“Veggie burgers. Slurpees. Whatever. No crowd surfing.”
I sighed. “Crowd surfing sucks, Dad. All you ever do is get kicked in the head.”
“Third rule,” my mom continued. “You must call us every half-hour while you’re gone. No exceptions. If your phone dies, you either beg, borrow, or steal someone else’s, or you find a pay phone or come home to tell us you’re okay.”
“Cake.”
“What?”
“Like, ‘a piece of cake.’ Consider it done.” I was bouncing up and down in my seat, too excited to sit still. “Can I call James now and tell him? Or maybe I should call Victoria first and tell her?”
My dad laughed, shook his head, and took his glasses off so he could rub his eyes. “Audrey, my beloved only child,” he sighed, “you’re going to be the death of me.”
21 “It takes more than a heartbeat to get me….”
—The Sounds, “Much Too Long”
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, I called James. “Hey,” I said. “Guess what?”
There was a pause. “Do I have to actually guess?”
“No, it’ll take too long.” I looked down at my bare toenails, which seemed to be the only body part that escaped the nail polish fiasco. “My parents said I can go out with you!”
“That’s awesome! Are they making you bring a bodyguard?”
Downstairs, the doorbell rang. My mom was out and my dad was on a conference call in his office, so I climbed off my bed and went downstairs to answer. “No bodyguard,” I told James. “Just a rabid Doberman.”
James laughed, which was good, because when people don’t get my sense of humor, things can go awry in a bad way. “Well, it’ll be nice to have company in case things get boring.”
“Hold on a second,” I told James, then unlocked the front door. On our front porch stood two skinny guys, both of them looking excited and anxious.
“Hi?” I said. This was a first, I had to admit. Autograph-seekers had yet to show up at my front door, but thanks to Google Maps, it was inevitable.
“Hi,” the first guy said, and then the next thing I knew, he was swooping in to kiss me while his buddy took a picture.
“Excuse me!” I spat, shoving him away with my free hand. Luckily I had managed to turn so that he only got the edge of my hair and not my mouth or any other part of my body attached to my face. “What the hell is your problem, dude?” I yelled. “My dad and an extremely insane cat are upstairs and they will fuck you up, I swear to God. Especially the cat. She’s loyal.”
“No, it’s cool, I’m Milo, I’m the lead singer for this band, Frequency, and we just got signed and we’re trying to get our first single out there and we thought that if you kissed us—”
I just shook my head. “You must be made of one hundred percent moron. Erase that photo.” Then I put the phone back to my ear. “Hey, James? Can you hang on for just a second more? There’s an issue.”
“Yeah, sure. You okay?”
“Totally fine. I’m just …” How to explain this situation? I decided to go for the truth. “Some wannabe rock stars want me to kiss them so they’ll get famous.” Then I shot my bitchiest look at both guys, who were reluctantly erasing the photo and glaring at me.
“Is this a daily thing for you?”
“Not yet. Hopefully not ever.”
“Did you kiss them?” he asked.
“Of course not!”
“Cool. I like your integrity.”
“Yeah, I like it, too. I also like the fact that you just used ‘integrity’ correctly in a sentence.” Then I turned back to the guys. “Now scram, losers. And next time you kiss a girl, ask first. They’re not all as nice as me.”
By the time I slammed the door shut and got back to the phone, James was laughing. “Did you just tell them to scram?” he laughed.
“Yeah,” I admitted.
“That’s probably the dorkiest thing I’ve ever heard.” He was still laughing.
I stomped back upstairs, still irritated by my run-in with the kissing bandits. “They were in a band called Frequency. Never buy their CD.”
“I had no plans to do that.”
“Cool. From the looks of them, they probably sound like Phish, anyway.”
“So where were we before all that?”
“Um …” I thought back a minute, then laughed. “Well, you were glad I was bringing a Doberman on our date so that things wouldn’t be boring. You might not believe this, James, but I’d enjoy a boring date.”
“I can imagine.”
“Oh, yeah. But my parents have some rules.”
