‘Well, you can just unpromise.’ I shoved the crutches at him and tutted furiously as he tried to take my arm and help me out of the car.
‘I’m going to give you a lift whether you like it or not,’ he said grimly, as he handed the crutches back to me. ‘So, what time?’
‘I don’t like it at all so I’m not telling you a time and you don’t know what number my flat is so you can’t ring the bell and even if you stood outside and waited for me, you can’t, like, physically put me in your car.’
‘I bet I could,’ Michael mused, eyeing me up and down as I adjusted the crutches and slowly and carefully stepped out on to the road. ‘Look, Jeane, can you just be reasonable for once in your life? I made you fall off your bike and I’ve told my parents that I’ll get you to and from school and that’s what I’m going to do.’
‘Look, Michael, I don’t do reasonable. It doesn’t suit me and what you told your parents isn’t my problem. Just leave your house a little bit early and then don’t come to pick me up. It will be our little secret.’
There was no point in arguing with me. Better people than Michael Lee had tried and failed horribly. ‘Fine,’ he sighed. ‘Fine. And I hope you don’t get a seat on the bus because it will serve you right for being such a pig-headed, belligerent cow.’
‘Whatevs,’ I drawled and I wished I could flounce off but all I could do was hobble and shuffle away from him with my nose in the air, which really didn’t have the same sort of vibe.
10
I could say that life went back to normal after Scarlett and me broke up but if I did then I’d be lying. Life wasn’t normal. It was all wrong.
For starters, everyone knew I’d been dumped – even if they didn’t know the painful and humiliating circumstances of my dumping. And everyone knew that Barney and Scarlett were seeing each other because they held hands at every opportunity. It was no surprise that loud whispers followed me around wherever I went.
I made a point of saying hello to Barney and Scarlett to show that there were no hard feelings and I was fine with it. But my ego was bruised and I spent a large part of each day with a churning in my gut and a feeling like I was something less than I used to be. I was also really irritable.
My extreme crankiness didn’t have much to do with Barney and Scarlett, and a lot to do with Jeane Smith, because she’d got under my skin like a prickly heat rash. I did take some small comfort in knowing that I wasn’t the only dumpee on the block, but at least I had my mates to whack me on the back and say, ‘Plenty more fish in the sea, mate,’ and, ‘Her loss, Mikey,’ and I had loads of texts from girls, including Heidi, saying that they were there for me if I needed to talk.
But Jeane … Jeane, she had no one, and I felt sorry for her even though she didn’t deserve any sympathy, especially when she’d execute a clumsy one hundred and eighty degrees on her crutches every time she caught sight of me. But I could tell she was troubled. She wasn’t rocking the fluoro-prints for one thing – on Wednesday she was even wearing khaki and plum (it looked like purple to me, but on her blog she insisted it was plum, not that I check her blog every day but I’d just happened to be passing that morning), which had to be like wearing black in Jeane world. She was even keeping it kinda on the downlow on the interwebz. Instead of tweeting about cake, she tweeted about the various injustices being done to girls around the world. I’d never realised that girls had such a hard time, but they were being stoned and having acid thrown in their faces when they tried to access a proper education and pharmacists in small American towns wouldn’t give them the morning-after pill and when Jeane mixed it up and posted photos of her glorious technicolour ankle, it was a welcome relief.
Then, on Friday, I felt better than I had done all week. There was a big party on Saturday night and I had a flirty text from posh Lucy, who went to the girls’ grammar school, because:
I want 2 double-check that ur going 2 Jimmy K’s par-tay & u & Scar r over. Her loss, my gain!
Posh Lucy was well fit, really outgoing, didn’t wear weird clothes and was just what I needed to get my groove back. Even better, I got a call from the bike shop to say that Jeane’s bike was ready to be collected. I’d pay for the repairs, hand over her boneshaker, then I’d never have to have anything to do with Jeane Smith ever again.
