‘I think there are plenty of normal people who blog,’ Michael said as he relieved me of the big Tupperware container I was holding. To show just how friendly and likeable I was, I’d made some cheese straws to share with my fellow partygoers. Also, Kathy had cut me off from the TV after I’d watched six episodes of America’s Next Top Model back-to-back. ‘Though I suppose once you get near a computer you might relapse and start going off on one about how wearing jeans is actually part of a global conspiracy to make everyone wear denim and look exactly the same.’
‘Piss off!’ I snapped, before I could stop myself.
‘I thought normal Jeane wouldn’t be quite so hostile. Guess I was wrong,’ Michael said. He’d never given me such a hard time, even when we were sleeping together and giving each other a hard time the rest of the time. ‘Probably best you get it out of your system before we get to the party.’
I couldn’t wait to get to the party, but it was only because my heels hurt more when I was walking on hard, unforgiving pavements. As soon as we got to Ant’s house and I was on thick carpet, they were bearable and I could prepare for the ordeal that lay ahead. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected apart from the music stopping and everyone turning round to stare at us as I walked in with Michael Lee, but it wasn’t like that at all.
Everyone ignored me. Everyone!
Whereas Michael was being hailed on all sides like he’d just come back from fighting on the frontline of a ferocious overseas conflict. He’d only seen his friends a few hours before when I’d been baking my cheese straws and explaining to a select committee that comprised Melly and Alice why I should still be allowed in The Melly and Alice Club, but his friends were all like, ‘Dude!’ and, ‘What took you so long to get here?’
‘You know Jeane from school,’ Michael kept saying, but everyone shook their heads or said, ‘Right, yeah, Jeane,’ as if they didn’t have a freaking clue who I was.
I shuffled into the kitchen to deposit my cheese straws and when I looked around Michael had disappeared. Probably couldn’t wait to exchange flirty talk and saliva with Heidi/ Hilda/whatever her name was, who texted him about fifty times a day.
I grabbed a paper cup of white wine and positioned myself in a prime spot by the mantelpiece in the front room, so I wasn’t in the way of anyone dancing and I could see everyone who came in and smile at them in a welcoming, inclusive way. Like, ‘Hey, look at me being all approachable and smiley. Come on over and say hello.’ Except no one came over to say hello apart from bloody Hardeep who’s been in the same Business Studies class as me for the last four years.
‘Hardy, it’s Jeane,’ I kept saying, but he was blathering on about football and all kinds of other crap and I knew I could shut him down in ten seconds but I had to stand there with a frozen smile on my face until he said, ‘Well, Jane, been nice talking to you, I’m going to get another beer.’
I stayed by the mantelpiece for another half hour. My old life might have been lonely but apart from when I was at school, I’d never had to be in close proximity to such a lot of imbeciles. I actually saw two boys doing the whole ‘pull my finger’ routine. Jesus wept.
Eventually, when I could feel my blood rising and counting to ten wasn’t really cutting it, I tottered into the kitchen, skirting around the sobbing girl who was being comforted by her friends (‘He’s a total dick who thinks with his dick’), opened the back door and staggered out into the garden.
It was freezing cold. I could feel my skin shrinking as I shivered on the decking. It was even too icy for any smokers to want to brave the elements so I was free to let rip – it didn’t count if there was no one to hear me.
‘O M actual G, why are my generation such a bunch of moronic idiots without an original thought in their heads? Why? For the love of God, why? And actually, Hardeep, if you’d looked at my face instead of my non-existent tits you’d have realised that it’s Jeane standing in front of you. Yes, Jeane! The Jeane who once hit you over the head with her Business Studies textbook when you said that women needed actual balls to run a FTSE 500 company, and, by the way, Hardeep, the only reason that you don’t believe in climate change is because you’re too stupid to understand it!’
I felt a little bit better. But only a little bit. Besides, I had a lot more ranting to get out of my system.
