Dead Romantic (4 page)

‘You can't smoke indoors, baby,' Lynx reminded him.

‘You can't,' said Damian, lighting up regardless. ‘What they gonna do to me?'

I still had one of Damian's old Marlboro dog-ends at home in a matchbox. I'd seen him chuck it down on the second day of term. I thought maybe one day I'd be able to clone a boy just like him, from the spit. I just had to learn to clone first.

‘You hooked up for the Halloween party yet, Camille?' he said, biting his inner lip. I really didn't know why he kept singling me out when I was saying nothing at all. It
seemed like the more I was trying to be invisible, the more noticeable I was.

‘Uh, no, not yet,' I smiled, once again Miss Cherry Tomato Features.

‘Loser needs a date, don't you, Lou?' said Splodge, wiping his mouth with his hand and draping his arm around Louis the way people do when they're acting like you're friends but really they just get a kick out of watching you go red. Lynx did this all the time and I hated it.

Louis swept his emo fringe aside and shrugged, shoving his hands in his cardigan pockets. He had loads of friendship bracelets on his wrists, which I thought was weird seeing as he only had two friends and never actually spoke.

Poppy wiped her glasses and giggled. Splodge went red in both cheeks and scratched his nose with his thumb. Louis Burnett looked at me and I looked away. It was a carousel of awkwardness for what felt like forever but was only about five seconds.

‘How about you two hookin' up then?' Damian went on, as though trying to bulldoze through the unease.

I shrugged. Louis did a kind of half-nod.

‘Sweet. You and Loser can come together then, can't you? Everybody's happy,' said Damian, looking at both of us in turn and striding off, his arm slung around Lynx's shoulders and his magnificent arse framed beautifully by the tightness of his jeans. Suddenly he looked back at me. ‘And you know where I am if you need help with that thing, Camille, yeah?' He winked at me as he walked away.

‘What's the “thing” Camille?' said Poppy, sucking the flimsy orange disc of her last Jaffa Cake.

‘Nothing, he's just being stupid,' I said, scratching the back of my head to hide my blushing cheeks with my arm. ‘Come on. Let's go and learn how to sociologise.'

 

 

 

 

O
kay, so ‘the thing' I needed help with was my virginity, which the life-ruiner Damian de Jager had found out I still had through sheer cheek on my third day of college. I'd been in the library trying to find this stupid book we had to read for English and he'd just appeared, cornering me at the dark end of the short-story section, his shirt collar all up like Dracula.

‘All right? I'm Damian. Your name's Camille, right? Lynsey's mate?' he'd said.

I'd nodded, blushing fiercely of course, clutching my books to my chest.

‘I'll come straight to the point. I'm in the virginity business. You got it; I want it. You need hookin' up, I'm your boy. You still got your V-plates, I'll take you out on the
roads, show you what's what. Here's my number.' He'd handed me his card. ‘You'll meet a lot of scrotes in this place. A lot of knuckle-draggers who don't know how to treat their women. Half of 'em couldn't find their way to a girl's G-spot with a sat nav.'

‘Uh . . .'

‘So what I'm saying is, don't worry about any of them. I got the sat nav. And I got the goods.' He'd looked down at his crotch, then back up at me.

‘Wha . . .'

‘I can deal with it so you ain't gotta worry about it, then you can just enjoy the rest of your A levels without it hanging over you. Do ya know what I mean?'

I'd nodded, my mouth doing a guppy impression. He'd had a green t-shirt on under his shirt that said MAN WHORE in really big white letters and he had been staring at me so hard I couldn't catch my breath. If stares could make babies, I'd have been having his triplets.

‘No pressure, no refusal, guaranteed good times. You keep that card safe and text me when you need me.'

‘Uh . . .'

‘Don't worry. It's a free service. And I'll always answer.' And he'd walked away, one hand in his pocket.

I hadn't said one word for another six hours.

I'd thought about calling him, I really had. But it wasn't right. Although I had all the feelings of love – my pupils dilated, my cheeks blushed, plus I fancied his face off – something felt wrong. I was scared. I was properly scared. What if I called him, we did it and I was completely rubbish at it? What then? Would it be all round college
that I was rubbish at it? And how did you
know
if you were rubbish at it? Maybe I wasn't ready. But I was sick of just thinking about it or reading about it in one of my romance novels. It wasn't enough anymore. I wanted it to happen to me. I didn't want to keep gazing at people in the street holding hands or snogging on coffee shop doorsteps, wondering, always wondering. How they did it.
Where
they did it. How many times they'd done it. Everyone I knew must have done it. The woman on the till in Sainsbury's. My dentist. Johnny Depp. My parents – ugh! But
I
hadn't. And now the perfect, sexy-faced opportunity was there for me to grab and I wasn't at all sure that I wanted to.

That was me, Camille Mabb. A sixteen-year-old girl who didn't want to do sex stuff with Damian de Jager. Freak. The weirdest kind of sixteen-year-old. I let my race down. And this was when I realised there was something really quite seriously wrong with me.

However much I fancied him, he actually quite scared me. He was so easy about s.e.x. and I really wasn't. Lynx was pretty whatever about s.e.x. too. She was always talking about things she'd done, things she'd touched, things she'd tried. I didn't know what half of it meant but I always nodded along, and afterwards I'd have to look it all up on the Internet.

