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  With an arched eyebrow, Dolores said, ‘We-ell, scalpels are dangerous too, and you’re playing with one of those,’ and then she whacked the burner on full. Gas billowed across the bench as I leaned towards the Bunsen burner, and just then someone ran by with a naked flame …

  Sigh. No, actually they didn’t. That would have been far better. Dolores could have burnt off her pink hair and a few inches of bosom and been far less attractive (though still more gorge than me) and I wouldn’t have done what I did next.

  Which was truly heinous and bloody.

  I stabbed the new boy.

  Yep, scalpel in my hand, reaching for Bunsen burner when I should have just minded my own business and let Dolores blow up her boobs which have to be filled with helium, in any case, to be that big and bouncy. Boy walking by, clearly coming over to talk to Dolores who he’d met on the steps earlier, stretching out an arm either to shake her hand or turn off the burner or something … I don’t know. I just know that the scalpel in my extended hand met the middle finger of his extended hand and sliced a fair chunk out of it.

  He turned white and fainted.

  Chairs clattered to the floor as both Dolores and I leapt to his assistance. Where’s a jug of water when you need one? That was how Dolores had revived the previous fainting boy. All we had was a jar of pure alcohol that would have seared his eyeballs out of their sockets if I’d chucked it all over him, and a couple of week-old lungs. I couldn’t have him coming around with a bleeding, chopped-up organ draped over his face: he might think it was his severed hand and faint all over again …

  So all I could do was go ‘Oh no!’ and stare at him.

  And then stare and stare and stare.

  Gosh, he was beautiful. Beautiously beautiful in a skinny, lanky, nerdy way that just hinted of weirdy beardiness in his future. This was a fellow scientist, I just knew it. A fellow lab lover. Someone I could discuss the double helix with who wouldn’t think I was talking about shoes. Someone I could compare notes with, and maybe kiss on his slightly-open mouth with the tiniest strip of downy stubble above the top lip. Someone I would one day marry and procreate with, to fill the world with little genius children …

  Dolores was prodding me in the side. ‘Cat! Do something. He’s bleeding.’

  ‘I can’t!’ I seemed to be incapable of movement.

  ‘I thought you wanted to be like a doctor or something,’ she said, her little nose wrinkling with concern as she gazed down at him.

  ‘No, I want to do a doctorate in science, not tend to open wounds.’

  Move. Do something. Help him. You stabbed him! Help the guy. My conscious was shouting at me even more than Dolores.

  But I can’t, said some other part of me. He’ll look at me, and he’s beautiful, the most beautiful boy I’ve ever seen, and I’m standing next to Dolores, for Chrissakes. Why oh why didn’t her boobs explode?

  He was starting to stir, no doubt roused by the crashing of chairs as Miss Sargeson and the rest of the class thundered across the room.

  ‘What’s his name?’ I whispered to Dolores, like that mattered while he was bleeding all over the parquet flooring. And I thought she said “Ferdy” which was brilliant because it went with “nerdy” … and my mind went off into all sorts of daydreams about Nerdy Ferdy and Cat the Daft Bat being THE couple in the school, and I told my mind to shut up because love is just a chemical reaction in the brain and doesn’t really exist, but he was so beautiful …

  ‘It’s okay, Ferdy,’ I whispered, holding out a hand to help him up. ‘It’s just a cut.’

  And the beautiful boy totally glared at me. ‘It’s Freddie,’ he said bitterly. ‘And you nearly chopped my finger off. What is wrong with you?’

  He held the offending finger up for us all to inspect. His middle finger. Right at me, in a sign that even I couldn’t ignore. What was wrong with me? I’d just had a chemical reaction in the brain for someone who was clearly destined to hate me forever.

  And when Dolores leaned over to help him up and he stared gratefully down her shirt, I felt the chemical reaction move somewhere else and morph into different kinds of emotions. First, the lung-ish area, in which I suspected my heart resided, where it fluttered in a kind of fight-or-flight anxiety, and then down down down, right into the pit of my stomach, where it turned green and poisonous.

  Jazzy Divine had better fall for Dolores too, was all I could think. Nobody other than the divine Jazzy D was going to be able to curtail the electricity zapping between my biffle and the nerdy dream-guy now listening to every dim word she was whispering to him.

