Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen - Dyan Sheldon [11]
I’d had another fight with my mother about my hair at breakfast. My mother thinks that the only suitable hair colours are brown, black, blonde and auburn. She was refusing to let me dye mine blue. She never got over me cutting off all my hair in my Joan of Arc phase and she still hadn’t really come round to the ring in my nose, so she was being especially stubborn this time.
But there were up things, too. My new cape had attracted its share of admiring looks, and Mrs Baggoli herself had wished me good luck for the auditions the next day. I innocently took these events as good signs.
I’d only gotten as far as everything that had happened in maths, my last class of the morning, when the world came to its sudden and horrible end. It wasn’t water, and it wasn’t ice, and it wasn’t even fire. It wasn’t even a neutron bomb. It was an announcement.
Wait’ll I tell you what happened in the cafeteria today, I was writing.
And then the song that was playing ended, and George Blue, my most favourite DJ in the whole universe, began talking again. I started to listen when I heard the name Sidartha. I almost wish I hadn’t; that the moment had passed right by and left me ignorant but happy for a little longer. I sat there, rigid with horror, the pen dangling from my hand like a withered flower on a severed stalk. I glanced at myself in the mirror next to my bed. If I had to describe the look on my face I would say it was the expression of a young woman who has lost every reason for living.
“Oh, my God!” I screamed back at the radio. “It can’t be! It just can’t be! You might as well shoot me now and get it over with!”
“That’s right, guys,” said George Blue. “You heard it here first. Sidartha is no more. The boys are going to pursue solo careers.”
After I recovered from my initial shock, I raced back outside to call Ella and tell her the earth-stopping news. Ella was devastated. She hadn’t been listening to George Blue, she’d been washing her hair. Like Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
“Oh, my God,” wailed Ella. “We never even saw them in concert…”
The rest of her sentence hung silently in the miles between us: and now we never will…
“I don’t know how I can face another day,” I said softly, trying to hold back the volcano of tears welling inside me. “I just don’t know.”
My mother was passing on her way back to the living room with a cup of tea. She glanced over at me.
“If you don’t get off that phone soon you won’t have to face another day,” she informed me.
“Five minutes,” I begged. “Just five more minutes.”
Ella and I got as far as agreeing to dress in mourning for the rest of the week when my mother came out and did her talking-clock impersonation (“Do you know what time it is? It’s eleven forty-eight.”) and forced me to get off the phone. I went back to my room and put on the new Sidartha CD. I cried for a while. Then I rubbed off the purple polish and painted my nails jet black. I looked through my music magazines, re-reading every Sidartha article and interview. I cried some more. I tossed and turned for hours, listening to the wind rip through the trees like monsters clawing out the hearts of babies in their cribs. Sidartha is no more! I silently wailed into the darkness. Sidartha is no more!
I don’t know how I ever managed to sleep that night, but I must have dozed, no matter how fitfully, because I knew the instant I was awake: the pain began again.
A BRIEF ASIDE
I can’t go on with my story until I’ve explained a little more about Carla Santini. But in order to explain about Carla, I first have to explain about the social structure of Deadwood High. Life is like that, I find. Complicated.
I think of Deadwood High as an eco-system. It has its groups, and each of them feeds off the others. There are, of course, small grouplettes on the fringe – dopeheads, a couple of retro-hippies, a few biker types (but largely without bikes), metal heads, the total untouchables – but basically there are three main groups.
The first group is what I call the BTWs: Born to Wins. These are the kids who think of school