I didn’t even care that I had to ask Scarlett to ask Barney to tell Jeane her bike was ready to be collected after school. I didn’t have her phone number, no freaking way was I going to email her via her website, and I absolutely couldn’t tweet her because she didn’t know that I was the same @winsomedimsum who tweeted her links to pugs on surfboards.
So it was a huge shock after I’d just paid Colin, the bike repairman, sixty of my hard-earned pounds, to suddenly come face to face with Jeane as she limped through the door, minus crutches but with a big grin on her face. It disappeared as soon as she saw me.
‘Why are you here?’ she demanded. ‘That wasn’t part of the deal.’
‘I couldn’t pay until Colin knew exactly what needed doing,’ I said huffily. ‘Believe me, if you’d bothered to let me know what time you’d be putting in an appearance, I’d have kept well away.’
‘If you’d never thrown me from my bike in the first place then neither of us would have to be here.’ Jeane folded her arms. ‘Go!’
Colin coughed pointedly and we both turned to look at him. He was in his fifties with tattoos over every inch of his body except his shaved head (I knew this because he was wearing shorts even though it was an icy-cold October day) and several facial piercings that looked painful. In short, he was intimidating, and you didn’t want to be in the same place as someone intimidating when a shouty girl was accusing you of throwing her off her bike. ‘Do you want me to take him round the back then, Jeane?’
I’d never known fear like it. I wanted to throw up, then fall to my knees and cry, ‘Please, don’t hurt me!’ Fortunately I was saved by Jeane.
‘Well, maybe he didn’t throw me off my bike. Not on purpose anyway,’ she conceded. ‘You can still take him out back if you want though.’
‘Now why would anyone want to do such a sweet little girl like you actual physical harm?’ Colin asked, and he winked at me so I guessed we were cool and that I didn’t have to fear for my personal safety. ‘Anyway, I straightened out the wheel and I tweaked your gears and brakes and re-oiled the chain for you. Mary should be as good as new.’
Jeane sidled closer. Usually all I could see when she was near was whatever colour-clashing outfit she was wearing, but today it was a navy dress and mustard-coloured tights, which couldn’t distract away from her pale face and the shadows under her eyes. She looked lost. She wasn’t pretty, not even a little bit pretty, but she had a certain fire to her, except now it seemed as if it had sputtered and gone out.
After I’d got back from driving her home the week before, I’d been expecting a medium to heavy grilling from Mum about Jeane and any intentions I might have towards her, but she’d just shaken her head and said, ‘That is one very troubled, very unhappy girl.’
I’d tried to laugh it off. ‘She’s a million times tougher than she looks.’
‘No, she isn’t,’ Mum said simply. ‘She’s so brittle that one hard knock would shatter her.’
At the time, I hadn’t paid much attention. Mum was reading Tolstoy for her book group and so I put it down to that. I’ve never actually read any Tolstoy but his books are long and full of people with confusing Russian names and Dad said that they were the reason Mum had been in a bad mood for weeks. When Alice had Crayola-ed the hall wall, I really thought Mum was going to put her up for adoption. But now as I watched Jeane climb on to her bike to see if the saddle needed adjusting, Mum’s words came back to me.
I had lots of friends, both in and out of school. Jeane seemed to have a lot less, unless you counted the people who followed her on Twitter, and I didn’t count them. Real friends were there for you and I could try to be there for Jeane. Not as a friend. God, no! But if peo
ple knew I was cool with her then they’d be cool with her too. It wouldn’t take that much effort to say, ‘Hello, how are you?’ at school. I could do that.
‘What are you still doing here?’ asked a peevish voice and I realised that Jeane was trying to wheel her bike out of the workshop and I was standing in the way, possibly with a slackjawed look on my face.
I got another black look as I held the door open for her, then, as she began to dump bags and belongings into basket and pannier, I had to ask the question that had been bugging me for days. ‘If we take the fact that I threw you off your bike out of the equation, then why don’t you like me?’
