We were in the final countdown before the gig started. The hall was filling up, but we found some places four rows from the front. We sat in line, three families, seven people and more secrets than you could count, as the audience settled down for the performance.
The evening had not started well. And it was just about to get a whole lot worse.
We’re late, can you believe it? All that waiting around and hanging out and we all but miss the danged thing.
It’s what to wear that’s the problem. Crash has this thing about blending in. He’s been talking all week about us looking like real Brits and he’s been so busy fussing in front of the mirror at the hotel that we only just make it to the show.
But we’ve done a good job. The way we look, no one can tell that we’re anything but a nice young British couple checking out a school for their little kid.
All we have to do now is find out where Sam is.
I felt my mother squeeze my arm. With wide-eyed, wordless panic, she nodded in the direction of the door.
There, framed in the doorway and looking about as out of place as anyone could be, were Mr and Mrs Lopez. Crash was in this blazer yachtsman-type thing, but spoiled the effect by wearing dark gangster shades. Mrs Lopez, in a flowery skirt and big hat, looked like she had walked straight out of an old movie.
‘What are they doing here?’ I whispered. ‘They don’t even know that Sam’s at Bradbury Hill.’
More heads were turning as Crash and his wife made their way to a couple of spare seats in the third row.
‘It’s going to be all right.’ Dad stared at the stage, his face pale. ‘Sam’s a girl.’
‘Yeah, right,’ I muttered. ‘That’s just fine then.’
The lights were dimmed. Mrs Cartwright left her seat in the VIP row at the front of the hall and climbed the steps on to the stage. Talent Night was about to begin.
It is an evening that is all about the kids, but I like to make what I call my mark on the evening by welcoming visitors, saying a few words about the school, noting some of our recent achievements, then leaving it to the young performers.
Here’s the way a Carthorse speech goes. First she tells you what she’s going to say. Then she says it. Then she says it again, in slightly different words. Then, to finish off, she reminds you what she’s been saying. Once she gets to her feet with that big queen-of-the-heap smile on her face, you just know that you’re in for the long haul.
So I drifted off pretty quickly while she was giving us the usual message about how talented the kids were, how amazing and understanding the teachers were, how Bradbury Hill had just got better and better ever since she had arrived – prizes, grades, achievement, success – but I tuned back in when, glancing at a piece of paper in her hand, she said that there was a change to the programme.
‘Zia Khan, one of Steve Forresters’ stars of Year Eight – and I must say that Year Eight has been particularly impressive this term – will not now be singing solo but will be joined on stage by three other girls from her class in a band called…’
The Pandas?
We must have been in shock when, sitting in the classroom a few minutes before the gig started, we agreed to that name.
‘It’s part of a whole concept.’ Sam reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out a lighter, then an old cork. ‘Everyone’s going to notice my black eye, right?’
‘It’s kind of hard to miss,’ said Charley.
Sam flicked the lighter and held it beneath the cork. ‘So we turn it to our advantage,’ he said. After a few seconds, he held up the blackened tip of the cork. ‘We all have black eyes – like we’ve just come out of a fight.’
‘Er, am I missing something here?’ I said, trying to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. ‘Why exactly would we want to do that?’
‘It’s funny. It’s interesting. It solves the name problem.
It’s a statement.’
‘A statement that we’ve totally lost it,’ said Charley.
‘Why not?’ said Zia, who was tuning her guitar. ‘I’ve seen pictures of models in Paris with fake black eyes. I’ve heard that it’s really fashionable this year, the beaten-up look.’
‘The beaten-up look. Yeah, I think I’ve read something about that in Heat.’ I held out my hand. ‘OK, gimme the cork,’ I said.
For some reason, can’t think why, I remember very little of the first hour of the show. A couple of kids from Year Seven sawed away at violins. A four-piece band from the Lower Sixth stood on stage looking moody as they did a couple of cover versions of recent hits. A guy from the year above me went through a comic routine about parents, which seemed mostly to consist of him asking us, ‘What’s that all about, eh? Eh?’ A few inhabitants of the Planet Nerd from my year did a couple of African choir songs. In between each turn, the Carthorse lumbered on stage to introduce the next act.
I was in a semi-snooze when I heard the head make the announcement our little part of the audience had been waiting for. ‘And now, ladies and gentleman, it’s time for a bit of wildlife – and I mean wild life! – with the Pandas!’
