Pop Princess

  “WONDER!” Never did I think I would be grateful to be saved from further conversation with Liam by hearing Kayla demanding my presence.

  Karl walked past me. “Your turn,” he groaned at me. He took the phone back. “Guess whose shrill voice that was, Punk. . . .”

  I wandered back to Kayla’s room. “Shut the door behind you,” she said.

  What the? . . . I kicked the door behind me. Jules continued to play on the PlayStation, not bothering to acknowledge me.

  “You have to listen to this voice mail I got last night. You’re not going to believe this,” Kayla said. She took my hand and guided me to sit on the edge of her bed next to her. She pressed some numbers into her cell phone and then passed off the phone to me.

  I heard Liam’s voice, drunk and slurring, sounding like he was in a loud bar: “Mmmm, K, whassup? So are we gonna finish what we started anytime, or what? I know we only messed around that one time, but I think about you all the time. Like . . . all . . . the . . . time. You’re . . . torturing . . . me. I know you know I have feelings for you, so why do you have to treat me like dirt, ignore me? I gotta move on. There’s this other girl in Boston I like. She’s no you, but she’s different, cute. I don’t wanna be wasting my time waiting on you, Kayla.” He started singing, “Quit playin’ games with tearin’ up my heart . . . or what’s that stupid fucking song anyway?” There was a loud clank like he’d dropped the phone on the floor, then a background voice proclaimed, “Dude, you are wasted. You got anybody to drive you home?” and then the message cut off.

  I looked up at Kayla after the message finished. Her emerald eyes were positively gleaming. She might as well have just thrown me into a WWF smackdown on the floor and jumped all over me for how dead I felt inside.

  Kayla’s finger latched on to my charm bracelet, like Lucky used to do. Kayla said, “Can you believe that shit? I mean, you’ve seen us together, you know I just think of Liam as a friend, like a brother, right? We never even really hooked up! We just made out one night when he was visiting during his spring break, right before you came to New York, but it was no big deal. And it was so long ago! I am so freaked out. I mean, ewwww! Do you think Liam’s a stalker? I just called in Karl to tell him but then I chickened out. But I think I’m going to have to tell Tig to fire Karl—it’s just too weird now. Right? What do you think?”

  I snapped my wrist from her and stood up. I said, “I think you can be a real asshole sometimes, Kayla.”

  I returned to the front of the bus, but sat on the other side of the aisle from where Karl was sitting, yakking with Liam. I put sunglasses on so no one would see me cry. Fuck the Windy City, fuck the Cubs game, fuck the pop princess good life. I wanted to go home to Massachusetts, to see my mom, to be anywhere but here, where I felt like my heart had literally been snatched from my chest and stomped to bits.

  “Later, Punk,” I heard Karl say. He snapped his phone shut, then looked over at me. He said, “The Punk, you know. He’s young, he’s stupid. Give him time.”

  Forty

  I was standing in the empty living room of Mom’s new apartment in Cambridge when Charles walked through the front door and plopped two boxes in the middle of the floor.

  “Put the boxes in the corner,” I said to Charles. “You’re blocking the middle of the room and the furniture movers are coming any minute.”

  Charles said, “Why don’t you shut up and help instead of just standing there, lazy.”

  I said, “I am directing this move, not moving this move. I’m shooting a new video soon and I can’t risk getting any injuries.”

  Henry came in and dropped some more boxes in the middle of the room. He patted my arm. “You just go on letting yourself believe that, Wonder.” Wonder. Not pop princess. How refreshingly not Liam.

  Charles repeated: “Lazy.”

  My hormones had Liam to thank that Henry could not penetrate my new anti-guy force field. I paid no mind to Henry’s lanky shuffle through Mom’s new kitchen as he checked out the appliances and inspected the thermostat. Henry’s sweaty T-shirt, which said something in Klingon on it, negated any desire to inspect his Schwarzenegger muscle progress. My eyes were blind to Henry’s postsummer head of sun-kissed dirty blond, newly shaved hair.

