Anyway, yes. I’m sturdy, stocky even. Like, my legs are really muscly because I cycle a lot and I’m kind of solid everywhere else. If it wasn’t for the iron-grey hair (it was meant to be white but my friend Ben had only been training as a hairdresser for two weeks and something went badly wrong) and the bright red lipstick I always wore, I could have passed for a chubby twelve-year-old boy. But this dress had enough nips and tucks and darts and horizontal lines that at least it looked as if I had some kind of shape because me and puberty hadn’t got on very well. Instead of womanly curves, it had left me with a general lumpiness.
‘You’d look so pretty if you wore a nice dress instead of all this nasty jumble sale stuff. You don’t know where it’s been,’ Betty lamented. ‘My granddaughter’s got lots of clothes she doesn’t wear any more. I could sort you out some things.’
‘No, thanks,’ I said firmly. ‘I love the nasty jumble sale stuff.’
‘But some of my granddaughter’s old clothes are from Topshop.’
It was very hard to restrain myself, but I didn’t immediately launch into a rant about the evils of buying clothes from high street chains, which peddled the same five looks each season so everyone had to dress just like everyone else in clothes that were sewn together by children in Third World sweatshops who were paid in cups of maize.
‘Really, Betty, I like dressing in clothes that other people don’t want any more. It’s not the clothes’ fault that they’ve gone out of fashion,’ I insisted. ‘Anyway, it’s better to reuse than recycle.’
Five minutes later, the dress was mine, and I was back in my own lilac-tweed, old-lady skirt and mustard-coloured jumper and heading to my stall where Barney was leafing through a stack of yellowing comics. Thankfully, Scarlett and Michael Lee were nowhere to be seen.
‘I got you cake,’ I announced. At the sound of my voice, Barney’s head shot up and his milk-white complexion took on a rosy hue. I’d never known a boy who blushed as much as Barney did. In fact, I hadn’t even been certain that boys could blush, until I met Barney.
He was blushing now for no good reason, unless… No, I wasn’t going to waste my precious time on Michael Lee’s crackpot theories, except…
‘So, Michael Lee and Scarlett Thomas, what were they doing here?’ I asked casually. ‘Hardly their scene. I bet they’ve gone away to disinfect themselves from the stench of second-hand goods.’
Barney was now so red that it looked as if someone had plunged his head into a pan of boiling water, but he hunched over so a curtain of silky hair covered his burning face and grunted something unintelligible.
‘You and Scarlett?’ I prompted.
‘Er, what about me and Scarlett?’ he asked in a strangulated voice.
I shrugged. ‘Just saw her checking out the stall when I was trying on dresses. I hope you gave her the hard sell and offloaded that chipped “Rugby players do it with odd-shaped balls” mug that I can’t shift.’
‘Well, no, I didn’t have a chance,’ Barney admitted, as if he was confessing to something shameful. ‘And that mug is really chipped.’
‘True. Very true. Not surprised you didn’t get round to it,’ I said, cocking my head in what I hoped was an understanding manner. ‘You two looked pretty tight. What were you talking about?’
Barney flailed his hands. ‘Nothing!’ he yelped, then realised immediately that ‘Nothing’ was not a suitable reply. ‘We talked about Maths and stuff,’ he added.
I’d been sure that there wasn’t anything going on with Barney and Scarlett apart from some compound fractions, but Barney’s apparent guilt was forcing me to rethink that theory.
I knew I could winkle the truth from Barney in nanoseconds, and that the truth was that Barney had a crush on Scarlett – being easy on the eye and untaxing on the brain, she was considered quite a catch. There was no point in getting upset about it, even though I’d raised him to be better than that, and it really wasn’t worth talking about any longer. It was far too boring.
‘I got you cake,’ I reminded Barney and watched his eyes skitter from side to side as if he wasn’t sure whether my abrupt change of subject meant that the topic of Scarlett was over and done with or if it was a sneaky tactic to catch him out.
For once, it wasn’t. I handed over a huge slab of cake, which was obscured by a napkin. Barney took it warily.
‘Well, thanks,’ he muttered, as he uncovered his prize and I watched his face go from deep pink to bedsheet-white. Barney was so white that he was only a couple of shades down from albino. He hated his skin almost as much as he hated his orange hair. At school, the lower years call Barney ‘the ginger minger’, but Barney’s hair isn’t ginger. It’s actually the colour of marmalade, except when the sun is shining and it becomes a living flame, which is why I’ve forbidden him from dyeing it. He’s not a minger either. When his face isn’t obscured by a thick fringe, his features are delicate, almost girlish, and his eyes, which were fixed on me imploringly, are pond-green. Barney is the only boy I’ve ever met whose signature colours are white, orange and green. Most other boys are blue or brown, I thought, and made a mental note to explore this colour theory on my blog later in the week. Then I turned my attention back to Barney, who had puckered up his face and was thrusting the napkin and its contents back at me.
‘This is carrot cake!’
I nodded. ‘Carrot cake with cream-cheese frosting. Yum.’
‘Not yum. This is, like, the anti-yum. I ask you to get me a cake. A CAKE! And you come back with something made out of carrots and cheese. That is not cake,’ Barney snapped. ‘It’s non-cake-food disguised as cake.’
I could only stand and stare. I’d seen Barney petulant before – I was usually responsible for it – but I’d never known him quite so snippy.
‘But you eat carrots,’ I ventured timidly under the weight of Barney’s ferocious scowl. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen you eat carrots.’
