You Don't Know Me

by Sophia Bennett

  ‘It’s all kicking off at Killer Act,’ he says. ‘The latest competition to find the new face of Interface in the UK went mega controversial when one of the acts dumped a singer because . . . wait for it . . . they thought she was overweight. Yes! It’s really true. Where is the sisterhood when you need it, people? All day, Twitter and FaceFeed have been going crazy with angry fans of the show pouring out their support for the girl, while the others battle it out with the latest finalists for a prize to advertise Interface for a year. Remember this?’

  There’s a short clip of Shady doing his impression of Animal from the Muppets on the drums. It’s a worldwide hit, so everyone will recognise it.

  ‘Well, that’s the prize these Dream Girls are chasing. While some people have been adding nasty comments about the larger lady,’ the presenter continues, ‘it’s clear that the vast majority of today’s teens won’t stand for that kind of behaviour. They want the remaining band members off the show, and they’re organising a campaign to make it happen. “Talent isn’t all about size,” says hellokitty582. And, “True friends stay together, through thick and thin. Literally,” says Sharon M. Looks like Killer Act is shaping up – geddit? Shaping up? – to be the hottest controversy since the Twilight breakup. Slap hand, K-Stew. Aw. You know we love you really.’

  Jodie arches an eyebrow. ‘You see?’

  I take a deep breath. I see. I get it get it now.

  My first thought is relief about Rose. Thank God there are lots of people on her side.

  My second thought is that Jodie understands all this stuff way better than I do. It’s taken me a while, but I’m there now: #dropthefatgirl is not about Rose being large; it’s about us being mean. And we sang a song about boots walking all over people.

  Right, well I’m sure that went down well.

  Toast.

  We are totally toast.

  Breathless

  On Friday, the second night of Killer Act Live, the ukulele band are announced the winners of our show. It was inevitable. When Andy announces it, I hardly feel a thing.

  We sit in the audience with our families to watch three more acts perform. Only two more days to go: one watching the last three acts, and then standing onstage with the other losers for the grand final. After that we can go home, be private, and forget this whole thing ever happened – apart from the bit where I grovel to Rose again, and beg her to talk to me.

  After Friday’s show, Jodie’s mum tries to get backstage to talk to Linus, or Ivan, or Janet, or somebody about what’s happening to us online, and how to deal with it. After all, it must be happening to them too: Linus was the person who came up with the idea of dropping Rose. He doesn’t come out of it much better than we do. Except, of course, that he wasn’t Rose’s best friend. Anyway, he obviously doesn’t want to see us. Nor does Ivan Jenks. Everyone we meet says that the judges and producers are ‘busy’, or ‘tied up’. It’s true that when we do catch sight of them, in the distance, they seem deep in urgent conversation about something. One of the TV production runners hustles us out of the building.

  ‘You go back to your hotel and relax. We’ll see you tomorrow.’ He checks a piece of paper. ‘You’ll be sitting near the front, so you’ll have a good view. Just have a nice day, OK?’

  I challenge anyone to have a ‘nice day’ when they discover (as Jodie does) that there’s a new page dedicated to their band called ‘I hate the Manic Pixie Dream Girls’ and it already has over 28,000 ‘haters’. Or while they watch a clip of themselves being discussed on the morning news by someone saying they are ‘the encapsulation of everything that is wrong with teen culture at the moment – the total focus on fame and body image. It was quite cruel what they did to that girl. I hope they’re ashamed of themselves today.’

  #dropthefatgirl is trending worldwide now. So is the translation of it into Spanish. And, as far as we can tell (using Google Translate), Arabic and Chinese.

  Nina Pearson has messaged me again.

  Glad you got it, witch-face. You totally deserved to lose, you loser.

  This time, something makes me show the message to Jodie, although up to now I’ve kept all the personal insults I’ve been receiving to myself.

  ‘Rose would laugh at that one,’ I say. ‘Tautology. She can’t take it seriously when people don’t get their grammar right.’

  ‘What’s tautology?’

  ‘Repeating yourself unnecessarily. Of course a loser loses.’