‘Also, school colleagues of mine, grinding up against the buttocks of a member of the opposite sex is not dancing. Technically, it’s sexual assault and—’
‘Jeane? Is it Jeane?’
There was a light hand on my shoulder and I nearly screamed. I also nearly fell over as I whirled round and saw Scarlett standing behind me with a little group of her friends. Girls. I think they went to our school, but quite frankly by this stage everyone looked the same to me. ‘It is you!’
‘Who else would it be?’ I snarled because I was in full-on grrr mode. She backed away and I held up my hand. ‘Hang on!’ I counted to ten, twenty, thirty … ‘OK, sorry about that. Hi, Scarlett. How are you? Love what you’re doing with your hair.’
‘Are you on drugs? Did someone spike the punch?’ Scarlett asked tremulously. She waved a hand in front of my face. ‘What have you done to yourself?’
‘I haven’t done anything. Well, apart from a makeunder,’ I said. ‘I’ve stopped doing that whole dork thing. I’m like everybody else now.’
‘Yeah, you sure about that?’ Scarlett was very snippy now she was dating Barney. And Barney had never been snippy until he started dating me. My influence spread far and wide, which was why I’d had to call time on my pernicious ways before I turned everyone snippy.
‘Yes.’ I struck a pose. ‘Say hello to the new Jeane. Jeane version two-point-zero, if you will.’
Scarlett shared a look with her friends. A smirky sort of look. ‘Not sure I really get the new Jeane,’ she sniffed. ‘I think I preferred the old Jeane.’
‘You hated the old Jeane,’ I reminded her.
‘I didn’t … I don’t. OK, the old Jeane was super-scary but she wasn’t that bad.’
‘Yes, I was. I was very bad,’ I insisted.
‘Not when I got to know you properly and you put me in touch with my inner feminist warrior.’
I sighed. ‘But you’re only one person, Scar. The only person who didn’t actively hate old Jeane.’
‘Not the only person,’ one of her friends said. ‘Everyone loved having you in their class because you argued with the teachers when they were being arseholes.’
By now the decking was filling up. A group of smokers had decided to brave the Arctic conditions and Barney had come out to find Scarlett, so there was a small circle of people around me who were all nodding and talking. Not at me, not at new friendly Jeane, but about how they liked old dorky Jeane and her stand-offish ways.
A boy who I was sure I didn’t know pointed at me. ‘What’s with the new image? Seeing what you were wearing was the highlight of my morning.’
‘Yeah, if I didn’t see you at school before Registration, I used to go to your blog to see what your outfit of the day was,’ someone else said.
‘And your Twitter. Like, you’d already have sent fifty tweets and posted a few links before I’d even had my first cup of coffee. When are you going to start tweeting again? You always find the best links, like that one with the kitten riding the Roomba.’
They were screwing with me. Now I looked all meek and unassuming they thought they could take the piss. ‘I happen to know that I’m only big on Twitter in Japan and America. Oh, and parts of Scandinavia.’
Barney was trying to take a hit on a joint. He wasn’t very good at it and he gave up so he could say in a very long-suffering way, ‘Jeane, how could you not know that there are a group of Year 10s that everyone calls The Jeanettes because they all dress just like you, except none of their mums would let them dye their hair grey?’
I shook my head. ‘This is precisely why I had to change so I could stop being some kind of freakshow for everyone else’s entertainment.’
>
Scarlett actually put her arm round my shoulders and gave me a comforting squeeze. ‘You’re not a freakshow. You’re just, well, eccentric. Sometimes in class when you were going on about something that I didn’t even understand, I used to think that it was a bit like going to school with a younger version of Lady Gaga, though you did draw the line at walking around in just your underwear.’
I didn’t want to be apart, I wanted to be a part of them, but they were standing in a semicircle around me, looking at me but still not accepting me, and I didn’t know what else I could say to persuade them.
It was a relief when Michael stepped through the back door. ‘What’s everyone doing out here? Ant’s about to fire up the SingStar.’
