Adorkable (29 page)

Barney looked at me, then he looked at Jeane, then he looked at me again. ‘What is going on? I mean,
why
? Like, you two? This is
so
weird.’

‘It’s not
that
weird
,
’ I snapped as I retrieved my jumper and pulled it over my head because Scarlett had averted her eyes and I wasn’t sure if it was because she’d seen me and Jeane pretty much having sex with most of our clothes on or she was still as disturbed by my body as she had been when we were dating. ‘We go to the same school and we live in the same area and we’re kinda the same age. We have loads in common.’

‘We have
nothing
in common,’ Jeane piped up and crushed that little bit of my ego that had remained intact despite her
best efforts to destroy it. ‘Michael thinks I’m a bossy, badly dressed freakazoid and I think he’s just a pretty face and not much substance. What we’re doing doesn’t mean anything and if either of you tell anyone about this …’ She paused. ‘You know how I’ve made you cry twice in English, Scar?’

Scarlett nodded. She still hadn’t regained the power of speech and my ego was now officially dead, no hope of a cure. Jeane was such a bitch.

‘Well, I can make you cry like that every day for the rest of your school career,’ Jeane continued. ‘I don’t want to but I will if I hear any talk that links me and Michael. If I even
hear
us mentioned in the same sentence. Got it?’

‘Like anyone would ever believe it,’ Scarlett gasped. ‘I saw it with my own eyes, and my brain … I can’t deal with this.’

None of us could deal with it. Barney was glaring at Jeane because she’d been mean to Scarlett. Scarlett was glaring at Jeane because she’d just been threatened and I was glaring at Jeane because she had zero respect for me. And have I mentioned the fact that she was a bitch?

Jeane wasn’t glaring at anyone. She swung her legs and seemed as if she was deep in thought. Suddenly she looked up, yelped, then jumped down from her perch.

‘Barnster, you’re a genius!’ she exclaimed as she dropped to her knees and started rummaging among the dusty boxes. ‘I’d totes forgotten I had some Haribo tucked away in here. I missed lunch and I’m
ravenous
.’ She pulled out a bag of sweets. ‘Though what I was thinking when I bought Milky Mix, I don’t know. Not Haribo’s finest moment.’

It was classic Jeane. Create a diversion. Go off on a tangent.
Be kooky. That way everyone forgot why they were mad at her – Scarlett was actually digging into the bag of Milky Mix that Jeane proffered.

I started to laugh. Jeane drove me mad and there were lots of times that I didn’t like her very much but she was the one part of my life that never went to plan and I knew then that I would go to New York with her, not because she’d worn me down but because it would be fun. Jeane was really good at making me have fun.

‘I don’t know why you’re laughing,’ Barney grumbled, because he was still mad at Jeane. ‘None of this is funny.’

I wondered if Barney still had a thing for Jeane, but he probably didn’t because he grabbed Scarlett’s hand and started walking her to the door. ‘If you make Scar feel even a bit sad, there’s going to be trouble,’ he warned in a very un-Barney-like way.

‘It’s OK, Barns, I can look after myself,’ Scarlett said, which was patently not true. ‘Anyway, I’m not going to say anything. Not because I’m scared but because I don’t want to think about what I’ve just seen ever again.’

And with that they were gone and it was just Jeane and me left. She was doggedly chewing on her Haribo, which were no substitute for a lunchtime sandwich, and she held up her hand to indicate that she wanted to speak once she was done masticating.

‘I don’t think you’re
just
a pretty face,’ she said eventually. ‘I know there’s more to you than that but I could hardly tell Barney and Scarlett that. It would make things even more complicated. It’s best they think it’s just to do with our hormones.’

‘Oh
, so I do have some substance then, do I?’ I asked, because this was as close as Jeane would ever get to an apology and I was determined to drag it out for as long as possible.

‘I just said so, didn’t I?’ She held up a thumb and a forefinger, a tiny gap between them. ‘About this much, I reckon.’

‘At least I have style,’ I said teasingly. ‘And by the way, Pippi Longstocking called, she wants her DNA back.’

