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‘To what?’

‘The collar.’

‘Oh, that,’ I said, suddenly aware that a real live pop star’s leather-clad arm was very close to mine and we were staring together over a glistening
landscape with the little puffs of cloud from our mouths mingling in the frosty air … For a real live pop star, he was sort of nice. Sort of easy. Easy to talk to and stand next to and mingle air with and think about collars alongside …

And then it hit me. ‘No, that can’t be right,’ I said aloud.

‘It is. I bought it from a specialist collector,’ he said. ‘My dad loved Fred Perry.’

‘No, no, I believe you. It’s just that I’ve had this mad idea about what might have happened to the collar, and where the other Jazzy might … No. No, that just can’t be right.’

But then I’m a science nerd, aren’t I? And this wasn’t magic or madness I was thinking about. This was Large Hadron Colliders for human molecules. This was DNA and double helixes.

So maybe it could be right. Not morally right, or anything. Just … correct.

‘You’d better sleep in the shed if you’re exhausted,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow we’re breaking into a laboratory.’

‘What if I’m seen?’ Jason said, interestingly not bothered about kipping down in the shed. ‘Unfortunately I am quite well known and easily recognised.’

He had a point. ‘All right. You stay in the shed, or go home, or whatever, and I’ll go on my own.’

Then his eyes sharpened. ‘No way. You’re not having all the fun, Sci-Fi Girl. I’m coming with you.
Just bring me a razor in the morning. I’m not going to kill myself,’ he said quickly, misinterpreting my confused expression. ‘Just shave my head so nobody recognises me.’ Then he worked out my confused expression, darn the new clever Jason. ‘You have got a razor, haven’t you, to shave your legs and stuff?’

‘Sure,
’ I said quickly. And I was going to start the very next day, shaving my legs and stuff. ‘Just wondering what Stephen Scowl will think if you shave your head.’

‘I don’t care,’ he said quickly, followed by, ‘I’ll just wear a wig or something till it grows back. I’m coming with you, Cat.’

‘Okay.’

‘Goodnight then.’

We stood there for a moment looking left and right and at the grass and everywhere but at each other, and then I made a break for it up the garden path. Behind me, the shed door opened and closed and there was a muffled ‘Ooof’ as Jason fell into the sleeping bag.

Like it or not, it seemed, we were in this together.
Not in the sleeping bag, obviously. The whole “who is the other Jason and where can he be” thing.

Definitely
not the sleeping bag.

No.

Stop thinking about the sleeping bag.

After getting up ridiculously early to work out how to shave my legs and armpits and then sneak out to the shed with a completely different razor (which I just tossed through the door as soon as it was ajar) I cornered Mum in the bathroom.

‘Mum, I don’t want to go to school today.’

This is unheard of, of course, as other than on Mondays when the social misfit thing gets me down, school is the centre of my universe. I get to do science stuff and hang out with Dolores and do chemical reactions in the brain when I see Freddie, so what is not to like?

However, this was a weird old time and Mum believed me, and must have thought we’d had enough of a chatette the night before for me to need no further punishment. If she’d known I’d been harbouring a different version of Jazzy D in my bedroom and then stashing him in the shed, she’d have thrown ten different
kinds of fit and then had him or me or perhaps both of us arrested.

As she didn’t know this, though, she just said,
‘Okay, honey, I understand. I don’t really want to leave you on your own all day, though.’

She applied a bit more mascara and for the first
time ever I watched really closely. Mascara application kind of goes with the whole shaving thing – get rid of excess hair, enhance the other type (not the hair wings, of course).

Mum gave me a quick “what are you staring at” glance, and then said,
‘I’ve got to go back to my client’s as I missed yesterday afternoon.’

This was just
the “in” I wanted.

‘How about,’ I said slowly as if I’d only just thought of it, ‘I go to Dean’s laboratory? I won’t get under his feet. I’ll enjoy it. And I’ll get to know Dean a bit better.’

Okay, so it was a slightly mean tactic, but it worked like a dream. Mum clutched my face on either side, still holding the mascara in one hand, and said, ‘Oh, Cat! That’s a brilliant idea.’

And so with a few quick conversations, it was sorted: Mum would drop me at Dean’s to a
void paparazzi, then head off from there to the domestic terminal, and I would spend the day with my step-dad-to-be although I had to be careful to stay out of the way while the Japanese were there. I took that to mean a few of the investor people he’d been trying to impress the other night, rather than the whole of Japan like an invasion.

All fine by me.

Meanwhile I emailed Jason in the shed (which meant I did actually have Jason Devaney’s email address and indeed his own phone number. Funny how things turn out) and told him to get in Mum’s boot. The car one, not the foot one. And to take a length of hosepipe from the shed to feed out through the rusty patch so he could breathe. And to remember to get dressed (haha and LOL) as other Jazzy often seemed to forget that part.