The last Sociology lesson, I was so
grrrrr
about both my best friends dumping me for boyfriends that I decided to unpick the last stitch. The Sociology classroom and the Chemistry lab were opposite one another but in different blocks, and from my seat I could look across the way and
see Zoe through the window. I barely heard a thing our teacher, Mr Atwill, who looked a bit like a nerdy Jesus, was saying about crime and deviancy. I was too busy gazing at Zoe pouring liquids and examining jars of blue stuff. I wanted to be where she was. I wanted to be near her. Everyone gave her a wide berth in the corridors. She didn't seem to be bullied or ignored; people just stayed away, like they'd stay away from someone with a disease. But I was desperate to be in her orbit in some small way. And to find out exactly what she had been digging up in the churchyard on freshers' night.

So after a lesson where the only things I'd really learned were that Splodge now puts five kisses on every love text to Poppy and that Damian's texts to Lynx were, well, let's just say ‘photos', I told Mr Atwill I was quitting and taking up Human Biology instead. He laughed. Poppy laughed. Lynx laughed.

But I wasn't actually joking.

And it was all because of Zoe Lutwyche.

By Wednesday lunchtime, having done my own head in with my confusing fears about sexy times with Damian and my sudden lusting over Digging Girl, I'd fully convinced myself I must have become a lesbian overnight. There was no other explanation for it.

I wondered if that was a recognised thing – if it
did
come over you all of a sudden or whether it had to be something you always knew, like when you were a baby or something. Did babies know they were lesbians? All I knew for sure was that I couldn't stop thinking about her,
couldn't stop looking for her in the corridors. I also really liked the way she did her eye make up and I wondered if I could borrow her eyeliner when we became friends.

I did the tests to see if I was actually in love with Zoe. Did my heart rate speed up when I saw her? Yes it did. Did my knees go to jelly? A bit, yeah. Did my pupils get bigger? I didn't know – I was too busy staring at her to check. So I had all the signs of being in love even though I'd never fancied either Lynx or Poppy or any other girl for that matter. I was in a ‘tumult'. I'd remembered that word from English.

A highly distressing agitation of mind or feeling; a turbulent mental or emotional disturbance.

That was me, Camille. In a tumult.

I couldn't concentrate on anything, couldn't focus. At lunch, I left half my ham salad with no dressing which was really odd for me because normally I'm so starving I start chewing on a napkin once my food's gone. I knew I needed help. I decided to go to the counsellor's office at the end of the day, see if he had any advice or leaflets about rapidonset lesbianism.

But I forgot to go to the counsellor. My first Human Biology lesson saw to that.

When Zoe walked into that Biology lab, it was like I could breathe again. And she went from my fastest ever girl crush to a code-red all-out bleach-stinking obsession.

What she did in that lesson was, in a word, electrifying.

She
was electrifying.

 

 

 

 

T
wo girls ran out of the lab crying. Others pressed their hands over their mouths like they were going to puke. Most just went all squinchy-faced and jumpy on their stools. I thought one girl with glasses was going to pee herself. Mr Chaney, the Human Biology teacher, was striding between our desks with a jar of dead hamsters, leaving one on every workstation. He came to me and plonked one down.

‘Thanks,' I said.

The door at the back of the room burst open and everyone, including me, turned around to see Zoe walk in. I actually smiled. I didn't know anyone else's name in the class and suddenly I felt like I had a friend there. Dressed all in black and keeping her head down, she made her way
to the only free seat in the room: the seat next to mine. Something in my chest swallowed something else.

‘See me after, Zoe Lutwyche,' Chaney boomed, as he took up position behind his desk, scrunching up his crotchety face to read his notes. Zoe scrabbled in her bag for a tatty black book and pen. She didn't seem to notice me at all.

‘You have before you
Phodopus sungorus
, the Russian winter white dwarf hamster. We will examine the digestive and respiratory systems, skeleton and muscle groups. On your worksheet, note down the organs you can identify and their primary functions . . .'

I caught my breath as I leaned over to say something to her. I couldn't believe how nervous I was. ‘It's me. From the graveyard,' I whispered. She was rubbing her hands with an antiseptic wipe. She looked at me and then back at the teacher.

‘Take your dissection pins . . .' said Chaney, and he went on to describe what we had to do. ‘Lie your specimen ventral side up on your dissection pan and pin the four paws to the baize . . .'

Zoe Lutwyche had already taken out some squiggly organ stuff before I'd even worked out what a dissection ‘pin'? was. I just wanted her to speak back to me. Say anything, just so I could hear her voice. I leaned in to her again. ‘Wow. You're really good at this, aren't you? You've done this before.'

Chaney tapped the board diagram. ‘Pinch a skin fold in the mid-ventral line as seen here and take your scalpel to make your incision down through the centre . . .'

I had a little go at snipping open my hamster's stomach but I made a bit of a mess of it. I couldn't get a nice clean cut like Zoe. I looked at her. She was full to the brim with concentration. I so wanted to talk to her about the other night, maybe ask if she wanted an assistant with whatever she was doing.

I leaned in yet again. ‘I haven't told anyone, you know. About . . . that night at the graveyard. About what you were doing.'

‘What was I doing?' she murmured, still focussed on her hamster surgery.

‘I don't know,' I said. ‘But I won't tell. I won't tell anyone.'