Chapter #11 - enjoy!
"When I said I wanted to be famous, I wasn't imagining that it was gonna be for popping my pimples." Tori groaned, placing her head in her hands.
Jade smiled to herself. When Beck had forced her to sit with the others, she'd thought she'd be in for a rough hour, but so far it'd been excellent. Beck had paid for her food, Robbie and his annoying puppet were nowhere to be seen and Tori was upset. What more could she ask for?
"Why did you pop your pimple in front of Robbie's camera then?" Cat asked, innocently.
"I didn't know it was there." Tori half-shouted at Cat, who shrunk back.
"Don't yell at her." Jade snapped, shooting Tori a menacing look.
Tori looked away. She wasn't yet sure how to deal with Jade. They'd never really had a proper conversation; instead, their interactions had largely been limited to similar instances to what had just happened. Tori longed to return to the three Jade-less weeks that she had been graced with upon her entrance to the school, and cursed herself for taking them for granted. Not to mention the fact that, in those 21 days, she had been blissfully unaware that Beck was unavailable. But now she was forced to pretend that she didn't care that he had a girlfriend, even if that girlfriend was seemingly intolerable, and convince herself that she never liked him that much anyway, and certainly not now she knew of his predicament.
But Tori had never been a great liar. It was embarrassingly cliché, to be honest, how she'd managed to fall head over heels for 'the school hottie', who'd also happened to be the first boy she'd bumped into at the school. Was she really so starved of attention and romantic connections that that was what her life had come to? She'd been the one to break off her last relationship, for god's sake - she was entirely capable of being single.
So why did the thought of Beck being off-limits make her chest hurt?
She wanted to respect his relationship, she truly did. She'd never been the type to encroach on others' space or do whatever she had to to get what she wanted. At Sherwood, she had embarrassingly been what, at Hollywood Arts, was colloquially known as a 'shrugger', someone who would sit back and observe, rather than taking events by the scruff of their neck and moulding them to suit their destiny. But she wasn't a shrugger here, that was the thing. Prior to Jade's arrival, she had been beginning to really fit in with this group of friends and find a sense of comfort with them that allowed her to propose hang-outs and make risky jokes. Even her arrival here had proven that she was not someone who was going to sit in the background and let other people shine - no, she would be the one to make it shine.
And there was the moral dilemma. Coming to this school had seen Tori achieve rapid self-development, but this relied on a wealth of determination. If she simply gave up and sat back, would she lose all the progress she'd already made and fall away from the promise of the future? But at the same time, going for Beck when he had a girlfriend, had a child, would be wrong, right? Thinking about it made Tori's head hurt, so she tended to squish the thoughts into a little ball that she threw to the back of her mind, ignoring the irritation of it bouncing back and pinging off the sides of her brain, never truly going away. She was 16 at the end of the day - an age perpetuated with petty problems; she would sure they would lapse at some point.
"Did you see, Tori?"
"Hm?" Tori snapped back into focus, turning to Andre, who had said her name.
"The caption? Of the video? Did you see it?" He asked, tapping on his pearphone.
"Uh, no. What does it say?" She asked, peering curiously towards his pearphone.
In response, Andre turned the phone towards her, pointing at Robbie's creative captioning of a video of Tori popping her pimple at school. He had inadvertently filmed her in the background of a rather disturbing interview with Sinjin, and had then capitalised on the opportunity by posting it everywhere in a dramatic, rapid news style. Unfortunately for Tori, it had been a great success for the usually unpopular student, meaning that far more people than she'd like had seen her zit removal techniques.
Tori scowled as she noticed the line 'I thought Mount Etna was in Italy, but here it is on Tori's face!' underneath the unflattering clip.
"What an asshole." She added, shaking her head as Andre took his phone back.
"I think it's funny." Jade grinned, Beck rolling his eyes by her side. "What? It's creative."
"When have you ever complimented Robbie before?" Beck asked.
"I compliment him sometimes." Jade shrugged. "Last week I told him he didn't smell as weird as usual."
Beck shook his head but said nothing. Tori wasn't sure if she was happy that he'd somewhat stuck up for her or disappointed that he'd barely challenged Jade.
"I don't like it when Robbie's mean. It's weird - usually it's only Rex." Cat pouted.
"Don't worry Cat, he's made his little joke and saved his Slap page, but it's Robbie." Jade laughed. "He won't have any funny ideas left. By tomorrow, his stupid Robarazzi page will be forgotten about."
It turned out that Robbie actually did have a few more funny ideas. And not only that, he also had a hell of a lot of support. By the end of the week, flanked by a bunch of ninth graders, he had managed to create a popular, flourishing news station that unfortunately focused mainly on the mishaps of his friends. And that was when his stories were true; by Thursday, he had begun to branch out into the completely fabricated, beginning with Andre's condiment obsession after the musician had asked for an extra ketchup packet at lunch.
"Man, if one more person asks me if I have a ketchup problem I'm gonna turn them into ketchup." Andre grumbled, pushing his noticeably sauceless burger around its container.
