Adorkable (7 page)

‘I have to go. I’m going to be late for Business Studies,’ I said, and it wasn’t just to get her off my back: I was horribly late and I hadn’t managed to listen to all of the podcast because Michael Lee had interrupted me.

I tried to keep my head down for the next forty minutes but the lesson took an alarming turn when Mr Latymer decided to
drill me to within an inch of my young life about the positive effects of fair trade farming in the developing world. There was only one thing to do and that was to launch into a skin-stripping rant about the negative effects of so many corporate owned coffee chains taking over Britain’s high streets.

It turned out most of the class preferred to argue over who did the better Frappuccino – Starbucks or Caffè Nero – than about fair trade farming. It got very heated very fast and I could sit back and tweet to my heart’s content as Heidi/Hilda threatened to wallop Hardeep when he tried to introduce Costa Coffee’s Frescatos into the debate.

The bell went as Mr Latymer was trying to restore order and I could quietly slip out of the classroom, while all around me people were being given detentions and shouting things like, ‘I don’t care if there are five hundred calories in a Double Chocolate Frappé made with skimmed milk. Why do you have to ruin everything for me?’

All I had to do was get my bike basket and pannier out of my locker and I’d be free of this hellhole that reeked of cheap disinfectant and failure until 8.40 the next morning.

‘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.’