Adorkable (17 page)

‘I guess I do go to the same school as you and I did have a problem in that I planned to go to bed without any dinner,’ Jeane said, as she pushed away her half-finished chips. ‘But we’re not friends, are we?’

I glanced over at her. She was wearing a floral green blouse, a yellow cardigan, a grey pleated skirt, which looked like part of Melly’s school uniform, and purple tights. ‘No, we’re really not friends,’ I said.

‘So it’s a bit of a headspin that we keep finding ourselves with our tongues down each other’s throats,’ she continued. ‘I mean, what’s up with
that
?’

‘Jeane!’

She swung her legs off the coffee table and stood up. ‘If we can do it then we can talk about it and I think we need to talk about it.’ She picked up what was left of her dinner. ‘But first I’m going to put this in the fridge. Do you want something to drink?’

I didn’t want anything to drink because I’d probably contract E coli or legionnaires’ disease, but the kitchen was fairly clean
and tidy because it was clear that Jeane didn’t cook. In her fridge were bags upon bags of Haribo, tons of cosmetics (‘They go on better when they’re cold, and I kept treading on my favourite lipsticks’) and a jar of pickled cucumbers.

Jeane didn’t have anything to drink that wasn’t water out of the tap but she did have disposable cups (‘I don’t do washing up’) and she hauled herself up to sit on the kitchen worktop while I leaned against the sink and she was right, we probably should talk about this, but I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to say. Even Jeane kept opening her mouth to speak then closing it again.

‘The thing is, Michael,’ she said eventually, ‘the thing is that actually you’re a really good kisser.’

‘There’s no need to sound quite so surprised,’ I said, and it was hard not to smile. I nodded in her direction. ‘You’re not too shabby yourself.’

‘Yeah, I do have mad kissing skills,’ she agreed and this time it was absolutely impossible not to smile. All my other friends were so predictable. Like, I knew exactly what they were going to say before they even opened their mouths and with her, with Jeane Smith, every minute revealed another surprise.

‘So, do we carry on with our mutual kissing appreciation thing?’ she asked. ‘A discreet little arrangement that no one needs to know about?’

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that but mostly I think I was relieved. She was a really good kisser, but hanging out with her and having to listen to her diss all my friends, then have all my friends repeatedly ask me why the hell I was hanging out with
her wasn’t something I could deal with. Still, I couldn’t exactly tell Jeane that.

‘But if you wanted to hang out at school … I mean, it’s cool if you don’t, but isn’t it lonely … that you’re always on your own?’

She shook her head and smiled brightly. ‘Not really. I hate school but I promised my parents that if they let me live on my own I’d do my A-levels.’ She folded her arms. ‘It’s not as if I’m having any sleepless nights about all the crappy parties I don’t get invited to and all the breaktimes when I could be sitting around talking shit about what was on TV last night. I get a lot of my Adorkable work done at school and, apart from Barney, I have
nothing
in common with anyone there so I’m much happier to hang out on my own. You really don’t have to feel sorry for me.’

She was making out that she had it all going on but when you were seventeen, going to parties, even crappy ones, was fun, as was talking shit about what was on TV last night. It was what you were meant to be doing, not spending all your time working on a geek-centric media empire.

‘Well, it still sounds kind of lonely,’ I said and Jeane shrugged.

‘It kind of is, and this may come as a surprise to you, but I’m not really a people person.’ Jeane smiled at me, a slow, wicked smile, which made me like her a little bit more and also made me relieved that she did actually have a sense of humour. ‘I know I hide it pretty well.’

‘Well, at least you’re a person,’ I said. ‘So that counts for something.’

‘Yeah
, at least I got it half right.’ She fingered the end of one grey pigtail. ‘So, please don’t start paying me any attention while we’re at school. I’d rather you didn’t.’

Another wave of relief threatened to knock me off my feet but I reckoned one more token protest was industry standard. ‘Yeah, but …’

Jeane held up one imperious hand. ‘Honestly, I won’t think any less of you if you ignore me at school. In fact, I’ll think more of you.’

‘So this thing, whatever this thing is, is just between you and me, and it’s simply a kissing thing?’