"Ooh, you could use my sauce maker from Sky Store!" Cat exclaimed, pulling a clunky plastic contraption from her bag. The table groaned but, unfazed, she continued. "Look, you just add the ingredients here." She began, pouring an unlabelled sachet and some white powder into the top of the machine. "Aaand here you go." She finished, pulling a plastic jar of purplish liquid from the bottom of the device and pouring it over Andre's burger.
He turned to her exasperatedly, but she continued to smile, so he sighed and bit into the burger.
"Agh! What's in this?" He cried, gagging on the bite he'd taken.
"Cornstarch and beet juice!" Cat declared happily, as the table's inhabitants drew back in disgust.
"That's disgusting, Cat." Jade informed her friend, whose face faltered for a second, before brightening up again.
"I like it though." She beamed.
"Of course you do." Jade rolled her eyes.
"Hey, don't let Robbie see that or he'll put on a segment about how you're addicted to beets or something." Beck warned Cat, who hastily began dismantling the device.
"He's already done one about her Sky Store purchases." Jade informed her boyfriend. "Although, I can't say I approve of them either. How much have you spent so far?" She asked, turning to Cat.
"Did everyone see that video he put up of Tori falling over?" Cat quipped hastily, changing the subject. "That was so mean."
"Yeah, it hurt too." Tori complained, rubbing the band-aid on her arm where she'd grazed it the previous day.
"I thought you might've enjoyed the trip, Vega." Jade smirked. "It's always nice to get away, isn't it?"
Tori dug her nails into her palm. How Jade constantly got away with such bitchy comments, she didn't know. Beck surely had the patience of a saint to be dealing with that all the time.
"Yeah, well, I heard you and Beck are breaking up. Any thoughts on that?" Tori snapped back. A low blow, even she would admit, and not a particularly creative one either. But Jade had to learn that Tori could give as well as take.
Jade's smile vanished and was just as quickly replaced by a snarl, although Tori barely had time to register this before the girl came lunging towards her.
"Woahhh." Exclaimed Beck, grabbing his girlfriend by the waist and pulling her back, as Tori flinched backwards. "Hey, hey, chill." He said soothingly, as Jade continued to glare at Tori.
"Don't tell me to chill." She spat towards Beck. "And you should shut your mouth about our relationship and get one of your own to focus on." She added, spouting her vitriol towards Tori this time.
"Calm down, both of you. Look what Robbie's stupid Robarazzi is doing to us." Andre grimaced.
"Yeah, there's no point getting angry over something that we all know isn't true." Beck added, emphatically directing the last bit towards Jade, as if trying to convince her that he also held that belief.
"I would rather your little fangirls didn't think it was true." Jade grumbled. The girls at Hollywood Arts, as obsessive as they were, barely needed a cue to harass Beck, and Robbie's rumours didn't help the burning insecurities that arose within Jade when she saw her boyfriend with other girls.
Before Beck could reply, there was a movement behind him and the atmosphere at the table shifted.
"Hey guys, watcha talking about?"
Each member of the table swivelled round to peer at Robbie incredulously. All week, he had sat with his ninth grade cronies as they brainstormed new ways to humiliate his friends, and now he wanted to sit with them?
"How your Robarazzi thing is a piece of shit." Jade spat.
Robbie seemed shocked by this comment. "What? It's really popular."
"We don't care that it's popular. It's mean and we don't want to be a part of it." Tori explained.
"But you told me to write about the people of Hollywood Arts and the people love it!" Robbie replied. "It's getting thousands of views. Why would I stop it now?"
"Because we're your friends and you're humiliating us with your stupid lies." Andre responded harshly.
Robbie sat back, taking in this new information. "Well, I'm sorry you guys, but I can't stop doing this at the height of its success just because it's ruffling a few feathers."
"Well then we don't wanna be your friends." Cat complained.
"Yeah. We're gonna go eat lunch somewhere else." Andre added, standing up.
The other four joined him, mumbling in agreement and picking up their lunch trays. Robbie remained seated as his friends walked off to find another table.
"Well, I don't need them." He said to Rex, who laughed in response.
"Yeah, it's not your fault they keep embarrassing themselves." The puppet replied. "You just happen to catch it on tape."
Robbie nodded in agreement.
"Oh, hey, I forgot something." Jade said, walking back over to the table. Robbie looked up to acknowledge her, only to get a face full of mayonnaise. He gasped as the thick liquid dripped off his glasses and hastily wiped it away. When he could finally see again, Jade had gone, but her destruction (his lunch now decorating the Asphalt cafe floor) remained visible.
"Must be cramps." Robbie muttered to his puppet, turning to see that his companion also had a face full of mayonnaise. He groaned - time to get the baby wipes out.
Tori had been thinking that her evening was already on the rough side and was unlikely to get worse, when the doorbell rang. Having been photographed by ninth-graders with her armpits caked in depilatory cream, she assumed that she'd probably had the worst of whatever the universe was going to send her way that day.
But when she opened the door to see a particularly angry-looking Jade West on her doorstep, she began to second-guess that assumption.
