Authors: Non Pratt
Whatever catharsis there was in my chat with Lee fell away at the sight of Lauren doing Kaz’s hair. That’s a best mate’s job, surely?
You don’t get to own her
.
But there’s a horrible little part of me that thinks I do get to own her, because Kaz is
mine
. Isn’t the point of being someone’s best mate the fact that you’re the one who brings out the best in them? It’s not a title given to you because you’re the person they prefer to everyone else, the way little kids say that purple is their best or Marmite or their bike. It’s about how you make them feel
their
best.
That’s what Kaz does for me, anyway.
“You look aces,” I say as I approach, nudging Kaz with my boot since my feet are the only part of me capable of expressing affection. It seems to work – Kaz is beaming up at me like we never even fell out.
“So does your left arm.” Kaz’s reflex response to a compliment is to pay it back straightaway, but she lightly runs her fingers over her head and adds, “The hair was Lauren’s idea.”
Of course it was. Lauren’s saying something, but I’m thinking of all the times I’ve said how awesome Kaz would look with her hair back and how sad I am that she can’t remember a single one of them.
“Good work, Lauren.” And because I can’t think of a meaningful way to say something nice, I follow this up with, “You should go pro.”
At which she snort-laughs. “Yeah. Thanks.”
Seriously. And
I’m
the one being a dick?
“Your ‘tattoo’” – her use of air quotes makes me want to snap her fingers – “is, er, nice?”
The way her voice rises is not a compliment.
“Yes. It is nice. Not what I’d have inked for ever, but it’s not bad.”
“You’d seriously get a tattoo?”
Kaz is completely oblivious to the fact that Lauren’s words were dipped in disapproval and rolled around in a bed of contempt when she explains, “Ruby’s going to be a tattoo artist.”
“‘Artist’,” Lauren says, using air quotes again. I regret not snapping her fingers the first time.
“Yes, an artist, as in body art,” I say.
“OK…” She eyeballs me. “If that’s what you want to call it.”
Kaz is looking uncomfortable. She’s been caught up in these conversations with me before, with my art teacher, with Callum, with my parents – with Tom. I guess it’s not surprising that his bland new girlfriend agrees with him.
“I call it art, because that’s what it
is
.” My voice is unintentionally loud and Lee looks up, sees who I’m talking to and shakes his head at me. Stung, I raise my voice to explain for his – and the others’ – benefit. “Apparently Lauren doesn’t think tattoos can be art.”
“Because they can’t,” she mutters.
“How can you say that? Who are you to define what someone else calls art?”
“You’re trying to define what
I
mean by art, aren’t you? Stretching it to include tattoos.”
My brain skips a beat. This does sound like what I’m doing, but…
Lauren shrugs. “Whatever. It’s hardly like it matters what I think anyway.” She looks at the time on her watch. “Doesn’t the signing start soon?”
In one short conversation, Lauren has managed to hate on my tattoo, question the importance of something I really care about and dismiss me for caring enough to want to convince her. Now she’s hauling Kaz up from the rug, saying a cheery farewell to Lee and the others and hooking her arm in Kaz’s.
I hate her.
When I saw the screen earlier, the thought of queuing up to meet Adam Wexler nearly melted my mind, let alone my pants. Now, trudging back from the toilets after washing the dried ink from my arm, I can’t even summon up the kind of excitement I feel when I wear a new T-shirt for the first time. Kaz broke the seal when she let Lauren in and now all the colour’s drained out of my mood – and as I turn greyer, Kaz grows brighter. I get close to the source of the sunshine as Lauren’s telling Kaz she could totally get a kiss on the cheek from Adam Wexter.
“Adam
Wexler
,” I say with more force than necessary as I join Lauren and Kaz in the queue.
“Wexter, Wexler, Dexter, whatever,” Lauren sings. “He won’t be able to resist this.” And she frames Kaz’s face with her hands Vogue-style, but instead of making some self-deprecating comment, Kaz is totally into it, sucking her cheeks in and pouting/giggling.
How come Kaz is deaf to all the nice things I say about her, but hears them loud and clear when they come out of Lauren’s mouth?
