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For the first time, Jazzy suddenly appeared to be thick in the body as well as thick in the head. I mean, there was an awful lot of him for two teenage girls to wrestle into a Vortexicon. Aggie appeared to be thinking exactly the same thing, and was backing away at speed.

‘Well, Jazzy …’

‘Just call me Divine.’

Dear Da Vinci, he’d gone bonkers
. ‘Okay, Divine, we’ll just see about getting you …’

And just at that point, my phone rang.

It was Jason.

‘Don’t you answer your texts? I’ve been messaging you for half an hour! Jazzy’s sor
t of escaped and he’s a bit mad…’

‘You’re telling me.’

‘He’s a bit mad at me. I’ve been training him to be in the band, but he’s not quite ready.’

‘And now he wants to make his own band. Of Jazzies.’

‘Yes, exactly, and …’ Finally. Jason caught on at last. ‘He’s there?’

‘Yes, with me and Aggie, at her house. Near the You Know What.’

There was a long silence. A loooooong silence. It was one of those weighing-up-the-pros-and-cons silences like I’d just done. Then Jason sighed.

‘Okay, there’s only one thing for it. You’ll have to bring him to me.’

‘To the music awards?’ I squeaked.

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Jason sounded very flustered and sort of adorable. ‘Err, I could send a car or … I don’t know …’

‘It’s okay,’ I said quickly, ‘we’ve got transport.’

I glanced over at Aggie and she
nodded immediately.

‘Catherine Melissa Andrews, you’re …’ Jason didn’t actually say what I was. ‘Thanks. See you in a bit. Don’t let him near the lab!’

Then he rang off. ‘Right, everyone,’ I said cheerfully and entirely fakely as I had no idea how we were going to pull this off. ‘Let’s get in the car and we can take you to the lab, oh Divine one.’

Excited, Jazzy hurdled some furniture and headed towards the garage.

I pulled Aggie back.

‘Child locks on in the car. I presume you have child locks?’

Aggie laughed. ‘Have you met my dad?’

‘Great. We’re going to need them. We’re taking the big oaf to the music awards, and he cannot, repeat cannot get out of the car.’

‘Okay,’ said Aggie, sounding more confident than her face appeared.

‘Don’t worry. We’ll put something in the car to distract him.’

And so we piled into the Volvo and screeched off towards town. Towards the bra shop for the bigger boobed.

Because if we were going to pull this off, we needed Dolores to come too.

Funny thing was, I no longer had to watch what I was saying to Dolores about Jazzy (or Divine as he now liked to be known) as she was really into Freddie. Sure, it might have been her day-dream to get together with the lead singer of the lead band Double Vision, and be Queen of the Divvies and have a wedding in Hello and beautiful babies called Berlin and Dubrovnik, but she never really believed it. It was just something fun to pretend. Meanwhile she had the real live Freddie the Ferd Nerd to adore her properly and in person.

Anyway, as he’d been MY Freddie the Ferd Nerd first, she could hardly have a go at me for turning up at Busty Betties with the Divine Jazzy D in the back of the car, could she?

True to form, she screamed like a banshee when I appeared at the shop window and pointed to the back of the car, where Jazzy was waving like the Queen. In seconds, she had grabbed her bag, shouted something to the boss lady who looked rather disgruntled, and pegged it out of the front door.

‘Omigod, you have got a lot of explaining to do,’ she said breathlessly, waving back at Jazzy D and then quickly at Aggie in the driving seat.

‘I’ll let Jazzy tell you himself, only call him Divine.’ I shoved her into the back seat with him, whispering, ‘And he’s completely insane, so don’t tell him we’re going to the Music Awards and not the lab.’

‘The Music Awards?’ shrieked Dolores.

Jazzy stirred lazily. ‘Are we at the lab?’

‘Not yet, Divine,’ said Dolores quickly, hardly missing a beat. ‘Be there soon. Tell me all about it.’

‘About what?’

‘Everything.’

