Katie Cox Goes Viral Read online

  “Now times it by eleven,” said Mom. Then, after a few seconds, “I know.”

  “You have to remember this feeling,” said Amanda. “Forever and ever.”

  It was then that I noticed Adrian was shifting about in his seat. And I kept noticing him, picking at invisible things on his jeans with those sausage fingers, rumpling what was left of his hair up and down and twiddling one of his supersized earlobes.

  “So,” he said.

  “What?” I replied through quite a lot of beef chow mein.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Remember this feeling,” I said. “Forever and ever.”

  “After that,” said Adrian.

  “Er, I don’t know.”

  He was really rocking around now, so much so that I thought he might break the chair. “This kind of thing, it just doesn’t happen. You get record labels trying to break people for years, spending all this money, touring them, and nothing. And then in just a couple of days, you’ve got the kind of following some bands, even pretty big ones, can only dream of.”

  I honestly didn’t know what to say. “So…?”

  “So I think this is an incredible career opportunity. And you have to take it.”

  This was completely unexpected. Not just for me but for Mom too, who looked about ready to punch him.

  “This isn’t what we discussed.”

  Wait. There’d been a discussion?

  He looked at the table. “No, it isn’t. But—”

  “But nothing. Katie is finishing her education, and then she is going to get a real job and, unlike some people, lead a decent and responsible life. She’s got the brains to do so much more with her life than this pointless—”

  “My music is not pointless!”

  “It’s a hobby!” said Mom. “And that is what it will remain!”

  “Is this about Dad?” I said.

  “It is about taking responsibility!”

  “I’m a teenager! I don’t have responsibilities!”

  “You have the responsibility to finish school,” said Amanda in a way I don’t think any of us found very helpful. “And work hard and clean your bedroom and—”

  Oh, please.

  “I hear what you’re saying, Zo,” said Adrian. “But that doesn’t change the basic fact that what Katie has here is something really incredible, and in my opinion, she needs to embrace it.”

  “In your opinion,” said Mom.

  “Yeah. And I’ve been making some calls—”

  Mom’s face turned purple, which sounds like an impossible exaggeration but isn’t. “Have you?”

  “Yeah. And my old bandmate Tony, he’s still in the business, and he’d like to catch up and meet Katie. Talk to her, find out what she’s all about—”

  “Since when did I give you permission to start phoning people about my daughter?”

  “That’s not—”

  “And how dare you send her off to one of those places on her own? She’s a child. She can’t be expected to make decisions like that—”

  “Which is why I’ll go with her!”

  “Who said you could do that? I know how this goes. First, it’s a recording here, a quick gig there. ‘Just a one-off, Zoe, and the money’s great.’ And then suddenly they’re running here, there, and everywhere, and you don’t see or hear from them in months. And then everything that was good, everything important, it gets…it gets… My family comes first, Ade. Before anything else.”

  He held up his hands. “I was only—”

  “Before anything.”

  “All right!”

  She hadn’t seemed especially interested when I’d basically come straight out and told her I couldn’t stand the guy. Now that he was offering to do something nice for me, she was going nuts.

  I do not understand my mother at all.

  • • •

  Back upstairs in my room, I could still hear the shouting going on, little snippets drifting up the stairs like balloons, if the balloons were filled with misery. I heard “You do not go behind my back” and “There is nothing more important than her education” and “This is Benjamin all over again,” which was not good news, considering what Mom thinks of Dad, and Dad almost certainly being the Benjamin in question.

  I shut the door and turned it over in my head. The facts were as follows:

  1. “Just Me” had more than a million views.

  2. Adrian could get me a meeting with a record label.

  3. Mom did not want me to meet with a record label.

  4. I had lied to Lacey about taking down the video.

  That seemed about the sum of things, although it didn’t factor in Mad Jaz. But some things aren’t ideal for lists.

  Discounting number four, because really, I couldn’t do anything about that right now, I was left with a sort of empty feeling inside. I could pretend all I liked that I didn’t care about my song. Only, I did. I cared a huge amount.

  They’d played “Just Me” on the radio. My words, straight from the heart, out there in the world, doing their thing, getting into other people’s lives. As though I’d cut up pieces of my soul and sent them over the airwaves like confetti.

  And people liked it.

  But Mom didn’t care. Even Amanda didn’t seem especially bothered. How bizarre that the only person who seemed interested in my future was the one person I wanted out of it for good.

  Still, if Mom said no, then that was that. I knew from experience that arguing with her wouldn’t help. Once she’d decided something, she never changed her mind. No amount of begging or pleading or leaving articles about nursing jobs in California lying around would alter things.

  The only thing I could possibly do was go to meet this Tony guy without Mom’s permission.

  But if I did that…

  Then I’d be, as McAllister would say, crossing a line.

  A line with signs all along it saying things like “Are You Sure?” and “Danger!” and “This Could Get Everyone Into Some Pretty Serious Trouble.”

  There was no way I’d do that.

  • • •

  “Adrian?”

  “Katie!”

  He was downstairs in the den, a bowl of chips balanced on his stomach. I tried to think where I’d seen someone do that before. Then I remembered—it was a photo of Mom, when she’d been pregnant with me.

