Pop Princess (4 page)

“Hi, Doug!” I said when we got to the counter. I tried to act all casual but my voice had that annoying enthusiasm I seem incapable of squashing. I had a T-shirt on over my bikini top, but he was on instant guy cam—his eyes went right to my chest. Mine went right to his bicep-muscle serpent tattoo.

“Yeah—Wanda is it?” he mumbled.

A group of girls were giggling at a nearby table. I turned my head and saw Jen Burke, the new bane of my existence. My first week at my new school had been made miserable by her. For some random reason, Jen and her clique of popular girls had targeted me as their victim for the new school year. That I had been a B-Kid was apparently the bug up Jen's ass.

Every kid from New England has seen
Beantown Kidz
at least once, probably a lot more. I wasn't particularly great on the show—Kayla, Trina, and Lucky were the real standouts—but I was known as “the cute one” so I got lots of letters and one marriage proposal when I turn eighteen from a movie star who's originally from Boston whom I won't name because I thought the whole proposal was somewhat disgusting and inappropriate. But since I had grown up and moved away from the Boston area, people rarely recognized me anymore, for which I was grateful. Unfortunately for me, Jen was not one of those people. Furthermore, she seemed stuck in some B-Kidz backlash that looked to severely infect my junior year at Devonport High. What is it about pretty girls named Jen, anyway?

Worse, Jen and I shared a crush. According to Katie, who knew every coupling in the town of Devonport dating back to Molly Ringwald movie days, Jen had been hot for Doug during the last school year and had even hooked up with him at a couple of parties. These groping sessions had never turned into an actual boyfriend-girlfriend thing, but Jen was always making a play for him. That Jen had the major hots for Doug could be seen every day the past summer when she trounced from the beach to the pizza joint and suggestively slurped Diet Cokes and ogled Doug with her buds while Doug tried to work. She must not have realized Ms. Right—that would be me—had a history with Doug going back further than freshman year. Marco. POLO.

“Nope, not Wanda—Wonder, that's me,” I babbled to Doug. I had known him since fourth grade! Why did he always pretend not to remember my name? “So can I have two slices of pizza, extra cheese and pepperoni?”

He started to write down my order but Trina interrupted. “Wrong. She'll have a turkey grinder with lettuce, tomato, and very light mayo. . . .”

“A Coke,” I interrupted, but Trina plowed on.

“With two mineral waters and . . .”

“Fries?” Doug said, scribbling.

“We'll split a bag of baked potato chips. A Caesar salad for me, dressing on the side. Thanks, bub.”

Trina laid a twenty spot on the counter and walked over to a table without so much as a glance back to Doug.

“Hey,” I said, following her. “I don't like sandwiches. I wanted pizza.”

“We're doing some serious dancing this afternoon, Wonder. You gotta treat your body with more respect.”

I didn't have a chance to protest. Jen sauntered over to our table. “What, is this a B-Kidz reunion?” she asked. She had one of those nasty pretty faces: straight light blond hair and doll-baby blue eyes, but a nasty disposition, like if you took Barbie's teen buddy Skipper and turned her into Nellie Oleson from
Little House on the Prairie.
Jen was also like one of those size-zero girls that always had to wear cutoff shorts and tube tops to let everyone know how skinny and cute they were. Underneath the table, my hands nervously tugged at the T-shirt covering my flabby abs, the result of a summer spent eating pizza for lunch and banana boat sundaes on my breaks at the DQ.

Trina shot back her vintage I'm-not-taking-your-shit look. She stared Jen squarely in the eyes and said, “If it is, I don't remember the invitation that went out to you.”

Point score: our girl Treen.

Jen flipped her hair and turned away. Her posse followed her out of the restaurant. As she left, Jen turned to face me at the door. She pointed at me, but said nothing. I was warned.

I wondered if Trina's coaching duties would extend to her becoming my five-foot-tall black country-music-singer-wanna-be bodyguard at Devonport High.

On the drive back to
Tig's, I asked Trina, “Do you stay in touch with Kayla?”

She shook her head. “Nope.” I took the silence that followed for: Don't go there.