“Good. I love rules.”
“Really?”
“Especially ones from parents of the girl that I want to go out with. Those are the best.”
I giggled. He’s funny! News like this had to be shared, so I started to sign on to IM, to message Victoria. It makes my parents crazy how I can do all of this at once, talk on the phone and email and IM. I’m just like, how can you not? I don’t understand how they get anything done during the day.
“So what are the rules?”
“Well, first, they have to meet you.” I logged in and watched my screen pop up. “Don’t worry, though, that’s easy. They just want to make sure you’re not hideous or a pervert.”
James gave a nervous little laugh. “Great. Can’t wait.”
“Trust me, if you can survive Sharon Eggleston, you can survive my parents. Second rule, we can’t go to any concerts or anything on a rooftop, apparently.”
“Do you normally go on rooftops?”
“No, my dad’s just trying to cover all of his bases. He’s paranoid. We’re also not allowed to crowd surf while on our date.”
“I hate crowd surfers. All they do is kick you in the head.”
“I know, right? I tried to tell my dad that, but he wasn’t getting it.”
“I have to tell you, so far these rules sound pretty easy. I think I’m gonna win.”
“Well, I also have to call them every half-hour, just so they know I haven’t been killed in a fan stampede or something.”
While I was talking to James, I found Victoria’s screen name and IM’d her.
BlondeOnBlonde: hihihihihi guess what
GodSavetheQueen: hola chica
GodSavetheQueen: what
BlondeOnBlonde: James = funny!
GodSavetheQueen: haha funny
GodSavetheQueen: or
GodSavetheQueen: nervous tic funny
BlondeOnBlonde: haha funny
BlondeOnBlonde: obvs >: O
GodSavetheQueen: tee hee
GodSavetheQueen: now who’s funny? lol
BlondeOnBlonde: not you
That’s when my Instant Messenger exploded.
Suddenly I started getting messages from everywhere, and new IM windows were opening all over my screen. “Whoa,” I said. “What the hell?”
“What?” James asked.
“I was IM’ing with Victoria and now …” I watched as the windows quickly filled my screen. “Holy crap, James, there’s like a hundred message requests coming in. I can’t even talk to Victoria anymore.”
“Do you think someone gave out your IM name?”
“Maybe …?” My computer was now frozen. “My computer’s totally stopped. I can’t even move the cursor.” I hit a few buttons. Like I even knew what I was doing. “Fuck!”
“What’s your IM name? I’ll Google it.”
“BlondeOnBlonde. No spaces.”
“That’s cute,” he said. I could tell just by the way his voice went up that he was smiling. “I like that.”
“What’s yours?”
“BoysDontCry. No spaces. Or apostrophes.”
I felt my heart flutter like a butterfly. “Is that your favorite Cure song?”
“Of course.”
“Where do you stand on Disintegration?” This could be the thing that ended our relationship before it even officially began.
“Well, I think—oh. Wow.”
“What?”
“I Googled your name and ‘BlondeOnBlonde’ and it took me to some message board?”
I sighed. “Is it the Do-Gooders’ message board?”
“No, it looks like a fansite.”
I winced. In the grand history of awkward moments, having your current crush on a fansite of your ex-boyfriend’s band had to be up there. “Um, are they talking about me?”
“I think the whole page is about you. Hold on, I’m going to the message board.” I could hear him clicking. “Yeah, someone leaked your IM. And your email address, too.”
“My email?” I squeaked.
I could hear James clicking around. “These people know a lot about you. I should go on here and do some research before our first date.”
I groaned. “Lies. All lies.”
“Audrey!” James took on a mock-game-show-host voice. “Is it true that your favorite food is macaroni and cheese?”
“Um, I’ve never really thought about it. But … okay, sure. Why not? Yay for mac and cheese.”
“It should be your favorite. Mac and cheese is awesome.” He continued to boom in that fake voice. “Audrey, is your favorite color lilac?”
“Hardly. Pastels make me queasy.”
