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  ‘Right, like that’s going to happen!’ This was unbelievable. Of all the teenage girls in the world, he wanted to go home with the only one who wasn’t interested.

  ‘Then I can come to Trevellyan School with you,’ he said.

  Suddenly, with a godly glowing through the clouds and the sound of angels going ‘Aaaaaaahhhh’, it all became crystal clear.

  School. Dolores. Freddie. Me. Jazzy D. Double dating with the Double Ds.

  Me, cool and popular and not Titanic for the first time in history.

  It was perfect.

  And that was how the Divine Jazzy D came to be camped out in our shed, on the blow-up mattress with my sleeping bag from madrigal camp.

  It was only when I was closing the door on him with strict instructions that he was not to appear NAKED in our kitchen in the morning, at least not until Mum had gone to Dean’s, that something occurred to me. I stuck my head back around the door.

  ‘Hey, I know we went to infant school together and all that, but how did you know which school I go to now?’

  He smiled at me dopily, looking ever so slightly and annoyingly cute. ‘From your pencil case. Cat Andrews, Year 11, Trevellyan School, something street …’

  ‘Oh, right.’ That made sense. I did have all my school stuff properly labelled, and he must have found my bag in Dean’s hall before he sprang his nakedness on us.

  Funny, though, because when Mum came home and returned my abandoned bags to me, my pencil case wasn’t there.

  Chapter 8: Fantastic Day (Haircut 100)

  Let me just tell you, btw, that Jazzy Divine is an arrogant prat. Not someone I would normally want to keep caged up in the shed all weekend so I could take him to school on the Monday (not that, you know, I normally want to do that to anybody). If I had actually known him at primary school he would have been the last person I’d have talked to, if I had actually spoken to anyone anyway.

  He’s quite hard to talk to, in any case, because he sings all the time. All. The. Time. I know I sing a lot when choir practice is looming or when we’re giving a performance, but being with Jazzy was like being in a musical, with every simple thing being turned into lyrics. I do not like being crooned at about my cereal. Or my uniform. Or my hair wings. Or anything.

  He didn’t seem to have any plans for the weekend, which was unusual for a pop star, I thought. But then DV did have a film just out, so maybe they were on a break or something. Jason didn’t particularly want to discuss it – just slept a lot in the shed and woke up occasionally to eat. It was a bit like having a pet dog, really, only one I had to keep from singing every few minutes. Luckily Mum was so loved up all weekend that she spent most of it at Dean’s place (and I so did not want to think about THAT so it was good to have a distraction at home).

  Before 8am on Saturday, Dolores called for a complete breakdown of how I ended up with Jazzy D in the car and where we’d dropped him and could we go and stalk him, like, right now. Then I heard her mum calling in the background and Dolores let out a groan.

  ‘I’ve got to go to work,’ she whined. ‘It’s totally unfair! They’ve got a phone ban there.’

  Dolores has a weekend job in the specialist bra shop for the bigger-boobed. The manageress took one look at her and hired her on the spot, obviously deciding that Dolores’ resemblance to an attractive pink-haired mushroom mattered more than her ability to, say, add up. ‘We need girls like you to bring in the teen demographic. You’re hired,’ she’d cried.

  When she said “girls”, I admit to getting a little excited for a moment as I was also looking for a Saturday job, and was standing right next to Dolores at the moment of hiring.

  ‘Great!’ I’d said, as Dolores was already holding up lingerie and doing amazed and aghast faces at the prices. ‘When do we start?’

  Well, somehow Dolores had already started; she’d made a sale in two seconds flat, just by showing the frilly orange bra to the middle-aged woman next to her and mouthing ‘Wow.’ Only I knew that she meant ‘I could get ten bras for that amount of money!’ The other customer must have thought it meant “Wear this and you too could look like me,” as she snatched it out of Dolores’ hand and ran for the till in an instant.

  ‘I only need one weekend assistant,’ said the manageress, watching the whole episode like a proud mother. ‘Sorry, dear.’

  Then she’d looked me up and down in a way that let me know I would never be able to work there as I was so breasticularly challenged and would block the doors with my hair wings, and I went back to doing extra homework all weekend just for fun, while Dolores earned money and got huge staff discounts on stuff that made her look even more perky in the chest department than she already did.

