‘Jeane,’ said a grim voice, as I was head first in my locker. For a second I thought it was Michael Lee and, in my alarm, I banged my head as I emerged from the metal cubby hole, only to see Barney standing there.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ I said. ‘I thought you were someone else.’
Barney didn’t say anything even though he was working his mouth furiously like he was chewing a massive wad of gum, which was something he’d never do because he had an irrational fear he’d swallow it and clog up his insides for ever. He obviously wasn’t going to form actual words for some time so I continued to search for my rosebud lipsalve.
‘How could you?’ Barney finally asked.
‘How could I what?’ By now I was rummaging in the furthest reaches of my locker amid Tupperware containers that hadn’t come home in weeks.
‘Scarlett had to leave Maths halfway through because she was crying.’
I sneered to myself. ‘She’s always crying about something. Honestly, she’s wetter than a … a … well, something that’s really, really wet.’
‘You called her a retard, which is wrong on so many levels.’ Barney sounded properly angry. Almost as angry as the time he’d been deep into Red Dead Redemption and I’d tripped over and pulled out the power cord on his Xbox.
I found my lipsalve and carefully extricated my head from my locker. ‘I didn’t call her a retard. It was aimed at the whole class and I promised Alli … Ms Ferguson I’d apologise so don’t get all up in my face about it.’
‘You were totally out of order,’ Barney persisted, his face red. ‘Saying mean things about people isn’t cool, it’s just mean. She can’t help it if she’s not good with words and she doesn’t like talking in class. Have you any idea how frightening you are, especially when it takes a lot of courage for someone to take part in a class discussion anyway and you just—’
‘Barney, I know,’ I said gently. If I hadn’t been entirely sure that there was anything to know before, now I was certain. Barney was defending Scarlett’s honour and her right to say idiotic things in class like his life depended on it. ‘I know about you and Scarlett.’
For a second, Barney’s mouth hung open in surprise. Then he shrugged. ‘There’s not that much to know.’
‘Do you want to try that one again?’ I hissed, because I couldn’t do gentle for very long. ‘Don’t even try to pretend that there’s nothing going on between the two of you.’
Barney sighed. ‘Nothing has happened but we like each other. A lot. But it’s complicated because she’s seeing Michael and, well, there’s you.’
‘What about me?’
‘She’s terrified you’ll kill her.’
‘Like I’d lay a finger on her.’ I snorted derisively.
‘It’s not your fingers she’s worried about. It’s why I didn’t say anything. I mean, I tried, I wanted to, but every time I bottled it,’ Barney admitted, and for once he wasn’t ducking his head, or biting his lip or hiding behind his fringe, but looking me straight in the eye. ‘You’re very intimidating.’
‘Intimidating? What’s so intimidating about me?’ I demanded, hands on my hips, and Barney was right: there wasn’t much to choose between my normal face and my fight face.
‘It’s like there’s no room for me,’ Barney said. ‘You’re always ten steps ahead and I’m always lagging behind and it’s like nothing I do or say is ever cool or clever enough for you.’
‘I don’t expect you to lag behind me,’ I spluttered helplessly. Now it was Barney’s turn to lean back against the lockers all free and easy because his big secret was out and the world hadn’t ended. Whereas I was standing there with my nostrils flaring and it felt as if my eyes were about to bug out of my head. ‘I try to include you in everything I do.’
‘Yeah, but I don’t want to wind your wool at sponsored knit-a-thons or wander the streets of Hoxton so you can take photos for your trend-spotting reports. And honestly, Jeane, I can’t work out what’s going on when you drag me to roller derby, but you never hear the word no.’
I couldn’t believe it! I’d let Barney into my life. I’d taken a chance on him, decided that maybe there was more to him than there was to the other cretins who lolloped along the corridors at school like they’d only just mastered the art of walking on two legs, and he repaid me by choosing Scarlett. Scarlett? She was so stupid she was practically brain-dead.
Barney lost the nonchalant slouch as soon as I started shouting at him. He tried to argue back but I just shouted louder until the sound of my voice drowned out his bleating.