“Me too. Where did they get all this info?”
I sighed. “Probably people at school. I heard that the tabloids are paying people for information about me, like where I eat and stuff.” I knew this from sitting in the front office for the past week, where if I stayed quiet enough, I could hear bits and pieces of conversations from all the secretaries and parent volunteers. “I think the going rate is a thousand dollars cash if someone can produce pictures of me and Evan.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Welcome to my life, James.” I hit a couple more buttons on my keyboard, but my computer was good and frozen. “Damn, I really liked my IM name, too. It’s gonna take me forever to think up a new one.”
“Heyyy … do you have any pictures of you and Evan still?”
“Um …” This conversation was becoming a series of Awkward Moments. What was the right answer to that question? I felt like I was going to say the wrong thing no matter what. “Why?”
“Because then we could get Victoria to sell them and then we could take the money for our date and go all out.”
I laughed. “What, expensive wine somewhere? Caviar?”
“I was thinking record shopping at RPM, actually.”
“I love it when you talk like that. But I think most of the pictures got burned.”
“How?”
“Me lighting them on fire in the bathroom sink.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry. But we can still go to RPM, right?”
“Well, I still have to meet your parents.”
“And not let me crowd surf. And probably not stage dive, either.”
“You know,” James pointed out, “your dad didn’t say anything about sky diving. Or deep-sea diving. So we still have a lot of options.”
Oh God, I heart him so much.
22 “You are everything I want ‘cause you are everything I’m not….”
—Taking Back Sunday, “MakeDamnSure”
FIRST DATES ARE NEVER EASY. I mean, duh, that’s a universal truth. But they can get a bit more complicated when your ex-boyfriend’s song hits the Billboard Top 10 on the same day as your date with New Boy.
That’s what happened to me. Because, you know, life’s just awesome that way.
As it was, I was already a basket of nerves. I guess that’s what happens when you spend day after day alone in the school office, pretending to care about Roman empires and geometry and whatever else I was supposed to care about during the day.
Anyway, on the Tuesday afternoon before my first date with James, the latest Billboard Hot 100 Singles chart was released. “Audrey, Wait!” had hit number ten. It was the fastest-rising song in chart history. The Lolitas’ new song, “Hell on Earth,” had surged forward, as well, but in England, it was at number nine, while the Do-Gooders were at number eight.
Throw the confetti.
I know all this because I was watching MTV2 with the sound off while I was drying my hair on that Tuesday evening, and a little news blurb came up. I saw a picture of Evan’s face juxtaposed next to a picture of Simon Lolita’s, with my high school yearbook photo between them.
If you learn anything from me, learn this: Make sure you take the best yearbook photo you can. You never know where it’ll turn up.
By the time I got the hair dryer turned off and the television sound turned up, I managed to catch the interviews with both of my exes. Talk about a surreal experience.
“I suppose we should call Audrey and thank her,” Simon said with a wink to the camera. He was flanked by two of his bandmates, both of whom were smoking and nodding in agreement. He had that little smirk on his face that I had thought was sexy, but watching him now, it looked more like a paralyzed facial muscle and not nearly as attractive. Plus, he had bad teeth. God, how could I not have noticed that?! It must have been darker backstage than I thought.
“She’s a special girl,” Simon continued, lighting his own cigarette. Then as the lighter flame illuminated his face, “Very special. We should give her some royalties or something. Maybe write a song about her for our next album.” Then he shared a secret grin with the viewing audience.
“Fuck your royalties and die,” I said to the television as my wet hair dripped all over the floor. I hadn’t even done my makeup yet and I was wearing old gym shorts and a T-shirt I got at a garage sale that said NEW HAMPSHIRE IS FOR LOVERS. “I hope you get food poisoning from tour catering,” I added.
Then they cut to Evan and the Do-Gooders. The rest of the band looked like deer in headlights, but Evan had practiced for these sorts of interviews for months. One hand to God, he used to TiVo MTV just so he could watch bands get interviewed and learn what not to do. At the time, I thought it was so hot that he was into his career while most other guys were getting high and playing endless rounds of Xbox.
