“But . . .”
“I can’t,” I repeated and I ran the flat of my hand over the knobbly ridge of bone at the back of his skull because he was the one thing in my life that had nothing to do with her and I wanted to keep it that way. “And thanks for the tea.”
“Way to change the subject,” he muttered under his breath, but when he lifted his head, his smile glittered. “So I’ve got you for a whole sixteen and a half hours?”
“Yeah. Wanna play some Scrabble?”
“The others have gone to this bar, do you wanna meet up with them?” he asked, twisting around to snatch his cigarettes up so he couldn’t see the face I just pulled. Molly was all right. In fact, Molly was a source of endless fascination to me, but Jane seemed like she was a bitch from way back.
“We could stay in,” I said, pulling his T-shirt down over the large expanse of thigh I was showing.
“We should go out,” Smith argued. “It will be fun.”
And I was about to argue about just how much fun it wouldn’t be when he bent his head and kissed my knee as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
It was almost as if Smith has sprinkled me with some of his own supply of hipster dust, so when we strode into Alicats, not one person questioned my right to be there, even though I hadn’t had time to do anything more transformational than slick on some lip gloss and smooth down the sticky-out bits of hair that were starting to be the bane of my freaking life.
And because Smith had paid for everything during our Eastbourne adventure (and that was an oxymoron if ever there was one), I brandished a tenner at him. “I’ll pay for the drinks if you go to the bar and get them.”
He closed my fist around the note. “I’ll get them. You’re not working.”
“Neither are you,” I pointed out, standing on tiptoe so he could hear me and shoving the money back at him. “Vodka and Diet Coke, please.”
“I’m not planning on holding your head while you puke, just so you know,” Smith said sternly as he led me through the sweaty crowd to the bar.
“Well, I’m not planning on puking, so that works out really well.”
We were still arguing about just how many drinks it took for me to reach my cut-off point when I saw we were heading for the dingiest corner of the bar and it was déjà ewww all over again . . . because Smith’s friends? Not the most user-friendly gang in town. Then Smith slid his arm around my waist and one of the girls looked up and smiled.
“Isabel! I’ll budge up and you can sit here,” Molly said, scooching over and patting the seat invitingly. “Don’t worry, Smith, most of your secrets are safe with me. Well, apart from the time you tried to snog my cat for a bet.”
I smirked at him. “Very smooth.”
“Go and sit down,” he said, pushing me in her direction. “I just want to say hello to someone. Molly’s sweet, she’ll look after you.”
And Molly was sweet, or else she just really knew how to fake it as she gave me a fleeting hug and pulled me down next to her, nudging the girl on her other side who was smooching the face off the guy whose lap she was on.
“Jane,” she shouted. “This is Isabel. Smith’s Isabel.”
Jane’s head shot up and she pinned me with the deadliest stare I’d seen in at least a week. “Ah, Smith’s Isabel,” she said knowingly. “And not any of the other Isabels we know. Hey, kid.”
“Hey,” I said back because she was far too intimidating to call on the whole “kid” thing. I poked at the ice cubes in my drink with the end of my straw, but when I decided to chance looking up she was still eyeing me.
“So just how old are you, anyway?” she asked belligerently. “’Cause I didn’t realize that our Smith had taken to loitering around the nursery school gates.”
“I’m eighteen,” I bit out, fumbling for my cigarettes to give me something to do with my hands and because if I was smoking, I was sophisticated and cool. Obviously. Or else, puffing my way to emphysema in the mistaken belief that I appeared to be sophisticated and cool. It was a judgment call.
“Jane’s being tested for Tourette’s syndrome,” Molly said soothingly. “It’s the only explanation we can find as to why she never thinks before she opens her mouth.”
“Oh, whatever, Moll,” Jane snapped. “And if she’s eighteen then I’m the fricking queen of England.”
“Give us another kiss, Your Majesty,” said the guy she was sitting on, and she wriggled happily and flung her arm around his neck. He was seriously not ex-rock star boyfriend material. If you were being kind you’d call him homely. If you weren’t being kind you’d call him a ginger minger. Then I realized his piggy little eyes were gazing adoringly at her as she ruffled his hair and matched his besotted look with one of her own.
I sat there and smoked my cigarettes while Jane and Molly bickered good-naturedly about whether Seth Cohen had any right to be emo if his parents were so damn rich. It was the kind of easy friendship I’d always dreamed about having if I didn’t have only two settings, which were either silent and/or vicious.
Jane was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen in real life.
Model gorgeous. Film-star sexy. It was almost too overwhelming to look at her perfectly symmetrical features; a bee-stung kiss of a mouth, limpid green eyes, the delicate curve of her eyebrows, the sweep of her cheekbones, all topped off with a tiny smudge of nose.
