Not Quite Perfect Boyfriend (11 page)

–noun; the residue, remainder, or aftermath of something.

– The Wordsmith's Dictionary of Hard-to-spell Words

I wake up at nine, and shuffle downstairs in my pyjamas. I take Gregory, my bear, with me in case I need him. I fix myself a Milo (equal parts milk and Milo), and two slices of peanut butter toast.

Mum and Dad are nowhere to be seen – I guess they're sleeping in.

I turn on the TV and watch cartoons. They're not as good as I remember them. I wonder what's changed – the cartoon quality or me. Only one way to find out, I suppose. I dig through the DVD cabinet until I find
Toy Story
. I used to love this film when I was little.

I put it in the DVD player. While it loads, I climb the stairs and grab my doona and a pillow.

When Mum comes downstairs at ten-thirty, I'm nearly asleep, with a half-empty packet of chocolate biscuits balanced on my stomach.

‘Do you have a hangover?' Mum asks suspiciously.

‘No,' I say, and then wonder if I do. I'm pretty sure I'm just tired – I only had half a plastic cup of beer.

‘Your period?'

‘No, Mum. I'm just tired.'

Mum gives me this funny look, and then climbs under the doona with me.

‘I feel like you're growing up fast, and I'm missing out on it because I'm at work all the time,' she says.

‘I'm not growing up,' I say.

On the TV, Woody is trapped inside a milk crate in Sid's room.

Woody bleats at Buzz Lightyear despondently.
‘Why would
Andy want to play with me when he's got you?'

I think about the blonde girl talking to Ben in Nina's kitchen.

‘Actually,' I say, ‘I'm thinking about giving it a miss.'

‘Giving what a miss?' Mum helps herself to a biscuit.

‘Growing up,' I say. ‘I think it's overrated.'

Mum raises her eyebrows.

‘It is,' I say. ‘You have to get a job, and earn money, and pay bills. And you're not even allowed to watch cartoons anymore, you can only watch Serious French Cinema.'

Mum laughs, and pokes Gregory. ‘And you're not allowed to have a teddy bear.'

I give Gregory a squeeze. ‘Exactly. Why would I want to do any of that?'

Mum smiles a sad smile. ‘You make a good case,' she says.

Buzz is getting all sentimental on the screen, looking at Andy's name written on his foot.

‘Dad's sleeping late,' I say.

‘He's gone out,' says Mum. ‘To visit your grandma.'

Good. That means I don't have to go with him. I hate visiting Grandma. I know that makes me sound like a bad person, but she doesn't remember who I am anyway, and the old people's home smells funny.

‘We should go out too,' says Mum.

‘To visit Grandma?' I say, my heart sinking. I have plans for
Toy Story 2
.

‘No,' says Mum. ‘We should have a girls day. Go out for lunch. Go shopping. See a movie.'

I think about this. I'm not entirely sure I'm ready to deal with the outside world. But I'm going to have to leave the house sooner or later, and I'd certainly feel safer if I had my mum with me. And anyway, everyone from the party will be at home today nursing their hangovers.

‘Okay,' I say. ‘Let's do it.'

‘
Yeah
!' says Woody, just before I click off the TV.

We go to our favourite shopping strip, and have lunch at a real restaurant. I have pancakes with maple syrup and bananas and bacon, and Mum doesn't even raise her eyebrows. She has curly fancy pasta with prawns, and a glass of white wine. We talk about school and spelling and her new case at work. She doesn't ask me about the party. I think she knows I don't want to talk about it.

‘So tell me more about this project you're doing,' Mum says.

‘It's about secrets,' I say. ‘We're setting up a website where students can anonymously post their secrets.'

‘What kind of secrets?'

I shrug. ‘Who they have a crush on. What test they cheated in. How they lied to their parents about something. Usual teenage stuff.'

Mum raises her eyebrows.

‘For most teenagers,' I say. ‘Normal for most teenagers. Not me. I'm abnormal. No secrets here.'

Mum sips her wine and says nothing.

‘We're going to use the site to analyse what issues are important to teenagers today,' I say. ‘We figure the things kids keep secret are the things they care most about.'

