I understood now why Dean Macaroni had been so dismissive of me when we’d been reintroduced at Steam, why Liam had been contemptuous when I’d been introduced to him as Kayla’s protégée: They immediately saw me as a product, not as a person.
My cell phone rang, Devonport calling. I said, “Hi, Mommy!” into the phone but it was Charles, not Mom. “Hey, butthole, the whole town is tuning in to J-Pop this morning. Don’t screw up or I won’t be able to show my face in school Monday.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” I could just see Jen Burke watching J-Pop this morning, then immediately starting an Internet smear campaign ratting me out as a Devonport High loser who should be shunned, not camping out with music industry A-listers.
“Don’t be like that. You coming home to visit soon or what?”
“I hope so,” I said, and I did hope so. After the months of work and preparation, I wouldn’t have minded a nice weekend in dead-end Devonport. I’d sleep till noon with Cash lying at the foot of my bed, I’d be awakened by salty breezes coming into my room and Cash licking my face, Mom and Dad would take care of me, do my laundry and take me out for a lobster roll and a giant ice cream sundae (not from Dairy Queen)—man, that would be so nice. I wouldn’t even care about running into Jen Burke or Doug Chase cuz I’d be telling Mom and Dad about this new guy in my life who goes to Dartmouth; Dad would be all over that.
Dad got on the phone. “Hi,” he said. He was always so formal with me now, never offered a “honey” or a “sweetie,” not even a “dear” when he spoke to me. “Good luck today—I’m sure you’ll do just fine. We’ll expect to see you in June for the G.E.D. test. Here, Mommy wants to wish you well.”
Dad didn’t wait for a response, which was okay with me—I dreaded the moment I would have to tell him I was backing down on my one sworn promise to him. I hadn’t studied for the G.E.D. and had no intention of taking it. It seemed to me that now that my income was supporting myself and our family’s home improvements, why should I be held accountable for that test anyway? Clearly I didn’t need a high school education to make it on my own. I was doing just fine.
Mom said, “Hi, sweetie, I’m so excited and nervous! But I know you’ll be great; I’m—we’re—so proud! Henry and Katie are here. We’re having a little celebration in your honor. I wish I could be there with you, but Charles has a skate meet later today.”
I didn’t bring up the fact that Charles had a skate meet like every other week, but how often was your daughter appearing on a famous TV show to debut her first record? I could only imagine that her absence was because of Lucky, that all the pain of our loss would hit her harder if she joined me on this important day, when she’d never gotten to see Lucky reach this point.
Mom said, “Here, someone else wants to say hi to you.”
Katie’s voice squealed, “OH MY GOD, Wonder! The whole town is talking about you; everyone at school just can’t believe it! Are you hanging out with Kayla? What is she like? What other famous people have you met? I am so PSYCHED for you!”
How nice, Katie. I couldn’t help but remember that our shared DQ experiences and years of knowing each other hadn’t meant she wouldn’t dump me at school the minute she got popular.
I said, “Is Henry there?”
There was a silence, then I heard Katie whisper, “But she wants to talk to you”
Opera Man came onto the phone, singing, “Is this the girl/who doesn’t return my e-mails/doesn’t/I suspect/even open them? I’m going/to slit my wrists now!” I grinned wide, then worried that the smile might have smudged lip gloss onto my teeth.
I so suck. If Liam had sent me an e-mail, I would have canceled every voice and dance lesson, every business meeting, any recording session, just to spend the whole day composing the perfect response to a guy I barely knew, but I hadn’t once bothered to e-mail or call Henry, whom I’d known since forever.
Kayla burst into the bathroom and locked the door behind her. I jumped down from the window perch so she wouldn’t rag on me for scuffing my pants or not meditating or whatever she does before an important public appearance. And since there is no such thing as a private cell phone convo when Kayla is present, I mumbled “Sorry, gotta go” into the phone and turned it off. Now I double-sucked. I promised myself I would call Henry back later to apologize for getting off the phone so quickly.
