Unrequited Read online

  It’s about this time that she notices something horribly disconcerting. She glances up from her iPod, which she’s been shuffling through during this whole second-stage waste of time. And . . . Hmm. If she isn’t very much mistaken, Angus Marsden appears to be staring at her.

  When he sees that she’s noticed, he smiles.

  Then he winks.

  Yes, he really does.

  Now, when Angus Marsden smiles and winks at any of the other 95,000 people in the arena, every single one of them — except maybe the burly security guards (but maybe even them) screams, cries, faints, winks back or throws something of theirs at him, as if it’s a pre-programmed biological response.

  No such biological response has been pre-programmed into Kat. Angus can’t work his artificial charms on her. No way. She goes back to shuffling her iPod until Annie starts pulling at her arm and pointing at the stage and saying, ‘He’s looking at us!’

  Kat tells Annie that he looks at everyone. It’s what he does! It’s all part of the act!

  Annie insists that he KEEPS looking over at them.

  ‘Hey, Angus! Angus! Where are you, man?’ Zach asks loudly into the microphone and Kat looks up in time to see that ‘where he is’ is exactly where Annie said he was. He’s looking at Kat. AGAIN. She laughs nervously, and finds herself mouthing ‘What?’ At ANGUS MARSDEN! Who smiles at her again, then re-focuses and says, ‘We love you, Sydney!’ And the crowd erupts.

  For a nanosecond, Kat’s swept up in it, then she remembers where she is. And who she is. And who HE is! It’s all so contrived. She rolls her eyes tries to check Instagram but of course there’s never any credit in an emergency, is there!

  The boys get back on the floating platform and return to the main stage. It’s kind of a relief for Kat because that was a weirdly close call. Even weirder timing, given McDreamy the Train Knight couldn’t be more uninterested in giving out his number. And then Angus — the very last guy on the planet that she would ever even contemplate getting to know (even if it was remotely possible) seems to have actually noticed her. Who would even believe it?

  ‘He saw you!!!’ Jess screeches.

  ‘He’s in love with you, Kat!’ Annie yells.

  ‘You’re both CRAZY!’ Kat screams, although try as she might to avoid it, she can’t resist a quick glance at the stage. She has to admit, even though it makes zero sense, that she feels the tiniest brush of disappointment that Angus is back in his game. Thoroughly professional. Working the audience like a puppeteer controlling the strings.

  Of course he hasn’t noticed her! Gosh, tickets on herself much? She must be losing it!

  Chapter 3

  Backstage after an Unrequited concert = manic. TOTALLY. If security was intense outside the venue it’s even worse behind the scenes and, coupled with that, Kat’s becoming nervous. Irrationally! But yes, there is something about Angus Marsden’s performance that’s unsettling her. And it isn’t his singing.

  By the time they eventually push through the throng of hysterical backstage-pass holders to a meeting room bursting with catering and more merchandise and extra security guards, Kat isn’t sure who’s more stricken with butterflies. Annie and Jess — or herself.

  They’re not kept waiting long. Zach and Reuben bound into the room, larger than life and on a post-concert high. Or pretending to be on one, Kat thinks. She can’t help being cynical. How can they possibly maintain this much energy night after night? In any case, the kids are LOSING IT. Seriously, Jess is practically hyperventilating.

  Not long after that, Xavier and Alex appear in the doorway and start hugging fans and scrawling their names on T-shirts and programs. Kat politely declines both hug and scrawl, but they spin her around and write on her Legally Blonde shirt anyway. She hopes it’s the type of ink that washes off, otherwise she’ll need a new one.

  ‘Guys, we’re sorry. Angus can’t be here,’ Reuben says without further explanation, relying on his blond-haired, blue-eyed gorgeousness to smooth the news over.

  Not here? Why?

  There’s a collective groan from the gathered audience, and a sigh of relief from Kat. She thinks about making a complaint, given the money her mum has spent on these passes and the crushed looks on her sisters’ faces. But then, if she does that, it would look like she’s upset about Angus’s absence. Does she really want to make a scene over Angus Marsden? Hardly!

