The Worst of Me (2 page)

But this. This was like: you
have
to be feeling something too. It
can’t
just be happening to me. You and me are in this together, and no one else can hear what our eyes are telling each other now. It felt brave and mad holding on to his gaze like that, neither of us looking away.

They were Malton boys. Malton Road School: it’s a posher school than ours but it doesn’t have a sixth form. Most of them go to the sixth-form college in town, but a few choose Samuel Bond’s because they like the fact that we have an old-fashioned sixth that goes back for ever and we were once a grammar school. We get about thirty of their lot a year. It’s a big enough number for them to come down on us like a pack, so they don’t care if they fit in. They have a rep for being snobby, but they’re also a bit rich and glamorous and our girls always try to go out with their boys. That’s why our boys hate them.

The others told me their names. The blond rugby player one was Dominic. The low-voiced stubbly one was Steve – the one who seemed older. The one I hadn’t really noticed was Lewis. He had dark hair, too, but his face was ghostly white with more freckles than I’ve ever seen on anyone. He laughed loudly at the others’ jokes but when he talked himself his voice was quiet.

They asked me questions about our school – the cafeteria, lockers, some of the teachers they had. I made them laugh. I wasn’t used to making boys laugh. I wasn’t used to talking to boys on my own. This is going to sound bad, but I was really glad I was alone because I knew I would have been a different person if my friends had been with me. I would have been all little and nice, and embarrassed about whether the girls thought I was trying to be fancied. I can only really do the confidence trick on my own, because I learned it to cope with being alone. That’s weird, though, isn’t it? Most people are better at being confident in big packs. The thing is, as far as Jonah and his friends knew, I was really that girl, the girl who was at the pictures on her own and made strangers laugh as if she didn’t care what they thought of her.

The thing is, I’m not.

For a long time, I’ve worried about what I’m faking and what’s really me, without being sure that there
is
a real me, something concrete underneath it all.
Sometimes I feel like I’m different with every single person. I get worried that I’ll make a mistake and get caught out, or find myself with lots of people I’m different with all at the same time.

When you really like someone you’re torn in two directions. You want them to think you’re worth their time, so you lie, and try and show them the person you’d like to be. But you need them to see the real you, so you can be sure they like you for you, so you also start confessing everything and putting out your worst side, just to test them and make sure they really mean it. Then the most dangerous thing you can do happens: you stop thinking about yourself altogether – you
get over yourself
– because you’re having a good time. And then who are you?

When I met Jonah I was still spending most hours of most days asking myself what was so wrong with me that had made Ian dump me. I already knew the answer: he’d found someone prettier and nicer. But I needed to feel it was something actual that I’d done, because that way I could fix myself and make things different next time, or even – I thought – get Ian back. It was hard that Ian wasn’t always around now, but even harder than that was the rejection – knowing I wasn’t good enough. His new girlfriend was Sophie, and I found her annoying. Not because of anything she did or was, just because she wasn’t me. She had
beautiful naturally-straight hair and a voice that always made her sound like she was smiling, so I never stood a chance. I had to pretend I was okay with things because Ian’s sister Isobel was a close friend of mine. I couldn’t really talk about it honestly to anyone else because Iso and I had the same friends.

Ian was my first boyfriend, and we’d been going out for nearly six months. If I’m being honest, that was the part of it I liked best, being a girl with a boyfriend, being part of that club where your friends talk about you as a couple. It’s like your personality’s not all your responsibility any more. When it was just us two alone together, we argued about only ever going to guys’ films, or about hanging out too much with my mates – about a lot of stuff that seemed stupid later but wasn’t much fun at the time. Sometimes we were moody with each other for no reason at all and sometimes both of us said mean things that we couldn’t stop thinking about. But once I’d lost that couple status, I forgot all the bad bits and felt sorry for myself and humiliated. I’d been feeling like that for a whole summer, because it was at the end of June, just before school broke up, when Ian dumped me. That same summer, my mum turned silly over a man, so I couldn’t even rely on her man-hating at Dad to make me feel better.

Then I had to go back to school and Ian was there every day, hanging around being lean and out of my
league, and knowing all my secrets. I’d spent weeks imagining what I’d say if he asked me to get back with him. Sometimes I imagined myself as angry, and sometimes happy, and sometimes I just ran away. But it had all been in my head, so he had to do what I wanted. Now he was real again he could do what he liked.

