Lou Out of Luck

by Nat Luurtsema

  “Camilla.” Mr Peters is looking weary.

  Camilla throws her hands in the air, like, Why are you making this difficult? “Get your parents to drive you, get a cab,” she says to Sasha, without bothering to turn her head to look at her.

  Mr Peters is shaking his head. “You can’t expect the whole year group to get cabs both ways. You’ll need to find money in the budget for coaches.”

  Cammie is scathing. “Coaches aren’t allowed at the Rothermere. It’s not that sort of place.” She seems to think that’s the end of the discussion, but Mr Peters does not.

  “Then you need to rethink your venue, Cammie. This prom is for everyone, not just people who can travel ten miles on a whim.”

  Hannah is staring out of the window. Her jaw is flexing and I think she’s chewing on her brace.

  Sasha puts her hand up again; she seems to be designated spokesperson for the class. She’s probably fearless because she has a very large brother in sixth form. “OK. How about entertainment?”

  “Are you wondering how they’re going to get there?” asks Melia, sarcastically, and there’s some snickering.

  “I’m wondering if they exist, Melia. Let’s finesse the details later.”

  HAHAHA! (I laugh inside my head.) The rest of the class does it out loud.

  “We’re still auditioning,” says Cammie, smoothly.

  “My cousin? He’s in a band so we have a back-up. He says he’s happy to help.” Hannah says, shyly.

  “Excellent.” Mr Peters is grateful for any good news.

  “No, it sounds excellent when you say your cousin’s in a band,” Cammie snaps. “Then you find out it’s a Christian rock band and they sing about the Lamb of God.”

  “Camilla,” Mr Peters warns.

  “After you’ve travelled out of town to see them play at a gig which turns out to be in a church,” adds Melia, bitterly.

  “That’s awful,” I say, sincerely. “How far did you have to travel? Five miles, ten?”

  At this point, the class starts hooting with laughter again. I can’t believe I said that, the words were out of my mouth before I knew it. I blame Uliol. I’m dangerous now I can think on my feet. “I’d hate to travel a twenty-mile round trip to something rubbish,” I hear myself adding and the room explodes with a fresh gale of laughter. My ears flush hot and I have to hide a pleased smile. I don’t dare look in Hannah’s direction.

  Mr Peters gestures with his hands to bring the class under control and is about to speak when Cammie, as ever, gets the last word. “And it’s fancy dress. Nu-Grunge and bling. If you don’t look tight, you’re not coming in.” She looks right at me, knowing I have never looked tight in my life.

  “Do you think that instead of working on rhymes, you should’ve focused more on organizing the prom?” comes a fake concerned voice from the back of the room. We’re all getting witty now. Uliol would love this. Next to me Dermot shakes with quiet laughter and poor Mr Peters flaps a copy of Beloved, trying to bring his English class under control.

  WORRY DIARY

  Spotted Dad yesterday, hurrying into town carrying a huge grip bag. Mysterious.

  We’ll have to visit Dad in prison every weekend – I’ll never see Gabe and I won’t get to go to Perf Class any more.

  Just realized I like Perf Class. I’m terminally uncool.

  When I get home from school, I find the house strangely quiet. I hang my coat up and see Lavender’s duffel coat already hanging there. “Laaaav!” I yell up the stairs but no reply. Her coat is sticky. I feel down the arms and there are gross flecks on it.

  I think I’m looking at a choice combination of hair wax, spit and gum. This is something you learn from being friends with Dermot: Things Bullies Like to Flick at You. In a moment of sisterly tenderness, I take Lav’s coat into the kitchen and start to sponge off the nasty bits. It’s dark in the kitchen and as I look out of the window, I can see Dad’s back in his shed, working on something. What is it? Crime homework?

  You can always tell when someone’s looking at you. Dad’s head bobs up at the shed window and he gives me a little wave, which I return with soapy fingers. He turns off the light in his shed, secures the three locks and comes into the house.

  “What did you spill on your sister’s coat?”

  “Nothing. I … er… Foundation,” I say, quickly. God, I’ve NEVER had to do so much thinking on my feet.

  “Get it cleaned up, quick!” he says, anxiously.

  “Why?”

  “She’ll kill you.”

  “She will?”

  “Louise. The sister you know and love is gone. A monster has taken her place.”

  “Not being a teeny bit dramatic?”

  “Nope. After Roman dropped her off this evening, I heard thwacking.”

  “Thwacking?”

  “I think that’s the word. She had her umbrella out and was thwacking away at our bushes in the front garden. It’s not funny!”

