The Kiss Off

The Kiss Off - Chapter Three

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Chapter Three

Through a glance at Van’s watch and a little power walking we had made it through the school gate as the home room bell rang. Though I was only really in the room for a minute, standing at the front with Mr. Murphy as he sighed and shook his head and grumbled about needing to find the white out so that he could change my ‘absent’ to a ‘present’ and wanting an excuse for my tardiness (I so wasn’t telling him that I could have made it on time but I got off the bus a couple of stops early because I couldn’t deal with my ex and his new she-devil girlfriend being all up in my face and him trying to be friendly and her trying to poison me with her existence so I just sort of mumbled something about an alarm clock not going off and he accepted it because he didn’t really care anyway).

I scowled at my desk, lost in thought for most of the day. I pretended that Cam was invisible and even when he answered questions in Biology and solved that hideous equation in Trigonometry I was determined not to learn a thing.

It wasn’t fair that he kept trying to talk to me, trying to be my friend. He wasn’t playing by the break up rules. Of lying cheating scumbag break ups. What made him honestly think I would want to talk to him? At least Nikki knew enough to stay away from me. She hadn’t called me once since I caught them. I would have liked to smack her again sometime though.

When I got home after school I went straight to the kitchen to steal a glass of chocolate milk from Dad’s secret stash. I never had any witnesses because I almost always made it home first.

But today as I headed for the doorway I spat my mouthful of milk out in a projectile spray as Mom walked into the kitchen, putting her jacket on. She froze, her mouth open, looking down at her clothes for any sign of chocolate milk. Luckily, there was none.

‘Mom!’ I yelled. ‘You scared the crap out of me. What are you doing home?’

‘Hello to you too, I worked from home this afternoon.’ She motioned to the walls and kitchen counter, covered in milk. ‘You’re cleaning that up, aren’t you?’ It wasn’t a question.

I grimaced at the chocolate milk running down the cupboard doors, dribbling onto the floor. I stomped to the sink for a cloth and started cleaning.

Mom opened the fridge. ‘So how was your day?’

‘Fine, it was you know, whatever. What are you doing?’ I watched her stand in front of the fridge and survey the contents. She opened the freezer.

‘Making dinner.’

‘But Dad makes dinner.’

‘I am capable of making dinner, Poppy.’ She might be capable of it but I couldn’t remember ever seeing her do it before. And I said so.

My mom has this face she makes, where she sort of bites both her lips and sucks in her cheeks a little and she looks like she’s counting to ten. That’s her “you’re annoying me” face. I know this, because I had seen it pretty often. And she had it on right then. ‘What are you doing right now? Don’t you have homework to do?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Good. You’re annoying me.’ Mom said. ‘Shoo.’

I tossed the cleaning sponge at the sink, picked up my milk and headed toward my bedroom, glancing behind me in bewilderment as she started pulling things out of the freezer. Presumably to cook. God help us all.

‘I’m not covering for you if Dad notices half his chocolate milk is gone!’ she called up the stairs.

I jumped on YouTube to check my stats before leaving. Whoa. I was getting some serious hits. A couple of other YouTubers were linking to it. This was unreal. People seemed to be loving them some angry girl rock at the moment. I hummed The Kiss Off, spinning slowly in the wheelie chair. I was proud of myself, and had to wonder if anyone I knew had seen it. If a certain two people had seen it.

My cell rang and it was Van.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I was on YouTube earlier and The Kiss Off was on the front page.’

‘Shut up.’

‘It was, just in the “someone is currently viewing this video” section but when I clicked over there had been a massive jump in hits.’

‘Yeah, FreezeRay promoted it on their page too,’ I said.

‘Who’s FreezeRay?’

‘You don’t know FreezeRay? Oh he’s this singer in Canada, he writes songs and plays them on YouTube too. He’s pretty cool and he has something like fifty thousand subscribers.’

‘Wow. There’s also this Japanese pop star called Yuri Maki who saw your song and linked to it on her site.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. And then some French actor Claude Dasten must have seen that and he mentioned how catchy it was on his FaceBook and this whole thing is going viral.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘I set up a Google Alert on you. On PoppyLongStocking.’

‘A what?’

‘I get emails when PoppyLongStocking is mentioned online.’

‘You can do that?’

‘Yes, Poppy,’ she said. ‘Did you listen to anything in Computer Lab last semester? Anything at all?’

‘All I need is YouTube, baby,’ I said. She frowned at me. I was trying her patience and it was funny.

‘Anyway, I had to switch it from immediate alerts to once daily because so many people are linking to it. It took me an hour to delete all the alerts there were so many.’

 ‘So cool,’ I said.

‘You’re an Internet celebrity.’

‘Ha! I wouldn’t go that far.’ I may not have been a celebrity, but I was definitely viral. Never thought I’d be happy to say that.