But mostly I hate her for being so obnoxious and such an out of control bitch that even her boyfriend can’t stand to be around her and has to start looking for an out. Especially when that out is my girlfriend.
I knew that Barney fancied Scarlett. It was a given. She was really fit. Really, really fit. Whenever we went into town and got within fifty yards of Topshop she was mobbed on all sides by model agency scouts.
But Scarlett never went to see the agencies because she said she was three inches too short to be a model and she was far too shy. Before we started dating, I thought Scarlett’s shyness was sweet. But, after a while, shyness isn’t endearing and doesn’t make you want to protect someone, it makes you secretly grind your teeth in frustration.
The thing about shyness is that it seems a lot like not trying, the same way that Scarlett wasn’t even trying to make our relationship work. I was putting the effort in, calling her every night, thinking of cool things to do on our dates. I bought her presents and helped her set up her BlackBerry and in all ways I was an excellent boyfriend. Whether it’s football or A-level Physics or dating, what’s the point of doing anything if you’re going to do it in a half-arsed way? And I don’t want to sound bigheaded but I could go out with pretty much any girl at our school – in fact, any girl at any school in our borough. The fact that I chose Scarlett should have given her a huge shot of confidence and she could have shown a little gratitude too.
So when I saw Scarlett and Barney together, it made me furious. All I ever got from Scarlett was a lot of hair-tossing and a few wan smiles but Barney got longing looks and giggling. I couldn’t actually hear the giggles but I imagined them as tiny, silver daggers aimed right at my heart and, when I turned my head away, I saw a short, squat, grey-haired girl preening in the mirror.
Jeane Smith is the only person at our school that I’ve never spoken to. Seriously. I hate labels and cliques and all that bullshit about blanking people ’cause they’re not into the same music as you or they’re crap at sports. I like that I can get on with everyone and always find some common ground to talk about, even if they’re not that cool.
Jeane Smith doesn’t talk to anyone, apart from that Barney kid. Everyone talks about her, or about her revolting clothes and the arguments she picks with the teachers in every single one of her classes, but no one talks to her because if you try to, you find yourself on the business end of some serious snark and a superior stare.
That was what I got when I tried to explain my suspicions about Barney and Scarlett. About halfway through my first sentence, I realised my mistake, but it was too late. I was committed to having a conversation with her. And I don’t know how anyone could manage a dead-eyed stare that also promised unimaginable pain but somehow Jeane had mastered the art. It was as if her retinas had been replaced with laser pointers.
Then she was sticking out her chin and being a bitch, and suddenly whatever whacked-out thing that was going on with Barney and Scarlett didn’t matter as much as having the last word.
‘Nice dress, by the way,’ I said, cocking my head at the horrible multi-coloured mess of a dress that she was wearing, and it was a low blow and completely beneath me, but at least it got Jeane Smith to shut up. But then she smirked and she was one of those people who could make a smirk say a thousand words and none of them good ones.
By the time I’d finished that unpleasant little exchange, Scarlett and Barney had finished their silent flirting. She hurried over to me, her face more animated than I’d ever seen it.
‘Can we go now?’ she asked, as if it had been my idea to go to a jumble sale full of tatty old junk and stinky clothes that wouldn’t have been accepted as donations at the crappiest charity shop in the world. But Scarlett had wanted to come and as she never suggested interesting or fun things to do on dates, I’d seen it as a real sign of progress in our relationship.
Now I suspected that Scarlett had only wanted to come because Barney was going to be there. Normally I’d have come straight to the point and asked Scarlett what was going on, but something made me hesitate. If I couldn’t make it work with Scarlett, what did it say about me? It said she preferred a mumbling ginger kid over me, which just … no. That couldn’t be possible.
So I just said, ‘Cool. This place smells like someone died in here.’
Scarlett murmured in agreement but, just as we reached the door, she turned her head and looked back at the corner where Barney sat. He wasn’t looking longingly at Scarlett but at Jeane, who, from the way she was standing with her hands on her hips and a belligerent look on her face, was giving him a hard time.