Jeane put her hand to her heart and pulled a face. ‘Ouch. First, I don’t look anything like Pippi fricking Longstocking and, hello! The guy who buys all his clothes from shops that pipe out foul-smelling perfume and don’t do real people sizes is dissing
my
dress sense? I don’t think so.’

‘Sorry that my clothes cause you so much pain. Probably best if we keep on pretending that we don’t know each other in New York – that way if we bump into someone you know, I won’t cause you any embarrassment.’

‘Oh, I’ll just say that you’re my special-needs cousin or something,’ Jeane assured me, and I waited while she rewound what I just said, played it back and then went all googly-eyed and gormless.

Jeane Smith. Speechless. God, I was
good
.

She pointed at herself, then at me, with one shaking finger.

‘Yes, Jeane. You and me go to New York together,’ I said slowly and loudly as if she wasn’t very bright and English wasn’t her first language. Her facial expression, caught somewhere between glee and a scowl, was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen and I started laughing again.

I laughed until she stamped on my foot.

I’d
half wondered if he’d back out at the last moment or confess everything to his parents, but, at 2 p.m. on Friday, Michael was sitting next to me on the Virgin flight from Heathrow to JFK, and, once they’d done the safety announcement and we were taxiing down the runway, he turned to me with a grin that made my heart genuinely skip a beat, though normally my heart doesn’t do stupid stuff like that.

‘Oh my God! I’m going to New York,’ he said. ‘It didn’t seem real before but now we’re about to take off, I’m getting proper excited.’

‘Hallelujah,’ I said. ‘Because mostly you’ve been stressed out about the whole thing.’

‘Yeah, well, you’ve been making me stressed out. Even after I said I was coming you still kept sending me those checklists.’ Michael pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his jeans
pocket. ‘I could have worked out how many pairs of socks I needed for four days all by myself, you know.’

He had a point but I was used to my peer group being as flaky as a bag of sliced almonds. ‘I can’t help it. I micro-manage and then that way when something goes wrong I know that it wasn’t my fault.’

‘You call it micro-managing, I call it being really, really bossy.’

‘Potato, potarto, my friend.’ I hoped that he wasn’t going to be like this in New York, picking at me the whole time, but then Michael nudged my arm and gave me another of his pretty smiles.

‘Anyway, I’m trying to say thanks for all this. Like, for asking me to come with you, and we’ll have to find a sweetshop so I can repay you in candy. It’s the very least I can do.’

‘You don’t have to do that,’ I said quickly, although I was already mentally adding Dylan’s Candy Bar to the detailed itinerary I’d already compiled. ‘The trip was
my
thank you for helping me to deal with all that family crap of mine.’

‘Well, whatever …’

‘Yeah, whatevs …’

There was a lurch as we left the ground and no matter how many times I’d flown I couldn’t unclench until I was sure we were properly airborne and weren’t suddenly going to plunge to our deaths. I was so tensed up that I didn’t even realise, until there was a ping and I went to unfasten my seatbelt, that Michael had been holding my hand the whole time.

So we flew over the Atlantic for about seven hours. Michael watched three films and I ate Haribo and worked on my
presentation. When it was time to give my speech, I’d appear to be winging it when, in reality, I’d rehearsed it so many times that I was word-perfect and didn’t even need to look at my notes. I’d throw in a few ums and ahs because nobody likes a smartarse seventeen-year-old, and I probably would fall over my sentences at the start from nerves but then I planned to be funny and insightful and the voice of my generation, which wasn’t difficult as my generation was woefully inarticulate.

Eventually we disembarked and started walking through miles and miles of corridors, until we were standing in the queue to have our passports checked. It was then that Michael started to get very antsy at the thought of having his fingerprints scanned and his photo taken.

‘But why?’

‘To make sure that you’re not a member of Al Qaeda or on any no-fly lists,’ I hissed.

‘Of course I’m not,’ he whispered back. ‘Do they keep our information?’

