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‘Jazzy, where exactly do you want dropping off?’

He swivelled round in his seat and I got the full blast of his big hazel eyes. Wow. Yep, they could cause a chemical reaction, for sure.

‘Home, yeah?’

‘Yes, but where’s that?’

Then his hazel eyes clouded over. What, question too difficult? He really was an idiot.

‘Where I found you,’ he said eventually with a slow, sexy smile. Was he flirting with me AGAIN? Telling me all that “home is where the heart is” rubbish?

I decided to ignore the sub-text.
‘That was Aggie’s dad’s house,’ I said gently, in case he turned violent because of the drugs. ‘You don’t live there, Jason. Where’s …’ I enunciated carefully. ‘… Jazzy’s house?’

‘Ummm.’

‘He can come to my house, just like he suggested,’ said Aggie hopefully.

Maybe he could. Maybe that would upset Dean so much that he’d forget he’d just proposed to Mother Dearest
…

‘Don’t you live there, Cat?’ said Jason suddenly. ‘I want to go where you’re going.’

‘Right, like that’s going to happen!’ This was unbelievable. Of all the teenage girls in the world, he wanted to go home with the only one who wasn’t interested.

‘Then I can come to Tre
vellyan School with you,’ he said.

Suddenly, with a godly glowing through the clouds and the sound of angels going ‘Aaaaaaahhhh’,
it all became crystal clear.

School.
Dolores. Freddie. Me. Jazzy D. Double dating with the Double Ds.

Me, cool and popular and not Titanic for the first time in history.

It was perfect.

And that was how the Divine Jazzy D came to be camped out in our shed, on the blow-up mattress with my sleeping bag from madrigal camp.

It was only when I was closing the door on him with strict instructions that he was not to appear NAKED in our kitchen in the morning, at least not until Mum had gone to Dean’s, that something occurred to me. I stuck my head back around the door.

‘Hey, I know we went to infant school together and all that, but how did you know which school I go to now?’

He smiled at me dopily, looking ever so slightly and annoyingly cute. ‘From your pencil case. Cat Andrews, Year 11, Trevellyan School, something street …’

‘Oh, right.’ That made sense. I did have all my school stuff properly labelled
, and he must have found my bag in Dean’s hall before he sprang his nakedness on us.

Funny, though, because when Mum came home and returned my abandoned bags to me, my pencil case wasn’t there.

Let me just tell you, btw, that Jazzy Divine is an arrogant prat. Not someone I would normally want to keep caged up in the shed all weekend so I could take him to school on the Monday (not that, you know, I normally want to do that to anybody). If I had actually known him at primary school he would have been the last person I’d have talked to, if I had actually spoken to anyone anyway.

      
He’s quite hard to talk to, in any case, because he sings all the time. All. The. Time. I know I sing a lot when choir practice is looming or when we’re giving a performance, but being with Jazzy was like being in a musical, with every simple thing being turned into lyrics. I do not like being crooned at about my cereal. Or my uniform. Or my hair wings. Or anything.

He didn’t seem to have any plans for the weekend, which was unusual for a pop star, I thought. But then DV did have a film just out, so maybe they were on a break or something. Jason didn’t particularly want to discuss it – just slept a lot in the shed and woke up occasionally to eat. It was a bit like having a
pet dog, really, only one I had to keep from singing every few minutes. Luckily Mum was so loved up all weekend that she spent most of it at Dean’s place (and I so did not want to think about THAT so it was good to have a distraction at home).

Before 8am on Saturday,
Dolores called for a complete breakdown of how I ended up with Jazzy D in the car and where we’d dropped him and could we go and stalk him, like, right now. Then I heard her mum calling in the background and Dolores let out a groan.

‘I’ve got to go to work,’ she whined. ‘
It’s totally unfair! They’ve got a phone ban there.’

Dolores has a weekend job in the specialist bra shop for the bigger-boobed. The manageress took one look at her and hired her on the spot, obviously deciding that Dolores’ resemblance to an attractive pink-haired mushroom mattered more than her ability to, say, add up. ‘We need girls like you to bring in the teen demographic. You’re hired,’ she’d cried.

When she said “girls”, I admit to getting a little excited for a moment as I was also looking for a Saturday job, and was standing right next to Dolores at the moment of hiring.