  I suppressed a full-body shudder and went in.

  Adrian had taken over the room next to the garage and called it “the den.” Meaning, I guess, for it to be this kind of awesome chillaxing zone as though we were in some American sitcom. He’d even stuck this ugly, old beanbag in one corner. It was made of brown corduroy and didn’t have enough beans, sagging there like a giant used tea bag. Then there was an ancient TV, not even a flat-screen, taking up most of one corner, and a sort of fake leather chair thing with a piece that flipped out for your legs. The walls were painted this nightmare toothpaste green, and the back wall had mushrooms growing out of it. So it was hardly surprising that the only person who ever did any chillaxing in there was Adrian.

  “I just came to say thank you,” I said. “For helping me with my song. It’s kind of incredible to think how many people like it.”

  “Yeah, well. When I was in the band, we had sort of a moment like this. We’d just recorded the single, and we got booked to play on a late-night talk show. It was big. Prime-time TV. We nearly… We might’ve…”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “The band split. That afternoon.”

  “Creative differences.” I remembered.

  “Yeah. Well, no. It was me. We were in the studio, doing the dress rehearsal, and…I freaked out. Lost it. Told Tony we should cancel the gig, that this wasn’t for us. He didn’t take it so well. Said I was crazy. And maybe he was right.” He took a h
andful of chips. “And I said it would come around again, that I was talented, the opportunity would be back. And I waited. And…and here I am.”

  “Here you are,” I said.

  He seemed to sort of wake up. “But you don’t need to listen to me. You’re young. You’ll have plenty more chances.”

  There was a very long silence.

  “This Tony,” I said. “Are you really still friends?”

  “He sounded pleased to hear from me. Which was kind of a surprise, given how we left things. Why?” He was looking at me, really looking. “You still want to go and say hi?”

  “Maybe,” I said. At which point I had this feeling like I was walking over the edge of a cliff or something.

  If Mom found out…

  It would be bad.

  Really bad.

  This could even split them up.

  No more Mom and Adrian.

  Was I the sort of person who would do that?

  “Yes,” I said. “I want to go and say hi.”

  Apparently, I was.

  God.

  He broke my gaze. “I don’t know.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I know it’s a lot to ask.”

  “You know we’d have to…keep it to ourselves.” I nodded. “It’s a heck of a risk to take. And for someone who doesn’t even like me.”

  So he’d noticed.

  “I think you’re great,” I said, trying to look into his eyes so he wouldn’t know I was lying, but I found that I couldn’t. Maybe if I just kept talking instead…“I’m sorry if I’ve been grumpy. It’s just, the move and school and the divorce… It’s been very hard.” Which, come to think of it, was true. It had been.

  He nodded. “Maybe we just need to get to know each other better. A trip to London could be just the ticket.”

  Stay calm, Katie. Stay calm.

  “Yes,” I said. “It could be. We could hang out, maybe get some food, meet this Tony guy…” My voice was so high I sounded like a chipmunk. I tried to lower it, to regain a little sophistication. “It would be pretty cool.”

  “Okay,” he said, hesitating. Then, as if he’d decided—truly decided—to go for it, “Okay! I’ll tell him.”

  He watched me doing a sort of dance of excitement, and his face…

  Well… It made me stop. “Are you sure about this?” I said.

  “I guess…I don’t believe in regrets. I want you to feel like you gave this a shot. So if it doesn’t work out, you don’t spend the rest of your life wondering what might’ve happened.”

  And for a second, or maybe even less, I understood what Mom saw in him.

  I didn’t sleep well. In fact, I slept incredibly badly. Worse even than when I was little and trying to wait up for Santa Claus or the nights after Dad had cooked his beef thing with all those peppers.

  Because the opportunity was there. This huge, glittering thing that I didn’t even know I wanted because I’d never thought I could ever have it.

  I mean, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t ever imagined people singing my songs or yelling my name, but it was in the same way that I’d imagined waking up and finding I suddenly had the ability to fly. People from Harltree don’t get famous, except that woman eight years ago who got knocked on the head and suddenly started speaking Chinese.

  To think that after all the hideous Mom-and-Dad stuff and Amanda and Adrian and the bus and school, there was a way to turn my life into something new…into something good.

  It was amazing, like a dream—ironic, given that I hadn’t slept at all.

  “Morning, morning,” said Adrian. “I’m frying eggs. Who wants a fried egg? Katie? Nothing like a fried egg, yeah?”

  There was no way he could have been more suspicious, short of wearing a giant hat that said “I’m hiding something” across the front.

  Incredibly, no one else seemed to have noticed.

  “You all right to open up on your own today, Manda?”

  “What? Oh my gosh!” She flushed a deep rose color. “Are you sure? That’s such a responsibility.”

  He grinned at her and tossed a huge bunch of keys down onto the table. “You’ll be all right.”

  “I’ll do my best,” she said, all earnest and sincere. “Thank you.”

  I couldn’t help rolling my eyes just a tiny bit. Only then I felt bad because Amanda bit her lip and looked down at her cinnamon squares. But not in a hungry way. She just looked sad.

  “Fried egg, Katie?”

