The Nanny Diaries

We arrived in North Carolina early this morning and currently we were at the arena the boys would be performing at tonight. The arena wasn’t quite ready for us, so everyone was waiting around for the venue to set up for the boys.

Raleigh was very hot. England didn’t get this hot and I was practically dying in all of this humidity. I didn’t know how I would survive Texas and Nevada. The heat and I did not get along very well. Lux didn’t get a lot of sleep the night before because of the buses, so today she was a toddler from hell. She was very fussy and in turn, I was cranky too.

The boys weren’t helping at all. They were anxious to start preparing for their show, but without anything to preoccupy their attention, they came to me. They kept bugging me and I couldn’t take it anymore, so I kicked them out of the spare dressing room Lux and I was holed away in.

I was trying not to move much on the couch so that I wouldn’t sweat as much. For some reason, the air conditioning in the building only worked in the main arena area so they could conserve energy. Bullocks, if you asked me.

I was so tired from staying awake with Lux the night before, I didn’t even remember closing my eyes.

&&

I slowly opened my eyes and didn’t recognize my surroundings. I rapidly blinked away the sleep in my eyes and realized that I had actually fallen asleep. I groped around for my phone while simultaneously trying to figure out how long I was out for. Getting frustrated, I started digging around the cushions and looking on the floor to see if my phone had fallen.

There was something off about the room. Something didn’t feel right, like something was missing. I took a quick look around and my breath caught in my throat.

Lux.

She was gone.

I stumbled to the door, almost falling in my wedges and wrenched the door open. I barely noticed my hair fanning around my face, which meant that my sunglasses were also missing too.

I started walking down the hallway looking in every open room and asking every person I saw if they knew where the small toddler was. Most of them either gave me a shake of the head or a weird look. I didn’t care. The only thing I cared about was finding Lux.

Seriously, this couldn’t have come at a worst time. If Lou found out that I lost her baby, I would for sure be out of a job, again. I would have to fly back to London immediately, pack up all my stuff, and move back to Suffolk with my parents. My dream of living on my own and finally doing something with life was diminishing with every second that I didn’t have Lux in my possession.

I reached the end of the hallway that was closest to the stage and was also One Direction’s dressing room. I went to go open up the door to see if they had seen Lux, but a note taped to the front of it caught my attention. I peeled it off and started reading the boyish handwriting.

tatum--------

if you ever want to see LUX (or your belongings) again, you must complete these tasks:

1. give your knicker to the next lad you see and say: “keep them forver” with a wink
2. go outside and take pictures with all of the fans that are out there
3. use lou’s computer, make a twitter, tweet “I love harry’s dick” and we’ll all retweet it

and last but certainly not least,

4. find sasha and tell her you had a naughty dream about you two together last night and you want it make it a reality

ps: we’ll be watching you so don’t try to cheat!

love, the boys

Each of them signed their name at the end with little hearts. Well, all of them except Harry. I didn’t know what to think. I should’ve known that they were behind all of this mayhem. None of the tasks particularly bothered me that much, except the last one.

Sasha was one of Lou’s assistants and she was absolutely gorgeous. She had coffee skin that was flawless, large curly hair that looked effortless, and really pretty almond colored eyes. I had a really big girl crush on her but I have no idea how the boys knew that. No one knew that. The thought of saying those things to her made me blush profusely, but I knew that if I didn’t do the tasks, the boys would never let me live it down.

I heard footsteps coming down the hallway perpendicular from the one I was standing in and I hoped to god it was a boy so I could get the first task over and done with it.

The unidentified steps finally rounded the corner and, in fact, it was a man. Or boy. He was very skinny, pretty lanky, and had thick-rimmed glasses. His black hair stuck up in all directions and for a quick second, I almost felt bad for doing this to him.

I stepped in front of his pathway and he looked at me with a confused face. I never broke eye contact with him as I hiked my hand under my dress, hooked my fingers underneath my knickers, and swiftly pulled them down. I used my foot to bring them up so I could grab them and walked closer to the boy.

