Adorkable (33 page)

Jeane was silent for a second. ‘Just say that there was an amazing American sweetshop in Manchester and you got them stuff there. You are
so
bad at lying, Michael.’

Jeane
had a point. ‘Well, you’re good enough at it for the both of us.’

She beamed at me. ‘I really am, and you bought me candy and if I didn’t have morning mouth and coffee mouth and really need a wee, I’d kiss you right now.’

It was past one before we arrived at the Greenpoint diner where Jeane had decided we were going to brunch, because she’d spent over an hour getting ready and had then wasted valuable time begging me to change my outfit.

‘But Michael, nobody wears skinny jeans any more,’ she pleaded. ‘Especially not with a tartan shirt. The grunge revival is over.’

I’d refused to listen and when we arrived at Café Colette in Greenpoint, which apparently was even more achingly hip than Williamsburg, which was way more cooler than New York, practically every guy in the place was wearing skinny jeans and a tartan shirt. They also all had hair that looked like it had been cut with a rusty pair of garden shears, so I was easily ahead on points.

There was a line out of the door and I was all for finding somewhere else to have brunch, but Jeane was insistent that we had to wait in line. She was also insistent that brunch was her treat and she paid the cab fare and even though she was getting all her expenses back, it made me feel weird. Not just weird, but like we weren’t on the same level. OK, there were times when it felt like Jeane wasn’t even on the same planet as me, but back home we went to the same school, walked down the same streets, raided each other’s fridges, but here it felt like Jeane was the one with all
the power. I knew I should be more enlightened and cool about her mighty girl power, but I wasn’t. No matter how hard I tried.

‘Hey, you’re holding up the line,’ Jeane suddenly said to me and I realised that we’d actually made it inside the diner and there was only one party in front of us.

Jeane’s phone started beeping as we were finally led across a chequerboard floor to one of the tables for two that were lined up against the back wall. I looked around with interest at the other brunchers and the big old-fashioned counter opposite, but Jeane was glued to her phone.

‘I’ve had, like, fifty emails in the last ten minutes,’ she muttered. ‘And on the day of rest too.’

I picked up a menu, keen to explore the brunch options. Maybe this would be my opportunity to try bacon with maple syrup, but then Jeane suddenly looked up from her phone and yelped like she was in pain.

‘What? What’s the matter?’ I asked, as the two girls on the next table glared at her.

Jeane looked around the café wildly. Then she pointed at a rack of newspapers by the door. ‘
The New York Times
,’ she rasped like she was a hardened forty-a-day smoker. ‘Have they got
The New York Times
?’

As she was paying for, well, everything, the least I could do was get up and fetch her the paper.

She snatched it from me without even a thank you and started rifling through it. ‘Boring. Boring. Economic downturn. Universal healthcare. Blah blah bloody blah. Oh my days! I do not believe it. Pinch me.’

I was kind of tempted but I leaned over and tried to look at
the newspaper upside-down. It wasn’t difficult because even upside-down the huge photograph of Jeane taken onstage the day before was instantly recognisable.

‘
Smells Like Jeane Spirit
.’ I read the headline out loud. ‘
Meet the English teen who’s turned dorkiness into a lifestyle brand
.’

Jeane blinked slowly and put her hands on her cheeks, which were bright red.

‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Oh. Wow. I emailed them my speech after the conference but I didn’t think they’d run it so soon. Or just run it as, like, a feature in its own right. Jeez Louise.’

‘
The New York Times
,’ I said slowly. I was pleased for her, really I was, but somehow I couldn’t make my voice sound pleased. ‘So, is that a pretty big deal?’

‘The biggest.’ Jeane stared at the photo of herself with a rapt expression like she’d never seen her own face before. ‘It’s a total game-changer.’

I didn’t even know what that meant. It sounded like the kind of bollocks people spouted on
The Apprentice
just before their arses got fired, but Jeane wasn’t even waiting for my reply but was tracing her fingers over the page and it was only when someone came over to take our order that she reluctantly tore her gaze away and deigned to look at the menu.

She didn’t say a single word to me for the next half hour. I didn’t even know that Jeane could go that long without talking. She just sat there in her plaid golfing shorts, a
Thundercats
Tshirt and an orange cardigan, and, instead of eating a proper breakfast, munched her way through a baguette heaped with Nutella and cream cheese held in one hand while she replied to emails with the other.

I
had ceased to exist. In fact, I started to wonder if I’d become invisible until my phone started to ring. At least there were still people who wanted to talk to me, even if that person was actually my mother.

To be honest, it was a relief to have an excuse to leave the table. There were too many American accents within earshot for me to take the call anywhere else but outside.

‘Be back in five,’ I told Jeane, who didn’t look up or nod or in any way acknowledge that she knew I was still there.

I
couldn’t believe it when Michael just got up and, like, left. This was the biggest day of my life. The most amazing thing that had ever happened to me and I’d been lucky enough to have quite a few amazing things happen to me over the last two years, but this was the most amazing thing yet. It was totes AMAZE-ing and Michael couldn’t even be bothered to say, ‘Well done,’ or, ‘Hey, congrats.’

He’d been in a mood ever since we’d arrived in Greenpoint. Probably because he’d wanted to stay in Manhattan and do something naff and touristy like have brunch at, I don’t know, The Four Seasons. But the first evening in New York, I gave him the tourist experience, and yesterday I’d been stressed like I’d never been stressed before and so I wanted half a day to scout round Brooklyn and photograph interesting-looking people and check out the vintage shops, so sue me.