Happy to talk to anyone with pretty pink and blonde hair and an enormous chest that actually obstructed her seat-belt, Jazzy then filled Dolores on being born in the Fort Oxygen and training with Jason and wanting to be in a band like Jason, while Dolores nodded along with increasingly round eyes and Aggie and I argued about the best way to get to the venue.

‘I’ve never driven o
n a motorway before,’ she wailed. ‘Isn’t there an easier way?’

I was going off the Sat Nav on my phone. ‘
How would I know? I don’t even drive, Aggie. What’s easier than the great big road that goes straight there?’

‘I don’t know! One without three lanes?’

‘I’ll see if I can find one.’ Much stabbing of the phone and muttered swearing. ‘There’s another road,’ I said as the motorway roundabout loomed ever closer. ‘But it takes an hour longer. We’ll never make it in time.’

Aggie glared at me and then gritted her teeth. ‘You owe me, big time.
’

‘Don’t call me Big Time.’

‘Cat, shush. This is not the moment for jokes. I’m completely terrified.’ Then she swung off the roundabout onto the slip road.

‘Me too,’ I said.

I was too. Utterly and totally terrified. Of this drive. Of getting there on time. Of Jazzy Divine Mental Person in the back with Dolores. Of seeing Jason again.

Dolores shouted from the back. ‘Can you put the heating on? I’m literally freezing to death back here.’

‘That’s not possible!’ shouted Aggie and I at the exact same moment.

We stared at each other in the brief nano-second that Aggie dared to take her eyes off the road.

‘I can’t work the heating and drive at the same time,’ said Aggie by way of explanation.

‘Oh, I thought you meant it’s not possible to be literally freezing to death in fifteen degrees.’

‘That too,’ said Aggie, and she laughed then screamed as a juggernaut skimmed the front bumper. ‘Omigod, I hate this!’

‘It’s all right,’ I said. Important to keep the driver calm when you have a fugitive rock star clone in the back of the car and an actual rock star awaiting his safe delivery in about forty five minutes. ‘Just keep your speed down, let everyone else do whatever they want to do, and we get off
the motorway in three junctions.’

I lied. It was nine junctions, but she was too busy
to notice, what with staring in horror at the traffic and clutching the steering wheel so hard that it might cry.

Or so I thought. ‘It’s more like ten junctions, isn’t it?’

Pros and cons, pros and cons. ‘Nine, actually.’

‘You know your mum does that, too?’

She did not. My mum? ‘What, lies about how much motorway is left?’

Aggie nodded. ‘Dad hates motorway driving. Because of Mum.’

‘Wow.’ That made total sense. ‘So … your mum died in a motorway accident?’

‘No, she was a coach driver.’

I don’t know whether it was meant to be funny – it was probably actually a smidge on the sad side, especially for Aggie – but suddenly we were both laughing so hard that there was a danger Aggie could swerve into the middle lane, blinded by the tears rolling down her face or foxed by her death-grip on the steering wheel. We whooped and flapped our hands around a bit until we’d calmed down, and then swapped stories about our parents that would make their ears bleed, particularly when we revealed them all at the wedding.

She really wasn’t so bad. Really, actually, was kind of nice. Fun. Eventually she said, ‘It’s weird, our parents getting together when we’re this age, isn’t it?’

Hmm. So she though it was weird too! ‘Don’t you like the idea?’

‘I didn’t at first.’ She glanced at my face and then laughed. ‘Any more than you. But I haven’t seen Dad that happy in forever, and what’s not to like about your mum?’

‘Me?’ I said, only half-joking.

And she didn’t say, no, no
, not at all. She just smiled and said, ‘Well, I decided to give you a chance.’

Like the chance you didn’t give me, is what she didn’t say. So she hadn’t found it all easy, and instead had decided to be mature about it.

Ouch. Should have made me hate her even more, but somehow it didn’t.

Anyway, chatting
made the journey go a lot faster and pretty soon we were actually at the correct turn-off and threading our way through the outskirts of the city, on the way to the national music awards to see the country’s favourite boy band.