I wonder if Mum has any secrets. Maybe what I'm getting for my birthday. I guess once you're married and have kids, there's less things to be secretive about, apart from all the Santa, Easter Bunny stuff.

When we leave the restaurant, I think I see Ben on the other side of the road, and nearly bring up my pancakes all over the footpath. But it's not him, it's someone else.

I'm not sure why I'm so nervous about seeing him. It's not like he did anything really wrong. It's not like
he
was the one who yelled at me and tried to hurt me. But I don't want to see him. I don't even want to think about him. Thinking about him makes me remember the way Tahni was touching him, and the expression on her face when she looked at me.

Mum and I go to all the shops. I don't know what's gotten into her, but I make out like a bandit. She buys me a navy blue dress, and these cute red shoes to go with them. It's pretty much the coolest thing I've ever owned, all retro and vintage-looking. Then she buys me a red necklace to match the shoes, and I start to get worried.

‘Mum, are you dying?' I ask as we walk out of the jewellery shop.

‘What?' says Mum.

I heft my shopping bags. ‘All this largesse,' I say. ‘Are you buttering me up for some bad news?'

Mum rolls her eyes. ‘I'm not dying.'

‘What about Dad?'

‘Aren't I allowed to spend some time and money on my daughter?'

I'm not convinced.

In the DVD shop, Mum hovers over a special edition of
Breakfast at Tiffany's
while I eye off the latest season of
Grey's Anatomy
.

‘So are you contributing one?' asks Mum.

‘One what?'

‘A secret. Are you submitting a secret to the website?'

I hadn't really thought about it.

‘Probably not,' I say.

But I wonder what my secret would be, if I did.

I made up an imaginary boyfriend.

A boy is going out with me in exchange for me doing his homework
for him.

I don't want to grow up
.

As we walk in the front door, the phone is ringing, and my stomach immediately lurches. I taste the pancakes again. What if it's Ben? What if it's Tahni?

Mum answers it, and then passes the phone to me. ‘It's for you,' she says.

I think I'm going to faint.

‘Someone called George,' she says.

Oh, George. Thank God for George. I take the phone.

He wants to know when we can work on our project. I'm so incredibly relieved it's him and not Tahni or Ben (or even Nina, complaining about the state of her lavender bushes), that I invite him over right away. He sounds sort of surprised, but says he'll come.

‘A boy?' teases Mum. ‘You invited a boy to our house?'

I roll my eyes at her. ‘It's for a school project,' I say.

‘Uh huh.'

‘Really, Mum,' I say. ‘I'm not interested. You'll understand why when you see him.'

When George arrives I take him up to my bedroom. He looks a bit less dorky in casual clothes, but his jeans are too high-waisted, and make him look lumpier than ever. He's wearing this windcheater that would have been more suitable for a fifty-year-old golfer. His hair still needs product. And while I'm reasonably certain he's wearing his Dunlop Volleys with absolutely no sense of retro irony, I decide to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Thinking like a cool person reminds me of the party and Tahni, so I stop. George doesn't look bad. That's enough. At least I don't have to pretend to be cooler than I am around him. I'm always going to be higher up on the ladder than George, no matter what happens.

George has a small cut above his left eye, and his right wrist is bandaged.

‘What happened to you?' I ask.

He looks uncomfortable. ‘Nothing,' he says. ‘I fell down.'

‘You sound like a battered wife,' I say. ‘Is there anything you want to talk about?'

He hunches his shoulders. ‘It's really nothing,' he says.

‘Come on,' I tease. ‘You got into a rumble, didn't you?'

He laughs, sort of weakly. ‘Yeah,' he says. ‘You got me.'

I sit on my bed, rather self-consciously, and he sits on a chair, taking in the posters on my walls, and the books on my bookshelf.

‘I love that series,' he says, pointing to a group of battered paperbacks.

‘Me too,' I say. ‘Obviously.'

I've never had a boy in my bedroom before. I wish I'd hidden all my soft toys in the cupboard. George's biscuity smell is extra strong today, vanilla and sugary.

George reaches into his bag and pulls out a folder. It has a big sparkly sticker of a dragon on the front. I feel myself blushing. I'm embarrassed for him.