I wondered how she felt, seeing her fellow girl group member and friend go on to superstardom. From what I could see, Trina seemed genuinely happy and excited about her future. I wondered if the same was true of Kayla. You'd think so, since she had become so famous, but in the few days I'd spent with Tig, he'd spent half his time on the phone reassuring Kayla how great she was, how beautiful, how popular—as if she didn't know.

I did venture this question to Trina: “Do you think about her?” We both knew I meant Lucky, not Kayla.

“Every day,” Trina said.

“Sometimes it feels like half of me is gone without her, and like I don't know what I'm supposed to do with the half that's left.”

Trina said, “I miss her so much still it literally hurts. When songs she loved come on the radio, my stomach just turns over and I have to run to the bathroom. I bet Kayla feels the same.”

I told Trina about the last year back in Cambridge, when Dad was forgetting to show up at the university and could be found wandering along the Charles River, Mom had been placed on disability leave from her law firm job because she couldn't make it through the day without falling apart, and my little brother had been caught spray-painting graffiti at the 7-Eleven.

“Sounds like this move to the Cape was what your family needed, Wonder,” Trina said. “You'll get used to living here, trust me.” Trina had such confidence that when she said those words—“trust me”—I believed.

For such a sweet-looking girl, Trina was a taskmaster. We spent the afternoon singing songs with mathematical precision, then drawing the songs out for depth and feeling. Trina's vocal stamina never wavered, but after a while my voice hurt from all the exercises, so Trina said, “Let's chug some Gatorade and then dance a while.”

We went into Tig's living room and without speaking started clearing the furniture to the sides of the room, just like Trina, Lucky, and Kayla used to do when they rehearsed in the basement of our old house in Cambridge. Their determination had awed me back then. When I came home from school, I munched on junk food and watched
South Coast
and Oprah. Those girls came home and went straight to the basement, set up the speakers and microphones, and practiced singing and dancing for hours, with a precision that was fierce. People think that most pop stars come out of nowhere and are just folks who got lucky to be born good-looking and with a decent singing voice. The truth is, if you look at the careers of most pop stars, even the really young ones, you will see that years of hard work, talent shows, failure, blind faith, and practice practice practice went into creating them.

That Trina could get me to dance at all was totally, simply, because I didn't want her to see that I couldn't do it. I had taken years of ballet, tap, and modern as a kid—I loved it, and was pretty good—but had stopped cold after Lucky died. In the time since, my muscles had turned to mush and I had to lie down on my bed to button my favorite pair of jeans. Feeling my body move again with fire and spirit might have been a welcome release if my body hadn't gotten so out of shape. And if anyone else besides Trina had been training me, I probably would have given up after the first misstep and said, “Hey, let's go see what's playing at the Cineplex instead.” But because it was Trina, and I wanted to earn her respect and show her I could be talented and hardworking like Lucky, I stayed in the game.

I was sweating buckets and longing for a bubble bath and a really long nap when Trina said, “You know, you've got a great sense of rhythm. That's pretty hard to develop without having it to begin with. A couple weeks of rehearsing is all it would take to whip your slagging behind into shape.”

I thought that backhanded compliment meant I was excused from working out after the hour of dancing she had just put me through. Wrong. Because I was
so
good, Trina turned on the music video channel and we danced through another hour of pop music videos, repeating the routines during commercials and stopping only for sips of Gatorade. Trina probably could have gone on all night if the Kayla video hadn't come on, silencing her instructions and—finally—getting her to zap the TV off and flop onto the couch.

“What do you think of those red streaks in Kayla's hair?” she asked.

Since becoming a pop princess, Kayla's long and curly black hair had been straightened and streaked with red highlights, her thick eyebrows reshaped to appear longer, slimmer, and arched, and her body had turned lean and taut, scary skinny, especially in comparison with her ample bosom, which I can assure you were not the real deal. Half the boys' lockers at Devonport High had posters of Kayla hanging inside.

I thought Kayla had been prettier when she looked like a real person.

Tig walked through the door, cell phone to his ear. “Yes, Kayla,” he said, sighing. “The magazine is giving you a cover, not a feature. You know it's only covers or nothing now. Right. Out.” He snapped the phone shut.

