Generation Next (7 page)

“My idea is to have a multi-faceted platform with reviews of gigs, music, sport and stuff that interests people our age,” I said, while we all huddled around Ava's MacBook Pro. “Plus we would feature the bands and artists that you don't get on all the big TV chat shows and aim it specifically at the fans, encouraging them to send questions and get involved right from the start.”

“So is it a website or a TV channel or what?” Sai asked.

“There's no reason why it can't be both,” I said.

“So we would be like curators as well as creators,” Ava said thoughtfully.

It was hard to take Ava seriously while she was wearing a gray beanie hat emblazoned with the slogan “You Can't Sit With Us,” but I did my best.

“Exactly. It would be like pulling together all the things we love about YouTube, Buzzfeed, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but mostly aimed at music with a bit of sport and some other stuff thrown in. Look, it's not going to be dead easy or anything, but I think we can do it. We're all smart enough, aren't we?”

I waited for a reaction while they looked back at me. You could feel the excitement in the air, but it was like nobody wanted to say anything in case the bubble burst. In the end, Sai was the first to speak.

“So could we have forums and chat pages for people to interact?”

“Yeah, maybe. And possibly some celebrity interviews further down the line if we're lucky, but on our terms and guided by what our viewers want,” I said.

“It sounds amazing,” Austin said, just as Ava got up and started pacing the room.

“I have a question,” she said, spinning on the heel of her boot to face me. “You said celebrity interviews. How the hell does a bunch of school kids get to interview celebrities? Why would they be interested in us?”

“And what about getting the proper rights to play music and all that stuff? That's a whole other can of worms,” Austin said.

“Look, it's not fully formed yet,” I said, “but we start small. Get in with some local bands and artists who need extra promo for their gigs, YouTubers, people we know who are doing cool or interesting things, you know? As for music rights, let's not run before we can walk, dudes.”

Ava started pacing again.

“I still don't see how we're going to win these people over and get them on side. I mean, what have we got to offer them? Sure, we're all smart, but none of us are exactly . . . I mean we're all . . .”

“What?” Austin snapped, standing up and following her around the room. “Are you saying that none of us are confident enough to do it, is that it?”

Ava shrugged.

“Look, Austin, we're all very smart behind a screen, but as personalities in front of a camera, I don't know.”

Austin looked to me for back-up, and I knew it was the right time to reveal the ace up my sleeve.

“I think Ava might be right,” I said, with a nervous half-smile. “Maybe none of us are confident enough to do the on-camera stuff, but I've got an idea, a secret weapon to combat that.”

“Oh really, and what's that?” Sai said.

By this time we were all standing in the middle of the room and you could have sliced through the atmosphere with a chopstick.

“Not what,
who
,” I said.

I watched as a look of confusion spread across their faces. Then I walked over to the door and up the cellar stairs, descending again after a few seconds.

“Friends, meet the face of our new venture. Ella Foster.”

Ella jumped down the last step and did a comedy curtsy.

“Hey, geeks!”

Ava was clearly unimpressed.

“You've got to be kidding me. What the hell do we need her for? No offense, Ella, I actually like you.”

“Cheers, Ava, I like you too.”

“No, I mean, even though you're sort of a popular, I think you're reasonably cool. It's just—”

“Hang on a minute, Ava,” I interrupted. “Look, I've been working with Ella for the last week on our media project, and she is an utter natural in front of a camera, she really is.”

“Why thank you, kind sir.” Ella smiled. Then she turned to the group. “Look guys, I can do this, I know I can.”

Austin pulled me over to the sofa, muttering something about having a word in private.

“Look, J. If we're all going to work on this, whatever
this
is, it's got to be serious and we've all got to be dedicated. Before we start discussing the pros and cons of inviting Ella into the team, I need to know. Are you bringing her in just because you want to . . .”

“Want to what?” I laughed.

“You know what I'm saying,” he said, grinning.

“Mate, we're a long way from anything like that. We're just friends, all right?”

“If you say so . . .”

I ignored Austin and walked back into the center of the room, holding court once more.

