Songs About a Girl Read online

  “Hi, I’m Olly.”

  Olly and I had talked just one time (at least, one time that I could remember), by the lockers, after assembly. I was packing my camera bag away, my cheeks still burning, my heart racing with adrenaline.

  “Hi.” He was holding tight to the straps of his backpack. “That was a really cool presentation.”

  The photography presentation hadn’t been my idea. At the time, Mr. Bennett was encouraging students to “Leap into Our Future Careers,” and if anyone showed even the slightest interest in something, they were asked to stand up in front of the whole school and talk about it.

  I felt sick the entire time I was onstage.

  “Um … thanks.”

  Olly sniffed and shoved his hands into his pockets. He was slight back then, with mousy hair and skinny legs and shirtsleeves that hung down below his wrists.

  “Your photos are, like … awesome. Especially the live bands.”

  I wrinkled my nose at him. No one had seemed that interested in my presentation when I was giving it. “Really?”

  “Yeah … you should do it professionally, or something. You’re really good.” He scratched the back of his neck and gave a small smile. “I’m actually thinking of going into music myself.”

  I shut my locker door and looked closer at him. “Oh? Like what?”

  “I wanna be a singer. You know, in a band.”

  Olly twisted around and hissed “Shut up” at a group of passing friends who were laughing at him. They shouted something incoherent and shuffled away down the corridor.

  “Not really sure if I’ll make it, though,” he said, turning back to me.

  Half as a joke, I replied: “Maybe you should go on Make or Break.”

  On Monday mornings, Make or Break was all anyone talked about at school. It was a Saturday-night talent show run by record-label boss Barry King, where budding pop stars would get up in front of a panel of judges, sing their hearts out, and, fairly often, make idiots of themselves. The few that didn’t, though, got the chance to launch careers with the most powerful man in the music industry. I rarely watched it, unless I was with Melissa, but it was impossible to avoid online. Since it started, Make or Break had spawned some of the biggest pop groups in the country.

  Six months later, it would create Fire&Lights.

  “Yeah, maybe,” said Olly, with a shrug. “I bet Barry King would tear me apart, though.”

  The bell rang above our heads, and Olly ran a hand through his short, neat hair.

  “See you around, then?” he said, stepping away from the lockers.

  “Maybe,” I said, and within seconds he had slipped back into the stream, the sound of the bell mingling with the bustle and chatter of students.

  Staring at my feet as I paced the tiled floor, I tried to picture myself on Saturday night, backstage with Olly and the rest of the band. An actual music photographer, in a professional venue, surrounded by pop stars.

  My stomach flipped at the thought.

  Nothing about it seemed real.

  * * *

  “You look starving, sweetheart. I’ll rustle you up a sandwich.”

  Melissa’s mum ran her hands under the tap, dried them on a dishcloth, and flipped open the bread bin. I was perched on the edge of a kitchen chair, school bag between my legs, watching her move around the kitchen.

  Melissa’s cat, Megabyte, nuzzled my ankles with her little pink nose.

  “Thanks, Rosie.”

  Rosie Morris was tall and soft-spoken and had curly red hair that hung down in ringlets on her shoulders. She was super-intelligent, like her daughter, and worked as a freelance writer for political magazines. I sometimes hung out next door after school when my dad was working late and, when Melissa and her dad were home too, I could pretend, for a while, that I had a normal family.

  “I think Melissa might actually be running that Computer Club now,” said Rosie, slapping two thick slices of bread onto a cutting board. “Honestly, obsessed with technology, that girl. I don’t know what she does up there all night, tapping away on her laptop.”

  I smiled and took a sip of tea. Rosie knew exactly how to make it: nice and milky, with half a sugar.

  “I think she’s slowly taking over the world,” I said, blowing on my drink. “She knows more about coding than most of the teachers.”

  Though she would never admit it, Melissa really just wanted to be like her big brother, Tom, who was studying computer science at Cambridge. That many smarts in one family might be annoying, if they weren’t also the nicest people in England.