‘Great!’ I’d said, as Dolores was already holding up lingerie and doing amazed and aghast faces at the prices. ‘When do we start?’

Well, somehow Dolores had already started; she’d made a sale in two seconds flat, just by showing the frilly orange bra to the middle-aged woman next to her and mouthing ‘Wow.’ Only I knew that she meant ‘I could get ten bras for that amount of money!’ The other customer must have thought it meant “Wear this and you too could look like me,” as she snatched it out of Dolores’ hand and ran for the till in an instant.

‘I only need one weekend assistant,’ said the manageress
, watching the whole episode like a proud mother. ‘Sorry, dear.’

Then she’d looked me up and down in a way that let me know I would never be able to work there as I was s
o breasticularly challenged and would block the doors with my hair wings, and I went back to doing extra homework all weekend just for fun, while Dolores earned money and got huge staff discounts on stuff that made her look even more perky in the chest department than she already did.

For once, though, I was quite relieved she’d got this job. It saved me having to explain that Jason Jazzy Divine Devaney was currently doing press-ups on the back lawn, and appeared once more to have forgotten that normal people wear clothes.

‘You’ll have to tell me on Mondayyyyy,’ moaned Dolores. ‘I’ve got to go to Dad’s tonight and you know what he’s like about texting and so on, and then work again tomorrow. It’s so totally unfair!’

‘
Never mind. On Monday, my busty biffle, I will make it all up to you,’ I said.

Oh, and how.

The r
est of the weekend passed uneventfully, though I did have to go to the supermarket and buy cheap clothes for Jazzy (just so he’d wear some), and then had to endure an hour of him doing a fashion show on the patio, trying out all the different ways he could model a black t-shirt, a white t-shirt, and a pair of five-pound-special jeans from Asda. I’ll admit it – he did manage to make even those look good, especially the white top with Dean’s 501’s. Anyway, I’d also bought him bags of junk food and a pair of pyjamas with my meagre savings, so I reckoned he could survive the weekend, and if he’d just wear some pants, so could I.

Without mishap, the next school week arrived. Hallelujah. Time to instantly become THE most popular girl in Trevellyan, and make Dolores delirious with joy, AND persuade Freddie that he was wastin
g his time with Double D and he’d be much better off with her cool, sciency and surprisingly-well-connected-in-the-pop-world friend.

I was actually in quite a good mood, which I’m usually not on a Monday owing to the general awfulness of being a social misfit and having a whole week of hideousness ahead … This week was going to be exceptional.
This day was going to be fantastic. I could feel it in my bones (mostly the tibia, patella and femur, though somewhat in the cranium too). 

I heard the voice at the kitchen window. Mum, fortunately, had already left to get the early train up t
o the city for her meeting. I wanted to be sure he still had clothes on so I ran to the window first, before tentatively opening the door. He was basically wearing the sleeping bag; I didn’t want to know if there was anything else underneath.

‘Morning,’ I said.

‘Morning, Cat,’ he said as he stumbled over the step. Then the singing began. ‘It’s morning in my eyes, but twilight in your soul, and if you don’t bring me your sunshine I will be forever cold …’

‘Very nice. Toast?’ It was an attempt to distract him but it just seemed to set him off again.

‘Toast - I raise a glass to yoouuuuu. Toast – it’s all that I can do. Even though you’re with another guy; I’ll say cheers so you don’t see me cry …’

He can sing, I’ll give him that. And even manage to look good in a sleeping bag, if you like that ripply shoulders and bulgy biceps kind of thing. Which I don’t. But still, he was in danger of bringing the neighbours running, so I buttered a piece of – yeah, Toast – and stuffed it in his mouth.

‘Eat up. Got to keep you big and strong for all your fans.’ Especially Dolores. I held up a carton of juice. ‘Would you like…’

‘Would you like, would you like, would you like to partayyyyyy?’ he hollered, spraying toast crumbs everywhere.

‘NO I WOULD NOT! I would like to sit and eat my cereal in peace.’

‘Pieces of you. Pieces of
me. Piece it all together and…

‘Jason Devaney!’ I yelled.
I was sounding more like my mother slash Miss Sargeson with every new song. ‘We do not need singing with breakfast. Please, please, please be quiet.’

A piece of toast fell off his lip as his jaw dropped open. ‘But my singing is brilliant.’