  I wish Rose were here to raise an eyebrow at Nina’s grammar and make the moment a little lighter. But of course she’s not, and that’s the point.

  On Saturday, we arrive back at the studio along with the rest of the audience for the third evening’s show. Jodie’s dad arrived early this morning, speeding up the motorway to join the trio of mothers and offer his moral support. It’s sweet that any of our parents think they can protect us from all this stuff. They can’t. But at least they can help take our minds off it. Mr Evans spends ages saying how he could have sworn he saw Rose’s granny driving her old BMW up the motorway on the way here.

  ‘What on earth would Aurora be doing in London?’ Jodie’s mum asks. ‘She hardly ever leaves the farm.’

  It’s actually great to share her mum’s endless theories about what Rose’s gran could be doing in any county other than Somerset, and her dad’s criticism of the build quality of the studio (he’s an engineer). It’s even good sharing Nell’s mum’s excitement at seeing the next set of acts.

  ‘I’ve checked out all the videos and I really think the little boy who sings opera is going to get it. Aiden, is he? He’s wonderful. I always wanted him to win. Apart from you girls, of course. Until . . .’

  She stops herself. Until we got voted off two nights ago because of an internet hate campaign. Yeah, that.

  ‘Just wait till you see Roxanne Wills,’ she continues, hurriedly, to Jodie’s dad. ‘She’s extraordinary. She looks normal-size on TV, but in the flesh she’s practically minute . . .’

  Soon, the lights go down and a producer comes on to tell some jokes and get the audience in the mood. When it’s time for the show to start, Linus, Sebastian and Roxanne appear in the spotlight, announced by a booming voice over the sound system, before taking their seats at the judges’ table.

  ‘Tiny,’ Nell’s mum observes, leaning across to mine. ‘Isn’t she? Tiny.’

  There’s a strange atmosphere in the studio tonight. The judges look nervous. Jodie leans over from my other side and whispers to me:

  ‘Did you see the look on Linus’s face this morning? It was on breakfast TV. Someone stopped him in the street and called him a tired old body fascist. They said people like him were responsible for half the eating disorders in the country. He looked like he’d been punched in the face.’

  I sit there for a minute or two, trying to imagine what it would be like to feel sorry for Linus. Nope. Still not working.

  Andy Grey comes on to introduce tonight’s first act: Lucy, the female soloist. We see her backstory video (a dog saved her life when she was six – yes, animals are cute), and she sings a pitch-perfect pop song. After her, Andy introduces the boy band, What Now, in what feels like a hurry. Backstory . . . act. Backstory . . . act. The acts and the adverts seem to pass by in a blur. Aiden, the little opera singer, comes on and performs a beautiful song in Italian, but when Andy Grey comes back to congratulate him, there still seems to be plenty of time left. Have they rushed too much tonight? Are they ahead of themselves? Could Ivan possibly make that sort of mistake?

  Andy stands centre stage and grins into the nearest camera. On the big screen behind him, a close-up of his sincere smile lights up the stage.

  ‘Before we go to voting, we have a treat for you tonight, ladies and gentlemen. Based on your feedback – the literally thousands of emails and messages we’ve been receiving – we’ve decided to break the rules and invite one of our earlier contestants back on the show. The judges want to give her a second chance. And I promise, you won’t be disa
ppointed. Here tonight, singing a song she wrote herself, is . . .’

  He lets the silence linger for as long as he possibly can, but already I know what he’s going to say. I reach out and grab Mum’s hand so tight that she squeaks in surprise. I wait, and Andy takes a breath to say her name:

  ‘Rose Ireland!’

  As the lights go down, a screen slides up to reveal a revolving stage with a grand piano, and a girl already seated in front of it. She’s wearing a long red dress, with her hair in a tousled bun and a diamante headband peeping out of it. Nell squeals. Mum squeezes my hand back, but I don’t turn to look at her. The cameras will be on us, I’m sure, waiting for our reaction, and I want to seem calm. I don’t want them to capture a flicker of the emotions I’ve been feeling since the moment Andy said ‘singing a song she wrote herself’ and I suddenly knew it would be Rose.

