She’s leaning against the side of the barn with her eyes closed.
‘Are you all right?’ I ask, although it’s obvious she’s not.
‘I’ll be OK,’ she says, breathing deeply. ‘Just leave me. Please?’ I go to her, but she waves me away. ‘Honestly. You go back. I’ll join you in a minute.’
I don’t like to leave her, but I know that when I’m feeling unwell the last thing I need is people fussing over me, so I promise her I’ll be back soon.
In the hot, sweaty barn, Call of Duty bring their set to a crashing close with a hard rock version of ‘Happy Birthday’ to George. The barn erupts into rowdy, storming applause.
‘Sorry guys – that’s all from us tonight,’ Ed Matthews calls out over the noise. ‘There’s another band on in a few minutes. Some strange name. Massive Pixie Dreamboats or something? Where did you find them, George?’ He laughs. ‘Anyway, they made one video, so . . . well done to the Dreamboats. Meantime, it’s not too late to vote for us in Killer Act. We need every vote and your vote counts, OK? And your mum’s. And your auntie’s. And if you’re very lucky, I’ll give you a little kiss to say thank you.’
Several girls in the audience shriek at the idea of it. Jodie and Nell are still hovering by the door. Jodie turns to catch my eye and looks as if she’s about to combust.
‘DREAMBOATS?’ she shouts at me, above the screaming.
‘He’s just jealous,’ I yell back.
‘One video?’
‘Well, we—’
‘We are going to Take. Them. Down.’
‘Right,’ I nod.
Although how we’re going to do that with one girl being sick in the garden, one who can hardly see through her steamed-up glasses, one about to explode with fury and one girl whose sole ability is jiggling around in a mini kilt, I’m not exactly sure.
With a fifteen-minute break between the boys and us, the crowd stream out into the night air for a bit of a break from the sweaty atmosphere and the chance to stock up on drinks from the bar in the living room. Ed Matthews saunters off, grabbing a bottle of water from one of the eager girls clustering round him. He comes straight down towards us, by the door, and flicks us a hostile look.
A bit heavy, I think. All we did was enter a competition. We didn’t even do that, actually – somebody else did it for us.
As he passes us his lip curls.
‘Are you ready to take on our crowd then, Dreamboats?’
We have never done this before. So no, we are absolutely not. Not even close.
‘Sure,’ Jodie says, through clenched teeth. ‘Any time.’
‘Great. And if it doesn’t work out, we always need more backing singers. Hotlegs here would be perfect.’
He winks at me, takes a swig of his water, and moves off into the night.
IhatehimIhatehimIhatehimIhatehim.
Outside the barn, Rose looks a bit better.
‘How did it go?’ she asks.
‘They were OK, I suppose,’ Jodie growls.
We chat for a while, until George arrives to tell us it’s time for our set. Rose puts on the bravest face she can. ‘Shall we go?’
We head for the stage – which is empty by now – shouldering our way through the returning crowd. Jodie sets up the backing tracks. We find our places and check the mics. In the middle of the room, I spot the girl from Call of Duty high-fiving various people and laughing.
The audience is noisy, happy and not interested in us – still coming down from the buzz of listening to the band as they gradually filter back in from the house. Nevertheless, George steps to the front of the stage and gives us a quick introduction. Nobody listens. Nobody cares.
Jodie starts the backing track. Our first track is ‘California Gurls’ by Katy Perry, which Jodie says is a classic anthem to get everyone in the mood. It sounded OK when we rehearsed it the last time; even Rose had to agree. Now, however, our voices are somehow lost in the general hubbub of party chatter. Call of Duty girl doesn’t seem to have noticed we’ve started, and the general noise levels don’t vary throughout our rendition of ‘Party in the USA’ by Miley Cyrus. (Actually by Jessie J, as Rose pointed out to us earlier, and only sung by Miley Cyrus. Not that the audience would be that bothered about who wrote the song; I’m not even sure they’re aware we’re singing it.)
Mortified, we carry on. Was this what George wanted? To humiliate us? Did he know this was going to happen?
‘Shall we stop now?’ Nell asks, when we’re almost done with Miley.