  “It’s a bit funny. What did the bushes ever do to her?”

  “The neighbours were staring. She was whacking chunks out of the lavender bush.”

  I keep scrubbing at the coat.

  “Did you say something to her, Dad?”

  “No. I stayed in the back garden until she’d gone in, then when she went to her room, I hid her umbrella.”

  “You’re a hero. Where’s Mum?”

  “She’s helping Nicky at the salon. She’s short-staffed and offered to pay her, for once.”

  Dad grabs Lav’s coat off me and takes over scrubbing.

  “I’m gonna go see Lav.” I leave him to it.

  “Good luck.”

  I’d usually barge into Lav’s room but now I’m hesitating outside with my hand on the doorknob. I’m sure Dad is exaggerating but I suddenly feel nervous about going in. Sometimes Lav feels a lot more than a year older than me, and now is one of those times. I open her door a crack and slide my nose around it, then slowly more of my face. She’s sitting on her bed surrounded by homework.

  “All right?”

  “Pffft,” she says non-committally.

  I sit on her bed, knocking several textbooks off and giving her my best listening face. To my surprise, she opens up a bit.

  “My stupid friends. They think they’re protecting me! I can’t wait for this competition to be over, someone else to win and everything to go back to normal.”

  “Huh,” I say.

  We sit in a heavy silence for a while. Then she finally gives in. “What, Lou? What does huh mean?”

  “You might win?”

  “It’s a public vote. You have to promote it to get people voting and I haven’t.”

  “Huh.”

  I catch a look off her and say, “No, nothing! Ignore me!” It’s not nothing, but I don’t want to stress her out any more. It’s just that I was on Roman’s Facebook page earlier and he is a one-man PR team, drumming up support and votes. He’s lucky Lav’s been avoiding social media lately.

  I go into my room and lie down on my bed. I should do my homework but my arms and legs feel rubbery at the thought of work.

  I’ll have a small nap, five minutes. Ten, at most…

  An hour later, Mum pops her head around the door.

  “When did you get back?” I ask. “And why is your head stripy?”

  “It’s not, is it?” Mum looks horrified and my sleepy brain registers that only Evil Grandma would think that a good thing to say aloud.

  “No, no!” I assure her. “Probably just the dim light.”

  She touches her hair and looks unconvinced. “Anyway, come down for dinner. It’s soup.’”

  Lav joins us at the kitchen table. Dad eyes her suspiciously, as if expecting her to start thwacking things again.

  “It is stripy, isn’t it?” says Mum, touching her hair. I shake my head but Lav is nodding, so I give up.

  “Nicky said she’d give me highlights and then halfway through said she wouldn’t charge me—”

  “I should think not!
” Now Dad’s listening.

  “She just wouldn’t pay me for the day’s work, and that would even out, financially.”

  “Oh Mum…”

  “And I got upset, I said I need the money, and we argued a bit, and she finally saw my point of view.”

  “Good! Too right!” we all say, indignant on Mum’s behalf.

  “So I got paid, but we’d lost track of time arguing, so the bleach had been on my hair too long. And now I look like a skunk.”

  We stare at her. I’m struggling to think what to say, because she’s nailed it. She has skunk hair.

  “The prettiest skunk in all the world,” Dad says finally, leaning in for a kiss. Mum smiles and I refrain from giving that the retching noise it deserves.

  Now look, I like ketchup, but this is a three-bottle pack from the pound shop and it smells remarkably vinegary. Plus, I’ve never held a fistful of it before.

  “It’s not going to stain, is it?” Mum asks in muffled tones from under her ketchup-slathered hair.

  “You or the bath?” Lav asks.

  “Both!” Mum snaps. “And will you get off your phone!”

  Lav looks wounded by this injustice. “I am googling how this works, thank you. You cover your hair in ketchup, wrap it in cling film and leave it for an hour.”

  “And it’ll make me less skunky?” Mum asks.

  “It’ll take the brassiness out of the bleached— Yes,” Lav interrupts herself to keep it simple. “It’ll make you less skunky.”

  “I still think you look pretty,” says Dad absent-mindedly. He’s sitting on the toilet (as a chair, thankfully), also on his phone, licking ketchup off his fingers.

  “What are you watching?” Mum asks.

  “Kittens fighting their reflection,” says Dad, gently putting his phone under Mum’s curtain of hair.

  Lav and I roll our eyes. What would she do without us? All Dad would do is eat the excess ketchup and google kittens.

  WORRY DIARY

  Nothing new – hurray!

  LITERALLY NONE of the old worries have been resolved – boo.

  I’m just cleaning my teeth when there’s a banging on the bathroom door.