  Git! Why isn’t he here? This is part of being famous — showing up when you can’t be bothered. The whole thing only serves to make Kat even less likely to ever become a fan. She’s embarrassed for having entertained the thought, even for a sliver of a second, that he actually appeared to single her out of an audience of thousands of girls, nearly all of them having made at least some effort with their appearance (if not way too much effort in many cases).

  The event wraps up pretty quickly and the boys say goodbye amidst an odd mix of elation and dejection from their fans. Just as they’re leaving the room, Kat overhears one of the managers muttering to one of the security guards.

  ‘Off chasing some girl, apparently. We’ve got to rein him in. It’s like there’s one rule for him and one for the rest of the band.’

  Kat’s stomach sinks. Oddly.

  I mean, why should she care if Angus is off chasing some girl? She can’t even stand him.

  It’s past eleven o’clock by this point, and she really needs to find a taxi rank and get these girls home. She’s reminded of the taxi they came in and the chain of events that transpired to get them into it. Is this whole elaborate evening a dream? What kind of girl would possibly have ‘encounters’ with a chivalrous med student and one of the world’s biggest pop stars in the space of only a few hours?

  Certainly not a girl like Kat, who routinely spends Saturday nights at home studying or watching entire box sets of One Tree Hill or Gossip Girl and bawling her eyes out while life passes her by, wondering if she’ll ever meet anyone good.

  ‘OMG!’ Annie exclaims. She’s jumping up and down on the spot. For once, Annie’s drama is a welcome interruption to Kat’s depressing inner monologue.

  ‘You should see what Angus Marsden just tweeted!’

  ‘I really don’t want to know,’ Kat says with a sigh, even though she really does want to know but refuses to show it.

  ‘It’s like, really cryptic, and it’s been re-tweeted about a gazillion times already!’

  Kat highly doubts it, and rams in her earphones.

  Annie is undeterred. ‘He says, “Hey, L26. What were you listening to?”’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Jess ponders. ‘Kat?’

  But Kat’s not listening. She’s had enough of Unrequited to last a lifetime. They can talk all they like about Angus Marsden’s tweets. She’s got Paloma Faith on. Loud. Hoping the girls will hear it and get the message.

  Annie and Jess give up and look through their bag of loot from the concert. Glowsticks, signed programs, their seat tickets — L28, L27 . . .

  It’s Jess who gets it first, and she goes to rip the earphones out of Kat’s ears and explain in no uncertain terms that ANGUS MARSDEN appears to be FLIRTING with her over TWITTER in front of the ENTIRE WORLD. But Annie grabs her twin sister’s arm and puts her hand over her mouth.

  ‘Don’t say it! Kat’s never going to buy into this. We can’t tell her or we’ll never get to meet him!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Shut up! Act normal.’

  And without another word, Annie applies the remaining fifteen minutes of the taxi ride home to the careful task of creating Gmail and Twitter accounts in the name of @elle_twentysix before replying to Angus Marsden’s tweet with two simple words that promptly send his entire account into meltdown:

  Paloma Faith.

  Chapter 4

  It’s been a long time since Joel Isaacson hasn’t been able to focus in an anatomy lecture, but he’s struggling today and he hates that. After throwing everything at getting this scholarship, the last thing he wants is to blow this chance over so
me fleeting encounter on a train with a girl he’s never going to see again.

  Irritatingly, he can’t seem to get her out of his head. What was it about her? She was the only other passenger who didn’t appear to be planning an elopement with Angus Marsden. Maybe it was that. Or maybe it was that she was the only one not plastered in makeup. Or could it have been the way she grabbed his arm and held onto it, begging him for help . . .

  His lecturer drones on about the central nervous system, and Joel swears he can still feel her touch on his arm. It’s ludicrous. It’s not like she’s the first girl who’s ever touched him. Calling that cab, putting Kat into it and refusing to give her his number was the most sensible thing he’s ever done. The last thing he needs right now is a distraction.

  He glances at his lecture pad and it’s patchy as hell. He reckons he’s picked up maybe one sentence in ten, and he runs his fingers through his dark hair in frustration. It’s like she’s scrambled his neural circuits with her damsel-in-distress act. It’s weird. He usually goes for the complete opposite type.