"What the fuck is wrong with you, Vega? Why would you tell Robbie of all people to make a blog about the kids at Hollywood Arts? He has zero boundaries!" Jade yelled, marching up to Tori and standing so close that the latter girl could feel the former's breath upon her skin.
Tori gulped. "I didn't tell him to invade our privacy!" She desperately explained.
"It's Robbie - of course he was going to invade our privacy!" Jade half-shouted, half-groaned. "Ugh, you're so braindead!"
"Hey, what gives you the right to come into my house and insult me? Why don't you go to Robbie's house instead?" Tori retorted defiantly, though she had to admit she was a little scared of the dark girl.
"Because none of this would've happened if it weren't for you and your incessant need to insert yourself into our group and act like you know us. You don't know Robbie so you convinced him to make this stupid blog and now look what's happened!" Jade spat. "And for the record, I've already been to his house. He wasn't there."
"Insert myself into your group? They're my friends just as much as they're yours Jade. Whilst you were sitting at home for three weeks, I was talking to them and making friends and being invited places. That is not inserting myself into anything! God, are you that insecure about your relationship that Robbie saying you might break up makes you come around here screaming at me?"
Jade's eyes looked like they were about to pop out of their sockets. "I thought I told you to shut your mouth about my relationship! And this has nothing to do with that! Your actions are putting my son in danger so you better sort it out, Vega, because I don't joke around when it comes to him."
"What are you talking about?" Tori asked, confused. "What does any of this have to do with your son?"
"Ugh, when's the last time you checked the Slap?" Jade asked.
"I don't know. Maybe lunchtime?" Tori shrugged.
"Look at Robbie's page. Now." Jade ordered, and Tori obliged, navigating to her friend's page. She noticed that a new Robarazzi video had been posted around half an hour previously, and so she clicked on it.
"Welcome to 'Robarazzi' - starring Robbie Shapiro." Blared out of the screen with accompanying eccentric graphics. Tori struggled against rolling her eyes as her nerdy friend flailed his limbs whilst selling the premise of the show.
"Coming up on Robarazzi - are Beck and Jade fighting over custody of their baby?"
The camera cut from the edited title page to a landscape shot of Beck and Jade sat a few meters apart on a stretch of grass. The footage had clearly been taken without their knowledge, from an awkward angle and with the top of a bush in the bottom of the frame. It was so poor that it took Tori a moment to notice Toby squirming on the floor in between his parents.
"I think you should take him." Jade spoke in the video, gesturing towards the baby.
"Really? You don't wanna?" Beck asked, surprised.
"Yeah, I think he'll be better with you." Jade nodded.
"You think?" Beck continued, seemingly stunned at her decision.
Jade nodded again. "You're good at calming him down." She explained. "And, honestly, I don't wanna see him."
Beck nodded understandingly. "I thought not." He said, shaking a toy above Toby's head and smiling as the baby reached up to grab it.
Then, the video cut back to Robbie.
"Looks like Jade's had enough!" He laughed. "Let's be honest folks, we all saw it coming." He added, to a rapturous response from the Robarazzi newsroom. "More to come next time on Robarazzi."
The clip cut out and Tori looked up at Jade who, though evidently wasn't witnessing the video for the first time, was seemingly reignited by its content.
"You see what kind of shit he's posting?" She hissed. "And not just of us - of Toby too. Do you know how many pedophiles there are on the internet, Vega?"
Tori was stunned by this line of questioning and stuttered, unable to think of an answer.
"No, you don't." Jade continued, choosing to keep her question rhetorical. "No one does. No one knows who they are, how many of them there are, nothing, because they keep themselves hidden and access all corners of the web and because of you there is a video of my child on there where they can access it!" She shouted almost hysterically, clearly losing composure. "I don't like you and I wish you never came to my school, but now you're here you better sort yourself out because if one hair on my son's head is touched because of you I will personally rip you to fucking pieces."
Tori took a sharp intake of breath at the threat. "Look, Jade, I-"
"Just stop talking. Nothing you say is helpful. Just get that video and Robarazzi offline. You started this shitshow, you end it."
The sound of footsteps echoed behind Tori and she was relieved to see her mother pacing down the steps. Granted, her police officer father and his handcuffs might've been more appreciated against the force that was Jade West, but at this point Tori thought that any kind of backup would do.
"What's going on down here? I heard shouting." Holly Vega asked, surveying the situation, her eyes widening as they locked on Jade.
"Nothing. Jade's just leaving." Tori replied, using the opportunity to force Jade out of the door.
"Is she threatening you, Tori? Her father is a cop, you know. I think you should go home and look after your baby instead of threatening my daughter." Holly called out towards Jade.
"Maybe if you focused less on my parenting and more on your own, then your daughter might be less of a fuck-up." Jade retaliated, heading towards the door. "And that's applicable to both, by the way."
"Right, that is, don't you-" Holly began, marching towards Jade, but she had already stormed out, slamming the door forcefully behind her. Shocked, Holly swivelled around to look at her daughter.
"Please say she's not one of your new friends." Holly begged.
"No, believe me, she's not."
"Thank god." Holly replied, shaking her head. "She's awful."
"Yeah." Tori agreed, sadly. "She's the worst."