‘Yes, let’s,’ Rose agrees gratefully. ‘No,’ Jodie says with a quick shake of her head. Fury and pure stubbornness are pushing her on.
‘Just one more?’ I suggest, as a compromise.
Unwillingly, the others agree.
And then, suddenly, everything goes black.
A socket behind us pops, with a flash and a little puff of smoke, and the barn is plunged into darkness. For a moment, the sudden silence has a volume of its own, then the crowd starts to laugh and boo.
‘Come on, George! Sort it out!’ someone shouts.
After a minute of fiddling, a couple of lights come back on – but they turn out to be two spotlights, shining right in our eyes and preventing us from seeing the crowd at all. The mics and speakers stay firmly mute. We’re stuck onstage and now everyone must be looking at us. Finally. If not exactly in the way we hoped.
There are a few laughs from the crowd, who seem to have spotted us for the first time.
‘Oi!’ a boy shouts from near the back, ‘aren’t you the “Sunglasses” girls?’
‘Yeah!’ someone else shouts. ‘Sing us your song, then.’
Oh wow, so they do know who we are. Not that it helps.
‘But we can’t,’ I shout out. ‘No sound.’ I point behind us and shrug.
The crowd are in a strange mood, though. Good-humoured, but not really listening to us. They start up a chant: ‘Sun-glass-es, Sun-glass-es, Sun-glass-es.’
Nell looks at me helplessly. I look at Jodie. She looks at Rose. Rose looks astonished. Meanwhile, the chant goes on.
‘We’ve got to do something,’ Jodie says.
A tall figure pushes through the crowd, which parts to make way for him. It’s one of the boys from Call of Duty – not Ed, the singer, but the other Abercrombie type – clutching an acoustic guitar. He stands in front of the stage and holds it up towards me.
‘I always bring one, just in case. Maybe one of you could play?’
He glances at Rose. She stares blankly ahead.
‘Will you?’ I ask her.
She says nothing, and seems rooted to the spot.
‘Anyway, take it,’ the boy says, handing the guitar to me.
I take it. It seems very kind of him, when we’ve overtaken his band on Killer Act and he could easily just watch us squirm. Nell gives him her cutest smile and even Jodie looks cheerful. He blends back into the crowd and I hand the guitar to Rose. She looks at it like it’s a hologram, or a unicorn. I worry that she might be sick again – here is not the place. But she looks more confused than anything.
‘You could play it,’ I suggest.
She looks out at the audience, then back at the guitar. Focusing on it seems to help – taking her mind off what’s happening. There’s a strap, which she puts over her shoulder.
‘Promise me you’ll sing,’ she mutters. ‘Promise me.’
‘I promise.’
She closes her eyes and strums the strings. It’s funny: the thing that would terrify me most – playing an instrument in public – is what seems to calm Rose down. She tries a few notes, opens her eyes and suddenly she’s a different girl. She looks OK now. In fact, she looks better than she has for ages. I think she’s gone beyond fear.
There’s a lot of shushing in the audience. Now the crowd are curious.
‘Are you ready?’ Rose asks quietly.
Jodie shrugs. ‘Go for it.’
Rose strums the first few familiar chords. She plays flawlessly, as if she’
s been playing it all her life. We gather near her, squeezing into the spotlight. From here it’s warmer, safer, and harder to see the crowd. After eight bars, we begin.
‘I put my sunglasses on
My yellow sunglasses on
And I think of you and the things you do
And it doesn’t matter any more because . . .’
Several people in the crowd join in at this point:
‘I’ve got my sunglasses on . . .’
Our voices are wobbly at first, but we quickly find the harmonies. After all our years of singing together, we know each other so well. And the crowd below us are quick to swell the noise.
They know the song! And they seem to like it. Rose was right about it being catchy. Were these some of the people who voted for us after all? Cool sixth-formers and their friends?
Gradually we stop being a bunch of terrified girls and we start being a band. The things we love – being silly together and singing in harmony – they’re OK. We look down at the crowd and behind the lights I can just about make out the bobbing heads of a hundred cool partygoers, all singing along to a song we wrote, laughing at our words, swaying to our tune.