Now, though? The words control freak and egotistical maniac came to mind.
“Audrey inspired the song, but I think we all agree that we wrote it,” Evan was saying. “Or at least, I did. She got the ball rolling, but this is our band and our careers and hopefully after awhile, our fans will think of us without thinking about her.”
For some reason, that made me even madder than Simon’s comments. “You’d still be sitting around that loser’s dorm room at UCLA if it wasn’t for me!” I yelled. “You should buy me speakers for my car! Or a new iPod!”
But then Evan smiled that shy smile that always meant a snarky comment was on its way. Even at home, I saw it coming and winced. And sure enough, he grinned and said, “And I think some other bands should find their own girls.”
Oh good Lord.
So of course our home phone was afire. By now, my whole family had stopped answering because of all the calls from the press. Even the calls from my fans, Simon’s fans, and Evan’s fans were getting out of control. If the president of the United States happened to call our house just to say hi, I doubt anyone would’ve answered for fear he would start asking questions about me. My mom and dad talked about changing our number, but we had had it for years and my dad was afraid that Grandma couldn’t remember a new one. I pointed out that Grandma only called us on Christmas and Thanksgiving, but it made no difference.
I had even turned my cell off, which I was doing more and more lately. The number hadn’t been officially leaked yet, but enough people had it so that I was getting more and more mysterious texts. One came in two nights ago that just said, “WHOREWHOREWHOREWHORE,” and I sat there for a minute and stared at it for so long that it began to look like “OREOREOREOREOREOREO.” Then I deleted it, switched off my phone, and went downstairs to see if we had any cookies.
I wasn’t telling my parents any of this. They didn’t even know that my email and IM address had been hacked. I signed into my e
mail right after James and I discovered the address had been leaked online and sure enough, I had eighty-four new messages. It went up to 337 by the next morning. I read a couple and they were nice enough, mostly girls wanting to know what Evan was like, but it felt uneven, like a teeter-totter. They knew so much about me and I knew nothing about them. Why answer their questions and make it even more lopsided?
So now my ex-boyfriend and my three-hour fling were in a war of words on MTV and a war of songs on the music charts, and my new boyfriend was on his way to take me on our first official date.
And I was running late.
Yippee.
I was throwing laundry around with abandon when my mom came into my room. “I couldn’t help but notice,” she said, “that our phone has been blowing up.”
I stopped mid-throw. “It’s what?”
“Blowing up. Isn’t that what you say?”
“Mom, please …” I sighed and tried to look patient. “You can’t say things like that. It sounds weird. It offends my youthful ears.”
“Okay, okay, it’s been ringing off the hook.”
“Thank you.”
“Anyway, usually when our phone starts ringing like this, it’s because …” She trailed off a bit. “… something’s … happened …?”
I went back to digging in my laundry basket. “Evan’s song hit number ten on the charts today and he and Simon are trash-talking each other on MTV.”
“Oh. Of course.”
I glanced around at the mess on my floor. “Have you seen my white shirt?”
“Which one?”
“You know, the white shirt. The one that makes—” I stopped myself just in time from saying, The one that makes my boobs look bigger. “The one that makes me look taller,” I finished.
“The crewneck with the short sleeves?”
“V-neck with three-quarter sleeves.”
“Hanging up in the laundry room downstairs.”
I hurried past her, found the shirt, and yanked it off the hanger. I wasn’t used to doing so much laundry. It was just natural to assume that everything I wanted to wear was dirty. But now I was being vilified in the press and online for wearing arm huggies the night I met Simon. “Sooo last year!” one magazine screeched at me, giving me their “What Were They Thinking?” award, and since I pride myself on having at least some fashion sense, I decided that wouldn’t happen again. Regardless, the pictures of me wearing the arm huggies were everywhere, so now everyone hated them, just on principle. “This is all Audrey’s fault,” one message-boarder raged. “She totally ruined them and she needs to go.”