But it was Molly who my eyes kept sliding back to. Not just because she was pretty in this quirky, mischievous way but because she was never still as she laughed and twirled her straw around quick fingers, knees bumping against the edge of the table in time to Ladytron. “They only want you when you’re seventeen, when you’re twenty-one, you’re no fun,” she sang, and then laughed at me. “Story of my life, this song.” I guess she had charisma or something. Like, when she went to the loo, shoving her way through the clumps of people, it was almost as if she was giving off some kind of chemical or pheromone because people turned to look at her as she brushed past them.
Smith was still someplace else. I craned my neck and saw him talking to a couple of guys over by the entrance. He was jiggling about in time to the music even though he really couldn’t dance for shit.
And it was easy to get more and more mopey as I sat there surrounded by people who were so adept at just being themselves, while I had to make such a hash of it.
“Jeez, Isabel, you look like you’re about to slit your wrists,” Molly said as she climbed over my legs so she could sit back down. “I got you another drink.”
“Thanks.” I gave her a crooked smile and then sat there, racking my brain for something witty and interesting to say to her that didn’t involve lawsuits or ex-boyfriends or . . .
“Do you think the DJ’s cute?” she suddenly piped up, and then pinched my arm as I swiveled my head in the direction of his booth. “Don’t look!”
I’d got a glimpse of what seemed to be a standard issue hipster with mop-top hair. “He’s okay, I guess.”
“He always plays The Hormones. Well, original Hormones.” She sniffed. “Do you think that means something deep and significant about his feelings toward me?”
Just how much had she had to drink, anyway? “Well, maybe, or else he just really liked The Hormones when you were still with them.”
Molly gurgled with mirth. “I should so get over myself. It’s all about me!” She gave me a sly little nudge. “I’m gonna get that printed on a T-shirt.”
“Actually it’s all about me,” I countered, because it was, and Molly laughed so hard that she sprayed a very unamused Jane with a mouthful of vodka and cranberry.
“You wanna know the worst piece of advice I ever got?” Molly asked me, once she’d finished snorting. She was pressed up against me, her hot breath hitting the side of my face. I nodded, and she gave me a secretive smile. “The worst advice handed down to me by someone who should have known better was, just be yourself. Like, I could be anything else, huh?”
She glared at me and then shook her
head like I wasn’t the person she wanted to be glaring at. “Sorry,” she muttered, running a hand through her hair. “Vodka makes me maudlin, and then I start remembering all the reasons why my life is so shit sometimes.”
I wanted to say something incredibly insightful and empathetic but, as usual, I couldn’t think of a single thing. “ Vodka . . .” I echoed, staring at my own glass.
“I envy you,” she continued. “You haven’t had time to fuck things up too badly, and you and Smith are just getting together and that whole start of a relationship is so giddy and you’re just, like, completely into that person and everything they say is meaningful or pant-wettingly funny and you feel like you’re the only two people in the world and . . .” She tailed off and hugged herself as if she really wanted someone to do it for her. “God, I really miss that.”
“It’s not like that . . .” I started to say, because what she was describing sounded claustrophobic enough to press down hard on my ribs and choke me, but Smith was winding his way toward us, looking first at me and then at Molly as if we’d had nothing better to do than talk about him the whole time that he was gone. Which, not even.
There was this whole to and fro when he got back of too many people and not enough seats, and I found myself perched on his lap. Molly smirked knowingly, as if she’d just discovered how to split the atom, when Smith wound his arms around me and absentmindedly kissed the back of my neck.
He was always touching me after that. He talked to Molly and Jane and Jane’s not very pretty boyfriend, and I tried to listen but mostly I just felt his hands, so very warm, settling on the violin curve of my waist and raising a host of goose bumps as they traced a path along my arms.
Then on the way home, fingers clasped together, lagging behind the others because it was hard to walk fast with my head on his shoulder and that rock-steady arm around me.
By the time we got back to their place, it already smelled of tea and toast, and Smith finally had to let me go so he could eat four pieces with peanut butter and raspberry jam. His teeth crunched into it and I could have snatched it straight out of his mouth I was so hungry, but their kitchen was a cesspool of filth and I’d have probably gone down with one of about a thousand deadly diseases that can happen when soap and water are alien concepts. Just as well they lived in a second-floor flat because otherwise they’d be the party house for a colony of cockroaches.
I lasted say, ooooh, about five seconds before I gingerly opened the cupboard under the sink with my thumb and forefinger and pulled out a crusted bottle of dishwashing liquid.
“You don’t have to do that, Isabel,” Smith said through a mouthful of toast as I let the hot water run until it was scalding.
“Yeah, I really do.” I sighed feelingly, and I didn’t care that the two coolest girls I’d ever met plus an assorted group of people in ironic logo tees and cords were staring at the weird girl doing what looked like a year’s worth of washing up, and that was just a conservative estimate.
“She’s such a freak,” Jane stage-whispered and I heard a slap and an ‘Ow!’ before Molly stage-whispered back, “Ssssh! She’s doing the dishes, just shut up before she changes her mind.”
