Adorkable

  ‘Oh, shut up and stop being such a drama queen,’ Michael snapped at me. ‘Anyway it’s not brown. You’ll wish it was.’

  I steeled myself to take off the sodden towel that I’d draped shawl-like over my head when Michael had started doing a good impersonation of the Harbinger of Doom. I turned to face the mirror, shut my eyes and removed my head covering. Then I opened my eyes and …

  ‘Oh! Oh! Oh, well, it doesn’t look that bad.’

  Michael groaned as if he was in great pain. ‘Your hair is the same colour as peach yoghurt.’

  ‘Or apricot yoghurt.’ I stared in wonder at my hair, which was a creamy, pastel orangey, pinky, peachy shade that I could totally work with. ‘Now this is much better. This is a neutral.’

  ‘In what world is that colour a neutral?’ Michael demanded.

  ‘In my world, boring boy,’ I rapped back, but my heart wasn’t in it. I much preferred to gaze at my new hair in the mirror. It looked kinda French and I decided that I might experiment with pinning it up and possibly investing in a tiara. And maybe a foofy skirt with another foofy skirt over it and why not a big flouncy net petticoat under both of them?

  I love the endless possibility that comes from changing your hair colour. Now that I didn’t have grey hair, I didn’t want to dress like a little old lady any more but like a Fifties prom queen on mild-altering drugs. There was definitely a blog post in there: Hair or Flair – which comes first?

  ‘I like it. I really, really like it,’ I said decisively. Michael was still acting as if it hurt to look at me. ‘At least you’re spared the humiliation of being seen out in public with a girl with peach-coloured hair.’

  ‘Well, there is that,’ he agreed, and then he was by my side so he could run his fingers through my damp hair and I didn’t know what this strange, intoxicating pull was but all he had to do was touch me and I began to wonder how long it would be before we were done with talking and could get to kissing. ‘But I don’t mind being with you in private.’

  ‘That works for me,’ I said, and Michael was staring at my mouth so I was self-conscious about how my lips moved as I was talking but I think he wanted to kiss me too. ‘Shall we move this to the sofa?’

  We’d never kissed lying down before, probably because usually we were either at school or there was so much stuff on the sofa that lying down wasn’t an option. For once we weren’t craning and stretching to kiss standing up, or bodies twisted at awkward angles to kiss sitting down, but lying on the sofa, legs tangled together, and we could concentrate on the kissing.

  It was such good kissing that it deserved to be savoured. He tasted of tea and tangy cola sweets and every time we stopped kissing, because we needed that pesky thing called oxygen, Michael Lee would sigh. Sad-sounding sighs and I didn’t want to think about why he might be sad so I’d kiss him again and because he was Michael Lee, he didn’t freak out when he realised his hand was on my breast for the first time but kept it there. It wasn’t just a motionless hand clamped to my boob either, he was stroking and pressing and finally unbuttoning my playsuit, which was sodden and chafing me from being continuously soaked with water throughout the afternoon.

  But the stroking and the pressing and the unbuttoning all seemed a bit one-sided and what was the point of kissing Michael Lee on your sofa if you didn’t get to see what all the fuss was about? What made the other girls short of breath and weak at the knees? Besides, I was only too happy to rid him of his American Eagle T-shirt, because his allegiance to fauxheritage American brands offended my eyes and my sensibilities.

  Up until then I thought I was in control of myself and the kisses, but with all that caramel-coloured skin rubbing against me, it was impossible not to wriggle and writhe and maybe even shimmy until Michael’s hand slid under my bra and I could feel his hard-on digging into me.

  ‘I think we need to stop,’ I whispered and I don’t think he heard me because he was biting my ear and pushing against me, but then he stilled.

  ‘We should stop,’ he said and he rolled right off the sofa, and by the time I’d buttoned my playsuit back up he was sitting on the floor, back against the sofa, trying to reassemble his stupid hairdo. ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to let things go that far.’

  I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean. Like, he was down with the kissing and the touching but he’d been repulsed by what he’d seen now that we’d moved on to partial removal of clothes? Or because he was the boy he got to make all the kissing-related decisions? Or that he was going to do a Barney and freak out about touching my breasts?

