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‘I know, right?’ I said, a bit bewildered.

Mum snorted. ‘There wasn’t much left to imagine, Gemma. He just forced his way into Cat’s life, showing up at her school. He even turned up naked in Dean’s dining room, for crying out loud!’

‘Sorry I wasn’t there,’ said Gemma. ‘I mean, I’d have loved to
have seen all of your faces.’

Ah yes. All those faces. Mine, and Mum’s … and Dean’s and, of course, Aggie. I felt a little surge of something which might have been triumph. Now Gemma was back, Mum might reconsider on the marriage front. She certainly didn’t need another step-daughter …

Suddenly a completely, utterly miserable day – no, make that a completely, utterly miserable
life
- was looking a whole lot rosier.

Gemma agreed to stay overnight after she and Mother Dearest opened the wine (and yes, I was actually offered a glass!) and we set her up in the spare room. I was already planning the layout and where she could put her desk etc, seeing as she’d be living with us between terms or whatever she had at university, but Gemma soon put paid to that.

‘So your mum tells me she’s getting married again,’ she said as we shook out the sheets and applied them to either end of the bed.

I shrugged. ‘Well, she says she is, but I’m not sure.’

‘You’re not sure she’s getting married?’ Gemma laughed. ‘I think it’s pretty def
inite. She’s booking the registry office next week.’

‘Yeah, but now you’re back …’

Gemma dropped her end of the sheet pretty quickly. ‘Aw, Squirt. I am back, in that I’m never going to stay away from you both like I have in the past. But our lives have changed. I’m going to be doctor in who-knows-where, you’ll be a scientist in somewhere exciting, and Mum will have Dean.’

‘Yes, but…’

‘And you’ll have a new step-sister, I believe,’ she added softly.

I shook my head. ‘No. No, I won’t. I’ve got you.’

‘It doesn’t mean you can’t have another one.’

But I don’t want another one, I wanted to bleat. In fact, I wanted to fling myself face-first onto the mattress and have a big old screaming tantrum
, braying like a donkey. I. Don’t. Want. Another. Step-sister! After all, the old one might have been a smidge unreliable to the extent of being not even there for the last five or so years, but she was the coolest step-sister ever: old enough to talking about going overseas, and living with her boyfriend if he behaved himself, and being a proper doctor with a stethoscope and everything. Plus, she’s gorgeous and pretty tall so I could borrow her clothes. Did I mention she’s gorgeous? Yep. Dolores levels of gorgeousness. I certainly did not need another step-sis, especially one who still lived with her parent and drove his car rather than her own and was more than likely to turn up in my bathroom and might even want to borrow
my
clothes. All right, maybe not that last bit but all the other stuff was true, for sure.

Then fairly tall, gorgeous Gemma nodded to the mattress and made me sit down on the bed beside her.

‘Dean makes your mum happy, Squirt. Doesn’t he?’ She didn’t wait for me to answer. ‘I don’t think Dad made anyone happy towards the end. He was horrible to live with for the first year after they split up and we went to Germany. He’s heaps better now, and that’s because he’s met someone new too. He’d love to see you, Cat, and introduce you to her. She’s got kids too. Twelve year old twins. And they’re boys!’

At that we both stared at each other, amazed and aghast.

Then she laughed. ‘That’s what families are like these days, Squirt. They get bigger, and divide, and get bigger again and multiply. They’re like …’

‘… cells,’ I said. She wasn’t coming back to live with us, was she?

‘Cells.’ She squeezed my hand. ‘And you are going to come over to Germany with me and see Dad again, and you can come up to the smoke and stay with me and Arlen, and you’re also going to get to hang out with your new step-sister and grow a new family with Mum and Dean.’

‘I was with you right up to that last part.
We cannot grow a new family. We are not a petri dish.’

At that, Gemma snorted with laughter, so hard she pulled a funny face and almost looked un-gorgeous. ‘Oh, I’ve missed
you, Catherine Melissa Andrews. You and your clever comments.’

I’d missed her too, naturally, although by then I was actually thinking how you literally could grow a new family, not in a petri dish, but in that strange contraption of Dean’s. If I had to have a replacement step-dad, I supposed a world-renowned geneticist wouldn’t be the worst one in the world.