I didn’t care that there were still a few last stragglers milling about, or that they’d all stopped milling in favour of standing and watching and even pointing and sniggering as I flayed the skin off Barney’s worthless two-timing body with the pointy end of my tongue.
‘You were nothing before me,’ I screamed finally, as Barney cowered where he stood. ‘And you’ll be nothing again, just a spotty geek immersed in World of Warcraft with no social skills. Just as well that Scarlett isn’t people but pond life, isn’t it?’
Then I shoulder-bumped Barney so hard that he rocked on his feet, as I stormed off. And I knew it was wrong and it wasn’t the right reaction to have in the circumstances but I was already composing the blog post I’d write about Barney and his perfidious, treacherous, morally reprehensible, snake-like behaviour as soon as I got home.
I was shaking, actually shaking, for a good ten minutes after my argy bargy with Jeane. It was my own fault, I thought to myself, as I sat in the Chemistry lab during my free period. I should have been making notes on molecular formulas, but all I could think about were the things I should have said to wipe the superior look off her stupid, ugly face. I’d forgotten all about the horror of our first encounter at the jumble sale. I’d forgotten all about her well-earned rep as the rudest girl in school and I’d forgotten that everyone pretends to be someone else on the internet and that Jeane’s friendliness was only Wi-Fi-enabled. ‘Oh, I was just passing and I thought I’d come over and say hi.’ Every time I relived that moment and the piss-and-vinegar look on Jeane’s face, I died a little inside.
The bell rang and as I was heading to Computer Science I bumped into Scarlett’s best friend, Heidi, who was bustling down the corridor with a fistful of chocolate bars, a can of Diet Coke and a wad of tissues.
‘Oh. My. God. Shit’s just got real,’ Heidi announced, though she needn’t have bothered because she was carrying all the items necessary to soothe any teenage girl’s frayed nerves. Except ice cream, though the student council had looked into the possibility of a vending machine that dispensed miniature tubs of Ben & Jerry’s.
‘What kind of shit?’ I resigned myself to being late for Comp Sci because Heidi always took several minutes and OMGs to get to the point.
She rolled her eyes at me. ‘Scarlett is, like, literally in pieces. For real.’
‘She’s not literally in pieces,’ I said, because it annoyed me how Scarlett and Heidi and their whole gang misappropriated the word ‘literally’ until it literally lost all meaning. ‘What’s she so upset about?’
‘Jeane Smith made her cry. I mean, she literally tore Scarlett apart and now Scarlett’s hyperventilating in the loos. And the only paper bag we could find for her to breathe into smelt of ham and pickle sandwiches so then Scar started retching as well and it was, y’know, just wrongness.’
Heidi stopped but I knew it was only to let in oxygen and she’d start yammering again if I didn’t seize the moment. ‘Why did Jeane make her cry? Did they have an argument about …?’ I paused because I didn’t want to mention Barney, but Heidi noticed a gap in the conversation and crowbarred her way back in.
‘Would you believe it if I said Jeane had a go at her about our A-level English texts? I mean, like, what? Then Jeane totes called Scar a retard.’
‘So, has Scar stopped crying?’ I asked and my perfect boyfriend halo was slipping because the news that Scarlett was weeping in the girls’ loos didn’t
make me want to rush to her side. It just made me think, Oh God, now what? Though calling someone a retard didn’t seem like Jeane’s style. It was low even for her. ‘And don’t you have a lesson to be in?’
‘The circs are beyond extenuating.’ Heidi wriggled her shoulders in annoyance. ‘Don’t even think about reporting me. Scarlett needs me.’
‘Well, let’s just pretend that we never had this conversation,’ I said. ‘And tell Scar I’ll see her after school and I hope she’s all right.’
‘If you were any kind of boyfriend, you’d come with me and make sure she’s all right,’ Heidi said, widening her mascaracaked eyes at me. ‘Did I mention that she’s literally fallen apart?’
‘Yeah, you did, but Scarlett is in the girls’ loos and I’m really late for Comp Sci and probably going to have to put myself on report so I’ll be all boyfriendly and caring when I give her a lift home, OK?’