  ‘You weren’t the only one on that sofa,’ I said, and he looked at me in surprise at my sharp tone. ‘I was cool with it and when I wasn’t cool with it, I decided it was time to stop. Please don’t start having second thoughts while I’m in the same room because it makes me feel like shit.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ he said quickly, then turned round so I could see him looking all stricken and pained. ‘Just we don’t know each other that well and we don’t know where this thing of ours is going and I don’t want you thinking that I’m taking advantage of the situation.’

  Michael was right – he didn’t know me at all. ‘You’re not taking advantage of me because I won’t let you,’ I told him sternly. ‘If you try something that I’m not down with then believe me, I’ll make sure you get the message.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I didn’t mean that—’

  ‘And same goes for you,’ I continued, just so we were clear. ‘If I bust out a move that you’re not cool with, you need to tell me.’

  Michael didn’t say anything for a long time. Long enough that I started to freak out a little, then he smiled. ‘You’re not like any other girl I know.’

  ‘So, is that a good or bad thing?’ I asked slowly, though I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know the answer.

  ‘Most of the time it’s more good than bad. And sometimes it’s very, very good,’ he said in a drawly voice and I swear he went a bit misty-eyed so I didn’t need to carry on freaking out.

  ‘OK then.’ I settled back on the sofa and watched Michael as he absent-mindedly picked up the flyer that went with the DVD I’d been watching of the Rock ’n’ Roll Camp for Girls.

  ‘Isn’t this the girl from Duckie? Polly …’

  ‘Molly,’ I corrected him and I had to bite my lip to stop myself from shrieking that Duckie and Molly were mine, all mine, and nothing to do with him. ‘Her name’s Molly.’

  ‘Right, yeah. I heard some of their songs on 6Music, then I downloaded their album off iTunes. Did you know she used to be in The Hormones?’

  It was kinda sweet but also very annoying that he was trying to bring me up to speed on the career of someone who I’d been on ‘Hi, how are you?’ terms with for the last three years, and after last summer when I’d hung out with her every day for a month and had even baked cupcakes with her and let her sleep on the very sofa that Michael and I had romped on, I could probably call her a friend. ‘Yes, I did know that.’

  ‘They’re playing next Saturday. A whole bunch of us are going. Should be really good if you want to …’ Michael ground to a halt as he realised that asking me to go to a gig with a whole bunch of sad-sack people from school, who were only just jumping on the Duckie bandwagon even though they’d been going for years, violated the rules of our mutual privacy pact. ‘So, yeah, should be cool.’

  ‘Well, I’m going anyway,’ I said casually, because it was better that I just told him, rather than him being caught by surprise and blurting something out and us getting discovered by half the school. I wasn’t going to tell him that I was on the guest list though. It sounded way too much like bragging. ‘Like, I’m going to shoot some interviews for the blog before the show and I’m meeting people there. Some of them I know from Twitter, so I guess they don’t count as real people.’

  ‘Jeane? Piss off.’ Michael reached round to pinch my toe. ‘Don’t get all confrontational and belligerent with me because it doesn’t really have any effe
ct on me any more. Not now I’ve seen you getting proper told off by your two gay dads.’

  I scowled at the back of his head. ‘You tell anyone about that …’

  ‘You’ll what? Call me out on Twitter? Write a mean blog about me? Then everyone will know our secret.’ He turned round again. This time it was so I could get the benefit of his smug smile and it wasn’t worth arguing about. Not when I planned to send him to the kitchen to bring me another bag of Haribo in the next ten minutes.

  So, although it went against everything I believed in, I actually let Michael Lee have the last word.

  16

  I didn’t see much of Jeane during the following week. She couldn’t make any of our usual lunchtime sessions and on Thursday afternoon when I usually gave her a lift to a little backstreet five minutes from school so I could snog her face off (well, I had the last two Thursdays), she sidled up to me in the staff car park.

