Anyway, I am going to go and watch some telly now because my parents are out at an extra rehearsal. It seems they might have more than one rehearsal a week from now on as the self-defence class that used to be in the hall on Thursday nights has had to move to a bigger venue, so the musical society are taking advantage of the free space. Before they went, Dad said the cast were ‘coming along in leaps and bounds’. I hope he didn’t mean literally. I can imagine him leaping and bounding all over the place only too well.
Lurking spot is still getting bigger, ready to emerge in all its disgusting glory. It looks redder than ever today. I thought about covering it up with make-up, but when I tried, it looked kind of flaky which was worse than just being red, so I washed it all off. It was like the make-up drew even more attention to my hideous blemish. I wondered if I could get away with hiding it from the world by covering my face with my hands a lot, but I remembered Mum saying before that you should try and avoid touching spots with your hands because you can spread bacteria from your hands to your face. I am pretty sure my hands are nice and clean – I mean, I wash them fairly regularly – but I’m not taking any chances. One spot is bad enough.
So I just had to go in to school and hope that my red, swollen chin didn’t look quite as hideous as I thought. Cass and Alice assured me it didn’t.
‘You can barely see it,’ said Cass.
‘I wouldn’t even have noticed it if you hadn’t pointed it out!’ said Alice.
I know they were lying, but they meant well. Unlike Vanessa. I ended up queuing in the loo next to her at lunchtime and she suddenly stared at me and said, in her usual abrupt and rude fashion, ‘What’s that on your chin?’
I glared at her as ferociously as I could.
‘A spot,’ I said.
‘Wow,’ said Vanessa. ‘I thought you had some, like, skin disease. I was worrying it was contagious.’
‘Well, it’s not,’ I said. ‘It’s just a totally normal spot.’
‘That’s a relief,’ said Vanessa. ‘I’ve got to do lots of promotional events for Bluebird Bakery this weekend. I wouldn’t want to be covered in, like, boils or whatever.’
Boils! I know I am paranoid about this spot, andI know it’s not that bad, is it? Surely it is just a normal pimple. A lurking spot, but a normal spot nevertheless. Anyway, I wish I’d actually told Vanessa it was a hideous contagious skin disease just to freak her out, but it’s too late now.
I went to Mum and asked her if she thought I should go to the doctor about the spot. She laughed in her usual callous fashion and said, ‘No, Bex, I don’t. It’s just a normal spot. And it’s not that bad!’
‘Well, Vanessa Finn thought it was a boil,’ I said.
Mum looked very cross when I said this.
‘Well, it was very silly and rude of her to say that to you,’ she said.
Which I knew already, but it was quite nice to hear Mum say it.
Band practice in the Knitting Factory tomorrow. Hopefully my spot will have disappeared by then. Or if that’s too much to hope for, maybe it will have just gone down a bit. Maybe it will never burst forth at all and just sink back down again? I can but hope.
So … something a bit weird happened today. Not huge and weird like Vanessa being famous, and not sad and weird like Tom dumping Rachel. Just …
Oh, I might as well just say it. I think I like Sam. In fact, I might have liked Sam for a while. And I mean, I like-like him. Not just in a cool-boy-I’m-friends-with way. In a fancying way. But I don’t think he likes me back. In that way. At least, I’m not sure. Oh God, it’s so weird! But I have to admit, it’s been sort of sneaking up on me for ages.
It happened like this. We had booked a practice room at the Knitting Factory for twelve o’clock, and we had decided that we’d get sandwiches and meet Ellie in the arts space afterwards for a sort of indoor picnic lunch thing. The practice was pretty good, although we did almost have an argument over whether to change the ending of ‘Pistachio’ or not. We didn’t come to a fixed conclusion in the end because Alice and I thought it should just end suddenly after the last chorus and Cass thought we should repeat the chorus about a million times until our listeners fell asleep (she didn’t say that last bit, but that’s what would happen if she had her way). Clearly she was wrong, but neither of us would back down. Still, we’re having a workshop with our old band mentor Kitty next week (hurrah!), so maybe she can decide what sounds best.