He was rapidly swallowing and I pressed my knickers to his chest while whispering in his ear, “keep them forever.” Unfortunately, they were my favorite pair, a red lace thong that was surprisingly expensive at Victoria’s Secret.

I walked away from the confused boy and rounded the corner of the hallway when I looked back at him. He was blushing profusely and staring at my retreating form. I winked at him just before he ducked his head back down and I finally walked away from him.

I backed up against the wall and put my face in my hands. God, I was so embarrassed. I just gave my best pair of knickers to a complete stranger.

“If you guys are really watching me, fuck you.” I said to the ceiling, as if the boys were watching me with secret cameras. I quickly composed myself and made my way towards the exit of the arena. Once I opened the door, a wall of heat hit me in the face.

The air was so thick that I almost didn’t even want to step outside, but I knew that this was one of the easier tasks, so I just had to suck up my hate for heat and get it over with.

There was a group of about 50 girls standing in line for the concert. The doors didn’t open for another 5 hours and I didn’t understand why anyone in their right mind would stand in this heat for that long. But in their defense, they weren’t in their right minds; they had the One Direction fever.

Once they noticed that it was actually me walking towards them, I could hear the chatter start up and it was pretty loud. I’ll admit, the small crowd of girls was intimidating, but I didn’t let it get to me. I wanted to prove to the boys that I could play their shitty little games and still beat them at it.

When I finally reached the small group, all of the chattering had stopped. It was completely silent.

“So, do you guys want any pictures?” I felt uncomfortable saying that since it wasn’t like I was a celebrity, but I had to follow the boy’s orders.

That seemed to snap them out of their trance and they apprehensively started talking to me. I took pictures with most of them, but they mainly wanted to chat with me. Of course, they wanted to know all the gossip about One Direction and I happily obliged. I gave them some dirt on each of the boys as payback for making me go on this dumb journey.

“I’ve seen Harry pick his nose many times.”

“Louis moisturizes his cuticles before he goes to bed every night. He’ll get cranky if he can’t.”

“Niall has really bad morning breath and sometimes doesn’t even brush his teeth – even with the braces!”

“Zayn steals Lou’s expensive tweezers to tweeze his nose hairs.”

“Liam sleeps in a hot pink onesie every night that Danielle gave him.”

The girls ate up the gossip just like I knew they would and I couldn’t help myself from grinning. It felt good to show their fans that they weren’t the perfect angels like everyone thought they were. The girls also wanted to know stuff about me like where I was from, if I had any siblings, and how I was so pretty. I assured them that I wasn’t that pretty but told them about my life.

After an hour, I said bye to the fans and made my way back inside. I made my way towards Lou’s dressing room and prayed that she wasn’t inside. It would be pretty awkward trying to explain why I didn’t have her daughter or that I didn’t even know where she was. Thankfully, the room was empty, and I grabbed her bag and pulled out her laptop.

I logged onto her MacBook and opened twitter. I made an account and followed all of the boys before I tweeted.

“@TatumPeck: I love @Harry_Styles dick!”

I added an exclamation point for fun and send the tweet out. I didn’t stick around to see the damage I was going to cause and just shut Lou’s laptop instead.

Now it was time for the fourth and final task. I was mentally exhausted as it was and now I had to go up to the most gorgeous girl in the world and tell her that I had a wet dream about her.

Well, if I’m gonna embarrass myself to no end, I might as well look good doing it. I rummaged around Lou’s makeup bag since the boys took everything I owned, and found some powder, lipstick, and eye shadow. I applied it as quickly as possible and made sure that I looked presentable before going to the stylists’ dressing room.

I smoothed my dress out and quickly walked down the hallway towards the stylists. I had this knot in the bottom of my stomach and I felt like I was going to hurl at any second. I kept taking shallow breaths to calm myself down, but nothing was working.

