Star Struck Read Online Free

looking at Claire hopefully. Anything for a day out, she thought.
    ‘Get dressed,’ Claire said. ‘We’ll figure it out when we get there.’
    And this was how Jo had come to break one of her most important rules. No one else had a car. Maria’s ex-fiancé Gavin had taken theirs as part of their break-up settlement. He got the car, she got the ten-foot-high, Posh and Becks-style professional picture of the two of them entwined and kissing. Jo couldn’t help thinking that Gavin had come out of the deal far better off than Maria, especially as they all had to look at it every day sitting at the top of the stairs. Maria was very sensitive about the picture and when Jo teased her about it she bit her head off and told her that someone had bought it from eBay and she was waiting for them to pick it up. Jo couldn’t wait to clap eyes on the nutter that would part with their hard-earned cash for that pictorial monstrosity. So Jo couldn’t drive, Maria had no car and Mick was everything-phobic, including driving. That left Claire to chauffeur them all unsafely to the venue of the
Star Maker
auditions.
    Mick looked out of the window at the Manchester skyline and sighed, ‘I can’t believe she didn’t tell us.’
    Her dad loved sighing, Jo thought. He would often string a load of sighs together so they sounded like one big ongoing outtake of breath. Jo once told an ex-boyfriend that there was no point in coming round to her house to meet anyone because her dad just sat in the corner sounding like a pressure cooker and they wouldn’t be able to hear themselves think.
    ‘I wonder what she’s going to sing?’ Jo pondered.
    ‘They’ll crucify her,’ Maria said matter-of-factly.
    ‘No they won’t,’ Jo snapped. Jo didn’t want to enter into one of Maria’s bitch-fests. Maria got off on other people’s misery – or so it seemed to Jo. What Jo couldn’t work out about Maria was how so many other people actually seemed to like her. People from work were always ringing up, she had at least one billion friends on Facebook and when it was her birthday she didn’t just go out for a drink or a bite to eat – no; it was a five-day, Liz Hurley’s weddingesque affair, with different themes and venues. Last year she’d had a night out in Manchester, a night out in Black-pool and a weekend in Magaluf. Jo thought that she’d rather stab herself in the eye than spend a weekend in Shag a Muff with her sister and her so-called mates but she’d kept quiet and bought her an iTunes voucher.
    Jo often wondered why Maria was so popular without coming up with much of an answer. As far as Jo could see it was as if the nastier and more cutting Maria was with people, the more they wanted to be her friend. It was classic school-bully behaviour and Jo saw it as her civic duty to pull her sister up at any given opportunity, seeing as no one else had the bottle to. ‘I wonder what she’s going to sing?’ Jo asked again.
    ‘R. Kelly, “Flying without Wings”,’ Maria said.
    Jo burst out laughing. ‘More like that’s what you’d sing, you wrong ’un. I can just see you up there, all moony-eyed at the judges, thinking you were the dog’s bollocks.’ Jo shut her eyes and began crooning in a high-pitched voice.
    Maria punched her in the arm. ‘Piss-taker.’
    Mick tutted his disapproval at the language.
    Jo shoved her back. ‘Deluded R. Kelly lover!’
    ‘Will you two give up!’ Claire shouted from the driver’s seat. Jo and Maria piped down as Claire began slapping the satnav angrily. ‘No, I do not want Peter Street in Abergavenny; I want Peter Street in bloody Manchester.’
    Jo bit her lip. She wanted to laugh but knew that she would be shouted at and in making Claire shout would distract her even further and they’d no doubt end up under the wheels of a tram. They all sat in barely held silence as Claire pulled up to a red light by Piccadilly train station and waited impatiently as if the whole traffic system was