Primperfect (2 page)

‘So. You want to smell Felix, eh?' Ciara waggled her eyebrows in an unladylike manner.

I nodded sadly. ‘I do. I do indeed.'

Snifffff

There was no point in trying to hide it. Ella was there and she does not see the point in lies and almost always refuses to keep secrets. She knows I want to smell her brother's jacket, because it has been going on for almost four years now and my nostrils remain aquiver.

‘What aftershave does he use?' Ciara is very interested in what brand of smell people have. She can identify specific ones by sniff. It is an almost-superpower.

‘I don't know. It smells of – boy?'

Ciara, who had been hoping for something more specific, looked a bit put out. ‘Syzmon smells of Hugo Boss. I got it for him last Christmas.'

Then she made the two of us smell Syzmon. And then the other two boys for comparison. Ciara is tiny, so I think the cider might have taken effect at this stage. Although maybe not. She has done stuff like this while sober. Kevin smelled the nicest, Ella and I agreed. Then I was all worried that I should have lied about it because:

A

Ciara got a little bit offended that we weren't
sniff-perving all over her boyfriend.

B

I have a long and messy history of kissing
and not-kissing Kevin. We are in one of our not-kissing periods. I do not
want to be kissing him again. Even though he smells the
best out of him, Syzmon and Caleb, I do not want him to
think that there is going to be any kissing happening
between him and me. We are just friends now. And
friends are honest with each other about
stuff like how they smell.

I am going to stay away from Fintan from now on. He isn't good for me.

Quote from Prim's mum's diary

ad gave me Mum's diaries last night. He's been holding them since she died when I was twelve. They are full of interesting information. For example, did you know that an LP is an album and a smather is a smack? Three and a bit years I've waited for those diaries and now they're here and I don't know what to do with them. Because if I read them all in one big greedy glut, like I do with books normally, her story will be over and I'll have no more of her. I want to be the kind of girl who doles them out sparingly, like a page a day until I'm twenty-one. Not that there's that many. Twelve fat notebooks: three black, two brown, one blue, one red, one pink, one gold, one chequered and two that have fancy marbled covers. I've looked through them and put them in order. Red is first: she was still in school when the books she used were red. I wonder if I should read them in order or skip right to the Mommy – Daddy drama of my birth? A bit of me says that Mum wouldn't like me reading private things. Another bit is too nosy to care.

Dad was kind of loath to give them to me. All talk about the past being in the past and so on. I have the distinct feeling he will not come off too well in these diaries.

Ciara asked me about them last night as we were walking to the bus.

‘I don't know if I'd want to read my mother's diaries,' she said, looking worried. (She's right to be. Ciara's mum is kind of a wagon who tried to con her out of her inheritance from Grandma Lily. It was this whole big dramatic thing that happened early last year.) ‘I don't know if I'd like what I'd read there.'

‘I'm sure it'd be grand. You know she loves you. Deep down anyway.'

I linked her arm with mine because it is nigh impossible to hug while speed-walking.

Ciara sighed. ‘Very deep down. She keeps bringing up how ungrateful I am. Even when I'm doing something like emptying the dishwasher or putting out a wash, she still calls me ungrateful because I amn't doing it quick enough for her liking.'

‘It will be worth it, though. And when you're a famous milliner like Phillip Treacy she will eat her horrid words.'

‘I hope so, Prim. I really, really hope so.'

Ciara's granny left her €20,000 of savings, with the express proviso that she use it to put herself through ‘hat-making college'. Ciara's parents want her to be a primary-school teacher who pays off their mortgage so they can spend their money on cruises and possibly retire early. Ciara is not complying with their wishes because she feels that Grandma Lily's instructions should be honoured and because her life's ambition is to be a milliner of some description with her own little hat-elier (see what I did there?) and everything. She is really talented and I wish I had more call to wear hats because the ones she makes are nothing short of lovely.

‘Three more years,' she said grimly.

I nodded.

‘Three more years' is kind of our motto at the moment. We share it. Ciara uses it whenever her mum is being all snippy. (Her dad can also be pretty snippy, but he feels more conflicted about completely ignoring Grandma Lily's wishes, seeing as how she gave birth to him back before epidurals were readily available and so on.) I use ‘three more years' whenever Fintan is being impossible. Ciara is using it more than me these days, but that might just change now that I am in possession of Mum's diaries.

‘Don't judge me based on what you read in there, Prim,' Dad said as he handed the diaries to me. ‘What happened between your mother and me was regrettable and I should have acted differently.'

‘Like not gotten her pregnant, maybe?'