Anyway, we agreed to disagree for the moment and went off to Centra to get our sandwiches. They were a bit manky, but sadly manky Centra sandwiches are all us youthful musicians can afford. I must admit that, despite my hideous spot not having gone away, I was sort of hoping Sam would be there when we went back to the Knitting Factory, and my hopes were fulfilled because when we went into the big art studio there he was, sitting on a drawing table talking to Ellie, Lucy and a boy we hadn’t met before, who turned out to be called Senan. Sam and Lucy seemed pleased to see us (Senan seemed happy enough, but I presume he wasn’t hugely excited to see us, considering he’d never set eyes on us before that moment).
They had just done a class with a visiting artist and were all excited about it. Her name is Maria Hanff and she usually makes giant sculptures out of trowels and old flower pots (maybe she goes to the same garden centre as my parents?), but apparently she can draw as well so she was teaching them about life drawing. This is when some poor person sits there without moving for hours on end while a bunch of people draw them. Sometimes the person is in the nude, so the artists learn how to draw the human body in all its glory, but of course this does not happen in an art class for teenagers who are in secondary school, so they all just drew a fully clothed man who Maria Hanff had dragged in from the Knitting Factory offices.
Ellie, Lucy, Sam and Senan’s pictures were pretty good, even though the Knitting Factory office man looked very bored, as most people would if they had to sit there for ages doing nothing while several strangers stared at them. Alice said she thought it might be quite peaceful and like meditating, but I tried meditating once after reading a book belonging to my Mum (well, I read the back of the book and the introduction), and it was pretty boring. I only lasted about two minutes. Alice says if I’d read the rest of the book, I might have learned how to do it properly, which is fair enough.
Anyway. We all sat there looking at the pictures and eating sandwiches and chatting for a while. It was so relaxed and fun that, after a while, I forgot to be self-conscious about my stupid giant spot. In fact, I forgot all about it. All the art people are into different sorts of art: Lucy and Sam like comics, Ellie likes designing and making clothes, and Senan wants to make giant oil paintings (which is why, as he said, it’s so useful having access to the studio. It’s not easy to do giant oil paintings in a semi-detached house in Killester). But they all agreed it was really useful learning how to draw actual people properly.
‘I’m still not very good at doing hands, though,’ said Ellie. ‘But I bet I can figure it out eventually.’
‘And if you don’t,’ said Cass, ‘it won’t be the end of the world. I mean, it’s not like you need to draw hands to be a fashion designer. Unless you’re designing gloves, of course,’ she added.
‘Hmm, I suppose I don’t really care about designing gloves,’ said Ellie. She was wearing a pair of tweed shorts she made herself. They are really cool, actually, though sometimes when she stood a certain way they looked a bit like a woollen nappy. But not much. I wonder if I could pay her to make a pair for me?
‘When I started doing comics I just used to draw people with their hands behind their backs,’ said Sam, running a hand through his hair. He’d had his hair cut but it was messy already. It’s always a bit messy. His hands were all stained with charcoal. He always seems to be covered with some variety of art material. ‘But I’m a bit better at drawing hands now. Well, I hope I am.’
We all instinctively looked at his picture, which was on the drawing table next to him.
‘Th
ey look pretty hand-like to me,’ said Cass.
‘Thanks, Cass,’ said Sam. He looked at his watch. ‘Ah, afraid I’d better go. I’m meeting Daire and some of the other lads from school in a few minutes.’
Most of the others had things to do too, so we all gathered up our stuff and strolled out. Everyone seemed to be going somewhere apart from me and Lucy, so we ended up walking towards the bus stop together.
‘Do you know Sam’s friends from school well?’ I asked. She and Sam have been good friends since they were little, but they go to different schools now – he goes to St Anthony’s with Richard (and John) and she goes to St Mary’s.
‘Oh yeah, his good friends,’ she said. ‘Daire’s pretty cool. He’s my friend too, I suppose. The three of us went to the Gaeltacht last summer, though this year Daire went back by himself ’cause we were at the camp.’