  Jazzy D. You’re mine.

  You have to be mine, so I can give you to Dolores.

  I had to message him somehow. This HAD to happen now.

  Jason Devaney

  c/o Stephen Scowl

  Talentfactory

  PO Box 47863

  London SW19 8DR

  Dear Divine Jazzy D or of course Jason Devaney as I would call you,

  Haha LOL and all that. I bet you’ve nearly forgotten me despite our regular emails over the past ten years since we were at school together in Jersey. I know, I know; I should have written more.

  Actually I’m writing this real snail-mail letter via your manager, Mr Scowl, since I seem to have lost your email address even though I did definitely have it. Definitely. And Facebook etc is just so impersonal and, like, EVERYWHERE, don’t you think?

  So, just to remind you in case stardom has totally gone to your head and you can’t recall large chunks of your childhood (as sometimes happens with stress and traumatic events like getting tossed around by mad fans in the mosh pit), it’s Cat Andrews here. Remember? Goofy old Cat – well, young Cat then because I was only 5 and you were 7 possibly 8 and in Year 3 when I was in Year 1. And I was called Catherine back in the day. My teacher was Mr Favreau and he was French. I … um … can’t quite bring to mind who your teacher was even though we were such close friends and you talked about him/her all the time.

  Anyway, buddy, friend, matey mate mate … I hear you’re in town next week playing at the Zed with Double Vomit Vision, and I thought maybe we could hang out a bit after the show? I’ve got a really lovely friend who is so gorgeous she causes fainting, fighting and tidal waves in the school canteen who just can’t wait to meet you!

  Call me and let me know where to find you after the concert!

  Your old friend,

  Cat Andrews – 07912 200976

  Formerly Catherine Melissa Andrews X

  Oh, and more kisses from Dolores, the lovely friend who is helping me write this

  Chapter 4: Crazy Horses (The Osmonds)

  We ended up having to get a lift to the Zed with Dean which Dolores thought was completely tragic. (‘Omigod, we might as well be put in buggies and rolled up there by our mums,’ she said when I told her. ‘Okay, meet me there then,’ I said, ‘if you want to get the bus and then walk and get your hair damp and smell like a wet dog when Jazzy D comes to meet you.’ ‘It’s sum-mer; it won’t be raining,’ she retorted. Then she looked outside at the sky. “What time shall I come over?’ she added quickly. We settled on arriving at the Zed at 5.40pm - just late enough to be cool even with parental drop-offs, but not too late that we couldn’t establish a meeting with Jazzy D if he got back to me in time).

  I thought having a lift with Dean was completely tragic, too, but for other reasons than it was very uncool. Although it really was uncool. But here are my reasons:

  We would have to go with Aggie if it was in her dad’s car, so there’d be no way of losing her at the critical moment of Jazzy-meeting to shake her off.

  Aggie was not super-pretty like Dolores, but what if Jazzy went for her instead of D, leaving D free to carry on whispering to Nerdy Ferdy/Freddie and causing my lower stomach to convulse?

  I had to go to Dean and Aggie’s house which made it all seem a bit more official between my mum and Dean. I mean, I know our old family unit had been ruined when she split up with Dad, but it didn�
��t mean I needed or even wanted a new family unit. What was the woman thinking?! Oh, okay, I suppose she was thinking that she might deserve to be happy after all this time, and I suppose she does, but it did seem a bit much that she’d found a boyfriend (aghhh, no, still can’t say it – companion stroke associate) with children. Child. Nearly adult.

  It was really uncool. Felt like going to the school disco in Year 6, when all the mums (and dads at that point) stood around the edge of the dance floor drinking warm wine is small plastic juice cups and dancing embarrassingly. Very uncool, even for nerdy science freaks like me.

  Just to prove how little parents’ opinions affected her, Dolores turned up at my house at 4.30 in what looked like her sports gear – tiny white shorts and an equally tiny and white tight top that made her legs look tanned and endless and her breasticular region look like a mountain range. ‘Too much?’ she said as I looked up her and down.

  ‘Too little,’ I said, nodding approvingly.

  Her face fell. ‘Should I go and get changed?’