  “And how about you, love?” said Rosie, spreading a thick wave of butter across the bread. “Everything going OK at school?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  She crossed to the fridge and lifted out a tower of Tupperware boxes.

  “You sure?” she said, throwing me a sideways look. “Year Eleven can be a rough ride, you know.”

  “That’s what my dad says,” I replied, scratching Megabyte on the head. She purred contentedly. “But, honestly, I’m fine.”

  Rosie was back at the counter, layering slices of meat and cheese into my sandwich. I watched her working at the window, the curve of her back, the slow, steady movement of her hands. The tucking of a ringlet behind her ear.

  “Your dad’s just worried about you, Charlie. That’s all.”

  She dropped the second slice of bread on top, pressed it with her palm, and sliced the sandwich in two.

  “He shouldn’t be,” I replied.

  “He’s your father, of course he worries.” Rosie rescued a cherry tomato that was rolling away toward the sink. “That’s his job.”

  She popped the tomato into her mouth, slid my sandwich onto a plate, and crossed over to the table.

  “Brian’s the same, you know,” she said, sitting down next to me. “Always fretting about Melissa. Dads and their little girls.”

  We used to be that way, too, but I wasn’t a little girl anymore.

  I picked at my food in silence.

  “It’s tough for you, too,” continued Rosie. “I know that. You’re growing up, all of you. Sixteen soon, goodness me.” Megabyte hopped onto the table, and Rosie shooed her away. “But you have to understand, love, that you’re everything he’s got. It’s not been easy for Ralph, since…”

  She stopped herself. I took a bite of my sandwich, and we listened to the dripping of the tap for a while.

  “You know, you’re the spitting image of your mum these days.”

  I looked up from my food.

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes.” She lifted her big mug of tea with both hands. “I saw the photos, years back. Like peas in a pod, you two.”

  I thought about the photos I had of my mother. Four dog-eared pictures that I kept tucked inside her old notebook, dates scrawled on the back in ballpoint pen.

  Rosie smiled at me, and I sipped my tea.

  It was easy being there, in Melissa’s kitchen. It always was. The cat curling itself between my legs, steam rising lazily from our mugs. The washing machine humming in a nearby room.

  * * *

  Later that evening, I was sitting on my bed at home, music playing in the corner, photographs scattered in a circle around me.

  In the first one, Mum sat on a tattered old sofa with me, just a baby, in her arms. A picture book lay open on her knee.

  In another, she was standing on a low wall on a windswept beach, balancing on one leg. A wintry sun blazed in the background. The third was Mum and Dad sitting together in a pub making goofy faces at one another, and she was wearing her hat—my hat—the blue knitted beanie that I wore every day, at least in the winter. It was old and starting to fall apart now, threads dangling from the weave, but that didn’t matter. It kept me warm, even with the holes.

  The fourth was my favorite, because it had all three of us in it. We were in a park somewhere on a sunny day, and I was sitting on a picnic blanket while Mum and Dad fussed around me. I had my back to the camera, so you coul
d see the distinctive birthmark on the back of my neck: white, about the size of an avocado stone, and shaped a bit like a flame. The doctors had never seen one like it, according to my dad. It made me special, Dad said, because that was the sort of thing adults said to children.

  I wasn’t sure who had taken the photo, perhaps a passerby, but it was the closest we had to a family portrait. My parents were young and scruffy, rosy-cheeked from the sun, their newborn baby wriggling in between them. Dad had a bit more hair back then, Mum was busy pouring the tea, and we looked like a real family.

  We looked happy.

  I had no memory of that time, so I only knew what my father had told me. It was before we moved to Reading, he said, when I was just a toddler, and he was studying in London. It was an exciting time, when Mum and Dad were newly married and they had their whole lives ahead of them.

  Then, just before Christmas 2000, my mother was killed in a car crash.

  Dad hadn’t told me much about the accident. He didn’t like to talk about it. “It wasn’t her fault,” he would say, when I was old enough to ask the question. “It was another driver, and he was going way too fast.”

