, and—

  “Dudes!” Up stalked Hudson Oaks, shoulders squared and a fire in his eye. He snapped his fingers like he thought he was Fonzie on a rerun of that old TV show, and with his white t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up and his low-slung jeans and his hair styled like that, he might have been Fonzie. “Leave my girlfriend alone.”

  Girlfriend! Oakley’s eyes bugged out. She was most definitely not his girlfriend.

  The Populars froze. The guys looked at Hudson with a burning dislike, and the girls looked at him with a burning desire.

  “Scram!” he said. The predators scattered. Partly due to the second bell ringing, but still. Whoa! With the sheer force of his charisma, Hudson had broken up the crowd, pushing everyone back, even the Populars. In one second, he had her books loaded into his arms, and he’d taken her by the waist and pressed a possessive kiss to the top of her head.

  Oakley grimaced. He shouldn’t be doing that. She didn’t want to be his girlfriend. She might mostly believe he was who he said he was, but the off-chance still remained that he was either a liar and a fake or else he was insane.

  But she didn’t pull herself out from under his arm as she walked toward Mr. DiConcini’s classroom.

  “He’s with that?” someone hissed as they passed a defecting pod of Populars.

  “You bet I am,” Hudson snarled. “Now, back off and nobody gets it after school in the parking lot. Got it?” He pointed his finger around at them, holding his hand like it was some kind of gun.

  Showers of relief washed over her. She tingled from scalp to toe, and her face had to be blazing red, like the cover of her algebra book, which she clutched to her chest. They were going to back off. She could see it from the looks in their eyes. For some inconceivable reason, every single one of the Brain-Deads obeyed Hudson’s orders. They suddenly turned away from Oakley like she didn’t exist anymore, or at least not as someone they’d ridicule constantly.

  Of course, a few of the Populars—the female versions—were holdouts on some level. They stood with their mouths agape, the longing for Hudson Oaks written on them as if in black Sharpie marker.

  “What’s she got that we don’t?” one of them whispered.

  “Nothing,” another one hissed.

  “So, what’s going on here, then?” The first one stomped her foot and stepped off down the hall. “Maybe the rest of the video gets better. Maybe she takes off her clothes. I mean, for that guy I would.”

  “For anyone you would.”

  She gave one last come-on glance back at Hudson, and Oakley looked up at his reaction in time to see him give her the brush-off with a dismissive sneer. At least it wasn’t accompanied by a rude gesture, but his Mean Face was the closest thing there was to a facial expression of flipping the bird.

  Oakley swallowed hard, her heart rate still high, but this time not from horror or humiliation. Maybe it was even beating more rapidly based on sheer shock.

  “You didn’t have to do that. I had it handled.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He let her dignity live. “I remember being a sophomore. People who don’t fit the mold get the bad end of the social stick.”

  “Well, that wasn’t ever you.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  A guy who looked like a hottie movie star who never aged, and who sang like his voice was designed to disintegrate females’ clothes right off their bodies, never dealt with moments like Oakley had just encountered? “No way.”

  “Believe me. I did my sentence in math-geek social purgatory.”

  Oakley doubted that. “I’m not saying this to flatter your ego. You hardly need that done. But trust me, a guy as good-looking as you are would turn math-geek into a socially acceptable, if not desirable, status.” Oakley could picture all the girls flocking to advanced algebra class just to swoon over Hudson Oaks every time he raised his hand.

  “It wasn’t always an obvious comparison between me and the Top Gun star. See these teeth?” He tapped his bicuspid. “You don’t think they came by this level of straightness naturally, do you?”

  She hadn’t thought about it.

  “Three and a half years of braces. And a headgear.”

  “What’s that?” She’d never heard of it, but it sounded awful.

  “You’re telling me you don’t have headgears in the future?”

  The tardy bell rang, and Oakley broke into a run. “They’ll shut the door and I’ll miss the test.”

  Hudson jogged after her, and they arrived at DiConcini’s classroom. Oakley slid into her seat just in time to have the test and all its foreign hatch-marking-gibberish land on her desk. It stared up at her in a laughing derision far more sinister than what she’d just faced in the hall.

  And then Satan said, “Let’s put the alphabet into math.”

  “Sir?” Hudson raised his hand. “I’m new today. Would it be okay if I take the test with someone else?”

  For some inconceivable reason, Mr. DiConcini said yes. “I’ll allow it today, young man. Oakley, you may need to explain the concept of an asymptote to our new student, but you’ll have to do it in the hallway so as not to disturb other students.”

  Mind. Blown.

  Oakley followed Hudson out into the hall, and they sat on the steps of the stairwell to the downstairs gymnasiums. The percussion of bouncing basketballs echoed in the hallways.

  “Schools always smell the same, wherever you go.” Hudson inhaled and exhaled fast. “Sweat and bananas from sack lunches.”