  ‘Don’t you dare.’

  She then tried coaxing me into various fashion disasters that Mother Dearest had bought me over the last few months, holding them up one by one while I said ‘Nope,’ ‘Never’, ‘Hideous’, ‘Slutty – no, not in a good way’, ‘Are you joking,’ etc until she gave up and left me to it in my one pair of jeans, one decent t-shirt which I’d got at Madrigal Camp the previous summer and was festooned with medieval instruments (pictures of, I mean, not actual medieval instruments), and an old cardigan I’d found in the back of Mum’s wardrobe.

  ‘Let’s go, Mother Dearest,’ I said to my mother as she, too, looked us up and down. She appeared a bit misty-eyed at the sight of me in the old cardy, but her eyes positively bulged when she saw Dolores.

  ‘Goodness! That’s a very …’ (Small? Tight? Flesh-exposing? Burlesque?) ‘… clean outfit, Dolores,’ she said quickly.

  Dolores patted her white, glowing bottom proudly. ‘My mum uses that Disappear stuff like in the adverts.’

  ‘Disapprove, more like,’ I whispered, but thankfully Mum didn’t hear me as she did her best to shield Dolores from view as she clambered into the back of our small car. I didn’t want her suddenly offering to drop Dolores home while she changed into something more suitable …

  Dean’s house, it turned out, was at the edge of the university campus. It was rambly and tumble-down, large and shambolic and more-or-less handsome, rather like Dean. It made our three-bed semi look really suburban.

  So that’s the kind of house you get when you’re an academic. A scientist. I could visualise it already: me striding off across the university lawns to deliver a lecture to eager young brains; Ferdy home-schooling the children with his brilliance and his attractive upper lip; long, summer afternoons on the rope swing in the garden, gazing into each other’s eyes having chemical reactions …

  Suddenly it was all ruined by Aggie appearing at the front door. She looked perfectly nice again. Jeans, like me, only tight-ish and faded. White top like Dolores, only loose enough to allow her to breathe. Lace-up biker boots, short jacket in a floral print that she might just have made herself. Perfectly bloody nice. I grimaced at her as we levered Dolores out of the back seat, but she obviously took my expression to mean ‘Check out what my friend is wearing’ and raised her eyebrows just a smidge, with faint sympathetic laughter in her green eyes.

  ‘Dolores, Aggie. Aggie, Dolores.’

  ‘Hiiiiiiii,’ they said to each other, fakely. Then, ‘So you’re a big fan, I hear,’ said Aggie with a grin.

  ‘Totally. Huge.’

  Dolores giggled, and suddenly they were both swapping histories of their Double Vision affections and in particular their overwhelming passion for the divine Jazzy D.

  ‘He’d better be worth all the hype,’ I said to nobody in particular, then added, ‘as he’s probably changed a bit from when we were at school,’ just to cover myself. But they weren’t listening anyway so I turned and stared at the distant uni buildings and flipped into my internal Oxbridge-versus-local-uni debate. Local uni was winning, unless Freddie preferred Cambridge, of course …

  Dean interrupted my daydream. ‘Fancy yourself in there one day, Cat? Rachel tells me you’re quite the scientist.’

  ‘Maybe.’ For some reason, I suddenly felt all shy. Of Dean, for Dawkins’ sake!

  Putting a hand on my shoulder, he swivelled me around until I was looking at a low glass structure that was much nearer to us than the older, more traditional university buildings. ‘That’s where my company has its lab. Rather less grand than the rest of the campus, but it meant we could still live on site and I could walk to work when … when Aggie needed me at home more.’

  When his wife died. That was what he didn’t say. When Aggie and he were left on their own and he needed to be home. Well, they weren’t the only ones who’d been left on their own, were they? I pulled my cardigan around me more tightly and decided to change the subject.

  ‘Oops! Five thirty. Won’t be there on time if we don’t leave now.’

  ‘That’s right! Dean, you did get the tickets okay, didn’t you?’ That was Mother Dearest.

  Dean pointed to his shirt pocket where the top of one of those little folders that hold tickets was poking out beside a red pen, a green pen and a black pen. ‘Got them right here. Come on, girls, change over to my car.’

