My dad raised an eyebrow, then picked up one of the papers. “Ahem,” he said, reading aloud. “‘But Audrey has found a bright side to all the attention that her ex-boyfriend’s song has brought her. The best thing, she says with a giggle “All the sex!”’ My dad set the paper down. “I can’t believe I just said that sentence out loud.”
Guess where I get my sarcastic streak from.
“I can’t believe that you said that,” my mother said, pointing to me. “What were you thinking?”
“I was kidding!” I shrieked. “Oh my freaking Lord, I was kidding! She didn’t really put that, did she?” I grabbed a copy for myself and began scanning the article. “We were just talking about the song and…I was being sarcastic and…” I trailed off as I read another paragraph.
In “Audrey, Wait!” the Do-Gooders craft a three-minute-plus song of pop perfection that’s so sweet, you can feel your teeth rotting as you sing along. It’s a song for teenagers, written by teenagers, but damn if it doesn’t remind you of the one that got away, of every girl who has ever done you wrong, put you down, kicked you out. And what does the girl think about that? “It’s all good!” squealed sixteen-year-old Audrey, title heroine of the Next Big Thing. “I love being singled out in public—it’s the best!”
Listen up, kids. This ain’t your parents’ rock and roll.
That bitch. I don’t even like calling other people “bitches” but…that total bitch.
“I was kidding,” I said again to my parents. “I was being sarcastic. She called me when I was late to work a couple of weeks ago and she asked if I could answer some questions and she was nice—she was nice—so we were joking around and—”
I was interrupted by the ringing phone, but my mom just waved it off. “Let the machine get it,” she said. “It’s the tenth call since I got home half an hour ago.”
My dad pushed his glasses back up his nose and looked at me. “Audrey,” he said in his I’m-not-mad-but-I’m-not-particularly-thrilled-with-your-current-life-choices voice, “the article was syndicated. The story ran in some newspapers.”
It took a minute for me to realize what he had said. “Newspapers?” I repeated. “Plural?”
“Plural.”
“How do you know?”
“Your mother Googled your name at work.”
I chewed on my lower lip for a minute. “So the whole country didn’t get the joke?”
“Your humor doesn’t exactly translate in print, sweetheart.”
“Which papers?”
My mom stepped in as my dad began rubbing at his forehead. “Mostly smaller papers,” she said. “Local ones.”
I tried desperately to understand the scope of the problem. “Like, how many?”
Suddenly the machine clicked on and a male voice came over the tape. “Hi, this is Michael Anderson, I’m a reporter over at USA Today. We are interested in speaking to Audrey Cuttler for a few minutes for a story we’re doing on teenage celebrity and—”
I would tell you what else he said, but really, my mind shut off at that point. My skin felt fuzzy and warm and I knew I was doing that fish look again that Victoria can’t stand. “So far,” my dad continued, as if a reporter from USA Today wasn’t asking about me on our answering machine, “we’ve had calls from the L.A. Times, the New York Times, the Miami Herald, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Post—they’re insistent, three messages so far—ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, MTV, and many other media entities with three letters.”
“And People magazine,” my mom added. (She will never confess to reading tabloid magazines, but I know for a fact that she tears through them when she gets pedicures.) “Audrey, what is going on?”
I sank down in one of our kitchen chairs and began creasing a corner of the Weekly. “It’s like the article says,” I sighed. “Evan wrote a song. After we broke up. About me. And it’s good. People like it.”
I could see my dad’s eyes getting wider and wider until it looked like there were two golf balls in his head. “You’re Audrey?” he said. “That’s you?”
Now my eyes were pretty wide too. “You’ve heard the song? I thought you only listened to classical music in the car.”
“I’ve been hearing that song every ten minutes,” he said, ignoring that last bit about classical music. So my mom reads tabloids and my dad listens to Top 40 radio. This day was becoming more revealing every minute.
“How does it go?” my mom asked. “Hum a few bars.”
Now, I thought my dad only listened to classical music in the car, but this day was becoming more and more revealing every minute. “Oh, you know,” he said. Then he sang a few bars in a voice that, let me tell you, sounded nothing like Evan’s. “Audrey, wait! Audrey, wait!”
“That song?” my mom gasped. I swear to God, she actually gasped. “I’ve been hearing it every ten minutes. That song is about you?”
If there was one small mercy in this whole debacle, it was that Evan never explicitly mentioned sex in the lyrics. I couldn’t handle the mental image of my parents blithely singing along to a song that talked about me having sex. My brain would melt and run out of my ears. “It’s me,” I said. “Thanks for giving me such a catchy name that rhymes with every third word in the English language.”