‘Whatevs.’ Heidi was already walking away and trying to tug down her short skirt where it had ridden up. There had been a time, the summer before last, when I thought that Heidi and I might become something. We kept getting off with each other at parties but when we weren’t getting off with each other we’d had nothing to talk about, and then I met Hannah and all other girls just seemed something less in comparison.
I had a sense memory of Hannah sitting on the stairs at a party that summer, her blonde hair shining in the muted candlelight as she told me about her favourite Sylvia Plath poem; her voice had got all choked up and she’d had to wipe away one single, solitary tear that slowly trickled down her cheek. Then she’d laughed and said, ‘God, I’m every teen angst cliché, aren’t I? Crying over Sylvia Plath on the stairs at a party.’
And then I thought about Scarlett crying her eyes out in the girls’ loos because someone half her size and twice as ugly had been mean to her and really there was no comparison between her tears and Hannah being moved to tears about something she really cared about and actually I was pleased to go to Comp Sci and learn about database theory – women are far more complicated than database theory.
When the final bell rang, I headed to the staff car park, where as head of the student council I was allocated a parking space for the rusting, held-together-with-gaffer-tape-and-chewing-gum, ancient Austin Allegro that I’d inherited from my grandma. It was where Scarlett should be but there was no sign of her.
She couldn’t still be crying.
I pulled out my mobile but, although I had seventeen messages, most of them to do with the debating society’s upcoming battle against the local posh school, the football match on Saturday morning and a party on Saturday night, Scarlett was not one of the many people that had texted me because she needed me to do something for her. Even my mum wanted me to buy a bag of red onions and some garlic on my way home.
Feeling entirely put upon, I walked back into school to track down Scarlett. There wasn’t a gaggle of Scarlett’s friends hovering anxiously outside any of the girls’ cloakrooms, clutching cans of Diet Coke and texting frantically, but I eventually tracked her down to the Year 12 common room. It was half the size of the Year 13 common room and smelt faintly of fish and old gym kits, which was why most of Year 12 preferred to shiver outside come sun, rain and blizzard, but there was Scarlett huddled on the windowsill and, sitting next to her, his arm round her shoulders, was Barney.
They both looked up when I bounded into the room, Scarlett brushing what had to be the last tears from her face, Barney leaning down to whisper something to her. And the weird thing, weirder than Scarlett and Barney tucked away in a smelly room with his arm round her, was that I felt like I was doing something wrong just by standing in the doorway and intruding on whatever the hell it was they were doing.
‘Are you ready to go, Scar?’ I could barely squeeze out her name. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you.’
Scarlett frowned. ‘Well, I have stuff to do so I don’t need a lift, but, like, thanks.’ She didn’t say anything else. Instead she gave me a pointed look, which was something I hadn’t known she could do.
Mind you, it was nothing compared to the look that Barney was giving me. I’d only ever spoken to him a couple of times – once I’d said hello to him at a gig and once I’d had to write him up for texting in the middle of a Maths lesson – and both times he’d stammered and blushed and stared at the ground. But now he looked at me like he had every right to be sitting next to Scarlett, so close that from shoulder to knee they were touching. He gave me a tight smile.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘me and Scar were having a private conversation.’
‘Fine,’ I said, like I really was fine with this distinctly unfine situation, but I wasn’t going to be the guy who lost his temper and let loose a torrent of angry words that I’d regret later. Be the bigger person, my dad always says, even when someone is trying to make you look small. I could do that. Or I could at least try. ‘Well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘OK, or I’ll text you,’ Scarlett said weakly, and I think all three of us knew that she’d do no such thing.
On the way home, I knew for certain that I had to end things with Scarlett ASAP. By rights she should be the one to do the dumping, but instead she was being indifferent and unreliable and hanging out with the geeky ginger kid who was tutoring her in Maths so she could force me to be the bad cop. The thing was that I’d never had to dump someone. Yeah, I’d broken up with girlfriends before but it was more a mutual decision that we weren’t into each other any more. Then there was Hannah and that had been a case of, ‘You know I love you, right, but you also know my dad works in the Foreign Office and I’m being shunted off to boarding school in sodding Cornwall to do my A-levels because he’s being posted somewhere where there’s a good chance that he and my mum might get kidnapped by rebel forces. For fucking real.’