‘Well, kissing, and we already do quite a lot of touching but we can take the rest as it comes,’ Jeane said. No one in my life was ever this direct. It made everything so much easier.

Anyway, we’d established some ground rules for the kissing and the maybe some touching so there was no good reason not to walk over to Jeane. For once, sitting on the kitchen counter as she was, our faces were level, which meant that I didn’t have to lean down and she didn’t have to crane her neck when I kissed her.

Over
the next couple of weeks, I got used to kissing Michael Lee. I even moved on from being freaked out about kissing Michael Lee. Instead, I began to treat kissing Michael Lee as a special karmic reward. Instead of finding a fabulous dress at the very bottom of a basket of £1 T-shirts in a charity shop, or splurging on a box of macaroons from Maison Blanc, I treated myself to some serious kissage with Michael Lee on Monday and Wednesday lunchtimes, after school on Thursday, and we currently had a question mark against Sunday afternoons.

Whatever his other faults were, the boy knew how to kiss. And stroke. And touch. And
grind
just a little bit. Every time I saw his face with those wide-spaced almond-shaped eyes already closed and his pretty lips pursed in a perfect kissshape (and his cheekbones … someone should write a poem about his cheekbones – oh, that’s right, someone already has) coming towards me in pursuit of a kiss, all I could think was
that this couldn’t be happening to me. Because I was me and not even my mother (well, especially not my mother) could pretend that I was pretty or loveable or had a winning personality or was in any way the kind of girl who got the kind of boys that looked like Michael Lee. We didn’t match, we weren’t suited, and we didn’t go together.

The rightness and the wrongness of it was all I could think about one Sunday morning about two weeks into our little kissing experiment when I should have been giving my full attention to dyeing my hair. I’d decided that the time had come to get rid of the grey. Now that my mousy roots were coming through, it looked all upside-down. Besides, I’d had grey hair for two months, which was for ever, and it was time for a change.

Ben had warned me that I needed bleach to get the grey out and he’d got me supplies from the hairdressing salon, as his boss had said that she didn’t want me in her shop ever again. He’d also written a detailed list of instructions with lots of shouty caps about how the ‘BLEACH CAN ONLY STAY ON FOR THIRTY MINUTES, JEANE, OTHERWISE YOUR HAIR WILL FALL OUT. ESPECIALLY AFTER WHAT HAPPENED LAST TIME. SET THE ALARM ON YOUR PHONE, NOW! HAVE YOU SET IT? GO AND DO IT.’ Ben had only been working in a salon for ten weeks but he’d already become very, very dictatorial about haircare.

I tried to follow Ben’s instructions but he wanted me to section off my hair and use tinfoil and in the end it was easier just to slap the bleach on and fashion myself a tinfoil turban after I set my phone alarm. The bleach stung my scalp and
made my eyes water so it was very hard to watch a documentary about last summer’s Rock ’n’ Roll Camp for Girls. I’d run workshops on making zines and websites, and how to build up rock ’n’ roll star-sized self-esteem. It had been a blast but I winced as I suddenly appeared on screen in a Wonder Woman T-shirt and started blathering on about being … I don’t even know what pearls of wisdom were falling from my mouth because all I could hear was my own drone of a voice. Even when I was really excited and I could tell that I had been really excited because I kept making jabbing motions with my hands, I sounded as if I was about to fall into a boredom coma.

I was saved from having to witness any more of my documentary fail by a bang on the door. I had ten minutes left before I could wash the bleach out, rinse my hair with some special gunk and then apply toner, so I needed to get rid of whoever it was. Though, as it was Sunday morning, it was probably Godbotherers wanting to know if I’d accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and saviour, which I
so
hadn’t. Mrs Hunter-Down on the ground floor was always letting them in.

‘Well?’ I said as I opened the door, hoping that my scowl and my tinfoil helmet would make any evangelists think twice about giving me the hard sell, but I needn’t have bothered because it was Gustav and Harry from next door and neither of them knew the meaning of the word no.

‘New look for you, Jeane,’ Harry boomed, as he pushed past me. ‘Love it. Really brings out your blue eyes. It’s your lucky day, we’ve got cleaning supplies and we’re not leaving until we can see your carpet again.’