Elena, Charley, Zia and then Sam shambled on to the stage. There was soot stuff on their arms and faces and Sam had torn the sleeve of his shirt. They looked like survivors from a bomb blast.
For a moment or two, a shocked silence hung in the air. What was going on here? Was it some kind of satire thing? Then, good old Mrs Sherman started clapping and going ‘Very good’. The audience laughed uneasily, and Zia struck the first chord of ‘Private Cloud’.
Something happened when Sam began to sing that night. A sort of shudder ran through the audience as if suddenly they were all caught up in the moment, snatched out of their mood of polite boredom and pulled in by the sound of Sam’s voice and Zia’s guitar.
‘They say – don’t let your heart rule your head, But I say – you’re gonna be a long time dead.’ So relaxed that he seemed almost to be having a conversation with himself, Sam reached out a hand as the music built to the chorus. ‘I feel my life slip like water through the fingers of my hand, And I’ll be high in the sky—’
But at that moment, as Zia harmonised the chorus, a problem became apparent. There was nothing else for the other two Pandas to do during the song except jiggle around in the background. Charley swayed about, looking like she was drunk or something while Elena, perhaps because by now no one had paid any attention to her for several seconds, went into a look-at-me dance routine.
The mood was broken. There was barely suppressed laughter from the audience. I looked down the row and caught Jake’s eye. He crossed his eyes and drew a finger across his throat.
I was impressed. I knew that Zia Khan had musical talent, but Sam Lopez was a revelation. That voice – angry yet strangely tender – had real quality. It was haunting, different.
I admit I was at something of a loss to understand the significance of why they were called the ‘Pandas’. Only later did I begin to understand the subtle message that they were putting over. The black eyes, the bruises – it was nothing less than a savage, teenage perspective of the problem of domestic violence.
Brilliant. I was chuffed to bits. Dead proud of my girls, I was.
The Pandas finished ‘Private Cloud’. During the applause, led by Mrs Sherman, who seemed about to explode with pride at her son’s girlfriend, I noticed that Sam was eyeing the audience.
He smiled at Jake and his father, at Tyrone and his mum, he winked at me. Then, I noticed something change and harden in his expression.
Sam gazed down at the third row. There, staring up at him, he saw the unmistakable, blazered figure of his dad, Mr Crash Lopez.
‘It’s the kid we saw round at the Burtons,’ I said.
‘She’s way taIented,’ said Ottoleen.
‘I guess,’ I said. ‘For a Canadian.’
We laughed at my joke and it was then that I noticed that the kid was still staring at us, kinda mean and hostile. For a nanosecond I wondered what her problem was. Then I thought nothing more of it.
There was this weird silence that filled the hall and seemed to go on for minutes as Sam eyeballed his dad while the other Pandas stood around looking awkward.
Were they going to sing another number? Was someone meant to be giving it some verbals between numbers? Or were they just cranking up the tension? Either way, it worked. There were murmurings in the audience, a bit of nervous laughter.
Mrs Cartwright, maybe sensing that something was going wrong with her precious Talent Night, stood up as if she were about to step on to the stage and introduce the next act.
Sam slowly turned his eyes towards her. ‘Hit it, Zed,’ he said into the microphone, and Zia struck the face of her guitar like she was something out of a heavy-metal band. It was a hard, banging beat – angrier and faster than the last song.
It was also very, very loud.
We had worked on the songs, but none of us had thought about how we should get from ‘Private Cloud’ to ‘Bad Girl’.
Looking back now, I can see that Sam’s broody staring act was better than any lame intro, but at the time we were all sweating with embarrassment and nerves. What the hell was Sam doing?
During the awkward silence I must have fiddled with the volume knob on my guitar because, when I played the opening chords, the noise almost blew us off the stage.
I was aware of two things – that the audience was looking up at us, wide-eyed and scared, and that there was no way that I could stop and start again.
So ‘Bad Girl’ was coming at them like a runaway train – and that was before Sam started singing.
A strange vibe had kicked in by now and everyone in the hall was aware of it.
Sam stepped forward a couple of paces, planted his feet a few inches apart as if he were squaring up for a fight, fixed his eyes a few feet over the audience’s heads and began to sing.
No, come to think of it, sing is the wrong word. It wasn’t a shout either. The sound that Sam made was something else, something beyond music and beyond the words that he sang, something that felt like pure, beautiful rage, something that had been gouged out of his soul with a rusty knife.
‘My momma says be pretty, girl
My poppa’s on my case.
