Lisa Clark - And the Rainbow Hearts

Wrong.

Well it does, except for when she uses all that head-swishin’ ‘tude of hers to tell you that her Tambourine Queen performance was strictly a one-off and it was not something she planned to repeat in the foreseeable future.

“No way, Lo,” she said. ‘I don’t do rock.”

I really hadn’t seen that coming. I thought Angel would be as excited as me about being in a band. We’ve always wanted to do the same things together, always. We always wore the same matching jumper and long knee-high socks in our first year at school together. We both ate marmalade sandwiches by eating the crusts off first. We both think spending an entire weekend watching My Super Sweet Sixteen in our pjs is a doable option. We have always always always liked the same things. Well, except for now that is, and if I’m honest, I didn’t like how it was making my belly feel.

I persevered because, c’mon, this is Angel we’re talking about, of course she wanted to be in a band really, who didn’t? But so talented in the field of head-swishing is Angel, that she is even able to do it over the phone.

“But Angel,” I had pleaded, when I rang her up for the fifth time to try to persuade her, “if, I mean, when we win, we’ll get to meet Tom Tootie, it’ll be ah-mazing!”

“Tom who?” she replied nonchalantly.

The funniest thing is, she wasn’t even being funny.

What Angel may have in fashion know-how, she totally lacks in music 101.

“Tom Tootie, y’know from the band The Tootie? Hence the name and all…”

The line went silent for nearly an entire minute as she searched the million really important fashion designers and brand names that filled her pretty little head. “Nope, never heard of them.”

Seriously, what do they teach these people at boarding school? Angel’s parental is paying big bucks for her to be there. I wonder how he’d feel if he knew his only daughter was missing out on a hugely significant part of her cultural teen experience by not knowing who Tom Tootie is? It should be against the law, it really, really should.

Okay, so if the promise of meeting Tom Tootie wasn’t enough to make her join the band, I had one last trick up my rather cute pink cardi sleeve. If this didn’t work then nothing would.

“You can totally be centre stage!” There. I said it. I couldn’t have delivered the line any better than if I was Audrey Hepburn herself in the movie Roman Holiday .

“I could? Even though I’d just be shaking a tambourine?” It seemed to work, as Angel’s tone had changed from total indifference to one of slight perky interest.

Of course, I had not run this whole ‘centre stage’ business past Bella yet, but surely, she wouldn’t mind, would she? She’s all about the music. If all the attention is on Angel, she can concentrate on delivering a kick-ass performance. And she’ll have a guitar solo. A really long one that will show any potential record makin’ dude or dudess that she is indeed the best guitar playin’ girl they will ever see.

I was beyond certain that I could win Bella over, and right at that moment, I wanted more than anything for my BFF to be in my band and putting her centre stage would make that happen, I just know it.

“Yes, yes, yes!” I say not thinking about Bell’s response right now. “What’s not to love about a tam-tam playing fashionista?” I tell her. “It would be a total unique selling point, for sure! C’mon Angel-cakes, whadya say?”

“I don’t know Lo, I really don’t think being in a band is…y’know, really my thing.”

I sigh. What’s it going to take to make it her ‘thing’? “What if you were in charge of wardrobe design too?”

It’s all I had left, and while I may be stepping on Sadie’s super-cute tippy-toes, what with her being the customising design-o girl of the group, I just knew that she’d be okay if it meant we got a band together and got that much sought after Tom Tootie Time.

“Okay Lo-Lo, I’m in! I’m back at the weekend—get the girls together, we’re going shopping!”

Hurrah.

Form a band

Me, Angel, Bella and Sadie

The first rule of forming a band?

Don’t make any band decisions without discussing it with your other band members first.

This ‘being in a band’ thing was proving to be a lot less fun than I’d originally imagined. I know lots of bands have their ‘musical differences’ but we hadn’t even had our first band practice yet and we were already having a full-blown spat in Sadie’s basement.

FYI: because Sadie’s bro is in a ‘serious’ band (if you ask me, ‘serious’ equals a teeny-tiny bit boring, but the band does include Jake Farrell, previous heir to my heart, who plays bass. He makes them all the more bearable) they’ve got a whole studio set-up in their basement.

I know.

Nowhere, I repeat nowhere, on the Tom Tootie Time to-do list does it say ‘argue with newly formed band’.

Why?

Because I wouldn’t have put it on there, that’s why.

But that’s the thing with writing to-do lists, it only has all the stuff you actually need or want to do. I love writing lists, I write them for just about everything, but what writing a list doesn’t do, which is really rather rude and wrong, is prepare you for a nuclear fallout with your be-there buds. Neither does it provide a series of practical, tip-based solutions that will get you out of the aforementioned situation.

Which would be especially helpful when the fallout is All. Your. Fault.

And that’s what it is.

All. My. Fault.

“Lola Love, I cannot believe you told her she could be centre stage…” Bella is not happy. She spits out the word her like it’s giving her a really bad taste in her mouth. “A tambourine player cannot be centre stage. That’s just ridiculous. We’ll be laughed off stage. If we want to be taken seriously, it has to be a singer with a guitar, not some random girl with big hair playing a freakin’ tam-tam.” She paces the floor and turns to me with her arms folded, waiting for my response.

I shuffle from foot to foot. I don’t dig confrontation, especially when it’s with my most favourite of all punk princesses. I didn’t like how her accent got a li’l harsher and her face got all screwy. This was not very ‘om’-like of her and I didn’t like it. Stoopid, I know, but I really thought she’d be cool with it. It turns out I didn’t really know Bella that well because she was most deffo anything but cool with it.

“Well?” She asks, tapping her big black boot that she carries off with the daintiness of a ballerina. “What were you thinking?”

Ok, what was I thinking? I was thinking I just wanted to hang out with all my fab friends and have a grand ol’ time rocking out and maybe meet a cute popstar in the mix. Now, I was thinking that I might really rather like to run like crazy, go back home, dig out my ‘weird writer girl’ badge that I’d put away for safe keeping, and once again start wearing it with pride. I might now have pink hair, a pink ‘tude and the ability to strum three chords on the guitar, but I was obviously not cut out to be in an actual band. I should just stick to what I’m good at, making up worlds in my journal.

In my journal being in a girl group with my fabulous friends is all pink feather boas, pink glitter sparkles and well, a lot of pink fabulousness. It would not involve kicking imaginary bits of dust while I tried desperately hard to think of how I could make everything better, really, really quickly.

Running away was still my most desired option, but my pink, kicked-in Converse had other ideas. It’s like by some kind of hocus-pocus jiggery pokery, they’ve been sent by the pink thinkin’ police to re-adjust my ‘tude. Pink thinkers were not quitters. No matter how icky the sitch.