by Oli White
“Exactly,” Austin agreed. “Now we’ve hooked people in, we can’t sit back and just hope they keep coming back. We need to ramp it up a notch. I think we should give it a week or so and then drop The Gloves interview. Show everyone we really mean business.”
“Totally!”
After that, the three of us just stood there for a while, grinning at the stats and one another like lunatics. And why not? This was pretty amazing stuff, you know?
Our brief moment of glory was interrupted by a commotion in the hall outside the common room: shouting and swearing—it didn’t sound too friendly. A few people, including Ava, headed toward the door to find out what was going on.
“Hey, what’s your problem?” Ava called out as she reached the corridor. “Leave him alone.”
I followed her across the room, and when I stuck my head outside, I was somewhat surprised to see Cooper crouching down on the floor nursing his guitar, which looked like it had been broken in about three places.
“What the hell is this?” I said, slightly stunned. “Cooper, what happened?”
There were a couple of guys standing over him shouting insults.
“The kid’s a homo!”
“Nasty little faggot!”
Unsurprisingly, they were pals of Hunter’s; I’d seen them hanging out with him a bunch of times. A handful of other students were standing around, but nobody seemed to be doing much to help, so before I knew what I was thinking, I was pushing through the gathering crowd and picking up the smashed guitar before helping Cooper to his feet.
“What’s he ever done to you, anyway?” I said.
I was standing in between Cooper and the bigger of the two guys and dearly hoping the dude wasn’t thinking about beating the crap out of me.
“I don’t like what he is, and I don’t like the way he looks at me,” the guy said.
I knew this boy, vaguely; he was in a couple of my classes and quite smart, if I’d remembered rightly. I couldn’t believe he was behaving like such a dick.
“The way he looks at you—are you kidding?” Ava shouted from behind me. “You need to go home and clean your bathroom mirror, mate, because you’re not exactly Taylor Lautner. You do realize that, don’t you?”
“He just got in our way,” the chunkier of the two piped up.
“So you smashed his guitar?” I said. “Really nice.”
“He dropped it, didn’t you, fag?”
Cooper said nothing; just stood there looking unsure, so I stepped forward, squaring up to the two guys but bricking it the whole time.
“Look, just back off and leave him alone, all right?”
That was when I spotted Hunter, grinning and shaking his head at me from the back of the small crowd.
“Ooh, Penman, you’re pretty scary when you’re angry,” he said, smirking. “Is there something we should know about you and the traveling minstrel?”
So Hunter being cool with me had lasted what? Three hours? I knew it was just a front for Ella.
“Dudes, you need to walk away,” Hunter told his friends. “You’re embarrassing yourselves and me. Just leave it. Let’s go get some food.”
That was when Ava stepped forward, furious.
“So as these are your stupid mates, Hunter,” she spat, “what I want to know is, do you agree with them?”
Hunter looked at his pals and then back at Ava, confused.
“What are you bleating on about?”
“I mean, do you think like they do? Those names they were calling Cooper?”
The corridor was full of people but you could have heard a pin drop at that moment.
“Whatever,” Hunter said. “I haven’t got time for this.”
“Is that right?” Ava said, her eyes burning. “Because I’m the same as Cooper, do you hear? I’m gay too, and if he’s all those things, then so am I. And me and Cooper and people like us are going to shut that crap down in this school.” She looked over at the two boys. “Do you understand? We’re going to shut you down.”
As the small crowd slowly scattered, Ava sat Cooper down in the common room while I surveyed the damage to his guitar.
“Thank you, guys, but I think I’m OK,” Cooper said. “I did worry I might be toast there for a minute, but they’re usually all mouth, people like that. Of course, I could have done without the smashed guitar.”
Within seconds, Sai and Austin had joined us, closely followed by Ella, who ran straight over to me, looking slightly horrified.
“Jack, are you hurt? Someone said you were in a fight?”
“Hardly a fight,” I laughed. “Not even a minor scuffle.”
By this time, Hunter and his friends were nowhere to be seen and Ella smiled at me proudly.
“Jack, you little hero,” she said.
I was a split second away from telling her about her boyfriend’s part in all of it, but I stopped myself. Why make her feel bad? She’d find out what he was really like soon enough without my help, plus it would have just sounded like sour grapes after seeing them together that morning.
“Jack, that was pretty brave, mate,” Sai laughed. “Those were some big-ass dudes, man.”
“Nah. If you want to talk brave, look no further than Ava,” I said. “She just came out in front of half the school.”
“Oh God, I did, didn’t I?” she giggled.
“Yes you did, bitch,” Cooper said.
I don’t know if it was relief or shock or what, but within a few seconds all six of us were in stitches, arms around one another in a circle, laughing our heads off.
