Chapter 11
“Did you have a nice time at Steph’s dear?” Her mother asked as they all sat down for tea.
“Yeah great,” she replied.
“And how was your test?”
“Fine,” she replied, “ a bit harder than I expected but I think I’ll be OK.”
The lies rolled off her tongue easily, she was more than used to it now, she would frequently lie in order to go and see the boys when she should actually be doing something else.
“And what are you up to at the weekend?” her Mum asked.
“Not a lot,” she replied.
“Not going to see your gay boyband then?” her sister asked, glancing up from her tea to look at her, a slightly amused expression on her face.
“No,” Mel glared back, “they aren’t around.”
Mel’s sister Lucy was 17, two years younger than her, yet she enjoyed taking the moral high ground. She was completely different from Mel in every way. Lucy was very clever and had scored high marks in all of her GCSEs, but as well as being studious she was also very pretty and had lots of friends, friends who all enjoyed taking the mickey out of Mel at any available opportunity. All of them looked down on Mel, believing that they were better because they were “normal” and liked “normal music”, personally Mel didn’t like to even call their noise music, they were mostly into metal where the lyrics were shouted and made no sense. Lucy herself treated Mel pretty much as a freak, she didn’t understand why she had to follow a band and made sure that she told her at every available opportunity.
Mel’s parents weren’t much better. Her Dad hated all pop music full stop, and thought that a1 were a complete waste of space and her Mum was always telling her that she needed to grow up.
Sometimes Mel thought that her family just wouldn’t be happy unless they were changing her into someone completely different to who she wanted to be.
“Oh dear they aren’t around?” Lucy asked in mock horror, “what on earth will you do?”
“I’ll find something,” Mel snapped back.
“May be you could stop being a freak and do something normal?” Lucy suggested, raising her eyebrows at her.
“Oooh, you could go clubbing dear,” her Mum encouraged.
If there was one thing Mel hated it was clubbing… being crammed into a small room with a huge group of “normal” people that she didn’t know, they wouldn’t know fun if it came up and slapped them in the face.
She sighed, “Mum I don’t understand why you want me to go clubbing so much!”
“Because its what you are supposed to do at your age,” her Mum replied.
“And what’s the problem with the way I am?” Mel retorted.
“Well, you are getting too old for boybands now, you need to grow up.”
“Right, so rather than spending time with bands you’d rather I go out get some tattooed biker boyfriend and get into drink and drugs then yeah?” she asked sarcastically.
“There’s no need to snap at me, I’m just worried,” her Mum replied.
“Why?”
“Because you don’t have a healthy relationship with normal people.”
“Popstars are normal people, I mean they aren’t made of cardboard or anything are they?”
Throwing her fork down on the table she left the room quickly running upstairs to the confides of her room.
She loved her room, it was her only escape, here she could just shut the door and also shut out the world. She would sit in there for hours listening to music, lost in her own thoughts.
Reaching over she pulled out her mixed a1 CD and threw it into her CD player and pressed Play. As soon as the intro started she immediately began to relax, the music took over her, easing all of the stress out of her mind.
Tomorrow she’s have to go to college, she hated college, no one understood her there either. As Steph and Karen lived across the other side of the city they went to completely different schools, things would have been so much better if they went to the same place. As it was, she had no friends and no one to talk to. May be it had been her own fault, on her first day she had made minimal effort to talk to anyone, she knew that no one would be into a1, and she found it hard to talk to people who didn’t like a1. Sometimes she worried herself that she was incapable of talking about anything other than a1, she was boring, she was boring to anyone that wasn’t an a1 fan. May be she didn’t even have a personality, that’s all she was, an a1 fan, nothing more.
The thought of going into college filled her with dread, another 5 hours of sitting by herself, lost in thoughts and not concentrating, watching the clock, waiting for the moment when she could leave and return home.
If only there were more people around her that understood her. But unfortunately most people were “normal” … Mel would have hated to be “normal”, “normal” was boring, what on earth was the point in getting up in the morning if you were “normal”, she was a strong believer that her and her friends were destined for something else, someone had chosen them to be different and every day she thanked her stars that her and her friends had all been chosen.
If it wasn’t for a1 her life really wouldn’t be worth living, they were the thing holding her together and keeping her alive. Sometimes she thought that she cared about them more than she cared about her own family, it was an awful thing to think, but seemed scaringly true.
Reaching over she turned her CD player up, this was the verse that Christian sang and she always liked to hear every last note of his voice.
The words filled the room and as he continued to sing Mel felt tears pour slowly down her face. The song was so beautiful and every time he sang it she got into this state. It was bizarre, she would never dream of crying to his face or in front of the followers, they frequently laughed at craves who did it, yet every time she heard him sing on CD she would start crying.
She pulled a tissue from the box by her bed and wiped away the tears that were still rolling down her face.
She knew exactly what the problem was, she was in love, madly and deeply in love with Christian from a1.