All
good, he responded.

Then I did some texting and calling with Dolores to explain that I couldn’t possibly go to school while the press were
chasing me and Cat-Astophic YouTube clips of the moment Jazzy flexed his thigh muscles in the school hall were appearing all over everywhere. To my shame, considering that I was about to spend the day with her real-life and forever LERV, she was really nice about it.

‘I’ve closed down your Facebook account and blocked anyone we don’t know from school from my account too,’ she said kindly. ‘And in History I’m going to send out a photo-shopped picture of Jazzy D with someone else so they all go and chase that person instead.’

‘Who?’

‘Keira Knightley.’

‘I think they already chase Keira Knightley.’

‘So it won’t be any extra work for them, will it?’ Dolores could make total sense when she wanted to.

Then she blasted me through the aortic valve. ‘Don’t forget our double date tonight.’

I had totally forgotten the double date tonight. I didn’t want to go on the double date tonight. I wanted to go on a single date with Freddie, not a double date with Freddie ogling Double D and his mate ogling me. ‘What’s he even called, Freddie’s friend?’

Dolores paused for a moment. ‘Errr. Nerdy Mate, I think.’

‘Good Galileo, Dolores, I can’t go on a double date with someone I don’t even know the name of.’

‘I’ll find out later and text you.’ Great. That would mean even more of Dolores talking attractively to Freddie. ‘Then I’ll come round at six to help you get dressed.’

‘I can get myself dressed, Dolores.’

‘You know what I mean,’ she said, and rang off.

Ah yes. To get dressed
properly
. To dress like a teenage girl instead of an ironing board with hair wings, or Doctor Sheldon Cooper in a clown wig. That actually depressed me more than the thought of the double date from hell – that I might have to wear something other than jeans. Ah well. At least I’d shaved my legs.

‘R U IN
?’ I texted Jason.

‘YES. GOLF CLUB IN MY BACK.’

‘SORRY. FORGOT MUM TOOK UP GOLF.’

‘WITH SPADE?’

‘SORRY? OH! YES, EMERGENCY SHOVEL FOR SNOW.’

‘REMINDS ME OF MY 1
st
GUITAR.’

‘HA HA.
EXPLAINS A LOT. REMINDS ME THAT IT MIGHT SNOW SOON WITH THIS COLD SNAP.

‘OH WELL. WARMER
IN HERE THAN SHED.’

‘AND
IT MOVES! LIKE A CARAVAN FOR POOR PEOPLE.’

Poor people like us, not Jason Devaney, who could probably afford to put his actual house/mansion on wheels and drive it to the South of France. Not like Mum, who had to pack blankets
and shovels in case the car broke down in a blizzard, and could actually get them out of the boot through the hole without even popping the lid. And Mum … aaaaagggh! Suddenly it occurred to me that she might just take it upon herself to put luggage in the boot, or load her briefcase in there. It could kill her at her age to open up the boot and find it contained one set of golf clubs, one picnic stroke snow blanket, one emergency snow shovel, and one dishevelled lead singer of the country’s most famous boy band.

I raced out to the car ahead of her, wrenching her briefcase out of her hand and stowing it behind her car seat before she could even think of doing anything else.

‘You’re eager!’ she said.

‘It’s a lab, of course I am,’ I said. ‘Oh, and Dean, I suppose,’ I added pleasantly.

She glanced at me sharply. ‘You be nice, okay? Dean’s doing you a very big favour today. Again.’

‘Nice? I’m always nice.’

‘Hmm.’

I took that to mean that she was remembering some occasion that she thought I wasn’t quite so nice, and then remembered the several occasions over the last few days when she’d had cause to worry about my niceness. And it was all Jason Devaney’s fault – perhaps not the one currently playing Show Me Tornadoes on a snow shovel in the boot of her car, but certainly the idea of Jazzy D and then the fake Jazzy D which had made everyone so crazy. No wonder they called this fan stuff ‘mania’, like Beatlemania and Divvimania …

It was all too much for me, combined with everything else that was going on in my mad life. I had to help Jason track down his doppelganger and then I had to get rid of the pair of them. Far away. Far far away so I could go back to being a nerd with one friend and a perfectly nice stepsister-to-be who was utterly annoying.

Then came the slight flaw in my plan.

‘Bye then; have a good day,’ said Mum as we pulled up in a layby on the outskirts of the university campus.

‘No, not here! Aren’t you going to drop me at the lab?’

Mum shook her head. ‘I don’t want to get stuck in the one way system. Out you get – it’s just over the hill. Tiny little walk.’

‘But … but the paparazzi!’

We both scanned the area and there wasn’t a soul around. Not a single, solitary soul.

‘No paparazzi, darling. Come on, you’ll make me late …’

‘But don’t you want to say hi to Dean, and hand me over properly? You know how much trouble I am. And I’m sure there must be a photographer lurking somewhere.’

