Adorkable (11 page)

She climbed on her bike and she was about to go even though there were many things I had to say, though I couldn’t remember what they were at that exact moment. ‘Well, we should really
not
do this again sometime,’ she said jauntily, and she stood up on the pedals and moved forward and I grabbed hold of the back of her bike because I’d just remembered that I wanted to tell her that she was an insufferable, stuck-up cow …

It seemed to happen in slow motion. Jeane went pitching right over the handlebars. I watched helplessly as she seemed to stay airborne for several long moments then she hit the ground with a dull thud, arms and legs at horribly weird angles like she’d broken all her limbs.
I’d
broken all her limbs.

She lay there silent and still, which would have been a relief at any other time, but not when I was sure I’d just killed her.
Oh God! This is going to seriously screw up my Cambridge interview
was the immediate thought that popped into my head before I remembered that I was a trained first aider. Partly because my dad was adamant that everyone should learn basic life-saving skills but also because my mother had been equally adamant that it would look good on my UCAS form.

I needed to check that Jeane was still breathing but to do that I had to turn her over and she really shouldn’t be moved. Or should she? Was I meant to be putting her in the recovery position?

‘Heavens to fricking Betsy,’ she suddenly groaned and rolled over. She wasn’t dead and I wasn’t going to be charged with manslaughter. Maybe aggravated assault, because her tights
were shredded and there were steady streams of blood running down her legs, which made her orange tights look even worse. ‘My phone? Is my phone all right?’

Jeane wasn’t yelling at me, which was good, unless she was saving her energy for when she called the police. I picked up her bike – the front wheel was completely buckled – and set it on its kickstand. ‘Where was your phone?’ I asked her hoarsely.

She frowned or else her face creased up in pain, it was hard to tell. ‘Maybe it’s in my pannier.’

I unbuckled the flap and pulled out her bulging ‘Dork is the New Black’ tote and placed it in front of her. Jeane sat up and groaned before she began to root through her bag, so at least her arms weren’t broken, which just left legs, ribs and possible concussion because Jeane was too much of a rebel to wear a safety helmet.

‘Maybe you shouldn’t move?’ I suggested. ‘You might have internal bleeding.’

‘I
need
my phone,’ she insisted, looking up at me with plaintive eyes that made her seem more Bambi than battleaxe. ‘I can’t find it.’

‘Are you sure it was in your bag?’

Jeane looked around the yard and I even squatted down and looked under a few parked cars until she gave a yelp. I turned round so quickly that I nearly fell over because it sounded like a pained yelp but it was actually an I-found-myphone yelp.

‘It was in my pocket,’ she said, then she actually kissed her phone and rubbed it against her face until she realised that her cheek was grazed.

‘Are
you all right?’ I asked her, because the way she was acting made me think that she was suffering from shock, though it really wasn’t any more crazy than how she usually acted. ‘Does anywhere hurt?’

‘I’m a little winded,’ Jeane said, and she was taking this much better than I’d ever expected. She hadn’t screamed or said anything bitingly sarcastic so maybe she did have a brain-bleed. ‘Everywhere’s kinda stinging a bit.’

‘I
am
sorry. I didn’t mean to do what I did. It was a moment of madness. I’ll pay to get your bike mended.’

Jeane gave her bike a cursory glance then turned her attention back to her phone. I’d never seen anyone type so fast. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s only a bike. No bones broken.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I think I’d know if my bones were broken,’ she mumbled. ‘And the bike is just a thing, things can be replaced.’

I stood there, arms hanging uselessly down by my sides. I wasn’t used to feeling useless and not knowing what to do next. Should I make Jeane stand up? And after she was upright, should I offer her a lift home? And sometime after that, should I beg her not to file an official complaint against me that would in any way impact on my choice of university?

‘Well, you should probably stand up …’

‘Yeah, just finishing my tweet. I’ve spent all day totally tweet-blocked so this is a bit of a blessing in disguise,’ Jeane said, and then she looked up and then she looked down and then, only then, did she scream.