Like, am I a doll or a member
Of the freakin’ human race?
Everyday they come on like
I’m the family disgrace.
Hey, Mummy, Hey, Daddy
Just get out of my face.’
Frankly, it was not what Talent Night was meant to be about, this bloodcurdling noise coming from the stage. I’m almost sure I heard the Lopez child say ‘freaking’. Was this a swear word? It sounded very much like one. I turned to Mr Brownlow, the town councillor who was on my right, and tried to apologise. Of course, he couldn’t hear a word I was saying.
We knew what was happening was different from rehearsals. This was a new Sam, a Sam that was lifting us, pulling the music along. It was scary but amazing.
Don’t ask me how the audience reacted during the song. I couldn’t take my eyes off Sam. I was mesmerised by him, and my guess is that everybody else was mesmerised too.
This was true rage, a musical version of what every kid in that place had felt at some time but most of us had never dared to say, let alone sing out loud, in public.
Fists clenched by his side, Sam hit the second verse.
‘Me, I’m just me
Not some crazy kind of creature
But when I go to school
I get hassle from the teacher
She says that when there’s trouble
She just knows I’m gonna feature
She’s, “Heaven knows, I try my best
But I just cannot what I call reach her”!’
Whoa, this was dangerous. Sam spat out the lines in a perfect, unmistakable imitation of Mrs Cartwright. A sort of unbelieving cheer came from the kids who knew just what was going on.
I was aware that at the end of the second verse a few heads turned in my direction. I smiled and kept tapping my hand on my leg in time with the beat. Clearly the girls were not referring to anyone in particular but to teachers utterly unlike those we have at Bradbury Hill – old-fashioned authority figures. I was not pleased by their general attitude, but decided to smile through it.
The joke on Carthorse seemed to snap the audience out of its trance. Suddenly, we were no longer afraid or embarrassed by what was happening on stage. We could enjoy it – for the first time in history, an act on Talent Night was telling it like it really was, rather than like parents and teachers would like it to be.
When the three girls came in on the chorus, shouting it at us, we started clapping in time to the beat.
‘Bad girl, bad girl.
With a bad kind of fame.
For being the baddest of the bad
Bad girl is my name.’
We had a choice to make. Either to sing the chorus in the tight, neat way that Zia had written it and we had practised it, or to follow Sam into whatever place he had gone.
We followed. The result may have sounded more like a football chant than a song, but it worked. By the end of the first chorus, the audience was going wild.
The Pandas were well into it now. Charley and Elena were doing their dance, Zia was going at her guitar like a mad axe-man. But the greater the mayhem all round him, the stiller Sam stood. It was funny but frightening, because no one – maybe not even Sam himself – knew how seriously he was taking it all.
‘The boys all try to hit on me
“Let’s go clubbin out tonight”
They tell me I’m a babe
I’m such a pretty sight.
But when we hit the High Street
They find out too right
This baby ain’t for dancin’
This baby wants to fight!’
Enough. Enough. I stood up, looking for the caretaker to switch off the sound, but then to my horror I realised that the audience had stood up too. They actually thought I was giving the girls a standing ovation.
I had no alternative but to go along with it, sway and clap with the rest of them, but I swore to myself that this would never ever be permitted to happen at a Bradbury Hill Talent Night again.
Hey, rock and roll, baby! I’m screaming at Crash that suddenly this is like the best gig since I caught the New York Dolls at CBGBs, but he’s still sitting down like Mr Straight from Straightville, Arizona, while all around him these kids are going totally wild.
So eventually Crash slowly gets to his feet, raises his big, muscular arms above his head and screams, ‘Yay, Bad Girls, go for it!’ and I’m laughing like I’m fit to bust.
I tell you, those kids are really good.
I was kind of chuffed by the way it was going. ‘Bad Girl’ was my song and, on its first performance, it was lifting the roof off. There was one more verse – the one about us all being bad girls coming good. Then there would be a chorus, replayed once; a shock staccato ending and we were out of there.
I hadn’t reckoned on any surprises from our lead singer. When we reached the last verse, Sam did something weird with the vocals – he went up a third as if harmonising with himself so that his voice was now high and strained and angry.
There was something else. He replaced my words with his.
I noticed a change in Sam. He seemed to relax as the song progressed. As they were singing one of the choruses he looked down at me squarely, then at Mum and Dad, and gave the merest hint of a smile. Then his eyes moved down the line and fixed on Crash Lopez. There they stayed until the song came to its spectacular end.