  For once, though, I was quite relieved she’d got this job. It saved me having to explain that Jason Jazzy Divine Devaney was currently doing press-ups on the back lawn, and appeared once more to have forgotten that normal people wear clothes.

  ‘You’ll have to tell me on Mondayyyyy,’ moaned Dolores. ‘I’ve got to go to Dad’s tonight and you know what he’s like about texting and so on, and then work again tomorrow. It’s so totally unfair!’

  ‘Never mind. On Monday, my busty biffle, I will make it all up to you,’ I said.

  Oh, and how.

  The rest of the weekend passed uneventfully, though I did have to go to the supermarket and buy cheap clothes for Jazzy (just so he’d wear some), and then had to endure an hour of him doing a fashion show on the patio, trying out all the different ways he could model a black t-shirt, a white t-shirt, and a pair of five-pound-special jeans from Asda. I’ll admit it – he did manage to make even those look good, especially the white top with Dean’s 501’s. Anyway, I’d also bought him bags of junk food and a pair of pyjamas with my meagre savings, so I reckoned he could survive the weekend, and if he’d just wear some pants, so could I.

  Without mishap, the next school week arrived. Hallelujah. Time to instantly become THE most popular girl in Trevellyan, and make Dolores delirious with joy, AND persuade Freddie that he was wasting his time with Double D and he’d be much better off with her cool, sciency and surprisingly-well-connected-in-the-pop-world friend.

  I was actually in quite a good mood, which I’m usually not on a Monday owing to the general awfulness of being a social misfit and having a whole week of hideousness ahead … This week was going to be exceptional. This day was going to be fantastic. I could feel it in my bones (mostly the tibia, patella and femur, though somewhat in the cranium too).

  I heard the voice at the kitchen window. Mum, fortunately, had already left to get the early train up to the city for her meeting. I wanted to be sure he still had clothes on so I ran to the window first, before tentatively opening the door. He was basically wearing the sleeping bag; I didn’t want to know if there was anything else underneath.

  ‘Morning,’ I said.

  ‘Morning, Cat,’ he said as he stumbled over the step. Then the singing began. ‘It’s morning in my eyes, but twilight in your soul, and if you don’t bring me your sunshine I will be forever cold …’

  ‘Very nice. Toast?’ It was an attempt to distract him but it just seemed to set him off again.

  ‘Toast - I raise a glass to yoouuuuu. Toast – it’s all that I can do. Even though you’re with another guy; I’ll say cheers so you don’t see me cry …’

  He can sing, I’ll give him that. And even manage to look good in a sleeping bag, if you like that ripply shoulders and bulgy biceps kind of thing. Which I don’t. But still, he was in danger of bringing the neighbours running, so I buttered a piece of – yeah, Toast – and stuffed it in his mouth.

  ‘Eat up. Got to keep you big and strong for all your fans.’ Especially Dolores. I held up a carton of juice. ‘Would you like…’

  ‘Would you like, would you like, would you like to partayyyyyy?’ he hollered, spraying toast crumbs everywhere.

  ‘NO I WOULD NOT! I would like to sit and eat my cereal in peace.’

  ‘Pieces of y
ou. Pieces of me. Piece it all together and…

  ‘Jason Devaney!’ I yelled. I was sounding more like my mother slash Miss Sargeson with every new song. ‘We do not need singing with breakfast. Please, please, please be quiet.’

  A piece of toast fell off his lip as his jaw dropped open. ‘But my singing is brilliant.’

  ‘It’s not bad, I’ll grant you, but those songs …’

  ‘Those songs are award-winning. They’re number ones. They’re fantastic.’

  I couldn’t help myself: I had to laugh. ‘Well, that’s a matter of opinion.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’ Jason folded his arms belligerently and the sleeping bag slid down over several inches of bare buffness. So, I’m guessing he was NAKED again under there.

  ‘Of course it is. You can’t seriously expect everyone to love your music,’ I said. ‘It’s not logical. There are seven billion people in the world; that’s a lot of different tastes. There’s probably less than … I don’t know … nought point five of a percent of the world’s population who actually like your music. And most of them are only looking at your muscles.’