  No point in even trying to feel sorry for Linus: he’s brilliant. How can people possibly blame him for being mean to Rose if he’s brought her back? We’re the only villains now. He and the team will want us to look shocked for the cameras. I won’t give them the satisfaction.

  Most of all, I don’t want people to see how I feel about Rose. How could she not tell me? She must have been busy making plans to come all this way to perform tonight, and not a word. She must actually hate me to have kept this a secret, knowing how I would be feeling now: hurt, abandoned, guilty. Above all, guilty. And nervous for her, too. Rose, who hates performing so much without the three of us around her. How have they persuaded her to put herself through this?

  And all the time the sound system is playing a backing track of stirring violins, while the cameras get into position, and she nods that she is ready to begin.

  She looks different tonight, though. Every hint of shyness has gone. She is calm and serene. If anything, she looks more beautiful than usual. She’s on her own and that’s OK. I’ve never seen her like this.

  There’s a ripple of excited murmuring around the audience. Some applause, quickly extinguished, some whispers, and then a hushed silence. A spotlight picks out Rose’s hair, the serene concentration on her face, the soft smile on her lips. She breathes in, she pauses for a moment, she settles her fingers on the keys for the first chord. She plays.

  Something has changed.

  This is not the girl who stood white and glaring in the corridor. It’s not the girl who hung back at the audition and worried about ‘jiggling’, or who faced me in her kitchen saying she needed to work out who she was.

  It’s the girl I always knew she could be. The butterfly, escaping from her chrysalis. I shiver as much as anyone else in the audience. This girl is something special, and now everybody knows it.

  The tune she plays is sad – bluesy and haunting. Rose’s voice is sad too, as she begins to sing the words. I’ve never heard her pour out so much emotion. I don’t think she’s ever dared. But I am sure of one thing: she has been checking Interface – or Ivan has told her about her supporters. When more than ten thousand people tell you how good you are, it gives you the confidence to sing.

  You can hear the gasp around the audience as her voice soars and her song fills the room with its warm, jazzy tones. A stand-out voice, as Bert said. One that makes you want to listen to every note. With growing power, Rose lets the sound build and build, as members of the audience are torn between whistling, cheering and wiping the tears from their eyes.

  ‘If you had to leave me

  You would leave me breathless

  You would leave the pieces of my broken heart

  Too bruised and tired to say goodbye . . .’

  I doubt they even had to persuade her much to come here. She seems at home, at last. This is what she was born for.

  ‘What’s everyone saying?’ Mum whispers, leaning across me to check the screen of my iPhone, where FaceFeed is open.

  ‘Give it a chance!’ I say. ‘She’s only been singing two minutes.’

  #killeract is trending, but I don’t want to miss the actual moment of seeing Rose nail the song.

  She sounds as though she’s been preparing for it all her life. It’s a song she wrote last summer, called ‘Breathless’. I recognise the tune as the one she was working on at the end of the holidays. But we got caught up in the com -petition and I never heard what she did with it, or what lyrics she wrote. I assumed she was shy about sharing it because it wasn’t ready. It is now.

  After all that build-up, the final verse is quiet, almost like a whisper, although we can still make out every word.

  ‘But if you had to leave me

  I would let you go without a whisper

  So just kiss me once then turn and go

  You may hear me breaking

  But you will never see me cry.’

  She repeats the last two lines, her voice fading gradually to nothing. Concentrating on the keyboard as she plays the final chords, she doesn’t seem to notice the camera moving in for an extreme close-up of the intense emotion on her face. She’s there, alone, until the last note fades and she looks up at the audience as if surprised there’s anyone watching.

  People stand. In twos and threes at first, then whole rows, then everyone. The judges, too. Everyone in the auditorium, almost, is applauding as hard as they can, and many people are crying too. I am watching fame happen, right in front of my eyes.

  Take Me Home

  On my phone screen, FaceFeed explodes with comments.

  Incredible.

  Best singer the show’s ever had.