‘I’m a dawg, all you people
I’m danger on the prowl
On the street, in the heat
In the gutters mean and foul
Hear my bark, feel my bite
Hear my wolverine growl.
Smell my dawg-breath,
Daddy, And listen to me—’
And as the kid said ‘dog-breath, Daddy’, she pointed her finger straight at me. I was like, hey, what is this?
‘Hoooooooo—’
As Zia, Charley and Elena and some of the audience hit the ‘Bad girl, bad girl’ chorus, Sam’s voice soared up and up.
‘Ooooooooooooo—’
It was unlike anything I’ve heard – wilder than Scooby-Doo, spookier than the Hound of the Baskervilles, beyond the scariest wolf noise you ever heard. Now and then he took a quick breath, then carried on howling.
There was laughter at first. But when the Pandas reached the end of the chorus, they looked at one another and their uncertainty reached the audience. Now there was tension in the air. The clapping and chanting died down, Zia’s rhythm guitar faltered, then stopped.
Sam kept going. He took one more deep breath and hit an even higher note as if he were trying to push his voice to breaking point.
And suddenly I knew what was going to happen.
There was a sort of catch in Sam’s voice, a violent croaking in the throat. He hesitated, coughed, took a deep breath and—
Uh-oh.
Oh…my…God.
What the—?
It wasn’t a howl that came from Sam now but a roar – deep, throaty and unmistakably male.
There were mutterings, the sound of nervous laughter in the hall.
But Sam wasn’t finished. He walked to the front of the stage. Staring deep into the eyes of his father, he raised the microphone to his mouth and growled, slowly and deliberately in his brand-new, masculine voice, the words, ‘Bad guy is my name.’
‘It’s a boy.’ The word spread like a bush fire through the audience – ‘a boy…a guy…she’s a he…a boy.’
I glanced over at the head teacher, but, for the first time in living memory, she was completely lost for words, as stunned as the rest of us.
Somebody had to take control of the situation and at that moment I decided it had to be Elena Griffiths. We needed to get off stage somehow, so I stepped forward, took the microphone from Sam and said, ‘Thank you, everyone. We were the Pandas. Let’s hear it for guitarist Zia Khan and our lead singer—’
No.
No!
No, Elena!
‘—Sam Lopez!’
The audience was about to start applauding when there was this mighty roar from the third row.
‘THAT’S MY SON!’
A few yards away from me, Crash Lopez was blundering towards the stage, pushing past other members of the audience, pointing at Sam, bellowing out the truth.
Sam looked down at him and, for a moment, I saw an expression on his face that I had never ever seen before. It was one of fear.
He turned and made for the exit at the back of the stage.
As pandemonium broke out in the hall, I turned to my parents, who were staring, spooked and ashen, at the door through which Sam had just disappeared.
‘I think it’s time we did some explaining,’ I said.
It was what I call a crisis situation. After a hurried discussion with Mrs Sparks, the teacher coordinating Talent Night, I announced that the rest of the event was abandoned and that the remaining two acts would perform at our Christmas play.
The audience was dispersing, but I still had an irate American to deal with. My first reaction was that the man was delusional, but, when he produced a wallet with a number of brightly coloured credit cards, each bearing the name ‘Lopez’, I had to accept that there was the possibility of a family connection with the girl – who now turned out to be a boy – Sam Lopez.
I took the American couple and Mr and Mrs Burton to my study, leaving Matthew to sit outside.
There I told them in no uncertain terms that this was a family matter and that it was not for Bradbury Hill School to become involved in what was thoroughly what I call inappropriate.
‘In a what?’ goes Crash, standing in the middle of the principal’s study. She’s behind her desk looking like someone made a smell under her nose. The Burtons are sitting nearby, all nervous and pale and English.
‘Inappropriate,’ goes the starchy old bird, who’s looking kind of freaked now on account of Crash leaning on her desk, fists down, giving her the eyeball. ‘I do not wish the school to become involved in this issue.’
‘Oh, the school is involved, believe me, lady,’ says Crash, more quietly now. ‘When you have my son at your school, on stage, dressed up as a girl, you are most certainly involved.’ He points a finger. ‘You fetch my son right now, we take him back where he belongs and maybe, just maybe, I won’t tell the cops about this.’
Frankly, it seemed a sensible suggestion, even if the threatening tone was not something I welcomed. The last thing I needed, just when my career was going so well, was a scandal involving an American child who had been taken from his home and didn’t know whether he was a boy or a girl.
