The Real Rebecca (4 page)
Authors: Anna Carey
So I got the money off Mum and went back to the hall (Rachel followed me out just to annoy me more) and gave it to Paperboy and he said, ‘Thanks’ and I said, ‘You’re welcome’, and he turned to go. He’d taken a few steps down the drive and I was just closing the door when he turned around and said, ‘Cool t-shirt, by the way.’ And I was so astonished I didn’t know what to say so I just gawped at him and finally said, ‘Um, I got it on the
Internet
’ which was a very boring thing to say. I should have thought of some witty retort, or at least said something cool like, ‘Oh, I just picked it up in New York last month.’
Although that would have been a lie, and he might have started talking to me about New York, and I would have to admit that I’d never been there and he’d think I was mad. Anyway, he sort of went ‘oh, right’ and then he waved and went off to his bike and the rest of his paper round. I closed the door in a state of bliss which vanished when I turned around and saw Rachel standing there with a very, very irritating expression on her stupid face.
‘Oh my God, you so fancy him,’ she said.
‘No I don’t,’ I said. ‘He has excellent taste in t-shirts, that’s all.’
‘Huh,’ said Rachel. ‘No wonder you’re all dressed up.’
‘Oh, shut up,’ I said. ‘You’re just jealous because he said something nice to me and ignored you.’
‘He couldn’t see me!’ said Rachel, before she
remembered
that she was too old and snotty to take her little sister seriously and said in this very patronising voice, ‘I think it’s great, anyway. It’s nice for you to have a boy who isn’t a
fictional
character to think about for a change.’
And then she ran up the stairs before I could leap on her in a fit of rage and kill her, which is what I wanted to do. But my rage quickly subsided because PAPERBOY
TOLD ME HE LIKES MY T-SHIRT! I rang Cass and told her what had happened.
I felt a bit guilty telling her what Paperboy said about my t-shirt in case she thought I was gloating. She was a bit quiet when I told her about it. I hope our love for Paperboy doesn’t come between us. I don’t think it will because we’re not stupid and we know what friends are more important than boys (even very, very cute boys in
olive-green
Converse), but passionate love makes people do strange things.
Rachel is driving me mad. She’s acting like she’s a
twenty-five
-year-old woman of the world who knows everything about love, not a sixteen-year-old who’s been going out with her very first boyfriend for six months. She keeps
following
me around the house and asking me do I want to talk to her about anything. Which I don’t. And even if I did, I wouldn’t, because I don’t want to give her the
satisfaction
of watching me come to her for advice. Which is
something I will never, ever do.
Except when I went to her about Mum last week. But that was different. I will never, ever go to her for love advice.
Although she really is more experienced in the ways of love than any of my friends.
But she is also much more annoying.
I’m writing this in history. It is very, very boring. We are doing the Reformation and have to write about what it would have been like to hear Martin Luther preach in the 1520s. I can only imagine that listening to him going on about reading the Bible in German was just as boring as
this class. To amuse myself I have drawn a picture of Cass as a turnip-eating sixteenth-century peasant at the back of my copy book. I just showed it to her and she has written a note on it saying ‘Why is your self-portrait wearing my glasses?’ Huh.
