My knee kept banging against the table leg as Barney desperately tried to find something that the three of us had in common. Yes, Scarlett wasn’t quite the insipid wretch that I’d originally thought but after she’d finished getting me up to speed on all the soaps, she had nothing else to say. Barney and I started talking about a Japanese graphic novel we’d both read but we had to stop after a minute because Scarlett didn’t know what we were going on about.
It was agony and then Heidi/Hilda/whatever her name is and the rest of Scarlett’s friends arrived and made it clear that the sight of the three of us together was causing them much amusement and they wanted to observe us at close quarters. I hadn’t signed up to be observed at close quarters by the kind of people I usually U-turned in corridors to avoid.
‘Well, this has been great, but I really do have stuff to do,’ I said, standing up. I stretched my mouth into a smile, though it felt like a pained grimace. ‘Thanks for getting me up to speed on Hollyoaks.’
Scarlett looked a bit pissed off at that, even though I hadn’t meant to sound so bitingly sarcastic when I formed the words in my head. Wasn’t much I could do about it though and it wasn’t like Barney seemed that bothered. He was actually talking to her friend, Mads, like he and Mads had things that they could talk about.
It was all very strange, I thought, as I left the canteen and walked straight into Michael Lee. I found myself blushing, though generally, as a rule, I didn’t blush. Blushing was for people with no backbone.
‘Oh, hey,’ he said in surprise and he was blushing too. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said, ’cause the Barney being friends with the pod people thing and then crashing into Michael Lee and having to remember the kissage made the bit of my brain that thought of tart replies completely malfunction. ‘Actually, I’ve been meaning to, you know, come and find you.’
He stiffened. No, not like that. He tensed up and looked unhappy and suspicious like he knew that I just couldn’t wait to ravage his poor, defenceless, innocent mouth all over again, which was so not the case. ‘Why would you want to do that?’
‘Because I have the crutches your dad lent me stuffed in my locker.’
Michael let out a sigh of relief. ‘Right! OK! Do you want me to collect them now or wait ’til after school?’
‘We should do it now,’ I decided, because there was only ten minutes until afternoon lessons started and so I wouldn’t have to hang around making painfully awkward conversation with him. I’d had my weekly quota of painfully awkward conversation.
Not a single word was spoken on the way to my locker. Michael Lee walked down one side of the corridor, I walked down the other side. Then he slouched against the wall as I opened my locker and braced myself for the deluge of crap that always fell out. Luckily, one of the things that fell out was a crutch.
‘One down, one to go,’ I said, as he picked it up and I began to try and extricate the other one while trying to prevent books and Tupperware and stuff tumbling to the floor.
‘What exactly have you got in there?’ Michael asked, peering over my shoulder to get a good look. ‘Is that a whole jar of pick and mix?’
‘No, of course not,’ I said, yanking out the crutch with one hand and slamming my locker shut with the other. It was a three-quarters-full jar of pick and mix. I turned round and Michael was still looming behind me so we were suddenly together. Almost touching, just a pair of crutches coming between us, and I couldn’t even work out how we’d kissed that first time because my mouth was on a level with the little divot between his top button and his Adam’s apple.
So, in order for us to kiss, I’d have had to stand on tiptoe and Michael Lee would have had to stoop down, which suggested that it had been a mutual kiss. That there had been two willing parties and that was a theory that needed mulling. Much mulling. Like, even if I had been standing on the very tip of my tippiest toes there was absolutely no way I could get to Michael Lee’s mouth unless he bent his head in much the same way that he was doing right now.
I think this time he kissed me because the only thing I was doing with my mouth was opening it to tell him to back the hell away from my personal space. It wasn’t just a brush of his lips against mine, it was a proper kiss, firm but yielding, and instead of freaking out over the kiss, I was just being kissed, even thinking about kissing him back and then I heard the sound of voices, a loud thump of a door being slammed and the bell for afternoon lessons.
We leapt apart just a nano second before the corridor was invaded by Year 12s. I shoved the second crutch at Michael, who grabbed it from me then stood there opening and closing his mouth and generally acting like a gormless fool.
‘Right, you’ve got the crutches,’ I said sharply, because somebody needed to take control of this situation. ‘There’s absolutely no reason for us to have any more contact with each other.’
‘Yeah, yeah. No reason at all,’ he echoed, rubbing his chin. The tips of his fingers just grazed his bottom lip and I realised I was staring at his mouth as if it was the source of all comfort and joy.
He was staring at me too as if I was some new species of life that he’d never seen before.
‘I’m going … now,’ I said, and Michael opened and shut his mouth a few more times and when it became clear that no actual words were going to come out of it, I walked away.
12
The first kiss was a fluke.
The second kiss was obviously just to see if the first kiss really had been a fluke.
But there weren’t any excuses for the kisses after that.
The third kiss occurred when Jeane just happened to be passing my car at the exact time that I was leaving early on Thursday afternoon, like I do every week because I have a free study period then. I’m sure she was meant to be in a lesson but she was walking across the staff car park towards me with a grim expression on her face and I put my bag down on the car bonnet so that when she did get to my side, I had my hands free to pull her close enough so I could kiss her.