“Look, guys, the reason you sought me out is because you thought I had something to offer the team, right?”

Everyone nodded.

“Well, if you want me to get involved, then this is what I think we should do. I think it could be really sweet, but I also think that Ella needs to be a part of it. Trust me.”

“We do trust you, don't we?” Sai piped up.

Austin and Ava eyed one another, still unsure.

“Well, there's one more thing that even Jack doesn't know about yet,” Ella said, looking mighty pleased with herself. “And if it doesn't persuade you that I'll be an asset, then I'll get my coat.” She pulled a small piece of paper out of her pocket, like a magician with a hat and a rabbit—well, if the magician was stunningly beautiful and wearing skin-tight jeans.

“What's that?” I said, grabbing at the paper.

Ella whipped it away fast, waving it in the air under our noses.

“This is my little piece of insurance,” she said.

“I knew it, she's going to blackmail us,” Sai said, but Austin managed to snatch the paper out of Ella's hand.

“Look, if it's those pictures that my ex put on Facebook last summer of me in my underpants eating an ice cream, everyone's already seen them.”

“He's right, Ella,” Ava chipped in. “The lingering memory of those tighty whiteys gave me the horrors for weeks.”

“It's just a phone number,” Austin said, glaring at the paper.

Ella snatched it back.

“It's not just any old phone number. It's the phone number of a man who may or may not be the manager of a certain musical act who may or may not be called The Gloves who may or may not have agreed to let me interview them while they're still in town.”

“I'm confused,” Sai said.

“Are you fricking kidding me?” I said. “The Gloves have agreed to let you interview them?”

“My dad oversees their management company's bank accounts,” Ella said. “He's even met them once or twice. All we have to do is organize a convenient time to shoot the piece. I just thought it might be a great way to start your little venture.”

“
Our
little venture,” Austin said, putting his arm around Ella. “Welcome to the team!”

“Why thanks, Austin,” Ella said.

I was suddenly seized with the urge to grab and kiss her, but—you guessed it—my nerves got the better of me, so I turned my attention to the rest of the team instead.

“OK! So are we all agreed that this is what we intend to put our spare time and effort into from here on in: a multi-platform website incorporating its own TV channel, focusing mainly on music, but also sport and culture relevant to our generation, the next generation?”

There was a resounding “YES!” from the group, and then a burst of ecstatic laughter.

“Right, we need to bloody well drink to this,” Austin said, grabbing five cans of Diet Coke from the mini-fridge
and throwing them to us. He shook his can and yanked the ring off, sending the fizzy liquid inside shooting up like a fountain. We all followed suit, covering ourselves in froth like Grand Prix winners.

With foam dripping off the front of her beanie hat, Ava held her can up high in front of her.

“OK, people! Let's toast us, then. Here's to the next generation, right? Generation . . . Next!”

Over the next six weeks, I spent every moment when I wasn't either asleep or studying for my exams holed up in Austin's cellar—sorry HQ—along with Sai, Austin, Ava and Austin's little brother Miles, who was a gold mine of information and knew exactly where to find all the coolest and most influential sites out there. I'm not going to bore you with a load of overly technical jargon, nor am I going to wax lyrical about the weeks of programming, researching, designing and generally slogging our guts out over hot laptops, but about a month later, we were just about ready to unveil our brand-new website, which we'd unanimously agreed to christen . . . GenNext.

Actually, the time flew past for me, especially on the evenings when Ella was around. As I'd predicted, she worked brilliantly alongside the four of us, and it didn't take me long to realize that although she didn't have the programming and tech skills that the rest of us did, she
certainly wasn't short of ideas, and was just as amazing behind a camera as she was in front of it.

Everyone rose to the occasion during that month: Sai's layouts and designs for how the site was going to look were spectacular, and then Austin would take over, finding ingenious ways to make it all work. In fact whatever ideas I threw at them, however tricky or convoluted, Austin and Sai seemed to be able to make them fly. Sai also came up with a brilliant logo for the site, which got a unanimous thumbs-up from the team.