‘I’ll ask my secretary to fetch him,’ I said quietly, picking up the phone.
Suddenly David did something which I never would have expected. He stood up, placed a finger on the telephone’s receiver and said in a voice that was really quite manly, ‘No.’
Sam’s hooligan father continued staring at Mrs Cartwright, ‘Make the call, lady,’ he said.
‘No.’ My husband stood his ground. ‘We have been given responsibility over Sam and, if this is his father, he should take his claim to a court of law.’
Mr Lopez turned his head slowly so that his nose was almost touching David’s. ‘Maybe the kid should decide about that.’
‘Maybe he should,’ said David.
Mrs Cartwright looked at the two men, then down at her telephone, on which David was still holding his finger. Sighing, she stood up and went to the door. She opened it and said, ‘Matthew, would you be so kind as to fetch Sam Lopez?’
I heard Matthew saying, ‘Yes, Mrs Cartwright.’
The head teacher returned to her desk and sat down.
‘This is all very unfortunate,’ she said.
There was quite a crowd when I walked into the classroom. Jake and Tyrone, with Mr Smiley and Mrs Sherman, were there, so were Mr and Mrs Khan and a couple of the younger Khan children. Elena was with her mum, who was standing near to Mr and Mrs Johnson, Charley’s parents.
For the briefest second, I forgot about the whole Sam drama. Here they all were, mixing and chatting, not like parents on the one side, kids on the other, boys against girls, Sheds v Bitches, but just…families. Weird.
Then I saw Sam.
He was still in a skirt, but someone had lent him a white school shirt to put over his bare shoulders and his hair was hanging over his face in true hippy fashion. At that moment, he looked neither entirely boy nor girl – just sad, confused and lost.
‘They’re in Carthorse’s, office,’ I said to him. ‘They want to see you.’
Sam stood up. Zia muttered, ‘Good luck,’ as he made his way to the door, walking like a man going to his execution. He raised a weary hand in acknowledgement.
‘So much for Operation Samantha,’ he said, his voice hoarse, as we reached the corridor.
‘Yup,’ I said. ‘It looks like your girly days are over.’
‘I couldn’t help it,’ said Sam. ‘I saw him, sitting there, the big smile on his face, just like it used to be when we were all together. And I knew, in my gut and in my heart, that I had to stop running away. The moment had arrived. It was time to be me.’
‘You want to go back to your father?’
Sam shrugged. It seemed that he wasn’t in the mood for conversation. We had reached the door to the head’s study and, without knocking, he pushed his way in.
I hesitated for a moment, then followed.
Crash checks out who’s walked into the office and sees that the English boy Matthew is standing behind Sam. ‘Lose the kid,’ he says.
‘This involves Matthew as well,’ says Mrs Burton. ‘Sam?’ says the principal. ‘Do you want Matthew here or not?’
Sam has been staring at the ground like he’s looking for the answer to his problems in the pattern of the carpet. Now he looks up. ‘Sure I do,’ he says.
We tried to behave normally, chatting about this and that in the classroom. One of the parents – Tyrone’s mum – suggested that we might all go out for a pizza together, but there was no way that we could leave Sam and Matthew battling it out with Psycho Dad and his girlfriend in Carthorse’s study.
So, after a while, we drifted out to the school lobby and waited for them outside the head’s study.
I addressed the rather peculiar gathering that was now in my study. I explained that in no way was Bradbury Hill responsible for any family misunderstandings or conflicts that occurred outside school premises, but that I had agreed that it would be sensible if some kind of resolution was found so that, at the very least, the child Lopez knew who she (he) was going home with tonight.
In my coolest tone, I asked, ‘Would someone care to explain how I came to have an American child in my school who has no contact with his father and who has been disguised as a girl since the beginning of term?’
There was a beat of silence. Then Mum started talking. She told the whole story. The way she explained it, there was no great deal in what had happened. It was just one of those crazy family situations.
I’ve knocked around a bit in my time, but I swear to you I have never heard such a load of baloney in all my days.
‘Lemme get this straight, I spoke in my quiet, snake-about-to-strike tone. ‘You come over to my ex-wife’s funeral and, just because I happened not to be around at the time, you take away my son. Right? Out of his country. Away from his family. Am I missing something so far?’
Mrs Burton gave me the cold English look that I now knew so well. ‘It was my sister’s wish. She thought you were still in jail. She believed that we could give her son a sound and stable family background.’