The fourth kiss took place on the tiny twisty staircase that led from the second floor of the upper school to the Art studios in the attic. Jeane tended to camp out there during breaks when it was too cold and wet to skulk around the bike shed. I don’t know how I knew that, I just did. No one else hung out there even though it was cosy and quiet – maybe it was because the entire school knew it was one of Jeane’s special places and she’d kill anyone stupid enough to trespass with just a look.
When she saw me standing at the bottom of the stairs, she glanced up from her laptop then placed it a few steps above her and sat there with her hands in her lap, waiting for me. I sat on the step below her so we were almost the same height and it was a little awkward and neck-cricking but we kissed for a good ten minutes without any interruptions.
Jeane was the ninth girl I’d kissed but her kisses were nothing like the other eight girls’ kisses. She tasted sweet and salty and she kissed like her life depended on it. She kissed me like I was going off to war or it was the end of the bloody world. There was no building up to it, no nibbling or nuzzling or clumsy introductory kisses – with her it was just BOOM!
Then the kisses would end in the same way they’d started. We’d break apart and put as much distance between ourselves as possible and we would never talk about what we’d just been doing. We never talked at all.
I didn’t know if she was using me or I was using her. And I still didn’t know why I was kissing someone I shouldn’t have been kissing. I mean, she wasn’t sweet or sexy or cool or any of the other qualities I wanted in a girlfriend. Obviously, I’d want to go out with someone who was good to look at, in the same way that if I had a choice of two shirts, I’d always pick the one that looked better.
It wasn’t even like Jeane was secretly pretty. Though maybe if you got rid of the horrible grey hair and the even more horrible clothes and the nasty shoes then she might be passably cute. Or even plain and ordinary, which wasn’t as bad as, say, being ugly.
br />
Whatever.
It was still all wrong and weird and I didn’t know what I was doing and why I was doing it. All I knew was that it had to stop.
So, two weeks after the kissing had started and we were tucked away again on the stairs that led up to the Art studios, Jeane sitting on my lap because that was the most comfortable way for us to kiss, her short nails gently scratching the back of my neck as her tongue danced in my mouth, I was determined that we weren’t going to do this any more.
I stopped kissing her and she sighed a little then slid off me on to the step and patted down her hair.
‘We can’t keep doing this,’ I said firmly. I think it was the first thing I’d said to her in two weeks.
She didn’t look surprised. ‘I know,’ she said, as she began to search through her tote bag. At all times she had at least two bags with her, plus books and folders. No one needed that much stuff.
‘It’s all this sneaking about and hiding from people,’ I continued. ‘It’s doing my head in.’
Her face was as blank as a piece of white paper so I had no idea what she was thinking. ‘What did you want to do about it then?’ she asked calmly.
To stop this right here and now, both of us vow to never breathe a word of it ever again to another soul, and get on with the rest of our lives, I thought to myself. I cleared my throat. ‘Well, maybe we could see each other outside of school. If you wanted …’
She actually had the nerve to smile. A small, triumphant smile that made me want to hurl myself down the stairs so I’d have amnesia and wouldn’t be able to remember the moment thirty seconds before when I’d somehow asked Jeane Smith out on a date.
‘I’ll think about it.’ She held up her phone. ‘Give me your number.’
‘Um, why?’
‘Duh! So I can text you when I’ve decided what I want to do.’ She raised her eyebrows at me. ‘Unless you’re having second thoughts because we could just carry on as we were, or, like, not. I don’t mind either way.’
I wasn’t going to have Jeane calling all the shots. ‘Well, neither do I,’ I burst out. I always ended up losing my cool with her. ‘I mean, we could just not do this at all.’
‘So, what do you want to do?’ She sounded peeved, but not quite as peeved as she normally did, which was maybe a sign that she was as freaked out about our kissing sessions as I was.
‘No way! If I say I do or I don’t want to, you’ll use it against me.’
Jeane put her hands on her hips. ‘Why would I even do that?’
‘Because that’s what you do!’ I rested my elbows on my knees. ‘This is all some evil trick, isn’t it? Has this been some psychosexual experiment for your blog? Will people leave mean comments about me?’
‘Don’t you think you’re being just a little bit paranoid?’ she asked sweetly. ‘I don’t diss people I know in real life on the internet, it’s one of the cornerstones of my blogging philosophy. It goes against the whole spirit of the Adorkable brand.’
‘Whatever!’ She’d blogged about Barney so her philosophy didn’t mean shit. Neither did Jeane’s mistaken belief that she was building a geek master race in her spare time. ‘This is all really messed up and—’
‘I have Art in five minutes so please go and have your existential crisis somewhere else before Mrs Spiers and the rest of my class arrive.’ She marched majestically up the stairs so she could sit on the top step.
‘You can’t blame me for not trusting you. I know you’d love to get one over on me.’ Really, what other reason could there be for Jeane willingly kissing me? There wasn’t. Not when she was looking as if she was going to march down the stairs again so she could knee me in the nuts.
‘Excuse me! Excuse me! I am trustworthy, which you’d know if you knew a single thing about me instead of judging me on what other people say.’ She twisted her face up until she looked like a gargoyle. ‘Believe me, I am riddled with faults, but if you ask me to do something and it’s something I want to do or you have a secret that needs keeping then you can trust me with your life.’
