Francis stood up first, then pulled me to my feet. He kept a tight hold of my hand but I pulled free once we’d climbed the stairs and could see the others still throwing strange shapes on the dance floor. ‘Let me tell Alice first,’ I said, because there couldn’t be any secrets between her and me any more. ‘The two of us, Alice and me, are a package deal. You know that, right?’
‘I had my suspicions, yeah.’ Francis didn’t look too overjoyed at the prospect. ‘But she’s not coming on dates with us and I don’t have to snog her too, do I?’
I decided that we’d reached the stage in our relationship where I could smack Francis, so I did and then he went to the bar and I went to join the others on the dance floor.
29
‘Where have you been?’ Alice demanded when I shimmied up to her. My heart sank. Then she tossed her hair back and grinned. ‘You missed all the fun. Louis took his T-shirt off, then tried to pick Bethany up and twirl her and this girl thought he was a random perv and threw her drink over him.’
‘What did Louis do?’
‘He said that if she’d given him some warning before she threw her drink, he’d have kept his mouth open.’ Alice did her patented slut-drop – the one time I’d tried it, I thought I’d dislocated both knees – then came back up to the surface. ‘Actually quite witty for Louis, I thought.’
‘Yeah. Like he suddenly turned into Stephen Fry or something.’ I touched her arm. ‘Listen, shall we go and have a chat?’
Another hair toss. ‘Franny! We’re in London, in a club…’
‘It’s kind of a pub with ideas above its station…’
‘Whevs. London. Club. The indie boys go into a frenzy every time I do a move that I totally stole from Nicki Minaj. We’ve got the rest of our lives to chat, now dance, Franny! Dance! Dance!’
I danced, because it had been weeks since Alice and I had danced together and now she was pulling out all the routines that made me laugh, from her demented aerobics instructor to her raved-up mime artist.
Francis watched from the sidelines, but he smiled every time I caught his eye and he had assorted Desperadoes to talk to until the music stopped and the lights came on.
Everyone who’d been dancing with such wild abandon looked around a little sheepishly. It was time to reunite with bags and coats and jiggle desperately as we waited in a long, snaking line to go to the Ladies, which was even grimier and stinkier than the Ladies in The Wow.
It felt a lot colder outside than it had been an hour ago when I’d had Francis’ arms around me but Lexy had a spare jumper in her bag and Kirsten lent me her scarf and Alice tucked her arm into mine as we started walking back to where the minibus was parked.
Francis walked on the other side of me, brushing his fingers against mine with every step, and though Alice raised her eyebrows and wrinkled her nose she didn’t say anything. Well, not about that. Along with the girls who were walking behind us, she kept up a running commentary about our first London clubbing experience.
It was all ‘I thought London girls would at least wear make-up when they went out on a Saturday night’ and ‘Yeah, Alice, he was totally into you but who could love a guy whose T-shirts have gone grey in the wash?’
Alice and Bethany seemed to have really bonded and I was pleased but I also felt a sharp jealous pang. I was the only girl that Alice had ever bonded with and what if she thought that Bethany was more fun than me? More best friend-worthy?
‘You all right, Franular B?’ Alice whispered in my ear and gave my arm an affectionate little squeeze, and I just knew I had nothing to worry about on that score. ‘Can you lend me two quid to buy some chips? Chips can’t cost more than two quid, can they?’
A portion of chips from a kebab shop that couldn’t have passed any Environmental Health checks cost a whopping three quid.
‘Three quid?’ the Merrycliffe posse chorused. ‘Three quid for chips!’
‘And eleven pounds fifty for haddock and chips!’ Louis shouted and then Francis had to leave my side to perform an intervention because Louis wanted to order a doner with all the trimmings and apparently that could never happen because the last two doners with all the trimmings he’d had on the way home from gigs had resulted in vomit and having to drive back to Merrycliffe with the stench of vomit writ large.
‘We’ll stop at a service station and get you a Ginster’s,’ Francis promised and all the way back to the van Louis sang a song about pasties.
‘Pasties, pasties, you’re so yummy. I can’t wait until you’re in my tummy.’
It was funny, but I was quite nostalgic for the days when I thought Louis was beautiful and enigmatic and hadn’t just done three loud belches in quick succession.
‘He’ll crash out long before we reach the first service station,’ Francis promised me and as soon as we got back to the bus, presented Olly with a three-pound portion of chips and had barely had time to buckle our seatbelts, Louis was curled up on the back seat and snoring loudly.
There was no awkward allocation of seats. Francis sat down next to Olly and promised to supply him with tunes and music trivia during the long journey home so he’d stay awake. That was another thing I liked about Francis; he cared about people in a cool, unfussy way.
I sat next to Alice, because of course I was going to. And because it was Alice, after I’d established that her hands were absolutely free of chip grease, I let her snuggle down under my cashmere coat, which I draped over the two of us.
‘Was everything OK with your parents, then?’ she asked as the others let out a ragged cheer as we pulled away from the Camden kerb.
‘Well, sort of. Mum sent me a really nice text and apparently she’s going to get help and Dad’s going to be around more, but I’m totally grounded. Like, whatever.’