‘It’s not bad, I’ll grant you, but those songs …’

‘Those songs are award-winning. They’re number ones. They’re fantastic.’

I couldn’t help myself: I had to laugh. ‘Well, that’s a matter of opinion.’

‘No, it’s not.’ Jason folded his arms belligerently and the sleeping bag slid down
over several inches of bare buffness. So, I’m guessing he
was
NAKED again under there.

‘Of course it is. You can’t seriously expect everyone to love your music,’ I said. ‘It’s not logical. There are seven billion people in the world; that’s a lot of different tastes
. There’s probably less than … I don’t know … nought point five of a percent of the world’s population who actually like your music. And most of them are only looking at your muscles.’

He flexed an arm appreciatively. ‘Well, my muscles are great. And big.’

Jeez. Was there no end to his vanity? ‘Pity your brain isn’t,’ I muttered.

‘It is,’ said Jason, with supersonic hearing, apparently. ‘Because the brain’s a muscle.’

‘It’s an organ.’

‘So? I’ve got big organs too.’

‘Shut up.’

The prospect of trailing him around school like a prized bull at a country fair was seeming less attractive by the second. But then I thought about someone who got more attractive by the second and would almost certainly know that the brain was an organ not a muscle and would definitely not be nakedly showing off
his freakishly enlarged arms to the world by doing tricep dips off the kitchen counter … and I changed my mind again pretty quickly.

‘Go to
the shed and put Dean’s jeans and the white – no, the black t-shirt back on. Over some underwear.’ Yes, I’d had to buy that too. Gross, rank and vomit-worthy. ‘Then you’ll have to find your way to the school because I get the bus and there’s only one seat booked.’

I whisked around the kitchen getting my lunch tog
ether, and handed him the rest of my supermarket money for a cab.

‘I’ll see you at the massive oak tree at the back of the running track
at 12.30pm, okay? Then it will be lunchtime and you can …’
meet Dolores only properly this time and fall in love and marry her in about three years’ time after faithfully dating her for all that time and have four attractive children named after cities
and be super happy for ever
‘… you can see the school and we can contact Stephen Scowl and find out about getting you home again.’

Because, to be honest, it had started to worry me that he might end up in our shed forever. Jason had evidently been getting my letters to him as
he’d known exactly who I was on Friday night (which meant – wow – that he
did
recognise me from primary school). Stephen Scowl, though, was a different matter, and I suspected it might take Dolores’ social media abilities to get through to him. What was really, really weird about Jason was that he didn’t have a phone (though where would he have kept it in his NAKED suit? Nope. Don’t even want to think about that …) or any idea how to contact his manager. He didn’t really seem to know who his manager was, in fact. Must have been some party he was at on Friday night, I reckoned, when he turned up to look for me clueless and clothesless …

‘Why can’t I stay in the penthouse shed?’
bleated Jazzy, suddenly sulky at the mention of his manager, Double Vision, work etcetera.

‘You do know it’s not really a penthouse shed, don’t you?
That was my little joke. It’s just a shed shed.’

‘I like it there. It smells of … slugs.’ He actually sniffed the air in deeply and closed his eyes, savouring the distant aroma of … well, slugs.
‘Reminds me of home,’ he added wistfully.

Oddly, at moments like that, when he was breathing in slugness, I actually quite liked him.

I shoved him out of the back door towards the shed. ‘Jason Devaney, you are truly weird.’

Then he ruined it all by bursting into song again. ‘Truly, madly, deeply weird. Crazy with my love for you.
Truly, deeply, crazy weird. Not a thing I wouldn’t do …’

‘Pleeeeeeeeeeeease shut up,’ I yelled after him.

‘That was Number One in fourteen countries,’ he said, pulling up his sleeping bag.

‘Go and sniff your slugs.’ I closed the door, then opened it again. ‘And don’t forget: 12.30pm at the oak tree.’

He popped his pecs at me by way of response, and disappeared into the penthouse shed while I leaned on the door, thinking. When he wasn’t nakedly singing, flexing his muscles, and basically being teen idol Jazzy D, he had moments of being really quite appealing. The shed
did
smell of slugs, and it was quite earthy and damp and wholesome, somehow. I liked it too.

Luckily for me and the rest of the world,
however, those non-Jazzy moments accounted for about 1% of the time.

Dolores would love the other 99%.

It was going to be a very interesting day.