It was a horrible, piercing sound that rent the air, scaring a flock of pigeons, which were scavenging by the bins, into flight.
‘You utter, utter bastard! Look what you’ve done to my tights!’ Jeane pointed at her shredded tights. ‘They’re ruined!’

They were and, quite frankly, it was an improvement. ‘You just said that things can be replaced.’

‘Not my orange tights. It took me
years
to find a pair in the right shade of orange and I got these in a shop in Stockholm and they were the last pair.’ Jeane clenched her fists and I really thought she was going to cry. Or punch me. ‘You shouldn’t go round tipping people off their bikes. You’re head of the student council; you’re meant to set an example.’

‘I know, I said I was sorry and I am sorry about your tights but they are only tights.’ I looked at them again and wondered why Jeane wasn’t more concerned about her cuts and grazes and then my eyes wandered down to her left ankle and stayed there. ‘Oh my God.’

‘I’m glad you appreciate the severity of the situation,’ Jeane snapped. Unbelievably she was reaching for her phone again. ‘I’m going to try and find an inferior pair of orange tights on eBay and you’re paying for them.’

‘Jeane!’

‘Now what?’

I pointed a shaky finger at her ankle, which didn’t even look like an ankle any more. It was the size of a football. ‘How can
that
not hurt?’

‘
What?
’ She looked down and then her eyes rolled so I could only see the whites and she lurched backwards so I had to rush to her side to stop her bashing her head on the concrete. She opened her mouth to say something but all that came out was a weak little whimper.

‘Does
it really not hurt, Jeane?’

She clutched on to my arm. Her nails were painted with wonky candy stripes. ‘Now I come to think of it, it hurts like a bitch,’ she gritted. ‘I think I might vom.’

I patted her hand, which was icy cold, as if she was in shock. I took off my leather jacket and placed it around her shoulders. ‘Look, I’m going to take you to hospital so you can have it X-rayed.’

Jeane shook her head resolutely. ‘No! I hate hospitals. I
think
I can feel my toes. Would I be able to feel my toes if it was broken? Shall I ask Twitter?’

‘I have no idea.’ I forced myself to look at her ankle again. It was bulging over the top of her sneaker. ‘And rather than wasting time tweeting maybe we should take off your shoe before it cuts off your circulation?’

‘No! It will hurt too much!’ Jeane lay back down on the ground. ‘I’ll have to stay here for
ever
and I have so much stuff to do tonight.’

Now that Jeane had reverted back to type, I felt easier. She was even more of a drama queen than Alice, but at least Alice had the excuse of being only five. Still didn’t have a clue what I was going to do with her though. ‘You
can’t
stay there for ever and you can’t walk and your bike’s all mashed up so I’m going to give you a lift. To hospital.’

‘I’m not going to hospital,’ she protested. ‘One whiff of industrial floor cleaner or seeing an elderly person with yellow skin and varicose veins on a drip and I’ll throw up all over you.’

‘Don’t be such a baby,’ I said sternly. Then I had an idea. ‘My dad’s a doctor. Will you deign to see him?’

Jeane’s
face twisted with indecision. ‘What kind of doctor?’

‘A GP. Head of his own practice. Twenty years’ experience and if you’re really well behaved he’ll give you a sugar-free lollipop.’

‘What’s the point of a sugar-free lollipop?’ she groused. ‘Well, I suppose I could see your dad, as long as he promises not to hurt me.’

I chained her bike up while she insisted on taking a picture of her mangled leg and tweeting it to her followers, and then with much wincing and flinching I helped Jeane to her feet, or rather her right foot because she couldn’t put any weight on her left foot. Then, clutching on to my arm, she tried to hop to my car. Every time she made contact with the ground, her breath caught, like the impact was jarring her ankle.

‘I could carry you?’ I offered half-heartedly. ‘You can’t weigh
that
much.’

Her eyes narrowed to piggy little slits. ‘You even try to carry me then you can forget about ever having children,’ she hissed. ‘I can manage.’

In the end I drove my car as close to the bike shed as I could and soon we were on the way to my house, without me giving much thought or consideration to whether I wanted Jeane anywhere near my house.