“Pose, pose…” There’s a frozen moment when Lauren clicks a selfie of her and Kaz. She does not ask me to get involved, because – as I appear to be the only one who’s noticed – she doesn’t give a shit about anything I do. They look at the screen and just as Kaz wrinkles her nose at the picture of herself, Lauren says, “Smokin’, Kaz. They should name you a fire hazard.”
God. Who says stuff like that?
And Kaz blushes like she believes it. The last time I told her she looked good in a photo, she declared she had an extra chin and deleted it from my phone, as she does almost all my favourite photos of her. If Kaz goes missing tomorrow, it’ll be this one of her and Lauren that the police will plaster all over the papers.
“Doesn’t she look good, Ruby?” Lauren shoves the stupid thing under my nose and I nod, barely looking.
“No better than usual.” Which I only realize sounds catty once I’ve said it. I mean that Kaz usually looks that good, but that’s not how it sounds. Lauren gives me a look and Kaz reaches for the phone to delete the picture out of habit, but Lauren snatches it away.
“Doesn’t my mate look hot?”
My mate
.
Lauren waves her phone at the girls in the queue behind us, who all agree, then she asks the same of a passing boy, who barely glances at the phone, but tells both of them to come and find him in Three-Tree Field.
“You’re outvoted, Ruby.”
I open my mouth to explain, but what’s the point? Lauren doesn’t listen – and when she’s with her, neither does Kaz.
We move round a corner of the queue that snakes around the barriers and I can see the band sitting at the table. The drummer looks bored, the guitarist is smiling at everyone, but he turns away briefly to massage his jaw. The bassist next to him says something and they both laugh and look along to the end of the table where Adam Wexler is holding a bra handed to him by a fan. It takes a second for me to realize that it was the one she was actually wearing as security gently guide her away. “That’s for you to remember me by!” she shouts, before trying to lift her top – an act stopped before it starts by the female security guard, who looks like she’s done this a million times before.
Every stupid daydream I had about meeting the man I worship seems even stupider now I’m actually here.
Lauren shakes her head as the girl at the front is led away and looks at Ruby. “
You’re
not going to do that, are you?” Ruby just stares at her until Lauren carries on the conversation herself. “The way Lee was talking it sounded like me and Kaz might have to restrain you.”
“Just try it.” It’s clear Ruby’s not joking. It’s equally clear that she’s not talking about anything to do with Adam Wexler, either.
Lauren gives a little frown before turning back to me. The queue moves forward, jiggling us all around so that by the time we’ve stopped, Ruby’s behind us.
I’m actually quite relieved.
Awesome. Now I can’t even
see
the bloody band behind those two vertically gifted freaks.
I get my phone out for something to do and discover that Lee’s sent me a photo of him and Owen and Parvati grinning at the camera, looking very sweaty and very happy.
See how friends share!
To stop myself telling him to fuck off, I scroll back through my camera roll, deleting some of the crapper pictures until I catch one I didn’t know I had on there. I tap back, trying to place when it was taken.
Last night. I can only assume my phone dropped out of my pocket and Stu was the one to find it. I wish he hadn’t.
There’s a series of them. The most recent is a selfie of Stu, with him looking broodily into the camera. He’s smiling at something, which only makes sense when you scroll back one.
Him again. This time with a girl, identifiable as Stella by her pink hair, since the rest of her face is attached to Stu’s in a full-on snog.
The one before is not of Stu. It’s of me, running away, Kaz just coming into the frame as she chases after me.
I force myself to scroll back to the photo of him and Stella and I stare at it, until it stops meaning anything, until it’s nothing but a set of pixels on a screen. But it isn’t. It’s a pain in my chest that won’t go away.
He probably thought that was what my reaction in the Grundiiz crowd was about until he saw me later, over there, by the boards, next to that row of Little John tour posters. At that point he must have realized there was no way I’d seen this picture, or I’d never have touched him. He’d let me humiliate myself, knowing it would only get worse when I found this photo on my phone.
I hate him.
Or something. I’m so knotted up that I’m not sure what I feel.
If we were alone, I would show Kaz and she would tell me he’s not worth the megabytes the pictures take up on my phone. Maybe I would find the words to tell her something close to the truth. That he is worth something to me, even if I don’t know what.