  ‘Have to take a rain check, I’m afraid,’ she announced cheerfully. ‘I’ve got to go into town to pick up a video camera and my friend Tabitha has got a new consignment of vintage clothes and I’ve got first dibs.’ She shook her head. ‘Creating a new look is such hard work but maybe we can hook up over the weekend, but not Saturday. Anyway it’s half-term next week so we can get together then, though I have to go into town for all the meetings I couldn’t do because of school.’ She finally paused to allow some air into her lungs and fix me with a fierce look. ‘You’re not really going to the Duckie gig, are you? It was just a wind up, right?’

  Wrong. I’d bought my ticket and been charged an extra two quid for the booking fee. ‘Yes, I’m going,’ I ground out. ‘You don’t have a monopoly on the whole cool thing.’

  She snorted. ‘Yeah, right. Whatever. I’ll see you around.’

  I watched her pedal off, then stop to adjust her head covering. Jeane was yet to debut her peach-coloured hair because she wanted to assemble her new look first. In the meantime she’d wrapped a huge piece of brightly patterned material round her head and had got into a fight in English when the person sitting behind her couldn’t see the whiteboard and Jeane had refused to remove her towering headgear.

  In a way, you kind of had to admire her tenacity to go all out for the sake of her dodgy fashion choices and, in another way … well, it had been a good two months with Scarlett before I realised I’d made a terrible mistake. With Jeane, it had only taken two weeks. Any fool could see (if they’d even known that we were ‘together’) that we were destined for disaster. Big, bad disaster. I didn’t know when it would happen but I knew it would happen soon.

  The feeling of impending doom was still there on Saturday evening when I met up with the gang in Nandos for some pregig peri-peri chicken. I was dreading going to the gig because Jeane would be there and maybe it would be obvious to everyone that we’d been getting off with each other whenever she could find a window in her busy schedule. Or I’d get dragged into some kind of Jeane-related drama. Or maybe she’d snub me completely, which would be for the best, but still the thought of Jeane giving me her most withering look (she could kill an entire rainforest with one sweep of her lashes) was putting me off my double chicken burger.

  Actually, that was a lie. What was putting me off my grub was Heidi, who kept rubbing her leg against mine in a really determined fashion as she tried to convince me to have everyone back to mine after the gig. Mum and Dad were in Devon to drop Melly and Alice off at the grandparents’ for half-term week and weren’t due back until late Sunday evening, but there was no way that I was going to invite a bunch of people over so they could drink themselves stupid, break stuff and vom.

  ‘It’s not going to happen,’ I told Heidi for the fifth time but she just rubbed my leg harder and pouted.

  ‘You’re no fun, Michael,’ she said and I caught the sideways look she gave Scarlett, who shrugged and raised her eyebrows so I guessed that Heidi coming on to me was sanctioned by my ex-girlfriend. Sometimes it seemed that we just all hung round in the same little group and swapped boyfriends and girlfriends. In fact the only new face in our crowd was Barney, which should have been awkward but wasn’t.

  He’d cut his hair so I could see his face, which was trained on Scarlett most of the time. They were a bit moony-eyed together but when he got the special salt on his chips, which she didn’t like, he teased her out of her snit. Had to give the guy props for that. Then we realised that we’d both been at three of the same gigs in the last few months and maybe there was more to Barney than just someone who’d nicked my girlfriend.

  It was natural to fall into step with him and Scarlett as we walked down the road to the venue, which was a converted ballroom. ‘My grandparents did their courting here,’ Barney confessed with a grin as we left the girls putting their stuff in the cloakroom and headed for the bar. Hanging over the dancefloor was the largest chandelier I’d ever seen, the stage had been set up at the far end and around the floor and tucked into little alcoves were tables and chairs.

  Ant and Martin managed to grab a spare table while we got the drinks. The girls still weren’t back – they’d probably gone to the loo to check the make-up that they’d checked ten minutes before in the Nando’s loos. ‘Right,’ Ant said, lifting up his plastic pint glass of lager. ‘Shall we neck these then start a mosh pit going?’

  There were general murmurs of agreement but Barney shook his head. ‘You can’t. Not at a Duckie gig. It’s a girls-only mosh pit.’

  ‘Are you rinsing me?’