  Since listening to the Liam message to Kayla, near the end of the tour, I had vowed to go off men, perhaps for good. I could either become a nun or a lesbian, I hadn’t decided. If the major objects of my lust thus far in life had included Will Nieves (gay), Doug Chase (jerk), and Liam Murphy (dawg), I clearly needed a time-out to figure out what the fuck.

  Henry said, “We’ve got all the boxes upstairs and in here and in the bedrooms. Want to go downstairs and grab a cold drink?”

  I blurted out, “I can’t, I’ve decided I’m not dating!” How my face could be turning hot in embarrassment in front of Henry of all people, I don’t know.

  Henry looked at me, confused—and like he was looking at the pop princess with the world’s biggest ego. “Good,” he said. “Because I wasn’t asking you for a date. And now that I’m coming into Boston twice a week for a chem class at BU that Devonport High has given me a special dispensation to take, let’s get this straight right now so we don’t have the awkward moments when your mom invites me over for dinner.” Henry’s words came slow and with precise articulation, “I said, ‘Let’s get a cold drink,’ not an intimate dinner for two at Chez Red Lobster. Over?”

  I laughed. “Over,” I answered. “Over” had been our tree house sign-off word when we played World War II ham radio the summer after third grade.

  Henry bowed at me, like a Jeeves or someone. “Then, madam,” he said, in an affected British accent that was all Cape Cod, “perhaps you’d like to join me for a little stroll along the Chah-les.”

  I slipped my arm through his. “Why, yes sir, I would.” I stuffed my hair under a baseball cap and grabbed my big black Chanel sunglasses. The props were mandatory for any pop princess with a smash single under her belt who dared take a stroll through the neighborhood with the boy next door and dared further to hope to not get asked for autographs.

  My cell phone rang as we were walking. “It’s Tig—I have to take this,” I told Henry. Henry popped into the video store on the corner while I sat down on a bus stop bench.

  “Are you sitting down?” Tig said.

  “Matter of fact I am!” I was hoping Tig was calling to tell me the good news that my new video could be shot in Boston. I was looking forward to spending more time in my real hometown.

  “First,” Tig said. “The record company has decided to release ‘Baby U R Tha 1’ as your follow-up single. I know you wanted ‘Don’t Call Me Girl (Call Me Woman),’ and believe me I pleaded your case, but this unfortunately isn’t about your personal preference.”

  Yeah, I was just the artist, who was I to have a vote on the song selection? Only an idiot like me would prefer a follow-up single with substantive lyrics and my best vocals on the whole Girl Wonder album over another cheesy dance track that probably sounded a lot better performed by Amanda Lindstrom, the disgraced pop princess who’d penned the dumb song.

  To my silence, Tig added, “It gets a little worse. You sure you’re sitting down?”

  “Yeah,” I grunted. What could be worse? Would I have to perform the video with the Kayla monster making a cameo, playing that Liam message over the track like a rapper cutting into a pop song, with maybe a cute little dance number thrown in?

  Tig said, “There are major rumors that Pop Life Records is about to be bought by a larger entertainment conglomerate. The marketing folks are panicked about their jobs and aren’t freeing up the bucks for the budget that the director they hired for your video expected. Marketing got into a fight with the creative side who got into a fight with the director and as a result . . . I’m so sorry to tell you this, but they canceled the video shoot. The record company has decided to focus the video budget this quarter on Kayla’s new album.”

  “Oh” was all I could say. Why did
I feel a little happy over this news? No video meant less dance rehearsal and no week of starving off a few pounds before shooting began. No video meant I could help Mom unpack and be truly lazy: watch TV and go to all my favorite old haunts in Boston and ignore all the hot college guys because I was off guys now.

  “It’s just a small setback, kid,” Tig said. “Why don’t you give Trina a call—I know she’d love to catch up with you. Take a month or two off. Take a class that’s not about dancing or singing. I’ll let you know when the record company has decided what kind of promotion they want you to do for ‘Baby U R Tha 1.’ I’m sure this whole company buyout thing will blow over. Always does. Just lay low for a while, have fun.”

  Henry came out of the video store carrying a stack of Buffy DVDs. Why waste any more time getting to the “laying low” part? “Signal’s running out, Tig, gotta go,” I said. I snapped the cell phone shut. Way shut.