  “You smell that, too?” Oakley had always defined Wood River High with those two specific scents, plus a few more. “Throw in too much cologne from guys and too many after-bath, fruity body sprays on all the girls and you’ve nailed it.”

  “So that’s the other stuff. You’re right.” Hudson looked at her like she was a genius. Which she wasn’t—case in point being her complete ignorance of the answers to this test. “Here.” He took the paper from her hands and looked it over. “Do you know how to do all these?”

  She took it back and examined it. She only knew half of the concepts well, and a fourth were foggy. The remaining fourth left her in the dark.

  “Can you help me with numbers twenty through thirty when I get there?”

  “Sure. I love polynomials and radicals.” In a couple of minutes, he had completed all the answers on his own paper. “I wasn�
��t a math geek in name only. I still think and breathe it, when I’m not thinking and breathing music, of course. My tutor loved me.”

  “I still don’t believe you had the social issues I’ve been running into since last year.”

  Hudson looked at her. His eyes narrowed, and he opened his mouth as if to say one thing but thought better of it. After a second he said, “Trust me. Confidence, even if you have to fake it, goes a long way.”

  Oakley let that soak in. So, he was saying he had faked confidence in the past? It was hard to believe.

  She did her test for a while, then he helped her with the polynomials. He explained them surprisingly well. Far better than Mr. D had in class. Or had she been absent that day?

  “Speaking of confidence, I doubt I could fake it enough to make any headway around here.” She rolled her eyes. “You weren’t kidding about your math awesomeness. You should be confident about that. You could get into a good college.”

  Truth slapped her again that maybe he didn’t. Maybe fate needed him to go back to the nineties to live out the rest of his life back then.

  Except … how was that going to happen? All the improbabilities and impossibilities of his situation blossomed in her mind. They had no idea how he’d gotten here, let alone how he could go back.

  “Here. Now we can talk about other stuff. Not math.” He placed both tests on Oakley’s lap and leaned his back against the higher steps. He draped one leg over Oakley’s and she didn’t pull away. How could she? He’d been her savior earlier. “What was that bullying incident all about back there?”

  “Oh, uh …”

  “Come on. You can trust me. I’m definitely going to keep those hounds at bay for you, and it will help to know why they’re barking all around you like you’re a carcass.”

  “Well, that didn’t sound very nice.” Oakley stuck out her lower lip. She and Brinn had faced them together all last year and this, with Brinn brandishing fists but never throwing a punch. And as bad as the Shoe Girl thing had erupted today, it only came up every so often, when she happened to be on their radar. Like when I’ve got a bad viral video going around.

  Or a gorgeous guy showing up at school with her. Both of those things had made her a lightning rod.

  “Sorry,” he said. “That was rude. But you have to admit …”

  She did. It was true. She’d been fresh meat for the Wood River Hyenas, which wasn’t really their mascot, but it should have been. “It was nothing.” Nothing compared to the coals they’d been heaping on her since the start of freshman year. Sure, they called her Shoe Girl, but that was only the tip of the iceberg. “It’s nothing out of the usual.”

  “That’s their usual? Jiminy. Jerks in the future take it to a new level. What did you do to merit their love?”

  Oakley sighed and explained her social status with a brief history.

  “But if they usually don’t speak to you, what’s new about today? I thought you said they usually pretend you don’t exist.”

  She might as well tell him the truth. After all, if he was going to lie for her, telling them she was his girlfriend, he at least needed to know about the viral video they were forwarding. “I mean, I auditioned for something last week.” Just the words made her mouth dry. If everyone saw only the first few seconds of the audition, they’d think of her as that one chick who couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. She couldn’t really blame them for turning her into a laughingstock, whether or not she’d finished strong. “And the first part wasn’t stellar.”

  “You mean, a singing audition?” He started nodding slowly. “That’s right—I remember now. It was when you were fading out on me, when you went down on the street corner. I heard it. You were mumbling something about singing on TV.”

  “I was?” Oh, geez. Her eyes rolled upward. “What else did I say?”

  “Never mind that. The audition?” Bless Hudson for not getting off on a tangent. Well, or curse him for not getting off on a tangent. There were so, so many things in Oakley’s life all of a sudden to not talk about. “You sang, I take it. What did you sing?”

  This question actually made it even worse. Here she sat, with Hudson Oaks, the originator of “Sweet Sixteen,” his leg draped over her lap, and she’d made, basically, a mockery of his best song. At least the first thirty seconds qualified as a mockery. And that’s all anyone around here would ever remember.

  “If you don’t tell me, I’ll go ask those sharks out for blood.” Hudson made like he was going to stand up. “I’ll have them show me on their smarty phones. Are you the only one who can show videos? I bet you’re not.”

  “No.” Dejection made Oakley feel like she weighed three hundred pounds. “Fine. I sang your song.”