‘God, I hate that girl,’ Scarlett said, her voice murderous and low. I stared at her in amazement. It was the first time I’d ever heard Scarlett express an opinion. ‘She’s so mean. She made me cry in English once because she, like, actually stuck her hand up in the middle of me reading from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to complain about my delivery. At least I don’t sound like a stoned robot.’
‘Well, she is kind of annoying …’
‘She isn’t kind of anything. She is annoying,’ Scarlett informed me icily. She was full of surprises this afternoon. She even glared at me as I held the door open for her as if I was a Jeane Smith proxy.
‘Why are you getting so worked up about her?’ I asked, as we walked up the steps that led to the street. I already knew the answer – Scarlett was hating on Jeane, because Jeane was dating on Barney. I was sure of it.
‘“I am Jeane Smith,”’ Scarlett intoned in a mechanical voice, which made me smile reluctantly, because this worked up, ranty Scarlett was approximately one thousand times more fun than the Scarlett I’d been dating. ‘“I have a million followers on Twitter and I am a blogging genius and my disgusting clothes and old lady hair are actually the last word in cool and if you don’t agree it’s because you are not cool. In fact, you’re so uncool that I can’t even bring myself to look at you, in case you infect me with your nasty, uncool suburban germs.” Ugh! She’s so up herself.’
‘She has a blog? Big deal. Everyone has a blog.’
‘You haven’t seen her blog,’ Scarlett muttered darkly. ‘The stuff she goes on about – it’s unbelievable.’
‘How come you’re cyber-stalking her anyway?’ I asked, my voice getting so squeaky that I choked on the final syllable.
‘I’m not.’ Scarlett’s voice, on the other hand, was fading into its usual whisper. ‘I have to read her blog, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to join in when people are talking about her at school.’
‘Don’t you Year 12s have anything else to talk about that isn’t Jeane Smith?’
Scarlett didn’t reply, but looked up and down the road then gave a sigh of relief. ‘There’s my mum’s car. I’ve got to go.’
‘I thought we were going to get a coffee.’
‘Well, yeah, my mum texted me and said that she was, um, like, in the area.’ Scarlett squirmed unhappily. ‘While you were looking round the jumble sale. I mean, that’s when she texted me.’
I should just end this, I thought. Because this, us, we were going nowhere and yes, Scarlett would give me her sad face that looked like a baby seal just before it got clubbed to death but I’d seen Scarlett’s sad face so often in the last few weeks that I was immune to it.
‘Look, Scar, I’ve been thinking …’ I began, but Scarlett was already backing away.
‘Got to go,’ she yelped, as her mother tooted the horn. ‘See you tomorrow or something.’
‘Yeah, see you,’ I said, but Scarlett had already started running to where her mother’s Range Rover was blocking the traffic and there was no way she could have heard me.
All too soon it was five o’clock and the jumbling hordes started thinning out.
I’d had a good afternoon and sold most of the heavy items, including a mouldy collection of pulp fiction novels, a hideous framed painting of a clown that had given me the shudders every time I looked at it, and an art deco statuette of a black cat, which had a light fit
ting shoved on top of its head and an electrical lead and plug where its tail should be.
It meant packing up the stall and loading my plastic crates into Barney’s mum’s massive petrol-guzzling four-wheel-drive didn’t take too long and we didn’t have to pile things up on the back seat like usual. Barney had only passed his test a couple of months before and it sent him into a sweating, shaking tizzy when he couldn’t see out of the rear window.
Even though his field of vision was completely clear, Barney still needed absolute silence while he was driving, but as we got nearer to where I lived it got harder to keep quiet.
I waited until we stopped at a traffic light. ‘So, do you want to hang at mine for a while?’ I asked. ‘Or we could go and see a film. There’s that one with Ellen Page that we talked about. Or how do you feel—?’