  Forty-one

  I celebrated the arrival of my seventeenth birthday in December by jumping out of my chair at a Cambridge coffee house when Tig announced that the record company was dumping me.

  I hadn’t expected for Tig to show up in Boston, I hadn’t expected the record company to drop me—and I certainly hadn’t expected to be as pleased as I was surprised over the news.

  Pop music was cyclical, Tig said, and the tide was changing. Rock and punk were hot now, bubble gum pop girls—not. Pop Life Records had indeed been bought out by a bigger label, and the parent company was trimming its artist roster, consolidating its management structure. Big words for: Wonder Blake, expendable. Music downloading on the Internet and a weak economy had made profit margins slim—and as an “artist,” I simply hadn’t been that profitable. While “Bubble Gum Pop” had been a smash hit, credit for that was given to Montana, not me, and one successful single was not enough; I needed to have a smash album in order to be viable in the pop music circuit. Radio programmers hadn’t liked my follow-up single, “Baby U R Tha 1,” and with radio not having lined up in support of the song, neither had the record company—it was that simple. The song had tanked. The album sales for Girl Wonder were respectable, but not close enough to gold-certified. The new label was keeping on only artists who were platinum status or who fit into the rock/punk niche that was currently riding the charts. Sorry, kid.

  Tig said, “You’ve got to be the first artist I’ve ever known to yelp with joy at news like this. And to think I was dreading having to tell you.”

  I said, “I’m sorry I’m such a disappointment to you, Tig. I know you were hoping for a bigger future for me.”

  Tig looked years younger since his management agreement with Kayla had expired and she had opted to sign on with Dean Marconi’s manager. Or maybe it was Trina Little sitting next to him at the table, adding a sugar to his latte and brushing a speck of dust from his suit jacket shoulder. Gone were the Kayla-era bags under Tig’s eyes and the tense jut of his jaw. He seemed . . . relaxed? Tig?

  Tig said, “Hold on, you’re not down for the count yet—don’t be discouraged. We can change your image, easy. Trina tells me you’ve been working on your own songs. I love the hair back to its natural color. I can get you a new deal elsewhere, I’m sure of it. Or if you want to go out to Hollywood, we can line up auditions for you. I know a lot of people out there who like your look, love your voice. . . .”

  “Can I think about it?” I said.

  “What’s there to think about? You’ve proved you’ve got what it takes to make it in this industry; this is just a setback. Don’t give me that look. Okay, you can think about it, but not for long. The life expectancy of a pop princess’s reign is short enough as it is. If we’re going to change your image and reinvent Wonder Blake, we’ve got to do it while you’ve still got the name recognition.” Tig looked at Trina. “What’s she need to think about? This is your influence. Now what am I gonna do?” But Tig was smiling.

  Trina nuzzled her nose against his: Eskimo kiss. It was almost disgusting. She cooed, “You can do what I’ve been suggesting to you for a long time now—start producing instead of managing, hear? Maybe that Montana guy oughta be your first collaboration. The guy owes you—he’d never have gotten the exposure for that number one without you.”

  Trina placed a kiss on Tig’s cheek. She was all but sitting on his lap. I said, “If you two are a couple now, isn’t that practically incest?”

  Trina looked up from her Tig PDA. “If you recall, we were related by marriage, but that marriage ended in divorce anyway, so nope.”

  I asked, “How long have you two been . . . you know?”

  Trina said, “You’re such a good Bostonian prude, Wonder, with the you know instead of saying it out loud. Tig and I have been you know for a long time, but not seriously until that person freed up his time and his soul and did this man the biggest favor of his career.”

  I teased, “But Tig, you’re a manager—you’re supposed to be a slave to your artists and to the record companies, you’re not supposed to have a life.”

  Trina waved her hand in the air like a low-flying airplane. “He’s been slipping one in under the radar for a while now.” Then they full-out kissed. I had to look away; it was just too much. It was like that time when Buffy saw Giles kissing her mom—great for them, but not something you want to witness.