  ‘Nope. There was a sign as we came in.’ Barney spread his hands wide. ‘If you try to get in the mosh pit you’ll be pulled out by security. Actually, that’s the best-case scenario.’

  ‘What’s the worst-case scenario?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ll be savaged by hordes of moshing Duckie fangirls and be lucky to escape with your life,’ Barney said. ‘Anyway, it’s kinda cool that the girls can dance and jump around without having to worry about some meathead trying to grope them, right?’

  When he put it like that, it made perfect sense, but Martin just shook his head. ‘Dude, you went out with that freak of nature for far too long.’

  ‘She’s not a freak of nature,’ Barney snapped, his face reddening. ‘She’s a bit … well … out there, but she’s cool. Coolest person I’ll ever know.’

  It made me like Barney even more that he’d stick up for his ex. Not that Jeane needed anyone to defend her: if she’d been there and heard what Martin had called her, she’d probably have slapped him. As it was, Martin was backing down. ‘Sorry, mate. It’s just, like, wasn’t she a bit much?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. She was too bloody much,’ Barney agreed with a faint smile.

  We’d been there for twenty minutes now and all this talk of Jeane made me suddenly scan the room nervously, but all I saw were the girls coming towards us.

  ‘OMG,’ breathed Heidi as she plonked herself down on my lap. We were a couple of chairs short but she was coming on way too strong. Still, I couldn’t push her off without causing a scene. ‘We’ve just seen Jeane Smith. You won’t believe what she’s wearing.’

  ‘And she’s changed her hair,’ added Mads. ‘It’s not grey any more. It looks like that Barry M nail polish you were going to get, Scar.’

  Scar agreed that it was similar and then all four of them craned their necks and I followed their gaze to the merchandise stall where Jeane was standing with a little gaggle of girls around her.

  She looked … You know what? There aren’t really any words to describe how she looked. Her hair was teased and backcombed and set off with a tiara and she was wearing a ballgown. Not a pouffy prom dress, but a humungous ballgown, which was bluey-green or one of those colours like turquoise or aquamarine that I’m not really sure about, and made out of some mysterious stuff like taffeta or shot silk or, well, recycled carrier bags. But what really looked different about Jeane wasn’t that hair or the super-glam, over the top outfit, but the smile on her face.

  Jeane looked happy, like she’d won th
e lottery and they’d transferred the cash into Haribo. I’d never seen her look like that. It suited her.

  I tried not to keep sneaking glances at Jeane as she fussed around with a camcorder and interviewed people. When she wasn’t doing that, she was totally working the room. Each time she took a step, she seemed to bump into someone she knew and would have to stop for hugs and kisses and excited chatter. It was a whole new side to her.

  ‘Who do you keep looking at?’ Heidi asked me crossly.

  I turned my head away from Jeane so quickly I almost got whiplash. ‘No one,’ I muttered.

  Heidi sniffed. ‘FYI, if you’re going to ask a girl to sit on your lap then it’s blates rude to ignore her.’

  ‘Don’t remember him asking you to plonk your arse down,’ Martin said, then they gave each other the stink-eye because there was history and all of Heidi’s weight was centred on my right thigh, which was going numb, so I didn’t even realise that Jeane was coming over until she was standing right in front of me.

  ‘Scarlett,’ she said. Scarlett looked at her warily. ‘Scarlett, can I borrow Barney’s brain for a second?’

  ‘Well, yeah. Course you can.’

  I forgot that sometimes Jeane could be thoughtful and considerate. That instead of texting Barney and summoning him, she’d come over to a table of people she didn’t like to check that it was OK with Scarlett before she thrust her video camera at Barney.

  ‘It’s on loan,’ she explained, crouching down so she could point at the screen. ‘And it’s all digital and not like my clunky old one. I zoomed in and now I can’t zoom out. What button should I be pressing?’

  ‘I don’t suppose you brought the instruction manual with you?’

  Jeane rolled her eyes. ‘Barney, why do you ask questions that you already know the answers to?’

  Barney grumbled and gave her the finger but then he bent his head and studied the camera. Jeane swept a glance around the table then took out her phone and, I guess, decided to tweet this thrilling part of her evening. Then I felt my phone vibrate.