Barney hissed in annoyance because I was still talking as the lights changed from red to amber. ‘Sorry,’ I muttered, sinking back on the seat as he tensed every muscle in anticipation of the lights turning green and having to drive off again without the car stalling.
I tried to keep still and quiet, and not even breathe too heavily, until Barney had pulled slowly and carefully into the kerb outside the redbrick mansion block where I lived.
‘So, do you want to do something now?’ I asked. ‘For a couple of hours.’
‘I can’t. You know my mum likes me to spend Sunday evening at home so she can check that I’ve done my coursework and that I’ve washed behind my ears and sharpened my pencils and I have enough clean T-shirts to last the week.’ Barney wrinkled his nose in disgust. ‘I bet even when I’m at university she’ll drive down on a Sunday afternoon to check up on me.’
‘I’m sure she wouldn’t do that,’ I said, although I thought Barney’s mum would do precisely that if Barney didn’t have a younger brother who needed just as much, if not more, supervision than Barney. There wasn’t much love between Barney’s mum and me – she thought I was a bad influence on her son and had much preferred the days when he stayed at home and didn’t have a social life. But I was careful never to raise this topic with Barney because I didn’t want to be the sort of girl who came between a boy and his overbearing mother.
‘Yeah, she would.’ Barney unclipped his seatbelt. ‘I’ll help you get everything inside, but then I have to go home.’
Once we’d ferried all the crates and boxes and bags into the foyer, then into the rickety lift up to the sixth floor and then dumped them in my hall, Barney took a deep breath and waited for me to hang up my jacket.
I could see his anxious face reflected in the hall mirror and it was a perfect match for my own. I hated this part. The goodbye kiss part.
I took two steps forward as Barney craned his neck a few centimetres towards me to show willing. When we were practically nose to nose, he screwed his eyes shut and pursed his lips tightly until they resembled a cat’s bumhole. Apart from the lack of visual stimulation, when I pressed my lips against Barney’s they didn’t feel very kiss-shaped. His mouth wasn’t relaxed, his lips weren’t soft and pliable, so we ended up kissing the way we always ended up kissing, mashing our mouths against each other furiously as if the effort made up for the lack of passion.
There were no hands cupping or fondling. Barney kept his arms at his sides and I placed one hand very decorously on his shoulder and there was absolutely no tongue. The first time I’d tried to introduce it, Barney had freaked out so much that I’d never dared repeat it. I counted, ‘One elephant, two elephant, three elephant’ in my head and when I got to ‘fifty elephant’ I gently disengaged our lips.
‘We’re getting better at that,’ Barney remarked, even though he had this pained look on his face as if he was longing to use the back of his hand to erase the phantom feeling of my mouth.
‘Don’t you think?’
‘Definitely,’ I agreed, but we both knew it was a lie. Or I did and surely Barney couldn’t be that deluded to think that the fifty seconds we’d spent with our mouths grinding against each other was an improvement.
Barney was funny and kind and he knew lots and lots of useful things about computers but we had no sexual chemistry at all. I wasn’t sure that any amount of kissing practice was going to change that. You either had sexual chemistry or you didn’t and we so didn’t.
‘Well, I’d better get going.’ Barney sighed, and it was a slight sop to my ego that he sounded completely unenthused about leaving me. ‘My mum was making lentil soup when I left. Guess I know what’s for dinner.’
Maybe it was more that he just didn’t want to go home. ‘I bet that carrot cake’s sounding pretty good right now,’ I said lightly and Barney grinned.
‘You’re so lucky living on your own, Jeane. No one to tell you what to do. You can eat what you want when you want, stay up as late as you like, spend so long on the internet that your eyes go blurry and—’
‘And if something gets broken or stops working, I have to figure out how to get it repaired all by myself. I have to do my own cleaning and my own cooking and get myself up for school—’
‘Oh, don’t try and make out that it’s awful,’ Barney scoffed.
‘It’s not like you ever do any cleaning and you live on Haribo and cake. Just think about me going home to be nagged to death by my mother as I eat her disgusting lentil soup and her really chewy homemade bread. It’s grey,’ he added with a shudder, as he headed for the door. ‘She says it’s just the wheatgerm, but it’s still no colour that edible bread should be.’