‘Yes. Wait, that's a trick question, isn't it? No. No. NO!'

And then he got stuttery about how he should have done certain things differently but he didn't regret having me and so on until I put him out of his misery by admitting that I was trying to

him.

I love that word, ‘flummox'. Ella's mum uses it all the time. This will be my first year of not being taken care of by Mary after school. Instead I will be going to two hours of after-school study. Because it is my post-Junior Cert year and I am now mature enough to spend an extra two hours in the marvellous establishment which I frequent so delightedly every single day of my adolescent life. Except for weekends. And holidays. But that is still a hell of a lot of days. I hope Joel isn't going. Or Karen. They're total besties now, all laughing at each other's stupid jokes and being gay together.

Karen is a lesbian or bisexual or something – I can't really keep track. The above statement comes across a bit bigoty. Unless you know how evil Karen is. Which is kind of why Joel and I are fighting. I did something very wrong and it wasn't nice of me. But I think it is more OK to do something wrong to Karen than it is to do something wrong to other people. Because

She really is and now she and Joel act like
I
am the devil and I amn't, I really truly amn't. I'm just a girl trying to survive in this crazy mixed-up world.

I miss Joel so much, but he won't be my friend any more, until I apologise to Karen again and I already had to apologise to her once and I will not apologise to her any more times until she apologises to me for being a horror. In exactly those words: ‘I am sorry I am such a horror, Prim. It was hurtful and wrong of me. I will try not to be in the future.' And then she has to follow it up with being nice to everyone for six months and maybe then we can talk about me maybe drafting something in the line of an apology.

Last year I went through a big phase of wanting to be a cruciverbalist (the people who draft and assemble the crosswords that go in the papers). It still sounds cool, but I'm so sick of hinting what I want and analysing other people's hints at what they want. It is exhausting. I just want to know what Joel wants me to do so this will all be fixed and we will be best friends since Montessori again.

It started because he fancied Kevin, I think. The rift. He really fancied Kevin and I wanted a boyfriend and Kevin seemed like he wanted to be my boyfriend and I fancied him even though he was a LARPer and so forth. Looking back, I can see that I totally backed the wrong horse. Kevin turned out to be a bad idea – not that he was cruel to me or anything, just really, really indecisive about what he wanted from a relationship and bad at texting back. And not kissing other girls. But we never really defined exactly what we were, so I suppose it doesn't really count as cheating. It felt like cheating, though. I was quite hurt. Anyway, even though Kevin isn't gay I totally hi-jacked Joel's crush and made it into my own on-again/off-again dramatic thing that I (admittedly) talked about a lot. Because I was thinking about it a lot. And Ciara kind of encourages that sort of boy-obsession. The analysis of texts and looks and tones of voice.

So Joel felt kind of horrid about that, and sometimes I would kind of break up with Kevin, vowing never to kiss him on sofas, on dance-floors, in his parents' kitchen or behind cinemas again because of that, but I kind of always ended up regretting it and getting back together. Or hooking up in Ciara's parents' walk-in wardrobe at her Sweet Sixteenth house party. We initially went in there to talk, but with Kevin it never really ends with talking. We say things and then there are pauses that we kiss each other to fill. I'm not even sure if we're proper friends, not really. I kind of have always seen him as a kind of sex-object. (Not that we're
having
sex.) First, he was Joel's crush, and then he was my first kiss. Then he was my undefined-sort-of-boyfriend, and now he is my – ex? But somehow he has insinuated himself into our group of friends and now he is a part of the stuff we do. He's still friends with Joel, at least a bit, so he helps me to find out what he (Joel) is up to. I miss just knowing. I miss being able to ask Joel myself.

They're always off doing things together, Karen and Joel. Probably talking about how much better friends they are than he and I could ever have been. They've been to gay bars in town together and everything. Karen knows how to get fake age cards. Karen knows how to get fake everything. I wish I hadn't outed her during big break over the intercom, but I paid my dues and got suspended for a week for bullying, which is rich because she is always bringing up my dead mum and putting me and my friends down, like reminding Ciara about how she used to eat her own hair. Last year at this dance thing we all went to, she actually referred to the way Mum died as ‘squishing'. But that doesn't count because it wasn't on school premises and I'm white and straight and incapable of being hate-crimed, even if I wanted to be. Dad was

with me and I know I was in the wrong and I did do the whole school-imposed apology thing that they made me write to her, but I didn't mean it and I had my fingers crossed the whole time I was writing it, which meant it was all lies and nigh illegible. I did write a real one. But I don't think sending it would sort things.

LETTER TO KAREN
draft 24
(UNSENT)