Adorkable (30 page)

I expected protests because Michael seemed so far out of his comfort zone that he might as well be on the moon, but a smile slowly appeared on his face.

‘Can we go on the subway? And can we get a ginormous pretzel from one of those street carts and, oh! I want to take a picture of the Empire State Building all lit up, not that I can show it to anyone, because nobody else knows that I’m here.’

‘That’s all doable,’ I agreed, standing up so Michael could get out of the chair, but he caught hold of my hand and lifted it to his mouth so he could press a kiss to the backs of my knuckles.

‘Thanks, Jeane, for all of this, I really mean it,’ he said earnestly.

‘Oh, don’t be so wet,’ I complained, pulling my hand free.
‘Come on, chop-chop, and put a proper jacket on. It’s cold out there.’

We did as much of New York as it was possible to do in five hours. I took Michael on the subway to the South Street terminal so we could get the free Staten Island ferry and see Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty en route, before we headed back to Manhattan.

Then we subwayed up to Herald Square and Macy’s and I introduced Michael to Old Navy, which was way cheaper than his beloved Abercrombie & Fitch. He was so excited about his super-sized pretzel that he didn’t mind that every time we took the subway I managed to get on the wrong train or the wrong line or the wrong platform. New York is very hard to navigate. Yes, I know it’s on a grid but I can only work with left and right, not east and west, and using Google Maps was eating my iPhone battery so we jumped in a cab and headed to Chinatown so we could have dim sum served by fabulously rude waiters.

‘They’re even ruder than the waiters in London,’ Michael announced with glee as we cracked open our fortune cookines. He read his message and sniggered. ‘I can never tell if these things are deeply significant or randomly selected by a fortunecookie message-generating algorithm.’

‘Let me see.’

He handed over a tiny piece of paper that proclaimed:
You will stumble on to the path that will lead to your happiness
.

‘Well, you’re sitting in a dim sum bar in Chinatown, New York, and you look pretty happy to me so maybe there’s some
truth in it,’ I said lightly, but I felt a surge of pride. Michael’s current happiness was entirely my doing. I had made him happy, which was not something that I usually excelled at. I was good, really good, at all kinds of things but not making other people happy.

‘What does yours say?’ Michael asked.

I unrolled the little slip of paper and although it was randomly selected by a fortune-cookie message-generating algorithm, when I saw the words my heart jolted like when you dream that you’re falling:
Don’t cry, life is pain
.

‘It says, “you are destined for greatness,”’ I lied, though it wasn’t really a lie because I
was
destined for greatness. I mean, obviously. I screwed up my fortune and signalled the waiter for our bill.

‘Oh, come on, I showed you mine, aren’t you going to show me yours?’ Michael complained as I tried to catch someone’s eye. All the waiters were pointedly ignoring me so I had no choice but to stand up and wave my arms around while shouting, ‘Can I have the cheque, please?’

It was super-late, almost midnight, which meant it was almost five in the morning back in London, and Michael’s voice sounded tetchy the way it always did when I kept him up long past his bedtime.

There was only one thing that shifted his mood when he was tired and cranky. I lowered my lashes and looked at him. ‘I’ll show you mine when we get back to the hotel,’ I said, and he perked up instantly because I wasn’t talking about anything that came in a fortune cookie.

When
I woke up at 8.30 to my first New York morning, Jeane was already awake and bashing away at her laptop. There were three empty coffee cups next to her and it looked as if she’d stripped the minibar of all its snacks.

‘How long have you been doing that?’ I asked as I struggled into an upright position.

She barely glanced up from the screen. ‘A while,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m meeting the conference coordinator and the tech guy in half an hour to go through my stage specs and everything’s going wrong.’

Jeane was still in her Bikini Kill T-shirt and polka dot sleep shorts and her hair, which she’d subjected to a lavender rinse the week before, looked as if it had been caught in a wind tunnel. Her eyes were swollen and red too like she’d decided that she didn’t need to sleep, even though not sleeping made
her really snippy. Then she’d drink tons of coffee and get really hyper. It was going to be a very long day.

‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

‘Hang on,’ she said, and typed even faster. Then she frowned and stopped. ‘Can you ring room service and ask them to send up a vat of very strong coffee and their most sugarific pastries?’

Jeane had explained last night that everything was comped, from the cab fares to the hotel room to the contents of the minibar to room service (‘as long as we don’t go mad and start ordering, like, six bottles of champagne and caviar and lobster and stuff’), but even so it made me feel uncomfortable. The woman who took my order was really nice but I half expected her to suddenly say, ‘You’re eighteen, I refuse to let you order room service. Don’t be so ridiculous!’

Not that Jeane noticed. In fact, she didn’t notice anything until the coffee and pastries arrived and she finally smiled at me. And when I helped her fix one of the slides in her PowerPoint presentation, which wasn’t doing what she wanted it to, she even gave me a hug.

‘Right, I’m done,’ she said, as she saved the document five times just to be on the safe side. She picked up one of the fluffy robes that the hotel had provided. ‘I’m going to do my soundcheck. I’ll be about an hour, OK?’

‘You’re going to meet them in a dressing gown?’ She was already walking to the door with her laptop tucked under her arm and looking at me as if I was the unreasonable one.

‘Well,
yeah
. The conference doesn’t start for another hour and a half and it’s not like I have time to change.’

She slammed the door behind her and was back in the time
it took me to sulk, have a thirty-minute power shower that was one of the single best experiences of my life, brood, look up places for brunch on the internet, and I’d just finished the long process of getting my hair just right when Jeane returned with the most ferociously furious look on her face that I’d seen yet and that was saying something.

‘How did it go?’ I asked dutifully, even though I was dreading the rant that was sure to follow. She could rant for hours and I was really hungry and it would be much better if she could get washed and dressed and then I’d let her get her rant on halfway through brunch.

She held up her hand. ‘Don’t. Even. Ask.’

‘Oh, it couldn’t have been that bad,’ I insisted cheerfully, but she just rolled her eyes and slammed the bathroom door behind her.

She was in there for ages so I had plenty of time to realise what a bad idea this trip had been. Not just because of the web of lies I’d had to spin to get here but because I was at the tender mercy and mood swings of a girl who spent seventy-five per cent of our time together arguing with me.

I couldn’t do what I did when she was getting on my nerves back home, which was to leave her to get on with it while keeping a close eye on her Twitter feed until I knew she was over her snit. I was stuck with her.

Oh God.

Jeane was still pretty tight-lipped when she emerged from the bathroom an hour later. She was back in the fluffy towelling robe but her lilac-tinted hair was pinned up and she’d applied full make-up, glitter all over the show, bright red lipstick and
thick, winged eyeliner. She completely ignored me as she began to rummage through her unpacked suitcase for something Day-Glo and mismatched to wear.

‘Do you want to get some brunch?’ I asked. I already knew the answer would be no but I wanted to remind her that I was still there in the room, breathing the same oxygen as her.

‘I can’t. I have to attend the morning session of the conference,’ she muttered. ‘I did tell you.’

‘Well, you kinda didn’t.’

‘Yeah, but you should have realised. I mean it’s just, like,
rude
if I don’t.’ She looked up from her suitcase to glare at me more effectively. ‘You don’t have to though. You can go out and get lost on the subway trying to find the Empire State Building if you want. I don’t care.’

‘I get that you’re nervous, I really do. I feel the same way when I’m taking part in a debate at—’

‘This is
nothing
like debating capital punishment with the sons and daughters of Tory scum from the posh school at the other end of the borough and I am
not
nervous. I’ve appeared at
hundreds
of conferences. Hundreds.’ She jabbed a finger in my general direction. ‘Look, you have to leave now. You are doing my head in.’

‘I’m doing your head in? I don’t know why you even wanted me to come to New York with you—’

‘Neither do I!’ Jeane contorted her face into a grimace so twisted it looked as if it was causing her a thousand immense agonies. ‘Just … GO!’