‘It’s
not that untidy,’ I protested, which was a shameless lie because even the area by the front door was littered with unopened post and flyers and takeaway menus.

‘We’ve also brought vegetables,’ Gustav said as he stepped through the door with a steely glint in his eyes. ‘I am going to make you eat them and drink a glass of milk. You’re at a crucial stage in your development when you need calcium.’

‘I’m not going to grow any taller than this,’ I cried, even though I knew it was useless. Gustav was Austrian and a personal trainer. Once he’d made his mind up about something, whether it was making me eat steamed broccoli (urgh, hack, hack, hack) or persuading lovely, smiley Harry, his Australian boyfriend, that they needed to come round and force me to throw out half my worldy goods, resistance was futile. ‘Can there be chocolate powder in the glass of milk, Gustav? Can there?’

‘That would be like letting you eat raw sugar,’ Gustav said with a shudder, his muscles rippling in revulsion. ‘We’ll start here.’ He thrust three bin bags at me. ‘Recycling, rubbish and stuff that you absolutely can’t live without.’

I knew from bitter experience that Gustav and I had very different ideas about the definition of stuff I couldn’t live without. ‘I hate you,’ I told them both fiercely. ‘I hate it when you do your gay dads routine.’

‘Oh, secretly you love it,’ Harry said, darting near like he was going to pick me up and swing me round, which he did occasionally, even though I told him it was demeaning and infantilising, which it was, even if it was also secretly thrilling. ‘We’ll put some Lady Gaga on to pass the time.’

‘Yes,’ Gustav added. ‘It will be fun.’

It
wasn’t fun. Gustav wouldn’t know fun if it came with a government health warning. And anyway, fun wasn’t the right word to describe Harry trying to put all my Japanese style magazines in the recycling when he thought I wasn’t looking and Gustav giving me a running commentary about mildew and mould and what they’d do to my pink, perfectly formed teenage lungs as he supervised me cleaning the shower stall.

Gustav refused to believe that my colour processing was at a crucial stage and wouldn’t let me get the bleach out of my hair until the bathroom was squeaky clean. Even though I explained, through the medium of yelling, that he was condemning me to baldness the longer the bleach stayed on my head, he remained immoveable – quite literally, as he ripped me away from the showerhead. Gustav works out for a living and I don’t so there was no way I could win. He also reminded me of several other times when I’d come up with similar excuses to get out of scrubbing the grouting. I was totes the girl who cried wolf.

Eventually the bathroom was deemed clean even by Gustav’s ridiculously high standards and he gave me permission to wash the bleach out. By this stage it was rock-hard and it took both of us and the whole bottle of special gunk until my hair felt vaguely hair-like again.

‘It’s meant to be that colour, yes?’ Gustav queried as he roughly towel-dried my hair. He probably wasn’t as into the cleaning as he claimed he was, because he was more than happy to dump most of the heavy scouring on Harry while he helped me. ‘It’s very, er … what is the word?’

‘I’m aiming for mid-blonde at this stage.’ I sighed. ‘Then we’ll chuck on some toner and make it platinum.’

‘Yes
, well, it’s always good to have goals,’ Gustav agreed and when I tried to straighten up he kept his hand on my shoulder. ‘No, stay there. I’ll put this toner on for you.’

Normally I wouldn’t let anyone boss me around the way that Gustav did but if it got me out of cleaning then it was a win. Especially now I was sure that Harry wasn’t in the lounge and trying to throw out my precious, precious books and magazines and backs of envelopes where I’d written important things, but had moved on to the kitchen where he was bellowing ‘Bad Romance’ at the top of his lungs and there was no way that he would throw out my Haribo stash. Not if he liked living.

Although I was going to have backache from bending over so my head and shoulders were in the shower stall, it was quite nice to have Gustav’s strong, muscly fingers working the toner in while he wittered on about his marathon training. Gustav actually flew to other countries to take part in marathons because he wasn’t right in the head.

‘The toner needs to come off now,’ Gustav announced. ‘This platinum blonde, did you have your heart set on it?’