  He flexed an arm appreciatively. ‘Well, my muscles are great. And big.’

  Jeez. Was there no end to his vanity? ‘Pity your brain isn’t,’ I muttered.

  ‘It is,’ said Jason, with supersonic hearing, apparently. ‘Because the brain’s a muscle.’

  ‘It’s an organ.’

  ‘So? I’ve got big organs too.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  The prospect of trailing him around school like a prized bull at a country fair was seeming less attractive by the second. But then I thought about someone who got more attractive by the second and would almost certainly know that the brain was an organ not a muscle and would definitely not be nakedly showing off his freakishly enlarged arms to the world by doing tricep dips off the kitchen counter … and I changed my mind again pretty quickly.

  ‘Go to the shed and put Dean’s jeans and the white – no, the black t-shirt back on. Over some underwear.’ Yes, I’d had to buy that too. Gross, rank and vomit-worthy. ‘Then you’ll have to find your way to the school because I get the bus and there’s only one seat booked.’

  I whisked around the kitchen getting my lunch together, and handed him the rest of my supermarket money for a cab.

  ‘I’ll see you at the massive oak tree at the back of the running track at 12.30pm, okay? Then it will be lunchtime and you can …’ meet Dolores only properly this time and fall in love and marry her in about three years’ time after faithfully dating her for all that time and have four attractive children named after cities and be super happy for ever ‘… you can see the school and we can contact Stephen Scowl and find out about getting you home again.’

  Because, to be honest, it had started to worry me that he might end up in our shed forever. Jason had evidently been getting my letters to him as he’d known exactly who I was on Friday night (which meant – wow – that he did recognise me from primary school). Stephen Scowl, though, was a different matter, and I suspected it might take Dolores’ social media abilities to get through to him. What was really, really weird about Jason was that he didn’t have a phone (though where would he have kept it in his NAKED suit? Nope. Don’t even want to think about that …) or any idea how to contact his manager. He didn’t really seem to know who his manager was, in fact. Must have been some party he was at on Friday night, I reckoned, when he turned up to look for me clueless and clothesless …

  ‘Why can’t I stay in the penthouse shed?’ bleated Jazzy, suddenly sulky at the mention of his manager, Double Vision, work etcetera.

  ‘You do know it’s not really a penthouse shed, don’t you? That was my little joke. It’s just a shed shed.’

  ‘I like it there. It smells of … slugs.’ He actually sniffed the air in deeply and closed his eyes, savouring the distant aroma of … well, slugs. ‘Reminds me of home,’ he added wistfully.

  Oddly, at moments like that, when he was breathing in slugness, I actually quite liked him.

  I shoved him out of the back door towards the shed. ‘Jason Devaney, you are truly weird.’

  Then he ruined it all by bursting into song again. ‘Truly, madly, deeply weird. Crazy with my love for you. Truly, deeply, crazy weird. Not a thing I wouldn’t do …’

  ‘Pleeeeeeeeeeeease shut up,’ I yelled after him.

  ‘That was Number One in fourteen countries,’ he said, pulling up his sleeping bag.

  ‘Go and sniff your slugs.’ I closed the door, then opened it again. ‘And don’t forget: 12.30pm at the oak tree.’

  He popped his pecs at me by way of response, and disappeared into the penthouse shed while I leaned on the door, thinking. When he wasn’t nakedly singing, flexing his muscles, and basically being teen idol Jazzy D, he had moments of being really quite appealing. The shed did smell of slugs, and it was quite earthy and damp and wholesome, somehow. I liked it too.

  Luckily for me and the rest of the world, however, those non-Jazzy moments accounted for about 1% of the time.

  Dolores would love the other 99%.

  It was going to be a very interesting day.

  Chapter 9: All Rise (Blue)

  ‘So how was your … movie?’ I asked Dolores when we could first speak, which was at morning break between English and History. It wasn’t first thing as it normally would be: I’d realised on the bus that I didn’t have my pencil case or my student ID which was in it, so I’d spent ten minutes trying to persuade the bus driver to let me on for free as usual, which made us late, and then another ten minutes scrabbling around in my locker trying to find a pen while Mrs Shaw stood at the classroom door, tapping her foot.