There were times when Michael could be kind and
considerate and the head boy of my heart and then there were other times when he could be an absolute dick. He also wasn’t back in five, so after twenty minutes of having to sit on my own and getting too many coffee refills because there was still a massive queue of people waiting for a table and they were all staring pointedly at me, I paid the bill and went outside to find Michael squatting against a wall and still on his phone.

I stood over him with my hands on my hips until he looked up. ‘My mum,’ he mouthed. ‘She knows I’m in New York.’

Whoop-de-do. So he was in New York and not in Manchester. He’d get grounded and suffer a very boring lecture about responsibility and not telling lies and being a role model to his younger sisters. It was hardly a matter of life and death. Perspective: he really needed to get some.

I didn’t have a chance to tell Michael that because he was
still
on the phone and furrowing his brow and saying he was sorry again and again and acting like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. Which, not even.

Eventually he finished, slowly stood up and hunched his shoulders inside his hoodie. ‘I am in so much trouble,’ he said in a forlorn voice. ‘You put a picture up on Twitter of us last night, didn’t you?’

‘
What?
’ I snapped. I hadn’t even checked Twitter this morning – I’d been too busy emailing Oona who was anxious to lock me down for the Tokyo conference. ‘As if I’d do anything as stupid as tweet a picture of the two of us
together
, never mind in New York. Why would I even do that?’

‘I don’t know, why would you?’ Michael snapped back, and then he went into a long convoluted story about how Sanjit, the
friend he was meant to be staying with at Manchester University, had a sister the same age as Melly and this stupid little sister had had a sleepover and when Michael’s mum had collected her from said sleepover at some horribly early hour and asked after Sanjit,
his
mum said he was in Leeds to meet his girlfriend’s parents.

By then, it was before dawn o’clock New York time, so when his parents couldn’t get hold of Michael, they went on the internet and somehow found this alleged picture.

I pulled out my phone and went on Twitter myself to see this famous photo and when a blurry image of me alongside Michael’s nostril and pouty mouth showed up, the events of last night slowly came back to me. Well, some of them did.

‘I was drunk! Look! I couldn’t even spell Gansevoort properly and
you
said it was OK to post the picture. Oh! Oh! Some moron retweeted it. Why would they even do that?’

‘I don’t know!’ Michael ground out. ‘Why do you have to tweet every single last thing that happens to you?’

I ignored him as I clicked to see who’d retweeted it. It was a follower of mine called @winsomedimsum.

	winsomedimsum is yum My girl & my left nostril RT @adork_able NYC, baby! At the Gansevort with ML. Peachy Lychees all round!

It took me all of five seconds to make the connection. @winsomedimsum had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Chinese cakes, overidentified with Jean-Paul Sartre’s imaginary harping,
bossy mother and always knew when I was down, even if I kept my tweets upbeat, and sent me links to dogs doing extreme sports.

Winsome-bloody-dimsum was Michael and I was going to end him.

‘You! This is you!’ I spluttered, as I waved my phone in his face. ‘Have you enjoyed fucking with my head, have you?’

‘What are you talking about?’ Michael grabbed my wrist to still it so he could see what I was thrusting at him. ‘Oh.’

‘Don’t even try to deny it.’ I wrenched my hand and my phone free. ‘You said that you weren’t even on Twitter!’

Michael shifted uncomfortably. ‘Well, what I actually said was that I didn’t get Twitter.’

‘I think you got it just fine. Was it funny to completely play me? Did you tell all your friends so you could have a good laugh at how you duped me? How you took me down a few pegs?’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Michael protested. His face was flushed and he pulled at the collar of his shirt like it was choking him. I wished it was. ‘I hardly knew you when we first started talking to each other on Twitter—’

‘You knew me enough to keep pestering me at school about Barney and Scarlett and you knew me well enough when you were having sex with me, but you didn’t think to mention it when we were tweeting each other,’ I spat at him. ‘It’s a total invasion of my privacy.’

‘It’s not. It’s a public forum and anyway, it was the internet. It wasn’t real. You’re not the same person on the internet as you are in real life and—’

‘Yes, I am! I’m like the most optimum version of me. And,
like, the internet is my happy place. I take a leap of faith that the people I interact with are as honest as I am—’

‘That’s ridiculous! We’ve been through this before. Everyone pretends to be someone they’re not online. They have, like, an internet persona.’

‘So who are you, then? The person I tweeted who was actually a great fat liar—’

‘None of the stuff I tweeted was a lie—’

‘Or are you Michael Lee, creepy cyber stalker, who used all the information I posted online for his own evil ends?’ I asked, and I wasn’t even being needlessly dramatic. For once. I hated the thought that Michael had pored over my tweets, looking for clues, trying to sniff out my weaknesses and maybe if he’d revealed himself sooner, it wouldn’t have made any difference to the things we’d tweeted each other, the tweets that I’d thrown out into the ether, but now I’d never know. He hadn’t given me that choice.

‘You shouldn’t put stuff up on the internet if you don’t want people to find it,’ Michael insisted doggedly, instead of apologising profusely, dropping to his knees and begging for my forgiveness. ‘You uploaded it for people to see, so I don’t get what the problem is. OK, maybe I should have come clean, but—’

‘There’s no maybe about it! It’s not just about you tweeting me under false pretences. I’ve told you things that I would never put on the internet, I confided in you, I trusted you …’ I had to break off because my voice was thick with tears even though I was determined I wasn’t going to cry. I wasn’t going to be one of those girls and I wasn’t going to cry over a boy. ‘And all that time, you were being completely deceitful.’