It was almost like being normal teenagers.

Finally, thanks to my trusty Sat Nav, we pulled up about a mile from the venue with the traffic already starting to clog up, just as my phone rang again.

‘Are you nearly here?’ Jason sounded more than a little panicky.

‘Yes, and don’t worry.
Someone
hasn’t noticed yet.’ I checked the phone display. ‘We’re only a mile away, but there’s heaps of traffic.’

There was a bunch of crackly noises, and then Jason snapped back onto the line. ‘The road’s jammed. You’ll be too late. We’re opening the show in less than an hour.’

‘Well, what are we going to do? I can’t actually fly, in spite of the hair wings.’

‘You don’t have … well, as long as he’s in the car I don’t suppose he can do too much damage.’

Sadly this was not true. Jazzy Divine Idiot was now staring out of the window, pointing at the billboards advertising the awards, saying, ‘That’s me. Hey, that’s me!’ I suddenly realised that when he’d said it before at the cinema, he’d been asking the question IS THAT ME? But now he was pretty clear that the picture was of him, even though it was actually of Jason. ‘Are we at the Fort Oxygen?’

‘He’s getting antsy,’ I hissed into the phone.

‘Okay, okay.’ Poor Jason. He sounded really desperate, bless him. Lovely Jason all flustered like that because of a naked idiot. It didn’t seem fair. ‘I sort of had a plan, but he has to be here.’

And suddenly I had a plan. ‘Jason, can you hide for a while?’’

‘I’m going into make up! They’ll notice if I’m not there.’

‘That’s not
as bad as what will happen if they notice there are two of you.’

Without me having to say anything else, he totally got it.

‘Right! Yeah. They’ll think I slipped out. Okay, I’ll meet you at the back of Gate X where all the catering vans are parked. Twenty minutes?’

Twenty minutes we could do.
Twenty minutes until I saw Jason again. Twenty minutes until I saw Jason again and handed over his double to be locked in a catering van for a few hours until Jason could talk him round and I saw Jason again. Actually Divine Nonsense might not even notice. He might mistake the SMEG fridge for Fort Oxygen and climb inside for a while.

Twenty minutes. This had to be instant.

I handed Dolores my phone. ‘Double D, you’re in charge.’

‘Yes, boss,’ she said. ‘What am I doing?’

‘You’re informing the world that the Divine Jazzy D has got himself stuck outside the awards venue, and the traffic needs to clear on the main road outside for him to get through.’

She barely even blinked.
‘Easy,’ said Dolores.

There was a flash of the camera, a quick question to Aggie about the car’s registration and make, about thirty seconds of the sound of her taloned thumbs tapping on the screen, and then
Dolores handed the phone back to me.

‘Done,’ she said.

And so we waited.

For about ninety seconds.

Then like Moses parting the Red Sea, Jazzy D and his muscly thighs caused the traffic to open up, with cars clambering up the pavements and across the central reservation to get out of the way, and millions of phone cameras snapping images of Divine Oaf as he waved and fist-bumped and blew kisses through the open windows where tearful girls screamed mercilessly. And quite a few boys.

We reached the main gates to the sta
dium in about thirteen minutes, and leapt out of the car en masse. ‘Special delivery,’ shouted Dolores.

It was Big Burly. He took one look at my buddy, my step-sister-to-be and me who towered above them both, and grabbed his walky-talky. ‘
You three again? You’re banned,’ he growled.

I reached behind me and dragged our friend forward. ‘Not this time. This time we’re not taking Jazzy D. We’re bringing him.’

‘Hi, Gordon,’ said Jazzy.

Ah, Jason, I thoug
ht. You have trained him well, Wise One.

Miraculously the great black gates to the back of the stadium opened at once, and we were directed round to the catering vans where I insisted we needed to go
. Immediately. Because Jason had said so.

Well, I wasn’t lying about that, was I?

The “immediately” part wasn’t because Jason said so, though.

It was because, for some mystifying reason, I suddenly couldn’t wait to see him.