‘Well, I’m sorry, it’s just that you—’
‘What did you think was going to happen here, Michael? Did you think I was going to beg you to keep doing this with me?’
How did she do it? I could be so sure that I was right then Jeane would blindside me and all of a sudden I was in the wrong.
‘Why would I beg you when there are tons of girls who want to get with me? Pretty, non-stroppy girls who aren’t such a bloody headache,’ I told her furiously.
‘Well, get with them then because I don’t want to be part of this … this freakshow any more.’ Jeane rattled the studio door handle but it remained locked and the only way to end this and to stop an argument that I was never going to win was to get as far away from her as possible.
13
Kissing Michael Lee the first time was an accident. Kissing him the second time was just plain silly. And the times after that were sheer Oh-my-God-what-is-wrong-with-you-ness.
It was obvious it wasn’t going to last but I never thought it would end with him calling me fugly and untrustworthy and just about the most evil, calculating person in the world. Like I would ever blog about what we were doing. Like I was proud of what we were doing.
I was meant to be working on a stupid seascape in Art because Mrs Spiers had said that if I didn’t she’d fail me for that module. It really was the least of my problems but I was just in the right mood to paint a storm-tossed ocean with lots of greys and blacks and purples. I even added a little sailboat getting pulled under with a teeny-tiny little man onboard, and if he hadn’t been so teeny-tiny then I’d have given him an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt and a faux-hawk because the teeny-tiny man was Michael Lee and the little sailboat was his miserable life, which was going to be nothing but a source of frustration and disappointment to him once he wasn’t the most popular boy in school any more and was forced to join the real world.
Of course I couldn’t tell Mrs Spiers that so I described my painting as a metaphor for the savagery of nature and how it would ultimately triumph over all the wrongs man had done. Mrs Spiers was really big on metaphor so she actually dared to pat me on the head and said that she expected great things from me this year if I kept up this standard.
Triple whatever.
I couldn’t wait to get out of school, though I had to steel myself to go and unlock Mary in case Michael Lee was loitering around the bike shed because he wanted to hurl some more insults at me or, worse, somehow I ended up kissing him again. I’ll say one thing for him, and only one thing: he was a really good kisser. That was a large part of the problem.
I’ve kissed seven boys and two girls and Michael Lee was definitely in the top three. He did this thing with my bottom lip and his teeth that made me want to squeal and swoon a little.
Anyway, he wasn’t there, which was fine by me because it meant that the thing, the stupid thing that should never have started, was over. I didn’t even cycle through the staff car park in case he was hanging around but took the long way down the grass slope and through the junior school.
It was cold with that crisp nip in the air that made me think of toffee apples and crunching through fallen leaves and mugs of hot chocolate and all the other things that were ace about autumn, but it was still light enough that I decided not to go straight home but huff and puff my way up the big hill, then up an even bigger hill until I was cycling to Hampstead and even then I didn’t want to stop.
I love standing up on my pedals but keeping my body low so I can go extra fast and feel the breeze lift through my hair and all I am is the ache in my legs as I pedal faster and I don’t have to think, I just am.
I cycled on to Regent’s Park, craning my neck so I could see the giraffes through the canopy of plane trees as I whizzed past London Zoo and I thought about cycling right through the park but the sun was getting lower and lower, so I cycled back through Camden, slowing down to save my energy for the big steep hill that I
couldn’t avoid on the way home.
My legs were shaking as I walked through my door. God, the flat was such a mess. Normally I didn’t mind the mess. Mess is a sign of a creative mind, after all, but right then it just seemed like one more aspect of my life where chaos reigned.
The fridge was another place where there was no order. There was also nothing in there for dinner and I’d spent my lunch-hour eating Michael Lee’s mouth off his face, then two hours cycling around north London, so I was ravenously hungry. I couldn’t even order a takeaway because a quick scavenge through bags and pockets and the back of the sofa only netted two pounds and thirty-seven pence. My debit card was somewhere in the flat, or maybe in my school locker, but right then it was lost to me.
Luckily I’m never more than five seconds away from some Haribo, so, ripping open a bag of Tangfastics, I switched on my MacBook and headed for Twitter.
adork_able Jeane Smith
Sartre was wrong. Hell isn’t other people. It’s other people AND the complete absence of Pad Thai in my life right now. Please send food.
Immediately people began tweeting me pictures of Pad Thai and also cake, which was sweet but wasn’t really helping the hunger pangs that the Tangfastics weren’t doing much to quell.
winsomedimsum is yum
@adork_able Sartre had nothing to complain about – he wasn’t doing five A-levels or was related to my mother, as far as I can tell.
It was a tweet from a new follower of mine, @winsomedimsum. I mean, I had new followers by the hundred every day, more if I had something published or one of my tweets was retweeted by a celebrity, so I didn’t take much notice of them and I very rarely followed back. But @winsomedimsum shared my love of weird foodstuffs and we’d just connected. And at least they weren’t one of the fifty-seven tweeters to now send me a picture of Pad Thai.