Adorkable (5 page)

I also didn’t find it funny that Jeane had over half a million deluded fools following her tweets. How was that even possible? Were her tweets sprinkled with magic dust? There were actual proper celebrities who were on TV and in the papers who had fewer followers than she did.

As I was staring in disbelief, the page updated itself.

	adork_able Jeane Smith Can this really call itself a cake when its main ingredients are cheese and carrots?

I clicked on the link to see a picture of a slice of the moist and delicious carrot cake I’d eaten earlier at the jumble sale.

Jeane spent the next five minutes debating the finer points of carrot cake and cake in general with the multitudes hanging off her every tweeted syllable.

	adork_able Jeane Smith I’m not adverse to a smidgeon of chilli in my chocolate (quite yummy) but not sure where I stand on rosewater cupcakes.

I was automatically logged in as @winsomedimsum (all combinations of Michael Lee and my date of birth had been taken) and I was leaping into the fray before I had time to come up with a million and one reasons why it wasn’t a good idea.

	winsomedimsum is yum @adork_able How do you feel about parma violets?

She
shot back a reply instantly.

	adork_able Jeane Smith @winsomedimsum I like the idea of them more than the reality of them. They taste like the smell of old ladies’ handbags. You feel me?

I knew exactly what she meant. When my grandmother came to stay, she was always asking me to fetch her reading glasses or her spare handkerchief or ‘fifty pence to get yourself something nice’ from her handbag and it smelt all powdery and faintly floral and musty, just like a tube of Parma Violets.

	winsomedimsum is yum @adork_able Anyway, once you’ve eaten water chestnut cake, carrot cake is for lightweights.
	adork_able Jeane Smith @winsomedimsum OMAG! I so want to try that. And what’s the red stuff in Chinese buns? It’s muy moresome.
	winsomedimsum is yum @adork_able Red bean paste. It’s kind of an acquired taste.
	adork_able Jeane Smith @winsomedimsum Oh, I’ve definitely acquired it.

Then
we talked about how we both hated milk, ‘except in tea, of course,’ which led to talk of yoghurt and cottage cheese, which a friend of Jeane’s called Patti swore blind they dyed red and used as gore in horror films.

An hour had raced by and Jeane and her friends were now tweeting about a band they were all going to see the following weekend. I’d never heard of the band but I was pretty certain they’d be the kind of band that I wouldn’t like, either all fey and jangly and singing about holding hands in ice cream parlours or so loud and jarring that they made your ears bleed.

I also wasn’t sure about correct Twitter etiquette. Did I say goodbye before I logged out like I did when I was in a chatroom? Or did I just go because they were all still wittering on about some band called The Fuck Puppets and wouldn’t even notice?

In the end I was saved by the bell. Or by my mother calling from the foot of the stairs about staying on the computer for too long or about the DVD they wanted me to watch with them or possibly the dangers of eating too much cold dim sum this close to bedtime. It was hard to tell.

I texted her to say I’d be down soon, even though I knew that drove her mad, and then made the startling discovery that in the time I’d been tweeting, I’d gained over fifty new Twitter followers, including Jeane herself. I suppose it was a big deal.
Jeane might have over half a million followers but she was only following a mere thousand people herself, which made me special. It made me one in five hundred, apparently.

My mean inner voice crowed triumphantly, ‘Ha ha! Fooled her.’ I tried to ignore it. I hadn’t fooled anyone; I’d just exchanged tweets with a girl who was friendlier on the internet than she was in the flesh. There was no more to it than that. I followed Jeane back, then turned off the computer so I could go downstairs and see what all the yelling had been about.

I
watched Barney and Scarlett closely over the next few days. Except they had no idea they were being watched because I was very, very stealth-like. Barney and Scarlett, however, were entirely un-stealth-like.

Now I knew what to look for I saw evidence of their treachery everywhere. It’s like when you discover a brand new word, and by the end of the day you’ve heard three other people on three separate occasions say this previously unheard word, because the word had been there all the time but you just hadn’t realised it. (And can I just say if Barney and Scarlett were a word it would be something clunky that felt wrong as you tried to sound it out like rambunctious or discombobulated?) Anyway, I digress: I was talking about REAL evidence of Barney and Scarlett’s crimes.

For instance, Scarlett commented on every single one of Barney’s Facebook status updates, even though they were very
boring. ‘Thinking of eating an apple. Should I have a red one or a green one?’ he’d type, and within five minutes Scarlett would have commented with a ‘ROFL’. Except she didn’t even capitalise it, she used all lower case, like she was too stupid to figure out the shift key. She was also fond of ‘lmao’ and ‘lol’ and was obviously so stupid that I wondered how she managed to get to school without being run over.

There were other signs, too, that suggested Barney was doing more than guiding Scarlett through the minefield that was GCSE Maths. He was meant to tutor her for one hour after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays but I noticed that actually he was nowhere to be found on Tuesday and Thursday evenings at all. He wasn’t on Twitter or Facebook or Google Chat and he certainly wasn’t answering his phone.