THE RISE AND RISE
The next couple of weeks were pretty much a whirlwind as we handed in our remaining coursework, knuckled down to some hardcore revision, and prepared for the onslaught of exams. Meanwhile, we had to keep up GenNext’s social media, and with the site getting more and more hits every day, that was a massive task on top of everything else. I have to say, I felt pretty positive about my media production AS level—Mr. Allen had given my and Ella’s project an A, which was half the grade—and I worked my ass off to cram for my other subjects, too. As nail-biting as it all was, when the exams finally arrived, they didn’t seem too bad. OK, so I might not come out with the world’s most amazing results, but given that I’d switched schools in the middle of sixth form, I felt pretty positive. The other four members of the team moaned and groaned about the amount of work just as much as I did—especially Austin, who’d left most of his revision until the last minute and then crammed like a nutter—but when it came down to it, they were all so bloody smart they would probably end up acing every single exam.
Once the exams and all things study-related were done and dusted, we only had a few weeks back at school, and before we knew it the summer holidays were upon us. And that was when everything really started to go crazy and my life as I knew it was literally turned upside down. Sure, there may have been a summer happening out there somewhere, but there certainly wasn’t much of a holiday going on; well, not for me, Sai, Austin, Ava and Ella, anyway. In fact things were going so freakishly well with GenNext that we hardly had time to take a breath. Everyone at school seemed to be talking about us online, and we found ourselves being bombarded with messages and texts from students, either telling us how much they loved the site or wanting to get in on the action.
We’d decided to hold The Gloves interview back until we’d really built up our subscribers and whetted their appetites, so when we did eventually upload it, everything suddenly went completely bat-crap crazy. Just the mere mention of the band’s name on the site caused a massive buzz and a huge amount of traffic, but once The Gloves put links to GenNext on their Facebook page, Instagram account and Twitter feed, we were getting tens of thousands of hits a day, plus a ton of new subscribers who seemed hungry for more. After that, the info@GenNext mailbox was bursting at the seams with emails from managers and agents practically begging us to interview their hot new acts and future stars. For the first few weeks, Ella and I tried to shoot segme
nts with as many of them as we could—at least the ones we thought had something cool or original about them—just to stockpile plenty of good content. After a while, though, I could hardly keep up with the emails, and I found myself trotting out the same polite reply, telling people that we just couldn’t accommodate any more requests at the present time and we would get back to them as soon as we could. It was utter madness.
Poor Mum and Dad must have started to forget what I looked like. For the previous few months, on the rare occasions I’d actually been at home and not sleeping, I’d either been locked in my room studying or flying past them in the hall on my way out of the door. Family mealtimes had completely gone out of the window, and the only time I ever found myself actually sitting down to eat was after midnight in front of a computer screen. Of course, they were both very proud of what I was doing and told me so whenever I phoned or messaged them from HQ with the next exciting bit of news. To tell you the truth, I think they were even happier about the fact that I now had a good bunch of friends and I was no longer the social recluse they’d spent so many sleepless nights worrying about. That said, I could tell they had concerns about how fast GenNext was moving and how insanely busy my everyday existence was becoming, even though they never actually said it out loud.
“You’ve still got your A levels to think about next year, Jack,” Mum reminded me on a regular basis.
Yeah. I wasn’t so sure about that. I was much too busy becoming the face of a hugely successful website and online channel. We’d get our AS level results soon enough, later on in the summer, and to be honest, with all that was happening, the daily onslaught of teachers banging on about higher education seemed like a distant memory now. Exam results somehow just didn’t seem as important now as they had done while we were still at school.
Actually, Ella was much more the face of GenNext than I was in those first weeks. I have to be honest, I didn’t feel massively confident about being on camera in the beginning. Still, as time passed, I started finding my feet and feeling more confident—I even started to enjoy it a bit. I actually got a few personal mentions on Twitter, which made me chuckle to myself on more than one occasion.
I mean, who’d have thought it, eh? The geek who nobody even spoke to a year ago. It was all very weird and wonderful.
The first time it truly sank in how fast things were moving was when Cooper phoned Ava to tell her that he’d received some serious attention from several record labels after we’d uploaded a video of him playing a low-key acoustic set—and not tiny obscure ones either; I mean record labels that I’d actually bloody heard of. We were all really chuffed with the news, of course, but on that same boiling hot Saturday, Ella came bombing down the stairs to HQ brandishing the shiny new iPhone 6S that Hunter had bought her for her birthday the previous week, and sounding flustered.
“Seriously, you have to look at this, guys!”
“What’s up?” Ava strode toward Ella and threw an arm around her neck as she looked down at the phone screen.
“Look at the number of followers on my Instagram all of a sudden,” Ella said.
Now I already knew how good Ella’s Instagram was—let’s face it, I’d spent enough time studying it over the past couple of months—so I wasn’t exactly surprised that she’d picked up a few new followers now she had a bit of an online presence.
“How many?” I asked.
“Well,” Ella said, “it’s gone from just under three thousand last week to . . . and you won’t believe this . . . two hundred and fifty thousand.”
“What?! When did this happen?” Ava screamed.
“I don’t really know,” Ella said. “I mean, I’ve been so busy on GenNext I haven’t even looked at my personal account for a few days, but then today it’s just . . . and it’s pretty much the same with Twitter.”
She tapped and swiped and then tapped her phone again as Sai and Austin leapt up from the sofa to join us.