He was nice. Being nice was Ian’s thing. He smiled at me when he saw me, his little shy smile, where he pressed his lips together until they disappeared. He talked to me every few days. It was worst when Sophie was there, with both of them looking at me. Ian being Ian, he worked this out pretty fast, and soon he only stopped to chat when he was alone, and always about nice boring things. He made it easy to hang out with Isobel at their house. He didn’t snog Sophie in the school walkways. He was just nice. It made me sad he wasn’t mine any more.

‘So, are we going to be allowed to talk to you at school now?’ Jonah asked. ‘Or tomorrow are you going to be like, “I don’t know these Malton Road spods!”?’ The question would have been more likely to come from me, them being sixth-formers and me being Year 11.

‘Sorry,’ I said, and shrugged. ‘We’ll have to pretend this didn’t happen. I’ve got a reputation to maintain.’

He smiled, a great smile.

Steve, the low-voiced stubbly one, suddenly lifted
his phone and took a picture of me and Jonah. I froze, confused. ‘Well, here’s the proof,’ he said. ‘Maybe we’ll use it to blackmail you.’ Then everyone laughed.

When it started to get dark outside, the café seemed to magically turn into a bar. They put the lights on, which reflected all around the windows so the whole place twinkled. They turned the music up. The daytime crowd went away and a new wave of evening people with louder voices and bellowing group laughter came in their place, but we stayed through the changes, just talking, making jokes. I knew my mum would have been expecting me back because I hadn’t told her where I was going. A bit after seven, I told the boys I had to leave.

‘Nah, stay,’ Dom said, and the others nodded. A few minutes later my phone blipped. A text from my mum asking me where I was.

‘That your boyfriend?’ Steve asked.

I shook my head, smiling. ‘It’s my mum.’ I tried to keep the smile on my face, but behind it I felt depressed. Would she be angry? Why had she waited so long to text, and why hadn’t she even called? The anger I’d been feeling for her earlier surged up again, taking me back to where I’d been when I walked out of the house. I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to make her worry.

With friends in town, didn’t realise was so late.
Coming home now
, I texted. Then: ‘Well, I could probably stay for one more drink,’ I said.

At nine o’ clock I stood at the bus stop with Dom and Jonah. They were getting a different bus, but said they’d wait with me till my bus came. Lewis, the quiet, freckly one, had peeled away hours ago, saying his mum would have his tea ready. Lewis was the type of boy who knows he’s not cool so he doesn’t try. The thing about being like that is, when you’re totally outside of the being cool game it doesn’t seem to matter, it’s not as bad as
nearly
getting it right. People take the mick, but it’s too obvious, it seems to bounce off them. Or deep down, are they feeling it? Are they embarrassed and hurt?

Steve had come with us as far as the bus stop but kept going, lighting a cigarette and then raising a non-waving hand as a wave as he walked away. In a way, I was glad because he was the one I was least sure about. I thought the others had wanted me to sit at their table, but maybe not Steve. He didn’t say anything that definitely stood out as not wanting me there, he wasn’t snidey or sarcastic to me, but he was more closed off than his friends. And I guess my default setting is to assume people don’t like me before I know better, rather than the other way around.

I was jingly with nerves and excitement. I already knew my mum was in a bad mood: the rule was I had
to prearrange where I was going with her, and today I’d just walked out. She’d texted, she knew where I was now, and that I was on my way home, but I was due some grief when I got back. And this was the first time in a long time I’d been out and not known what to expect. I was imagining school on Monday – suddenly having this pack of sixth-formers who knew who I was, Malton boys, too. Regardless of Jonah’s jokes, would they speak to me? Their bus came and went, and my skin prickled with embarrassment; I don’t like causing other people hassle.

‘You should have got that,’ I said.

‘Don’t be daft,’ Jonah said. ‘We’re the ones who kept you out late. I should be taking you right to your door but . . .’ He hugged his arms as if he felt the cold.

But what?

It wasn’t cold, but there was that strange thinning of the air you get on warm autumn days, like the stickiness of summer has been filtered out. After half a day talking non-stop, suddenly the three of us had nothing to say to each other. We started talking about the film again, unable to find a way back into the easy joking in the café, as if Steve had taken all our funniness with him. Which was strange, because Jonah and Dom had been the ones making all the jokes.