Meanwhile, I tried to keep myself involved in every aspect of GenNext's development, stalking around HQ and piloting the proceedings, laughing, shouting and waving my arms around like some insane orchestra conductor.

When it came to filming and directing the content, that was where the girls shone. The night we all took a train to London and stood outside Wembley Park tube station in the pouring rain till midnight, Ella was a total star. As drunk, excited fans poured out of the much-talked-about Years and Years gig, we grabbed as many of them as we could for on-the-spot video reviews and comments, and although
she was soaking wet and completely knackered, Ella knew exactly where to position herself, who to target, where to get the best shots and which questions to ask, and drenched or not, she looked utterly stunning doing it. Afterward, Ava sat up all night reviewing the footage, editing the interviews and searching out the funniest and most mischievous comments, just so she could bring it into school the next day to show us the results. Then she fell asleep and snored loudly through her history class—now that's dedication.

I guess when you're living in people's pockets like that, you get to know them pretty well, and what I knew was that this was a bunch of good guys. Call them what you like: geeks, nerds, whatever. They'd all known one another for years, yet they'd accepted me into their group and that meant a lot. They were a great team; they were
my
team. They were my friends.

Some nights I'd watch Austin work while I crammed in extra revision—we often revised and worked on GenNext at the same time, swapping shifts. Austin'd be hammering away at his keyboard, excitement and enthusiasm burning away in his eyes, then he'd turn around and do this weird crooked smile he does, like he knew we were on to something amazing. Other nights I'd be so tired I'd end up dozing off, propped up on the sofa, and would wake to find Ava curled up next to me, fast asleep with her head on my lap, a massive history textbook lying open over her feet like a cushion. Sai was the one who kept the jokes coming while we worked. With his blunt, slightly twisted sense of humor, he kept everyone sane when things didn't
work or went wrong, which to be fair was almost every day. And then there was Ella. What more can I say about her apart from the fact that the more time we spent together, the harder I fell for her. Even when we weren't hanging out, she made her presence felt, firing silly videos at me over Snapchat and drawing me into extended WhatsApp chats whenever she needed a bit of a break from revision, the other major thing zapping our brain power.

I guess it goes without saying that the five of us were very proud when the first version of GenNext was almost ready to go live, even though it was only the bare bones at first: lots of “check back for this page next week” and “coming soon”—you know the vibe. Still, we'd ultimately created a virtual space where people could watch videos and reviews of gigs, plus find recommendations for upcoming shows, music, clubs and so much more. Now we just had to pass the word around and sit tight until it went live.

Our ace in the hole was our video interview with The Gloves, which couldn't have gone better—actually, we killed it. The band were very cool and gave us a ton of time, despite the fact that we filmed them answering questions while they were climbing up, swinging from and jumping off various things in the local adventure playground. Yeah, I know, it sounds weird, but this was my bright idea as an alternative to all the dry, coma-inducing music interviews I'd had to sit through while I was researching the website. The thing is, the band loved it, and Ella did an amazing job of coming up with some genuinely funny, savvy questions, which they were happy to answer even while careering down a thirty-foot zip wire. Wren, the band's singer, who I'd never once seen smile in an interview, laughed the whole time.

After we'd finished filming, they invited us all to their gig at KoKo in London the following month, and, most importantly, they promised that once GenNext went live and we put the interview up, they'd add a link to us
on their YouTube channel and also tweet it out, hopefully sending a huge amount of traffic our way. Austin's gut feeling was that we shouldn't put the video up right away, but give it a couple of weeks until we started gathering a good amount of views and then hit them with it full throttle. In the meantime, I did a blindfolded football skills tutorial with Miles and a couple of boys who played for the Watford FC youth team, and appeared with some up-and-coming YouTubers whose subscribers were starting to go through the roof and who were happy to help us out.