‘Stick up for me here, Michael,’ I begged. ‘Will you tell your friends that I’ve renounced my dorky ways?’
‘We’ve been through this a hundred times already.’ He sighed. ‘Being an obnoxious, badly dressed pain in the arse is who you are, not a lifestyle choice. It’s not something you can renounce.’
‘No, I can. I take my dorkdom back. I don’t want it because one day I won’t be a dork, I’ll just be a mad old lady wearing weird clothes who yells at small children for pushing in at the bus stop.’
‘You yell at small children for pushing in at the bus stop now.’
‘But I have to start fitting in, before it’s too late. Look, I’m wearing jeans!’ I shouted, slapping at my denim-clad thighs.
‘They don’t suit you,’ Michael said, and I knew he was about to start laughing at me again but he didn’t. Instead, right in front of everyone, all his friends who thought he was the coolest thing in the whole world ever because their parameters of what was cool were actually very, very narrow, he kissed me.
He kissed me so long and hard that it would have been blates rude not to kiss him back, and after five minutes I guess everyone became acclimatised to the sight of Michael Lee and Jeane Smith kissing because I was dimly aware of them beginning to complain about the cold and they drifted back indoors.
Once they were gone, we could really start to kiss properly.
‘I can’t believe I’m saying this but I miss old Jeane so much,’ Michael said when we finally broke apart and sat huddled together on the garden wall. ‘You’re a dork, Jeane, deal with it.’
‘Old Jeane wasn’t very loveable, though, was she?’ I asked and wished I hadn’t because it wasn’t like I was expecting any great declarations.
‘She had her moments,’ Michael decided, and we sat there in silence for a while, until he started giggling. ‘And her huge fanbase is in pieces.’
‘What? You mean those half a million Twitter followers who don’t even know me?’
‘They might not know you but they seem to be missing you,’ Michael said. ‘The internet’s gone into mourning at Adorkable’s untimely demise.’
‘Look, I get that you’re trying to make me feel better by cracking a few funnies but it’s not helping,’ I said, and I couldn’t bear to talk about this again. Not if kissing Michael might be back on the agenda, because I’d really really missed his kisses.
But Michael ignored me when I leaned in for another smooch. He pulled his iPhone out of his back pocket because he checked it every five seconds. It was very annoying. Even I never used to check my phone that often.
‘Look!’ he demanded, thrusting the phone in my face. ‘Look! Over ten thousand people have liked a Facebook page called “Bring back Adorkable and reinstate Jeane Smith as Queen of the Interwebz.”’
I went to snarl something sarcastic but actually nothing sarcastic came to mind. It was kind of sweet. ‘Well, that doesn’t mean anything.’
Michael nudged me. ‘Go on, check your email or Twitter, or go on YouTube, because I bet some new puppy videos have gone up over Christmas. You know you want to.’
‘Oh my God, you’re like a skanky drug dealer trying to give me the first few rocks of crack for free,’ I snapped. ‘I’ll only mean to check my Twitter for five seconds and the next thing you know I’ll have started a heated debate about the inherent evil of Haribo’s Fried Eggs and got into a fight with an old Big Brother housemate.’
As I was talking I was logging into Twitter, Michael peering over my shoulder as I clicked on my replies feed.
@adork_able Where are you? I’m suffering puppy links withdrawal.
@adork_able Come back, Jeane. The world is a cold lonely place without you.
@adork_able I dork, therefore I am. Isn’t that what you always said? Don’t leave us!
@adork_able Every time you tweeted it might not have meant much to you, but it always made me feel less alone.
It went on and on, until I couldn’t get my replies feed to load because there were too many tweets for it to handle. And the really weird thing was that since turning my back on dork, I’d gained over ten thousand new followers, though that might have had something to do with a link to a Guardian article about me and something called blogger burnout.
‘See? It’s not just me that misses the old Jeane,’ Michael said. He stroked his fingers through my hair. ‘I miss your horrible experiments with hair dye. I miss the clothes that smelt of old lady. I miss y—’
I pulled away from him, because his touches were making me come undone and I wanted to be whole. ‘This is really nice that people miss me, but they’re not real. It’s not real. It’s just the internet.’
