Pop Princess (10 page)

“Diva,” Tig said.

“Asshole,” Kayla responded.

Kayla and Tig both laughed like they were having fun, but I wasn't sure they were joking.

I jumped up to give Kayla a hug. I hadn't seen her in more than two years. The brightness of her green eyes dimmed for a moment as she looked me up and down, and I knew that, just as Mom always did, she was looking through me for a piece of Lucky.

“So Tig here pulled you into this racket, eh?” she said. She ran her fingers through a strand of my blond-streaked hair and her eyes passed over the low-cut tight shirt given me by the stylist Tig had hired. “You're going to open for me this summer, right?”

I nodded, eager to please. It was so good to see Lucky's best friend again—and so strange to see her live and in the flesh of her new incarnation as reigning queen of the pop charts. She was a good fifteen pounds thinner than the last time I'd seen her, wearing low-rider jeans dipped down to there, with a halter top that left her tight, tiny stomach bare. Her raven hair was let loose in its natural curls, with red and pink streaks framing her gorgeous face.

Tig said to Kayla, “Aren't you supposed to be in rehearsal today?”

Kayla said, “Well, the music director didn't take kindly to me telling him he didn't know shit about my music. He threw a hissy fit and sent everyone home for the day. I expect you'll be getting a call from him any minute now.”

You could almost see the tight little braids on Tig's head turning gray.

Kayla patted me on the back. “Don't worry, I got your back, sister. I'll be watching out for you.” Her tone was nice, but I wondered if something about her message was intended for Tig, not me. “C'mon, I got the driver downstairs, let's go play.” She tugged at my hand.

Tig snapped, “We're working, Kayla. You two can have a play date later.”

The thought of doing something
fun
—as I knew it would be with Kayla—overwhelmed my need to say what I knew Tig wanted to hear, that I wanted to stay and work. And work and work and work, as I had been doing for three straight months.

I whimpered like a puppy and begged Tig,
“Please please please.”

Tig shook his head, but he let me go. “Oh, just play the cute card on me, sure. Yeah, I can see I'm not going to win this one. Wonder, go ahead and play, but the driver will be around at seven
A.M.
sharp tomorrow morning to take you to the recording studio. We gotta bang the rest of this album out quick. The record company is getting anxious, and they want that record out
now
if you're going to be touring with Kayla this summer.”

I threw my arms up in the air and sang out, “Yeah! Fun day!”

Tig pointed at Kayla. “Bad influence,” he told her as his phone line lit up from an incoming call. He slumped when his assistant buzzed in to announce Kayla's music director holding on line one.

“You love it,” she answered, then she grabbed my hand to lead me to the door.

As we walked out Tig called out after us, “Kayla, her voice better be in prime shape tomorrow morning. You know what I mean.”

“What does he mean?” I muttered to Kayla.

She slammed his office door behind her with the back of her foot. “Oh, he's afraid I'm going to corrupt you.”

I didn't have a chance to beg to be corrupted before a giant ZZ Top-meets-sumo wrestler-looking dude pounced to Kayla's side. He was about six feet five million inches tall, with long thinning hair pulled back into a ponytail that fell halfway down his gorillasized back. He must have weighed three hundred pounds easy, and he wore bulky blue jeans, a leather jacket, and motorcycle boots. His ear had a cord attached to it that ran down inside his jacket. With hands that looked about as large and wide as soup bowls, he handed Kayla a baseball cap and a pair of large black sunglasses.

Kayla bunched her hair up under the cap as we rode the elevator down. “Wonder, meet Karl Murphy. Karl, meet my new protégée, Wonder Blake.”

Karl the almost-sumo wrestler grunted something indistinguishable and reached to shake my hand. His handshake was so tight and strong I thought I would need an ice pack to relieve the pain when he let go.

Kayla said, “Karl is THE man. Stalkers beware!”

It was hard to tell under all that beard and mustache if Karl THE man let out a smile at Kayla's compliment.

Karl grunted into the mouthpiece of the cord hanging from his ear, “We're on our way down now. Outside thirty seconds, car in front.”

“Girl,” I said to Kayla, “you sure enough ain't no B-Kid no more.”