  The show ain’t over until the fat girl sings. Well, she did tonight! #voterose. #breathless

  Drop the fat girl? You idiots. I hope those #selfishcows who ditched her are crying now.

  ‘What’s it saying?’ Mum asks anxiously, trying to peer across me.

  ‘It’s saying she’s great,’ I tell her, shifting the angle of my phone so she can’t see it.

  At the end of the performance, Linus waits until there is total silence before pronouncing his judgment. After all the excitement he has to wait a long time. While he waits, his expression is triumphant. He’s the opposite of the scared, nervous man who was on the news this morning. It’s as if he owns Rose now. As if he invented her.

  ‘That was extraordinary,’ he says, allowing a slow grin to play across his face for the camera. ‘Sublime.’

  ‘You are So. Special. Rose,’ Roxanne adds, with tears in her eyes. ‘I always knew there was something about you.’

  Yeah, right. Not large, but large. Was that the something? Roxanne somehow manages to make every moment on camera So. Special. But I’m starting to understand that she doesn’t necessarily Mean. What she says. All the time.

  Sebastian Rules looks happier than I’ve ever seen him. ‘You rock, princess! You wrote that song yourself?’

  Rose nods.

  ‘You got a career, girl. A total career. How you feeling about the girls who dropped you from the band? You got anything to say to them?’

  I close my eyes. Sebastian is the one whose opinion I now respect the most: he’s always been honest, I think. Why did it have to be him who mentioned the rest of us? I wish I could just shrink into a tiny pixel and press ‘Delete’.

  Rose pauses for a moment and looks out beyond the lights, knowing that we’re sitting there somewhere.

  ‘They did what they had to do,’ she says, quietly. ‘I don’t mind, because this is my music. They made me think about a few things when they let me go.’

  ‘Well, you are one classy lady,’ Sebastian says. ‘And I think you just made the whole world fall in love with you.’

  Rose looks modestly down at her hands in her lap.

  ‘I think you just earned yourself a place back in this competition,’ Linus says. ‘Because we might just have found our star.’

  Afterwards, as most of the audience heads for the toilet queues, I catch up with Nell.

  ‘Did you have any idea . . . ?’ she asks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Me neither.’

/>   ‘I’ve got to try and see her,’ I say. ‘Are you coming?’

  Nell looks at me nervously. ‘I don’t think so, Sash. I don’t think she wants us right now.’

  She’s probably right, and that’s why I have to see Rose so desperately. Please can the new Rose not hate me? This is so hard.

  I get Mum to wait for me in the lobby and I make my way down towards the backstage area, where Rose must be unwinding and getting changed. A big security guard from the TV company guards the door.

  ‘I’m Sasha,’ I explain. ‘From the Manic Pixie Dream Girls. I’ve just got to . . .’

  ‘Nobody enters,’ he says, not even looking at me.

  ‘But I was there two days ago. My friend’s in there. I just need to—’

  ‘That’s what they all say. Night night, sweets. Run along, now.’

  His eyes meet mine for a second. They are hard, with a warning in them. The door stays firmly shut.

  ‘Just for a minute,’ I beg.

  He simply ignores me.

  At that moment, Roxanne Wills rushes by, surrounded by her entourage. The security guard stands back to let them through, but he keeps his eyes on me, to make sure I don’t join them.

  ‘Roxanne!’ I call. ‘It’s me. Can you let me in?’

  She turns and looks at me, then shrugs helplessly.

  ‘Sorry, babe. I’m in a rush here. See you later, OK?’

  The door shuts behind her again and the guard stands impassively between me and it. Still, I stand my ground.

  ‘I was just in there!’ I repeat. ‘Two days ago! I’m part of the show. Well, I was.’

  He catches the look of sadness and defeat on my face. For a moment, there’s a flicker of sympathy in his eyes.

  ‘Why don’t you call her?’ he says. ‘Your friend. If she says you can come in, I’ll see what I can do.’

  So I do. I try one more time. I call her number. I text. There is no reply.

  The security guy gives me a pitying smile.

  ‘Night night then, sweets,’ he repeats.