‘I know,’ Michael said soothingly, like he was just humouring me. ‘But you’re on a roll now. You might as well check your email.’
He had a point. It couldn’t do any harm. Besides, I might have a message from Bethan or from a Nigerian government minister who wanted me to send him my bank details so he could transfer a million quid into my account.
I had over thirty thousand new emails in my inbox. In fact, for five minutes I couldn’t even get into my email as my inbox was full. Who knew that was even possible?
I didn’t know where to start so I looked in my Friends folder, which was where messages from people I knew in real life went. There were messages from Bethan, Tabitha and Tom and even Mad Glen. Scarlett, Barney, Ms Ferguson, Gustav and Harry and Ben and Ben’s mum and all of Duckie and an email from Molly that began –
Oh, Jeane, my honorary little sister
I don’t know why you’re hurting but I want to make it better. Get yourself on a train to Brighton where there will be tea and cake and the My So-Called Life box set and a big, squidgy hug waiting for you.
I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t. It was cold and my eyes were watering, which was why Michael was brushing the tears from my cheeks. I say tears, but there were only about three of them.
But then I started opening random emails from people I didn’t know. Not people from real life but people from the internet.
I’m fourteen and I had no friends because I’m a dork. I used to spend all my time sitting in my bedroom planning what my life would be like when I was old enough to leave home and try to find people who were like me.
But then I found you. I read your blog and I realised that it was OK to not fit in. That it was OK to be odd and a bit weird and to be a dork, because my dorkiness was something special. And then I followed you on Twitter and you tweeted me back and I followed other people who followed you and they were a bit like me and then I did what everyone told me not to do: I met people off the internet in real life! I found friends who accepted me for who I am and are a bit weird like me. We meet up to go to jumble sales and we share a Tumblr but mostly we laugh and don’t feel alone any more and it’s all because of you.
Hey Jeane
Not sure if you remember me but I met you last summer at Molly Montgomery’s rocking Rock ’n’ Roll Camp for Girls. You did this amazing talk about empowerment and self-esteem and you made us share the most hurtful names we’d ever been called then reclaim them by Magic Markering them on to our bodies as tattoos.
My word was ‘Fat’ and this is a picture of the beautiful tattoo I had done for Christmas.
<
br /> I don’t think of fat as an insult any more but as a powerful statement of who I am, to let the haters know that they can’t touch me.
Just wanted you to know that you helped me loads and that everyone at Rock ’n’ Roll Camp had an out of control girl crush on you.
Jeane!
I read your blog about trying out for roller derby and you inspired ME to attend a training session with my local team.
I’m now a proud member of the Blackpool Brawlers and we all love you. Come to Blackpool and let us take you out for chips and a go on the waltzers.
Dear Jeane
Every time you post a blog, you change someone’s life. I promise you.
You changed mine.
It was message after message from people that I’d never met. People that I’d never even tweeted or mentioned in a blog. But they all had something in common: they all insisted that even though we’d never been in the same room together, I was their friend. They were my friends. That the whole point of the internet was so that people like us could find each other and Adorkable was the Sat Nav that guided them towards all the other dorks and freaks and outsiders and loners and that none of us were on our own. Together we were strong. And if that wasn’t enough to convince me, there were also offers of spare rooms, muffin baskets and someone even wanted to give me an actual live puppy.
‘Well, I suppose this is something to think about,’ I said slowly. My voice was very croaky as it was taking a super-human effort not to burst into tears. ‘What was that you were saying about most of the people I knew on the internet being weird middle-aged men who live with their mothers or spammers who just—’
‘OK, I’ll admit that maybe I was wrong,’ Michael muttered. He gave me one of his penetrating looks, which I was sure he practised in front of the mirror while he was taking ages to do his hair. ‘Maybe I’ve been wrong about a lot of things.’