  Wonder Blake, Pop Princess wasn’t supposed to have a life either, but somehow one had slipped in under her radar too. I’d come home to Boston at the end of the tour in late September with indefinite plans made more indefinite by Tig’s advice for me to take a hiatus, and right away Cambridge was where I knew I wanted to stay. The leaves began changing color to brilliant reds and golds, the air got colder, and just like old times, the students were practically knocking me over on Mass. Ave. as they argued over existential something-or-other. Even riding the T felt right; for all my time in New York, I’d never ridden the subway, never felt part of the place.

  When I arrived at Mom’s, I never said, Look, I am completely freaked out because I slept with this guy and I kinda coulda been falling for him but it turned out he liked the Kayla monster and I feel like such a jerk, please can you just take care of me for a while so I can be sad and the biggest loser in the history of the world in private instead of in front of the whole music industry back in New York? I did tell Mom, Oh yeah, the tour was great, here’s some trinkets and programs I saved for you, whatever. Congrats on your new job, Mom. You doin’ okay?

  I didn’t intend to stay with Mom for long. I fully intended to get my own place. I had the bank account for it and maybe I wasn’t a legally emancipated teen but I knew Mom would co-sign a lease for me, however reluctantly. She had signed the form for me to drop out of school, after all. But a week at her new place turned into a month that had now turned into almost three months and somehow the spare bedroom that was supposed to be for Charles had my bed in it, my CD collection, my TV, and my videotape collection of the South Coast episodes I had missed during the summer on tour (thank you, Mommy), and somehow Charles was sleeping on the pullout sofa in the living room when he visited on weekends. And as much as I had fantasized that staying with Mom would mean she would do my laundry and make dinner and be all-wise with the Mom advice, that’s not how the living situation worked out. The fact was, my days were free and Mom often came home tired from work, so I ended up doing the wash. I wanted to learn to cook, so I ended up preparing dinner. And it was me who told Mom that leaving Dad had been the smartest thing she’d ever done to get her life back on track after Lucky’s death. It was me who urged Mom to join Weight Watchers if she really wanted to feel good again, me who bought Mom the membership at the Y so she could go swimming in the mornings.

  Somehow the pop princess had lapsed back into being a regular girl without even realizing it. The Boston accent was back wicked thick. So were the natural brunette hair color and the size-eight body and the four-times-a-week dance classes instead of the psychotic daily workout regimen and protein bar diet. And future pop princesses bew
are: A simple get-together for coffee with Trina Little could change your life. Not that I would ever let Dad know, but I was sneaking into classes with Trina at Boston University. The school thing started as a dare from Trina, who claimed I was full of it when I said I didn’t need to go to college, and before I knew it I was enraptured in her history professor’s lecture about how music had affected the course of the civil rights movement. Now the professor was up to the sexual revolution and my girl Janis Joplin was getting her freak on with the movement in San Francisco in the late ’60s, and I was hooked. Every Tuesday and Thursday—at eight in the morning, no less—I was sitting next to Trina in that lecture hall, chugging caffeine and hanging on the professor’s every word. And I wasn’t just there cuz the professor had that tweedy, glasses ’n’ frazzled hair intellectual look—very hot for a friggin’ teacher—I was legitimately interested in what he had to say, though glad it was Trina and not me who had to write the final exam paper.

  At BU, nobody recognized me as the “Bubble Gum Pop” girl. When I snuck into classes with Trina wearing a baseball cap and big ole sweats, I just looked like every other student there. It was great. There was no system of cliques I had to maneuver, no B-Kid backlash to overcome. Students there seemed to want to learn, to hang out, to grow. College was a world away from Devonport High.

  The one place I was not safe from being the “Bubble Gum Pop” girl was the mall. I give full props to the middle school-age girls of the world. They can spot a pop princess, even one in sweats, no makeup, and natural hair color, from a level away at Claire’s Accessories, and before you can say text pager a horde has swarmed you at the Danskin store, taking pictures with you and having you sign their sneakers, whose brand you were promoting six months earlier, and asking who is hotter: Will, Dean, or Freddy. Will, of course! And somehow, so long as no parent used those dreaded words role model, the experience counted as silly but fun. I oughta write a song about those girls!