My bus came. I stepped back to let a little old lady on it first.

‘I’ll see you both on Monday,’ I said.

Jonah started hopping from one foot to the other. ‘Should I . . . do you want me to see you home?’

‘I live really close to the stop,’ I said, shaking my head.

‘Okay.’ He sucked in his bottom lip as he nodded.

I got on the bus and found a seat on the bottom deck. The bus pulled away and I waved to them.

I told my mum I’d been with two boys from school who had seen me home.

‘I didn’t see them. I was looking out the window.’

‘I said they didn’t have to come right down the street. You know, it’s such a long street, it’s a cul-de-sac, I said I’d be fine. And I am fine.’

‘That doesn’t matter, they should have come all the way down. Who are these boys? I haven’t heard you mention them. Why was it just boys? Why weren’t you with any girls?’

‘Jonah and Dominic. And Lewis and Steve as well, earlier. I haven’t known them long. They’re nice. They were at Malton Road.’

‘Oh.’ That seemed to satisfy my mum. Malton Road meant nice middle class boys. ‘Well, you know how I feel about you being out late without telling me where you are.’

‘I did tell you.’

‘Beforehand.’

‘We weren’t sure where we were going.’

‘You didn’t tell me anything, though, Cass. Next time, I need to know everything. Have you eaten?’

She didn’t seem all that angry. She didn’t seem angry at all, even – just ticking the boxes. My muscles were tensed and hard, ready to withstand a blast of shouting. When that didn’t come, I couldn’t relax again, not just like that. I stopped frowning, loosened my shoulders. It felt weak and wrong.

‘Where’s Paul?’ I said.

‘He went out to meet a friend.’

I thought:
She’s not going nuts at me because she’s been lonely tonight.

I thought:
They had a row. She’s not that interested in me coming in late.

I thought:
I hope he never comes back.

I said that I’d eaten when I was out, even though I hadn’t had anything since the sandwich after the film. I was happier hungry – I wanted to be thin and sexy on Monday when I saw the Malton boys again.

Josette did not dislike me. Josette hardly knew me. Josette – pay close attention now! – had no negative feelings towards me.

I’m glad we sorted that out, aren’t you? For some reason, though, my friends thought it needed repeating every time they talked about Josette’s party, which was a lot. I was sick of everyone talking about her party because it was boring, not because I was jealous. The last thing I needed was to be reassured that Josette didn’t hate me, but that didn’t stop them.

Okay . . . it’s never
great
to be excluded from something everyone else is going to. But I would have been fine about it without all the understanding and sensitivity and
reasons
.

‘I think she just didn’t think about it because you weren’t there on her birthday,’ Finian said. ‘That was
when we all started talking again. I mean, she might not even know who you are, really, you’ve only met her in big groups.’

‘I bet if we asked her if you could come too she’d be well up for it,’ Kim said.

‘Well, you know she knows Sophie too, Soph’ll be going, maybe she thought there’d be weirdness, not that there would be,’ Isobel said. ‘She doesn’t know it’s not like that with you and Ian.’ Even though she wasn’t saying so, that was the first time I realised that maybe
Isobel
was weird about me not going out with Ian any more, or thought it changed things, anyway.

‘That’s the point!’ Finian said. ‘She doesn’t even know you really.’

Shut up, everyone, shut up, shut up! Did I even ask? Bloody Josette. She went to a different school – not the one Jonah and Dom had come from – but she’d gone to the same primary school as some of my mates, and they’d all met up again at a gig which just happened to be the best night of everyone’s life ever, only I was out with Ian that night. We’d been arguing, as usual, about how we only did things my mates did and maybe one Saturday he could go out without having to hang out with his little sister. So we’d gone to the pictures and seen one of his stupid superhero-type films while, as luck would have it, everyone else I knew was having a better time with Josette, and I would never, ever, be able
to make up for missing this one amazing night. If I sound sarcastic, it’s because I’m trying to, but don’t trust me: I do actually believe this crap. There’d been a lot of web chatting among them all since then, but that was the night our circle of friends had opened up and let someone new walk right into the middle, and then closed again. And somehow I hadn’t made it back in time before the doors were locked.