‘I've drawn up some designs for the site,' he says, opening the folder. He doesn't seem to be embarrassed by the dragon, so I don't know why I am.

‘Great,' I say. ‘I've got the text all ready to go. We just need to build it.'

‘Do you have Dreamweaver?' George asks.

I'm about to say ‘No, but Tahni can get it for us,' when I remember that I'm not in a position to be asking Tahni any favours at the moment. Or really, speaking to her at all. So I just shake my head.

‘We need to figure out how to publicise it,' says George. ‘Flyers?'

I nod. ‘And we can put something in the school newsletter.'

‘Email?'

‘Yep,' I say. ‘Oh, and we should run a competition. Contribute to the Secret Project and go into the running to win movie tickets or something.'

‘The Secret Project,' George says, smiling. ‘I like that. Sounds like a top secret government file.'

I feel strangely proud to have impressed him. So much of this project has been his ideas. At least I came up with the name.

‘Like those files that prove that the moon landing was fake,' I say.

George laughs. ‘Or that Madonna was assassinated by the Ku Klux Klan in the 80s and was replaced with a robot.'

‘Or that Bert Newton is an alien in a rubber mask!'

That really sets George off, and we speculate about which other celebrities are aliens wearing rubber masks.

‘What about Oprah?' I say. ‘Or Paris Hilton?'

George laughs again. ‘So how was the party?' he asks, out of the blue.

Just like that, my nice warm Sunday evening feeling vanishes. It's as though I'm back at Nina's. Tahni is looking at me with cold, make-up-smeared eyes. Ben is talking to that hair-extensions girl. The vomit is splattered all over the bathroom. The floral couch is being deflowered.

I swallow. ‘How did you know about the party?' I ask, trying to buy time.

George shrugs. ‘Everybody at school was talking about it on Friday.'

‘Oh.' I feel guilty that George wasn't invited. But it wasn't my party. Even though Nina said I could bring whoever. I don't think George counts. And he wouldn't have had a good time anyway. Not that I had a good time.

I'm pretty sure George can read my thoughts, because he says, ‘I would have gone, but I had other plans.'

I nod. This is a lie, and we both know it. But it makes things easier.

‘So?' he says.

I stare at him. I really, really don't want to talk about the party.

‘How was it?' he asks again.

‘It was okay.'

I pick up his folder and consider his notes. A loose page falls out onto the floor. I reach for it.

‘Don't–' says George.

I stare at it. It's a map. It looks like a map from a fantasy novel. Everything's divided up into little octagons, which are all different colours. There's a bunch of red octagons together in the area called ‘Eldritch Swamplands'. There's an even bigger blue section in the ‘Forests of Rangokk'. The biggest section is yellow, which stretches from the ‘Hollow Mountains' to the ‘Simikk Plains'.

George snatches it out of my hands.

‘Is this from a book?' I say.

‘It's nothing,' he says, folding the map and stuffing it in his pocket.

‘What is it? A map to buried treasure?'

George waves a hand at his folder, which is still on my lap. ‘We should get started on writing this proposal.'

I narrow my eyes. ‘Come on, tell me what it was.'

He looks so awkward, I think he might fall apart. ‘It's really not important,' he says. ‘We have work to do.'

‘It
is
important,' I say. ‘We're doing a project about secrets. And you seem to have one.'

I think I might be flirting with George. This is very strange.

‘Come on,' I plead. ‘Tell me.'

‘Tell me about the party.'

Checkmate.

Now it's my turn to squirm. ‘It was fine,' I say. ‘You know, just a party.'

George raises his eyebrows and his forehead does the crinkly thing it does. ‘So you didn't have a good time.'

‘Sure I did,' I say, without much enthusiasm.

‘Did you and Mister Perfect have a fight?' asks George.

He knows about me and Ben. For a moment I feel quite proud – king and queen of the school again. But the feeling doesn't last long.

‘No,' I say, but I'm not sure if that's true.

‘Then what?'

What is this, the Spanish Inquisition?

‘I sort of had a fight with Tahni.' I'm surprised that I say it. To George of all people. I really don't want to talk about it, but it all comes spilling out.