‘I eat them under duress – I have to have meat or potatoes with them.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said and I tried to sound like I meant it. Barney was in a very unpredictable mood and I didn’t want to trigger another explosion. ‘I’m sorry I sucked at the cake selection. I obviously need to work on that.’
‘Well, I suppose it’s not your fault,’ Barney decided magnanimously. He looked at me from under his fringe, a mere glimmer of a smile just hovering on his lips. ‘You do really suck at choosing cakes, but it’s good to know you suck at something. I was beginning to wonder.’
‘I suck at loads of things,’ I assured Barney, as I decided that it was probably safe to stand behind the stall with him. ‘Can’t turn cartwheels. Never got the hang of German and I don’t have strong enough facial muscles to arch an eyebrow.’
‘It’s genetic,’ Barney said. ‘But I think you can teach yourself to do it.’
I pushed up my right eyebrow with my fingertip. ‘Maybe I should tape my eyebrow up every night and hope that my muscle memory kicks in.’
‘I bet there’s an instruction guide on the internet,’ Barney said eagerly. It was just the kind of obscure, random thing that he liked to research. ‘I’ll put my Google-fu on it, shall I?’
We were friends again. I mean, boyfriend and girlfriend again. I got Barney a slice of chocolate cake, then spent the rest of the afternoon adding to the list of things I absolutely sucked at, which made him laugh.
It was good. We were cool. Though I wondered why I had to run myself down in order to make Barney feel better about our relationship when I was a card-carrying feminist. Like, seriously. I had the word ‘feminist’ on my business cards. But for once I took the easy option because I couldn’t bear the thought of three hours of Barney moping about. I didn’t even yell at him when he spilt Dr Pepper on the ‘Adorkable’ hot water bottle cover it had taken me ages to knit.
2
I hate Jeane Smith.
I hate her stupid grey hair and her disgusting polyester clothes. I hate how she goes out of her way to make herself look as un
attractive as possible but still wants everyone to notice her. She should just wear a T-shirt with ‘Everyone! Pay attention to me! Right now!’ printed on it.
I hate how everything she says is sarcastic and mean and sounds even more sarcastic and mean because of the flat, toneless way she speaks. As if showing emotion or excitement is way too uncool.
I hate the way she shoved her fugly face into mine and jabbed a finger in my chest to make her point. Though, now I think about it, I’m not sure she did do that, but it’s the kind of thing she would probably do.
But mostly I hate her for being so obnoxious and such an out of control bitch that even her boyfriend can’t stand to be around her and has to start looking for an out. Especially when that out is my girlfriend.
I knew that Barney fancied Scarlett. It was a given. She was really fit. Really, really fit. Whenever we went into town and got within fifty yards of Topshop she was mobbed on all sides by model agency scouts.
But Scarlett never went to see the agencies because she said she was three inches too short to be a model and she was far too shy. Before we started dating, I thought Scarlett’s shyness was sweet. But, after a while, shyness isn’t endearing and doesn’t make you want to protect someone, it makes you secretly grind your teeth in frustration.
The thing about shyness is that it seems a lot like not trying, the same way that Scarlett wasn’t even trying to make our relationship work. I was putting the effort in, calling her every night, thinking of cool things to do on our dates. I bought her presents and helped her set up her BlackBerry and in all ways I was an excellent boyfriend. Whether it’s football or A-level Physics or dating, what’s the point of doing anything if you’re going to do it in a half-arsed way? And I don’t want to sound bigheaded but I could go out with pretty much any girl at our school – in fact, any girl at any school in our borough. The fact that I chose Scarlett should have given her a huge shot of confidence and she could have shown a little gratitude too.
So when I saw Scarlett and Barney together, it made me furious. All I ever got from Scarlett was a lot of hair-tossing and a few wan smiles but Barney got longing looks and giggling. I couldn’t actually hear the giggles but I imagined them as tiny, silver daggers aimed right at my heart and, when I turned my head away, I saw a short, squat, grey-haired girl preening in the mirror.
Jeane Smith is the only person at our school that I’ve never spoken to. Seriously. I hate labels and cliques and all that bullshit about blanking people ’cause they’re not into the same music as you or they’re crap at sports. I like that I can get on with everyone and always find some common ground to talk about, even if they’re not that cool.
Jeane Smith doesn’t talk to anyone, apart from that Barney kid. Everyone talks about her, or about her revolting clothes and the arguments she picks with the teachers in every single one of her classes, but no one talks to her because if you try to, you find yourself on the business end of some serious snark and a superior stare.
That was what I got when I tried to explain my suspicions about Barney and Scarlett. About halfway through my first sentence, I realised my mistake, but it was too late. I was committed to having a conversation with her. And I don’t know how anyone could manage a dead-eyed stare that also promised unimaginable pain but somehow Jeane had mastered the art. It was as if her retinas had been replaced with laser pointers.
Then she was sticking out her chin and being a bitch, and suddenly whatever whacked-out thing that was going on with Barney and Scarlett didn’t matter as much as having the last word.
‘Nice dress, by the way,’ I said, cocking my head at the horrible multi-coloured mess of a dress that she was wearing, and it was a low blow and completely beneath me, but at least it got Jeane Smith to shut up. But then she smirked and she was one of those people who could make a smirk say a thousand words and none of them good ones.
By the time I’d finished that unpleasant little exchange, Scarlett and Barney had finished their silent flirting. She hurried over to me, her face more animated than I’d ever seen it.
Sarra Manning, French Kiss
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