Before my nerves took over my body, I quickly knocked and the door and waited. Those short ten seconds felt like an hour until someone finally opened up the door.

I was eye to eye with Sasha. Even though I was a tall girl, Sasha was even taller, and I was in wedges. I gave her a small smile and she returned it even though I could tell she was confused.

“Tatum? Are you looking for Lou? Cause, actually, she’s been trying to-”

“No!” I interrupted her. She looked startled and I wanted to smack myself in the face for being so awkward.

“I mean, no, I wasn’t looking for Lou. I was, um, looking for you?” She scrunched her eyebrows up and I quickly peeked over her shoulder to see if anyone else was in the room. There were two other girls, Charlotte and Heather and they were watching our exchange with curiosity. Great, now I had an audience.

“Um, ok. What did you need?” God, she sounded so concerned, I hated that I had to do this to her. It would be just as embarrassing for her too. I’m going to kill those boys.

“I wanted to tell you something.” She gave me a look that said ‘keep going.’

“I, uh, well this is gonna sound crazy. But last night, you were in my dream? It was a really detailed dream. We were uh, together?” I stopped and looked up at her face and she seemed really confused. Hell, I was confused.

“You know, like together?” I emphasized. Suddenly her eyes went wide and she opened her mouth to say something but I beat her to it.

“Wait! Um, I was just wondering. Do you want-” Suddenly, someone clasped a hand over my mouth, preventing me from telling Sasha that ridiculous lie.

I looked over and saw Louis. Except he wasn’t looking at me. He was grinning at Sasha, who now looked very, very, confused. I didn’t blame her.

“Hello, love! Don’t mind her, she didn’t get much sleep last night and heat’s getting’ to her head.” He rolled his eyes at me and grinned at her while dragging me away from Sasha. She still looked super confused but shrugged her shoulders and went back into her dressing room.

Louis kept dragging me while still holding a hand over my mouth. He pulled me into a room with the rest of One Direction and all of them were staring at me. Louis went to go stand with the rest of them and it looked like I was in a staring contest with all of One Direction.

All at once, they burst out laughing. They actually couldn’t contain their laughter. They were leaning on chairs for support and had to sit down because they were laughing too hard.

“Well, I’m glad you guys think this is funny! I lost my favorite pair of knickers today! You guys owe me another pair.” This made them laugh even harder and I was so fed up that I was about to leave, but Louis stopped me before I reached the door.

“Love, love, c’mon, it was just a prank. You did great! We didn’t think you were actually going to do number four though…” They all grinned to each other and I made me feel so disgusted. Men are pigs.

“Well, I’m glad you guys had a nice laugh. How many retweets did my tweet get?”

“Fifty five thousand or so,” Niall piped up. My eyes widened. Fifty five thousand?

“Well, can I just have my stuff back?”

“Well, love, the thing is, we never took your stuff in the first place. Just sort of, repositioned it. It’s still all in that dressing room.”

“Well, what about Lux?” How had the boys fooled me this bad?

“Oh, we just handed her off to Lou. We said you didn’t feel well cause of the heat.” You’ve got to be shitting me.

“I did all of that for nothing? You’re all wankers.” I pivoted on my heel so I could get out of there and get all my anger out without killing one of them. But once again, someone grabbed my arm. I whipped around and yanked it out of their grip. I was face to face with Liam and he looked guilty.

“Love, don’t be mad? It was just a joke, yeah?” I rolled my eyes and turned back around to leave. Even Liam’s puppy eyes couldn’t make me feel better.

“No, it wasn’t ‘just a joke’! You guys had me running around everywhere doing humiliating things just to get my stuff back. I was already tired as it was and this just added to it. So, if you don’t mind me, I’m going to go pick up Lux, and head back to the room. Don’t forget, that was a red thong. If I don’t get a replacement, you better believe I’m gonna be spilling more secrets about you guys to your fans.”

And with that rant, I spun on my heel and booked it out of there. I needed a vacation from those boys.