Kayla went into the stall. “Swear to God, if anyone follows me into this bathroom I’m gonna scream! Sometimes I just get so sick of people touching me all the time—can you sign this, can we take a picture of you with us, blah blah BLAH! The only place I can get any friggin’ peace is the friggin’ bathroom.” Then, insta-mood change that was vintage Kayla. “Wonder honey, are you ready for your big day?”
She came out of the stall to wash her hands, telling me, “That outfit is adorable.” I had on tight white capri denim pants and a tight white T-shirt with the Wonder bread logo across the chest, along with a pair of the sneakers whose brand I was now promoting, in colorful shoelaces that matched the blue, red, and yellow Wonder bread logo colors. Kayla touched my hair, fixed a smudge of my eye makeup. “Go like this,” she said, blotting her teeth. “Now this,” she added, rubbing her teeth with her index finger. I followed her instructions. She pulled a little tube of Vaseline from her pocket. “Put this on your teeth so they’ll shine on TV.” She patted my bum. “Good girl! The boys are gonna love you!”
I had a question I had been dying to ask her for weeks now. Since I seemed to be in her good graces at this particular moment, I took my shot. “Heard from Liam?” I put on my best no big deal voice.
“Liam! What the hell, you’re asking about Liam when you’re about to appear before millions of people on TV? What, do you like him or something?”
Very bad strategic move on my part. I knew I should have trusted my instinct not to ask her about him. “No!” I said. “I was just curious. . . .”
Karl’s knock on the other side of the bathroom door saved me the inquisition I know Kayla was about to put me through on why the hell I cared what Liam was up to. Karl’s voice grunted, “Kayla, they’re ready for you.”
Kayla gave me a quick once-over. “Do great today. Liam? LIAM? Whatever! Think of Lucky, think of me.” She headed toward the door, unlocked it, then turned back to me and winked. “Just don’t do too great—I’m not quite ready to retire yet!” And she was gone.
Deep breaths, deep breaths. Jules rushed inside the bathroom calling, “Wonder!” When she saw me staring absently out the window, she snapped, “Showtime, girl! Get your ass out there, now! Kayla’s just going on.”
Jules hustled me over to the curtained guest entrance of the J-Pop set to wait before being announced. From the playback screen overhead, I saw J standing before the camera. He said to the audience: “We’re introducing today a singer we think is going to be huge. But it’s not me who’s gonna tell you all about her. It’s . . .” And then the cameras panned to Kayla as she burst into the studio, followed by a deafening roar of screams from the studio audience. The audience jumped on its feet, cheers and whistles and screams and high-fives all around.
“What’s up NEW YORK?” Kayla said. The girl could work a crowd like no one else. In front of the cameras, with a studio audience, all of a sudden her attitude was all street, her language hip-hop, as if she’d grown up in the hood and not in a big Victorian house with an organic garden and Birkenstock parents in Cambridge, Mass. She chatted with J for a few minutes about her upcoming tour, the new video she was about to shoot, her possible movie career down the road. Then they got down to business—my business. Kayla turned to the audience: “So y’all know I am touring this summer, so now what I gots ta do is introduce y’all to my opening act, she’s like my li’l sis, I’ve known her since we were coming up together in Boston. Give her a big shout out, awright? Wonder Blake!”
I rushed onto the stage, almost tripping over the soundstage wires, to where J and Kayla were standing. The camera zoomed in on the billboard outs
ide the windows behind us. My heart was pounding a katrillion beats per second. But with the camera on, there was a comfort zone I’d known since Beantown Kidz. Somehow, the scene was less frightening than the nervous anticipation I’d experienced in the dressing room and the bathroom.
I could feel the excitement in the air, but I knew it came from Kayla’s surprise appearance, not because of me. A frat dude type guy in the audience stood up and shouted, “Kayla, you’re so HOT!” Kayla hand-gestured a phone signal with her thumb at her ear and her pinkie at her chin. She mouthed Call me! but to the camera, not to the boy in the audience. The crowd laughed.
J said, “Wonder, welcome, we’re excited to have you here.” He turned to the camera. “Everybody here knows about Beantown Kidz, how it launched the careers of Kayla, Freddy Porter, and Dean Marconi. Wonder’s another B-Kidz alum—”
“She was like the baby of the group,” Kayla interrupted. She put her arm around me in a sisterly grip. She even played with the ends of my hair, like Lucky used to do.