Kayla laughed as the elevator opened at the ground floor. I started to step outside but Karl THE man motioned me back. He stepped out, scoped the area, and then gave us the okay.

We darted outside the building toward a giant SUV with darkened windows. Kayla took my hand to lead me to the car but was stopped by a pack of shrieking preteen girls who'd somehow recognized her under the hat and sunglasses.

“Kayla!” they shrieked. There was near-hysteria among the pack of girls as they screamed and jumped up and down.

Karl stood in front of Kayla. “Girls, if we can keep quiet, I think Kayla can do an autograph or two, all right? Line up here.” His accommodating offer was grunted like a military command, and the girls snapped to respectful attention. Karl scanned the girls quickly. I do believe he was looking for any potential dangerous implements hidden in the pockets of their Brownie uniforms.

Once Karl had completed his inspection, he nodded to Kayla, who turned on like a lightbulb. “Who first?” she asked, all smiles. Four girls extended pieces of paper that appeared out of nowhere. Kayla took a purple pen from Karl's enormous hairy hand and signed away, asking each girl, “Who's this for?” then inscribing the girl's name along with her signature “Love ya baby, Kayla.” The girls were shivering with excitement and
ohmygawds
as Karl marched them away. One girl turned back and looked up at me. “Are you famous too? Should I get your autograph?” I shook my head a vehement NO, but Kayla handed me her purple pen and said to the girl, “Her name is Wonder Blake. Her first single drops any day now. She's your next false god.” Even under all that beard and mustache, I saw Karl let out a chuckle.

As I leaned down to scribble my name below Kayla's on the girl's paper, I whispered into the girl's ear, “Not really.”

We hopped into the mammoth-size
SUV. I recognized Kayla's grandmother sitting in the first row of seats. She was asleep, her head resting against the car window. Seeing her kind, wrinkled face brought back instant memories of hanging out in the kitchen at Kayla's house with Lucky and Trina during Kayla's grandmother's cooking lessons on how to make potato latkes with applesauce, pretending to listen but really just waiting at the table for her to dish out the delicious results. A young guy reclined across the backseat behind Kayla's gram, with an expression so hostile he had to be destined to become an unpleasant memory. The guy had a mess of brown hair with random, green-dyed spots throughout it, and hazel eyes that glared at me like I'd committed some form of atrocity by daring to step into the vehicle.

Kayla sat next to her grandmother, and with Karl in the front seat next to the driver, I approached the back row next to scowl dude. He did not relinquish the 75 percent of the seat he was occupying to make room for me.

Kayla leaned over and mock-smacked the guy on the hand-painted Converse All Stars that were resting on the back of her seat. “Make room for my girl, Liam!”

Liam,
whoever he was, moved his baggy pant legs to sit upright and placed his feet on the floor. He wiggled around. When he'd found a comfortable position, he pulled a Tootsie Pop from his mouth and slowly turned his head around to me. He literally inspected me, inching his way from bottom to top, starting with my cotton candy—colored toes in their rhinestone-specked sandals, working his way up to my shredded cutoff denim miniskirt, stopping on the midriff sticking out between my skirt and tight shirt, then a long—
long
—pause on my chest, and finally up, up, up until his hazel eyes were meeting mine. I had never felt so violated by a guy's eyes before—who
was
this person? His eyes held mine in a dead-stare showdown until I couldn't help but look toward Kayla, like,
Save me!

“Oh God,” Liam finally said, “don't tell me you're the new pop princess. Tig must breed you all like rabbits.”

Kayla leaned back and mock-slapped him again. She turned to me. “Wonder, meet Liam. He's Karl's son and an unfortunate hanger-on during college boy here's school vacations. See, it's his spring break, when most normal red-blooded freshman males would be in Cancún ogling drunk sorority girls in wet T-shirt contests. Instead Liam came here to New York with some lame excuse about needing to do research at the New York Public Library for an anthropology term paper, but in fact just wanting to torture myself and Karl.” Liam's scowl morphed into an ironic smile, as if he enjoyed Kayla's ribbing him. Then she added, “Wonder, you'll have to excuse Liam's bad manners. He's never gotten over the bitterness caused by his high school garage bands each sucking more than the one before it, reducing Liam to an embarrassing smarty-pants Ivy League existence at Dannon Yogurt University—”

“It's Dartmouth,” Liam interrupted. He offered a dramatic sigh. “Not a place a high school dropout pop princess like you will ever see except from the window of a tour bus, isn't that right, Kayla?”