  Mum blew me a kiss. ‘Have fun!’ she said. ‘Say hi to the Divine Jazzy Devaney for me. I’m sure I’d remember him if I saw him.’

  I sure hoped I would.

  ‘I’ll collect you all when you text, okay?’

  We all nodded. Having delivered the usual safety precautions, as well as a few more comments directed straight at Dolores like ‘go everywhere in pairs’, not that she noticed, Mum dipped back into the car and grabbed a carrier bag that I hadn’t noticed before.

  ‘I’ll put dinner on for when you’re back, Dean,’ she said, and then whisked into the house.

  His house.

  His rambly, tumbledown house.

  As if was her house.

  Yikes.

  There was too much to accomplish during the evening to dwell on that for long, but it set off a few alarm bells, like – did she have a key for Dean’s? Did Dean have a key for our house? Was I going to come downstairs and find Dean in the kitchen? Even worse, was I going to go upstairs and find Dean in our bathroom? Or yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck, even worse, would I go upstairs and find … Aggie in our bathroom? It was all too hideous to ponder at this critical stage of my plotting.

  So I concentrated on Jazzy D.

  Dean dropped us as near to the main doors of the arena as he could get us, which was about a mile and a half away. ‘See, Aggie? This is why I suggested you didn’t drive yourselves here – there’d have been nowhere to park nearby.’

  ‘Yes, Daaaaaad,’ she said amiably in a tone so like the one I took with Mum that I did a double-take at her. She winked. Seriously. Winked at me in a “we’re in this together” sort of way.

  ‘This is where we’ll meet you afterwards,’ he was droning, averting his eyes from the sight of Dolores prising herself out of the car like a rabbit from a hat. Jessica Rabbit from a hat. Only in less clothes.

  Aggie gave him a thumbs up while I wondered about that “we” thing for moment, and then decided that it would have to go on the list of “Things I will discuss with Mother Dearest when she and I are alone again, along with #1 What is going on with keys and making dinner at Dean’s?”

  Anyway, it’s a good job we arrived when we did (my suggestion, might I add) and where we did (okay, Dean’s suggestion but where I would have said anyway) because the crowd waiting for Double Vision was freakin’ enormous. There were so many long legs and toned tummies on show that I feared for a moment that even Dolores might be overshadowed, but then I saw her flash a smile at the guy selling programmes and from the way he watched her walk away, I knew that we were home and dry.

  ‘That’s it, Dol
ores! Work those shorts,’ I muttered to her out of the side of my mouth.

  To my surprise, Aggie (who I’d forgotten about, to be honest) suddenly giggled behind me. ‘They are very short shorts, aren’t they? I’m so jealous!’ she added in a totally non-jealous voice. ‘I’d never get away with those. Even if Dad would let me out of the house in them.’

  ‘Mum wouldn’t. She barely let Dolores out of the house. She’s really strict about clothes, and curfews, and … oh, you know, just about everything. Boring!’

  This was another total lie, at which I seemed to be becoming rather expert, as Mum is pretty relaxed about most things and would probably quite like me to ever ask her about suitable clothes or to ever need to discuss curfews and so on, seeing as I never leave the house. I like the house. Why go out?

  So the subtext of this whole pile of boloney was: Mum’s awful. You’d hate her. Stay away. Keep Dean away too, while you’re at it. And don’t even think about getting keys and turning up in my bathroom.

  Aggie gave me another of her cryptic glances and then we plunged into the flesh-fest after Dolores, who was somehow still managing to cut a swathe through the crowd even though it was 99% female. I reckon the Divvies (Double Vision fans) just knew their leader when they saw her. She who would be crowned Queen of the Divvies. She who would marry King Jazzy the Divine and fulfil all their dreams for them …

  As long as we got to meet Jazzy. Remember him? My matey mate mate old buddy from school? Oh, and super mega-star lead singer of the biggest band in the country and possibly the world. All at once I remembered why we were actually at the Zed.

  And so did someone else.

  ‘I can’t believe we’re actually here, and we’re actually going to meet the Divine Jazzy D,’ squeaked Aggie, glowing happily as she held her programme above her head and shoved through the crowd beside Dolores. The two of them high-fived and squealed in unison.