“Look” she said, holding her phone up. “I mean, I’ve been tweeting The Gloves interview, but this morning the followers are jumping up by the second. I’ve literally got hundreds of tweets from people saying how much they love GenNext. It’s just—”
She stopped dead, a look of astonishment sweeping across her face.
“Oh my God, that’s why. Oh wow!”
“What is it?”
“Katy Perry only retweeted my message and the link to GenNext late last night,” she said. “I mean, how did she even . . . ?”
“Yeah, that’ll do it,” Ava laughed. “She has over eighty million followers.”
“This is legit crazy, guys,” Austin said. “It also explains why I’ve just had an email from some hipster cosmetics company saying they’ll pay us proper coinage if we get Ella and Jack using some of their hair wax, sludge, clay, whatever, and mention them by name on camera. I thought it was a piss-take, but—”
“How much money?” Sai jumped in.
“Two grand a pop.”
“Tell them we’ll do it for three,” I said, thinking fast.
“Yeah?”
“Hell, yeah!”
Of course I was going to do it—wouldn’t you? Look, as far as I was concerned, GenNext wasn’t just a cool after-school project or a hobby anymore. Now it was something to build on; a way to make money and start carving out a career, just like I’d always wanted.
It didn’t stop there, either; as the summer rolled on, there were more and more opportunities to turn GenNext into a viable business, and in the end Sai suggested we let his dad’s youngest brother, AJ, take us under his wing and manage us as a team. AJ was only in his early thirties and looked even younger, but he was very shrewd and extremely successful. Amongst other things, he was a partner in a cool talent agency called Metronome. When Sai put it to us, we all agreed that the business and promotional side of GenNext was getting too complicated for us to handle while we had the technical and creative side to look after. It was time to take things to the next level.
Later that afternoon, Ella pulled me to one side saying there was something she wanted to ask me, so the two of us headed out for a walk. Now I have to tell you, it had been quite some time since I’d been on my own with Ella, and that was something of my own engineering. Much as I enjoyed being close to her, I was worried that being alone with her might be too difficult. Like, I wouldn’t know what to say or how to behave, you know? When other people were around it was a doddle to be natural, but alone . . . well, I just didn’t know. For a start, it all still felt a little raw, even though it had been a couple of months since I’d found out about her and Hunter. What if I ended up taking her hand or telling her how amazing she was, or something utterly embarrassing like that? I might not be able to stop myself. I was apprehensive to say the least, and what could she possibly want to ask me that couldn’t be said in front of the others anyway?
We headed out into a gorgeous, bright day, taking a leisurely stroll around the streets near Austin’s place, lost in banter about how fast everything was happening and how excited we both felt. After a while, Ella suggested we go to the park and sit down for a while, so I grabbed a couple of Diet Cokes from a newsagent and off we went. It was scorching, but so good to be out in the sun, especially after living like moles in Austin’s cellar. Ella grabbed a small bottle out of the patchwork shoulder bag she was carrying and started spraying it at me.
“What the hell is that? Get off!”
“You’ll end up like a radish with your fair skin if you sit out in this sun for too long,” she said, giggling. “Just let me put some on; we don’t want you developing a nasty skin complaint, now do we, Jack Penman?”
“I suppose not,” I said.
Just hearing her call me by both my names like she did the day we first met made me feel horribly nostalgic, and the thought flashed through my mind that maybe things might have been different if I’d just . . . No. I wasn’t going to go there again. That subject was done.
“How’s it going with Hunter?” I asked inst
ead. I didn’t really want to know, but it just sort of came out.
“Oh, we have our moments. You know,” she said evasively.
“Actually I don’t know,” I said. “You never talk about him much and you never bring him along to any of the gigs we film or anything, really.” Then, seeing as we were on the subject, I thought I might as well go for broke and ask the question that haunted me. “I mean, are you guys in love . . . or is it just a casual thing?”
She went silent for a moment, thinking about it. “I thought I was in love with him for a little while, maybe . . . back at the start of the year,” she said. “Then we had a break from one another and then we fell into this casual dating thing and then . . .”
“Then what?”
“Then you came to St. Joe’s.”
She smiled so sweetly at me and I swallowed hard, my heart suddenly thumping in my chest. What was she trying to tell me?
“And that made things different how?” I said softly, daring to put my hand on hers.
“Oh, you know,” she said.
“I don’t know, I’m actually really dumb,” I said. “People have to spell things out for me generally, otherwise . . .”
Ella lifted her hand and softly touched my cheek.
“You absolute nutter,” she laughed. And then she leaned forward and gave me a friendly peck on the cheek.
It was only a quick, harmless kiss, but as she pulled away, the shock of what she’d done registered in her eyes. She stared at me for a moment, her face softening, and then she leaned in again, closing her eyes, and before I knew what was happening, she’d kissed me again—on the lips. Only this time it wasn’t harmless. It was sweet-soft and amazing. It was what I’d been waiting for from the moment I set eyes on her that day in Mr. Allen’s class. It was everything.
OK, so it’s probably been said a million times, but when I kissed Ella, every single part of me felt weak, as if I’d completely surrendered. It was the most fantastic thing imaginable for a few moments, but then she jerked away from me as if some electric current in my lips had given her a shock.