They didn’t have pan scourers or a scrubbing brush or a pair of rubber gloves so I was slightly handicapped, but after I’d done the washing up, it seemed kinda silly not to wash down the worktops or wipe the toast crumbs off the table, and by the time I’d finished, it looked better. It was no Flash commercial, but it was clean enough that I could shove two pieces of bread under the grill and not worry about my stomach lining being eaten by unfriendly bacteria.
“I guess I scared everyone off with my mad housekeeping skills,” I said to Smith, who was still sitting with his legs outstretchedso he didn’t get footprints on the newly washed floor.
“Wouldn’t say scared.” He smiled. “And I think Jane and Molly want to adopt you if you promise to do the washing up every day.”
I smiled back. So typical of me that I couldn’t make friends by being really good at doing Paris Hilton impersonations or sharing a passion for Bright Eyes. No, I had to do the dishes for them.
“Hey, turn that frown upside down,” Smith said, patting his thighs, and if I liked sleeping with him curled around me, I was starting to like sitting on his lap, too. I leaned back against his chest and let him rub little concentric circles on my nape with his thumb.
“I could do your living room next time,” I murmured, half to myself. “Before you get rats. Do you, like, ever throw anything away?”
“Housework would ruin my dangerous mystique,” he protested, and I snorted inelegantly before I had to get up and rescue my toast, which was just one second away from burning.
The flat was silent as we crept upstairs, holding hands and our shadows on the wall loomed large and long so I couldn’t recognize myself. But in Smith’s room with the red lightbulb in his bedside lamp turning everything pink, there was nothing to be frightened about.
Let'sGetLost
Let's Get Lost
15
I had eight hours of bone-melting, soft as lace sleep. It was as simple as putting my head on the pillow, dragging Smith’s arm around my waist and closing my eyes.
I didn’t suddenly get shocked awake by bad dreams that made the sweat drip off me, either. Instead the world came gently into focus, shapes and colors becoming sharper and brighter as I realized that the insistent beeping noise was my mobile phone.
Smith groaned, turned over, and huddled into the duvet as I groped on the floor for my bag and pulled out my furiously shrieking, vibrating phone.
Dot’s name was flashing on the screen and my finger hovered over the “off” button until Smith groaned again. “Just answer the bloody thing.”
I held it up to my ear cautiously.
“Dot, hi.” My perky, “no, you really didn’t wake me up” voice needed some work. “Why are you calling me so early?”
“I have to go to church in a minute,” she spat, because her parents were freaky religious types who expected her to save her virginity for her wedding night. Double whatever. “I’m in such a state. I need your Art History notes, so I’m going to come over now.”
It was a bad dream. Just had to be. Because I was sitting bolt upright in bed, waiting for the sweat to pop out any minute. “No! You can’t. No. Can you borrow someone else’s?”
Cue sorrowful snuffles and even without the puppy-dog eyes that usually went with them, I was squirming under the covers. “I can’t,” she whined. “Nancy and Ella are, like, terminally stupid and they’re not doing Art History. You’re it, Is. Please! You’re meant to be my friend, and if I don’t get those notes I can’t do my essay. So I’ll be around in ten minutes.”
There was no reasoning with Dot when she was getting hysterical. “You can’t,” I whimpered, trying to think of an excuse that would stop her turning up on my doorstep when Smith snuck his head out from under the quilt.
“Do you have to talk so loud?” he demanded plaintively. “This is meant to be the day of rest.”
“Ssssh, go back to sleep,” I soothed, trying to drop my voice so low that Dot couldn’t hear.
“Who’s that? Is that Felix? Didn’t sound like him.” I could hear the cogs, or maybe that should have been cog, slowly whirring. “I know why you don’t want me to come around! You’re not there. Oh, my God, where are you and who are you with?”
“Where else would I be?” I hedged, trying desperately to play for enough time to get dressed, run back to my house, and be there to give her my Art History notes. There was never a handy temporal fold around when you need one.
“You always get pissy when anyone else tries to answer a question with another question,” Dot said waspishly. Religion always puts her in a fiendishly bad mood. “Boy, am I glad that I didn’t ring your house first . . .” She tailed off meaningfully, and she must have grown a pair since Friday when I’d made her cry by relentlessly mocking her new shoes.
“I’m not there,�
� I prevaricated, looking around the room for some divine inspiration and meeting Smith’s sleep-befuddled gaze instead.
“Tell whoever it is to piss off,” he suggested helpfully. “I’m still aiming to have a lie in.”
There was an outraged gasp from the phone. “You’re with a boy!” she deduced with the logic that had put her in the top twenty percentile of her class. “I don’t believe it! You spent the night with A BOY! Who is he?”
“No one,” I said automatically. “It’s just the TV.”
“Yeah, right,” she practically crowed. I could hear her mother shouting in the background. They were probably late for their weekly spot of God-bothering. “I have to go. I’m going to come around after church and then you’re going to tell me everything.”
“But . . .”
“Everything,” she repeated in a distinctly unDot-like way. “I can’t believe you, Is. Always the quiet ones.”
Let's Get Lost Page 14