We’d talked about long-distance relationships and how we could Skype every night but in the end Hannah was in so many tiny pieces about her parents that I didn’t want to be one more thing for her to worry about. The break-up was awful. I’m not going to lie: I cried. Hannah cried. Even our mums cried and I still have a Post-it note in my wallet that Hannah gave me just before she left on which she’d written: ‘Even when I’m a greyhaired little lady I’ll always think of you as The One Who Got Away.’
Thinking about Hannah and how she was the only girl who’d ever reduced me to tears, apart from Sun Li in kindergarten who’d spurned my amorous advances only after I’d given her a tube of Smarties, made me so distracted that I overshot a red light and nearly crashed into the back of the car in front of me.
Somehow I managed to get home without mowing down any stray pedestrians. Then I had to go out again, on foot, to get garlic and onions after a bollocking from my mother about shirking my responsibilities and it wasn’t until she was making a lasagne that I was able to go to my room and begin to brood properly.
After the first five minutes of ‘Woe is me’ I decided that brooding was boring. I switched on my computer but I didn’t want to go on Facebook because before I knew it I’d be cyberstalking Scarlett, so I drifted over to Twitter at exactly the same time as Jeane Smith, who wanted the world to know that she’d just posted a new blog. I was already in that mindless internet haze that had me clicking on the link without really registering what I was doing and then I was rocking back in my chair and nearly upending myself in the process.
Barney’s gone and got boy disease
When I started this blog, I made a solemn vow to myself that I would never blog about people I know. I would not talk shit about people I know. And when people I know do crummy, mean things, I will not call them on it. Not on this blog. No, sir.
Except for now, because I’m outing The Boy. Regular readers will know all about The Boy, I mention him often. He’s part boyfriend, part sidekick, part kiss-buddy. Well, he was, and I always called him The Boy to protect his privacy and to, well, protect him, but he’s not worthy of my high regard or my protection any longer.
HIS NAME IS BARNEY AND HE’S A TOTAL NO-GOOD, TWO-TIMING RATFINK! Worse, I was training him up to be a sensitive, well-rounded, free-from-macho-bullshit boyfriend (I even bought him a ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ T-shirt) but you can’t train up someone when it turns out they’re the MOST LOW-DOWN SNAKE IN SLITHERTOWN so now I’m breaking all my blogging rules and I’m USING SHOUTY CAPS AND I HATE SHOUTY CAPS!
Before he met me, Barney was pretty much a cultural embryo. He’d been nowhere, experienced nothing, never had a single, solitary adventure until I made space for him in my life. I introduced him to people and places and tastes and sounds that expanded his world (which wasn’t difficult when his world was a TV screen hooked up to an Xbox).
Before me, Barney hadn’t even heard of roller derby. He’d never eaten sushi or chilli-infused chocolate. He’d never been to a jumble sale or listened to Vampire Weekend or The Velvet Underground and cried during ‘Pale Blue Eyes’. Never seen a foreign film. Hadn’t stayed up all night and climbed to the top of a really big hill to watch the sun rise. Still let his mum buy his clothes and, worst thing of all, he downloaded music off the internet and never paid for it.
He leeched my cool like he was trying to jump-start a car battery, and how does he repay me? By mooning over another girl. Having wrong thoughts about another girl. Wishing he wasn’t with me, but with this other girl.
People fall in and out of love the whole time and it’s not like Barney and I are Romeo and Juliet Redux (though I’m quite sure his mother would love it if I drank some poision and, like, died), so if Barney wanted to fall in love with someone else, there’s not a whole lot I can do about it.
But it turns out there’s been something going on for weeks and I had to find out, from, like, one of them. You know, one of the anti-dorks. Even then I refused to believe it, because Barney would never do that to me, because I’d made him listen to Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill and added the F-bomb to his Google Blog reader and showed him in a million other ways that he had to be cool and treat me with respect in order to make amends for centuries and centuries of patriarchal domination and boys thinking they’re better than girls just because they have a lump of flesh dangling down between their legs.