I try and keep my voice low. I know I’m the ‘truckful of gravel’. But even so, we sound good. We really do – you can just tell. Singing in secret was fun, but singing here, now, is a million times better. I almost wish I still had my feather boa to wave around me. The wonderful feeling builds and grows. By the end, like me, Nell is beaming. Jodie looks happy enough to light up the whole barn and Rose – well, Rose is glowing. I think she’s almost forgiven Jodie and me for making her do this tonight.
As soon as we finish, Rose turns to the rest of us and tentatively plays the opening bars to ‘I See The Light’ by Roxanne Wills – the other song Jodie chose. I didn’t even know Rose knew it on the guitar. However, she makes it seem easy and, as we practised, she sings the first verse alone. Her voice is gorgeous: mellow, and smoky, warm and strong.
Jodie’s made us sing the words so often that when my turn comes to sing the second verse, I do it without really thinking. The nerves have gone. When we get to the chorus, once again everyone joins in. A hundred chanting voices, a hundred smiling faces. The music lifts me up, up and over the crowd. It’s like learning to fly and never wanting to land. It is absolutely the best feeling I’ve ever had. Looking across at the others, I can tell they feel the same. We’re all floating, flying, soaring.
As my eyes begin to adjust to the bright lights in our faces, I glance down into the crowd and see a sixth form boy in the front row, sandy-haired and pale-skinned, filming us on a camera phone. He stands out because he’s not so much happy as mesmerised. And he’s staring right at me.
I recognise him from Jodie’s house, because he hangs out with her brother Sam a lot. His name is Elliot Harrison. He’s a bit of a computer nerd, like Sam, and generally avoided by all but the super-geeks. His stare has a strange intensity and the steadiness of his hand contrasts with the general movement among the crowd as he holds up the phone to film us.
In the midst of all the fun we’re having, it flashes over me with absolute certainty: Elliot is the person who stole my phone. For some reason, he has an unhealthy interest in the Manic Pixie Dream Girls.
He started all this. He made it happen. He uploaded the video.
Whatever It Takes
I stare at Elliot; he stares at me. But by the time we get to leave the stage, he’s disappeared. Anyway, we’re surrounded. Suddenly everyone wants to say hello, or fetch us drinks, or get our numbers. George comes over, smiling his face off. He insists we have to meet all his friends. When we pose for photos, he drapes his arms round me and Rose. And now it’s OK: I’m not just a girl – I’m a singer in a band.
This, I think, is what it must be like to be a rock star. The buzz lasts for the rest of the party. It even survives the journey home, in the back of Nell’s dad’s ancient Volvo, squashed up against our costume bags.
There’s hardly any talking. Nell quickly falls asleep, but the rest of us are busy reliving our moment in the spotlight. It’s not until we’re nearly back in Castle Bigelow that I remember to tell Jodie and Rose about my big discovery.
Jodie yelps so loudly it wakes Nell up.
‘What? What?’
‘Elliot Harrison is a weirdo phone stalker!’ Jodie yells at her.
‘Who? How?’
‘Sam’s friend. Sasha just worked it out.’
Nell still looks pretty woozy. It takes a while to bring her up to speed.
‘So what shall we do about it?’ she asks, when she’s eventually awake enough to wonder.
‘Confront him,’ Jodie says. ‘At break time tomorrow. Together.’
‘Are you sure?’ Nell’s dad asks. ‘Is he a boy at school? He sounds a bit . . . alarming.’
‘Oh no, he isn’t really,’ I assure him. ‘It’s just the way Jodie describes him. We’ll be fine.’
First thing next morning, I check our fan page. Someone has uploaded another video of us singing last night, and that person must have been standing exactly where Elliot was standing. It was totally him.
At break time, we meet in the main corridor to track him down. However, on the way to the sixth form common room we have to stop to sign three autographs, pose for photos with people who were at the party last night and couldn’t make it to us through the crowd, and record a quick a cappella duet of ‘Sunglasses’ for another person’s ringtone. It slows us down quite a bit, but we find him with five minutes to spare.
He’s standing near the vending machines, looking at something on his phone. He doesn’t see us coming until it’s much too late to escape. We crowd round him, Rose and me on one side, Jodie and Nell on the other.