J said, “But now this girl is all grown up. She’s got a debut single we’re premiering here today.” J turned to me. “Wonder, I first met you at a party at Kayla’s house recently. The thing I noticed about you then—I think everyone at that party noticed—was how you dance. You just tear it up on the dance floor.” Yeah, just gimme a few Cosmos, J, and watch me go!
Tig had told me to just be myself, not a Kayla clone. I said, “I love to dance! But mostly I was psyched that I got to dance with Will Nieves from South Coast in my first video. I have been crushing on him since seventh grade.” I saw several girls in the audience nod their heads appreciatively.
J introduced an old B-Kid clip of me doing a hip-hop dance routine with Kayla. The audience was all “awww . . .” looking at our ponytail hair and awkward preadolescent faces and bodies. J said, “You’ve come a long way since those days, Wonder. What do you think of all this?” He gestured toward Kayla, the studio audience, the tall buildings of Manhattan outside the studio windows, the giant billboard of me.
What I was really thinking was not appropriate to say aloud, much less on national television. Well, J, I think about sex all the time—when will I do it, with whom? (I’m, like, extremely curious about The Liam.) And my mind is so in the gutter that I’m in actuality wondering what your raw pecs look like without that tight black muscle shirt you have on, even though your attractiveness quotient gets severe demerits cuz I am fairly sure you wear a toupee. But I’m distracted because I have cramps at this moment and why did the stylist have to choose an all-white outfit for me during this time of the month, and this is the third day of my period and really what I am thinking is I COULD SCARF DOWN TWO BIG MACS RIGHT NOW!
But I was a good pop princess. Instinctively I turned on for the camera, smiled wide, and said, “I’m thinking I can’t believe I am on this show and that this is my life!” The audience offered a small trickle of applause, sincerity points.
J said, “We’ve got a game we like to play here—it’s called Quick Questions. I’m going to ask you a few questions; just answer rapid-fire—don’t think, just go. Question one: What is your favorite movie?”
“Bring It On.” My favorite movie is really Heathers but during the preinterview in the dressing room, J told me not to say that movie because advertisers on J-Pop would not appreciate a reference to a movie about a clique of nasty girls and dreamy Christian Slater who wants to blow their high school up.
“Best song to make out to?” This was a surprise question! The second question was supposed to be, “Who are your favorite singers?”
Without thinking, I blurted out, “Anything by Paul Weller.” D’oh! Why did I have to say that? I prayed that Liam was too completely cool to ever watch a show like J-Pop. I saw Karl standing in the distance; I could have sworn his bushy eyebrow raised upward at my answer.
J turned to the audience. I think he was annoyed with me for referencing a singer obscure to the teen pop audience. “That was an interesting choice Wonder had; I didn’t realize she had such eclectic taste in music. A lot of you here might not know who Paul Weller is. He’s a British singer who—”
I interrupted, my face at full blush. “Next question please!” Everyone laughed.
J said, “I think Wonder speaks from experience! Well, that leads to the next question. First kiss?”
Okay, the last question was supposed to be, “Boxers or briefs?” (Boxers, fer sure.) I realized I had been set up. I didn’t want to say “Doug Chase” because that jerk was certainly my first real kiss and no way did I want the whole town of Devonport knowing that, but J was laughing, and said, “No need to answer that one, Wonder, we’ve got a clip here to answer that question, one that I think the girls in the audience will particularly be interested in.” There it was, a New Kids on the Block-looking fourteen-year-old Freddy Porter asking me in a squeaky voice, “Wanna try?” and me bouncing my head like I was the genie girl on I Dream of Jeannie and then quite possibly the most embarrassingly bad lip smack in the history of television. The girls in the J-Pop audience squealed. Some girl shouted out, “You are so lucky!”
I laughed too. “How did you find that?”
J said, “We have our sources. Speaking of whom, we’ve got another surprise today, a very special caller on the phone. Freddy, are you there?”