Kayla snickered, then Karl yelled from the front passenger seat like some dad on an agonizing road trip with bickering kids, “Enough back there, you two!”

This woke Kayla's grandma, whose head popped up and eyes sprang open. “Where are we?” she asked, confused. Then she saw Kayla sitting next to her and she smiled. She caressed Kayla's cheek. “There's my baby.” Kayla moved over and snuggled next to her gram.

Kayla and her grandmother had always been close, much closer than Kayla was to her parents. Kayla's parents were both prominent academics in Boston: Her mom was a professor of women's studies and her dad a theology professor. Both of them were always being quoted and published in major newspapers and academic journals. You'd think parents would be ultraproud of a daughter with Kayla's talent and success, but hers weren't; in fact, they'd always seemed embarrassed by her career, mortified that Kayla had chosen the B-Kid/pop star route and not turned into the classical music prodigy they'd expected when their brilliant minds had procreated. They sure hadn't protested when Kayla dropped their surnames for her professional performing career. It wasn't that Kayla went by one name only just to be like Madonna, but Kayla's mom was Korean and her dad was Jewish, and Kayla Kim-Chaimovitz was a whole lot of name for a prospective pop princess.

Kayla's gram—Mrs. C, as she had always been called by Kayla's friends—turned around to face me. “Is that . . .”

“Wonder Blake,” Kayla said. “Yup. All grown up. Look at that.”

Mrs. C's face was bright and sad at the same time—always the reaction I got from people who had known my family since Cambridge. “Look at her indeed,” Mrs. C said. “Another beauty, just like Lucky, bless her soul.”

Liam perked up from his slouch.
“You're
Lucky's sister?”

I looked back at him. It was too bad about his sorry disposition; without it, his stubble cheeks, hazel eyes, and scruffy mess of green-spotted brown hair could have passed for semiattractive. But oh my, with Liam's scowl of a stare, he looked like Angel from
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
—Angel from seasons one and two, when he was really skinny and moody, before he went off to his own show and got all into nasty Cordelia, before he started wearing leather pants and lost his street cred.

Kayla pointed her finger at Liam. “That's my best friend's kid sister. You're not nice to her, you have to answer to me.”

He looked at me. “Oh, I'm so scared.”

Karl: “
What
did I just say?”

Every tabloid and teen magazine that had Kayla linked with seemingly every hot young actor or teen prince of any European or South Asian royal dynasty had it wrong—Kayla and Liam clearly were a couple, even if Kayla and Liam hadn't figured that out yet.

I looked out the window as the car, caught in traffic, inched past the Plaza Hotel. A manure scent wafted over to us from the row of horse and buggies across the street. I had been in Manhattan for three months now, but I hadn't seen much of the city beyond studio spaces, offices, and salons. I tuned out Kayla and Liam's banter for a moment, fantasizing that I was the girl in the carriage, that some Will Nieves (but not gay) or Doug Chase (but not a jerk) fun great guy was treating me to a ride around Central Park. We'd laugh and hold hands and time would just stop for the two of us. I didn't care that the whole idea was about the lamest Disney romance scene a bored, boyfriendless, sixteen-year-old almost-pop princess could have ever imagined. I sneezed from the smell of the horse manure. Forget that fantasy—I could do better. Okay, how 'bout me and unseen dream date guy go on the Staten Island Ferry like in the “Papa Don't Preach” Madonna video, only we don't dance around and worry about me being pregnant. Then maybe at the other end of the ferry there's a limo waiting to take us to some incredible Italian restaurant, and yeah, my guy is this unbelievably hot firefighter from Staten Island, ooh, that'll work, and . . . Yeah right, and maybe Tig would be text-messaging me every minute:
Where are you? Did you learn the melody yet? Did you lose those last five pounds yet?

God, how depressing: Even my fantasy guys had reality checks. Shouldn't my
imagination,
at least, be off limits? “Where are we going, anyway?” I asked Kayla.