Zak: I hadn’t wanted to go, but now I didn’t want to leave.
Pea: I mean, I knew he was leaving. I thought about films I’d watched, where one person would ask the other to stay. Thought about how little control I had over my own life. When they were going back to the hotel, he asked if I’d meet him for a walk later.
Danny: I don’t know about you but I am right back in my teenage years, feeling all that incredible longing and heartache.
Alex: When they’d gone, Pea and I went up to her bedroom and I told her to tell me everything. Every last detail. But she was sort of coy about it. She kept saying that it felt like something really special and she felt like talking about it would take the shine off or something. I asked her whether she knew what a big deal this was, her being with AJ Silver’s brother. She said they weren’t together and reminded me that he lived in LA. I went home in the end. Sometimes she got like that and there was really no talking to her.
Pea: I was nervous about telling Mum and Dad I was meeting Zak again. I went downstairs. They were sitting at the kitchentable, heads together, no doubt talking about how the visit had gone. I said I was going to go out for a walk in a bit. I was hoping they’d just assume I meant with Alex, but Mum must have got the scent of something suspicious and she asked straight out if I was seeing Zak again. I said I was. Dad smiled, said he couldn’t have come up with it himself but a romance was just the thing to make sure they chose us. Mum gave him a hard stare for that. She asked where we were going. I think she was worried we were going to go back to his hotel. I panicked a bit at the thought of that. Kissing was one thing, but I wasn’t sure I was ready for anything else. And Zak was three years older, and he looked likethat, so he was bound to have loads more experience than me. If I’d had a mobile phone back then, I might well have called the whole thing off, because of nerves. But I’d said I would meet him and I knew Dad would make sure I did. If a romance was enough to seal the deal, a no-show might be enough to break it.
Zak: I wanted to ask her to come up to my hotel room and lie on the bed with her with an earphone each and listen to music. And yes, of course I wanted to kiss her again. But I didn’t know how she’d react to any of that, so we walked, as planned. I’m not sure whether it was something to do with walking and not looking at her as I spoke, but I found myself really opening up to her. I told her all about how AJ getting into music had been cool at first, but how it had taken on a life of its own and been a big factor in my parents’ divorce. Dad had wanted AJ and me to be normal kids, but Mum was adamant that AJ was destined for greatness, and once he became a star, she was adamant that she’d been right all along. After we moved to LA, everything was about AJ and his career. I sometimes wished I’d stayed in Atlanta with Dad. Pea just listened. Sometimes, people try to tell you about things they’ve been through that are similar, but she didn’t do that. I think we both knew that the turns my life had taken werepretty extreme. She just let me pour it all out, and said it must be hard. And just that acknowledgement, that his success had taken a toll on me, was all I needed, I think. I was so grateful for that. I wanted to hold her hand, but she kept reaching up to tuck her hair behind her ear. One time, when she did it, I grabbed it and wrapped it in mine, and when I snuck a glance at her, she looked happy.
Pea: When we’d done a loop of the town centre, walked along the side of the river for a bit and seen most of what the town had to offer, I led us back to his hotel. He hadn’t kissed me, but we’d held hands for some of the walk and it had felt so natural. I wondered whether he might ask me to go to his room with him, and what I would say if he did.
Zak: We just stood there outside the hotel door for a minute or so. I was kicking at the ground with the toe of my sneaker. I was nervous, man. I was so young, and we’d only just met, but I had this feeling that this girl was it for me. And she lived on a different continent.
Pea: I just blurted it out into the silence in the end. Asked whether he thought they would choose us.
Zak: I said I would do everything in my power to make sure this was where we came for AJ’s tour.
Pea: I believed him. It felt like it was really something, this thing between us. I went up on my tiptoes and put my hands on the sides of his face, the way he’d done to me the night before, and I kissed him. His stubble was scratchy and his lips were soft. I felt like I would do anything for him in that moment. When he pulled away, he grabbed my hand and pulled me behind him through the door. I couldn’t look at him in the lift as we wentpast floors two, and three, and four. And then we were out in the hallway again and he was opening the key to a room and all I could see in there was this huge bed.
Zak: I was very conscious of the fact that she was fifteen. I just wanted to keep on kissing her. And not in the street, where everyone could see. But she was so nervous that her hands were shaking when I took them in mine. I said there was no pressure, that we weren’t going to do anything she didn’t want to do, and then I purposely didn’t kiss her, so she’d believe what I was saying. I sat down on the bed, reached onto the bedside table for my Discman and CDs, and handed them to her to flick through. She chose Dinosaur Jr, and I handed her one of the earphones and we lay down, side by side. There was always something so powerful about listening to an album with someone in silence.