More screams (LOUD! No wonder Kayla wore earplugs) from the girls in the audience as a current-incarnation video clip of Freddy Porter was shown, a close-up of the eighteen-year-old sex god with arms open wide on some tropical beach singing, “Girl, I wanna get wit’ you.” I looked at Kayla. Even she looked surprised—and Kayla never looked surprised. She whispered in my ear, “I have no idea. Just play along. Whatever.”
“Wonder! J! Kayla!” Freddy’s voice boomed out from phone speakers coming from I don’t know where.
J said, “Freddy, what’s up, dawg? So to Wonder’s apparent mortification, we’ve been sharing with the audience—and all of the world—Wonder’s first kiss, which it turns out was with you, dude. Care to share your memories of this magical moment? It’s not every pop princess we get in here who has footage of getting her first kiss from Freddy Porter.”
Freddy’s voice blared: “She was a great kisser! A quick study!” Audience laughter and applause.
I played along. I went, “I was twelve!” Blech, my parents were watching this! How embarrassing!
Freddy teased, “Yeah, unfortunately there was no tongue. But you all want to know something?” The audience cheered. “That clip shows our kiss, right, on B-Kidz. But Wonder, do you want to tell everyone what happened before that take?”
The camera zoomed on me shaking my head vehemently. Freddy’s voice again: “We had a practice session in the dressing room first! Her idea!”
The camera was on me again, this time my head nodding fast and embarrassed. “It’s true,” I said. Why did he have to remember that? I winked at the audience. “Practice makes perfect, I always learned.” Cheers for Wonder from the audience. I saw Tig standing next to Karl, and if I didn’t know better I’d say Tig’s stone face had an almost-smile on it. I was doing good. I hoped Jen Burke was part of the Devonport contingent watching J-Pop this morning—I knew for a fact she had pictures of Freddy Porter taped all over her notebook.
Kayla ribbed me. “You never told me that!” How comfy-coze we all were, like a little B-Kidz reunion moment captured on J-Pop.
Then Freddy said, “Wonder, I’m . . . uh . . . wondering.” (Audience laughter again, some screams of “We love you, Freddy!”) “Should we pick up where we left off? Maybe dinner sometime?”
And I swear to God, the shrieks and screams in that audience you couldn’t believe. The girls in the audience apparently didn’t know Freddy wasn’t bad as a dance partner, but that he was a little . . . shall we say “frisky”? . . . with where his hands strayed. Not to mention that Freddy had a tendency toward bad breath and toward assuming all girls are easy. I doubted the swooning girls in the audience would
have appreciated me reeducating them about the object of their lust, however.
J said, “Wonder, I think you’ve just been asked out on a date on national television by Freddy Porter. I think the screams in this audience can testify to the fact that a lot of girls wouldn’t mind being you right now! So, does Freddy have a shot?”
I repeated Kayla’s earlier hand phone gesture, thumb at my ear, pinkie at my chin, but instead of mouthing the words I sang out, “Call me, Freddy!” and the audience cheered and applauded again.
J said, “Wonder, care to introduce your video?”
I said, “Here it is: ‘Bubble Gum Pop.’ I hope you all—and Freddy!—like it!”
And I was officially launched.
Thirty
Kayla and I were in the monster SUV with the darkened windows riding back to her house from the J-Pop set when a text message flashed across my cell phone. From Liam! Pop Princess: J-Pop makes me wanna puke, but even I will admit you were a star. Did I leave my Paul Weller CD in your Discman?; >-L
Oh, I couldn’t take it anymore! I blurted out to Karl, sitting in the front seat, “Hey Karl, did you give Liam my cell phone number? Is he coming back to Brooklyn once he finishes finals?” I’d lost count of how many times I’d tried to give Karl a subtle hint to drop my digits on Liam. Karl was practically my suite mate up there on that brownstone fourth floor, and I didn’t know how many more times I could pretend that I’d found Liam’s book in the bathroom, or I’d heard about some awesome restaurant up by Dartmouth that Liam should know about, so maybe Karl could tell Liam to like call me sometime or whatever? Now that Karl had finally gotten the message, I felt like the universe as I knew it could not possibly go on any longer without me finally getting the DL on Liam. Who cared if Kayla was in the car? After my J-Pop performance, I was golden—for now.