And I don’t know why, but, without thinking, I found myself saying, ‘Does Gemma get on with them? Sam’s friends?’
Lucy looked very confused.
‘Gemma?’ said Lucy. ‘Um, she’s never met them, as far as I know. Why do you ask?’
‘Oh, I just thought what with her and Sam being …’ I said. ‘You know.’
‘Sam and Gemma?’ said Lucy. Then realisation seemed to dawn on her. ‘Oh, you thought they were … but there’s nothing going on there!’
Now it was my turn to be surprised.
‘But I thought …’ I said. ‘After the camp party … and I met you together in town a few weeks ago. I assumed they were together.’
‘Oh no, nothing really happened,’ said Lucy. ‘I mean, they were with each other once at the end of the camp, but that was basically it. Sam thinks she’s cool but he doesn’t really fancy her. To be honest, I think he was a bit surprised when she kissed him.’
And that was it: the moment I realised I liked Sam. Because when she said that Sam didn’t really fancy Gemma I felt a huge wave of relief wash over me and I couldn’t really ignore it anymore.
‘Really?’ I said, trying to make my voice sound as normal as possible. I think I succeeded because Lucy didn’t seem to notice anything strange.
‘Oh yeah,’ she said. ‘In fairness to Sam, he doesn’t usually mess girls around. If he’d known at the time that she really liked him, he wouldn’t have kept kissing her back. I think he thought it was just, you know, the party mood – they were all just having fun.’ As soon as she said this, Lucy looked horrified. ‘Oh God, I shouldn’t have told you she liked him. It’s not fair to her. Pretend I didn’t say anything.’
‘I actually did know already,’ I admitted. ‘Someone else told me.’
‘Oh, okay.’ Lucy looked relieved. ‘So yeah. Basically, she told him that she really liked him and he says he turned her down gently, so I hope he did. He felt really bad, I do know that.’
‘Really?’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ said Lucy. ‘He got worried he’d given her the impression he was into her earlier in the camp. She’d asked him whether something was going on between him and me, and of course he said there wasn’t and there never had been. So then, when she declared her love, he got all worried that he’d somehow given her the wrong impression when he told her he was single. I’m pretty sure he didn’t, though. I mean, I doubt he said, “Me and Lucy are just friends, but I’m actually looking for a girl who looks just like you”, or something like that.’
I don’t blame Gemma for thinking there might be something between Sam and Lucy. During the camp I actually wondered myself whether Lucy and Sam were really just good friends, and she had told me that people always thought this and that it was always very annoying when either of them ever liked somebody else.
‘So how did you end up in town together, that time I met you?’ I said. ‘You and Sam and Gemma, I mean.’
‘Oh, we just bumped into her when we were coming out of a bookshop,’ said Lucy. ‘It was a bit weird at first because Sam hadn’t seen her since that night, but she seemed genuinely cool about everything and we ended up going for a coffee together. I don’t think she’s, like, pining away for him or anything.’
‘Oh right,’ I said. And then I didn’t want to say anything else in case Lucy could tell what I was thinking about Sam. I didn’t want to go on about him and his love life too much. Also, you know when you like someone and you feel really self-conscious mentioning their name? I was starting to feel like that – I was worried that I’d sound a bit funny when I said it and then Lucy would guess that I liked him. Because I definitely don’t want her to know. In fact, I don’t think I want anyone to know. So I asked some stupid random question about Maria Hanff and luckily by then we’d reached my bus stop, so we said goodbye.
But anyway. There it is. I like Sam. I really like him. And I’m not sure what I can do about it because I have no idea whether he likes me. I mean, I’m pretty sure he likes me as a friend because we get on well together and he lends me books and things. But that doesn’t mean anything special, because he is someone who is used to being friends with girls as well as boys. For all I know he doesn’t even fancy girls at all. Which I suppose would be better than him fancying another girl but not me. But still, I’d rather he liked girls. And by girls I just mean me.