Pea: I liked the music, but I liked kissing him more. I was painfully aware that our time was short and we were wasting it. It seemed impossible that I’d spent all those days and months and years not touching him, not even knowing he existed. Would we keep in touch? Would he give me his address? He had mine, of course. We were on the last song when the phone rang and Zak leaned across me to get to it. I couldn’t hear the person on the other end, but I saw his reaction. When he hung up, he said my parents were in the lobby and they were pissed. I knew, then, that this was my last opportunity to kiss him, possibly ever, so I did. He wasn’t expecting it, but he kissed me back, just for a minute or so, and then he pulled away and said we had to go down to the lobby. I said that we call it reception, and he laughed and said he didn’t care what we called it, he cared that my parents thought he was up here defiling their daughter.
Zak: We must have looked sheepish as hell, emerging from that elevator, even though we hadn’t been doing anything. Johndidn’t say anything, but Cathy asked me if I knew that Pea was only fifteen years old. I put both my hands up in surrender and said that there had been nothing going on in my room. Cathy laughed at that.
Pea: I said he was right, we’d just been listening to music, but Mum was really wound up. Did the whole ‘Do you think we were born yesterday?’ thing. I looked at Dad. Because in truth, he’s the one I would have expected to get upset about something like this, but he was hanging back, quiet. And that’s when I realised that the AJ Silver deal meant more to him than my innocence did. That he wasn’t prepared to get aggro with Zak, in case it ruined the whole thing.
Cathy: Maggie appeared at some point, and she calmed me down. I was so angry that John wasn’t backing me up. What father doesn’t care that their fifteen-year-old daughter is spending time in a hotel room with an eighteen-year-old boy?
John: I believed them, that’s all. Pea was a sensible girl. If she said they were just listening to music, then they were just listening to music.
Maggie: I was in my pyjamas when I got a call from the lobby saying there was some trouble with Zak. I pulled on my jeans and a vest top and went down there to find Cathy screaming at Zak and Pea. I told Zak to go upstairs and let me deal with it and Pea looked like she was going to cry.
Pea: We didn’t get to say goodbye. I appreciated Maggie trying to calm things down, but in the months that followed, I replayed that night over and over and never got over the fact that we didn’t get a goodbye kiss or even a hug.
Zak: I didn’t want to go, but Maggie was in charge. I said goodbye to Pea without getting any closer to her and she bit her lip to stop herself from crying. I went back to my room, put my earphones in and turned the music up as loud as it would go. I didn’t want to talk to Maggie about this afterwards. We had the whole journey home for that.
Cathy: Maggie kept saying that Zak was a good kid, and that she was sorry. We left in the end. There was nothing else to say and John was still doing a great impression of a mime artist, so I took hold of Pea’s arm and marched out. As soon as we were on the pavement outside, she pulled away. She didn’t talk to us on the walk home, and when we got to the house, she went straight up the stairs. What killed me was that she didn’t seem angry, just desperately sad. And I remembered how it all felt, at that age. I lay awake that night wishing she could just have a crush on a boy at school, like everyone else.
John: I had no idea whether we’d blown the whole thing. No idea. I opened a beer when we got home and took it into the lounge, put the TV on. I chose something I knew Cathy wouldn’t like. It was petty. Pea had stormed upstairs, and Sebastian was getting ready for bed. It was a quiet house that night.
Danny: So that’s how the visit ended. Lots of tension and lust in the air. Life for the Hunters went back to normal while they waited to hear the verdict.
Pea: God, the wait. It had all ended so abruptly and none of us knew where we stood. Dad was wound so tightly for weeks.
Cathy: We didn’t hear anything for a while. You have to remember, email and mobile phones were still in their infancy, so there was no way of sending a quick message. I thoughtMaggie might phone, a day or two after they left, and at least tell us when we could expect to hear from them with an answer, but nothing. John was awful to live with.
John: I was tense, yes. Who wouldn’t be? This was make or break for us.
Pea: I didn’t care about the money. I only cared about seeing Zak again. And everyone at school kept asking and asking about it. Shane Lambert had stayed true to his word and was trying to make my life difficult at every opportunity. In Science, he’d knock my test tube onto the floor and I’d have to get a dustpan and brush to clear up the broken glass. In PE, he’d call across from where the boys were playing football to where us girls were playing netball. Just little jibes, nothing that could get him in too much trouble. Once, when he knew I had Home Ec after lunch, he snuck into my things and cracked the egg I’d brought in for making scones all over my other ingredients. I only talked to Alex about it. I didn’t tell anyone at home. What would have been the point?
Cathy: Problems at school? First I’ve heard of it. She was definitely down in the dumps for a while after that visit, but I thought she was just mooning over Zak.
Sebastian: God, it was tiresome. Everyone on tenterhooks. Every time the phone rang, they’d all jump. And it went on for so long.
John: It was about six weeks, I think.