Aggie, though, was a different matter.

‘Give her a chance, Squirt,’ said Gemma, reading my mind as she always used to.

‘Maybe,’ I said.

‘And Jason.’

‘Huh?’ I said.

But then Mum came in with hot chocolate for everyone and we all sat on the unmade bed and talked for hours until the mascara streaks had set on my face so it looked like a sedimentary plain leading to the delta of the Nile (as in Geography GCSE – see, it’s not just science). Then I fell asleep right where I lay so Gemma got in my bed and I woke up in a strange bedroom feeling very peculiar, like I no longer knew who I was.

I decided I had to be brave and go to school. Actually, Gemma decided for me and drove me there herself after I told her all about it.

‘If you don’t go,’ she said, ‘you’ll imagine everyone is thinking you’re not there because Dolores and Freddie are going out, and then you’ll never be able to go back because you won’t be able to stand them thinking that.’ She glanced at me slyly over the coco-pops. ‘And then you won’t get your grades and do A levels and go to uni and be a proper scientist.’

She’s clever, that Gemma. Knew exactly
what would motivate me. Never going back to be stared at – that I could handle. Not getting to go to uni – no way.

I clung onto
her at the school gate, saying, ‘Come in with me! Stay for the day. You could teach a class! Do biology – Miss Sargeson is rubbish.’ That’s actually not true; she’s a good teacher if a little on the shouty side. But then she is dealing with a bunch of morons waving Bunsen burners and … ahem … scalpels around.

But Gemma just laughed and said she had to get back for lectures. She gave me her address and her phone number and Arlen’s phone number in case she was in uni and couldn’t take a call, and promised to be in touch with a date for visiting Dad together in the very near future.

‘Wunderbar,’ I said Germanly. ‘Ich liebe…’

‘I love you too, Squirt,’ said Gemma, even though I’d been about to say “Deuts
ch” not “dich”. ‘Look after Mum.’ She pulled away and then wound down the window. ‘And yourself.’

Then she gave me a big thumbs up and drove off with her beautiful Rapunzel hair flowing behind her in the jet stream. Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite like that, but I sure was going to start missing her all over again.

Talking of people I was going to miss, I turned to
stare at the school and wondered for the millionth time that morning what I was going to say to Dolores and/or Freddie. If I could actually bring myself to say anything at all. What if they were sitting together? What if they were gazing at each other in a loved up fashion? What if they were (pause to say rank, vomit-worthy and utterly unacceptable) KISSING? It was completely possible that my arteries would literally clog up with poison and I would die on the spot.

But the bell rang, and no amount of staring at the building was going to stop any of those things from potentially happening, so I tucked my hair wings behind my ears in a teeny attempt to control them, and forced my feet to march one after the other into school.

Only then did I discover that Dolores was waiting for me behind the door. She really
isn’t
as daft as she sometimes thinks I think she is (all right, fessing up, sometimes I do actually think she is, but not ALL the time). You see, if I’d seen her lurking at the main entrance I’d have found another way in, or stood frozen to the spot unable to move at all, or possibly I’d have run after Gemma’s car, hair wings flapping and screaming, ‘Take me with you!’

She surprised me, though, so despite the pink hair and the boobiness I didn’t even see her until I’d got to the bottom of the stairs up to the form
room.

‘Cat,’ she said. Not unusually, as that is, in fact, my name.

Mostly.

‘It’s Catherine,’ I said, because Cat was the name Dolores invented for me.

‘Oh, Cat, Cat; don’t be like that.’

That almost made me laugh, but then I remembered we were no longer friends and sorted my face out, and instead of saying ‘Okay, Dr Seuss,’ as I would normally have done, I said, ‘Like what?’

Then Dolores looked up at me and I could see some amazing things:

#1 she had no
make-up on

#2 her hair was distinctly lank, so the pink strips merged with the dark blonde and it was overall just kind of mousey brown. I had never
ever before seen Dolores with not-washed hair.

#3 she’d been crying.

#4 she was actually still crying a bit.