‘Let me just remind you of one small detail.’ I spoke casually, then exploded. ‘He’s been dressed up in a god-dam skirt for the last three weeks! Is that your idea of a sound and stable family background?’
‘It’s plain dysfunctional is what it is,’ said Ottoleen. ‘You’ve probably messed that poor kid up for life. He won’t know if he’s Sam or’ – she hesitated for a moment – ‘Samette…Samine…Samma?’
The cream-puff-fink Burton looks at Ottoleen like she’s some kind of basket case. Then he turns to me. ‘Is Sam really more messed up than when he was living with Mr Lopez? Somehow I doubt it. And I have to ask whether Sam’s inheritance has anything to do with—’
I had heard enough. ‘He’s my kid,’ I hollered. ‘I’m taking him home.’
I thumped the desk. Hard.
The sound of Crash’s fist on the desk seemed to bring Sam out of his trance. For the first time since we walked into the office, he looked, direct and unblinking, at his father.
‘Do you remember the wall?’ he asked quietly.
‘Wall?’ Crash narrowed his eyes threateningly. ‘What are you talkin’ about?’
‘The wall where I saw you for the last time. The wall that changed my life.’
Crash glanced over at Mrs Cartwright. ‘I told you that putting the kid in drag would mess up his mind.’ He turned back to Sam. ‘We’ll talk about the old times later, son,’ he said, a hint of threat in his voice.
‘Tell us about the wall, Sam,’ said my father.
‘I had just turned five.’ said Sam, his eyes still fixed on Crash. ‘You had been taking me out on jobs for a few months already. You called me “Crash Junior”. You said I was one of the gang.’
‘Happy days,’ said Crash nervously.
‘Dare one ask what kind of job this was?’ asked Mrs Cartwright.
As if no one else was in the room except him and his father, Sam continued. ‘This job was special, you said. It was a chance to prove that I was a real tough guy, just like my daddy. All I had to do was to stand on a ledge outside a second-floor window where you put me. Then, after I had counted to a hundred, you wanted me to step out on to a wall that was overlooking the main drag, walk out a few steps and start screaming, just as loud as I could. All the folks down there would panic, right? No one would notice that, on the corner of the street, three guys were walking in to help themselves to a payroll bag as it was delivered to a shop.’
‘Help themselves?’ It seemed that Mrs Cartwright was beginning to understand what this was all about.
‘It was a good plan,’ said Sam. ‘After all, the wall was thirty feet above the concrete sidewalk. Seeing a small kid up there alone would be a pretty good diversion, right?’
‘Twenty-five feet, they said in court,’ Crash muttered.
‘But I blew it,’ said Sam. ‘I looked down and suddenly I felt dizzy. I really did panic. I screamed and screamed and then I pointed to you and called out to you again and again when I saw you pull in to the side of the street in the getaway car. Except you didn’t get away.’
There was silence in the office as we waited for Sam’s father to speak.
‘Poor Sam,’ my mother murmured.
We looked at Crash Lopez. Suddenly he was no longer this hard billiard ball of a guy. He rolled his shoulders uneasily. ‘It wasn’t your fault, kid,’ he said. ‘It was mine. I was young. You were scared of the wall, but I was scared too – scared of drowning in family life, losing my freedom, losing everything that mattered to me. Go and grab the world by the throat – that’s the Crash Lopez way.’
‘And that’s what you’re doing now,’ said Sam.
‘It’s not the money, I swear,’ said Crash. ‘I thought the million bucks was what mattered to me when I flew over here, but now I’ve seen you, I feel differently.’
‘What money?’ asked Mrs Cartwright. ‘Would someone kindly tell me what is going on here?
‘You never came back to see us,’ said Sam. ‘All my life, I’ve believed that I was the reason you ended up in jail.’
‘Listen, kid. Things were kinda complicated. There were people who wanted to see me real bad – people who did not have my best interests at heart, if you know what I mean. I didn’t want to get you and Galaxy involved.’
‘Bull,’ said Sam. ‘You were living your life’. A flicker of a glance took in Ottoleen: ‘Having fun. And you know what? I don’t blame you. Maybe I’ll do the same thing one day.’
Crash chuckled uneasily. ‘Chip off the old—’
‘You didn’t want me around. You only wanted me when I was useful. Recently I’ve discovered that not everyone’s like that.’