  “Who was he?” I used to ask, because that seemed important to me at the time.

  “He was just a stranger, Charlie. He made a mistake.”

  When I was younger, Dad used to talk about Mum all the time. He’d tell me how smart she was, how passionate, and how she would have told me every day to find something that I loved and chase after it. She’d be proud of me, he’d say; she’d tell me stories and sing me songs, and take me to the movies on rainy days.

  I stared at my mother in the picture, then at myself in the mirror. I thought about what Rosie had said that afternoon, and realized she was right. In the last few months, something had changed.

  I was beginning to look just like her.

  I had her elfin build and her messy, milk-chocolate hair. I had her pale skin, too, with a handful of freckles on each cheek. And I had these big, chestnut-brown eyes that I’d always thought made me look childish, but on her they were bright, mesmerizing.

  Reaching across the bed, I lifted Mum’s notebook off the pillow and set it on my lap. Aside from the hat and the photographs, this notebook was my one memento of her life. It was a private journal, a thick, crinkled scrapbook filled with scribbled phrases and bits of poetry. I found it one day in the garage when I was about seven and, after some persuasion, Dad had let me keep it … though there’d been a pained look in his eyes at the time, which I’d never quite understood.

  I lifted the cover, and the book fell open on one of my favorite pages.

  Take me home

  I’ve been dreaming of a girl I know

  The sweetest thing, you know she makes me wanna sing

  I still remember everything

  On the opposite page, a second verse.

  I call her name

  I keep her picture in a silver frame

  So she will know, just as soon as I come home

  That she will never be alone

  It was clear to me from the beginning: I was the girl in Mum’s poem. I was the little girl she’d been dreaming of; I made her want to sing. She and Dad kept my picture in a silver frame. And the notebook, I had decided, was her gift to me, her legacy, and as long as I kept it safe, she’d never really be gone. For months, I pored over every page, every line, looking for clues and hidden meanings, trying to make connections with my own life.

  One couplet appeared several times throughout the book.

  She lives her life in pictures

  She keeps secrets in her heart

  Those lines were the reason I took up photography in the first place, those six words: she lives her life in pictures. I was so certain they were about me, or at least the person I might become. The person Mum wanted me to be. And this idea soothed me when I couldn’t sleep at night, when my imagination just wanted to play car crashes and headlights and broken glass on the motorway.

  As I read her words again, flipping through the pages, I remembered myself as a seven-year-old, hiding beneath the covers with a flashlight. Night after night, I would sit up in bed, whispering the words to myself, imagining that if I kept going long enough, one day she would come home.

  “… No, Jen, I’m talking about formatting here … Eh? Well, no, that’s not really what I meant…”

  Dad’s voice carried upstairs from the hallway, and I could hear him throwing his keys on the front table and moving to the kitchen. I closed the notebook and slipped it under my bed.

  “… Yes, I know that,” Dad was saying into his cell phone as I reached the bottom of the stairs, clutching one of Mum’s photos. I drifted into the kitchen. “And that’s fine for now, but if I come in tomorrow and find the report’s not right, then—Jen…? Jen? Damn signal.”

  Dad muttered something under his breath and walked to the dresser, where he started sifting through the mail.

  “Hi,” I said, from the doorway.

  “Oh … hey there, Charlie,” he said, putting the mail aside. “I didn’t see you there. What are you up to?”

  I shrugged. “Just … looking through some old stuff.”

  He nodded, clearly distracted, pulled a bottle of wine from the cupboard, and jabbed a corkscrew into it. I watched him twist it once, twice, a third time, and I glanced down at the photograph in my hand.

  In the last couple of years, Dad had stopped talking about my mother. Not suddenly or all at once, but in fading fragments, like a radio losing power. The days fell away, and I awoke one morning to find she had slipped quietly from the room, in the middle of the night, like a forgotten houseguest. Now just mentioning her name felt awkward.