  ‘It was A-MA-ZING,’ said Dolores, sounding like Craig Revel Horwood, ‘but not half, no a quarter, no, a THIRD so amazing as you turning up in a car with Jazzy D. Cat, what was … how did … what is …’

  Her face matched her hair, she was so breathless and dying to hear what had been going on. I could hardly wait for 12.30pm. Her hair and face would turn purple for joy. Or some colour for joy. What colour do people go for joy? Maybe from now on, it would be called Dolores for joy. Like, and I literally went Dolores …

  Anyway, now she had me by the lapels and was rattling my teeth. ‘How did it happen? Where is he now? What’s he like in person? Does he know about me?’

  So many questions, such strange answers.

  I ticked them off one by one. “Firstly, how did it happen? Well, he’s clearly got all my letters and remembers me from primary school and turned up on Friday night to find me. Looked straight at me and called me Cat.’

  Dolores squeaked.

  ‘Oh, yes. Next, where is he now? Um, I can’t really say …’ This was true as he could well be roaming the high street looking for a taxi company by now, or finding his phone somewhere. ‘… but you’ll find out soon.’

  Another squeak.

  ‘What’s he like in person? Gosh, that’s a hard one. He’s part …’ How to put this nicely? ‘He’s part singing idiot with muscles, part – and it’s a very small part – sensitive, dreamy soul.’

  Squeakety-squeak which sounded like ‘Oh singing and muscles and sensitive and dreamy’ in the language of squeak.

  ‘I did say very small part soulful and sensitive, didn’t I? Like one percent.’

  Squeak-speak which sounded like deep Dolores depths of joy that he was mostly a singing idiot with muscles.

  ‘Finally, has he heard about you? Yes. Oh, yes.’

  I couldn’t swear how much he’d been listening, to be fair, but I’d been feeding him a steady drip of Glorious Dolores all weekend: how beautiful, how kind, how generous, how breastacular, how sweet, how perfect a friend that she’d be bound to make a fantabulous girlfriend for a pop star … All of which was absolutely true, but it’s not often you string together everything you think about your friend so you can do a sales job on them. Not that I needed to – he’d find out for himself in a very short space of time. />
  Still, I didn’t want it all to go to her pink head. ‘I told him you were quite nice but no match for me, and if he valued his shirts he’d best stay right out of your way.’

  ‘Ha ha.’ She took a blouse-bursting deep breath ready to ask another chain of questions, just as Freddie and an equally nerdy friend came sauntering across the hall.

  ‘Hey, Dolores,’ said Freddie, sweating slightly. ‘Cat.’

  He knew my name he knew my name he’d said my name he’d said it, without prompting or anything! I stared at his mousy lip and tried to say something, but Dolores had already leapt in.

  ‘Freddie! Cat was just telling me why Jazzy D was in Aggie’s car with them and she says he’s absolutely brilliant in real life, and he can’t wait to meet me.’

  There was a ripple of interest around us at the mention of Jazzy D, followed by the aroma of rampant disbelief as the rest of Dolores’ words sank in. Jazzy D in a car with Catherine Andrews? In what universe?

  I could see from the expressions on everyone’s faces that the rumour had already been dismissed as a complete piece of fiction, probably made up by me.

  It was like Aggie all over again.

  And while I could see why it would seem weird, was it really so unbelievable that I might have gone to school with someone a bit interesting? Really?

  Freddie, I could see, had other reasons for not wanting to believe it. He glanced quickly at Dolores, his Adam’s apple bobbing nervously. ‘It can’t be the real Jazzy D. It’s a double, or something. Did you hire him, Cat?’

  He stared me down with an expression that was half challenge, half pity, and suddenly I knew something terrible. He knew. I knew that he knew that I had chemical reactions in the organ of the brain for him, and that sometimes they transferred to areas lower down my body. And he knew that I knew that he liked Dolores while I liked him, even if Dolores hadn’t properly worked it all out yet, and I knew that he knew that I was plotting to somehow distract Dolores so I could get my claws – I checked my hands – my chewed, stubby fingers into him.