  His phone lights up with an incoming message. It’s Sarah Elliott, right on cue. Third-year law. Off-the-scale smart. Gorgeous. Blonde. The kind of girl who would never be caught short of cash on a train heading for an Unrequited concert. In fact, she doesn’t catch trains at all. She’s everything Joel would be looking for if he was looking. Which he isn’t.

  ‘Coffee?’ the message reads.

  ‘Be there in ten.’

  At the cafe a few minutes later, watching Sarah scrawl notes on a napkin for the latest fundraiser she’s volunteering for, Joel wonders (not for the first time) if he isn’t totally missing the mark with Sarah. In all the years they’ve been friends, he’s not once asked her out. Well, not unless you count her infamous and crushing rejection of him at the school fête in Year Six. It happened in front of everyone in the queue for the dodgem cars. He’d been trying to rouse the courage to ask her to be his girlfriend for weeks. To this day, he shudders at the memory.

  Then there was that other time. Also a debacle. February fourteenth in Year Nine. Joel had sent Sarah an anonymous Valentine which she somehow assumed was from Lane Wilkinson. Lane was that lethal combination of sports captain plus debating champion, and he’d done nothing to clear up the misunderstanding. In fact, he capitalised on it, swooping in to become Sarah’s first boyfriend. He was also the first to break her heart, the pieces of which Joel put back together one rainy weekend (while fighting an urge to thump Lane).

  He didn’t thump him, though. He was happy enough just to have Sarah back. He gave up hoping for anything more and they got on with their friendship, grew up, and at some point seemed to create this unspoken rule that they would never cross that line together. He suspects neither of them would risk what they have now by getting mixed up with each other that way, which is how he comes to be sitting here quite comfortably with her now, wondering if he should tell her about Kat.

  ‘Where are you today, Joel?’ Sarah asks, and he realises his thoughts have drifted off. Again.

  He mumbles an apology but she doesn’t buy it. ‘Have you met someone?’

  Her frankness catches him off-guard and he scratches for an answer but the game is up. She knows him too well.

  ‘You have met someone, haven’t you? Tell me all about her! Start at the beginning. I want to know everything.’

  ‘There’s really not much to tell,’ he says, truthfully.

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Kat.’

  ‘Kat who?’

  He shrugs. ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Well, where did you meet her?’

  ‘On a train.’

  ‘On a train?’

  ‘Yes, Sares — people do catch trains you know!’

  ‘Does she study here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, what’s she studying?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Where does she live?’

  He shrugs.

  ‘Stop being cagey, Joel. It’s infuriating!’

  He laughs. ‘I’m not being cagey. I barely know this girl. I probably wouldn’t recognise her again if I fell over her . . .’

  Although, that’s a lie and he knows it. His stupid memory has apparently logged every last detail about her, from the way her white T-shirt kept slipping off her left shoulder and she kept hoiking it up, through to her frown when bits of flyaway hair blew into her eyes as the hot westerly rushed in through the train window. It was all he could do to pretend to focus on his iPad and not stare at her.

  ‘Where was she going, then?’ Sarah presses.

  ‘This is not how it sounds, but she was going to an Unrequited concert.’

  ‘What? You’re kidding! How old is she? Fourteen?’

  ‘I hope not,’ Joel answers, too quickly. He can’t even guess how old she is. Younger than him, definitely. Her sisters seemed about twelve or thirteen and she was chaperoning them, so maybe sixteen or seventeen? Probably still at high school, he thinks with a jolt. ‘Look, there’s really no point discussing it. It was one of those chance meetings. She probably hasn’t given it a second thought. End of story.’

  Sarah sits back and ponders this for a minute. ‘This whole thing reminds me of something I heard in the hairdresser this morning. They were all talking about Unrequited . . .’

  Joel groans. ‘Can we just change the subject?’

  ‘No! It was quite intriguing actually. Apparently this singer . . . What’s his name again? The one with the eyes . . .’

  ‘They’ve all got eyes.’

  ‘Yeah. Not like this guy . . .’

  ‘Angus Marsden.’