Anyway. Me and Cass and Alice were a bit late for class so we couldn’t sit together. I am sitting next to Vanessa Finn. She is very annoying. I mean, she’s not particularly annoying at the moment, because she’s just sitting there staring blankly at pictures of popes in the history book, but in general she is annoying. So is her best friend Caroline. Vanessa never shuts up about how terrible it is for her having to go to a state school and Caroline just nods
sympathetically
. They never do any spontaneous dancing; they just talk about hair and about all the things Vanessa buys when she makes her weekly trek over to the Dundrum shopping centre and pretends she’s from the southside. Alice, Cass and I never talk about hair, partly because our own hair is just too depressing to talk about. Well, mine and Cass’s is. Mine is boring, brown and wavy. That sounds okay, but it always looks a bit mad. It doesn’t respond well to damp weather so most of the time I have to
tie it back or it just gets bigger and bigger as the day goes on. Cass’s hair is also wavy and sort of golden brown and would be okay if it wasn’t taking about ten years to grow out her fringe. She has had a sort of fringe for as long as I’ve known her (a year), but apparently she got it cut when she was about eleven and has been trying to grow it out ever since. But every time she goes to the hairdresser the
hairdresser
trims the end bits ‘to frame her face’ so she can never get rid of it. In fact, the only one who has nice hair is Alice. She has shiny, well-behaved proper golden blonde hair, the sort of hair no one really has in Ireland unless they dye it. This is because her mum is German and incredibly blonde. Alice’s mum came over here in the eighties when she was a student and for some weird reason she loved Ireland so much she couldn’t bear to leave. She says she thought Ireland was a magical place and by the time she realised it wasn’t she had made lots of friends here and had got together with Alice’s dad so she liked it anyway. Alice can speak German perfectly. The first time I heard her talking to her mum ‘auf Deutsch’ (as they say) it was really weird – it sounded so strange to hear perfect German coming out of ordinary old Alice. But there you are.
Alice doesn’t do German at school, even though she would get all As if she did, because as far as I can tell her German is better than our teacher’s. She certainly sounds properly German, whereas Frau O’Hara sounds like
someone
from Cork who just happens to be speaking German, which is basically what she is. But anyway, Alice thought doing German with a bunch of halfwits like me, who take two weeks to learn how to ask for directions to a youth hostel, would give her an unfair advantage so she did French instead. This is because she is a good person (or possibly mad). I, of course, am not good at all and if my mother was German there is absolutely no way I’d have done French. This is why Alice is a better person than me. Every so often she offers to help me practise German conversation. I always say no, mostly because I know it’s because she’s heard me speaking German and knows how bad my German is. She just feels sorry for me. Cass (who does Spanish) says I’m being silly and should take advantage of having a special tutor but it’s actually embarrassing talking so badly in a
language
to someone who speaks it properly (I don’t think Frau O’Hara notices, her own German is pretty awful. According to Alice, of course. I’m hardly one to judge).
Today for the first time this term Miss Kelly actually did proper normal geography instead of telling us about the end of the world. I never thought I’d say this, but it was kind of a relief just to listen to her waffle on about the Ruhrgebiet and the sorry state of German industry in
general
. All those long descriptions of tidal waves crashing over Dublin and killing us all were freaking me out. Also, I was secretly getting afraid that she was never going to teach us anything on the course and we would all fail our Junior Cert. I mean, I always welcome anything that can distract a teacher from the actual class (which is why we always try to get Mrs O’Reilly to tell us about the time she was visiting an ancient amphitheatre and her husband fell down the steps and into a lion pit). But Kelly hasn’t actually done anything on the course since January. Our summer tests were all about greenhouse gasses (we all got As). But sadly, the end of the world is not going to be on our Junior Cert exam. I mean, I don’t care about geography, but I don’t
actually want to fail it or anything. It was even too much for Cass, who always manages to get As without doing any work at all and who is always the first to get O’Reilly onto the subject of Roman steps and how very, very slippy they were.
Kelly told us about French rivers today. I started falling asleep until Cass kicked me.
Oh my God, I would give anything for Miss Kelly to tell us about mile-high tidal waves. Anything! She’s been talking about EU livestock quotas for forty minutes.
I have decided that Mum needs my help to get over this
terrible writer’s block. I mentioned this to Rachel this evening and she laughed. I’m glad she finds me so
amusing
. When I’ve single-handedly saved our mother’s career she’ll be sorry. Of course, I’m just not sure how I’m going to do it yet. But I’ll come with something. God knows my life is so boring I have plenty of time to use my
imagination
. It seems as though all bestselling books for grown-ups include three women who are meant to be very different but are all the same really (their hair is usually different
colours
, but that’s about it) and how their friendship supports them through the hard times. And as it is a book by my mum, then there will have to be a devoted mammy who dispenses wisdom to her daughters (very unlike my own mother, I must say). I could even write it myself, actually. How hard could writing a book be?