‘Well, of course they do.’ I had no idea whether they did but then Michael shuddered and light dawned. ‘I promise they’re not going to phone your parents to tell them you’ve entered the United States.’

‘I know that,’ Michael said huffily, then he sighed. ‘On one level I know that but on another level, where I’ve never lied to my parents on this kind of scale before, I expect vengeance to heap down upon me.’

‘You’re not taking drugs or binge drinking or committing random acts of violence so vengeance doesn’t even come into it,’ I said, as we reached the top of the queue and a customs
official gestured to a booth. I tugged Michael with me. ‘It will all be good. Now shut up and let me do the talking.’

It was another hour before we’d been reunited with our luggage, gone through ‘Nothing to declare’ and were in the back of a proper yellow New York taxi cab. There was absolutely no way I could have got us to our hotel via the subway and not ended up detouring via The Bronx.

By now it was almost six and night had fallen as we travelled through the urban sprawl of Queens. Then we were on the BQE and when we looked out of the window, across the river, we could see the island of Manhattan all lit up and glittering like some futuristic mirage on the horizon.

‘Wow,’ Michael breathed. ‘New York. It looks magical.’

It wasn’t quite so magical having to sit in rush hour traffic but finally our cab was weaving through the narrow streets of the trendy Meatpacking District and pulling up in front of the Gansevoort Hotel. Before I’d even paid the driver, one of the doormen was getting our luggage out of the boot and we were ushered into the hotel which was all glass and tubular steel and luxurious in a sleek, modernist way that was exciting but also really scary, especially when Michael was in a leather jacket, hoodie and jeans and I was wearing a pair of golfing shorts over pink woolly tights and a faux-fur leopard-print anorak.

The receptionist, who looked as if he modelled for
GQ
, didn’t blink an eyelid but checked us into a junior suite, handed me a pile of conference-related bumph, a wad of phone messages and our room key. Five minutes later we were standing in the sitting room of our suite staring wide-eyed around us at the huge plasma TV and the breeze machine and the Andy Warhol
Marilyns on the wall and the view. Oh, the view! Skyscrapers and neon as far as the eye could see.

‘Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.’ It was all Michael could say. ‘Oh my actual God.’

‘God had nothing to do with this,’ I said, and he looked at me with awe and wonder in a way that no one had ever looked at me before.

‘This conference, Jeane, is it a really big deal?’ He gestured at the splendour of our surroundings. ‘Are you a really big deal?’

‘Well, I know a lot of stuff and I’m good at talking and theorising about the stuff,’ I explained, because I could hardly start banging on about how I was reckoned to be an innovator and a one-girl zeitgeist and the queen of the outliers, which was how the conference organisers had described me in their publicity material.

‘Look, it’s just a bunch of people who are doing new things in their fields. Like, there’s some social network people from Palo Alto and fashion designers and a graphic artist from Tokyo and this guy who’s big in molecular gastronomy and a science dude and we’re talking to this audience of corporate suits and venture capitalists about the future. I’m going on at the end like a palate cleanser to represent for the kids, you know?’

Michael shook his head. ‘I didn’t really understand any of that. So, like, they’re paying for all this, the conference people?’

‘Well, yeah! You don’t think I’d spend weeks working on a presentation out of the goodness of my heart, do you? Damn right they’re paying me.’

‘They’re paying
you
as well as the flights and the hotel room and …’ He trailed off and collapsed into a leather armchair.

This
wasn’t the time to tell Michael that I was getting paid ten thousand of our English pounds and was generally considered to be something of a bargain on the conference circuit. His mind, it would be totes blown – besides, it was tacky to talk about money. So I just crouched down in front of him and put my hands on his knees.

‘Are you tired?’ I asked. ‘It’s about midnight English time.’

‘I’m too wired to even think about going to bed.’

‘And are you hungry?’

Michael shook his head. ‘They kept thrusting food at me on the plane.’

‘Right, so you don’t want to sleep and you don’t want to eat and if we stay here you’ll keep saying “Oh my God” under your breath in a really annoying way, so let’s go out and explore New York.’