I followed Barney out because he could never work the latch and as I leaned in for a friendly goodbye peck on the cheek, he jerked his head back like I’d been about to lunge for his mouth with tongue unfurled.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Barney said heartily to hide the fact that he’d reared away from my lips like they were infected with flesh-eating bacteria, his face flaring up for about the seventeenth time that day. ‘Gotta go!’
I listened to the soft slap of Barney’s sneakers on the parquet floor, the scrape and creak as he pulled back the metal grille and stepped into the lift, then its whirr as it travelled between the floors. I could even hear the distant slam of the front door. It sounded so final, so definite.
After my parents had got divorced and I’d moved into a flat in a mansion block with my older sister, Bethan, I’d been thrilled. It seemed so exotic after spending my first fifteen years in a semi-detached house with a garden, garage, double glazing and fitted wardrobes.
Living in a mansion block which smelt of beeswax and had a black and white tiled floor in the lobby – even the fact that it had a lobby – made me feel like a girl in a book written in the 1920s who bobbed her hair and said, ‘Gosh, thanks awfully’ when men held doors open for her.
Bethan and I had even talked about learning to tap-dance so our tap shoes would make the most splendid sound as we softshoe-shuffled (or whatever it is that you do when you tap-dance) along the hallways. But that was last year, and this year Bethan is doing a year’s residency at a specialist paediatric hospital in Chicago and I’m living on my own in a beautiful flat, which isn’t quite so beautiful any more because, well, life’s too short to vacuum or dust or pick up after myself.
There was a vaguely clear path from the front door to the open-plan living room. I crunched over magazines and sweet wrappers to get to the table and switched on my MacBook.
It took a huge effort but I didn’t check my email, or my Twitter or my Facebook, but started to read my Business Studies notes.
I always have homework on a Sunday evening. Not because I’m a slacker who leaves everything to the last minute but because Sunday evening is the loneliest evening of the week. Everyone else is hunkered down with mums fussing about packed lunches and clean clothes. Even my real, grown-up friends say they get that back-to-school feeling on a Sunday night that can only be quelled with a cheesy film and a tub of ice cream.
I don’t have a mum fussing about me, or a dad for that matter, so I always leave some homework in r
eserve so I don’t have a chance to start wallowing. You can’t really wallow when you’re painstakingly adding financial data to spreadsheets for your Business Studies coursework.
It didn’t even help that the company I’d created for Business Studies was my actual real-life company. Adorkable was a geek-championing lifestyle brand and trend-spotting agency that I found myself creating after my blog (also called Adorkable) started winning loads of awards and I kept getting asked to write pieces for the Guardian and take part in live dicussion panels on Radio 4. The actual figures I was cutting and pasting from one document to another showed the actual money I’d made in the last six months from consultancy work, public engagements, journalism and selling Adorkablebranded products on Etsy and CafePress. It still didn’t make Business Studies fun. Not one bit. I was just sighing in relief as I got to the end of the last column when the phone rang.
My mum called at 7.30 every Sunday evening so it shouldn’t have been a surprise and my heart shouldn’t have stumbled like it did. Maybe it was because I spent the rest of the week repressing the memory of our Sunday evening phonecalls so it was always a shock when she called and said my name with that same note of trepidation that she’s been using for as long as I can remember.
‘Hi, Pat,’ I said. ‘How are things?’
Things were fine in Trujillo, Peru, although the power had been out during the week and she was running low on clean clothes because …
‘Do they even have washing machines in Peru?’ I asked distractedly, because her voice was crackly and there was a weird time delay and even when we’d lived in the same house we hadn’t had much to talk about.
‘Of course they do, Jeane. I’m running out of clean knickers because I haven’t had a chance to do any washing. Peru isn’t the Third World. They have washing machines and hot and cold running water and yes, even Starbucks. Though that says more about globalisation than—’