I went. It wasn’t exactly a hardship. It was exciting. I had all of New York City to myself and it looked just like it did in the
movies, steam rising up from the manhole covers, the streets stretching towards the horizon and on this cold, crisp day, the sun glinted off the skyscrapers and yellow taxi cabs hooted and everyone I walked past had an American accent and when I went into Starbucks to get a cappuccino and a muffin the barista really did ask me, ‘How
you
doing?’

Also, the subway was really easy to use. Like, super-easy. New York’s laid out on a grid and most lines went uptown or downtown and a few went crosstown. It was simple: any fool could figure it out. I went to Central Park, which was pretty much a big park, and then I walked up to The Museum of Modern Art because I felt like I should do something cultural, even if I did spend most of my time in the gift shop. After that I jumped back on the subway and went to Dylan’s Candy Bar, because the interwebz said it was the best sweetshop in New York.

I owed Jeane candy – not that she deserved any, but I couldn’t wait to see the sheepish look on her face as she stumbled through an apology when I presented her with a great big jar of sweet and sour mix and chocolate-dipped jelly beans. But mostly I wished Melly and Alice were with me because they would have both thought they’d just died and gone to sweetie heaven.

I bankrupted myself loading up on lollipops and Pez sets and gummy bears and Wonka chocolate bars because they were both obsessed with
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
. My allowance was dependent on doing chores and admin work for the parents, and I was going to have to put in overtime so I could afford Christmas presents. It wasn’t like I got paid to bore on about all the crap Jeane liked to bore on about.

It
was lunchtime so I decided to head back to the hotel to dump my stuff and see if there were some leftover pastries from Jeane’s breakfast that I could eat – I was now too broke to even hit up Burger King. Unfortunately, when I got back to our suite, it was a pastry-free zone, and though the minibar had been restocked, I was damned if I was going to make any dents into Jeane’s bill. As it was, I was probably going to sleep on the couch tonight.

Not sure what to do next, I drifted back down to the lobby. I found myself following the signs that pointed to the conference and, when no one stopped me, I wandered into a little ante-room where there was a lunch buffet set up. Score!

I walked casually over as if I attended conferences all the time, grabbed a plate and quickly started to fill it with sushi. Then I swiped a bottle of Coke and was about to scurry for the safety of our suite when a woman rushed over. She was dressed all in black and had her hair cropped in a severe cut that matched the equally severe expression on her face.

There was nothing I could do except dredge up some rusty Cantonese if need be and pretend that I had no idea what she was talking about, but she was already looking down at her iPad. ‘You’re Jeane’s guest? Michael Lee? Did you know you’ve already missed the morning session?’

‘Oh, well, I didn’t know that.’

‘And you’ve missed the breakout sessions over lunch too,’ she continued accusingly. ‘And you’re just about to miss the start of the afternoon schedule.’

She was already hustling me into the conference room, one steely hand at the small of my back, and she stayed standing
over me until I sat down and then finally she left. She was back one minute later though, like she knew I was planning to make a run for it, and shoved a glossy folder and a neoprene duffel bag at me, then stood right by the door. At least it was warm and I’d got to keep my sushi and when the mean woman stopped glaring at me I could have a little sleep.

But it turned out that conferences on The Future is NOW! were really quite interesting. Who knew that? Not me.

First, a man and woman from a global trend agency, wearing matching nerdy glasses, talked about how they sourced and tracked trends and used the information to help businesses develop new products. Like, one of their scouts might find some kids who’d set up their own club in east London and dressed like nineteen-forties gangsters who sold nylon stockings on the black market. Then, in Berlin, there might be other peeps dressing like the swing kids of forties Germany who were obsessed with American jazz and refused to join the Hitler Youth. And
then
, in Tokyo, there might be a DJ mixing old Benny Goodman arrangements with breakbeats. They’d take all this information and present it to their clients and, two years later, there’d be lots of forties-influenced fashion and Make Do And Mend posters all over the high street.