  “Yuck, no.” At which point I remembered my new pro-Adrian status. “Oh, all right. Just one.”

  He leaned in to plop an egg onto my plate, all wet and glistening and eggy, and as he did, he whispered, “End of the road, ten a.m.”

  “What? Ten a.m. today?”

  He was already back at the stove.

  “What’s today?” said Amanda, looking up from her cereal.

  “Oh, just…this…thing…I’ve got. With…Lacey.” When it comes to lying, I’m not the best.

  “Adrian, can I play the new Michael Kiwanuka EP? Or would you rather I stuck to the official playlist?”

  “Play what you like,” said Adrian. “I mean it. You’ve got great taste.”

  She practically danced on the table.

  Meanwhile, I headed upstairs, wondering why Adrian wanted to meet me at the end of the road like we were in a spy film or something. What with daydreaming and wondering and not being able to find any clean sweatpants, I didn’t make it to the end of the road until nearly ten thirty.

  Adrian was hanging out his car window. “Quick! Get in! We’re going to be late.”

  His car smelled a little bit of mints and a lot of cigarette smoke. This was because just as I’d arrived, Adrian had been smoking a cigarette, which he threw away the second he saw me. Mom has strong opinions on smoking—these opinions are that me and Amanda never ever do it, or she’ll kill us. This translates into everyone we ever meet also being banned from doing it, which I don’t understand at all. Does she think we’re really that easily influenced? Also, if I’d ever wanted to smoke, which I don’t, the sight of Nose Hairs taking a drag would be a pretty effective deterrent.

  “Late for what?” I asked.

  “Top Music.”

  “What?” By now I was in the passenger seat; otherwise, I might have collapsed.

  “I fired off an email last night, got a reply straight back. He’d love to say hi. Of course, this is just a first meeting, so don’t get too excited. These things take time. Lots more meetings. But it’ll be interesting to hear what he has to say, yeah?”

  “But, but…it’s a Saturday. I thought people didn’t work on Saturday.” I was staring down at my beat-up sneakers and flaking nail polish. “I haven’t even brushed my teeth!”

  “We’ll get you some mints at the station.”

  I took a quick look at myself in the passenger mirror, then wished I hadn’t. Maybe we could find a drugstore, and I could do my face with the makeup testers.

  “So, Tony started Top Music a few years ago now. And I think it’s doing pretty well from what I can tell. Doesn’t surprise me. He always had that kind of drive. Much more so than me.”

  “And he’s nice, right?”

  “He’s in the music industry,” said Adrian, doing a three-point turn in the middle of a really busy traffic. “What do you expect? In fact, let’s go over our nonnegotiables. It’s good to be clear on this kind of thing from the beginning.”

  “Clear about what kind of thing?”

  “Not missing school.”

  “But—”

  “You know what your mom thinks.”

  “Dad wouldn’t mind,” I mumbled. “He’d let me miss school if it was important. This is.”

  “I’m not taking parenting lessons from a man who leaves his kids to go and live on the other side of
the world,” said Adrian, which was the most he’d ever said about Dad. “No missing school.”

  I shoved myself down low into my seat. “It’s not going to be a very fun meeting, is it? If you go in and basically start telling him off.”

  “Katie, I’m on your side.”

  “But I can handle myself,” I told him. “I’m really very organized.”

  We passed a sign for the station, and it occurred to me that I was on my way to London to meet a man at a record label.

  “Katie, are you all right?”

  “Mnnnrg.”

  “You don’t sound all right.”

  “Uwuuuug.”

  “Do you want me to pull over? Breathe, Katie. In out, in out. There you go.”

  “Sorry,” I managed. “It just occurred to me that I’m on my way to London to meet the head of a record label. Woooooah—it’s happening again.”

  “In out, in out,” said Adrian. “And look, it’s exciting. But it’s not that exciting.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s not going to offer you a deal on the spot if that’s what you were expecting. You weren’t, were you?”

  “N-no.”

  “Good. These things take forever—weeks of negotiation. They’ll want to hear you play, maybe see what you’re like in front of an audience. And that’s even if he wants you for the label, which he may not. Most likely it’s just going to be a friendly chat so he can keep an eye on you, watch what you do next.”

  “That’s still cool,” I said bravely.

  “Don’t be upset. That’s more than most people get in a lifetime!”

  Which was true.

  Well, at least the hyperventilating had stopped.

  • • •

  London’s fantastic. It’s basically everything that Harltree isn’t. It’s so big that even familiar places aren’t familiar really—at least not in a Harltree way, where I know the exact location of every last puddle and the last major event was when they opened the new supermarket.

  There’s just this…feeling about London. It’s only a few miles from home, but really, it’s another planet. London is dirty and dangerous and exciting, and stuff happens there. Which is to say that even though I don’t ever really relax when I’m on the subway and I can’t figure out how anyone knows how to take the bus anywhere and when I get home and blow my nose, my snot’s gray from all the pollution, it’s still my favorite place. It makes me want to write songs like “Warwick Avenue” or “Waterloo Sunset.” It would be crazy and happy-making and have a racing beat with the kind of hook that makes you jump in the air and scream.