But Lauren
.
So I do something stupid. I text the picture to Stu. I know I shouldn’t, but the number’s there in my head. I stab out the words
Thanks, fuckhead
and press send, regretting it immediately.
At the front of the queue, Lauren and Kaz have worked themselves into a frenzy of giggles and the first guy to sign their card looks as if he doubts their sanity. They move on, but I haven’t anything to sign.
“Was I meant to pick up a card?” I ask.
“You were.” It’s the drummer, whose name I have temporarily forgotten.
“What’s the point of a signed card?” I ask and he shrugs, looking bored. “Can you sign this, instead?”
I pull off my belt and hand it to him. It’s a canvas one, yellow, plain. The drummer shrugs again, looking marginally less bored, and signs the belt with his black marker pen.
I push the belt along to the bassist, who doesn’t comment, and then the guitarist, who does, his rictus grin still in place.
“Not signed a belt before.”
“You have now,” I say, thinking that there must be something wrong with me – Adam Wexler isn’t actually the only person I worship in this band. I love all of them, one way or another. I can’t move on because Lauren and Kaz are still with Adam Wexler and I see Lauren shove Kaz forwards so she’s leaning over the table next to him, posing for a photo. He’s smiling and polite, the perfect rock star in all his glory. Moving in close, he says something to Kaz and I see her blush a shade deeper.
Curiosity flickers in me, but the flame’s extinguished when my phone goes and I see Stu’s reply.
Fuckhead. Shithead. Call me what you like. Doesn’t change the fact that you want me…
The words are loaded with so much self-satisfaction that I feel sick and I dully step forwards, pushing my belt towards Adam Wexler for signing.
“I can’t use this.” I look up sharply, but he’s turned away to someone behind him to ask if he could have a black pen for signing my belt instead of the gold one he’s been using. When he turns back to me I feel a vague quiver of excitement.
Wexler is as sexy in the flesh as he is on the posters taped to my wall. His eyes are Photoshop-filter blue and it’s hard not to imagine what kind of gorgeous mess I’d make by running my fingers through his hair. The long-sleeved top he’s wearing might hide that new tattoo of his, but it does nothing to disguise the shape of his body beneath.
I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath.
“Cheer up, love. Whatever it is can’t be that bad.” He crooks his mouth in the half-smile I’ve seen accompany every Gold’ntone interview, but the impact is lost in my indignation. There’s nothing more patronizing than the whole “cheer up, love” sentiment.
“Oh, really?” I wave my phone at him. “How would you feel if your ex took a photo ON YOUR PHONE of them snogging someone else?”
Wexler frowns and catches the phone to actually look at what I’m showing him.
“I suppose I’d feel like snogging someone else in retaliation.” The look accompanying these words gives me all sorts of very wrong thoughts. Then he turns to take the pen from whichever assistant has found one and signs my belt before flipping it over and writing something the full length of it – something that’s hard to read upside-down.
“Good luck getting your own back,” he says with a wink. “You know where to find me.”
As I wander off in a bit of a daze, I open my arms wide to read the message on my belt.
WHEN A KISS BECOMES A KNIFE TO THE HEART YOU KNOW YOU WERE IN LOVE
It’s a lyric from one of their most famous songs. I quickly flip the belt over and thread it back through my shorts before I can dwell on what it says. Stupid rock-star musicians think they know the answer to everything. They know
nothing
.
Ruby does not seem as excited by meeting Adam Wexler as I expected. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that she must have gone into shock. I think
I
have after he whispered in my ear.
It should be illegal for a man to smell that good.
“So what did he say?” Lauren asks Ruby as she threads her belt back onto her shorts. It looks good adorned with all the Gold’ntone signatures. Very cool. Very Ruby.
“Not much.” Ruby looks up with a distracted smile.
She is definitely in shock.
“An anti-climax?” I suggest and she nods, smiling a little more as if she’s grateful for me finding the answer.
“Well, not for me,” Lauren says, shaking her head. “I didn’t believe anyone could be that fit in real life.”
Ruby grins. I think it’s the first time Lauren’s had that reaction – if nothing else, Wexler’s improved Ruby’s mood. “Yeah, he is quite hot.”