Jeane had been glued to her iPhone for the entire five minute journey but as I pulled into our drive and parallel parked next to my dad’s Volvo, she looked up and gave a long, low whistle. ‘Swankerama,’ she said with a slight sneer to her voice like it wasn’t cool to live in a big house.

But we didn’t live in a mansion set in fifty acres with a duckpond, an ornamental lake and a croquet lawn. It was just a big,
rambling Victorian house with a roof that leaked and sash windows that rattled in their frames. And the basement and most of the ground floor were taken up with the doctor’s surgery but Jeane still looked disapproving.

My dad always finished early on Thursdays and as I ushered a hobbling Jeane through the side door, he was just coming out of the surgery.

‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘Someone’s been in the wars.’

I expected Jeane to launch into a detailed account of how I’d crippled her, but she just leaned against the doorframe so she could hold out her hand. ‘I’m Jeane, do you accept walk-ins?’

‘I think I can make an exception,’ Dad said calmly, like he wasn’t at all phased by a seventeen-year-old girl with iron-grey hair who was dressed like a freak. ‘Michael, will you tell Agatha that she can go home then make sure that Melly and Alice don’t put CBeebies on?’

Jeane waggled her fingers at me as I headed up the stairs to relieve our au pair. ‘So, do you think my foxtrotting days are over?’ she asked Dad. ‘And do you mind if I live-tweet my medical examination?’

Half an hour later, I had Melly and Alice sitting at the kitchen table doing their homework but mostly arguing about who was the queen of Disneyland Paris and I was making a start on dinner. Thursday night was always stir-fry night, which involved chopping up a huge amount of vegetables.

I’d just started on the peppers when I heard a heavy thump and drag on the stairs and the sound of voices. I looked up in time to see Jeane enter the kitchen on …

‘Crutches!’ she exclaimed happily, as Alice and Melly both
stopped arguing in favour of staring at Jeane with wide, confused eyes. ‘I’m
so
guaranteed to get a seat on public transport.’

‘It’s not broken?’ I asked nervously. Dad had followed Jeane into the kitchen and he didn’t have the look of a man who was going to ground me and give me a looooonnngggg lecture on good manners and not tipping people much smaller than me off their bikes. But no: he was smiling indulgently at Jeane, who was clutching a bouquet of sugar-free lollipops in one hand.

‘It’s just a bad sprain,’ he said, as he opened the freezer and pulled out a bag of frozen peas, which were only used in a vegetable emergency. He gestured at one of the kitchen chairs and Jeane sat down and propped her pasty white leg (now devoid of torn orange tights) up on the chair next to her. ‘Now keep this iced for a little while and then I’ll bandage it.’

Alice nodded. ‘RICE,’ she noted. ‘Rest, ice, compression, elevation. If symptoms persist, please consult your doctor. Who are
you
?’

‘I’m Jeane, who are
you
?’ Jeane stared right back at Alice, who couldn’t take the pressure and hid her face in her hands.

‘She’s Alice,’ Melly said. ‘I wouldn’t pay her any attention, she’s only five. I’m nearly eight.’

‘You’re not nearly eight,’ Dad reminded her. ‘You only turned seven two months ago.’

‘Yes, but I’ll never turn seven again,’ Melly insisted. She gave Jeane an appraising glance.‘Are you one of Michael’s girlfriends?’

‘No,’ I said shortly. ‘Jeane goes to my school and don’t ask personal questions.’

‘Is Melly asking personal questions again?’ Mum wanted to know as she came through the door. She dumped handbag,
briefcase and laptop bag on the table, took off her coat, slung it over the back of a chair, kissed Dad, then caught sight of Jeane who was eyeing her with interest. ‘Hello, who are
you?
’

Introductions were made. It was like watching two dogs circle each other warily. I’d never seen Jeane look less sure of herself. ‘Well, I’ve rested and I’ve iced,’ she said, staring at her foot. ‘Is it time for compression yet?’

‘Why don’t you stay for dinner?’ Mum suggested. Mum’s suggestions always sounded like a direct order.

‘Well, I do have rather a lot to do this evening,’ Jeane said, staring at the worktop where Dad was making a marinade. ‘What are you having?’