  “What now…?” mumbled Dad at the beeping of his phone on the kitchen counter. He squinted at the screen.

  “Hey, Dad.” I was still loitering in the doorway. “Melissa and I are going to hang out in town on Saturday evening, if that’s cool with you.”

  I’d decided I needed an alibi for the Fire&Lights concert. Something told me that running around with a boy band wouldn’t fit in with my dad’s definition of Concentrating On Schoolwork, so I’d forged his signature on the confidentiality contract and agreed on a cover story with Melissa. I didn’t exactly feel great about it, but it was only for one night.

  “Oh.” He slipped one hand into his pocket, jingled his change. “I thought we were going for a birthday dinner.”

  I touched my mouth. I had completely forgotten. “Sorry, Dad … it slipped my mind.”

  For a passing moment, our eyes locked across the room.

  Then he waved a hand at me and, with the other, poured himself a large glass of wine.

  “No, come on, that’s fine. You don’t need your dad following you around on your birthday.”

  He turned away, undoing the top button of his shirt.

  “Don’t be back late, though,” he said with his back to me. “You’ve got a curfew, remember.”

  Dad took a sip of wine and loosened his tie. As I watched him pull it over his head and hang it on the back of a chair, I thought of his younger self in the photograph, kneeling on a picnic blanket, sleeves rolled up, squeezing my baby toes as I sat in the sun.

  Before he could turn around again, I slid the photo into my back pocket and disappeared from the room.

  5

  “Prepare yourself, oh bestest friend, for the awesomest night of your life.”

  Melissa and I were standing by the climbing bars in the gym, watching sweaty boys fling themselves around the dance floor to something loud and thrashy. I shouted back at her over the noise.

  “I think I’m prepared, Mel. When will it start being awesome?”

  “What?”

  I yelled into her ear. “WHEN WILL IT START BEING AWESOME?”

  People were scattered in clumps around the room, mostly boy or girl clumps, while the music thrummed and boomed and bounced off the high concrete walls. Teachers sipped coffee from brown plastic cups, watching th
e mosh pit with expressions that were one part suspicion, two parts boredom.

  Above our heads, sad paper streamers hung from exposed pipes, quivering to the beat.

  “THE WORLD IS OUR OYSTER!” bellowed Melissa, swigging at her punch, leaving her top lip moist and orange. Across the hall, the thrashy song ended and a slushy R&B ballad started up.

  “You’ve just turned sixteen,” she continued. “Tomorrow you get to hang out with The Greatest Band In The History Of The World, and as for me … I’m about five minutes away from losing my kissing virginity to a gorgeous-eared boy with superior coding skills.”

  Sixteen. I stared into my drink.

  “Do you think I’m supposed to feel any different?” I asked.

  Melissa closed one eye. “Probably. Do you?”

  I glanced around the sports hall. Drawn by the siren call of The Slow Dance, couples were shuffling awkwardly onto the dance floor, and the lights were beginning to dim.

  “Not sure. Though according to BuzzFeed I can now legally pilot a glider, so that’s good.”

  “There you go!” said Melissa, raising her drink. “You’ve always wanted to do that. You’re a woman now, Charlie, and no mistake. You’re basically Beyoncé.”

  I raised my cup to hers, and we pressed them together, releasing a plastic crunch. I took a sip of the tangy, sugary drink and winced as it coated my teeth.

  “Oh my gosh,” blurted Melissa, pointing ahead. “There’s Khaleed!”

  Khaleed was standing a few feet away from us in a pool of spinning white light. His shirt was tucked in, and he looked petrified.

  “This is my moment,” said Melissa, discarding her drink next to a giant bowl of potato chips. “Wish me luck.”

  “Go easy on him, Mel,” I said, watching the light from a glitter ball rebound off Khaleed’s hair-gelled head. “He’s smaller than you are.”

  She didn’t hear me, though, because she was already skipping over to Khaleed. She looped her arms around his back and, to the thud-plick, thud-thud-plick of the beat, the two of them began to rotate.