The funniest thing we did in those first few weeks was have Ella follow one of the coolest new local bands around Asda while they went food shopping, interviewing them about what they were buying, and why, with a GoPro on her head while Ava replaced the junk food and ready meals in their trolley with healthier choices: music and nutrition all in one video—what's not to like? OK, OK, so our ideas were a little bit left-field, but that was the idea, wasn't it? That was what made us original and was going to make us stand out . . . I hoped. It was early days, yes, but I felt like GenNext was potentially off to an auspicious start.

There was only one thing bugging me during the final ten days leading up to the launch of the site, and that was a distinct lack of Ella. Although she'd worked her
butt off with the rest of us for the previous few weeks, suddenly she always seemed to be busy doing something else—at least that was how it appeared to me. Even on the odd day she was around she seemed distracted and somehow . . . well, different, I suppose. Even the texts and WhatsApping action dwindled to almost nothing.

“I've just had a lot of family stuff on, and I've really got to step the revision up after all the time I've spent on GenNext,” she told me when I asked her—as casually as I possibly could, of course—what was going on. We were eating lunch in the school common room on a Monday, and I felt like it was the first time we'd sat down and talked in days.

“But you are still interested in being part of GenNext, right? You're not bailing on us already, are you?”

“Oh God, Jack, no way,” she said, pushing her prawn salad away and looking me in the eye. “Please don't think that. It's just . . . well the thing is—”

At that moment we were rudely interrupted by Ava, who threw herself down on a chair and slumped across the table complaining for the next ten minutes about how tired she was. Eventually Ella grabbed her things and got up to leave, cutting our conversation annoyingly short.

“Look, we'll speak later, Jack,” she said. “I'll be down at HQ tonight so we can catch up then.”

“Cool.” I watched her walk away, hoping I might finally get to the bottom of what was bugging her.

Only she didn't come down to Austin's that night, or the night after. And I felt lost.

It was all a bit weird, really. I mean, for quite a few weeks we'd been pretty much inseparable, working together on projects in and out of school, but now it suddenly felt like she had somewhere more important to be whenever I was with her. That was especially hard because it always felt so good being close to Ella. There was a connection between us that I'd never felt with any other human being, and I absolutely knew she felt it too. When I laughed, she laughed, and if we were working on something together and I had what I thought was a genius idea, it was like I could somehow telepathically convey it to her, because she'd be right there with me, having the same thought at the same time.

So you can just imagine how frustrating this new development was; even more so because deep down I felt like it was all my fault. Yes, we were the best of friends, but so far there was nothing more and that was down to me. I don't know why, but it was like there was some invisible force stopping me from taking that one step further and turning our friendship into a romance. Yeah, I hear you; maybe I was just a coward, but it was as if our friendship was something perfect that I was too scared to touch in case it shattered and broke.

Lying in bed some nights after we'd spent the day together, I'd mentally kick myself for being such a wuss
about the whole thing, but then I'd see Ella the next day and it would be just the same. I'd sit there thinking about how well we got on, how smart and amazing she was. I'd read and inject hidden meanings into everything she said—come on, we've all done it, right? Like, if we were down in HQ and she made me a coffee while I was working on something on my laptop, setting it down next to me with a chocolate Hobnob and patting me on the shoulder, I'd be thinking, yes, she really cares about me. She didn't make a coffee for Sai or Austin or Ava. She didn't offer them a chocolate Hobnob, just me. When the truth of the matter was probably that she couldn't be bothered to make five coffees, or there weren't enough bloody biscuits left in the packet. Or the time she said something like “I love working with you, Jack, I hope we can keep doing it.” Well, I sort of heard that as “Will you marry me, Jack?” OK, OK, not literally, but you get my drift, right?

It wasn't easy, and although I'd put that vital sentence together in my head a hundred times those past few weeks, the actual words “Would you like to go out on a date with me, Ella?” or anything bearing any resemblance to that had not been forthcoming. Instead I spent hours checking her Instagram feed and wondering just how many times it was acceptable to text a person in a twenty-four-hour period. It was strange; I'd fancied girls before, of course I had, but I'd never felt anything like this crazy longing to be around someone. It was like
going slightly insane but with the most beautiful kind of insanity I could imagine.