Oh why is everything so complicated? Why did I have to start fancying Sam instead of just being friends with him? It would have been much easier. It’s not like I was even looking for someone to fancy. But I can’t help it. He’s so nice and funny and he’s very good at art. And he’s cute. The more I see him, the cuter he looks. And he wears cool t-shirts. And I like the battered old boots he wears (even though they’re a bit like John Kowalski’s, but, in fairness, I liked John’s boots too). And his new haircut is pretty cool. Oh I just like him. I really, really like him. And I’m so, so glad there’s nothing going on between him and Gemma.
Though maybe I’m better off not even thinking about boys. If Rachel is anything to go by at the moment, no romance is worth it in the end. She is still feeling rotten. Jenny has just gone home after spending the entire day (as far as I can tell – she came over just when I was leaving the house to go to my practice) listening to Rachel being miserable. I need to think of something new to cheer her up tomorrow. I’ve been neglecting my plan to help her get over Tom. And, on a selfish note, it might stop me thinking about Sam.
I keep thinking about all the conversations I’ve had with Sam. He’s always been really friendly and nice, but, as far as I can tell, he’s always been friendly and nice to everyone he knows, male and female. He is the sort of person who just gets on with people. The only time I’ve ever seen him be a bit off was when he thought he was going to have to play Mr Banks in our production of Mary Poppins, and that’s only because he gets a bit nervous on stage.
In fact, he was only expecting to be in the chorus when he joined up for the musical, but there were so few boys they had to give him the part of Uncle Albert. That made him nervous enough, which is why he was quite quiet during the rehearsals, but once he was actually performing he was pretty good. We only talked properly for the first time after the first triumphant night of the musical, when he was a lot more relaxed, and that was when I realised how nice he was. Though I didn’t fancy him. And now I do. How did that happen?
Anyway, I haven’t just been thinking about myself and my romantic problems (if you can count fancying someone you’re friends with and who may not fancy you at all as an actual romantic problem). I’ve been thinking about Rachel too. I have been looking up ways to help someone get over a break-up online, but unfortunately it hasn’t been very useful so far. One website suggested that I get Rachel to join me on a 5K run. I suppose running might do her some good, but I’m not willing to run 5K myself. I mean, it’s not that I don’t want to put myself out for Rachel, but I don’t think it’s actually possible for me to run five whole kilometres. I’m not even very good at just running around all the bases when we play rounders in PE.
The same website also suggested I get Rachel to help ‘r
emodel my sitting room’ which I presume means redecorate it. Actually, I wouldn’t mind redecorating our sitting room – I keep telling Mum we should get rid of the boring cream paint on the walls and paint them a nice bright turquoise or something. And I wish we had a new couch. Ours is about a million years old and one of the arms has never been the same since me and Rachel played gymnastics on it too enthusiastically when I was nine. But sadly Mum and Dad refuse to listen to me, so I don’t think they’d let me do up the room, even if it was in the good cause of helping Rachel.
The last tip suggested that we go on a ‘girlfriends road trip’, which isn’t much use to me. I am fairly sure a walk around the teacher-training college doesn’t count as a road trip, but in fairness I’m not sure what else I can do, given that we are both in school and can’t drive. At least I managed to get her out of the house for an hour.
Anyway, all these tips seem to be designed for a sporty grown-up with lots of money and her own house and a car. In other words, the opposite of me. But surely there must be more useful tips out there. I will keep looking for inspiration.
I had no intention of persuading Rachel to join me on a run, but just out of interest while I was helping Mum empty the dishwasher this evening I asked her about doing 5K. She goes for runs sometimes, but it’s mostly when I’m at school, so I sort of forget that she ever does them.
‘I’d never be able to do that, would I?’ I said. ‘I mean, that’s for serious runners.’
‘I can run 5K!’ said Mum. ‘That’s what I do pretty much every time I go for a run!’
‘What?’ I said in astonishment. I’d sort of assumed she just went for a short trot around the block, not miles and miles and miles.
‘Yes!’ she said. ‘It’s only about half an hour!’