‘There isn’t,’ said Mum
with a frown, ‘and I don’t see…’

Suddenly from very close behind us there was a flash, followed by a tiny tinny voice saying, ‘I think I got the shot, Bill.’

‘Oh my lord, Cat, you’re right. They’re everywhere.’

Mum shoved the car into gear and screeched to the laboratory doors, where I made sure she reverse-parked by the trees (to avoid photos) and sunk down low below the steering wheel (to avoid ph
otos) and ignored me when I opened the boot as I got out of the car so she couldn’t see anything in her rear view mirror (to avoid photos; this is a well-known trick to stop the press getting shots inside or near the car, according to, well, me).

So thanks to Jason’s quick thinking of sticking his phone out through the rusty hole, combined with my quick thinking of pretend-avoiding paparazzi, we managed to get to the laboratory and tip Jason out into the surrounding copse of oaks while I went inside to find the right moment to open an exit and get him in too. Poor guy must be freezing by now
even it is early summer, I thought, after a night in the shed and a morning in the boot of a car.

Dean met me at the door, looking disappointed. ‘Oh. Did your mum not want to come in?’

‘Too busy,’ I said. ‘That’s what you get for marrying a career woman.’

Then he smiled in a frankly nauseating way. ‘I wouldn’t have her any other way.’

It was quite hard not to gag. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Hey, Dean, you know that night of the party? I think I left my pencil case here, and my ID and …’ And a piece of someone’s collar that I think got into your Vortexicon and created another person. ‘… and some other stuff.’

‘Yes!’ He said this very brightly, like he’d just conjured them out of thin air. ‘Janice has them behind Reception.’

‘Oh. They’re not still in the lab with that … gosh, what was it called?’

‘The Vortexicon? No,’ said Dean, shuffling me over to the Reception desk where Janice was clearly eavesdropping and was
already fishing my pencil case out of a box marked ‘RECYCLING’. ‘The V is strictly off limits, I’m afraid. Still so experimental. It was only re-opened that night for the investment event.’

Darn. Then I had a thought. ‘Talking of investment, a
ren’t the Japanese in today?’

At that, Dean looked at his watch. ‘Blast, yes, in ten minutes. Sorry, Cat; will you be okay to have a look around while I get everything set up for them? There’s a coffee machine down that way, or you can sit with Janice here, if you prefer.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ I said, and I meant it too. Even if I hadn’t needed to be there for other reasons, this was definitely my kind of environment. Very sciency. I could have spent days just looking at the mummified person in the glass case in the middle of Reception, even though I could clearly now see it was a wax man. Some parts of him were proper skin grafts, however, and there was a whole set of fingers which looked very real indeed. Very like Jazzy D’s fingers, in fact. The other, fake Jazzy D, not the one lurking around the lab at this very moment.

‘I’ll just go and get a coffee, Janice,’ I said to Janice, who jumped because I’d caught her on an internet dating site.

‘Right you are, love,’ she said. ‘Take your time. He’s not going anywhere.’ She giggled and pointed to Wax Man.

I leaned over the desk. ‘O
h, he’s nice,’ I said, lying about the non-wax man whose photo was plastered all over her computer screen. She looked very embarrassed (at being caught? At her terrible taste? Hard to tell) and fumbled around with the keyboard, just long enough for me to grab her keys.

Anyway,
Wax Man was starting to make me a tidge uncomfortable, truth be told. He glistened as if he was in a permanent sweat, and the sections of him that were obviously real, like, HUMAN, sort of sat on the top like Elastoplast. It was hard to imagine that this clumsy mannequin bore any kind of resemblance to The Other Jazzy D and could therefore have been invented by the same machine, but then (and this was VERY sciency of me) I kind of guessed that a company like Dean’s wouldn’t go putting its very latest creation on display for the whole world to see. Not until they’d licenced it or whatever it was they did.

I thought of licencing Jason/Jazzy and giggled. While Fake Jazzy wouldn’t care (or understand), I suspected the real Jason would have something to say about it. Which led to a lot of questions. Like, why is Fake Jazzy such a moron? And why does he repulse me and you, real Jazzy D, do
not? And why oh why oh why is Fake J always displaying his nakedness?

Time to go to the source.

I sauntered casually towards the coffee machine (and it’s pretty difficult for someone who looks like me to saunter casually), then feinted back and headed in the direction of the Vortexicon. Due to my pretty much photographic memory I was able to find it at the end of the corridor without too much trouble; thankfully Dean hadn’t made it that far yet, so I opened the door, propped open the nearby emergency exit, and texted Jason.

‘BIG BIRD HAS LANDED. REPEAT, BIG BIRD HAS LANDED.’

Moments later, a frozen pop star shuffled through the opening and folded himself stiffly onto the chair beside mine. ‘Can’t speak. Must thaw,’ he croaked.