Tig looked at Trina and me flopped on the couch.

“Well?” he said to Trina.

Trina said, “Girl's got what it takes, if she wants to take it.”

No discussion. Trina's opinion was law. He said to me, “Can you spend Saturday and Sunday here? We'll make the demo then. Trina, can you come back for the weekend to do some harmony with Wonder and choreograph some moves for a video demo?”

The whole deal felt like one big joke, but I was confident that ultimately nothing would ever come of it, so what did I have to lose? Plus, I liked hanging out with Trina again.

“I'm in,” I said.

“Let's do this,” Trina said.

Glamour? No. Excitement? No. Just business. And the business completed, this prospective pop princess hit the shower to get ready for her evening shift at the Dairy Queen.

That night, I was so
exhausted from the workouts with Trina it was a miracle I stayed awake on the job. I wanted to go straight to bed and pass out. Fortunately for me and the DQ, I was perked up by the arrival of a select group of customers: Doug and his band members.

When I saw them outside getting out of their trucks I made a beeline to the bathroom for a quick lip gloss and mascara touch-up. Customers waiting on me? What customers? I made it back to the register just as Doug came to the counter.

“You again,” he said. He was wearing denim jean shorts cut off at the knees and flip-flops. His upper bod was lean, a little hairy, absolutely perfect. The fire coming from that tattoo serpent seemed to be calling to me personally:
C'mon, Wonder, make a complete fool of yourself for us. Wouldn't be the first time, right?

“Me again,” I said with a sigh. I hoped drool wasn't falling from my mouth onto the counter. I heard Katie giggle from the kitchen. “What can I getcha?”

His buddies all looked stoned. The DQ experience must have been a munchie run for the band. “Coupla brownie sundaes and a strawberry soft-serve with jimmies on top and one fat-free chocolate froze yogurt,” Doug said.

“Who's the froze for?” I asked, and flashed my glossed grin.

“Me,” he stated, deadpan. “Gotta watch my girlish figure.” It was not my imagination—he actually winked at me.

“Coming right up!” I said. I think I might have yelled. He jumped back a little. His gorgeous sea eyes were bloodshot and murky under his thick brown lashes, the kind of lashes that would have been almost pretty but for being offset by the stubble covering his jaw and chin.

“He's totally flirting with you,” Katie whispered to me as we prepared the group's order.

“Sigh,” I said.

“Tell him how you know Kayla! He'll totally want to go out with you then.”

I shuddered at the thought. I would never name-drop like that.

I took Doug's order to his group's table outside and asked, “So, are you guys really playing at the Homecoming Dance?”

Doug looked embarrassed. “A gig's a gig, man. Yeah.”

“Cool!” I said.
Cool?
Lame answer, Wonder. I wished I had on a short skirt so he could get a good rear view as I trounced back to my register, but no, I had on supersexy polyester uniform pants. Maybe my butt muscles had improved since that day's workouts with Trina. As I walked away, the guys were talking low and mumbling, but I caught these words: “new girl,” “junior,” and “B-Kid.”

I returned to the register and, blissfully uninterrupted by more customers, watched them eat their ice cream for ten minutes. Gotta love the off-season. Just townies and the occasional Tigs to populate the glorious DQ.

My bliss was interrupted by the ninth circle of hell: Jen Burke—again—and her posse—again—this time arriving minutes before the store closed. I tried to pull my uniform visor over my eyes so she would not recognize me, but no such luck.

“Look, everybody, it's Devonport's own B-Kid, slumming it for minimum wage at the Dairy Queen,” Jen announced.

I wish I could say I had a sudden dose of Trina empowerment, but I didn't. Truthfully, I was scared. Jen was someone who had the power to make my life miserable at my new school. So I pretended I didn't hear her and I focused on that Employee of the Month award I was coveting. Cheerfully, I said, “Welcome to Dairy Queen. May I take your order?” May I shove hot fudge sauce up your big fat nose, bitch?

Doug distracted her from whatever form of torture she was devising to spring on me. He poked his head inside the store and called to her, “Hey Jen, we got shit here.” He gestured to Jen and her gang to join him and his crew. Was he trying to save me, or score with Jen?