  “My song?” Hudson’s face brightened. “Which one?” His eyes even sparkled, and the crinkles deepened beside his eye. He was a little bit irresistible when he smiled, and she suddenly couldn’t blame the teachers for their kowtowing to him.

  “If you must know, it was ‘Sweet Sixteen and Never Been Kissed.’” As she said it, she wanted to sink into the steps.

  “But that’s a guy’s song.”

  “I know. I altered the lyrics.” That sounded rude, somehow. “For a girl to sing. I hope that’s okay.”

  “Okay! Are you kidding me? I think that’s awesome!” He sounded genuinely ecstatic over it. “How did the words go?” He reached out for her backpack and made like he was looking for something. “I want to see the video. Is it on your smarty phone?”

  “It’s called a smart phone, and if you’re smart, you won’t watch it.”

  “But …” He hung back. “What’s wrong?” Then it appeared to dawn on him. “So it didn’t go as planned. So what? I totally get that. Do you know how many takes it took for us to get it just right in the studio? I mean, during the recording session we were sixteen ourselves, and we had to do it so many times over and over, I thought Roman was going to drop us right then and there and go look for a better boy band he could catapult to stardom. I’m just glad he didn’t.”

  The results of being a boy band that died tragically hovered between them for a moment, and she watched as regret flickered across his face.

  “No,” Oakley said, trying to clear the air, “ultimately my ‘Sweet Sixteen’ debacle smoothed out. Overall, the audition went fine. Quite well, in fact. Just not those first thirty seconds.” Recalling them, she felt sick to her stomach all over again, like she’d just eaten way too many onion rings with Buffalo sauce. “Those thirty seconds … stunk.”

  That was putting it mildly.

  “And those thirty seconds are all your super cool high school friends saw, I take it.”

  “Precisely. Or at least all they would mention.”

  “Well, I don’t care.” Hudson waved a hand in the air as if brushing the Populars aside, like some kind of annoying mosquitoes. “Show me the whole thing.”

  “You’re serious.” Oakley’s courage rose, and she dug out her phone and searched up the video clip. Wow she looked really weird on the stage. Taller. A lot thinner than she pictured herself. But whoa, those shoes. Brinn was so right about them. A glance down at her feet made her pull them back under herself. Even though she’d promised to wear them until they wore out, she might have to cave and ask mom for a different pair sooner. She wouldn’t say no, Oakley was sure, but Oakley also hated to break a promise, no matter how ill-conceived.

  It was time to swallow that pride.

  “Let me see.” Hudson reached for it. She put it on the lowest sound setting— so as not to alert Mr. DiConcini that they’d abandoned their algebra studies— and hit play.

  Her voice was garbled and awful. The first bit was far worse than even she remembered. A cringe wrinkled her face, one that could have broken her into a thousand pieces if she’d been ice or glass. It was so bad, so very bad.

  “I’m going to turn this off. If the school allowed dogs, they’d be howling.”

  “No, no.” Hudson pulled it away, not letting her re
ach for it.

  But then, the worst passed. Oakley’s voice evened out on the bridge, and sure enough—she’d finished strong.

  “Wow.” Hudson nodded slowly. “That was …”

  “Oh, I know.” Oakley held up a hand to stem the tide of description she knew would follow. “No adjectives required.”

  “No, no. I mean—the lyrics. Those were … ingenious. Can I just say? I really like what you did with them. You didn’t just change the gender of the song, you …” He thought for a moment. “You improved the poetry of it.”

  “Poetry, huh?” She looked over to see if he was joking. But the look on his face was all sincerity, all earnestness and hope. “You really liked it?”

  Hudson placed the phone back in her hands. His eyes didn’t leave hers as he leaned in toward her face. Oakley froze, her eyes widening as he closed the gap between them. Her mouth went as dry as a convenience store sandwich, but she didn’t pull away.

  Soft as a whisper, Hudson Oaks brushed his lips against hers.

  “There, now, Oakley Marsden. You can never sing that song again and tell the truth.” His voice sent a river of blazing heat from her lips through every vein and artery in her body, setting her blood a-boil. “I think you have a gift for lyrics. Please say you’ll write more of them. Lots more.”

  “I—” A million protests and reactions flitted through her. She loved and hated the kiss at the same time. Her eyes met his— the gorgeous, intense gaze of her rescuer, and of the guy who liked her lyrics. She hadn’t meant to let him take her first kiss from her.

  But … who better?

  “You’re special, Oakley. I hope you know that. I hope you never let those know-nothings make you think otherwise.”

  Oakley was frozen, staring at him, her eyes blinking, and her lips ablaze.

  The door to the algebra room swung open. During his time in the military, Mr. DiConcini had earned a prosthetic leg, one pant-leg hanging much looser than the other on the giant of a math teacher. He stumped out toward them, the sound of his limp alerting them to his presence as much as the swoosh of the door itself.