Crash shrugged uneasily. ‘Hey, I was young. I was out of my depth. I’ve changed, kid. I’ve got feelings deep down where it matters.’
‘Yeah?’ Sam smiled sadly. ‘I doubt if Crash Lopez will have real, true family feelings for as long as he lives.’
There was silence for a moment. Then, something very strange – even stranger than what was already happening – took place. A sort of weird police-siren-like wail came from Ottoleen.
‘He has got family feelings,’ she managed to say eventually. ‘He’s like this totally big-time father kind of guy.’
‘You weren’t there,’ said Sam.
Ottoleen glanced down at him. ‘I’m not talking about you, you little jerk,’ she snapped. ‘You’ve been nothing but trouble. We only wanted you back because of the cash. I’m talking about his real family.’
Everyone stared at her. ‘What exactly are you saying, Ottoleen?’ Crash asked.
‘Our baby.’ Ottoleen put a hand on her stomach. ‘Just promise me you’ll have family feelings towards our baby, Crash.’
‘Are you saying you’re pregnant?’
Ottoleen nodded and smiled gloopily through her tears. ‘I took the test yesterday. I didn’t know when to break it to you,’ she whispered. ‘All you could think about was this brat of yours.’
And Crash opened his arms and let his sobbing wife walk into a big, gentle bear hug.
‘Baby, baby, baby,’ he said. ‘I’m so proud of my little kitten.’
Ottoleen, face against Crash’s chest, was making a strange new noise.
‘Miew,’ she went. ‘Miew, mieeeeew.’
I looked across at Sam. He shook his head. In spite of the craziness and the stress, in spite of everything, we started laughing.
The noises that were coming from that office! Murmured conversation, then a bit of bawling and shouting, then quiet again, then a sort of high-pitched whine. I was agog to know what the hell was going on.
Then, just as we thought that this mad soap opera was going to last all night, the door to the head teacher’s study opened.
Sam and I stepped out first. There, to our amazement, was a small crowd, waiting for us in the school lobby.
For a second or two, there was silence as the two of us stood, framed by the doorway. Then I put an arm around Sam’s shoulder and we both smiled.
I guess that must have said it all, because suddenly they were all applauding like we were back in Talent Night and we had just completed some kind of brilliant performance.
Then, out of the crowd, this small figure rushed forward and threw her arms around Sam’s neck.
Yes! Oh yes!
All hell broke loose. The Lopezes came out of the study crying, the head was shouting to restore order, Mrs Khan was trying to pull Zia away from Sam, Mrs Sherman seemed to be having some kind of row with Tyrone, perhaps on account of his famous girlfriend having turned out to be a boy, Charley and Elena were standing with Jake and his dad, who was looking confused as they tried to talk him through precisely how all this had happened. It was going to take some explaining.
I stepped back and watched them for while. Across the lobby, my parents smiled. Mum gave me a double thumbs-up sign.
And, just for a couple of seconds, I almost lost it there and then. The whole scene became blurred, I felt this whole lump thing happening in my throat and a pricking around my eyes.
I cleared my throat, sniffed, squared my shoulders and walked towards them.
If this story was a Doors song, which would it be?
‘Strange Days’?
‘Ship of Fools’?
‘Take It As It Comes’?
‘Wild Child’?
You want my opinion, it would be a little number called ‘Break on Through to the Other Side’.
Mr and Mrs Lopez broke on through by becoming Mom and Pop to a little girl called Elizabeth, named after the queen of the country where she started her journey into the world. Crash is Tony these days. He’s the proprietor of My Private Cloud, a restaurant in downtown Santa Barbara.
Matthew, Elena, Tyrone, Charley and Jake broke on through to something which looks suspiciously like friendship. They discovered what some folks take a lifetime to learn – that there’s no point in fighting the difference between guys and girls. In fact, maybe it’s the difference that makes life kind of weird and interesting.
At least, sometimes. When it comes to Sam Lopez, he’s broken on through to the other side in his own way. Sometimes, just to mix things up a bit, he likes to go out as Samantha. Folks can be different even in one body, he had discovered. Summers he flies over to the States to see his dad and his stepfamily out on the coast. The rest of the year he’s living in London with his new gang, with the Burtons, with Zia, singing songs, living life out loud.
It may sound like a mess, but sometimes mess can be OK, mess can be fine. Sometimes mess is just another word for living your life as the real you, not someone else’s version of what they think you should be.
And, take it from me, that feels good.