  ‘Yes! Angus Marsden has apparently fallen head over heels in love with a girl from the audience last night. He’s tweeting her using her seat number — L26 — and she apparently sent a tweet back after the concert. I can’t stand the band but even I can recognise a fairy tale when I see one. This story has Cinderella written all over it. The hairdressers were hooked on it! Everyone is trying to work out who she is!’

  Sarah’s prattling on in a very un-Sarah-like way and something in Joel’s chest freezes. He has a flashback: picking Kat’s concert ticket up off the floor of the train and seeing the seat number before he handed it back to her.

  L26. He’s sure of it.

  Suddenly he’s not feeling so stupid about this nonsensical crush. He is feeling stupid, though, for bundling her into that cab and sending her straight into the lion’s den. Bloody Angus Marsden! He could show a flicker of interest in any girl in the world and they’d show up at the click of a finger. Why does it have to be Kat? And she’d even asked for Joel’s number and he’d refused. He could kick himself!

  ‘Joel? Are you even listening to me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What’s going on with you?’

  He looks Sarah square in the eye and wonders if he can tell her, or whether he’s better off leaving it. Better off forgetting this ever happened.

  He’s hardly going to fight the guy for Kat, is he? Marsden’s an international pop star — fantasy boyfriend of millions of girls the world over. The whole idea of it makes Joel’s chest hurt and his brain thump with envy. It’s not an emotion he’s used to. She’ll be like a bee to honey with Angus. Any girl would be. Even Sensible Sarah’s all flushed just talking about it and that’s entirely out of character for her.

  Joel lets his mind wander one last time to Kat, and the way she looked at him on the train when she was desperate for his help. His stomach lurches at the compulsion he felt to be exclusively at her service. He’d have done anything for her right then, in a way he’d never felt compelled to before. For anyone.

  What if she’s out of her depth now? he wonders. What if, by some inexplicable miracle, she doesn’t want the hottest pop star on the planet falling in love with her? What if there’s even the smallest chance that she’s thinking of the train ride, too . . .

  Hmm. He looks at his friend. Should he go th
ere?

  ‘Sarah, can you keep a secret?’

  Chapter 5

  Jess and Annie huddle in a corner behind the science block and talk tactics. It was all fun and games for the first tweet, but it’s like they’re stuck now, impersonating a seventeen-year-old online, and it’s harder than they thought.

  ‘We need it to be believable,’ Annie says earnestly.

  ‘Yeah, if we muck this up, he’ll let it go and we’ll have no chance of meeting the band. We’ve got to make him fall in love with Kat!’

  ‘He already has . . .’

  ‘That was before we got involved. How are we going to do this without scaring him off?’

  The twins give it some intense thought and check in on his latest message to @elle_twentysix: ‘Not an Unrequited fan, then?’

  ‘What is she supposed to say to that?’ Jess asks. ‘If she says no, won’t he hate her?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe pop stars like a challenge?’

  ‘Do we even go back with a Yes/No answer, though? Isn’t it a bit boring? She has to come across really clever and funny, which she is. But how do we fake it?’

  Annie thinks for a bit and then her eyes light up. ‘I’ve got it! It’s risky but I think we could make it work. We could get Lucy involved.’

  Lucy is Kat’s best friend and hugely besotted with Unrequited. It would have been way better if Lucy had taken the twins to the concert instead of Kat, but she’d been to the one the night before and her mum already practically wants to book her into a psychologist because she doesn’t think her infatuation with the band is ‘normal’. It’s the only thing she and Kat disagree on. That and Kat’s obsession with vintage op-shopping. Jess frowns. ‘Won’t she go straight to Kat and tell her?’

  ‘Not if Kat getting together with Angus Marsden is the best thing for her. She’ll do anything for Kat! Remember that time she won the GHD in a magazine competition and gave it to Kat because her hair’s so wild? That’s friendship!’

  ‘But doesn’t Lucy want Angus for herself?’

  ‘Nuh, she likes Reuben,’ Annie points out. ‘It’s the whole blond hair, blue eyes thing. She’ll want to help us because then she might meet Reuben through Kat AND set her best friend up on a blind date with the hottest guy alive! I’ve got it all figured out! It’s the perfect plan! What could possibly go wrong, Jess?’