#5 she was speaking while crying a bit and saying, ‘I won’t go out with him if it means that much to you. We can’t not be friends any more.’

‘Oh,’ I said, because suddenly I couldn’t think what else to say. ‘You heard what I said through the bus

doors then?’

She nodded, looking dangerously as if she was about to start blubbing for real. ‘I can practically read your lips, from when you didn’t use to speak up at all.’

‘Oh.’

Yeah, I know ‘Oh’ doesn’t really cover it all, but I seriously could not think of anything else to say because all at once it was quite clear that I’d been thinking horrible thoughts about my BFF while she was worrying about losing my friendship. And I’d been dreading seeing her and Freddie together when they actually liked each other and even then Dolores was prepared not to go out with him to keep hold of me. And even more, I’d been actually doing some pretty horrid things to get Freddie to notice me and not notice Dolores (even though they didn’t work and he had obviously noticed Dolores long before I lovingly skewered him on a scalpel). Some of those things included getting a pop star to fall in love with her to take her out of the running when said pop star was evidently quite afraid of her and her fingernails.

What the hell was wrong with me?
I’d been an utter bitch, basically, while Dolores had been nothing but nice.

But I’m the nice one … aren’t I?

It suddenly seemed important to know, even though we’d missed registration and there would be parental phone calls any second.

‘Dolores, why do you even like me?’

‘Why do you even like me?’ she said, with a stroppy bobble of the head.

‘Even when I’m horrible to you, you still want to be my friend.’ It puzzled me.

‘Even when I’m horrible to
you
, you still want to be
my
friend.’

That puzzled me too.
Didn’t I just say that?

‘But … why are you the only person who puts up with me?’

Dolores pouted. ‘Why are
you
the only person who puts up with
me
?’

‘Dolores,’ I yelled, grabbing her by the shoulders, ‘why are you just repeating everything I say?’

I half-expected her to drone, ‘Why are you just repeating everything
I
say?’ but she didn’t.

Instead she said something which was actually massively intelligent.

‘Cat, you don’t get it. We’re the same! You and me – we’re the same. Both a bit different; both the kind of girls that other girls are afraid of; both hard on the outside and mushy on the inside.’ Suddenly Dolores looked all in chargey again. She pointed a finger at me seriously. ‘You were the only girl to ever see past my face and like me for what’s inside.’

Well, and well again. True. And what could I say?

‘Well, you were the only girl to ever see past my face and like
me
for what’s inside.’ I paused. ‘Or at least past my hair wings.’ My face isn’t that bad, to be fair.

With a nod, Dolores gazed sadly at my head. The wings comment obviously reminded her of last night. It reminded me of last night, too, and suddenly I was fed up with it. Fed up with myself. Fed up with the whole silly situation.

‘Friends?’ I said.

Dolores squealed and hugged me. ‘Friends!’

‘And if, as your truly amazing biffle, I allow you to go out with the one guy I have ever chemical reactioned in a major way,’ I said, like I had a choice, ‘will you promise me one thing?’

‘Errr …’ Dolores hesitated, clearly a tad suspicious about what I was going to propose (which was fair enough as I was thinking: you can’t kiss his attractive top lip, EVER, or any other part of him come to mention it). ‘O
-kay?’

What I actually said was: ‘Promise me you will never again make me double date with any of his pervy nerd friends.’

She giggled. ‘Deal.’

Shaking hands, w
e looked at each other goofily for a few seconds, and then I swivelled her around in the direction of the office. ‘We’d better go and face the music.’

Face the music. Made me think of Jason. And Jazzy. And Jason and Jazzy.

It also made me realise that, with Dolores and Freddie now an item, and Dean and Aggie totally convinced that I really did know him from school in Jersey (plus Mum, Gemma, the whole of the school and possibly the world because of Fatalbook), there was no need for me to ever see him again. Either of him, in fact. Hurrah!

For some reason, though, it gave me a very strange sensation in my flat chest. I squashed it down, stuck my tongue out at Stupid Sean who didn’t look so pleased to see me without a medieval instrument hanging off my left nipple, and followed Dolores into History.