‘Yeah, whatever,’ Alice snarled in agreement. ‘After what you’ve been through with your mum, I hope you sneer in the face of being grounded.’
‘That’s what I was planning to do.’
Alice gave me a sideways look. ‘I mean, you’ve had such a hard time lately that I was thinking that I need to cut you a break too.’ She smiled. It was her post-cream cat-like smile. ‘You can have Louis. I want you to have Louis.’
My heart fluttered. It was a very unpleasant sensation. ‘No, that’s OK. You can have him,’ I said sweetly. ‘It’s the least I can do after all the mean things I’ve done.’
‘No, really, he’s all yours. You were right. You had first dibs,’ Alice reminded me.
‘But, see…’
‘Unless, of course, you don’t want him any more because actually you’ve decided that you fancy someone else. Hmmmm, someone like Sneering Studio Tech, perhaps?’
‘How could you know? I only figured it out about two hours ago!’
‘Oh, Franny, poor, foolish Franny – how could I not know?’ Alice was loving this. ‘What about all those flirty chats about the Rolling Stones on Facebook? Today might be the first time I’ve seen you two together but it couldn’t have been any more obvious. You and Sneering Studio Tech – who’d have thought it, eh?’
I nudged her furiously. ‘His name’s Francis and he is really, really nice and OK, I didn’t know how I really felt about him. Not even when I suddenly couldn’t bear to have Louis snog me,’ I burst out in a heated whisper.
I cringed in expectation of Alice’s reaction because she had to have kissed Louis ages before me and they’d danced together loads this evening and maybe they were going out. Alice had gone very still and her eyes were narrowed. ‘Did you get as far as being licked by him?’ she asked, then she giggled. ‘And before he licked you, did he take hold of both your tits like he was choosing melons in a supermarket?’
‘No.’ I giggled too. ‘Nothing melon-like about my boobs. So, did you?’
‘I snogged him for a bit but it was a lot like having someone go all rinse-cycle in my mouth,’ Alice said with a sniggery shudder. ‘So, I made him stop and I said we should just be mates.’
‘Oh my God,
I made him stop way before the rinse cycle and I said we should be mates too. It’s so weird ’cause Louis is like textbook hot…’
Alice nodded vigorously. ‘He’s so sexy and cool, until you spend a couple of evenings hanging out with him and then you realise that he’s just a great big goofy dork. That’s not to say that he isn’t lovely…’
‘Yeah, he’s very lovely but I absolutely don’t fancy him.’ Something else occurred to me and I giggled again. ‘Also, now that I know Louis, I realise our plan had a fundamental flaw in it.’
‘What?’
‘Even if one of us had ended up getting married to him, he’d never, ever have got round to changing his relationship status on Facebook,’ I spluttered and then Alice and I were clutching each other and laughing and wiping away the odd tear until I begged her to stop because I really was going to wet myself.
Once we’d settled back down, she gave me another sideways look. ‘So, you and Francis then?’
‘Yeah, me and Francis but I’m going to make loads of time for you. I’ve already told him you and me are a two-for-one deal.’ I took her hand. ‘I am sorry about you and Raj and coming between you. I could talk to him, unless he and Bethany…’ I frowned. ‘But you are done with that, aren’t you? You’re not going to go for the boys that are already taken?’
‘Well, Bethany said that she and Raj went on one date and he spent most of it talking about me,’ Alice said with a quiet note of satisfaction. ‘So, I don’t know. Maybe we could start being civil with each other and see where it goes, but also Lexy and Kirsten have already said that if I did want to go older then we should head for the University of Lancaster student union bar one Saturday night, so I have options.’
‘You are unstoppable,’ I told her.
‘I like to think so and it seems only fair that I let you and SST have a little alone time.’
I pinched her arm. ‘He hasn’t been Sneering Studio Tech for quite some time now.’
Alice peered down the bus. ‘He’s not so bad-looking,’ she decided. ‘You could do a lot worse. He’d be even cuter if he did something about his hair. Hey! I could cut it for him, as a nice, friendly gesture.’
Was she on crack? Was I going to have to persuade Francis to let Alice butcher his hair for the sake of my best friend getting on with my boyfriend?
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Franny! It was a joke!’ Alice snorted. ‘You know I don’t cut boys’ hair.’
‘And you should know that it’s always going to be too soon for you to make jokes about that,’ I snorted back and then we slapped each other’s hands a bit until Alice yawned and rested her head on my shoulder and I thought she might be asleep, until she suddenly sat up.
‘We’re cool, aren’t we, Franny?’ she asked, all laughter gone. ‘We’re different to how we were, but we’re still cool, right?’
‘The coolest.’ I looked down the bus to see the back of Francis’s head and just the sight of his grey beanie hat nodding as he talked to Olly filled me with a sharp thrill of what we had to come. Then Alice shifted against me, huddled in tighter, because we were both cold. Being with Alice was warm and comforting, like coming home. ‘Chicks before dicks.’
‘Every time,’ she stated firmly. ‘Boys may come and go, but you’re stuck with me, bitch.’
‘I wouldn’t have it any other way.’
Sarra Manning, The Worst Girlfriend in the World
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