‘Elliot Harrison, you have some explaining to do,’ I begin.
He looks panicked. He may be a sixth-former, but it’s four to one and we can be pretty intimidating if we’re angry. He tries to deny it, but with four of us challenging him, he can’t hold out for long. The evidence of the second video is the final straw. He turns to Jodie, with as much defiance in his face as he can manage.
‘I was doing World of Warcraft with Sam and we heard you talking to her’ – he indicates Nell – ‘about these videos. They sounded funny. We wanted to see them. That’s all.’
‘So you stole Sasha’s phone to watch our videos?’
He looks super uncomfortable. ‘Not stole. Borrowed.’
‘And then you thought you’d just put them on the internet?’
Jodie is marginally taller than Elliot, and infinitely scarier. He cowers down.
‘Not all of them,’ he says defensively. ‘Look, we weren’t going to do anything. But the Sunglasses one . . .’
‘What about it?’ Jodie demands.
‘It was good, OK? Special.’
‘Thanks,’ Nell smiles. Jodie glares at her.
‘We liked the song,’ Elliot mutters. ‘Well, I liked the song. I thought people ought to see it so I put it up for you. As a favour. OK?’
‘No! Not OK!’ Jodie yells.
‘A favour? You stole our video as a favour?’ I storm at him.
He sighs as if I’m being stupid. ‘Not stole. Shared. I gave your phone back, didn’t I?’
‘But what if everyone had hated it?’ Rose asks, quietly, from beside me.
‘They wouldn’t.’ He looks at us with that same steady stare as last night. ‘They just . . . wouldn’t.’
He blushes, then looks angry and miserable, as indeed he should. Weirdo stalker.
‘So it was you and your geeky friends who voted for us,’ I murmur, trying to make sense of it all.
‘Ye-es,’ he agrees, shifting about and not meeting our eyes.
‘That doesn’t make sense. How do you explain us getting so many votes? There aren’t that many geeks in school.’
He twitches nervously.
‘I . . . It just . . . snowballed.’
For a moment, he looks up and I catch a flas
h of something behind his eyes. There’s something else: something he’s not telling us.
‘Snowballed how?’ Jodie challenges.
He stares back at the floor.
‘I don’t know. It’s a totally weird phenomenon. You should be pleased, anyway. I only—’
‘Only what? What, Elliot?’
But the bell goes, loud and insistent, cutting off all conversation. A crowd of people rush by on their way to the next class and Elliot takes his chance to join them and escape.
By lunchtime the new video has loads of comments saying they like us. Not just from people we know at school, but others too.
You were awwwwwweeesoooooome!
Loving you guys so much!
Girl in the hotpants – can I have your number?
1500, 1750, 1999 ...
Now the numbers start to rise in even more rapid leaps. We overtake Call of Duty by hundreds of votes and there doesn’t seem to be a single person in school who doesn’t recognise us. Three people want us to play at their Christmas parties, and we say yes to all of them, even the cheeky girl in Year 7, because we’re so grateful to be asked.
By the first of December, there’s a new number at the bottom of our entry: 97th. Temporarily at least, we’ve made the top 100 on Killer Act and the competition still has two weeks to run.
So what exactly do we have to be angry with Elliot about anyway?
On the last day of term, they announce it in the local paper.
BIGELOW GIRLS MAKE TOP 100
A girl band from St Christopher’s School in Castle Bigelow has made it into the finals of a national online school talent competition.
Out of thousands of entries, Sasha ‘Hotlegs’ Bayley and her band, the Manic Pixie Dream Girls, have reached the top 100 of Killer Act, and will be attending auditions in January for the live TV finals, which will be broadcast in March. The local girls had an online hit with their song ‘Sunglasses’, and reached an impressive 3,897 votes.
Killer Act is sponsored by Interface, the social networking company that was recently valued at over £600 million($1 billion).
Jodie is not thrilled about the ‘Hotlegs’ bit – not at all. But she decides to forgive me: it was hardly my fault, after all. She’s already thinking about our audition piece.
You Don't Know Me Page 4