Jeane rolled her shadowed eyes. ‘I don’t have time for this.’
‘C’mon, it’s a valid question.’ I rested my hand on the crossbar of her bike and she flinched even though she wasn’t even on the bike yet.
She thought about it for all of three seconds. ‘I just don’t,’ she said flatly, which was much worse than if she’d said it fiercely. ‘Hard as it might be for you to understand, not everyone you meet in life is going to think the sun shines out of your arse so it’s best you get used to it now.’
I decided to let that slide. ‘But what specifically don’t you like about me? Name one thing. No! Name three things.’ If Jeane could only come up with one reason then it was just Jeane being Jeane, but if she had at least three believable reasons for hating my guts then those were areas that I needed to work on.
‘What is the big deal? You don’t like me either!’
‘I do!’
‘That’s utter, utter crap and you know it,’ she sneered.
‘I don’t not like you.’ That wasn’t what I meant. ‘I’m open to the idea of liking you but you don’t make it easy.’
‘Why should I make it easy?’ Jeane demanded. ‘What makes you think that someone like you deserves to be friends with someone like me?’
I looked around slowly and deliberately. ‘Yeah, because you have so many people queuing up to hang out with you.’
Jeane drew herself up to her full height, which actually wasn’t very tall. ‘Do you know how many followers I have on Twitter?’
I did know and I was one of them, but … ‘The internet doesn’t count. I bet half your followers are middle-aged men with bad personal hygiene who live with their mothers and the rest of them are spammers who want you to click on dodgy links that will infect your computer with a virus.’
‘No, they’re not! They’re real. Or most of them are. And just because you interact with people online doesn’t mean that those friendships shouldn’t be valued,’ Jeane argued. ‘It’s the bloody twenty-first century.’
‘And where were all your internet friends when you bust your ankle?’
Jeane practically howled in disbelief. ‘I? I? I didn’t bust up my own ankle. You threw me off my bike!’
I wasn’t sure how I’d gone from feeling sorry towards Jeane to baiting her into a full-on strop-attack. It was just she was so full of bullshit and someone needed to call her on it and … and … she reacted so beautifully. You just lit the fuse, stood well back and watched her explode. Except I’d forgotten to stand well back so now she was jabbing her finger in my general direction and with each fifth or so jab it would hit me in the chest. She could pack a lot of punch into one stubby index finger.
‘Anyway, whatever,’ I said in my slowest, drawliest, most bored-sounding voice. ‘You bust your ankle and where were all your Twitter followers then? Did they rush around with bags of grapes and ibuprofen? And do they hang out with you when you’re at school or do you have to go off by yourself into a little hidey-hole where you can do your knitting and generally act like a weirdo freak loner?’
‘How dare you? How dare you? You know what? You think you’re such a big man around school but these are the best days of your life. This is as good as it’s ever going to get for you,’ Jeane spat. ‘You’re just a big dumb goldfish swimming around in a fucking tiny pool but the pool is going to get bigger and bigger and you’ll get smaller and smaller until you’re just a minnow and while you’re settling into mediocrity in your miserable, confined little life, I’ll just be coming into my own. You might think I’m some weirdo freak loner but at least I’m not afraid of who I am.’
Her finger was like a branding iron, beating out a fierce, painful tattoo into my heart and the only way to stop it was to grab Jeane’s wrist. Her skin was shockingly warm beneath my fingers and I waited for her to scream but she was looking at me with a confused expression on her face, eyes narrowed like she wasn’t sure what I was doing or why I was doing it.
I wasn’t sure either. But there was one thing she needed to know. ‘I’m not afraid of who I am.’
She shook her head. ‘You don’t even know who you are,’ she said in a much quieter voice, like she wasn’t even trying to hurt me now and that it was the absolute truth. ‘You just be what other people want you to be.’
Maybe I kissed Jeane because it made her shut the hell up. Or it might have been the easiest way to show her that I wasn’t who she thought I was, that there might actually be some hidden depths to me after all. But I have a really horrible feeling that I kissed her because I wanted to.
