Love and Fame Games (Book 1)

03

"Young lady, do you know what time it is?" My mother snapped at me when I joined her and my dad at the breakfast table, just as she had for the last couple of days, whenever I came out of my room.

"It's not even noon," I shot back. Lately, that was around the time I had been getting out of bed, but today was an exception. It was the last weekend before school started and I wasn't going to waste it. I got up earlier than usual.

Even my parents seemed to have a big day planned. On my way down, I saw that Mom had her cleaning supplies ready and Dad had his power tools out. I frowned a little; Dad got so little time off work and when he did, he spent it doing repairs around the house. It didn't seem fair.

I poured myself a glass of almond milk and shoved a blueberry muffin into my mouth, hoping that would discourage conversation, but my mom was persistent.

"Why anyone would stay up watching YouTube videos is beyond me; I mean, you've seen one cat video, you've seen them all," she said, out of the blue. A piece of muffin got lodged in my throat and I started coughing.

Since the night of the concert, I had been staying up all night trying to make sense of everything that happened by gathering as much information off the Internet as I could.

At present, it was common knowledge that Jordan Castle brought Off-Kilter in as a last-minute replacement for Conner Grey, but there was endless speculation as to why. Some said Jordan Castle and Conner Grey had broken up and weren't about to share the stage anytime soon.

I found this ridiculous: Even I could make nice with someone whom I hated with the fire of a thousand suns, if it meant that a buttload of money could be made from it. These people were professionals; did I really think they were capable of less than I?

It was still just a rumor, anyway; a representative of Conner Grey issued a statement that he was simply unavailable the night of the concert as he was attending to other matters. What could be more important than Jordan Castle's concert? That remained to be answered.

Fueling the breakup rumor, however, was the release of Jordan and Off-Kilter's version of Last Frame as a single. (I bought it off iTunes the minute it became available.) People construed this as a bitter girl's way of burying her ex-boyfriend alive and pretending they never sang what was the most romantic single of the year. More ridiculousness. As if people could forget that easily.

But, the biggest questions on everyone's minds were: Who was Off-Kilter? And why—of all the musical acts that would give up their firstborn for the chance to perform with her—did Jordan Castle choose an unknown group of high school boys from the opposite side of the country?

Why, indeed? I was a little curious, too. A few articles and news features on them had surfaced, but I didn't pay much attention to them; I didn't need to know what their favorite condiment, or favorite pizza topping was. I wasn't interested in any more pointless trivia about these boys than I already knew.

I was interested in finding out that they had a YouTube channel, though. They uploaded all sorts of videos: song covers, band practice, which almost always showed them doing all sorts of goofy stuff except practicing, even original songs (I used the term 'songs' loosely as they were songs written by a group of boys who were in eighth grade when they first started out.)

The tunes were catchy enough—pretty, even—but the lyrics? Not their strong suit. Case in point: they had a song about a breakfast burrito—and it wasn't a euphemism for anything. It was just, literally, a song about a breakfast burrito. And don't get me started on how much freestyle rapping those dorks did in their earlier videos.

It was hard to watch but once I started, it was harder to stop. Maybe the concert helped get the word out about the channel, but that probably also accounted for why the number of views for most of their videos was, at present, in the hundred thousands, and even millions. There were very few things in this world people enjoyed more than secondhand embarrassment.