One moment we were standing in the street, the bike between us, the next moment we were kissing. People always say, ‘And then, like, the next thing I knew we were kissing,’ and that never computed. Because there had to be a thing before the kiss. But this time there really wasn’t.
It was me, me, Michael Lee, kissing Jeane Smith.
11
I kissed Michael Lee.
Four words I never thought I’d write. Four words that, in my wildest dreams (even wilder than the dreams I’d had the time I’d scarfed down a fudge brownie, which turned out to be packed with spliff as well as chopped-up dates), I could never imagine going together.
I don’t even know why I kissed him. Maybe it was to shock him out of his sad, safe little life. To make him see that anything was possible. It certainly wasn’t because I wanted to kiss him.
But I was kissing him and all I could think was, My God, why am I kissing Michael Lee?
And then I was like, Oh. My. God! Why am I still kissing Michael Lee? and I pulled away from him but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that I think he was pulling away from me at the exact same moment.
I didn’t know what to say, which never happens, because I always know what to say and Michael Lee was looking like Wile E Coyote in that split second after he’s run off a cliff and realises that he’s about to fall into a rocky ravine studded with cactuses. Sorry, cacti. In short, he looked like a boy whose entire belief system had just turned to dust and rubble.
We both stood there, not talking, just staring at each other. The not talking and the staring seemed to go on for several eternities and I wanted to look away but I couldn’t. It was a relief when Michael Lee stopped looking at me in favour of fixing his eyes on the floor.
‘Well, that was bound to happen,’ I said calmly, because screaming hysterically wasn’t going to erase the fact that we’d kissed. That I’d kissed Michael Lee. I couldn’t help it – I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth. ‘All that negative energy between us, well … it had to go somewhere.’
He frowned, then looked up to stare at my lips like he couldn’t quite believe that two minutes before he’d had his mouth on them. ‘Yeah, totally. Yeah. I mean, all that sniping. Had to end somewhere.’ He shook his head. ‘That was so weird.’
I nodded and tugged Mary out of his grasp. ‘And at least you didn’t throw me off my bike again …’
That wiped the frown off his face. ‘For about the millionth time I didn’t do it on purpose!’ He was managing to talk in complete sentences again.
‘I know. It was a joke. You do know what a joke is, don’t you?’ I mounted Mary and carefully steered her towards the kerb. My ankle seemed to be holding up all right. ‘Anyway, it happened. It’s never going to happen again and if you tell anyone, I’ll
deny everything.’
‘Like anyone would even believe it,’ Michael said. Then he ran a hand through his hair and ruined his faux-hawk. Annoyingly, being rumpled made him look very cute, though it wasn’t the kind of cute that did it for me. ‘You absolutely promise you won’t tell anyone.’
‘You really know how to win a girl’s heart,’ I told him, as I checked to see if there were any cars coming. I was as freaked out by the kiss as he was, but he didn’t have to make it quite so clear that he was blates repulsed by the touch of my lips.
‘But don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.’
I pedalled off without a backward glance, even ignoring the twinge in my ankle because that wasn’t important. What was important was getting as far away from Michael Lee as possible.
That was that. It really was. The days just flew by. I blogged, I tweeted. I trend-watched. I even hung out with Barney and Scarlett to show that the three of us were mature people (well, I already knew that I was a mature person, Barney has his moments and I don’t think Scarlett will ever be mature, not even if she lives to be a hundred and five).
Barney made this big thing about the three of us having lunch together in the school cafeteria so everyone would know that all was cool and civilised between us. I think he also had this idea that he could gently ease me into mainstream society, like that was a big ambition of mine.
It didn’t help that my lunch consisted of three cups of grainy vending machine coffee, a banana muffin and some Haribo Sour Mix. I’d stayed up until five in the morning working on a piece about youth tribes for a German magazine and I needed all the artificial stimulants I could get.