  “Lou, out!” Mum shouts and I open the door to her. She tumbles into the room and hops into the shower.

  “Don’t panic,” I tell her as she whisks the shower curtain across. “You won’t miss anything on TV, with the plus one channels.”

  “Oh, ha ha,” she says. “Your dad and I are due at the Jobcentre in forty minutes. If you’re late, they sanction you.”

  “What does sanction mean?”

  “Cut your benefits off,” Dad puffs at me as he squeezes into the bathroom to clean his teeth and neaten his hair. “And we’re down to half a cauliflower for dinner.”

  “That sounds better than a whole one, tbh.”

  “I hope we don’t get that horrible woman again,” Mum snarks from the shower. “She says I need to ‘think outside the box’ with my job goals. I’m a teacher! She acts like I do something weird and niche like juggling.”

  “She’ll be glad to see you’re dipping a toe in hairdressing,” says Dad.

  Mum laughs. “Now, hairdressing … that’s a profession people will always need.”

  “No, you’re doing it wrong,” Dad jumps in with an even more prim, clipped accent. “Hairdressing is an ‘all-weather’ line of work as I like to call it. Not like teaching, which is a more vulnerable vocation in the current climate.”

  I leave them to it, because there is nothing more boring than listening to people do impressions of someone you’ve never met.

  I open the front door to see if Aggy is coming and, to my surprise, the van is sitting demurely at the end of the drive. Aggy gives me a smug wave as I jog down to join them.

  “Good luck, Mum and Dad!” I yell over my shoulder. “What’s this?” I ask as I climb up next to Dermot.

  “I sold a table for seven hundred quid, picked it up for next to nothing!” Aggy tells me. “So I thought I’d treat us all and get the van serviced. Listen!”

  She turns on the engine and it purrs into life. Like a tiger, we agree, and ride to school feeling like royalty, especially as Aggy’s thumb is better so she’s changing her own gears now.

  Dermot tells me as we head to school that he and Aggy often finds loads of designer clothes in her clearances – he could help me find something for prom? I look down at his trousers, which seem to be made of wetsuit material. Then I look from his gigantic hobnailed boots to his garishly patterned mohair cardigan and his tie made of plastic. I do a lot of looking, as I think that makes my point more clearly than having to say it.

  “I won’t dress you in anything I would wear,” he says good-humouredly. “I’ll find you something boring if you like.”

  “Yes, please!” I say, relieved. “Like maybe dark blue? Plain dark blue?”

  He sighs dramatically. “Fine.”

  We arrive at our form room to find Hannah sitting at our shared desk again, so I guess the Prom Committee haven’t kissed and made up yet.

  Mr Peters closes the door behind us and turns to the class. “Nice to see you back, Nicole,” he says. “I trust you’re feeling better?”

  “Yah, it was like one of those twenty-four-hour things,” she says, giving Melia a smirk that she doesn’t return. Nicole can be so dense. She faked an illness to leave her friends in the lurch and then expects them to high-five her for it later? Her smile flickers and fades.

  “Right, well. I wanted to talk to you all about bullying on social media. It’s come to the school’s attention that there’s been a lot of … activity … online around a modelling competition?”

  All eyes in the class swivel to look at me. It’s not a nice feeling and I examine my fingernails with interest. These cuticles need pushing back and there’s no time like the present!

  “I understand that there are two local finalists in the competition, one is from this school and one is the –” Mr Peters looks up, as if he’s trying to remember – “the girlfriend of a cousin of someone’s auntie’s dog-manicurist.”

  Everyone stares at him blankly. Dermot grins. Mr Peters points at him. “Thank you, Dermot. If it wasn’t for you, I’d start to doubt my wit. God forbid. The point is, one of the other finalists has a tenuous relationship to someone else at the school and I understand that feelings are running high. Can you just do me a favour, guys? I’m a nice teacher, aren’t I? Lenient on punctuality, turning a blind eye to nose rings – yes, Sasha, I have noticed – listening to your myriad problems… In return, can you just not get involved in this? It’s all getting a bit silly, as I think we saw in the canteen the other day.”

  “You got it, Mr Peters,” says Sasha and there’s a murmur of agreement. I imagine this talk is going on in all the other classrooms and feel grateful that school’s stepping in. I hope this makes Lav’s life a little easier. It’s just a couple more weeks till they announce the winner and then everything should calm down.

  “Thank you,” he says. “I mean it. I’ll be looking online, and if I get any sense of bullying behaviour from anyone in my form, I’ll be handing out a whole term of detention… And you won’t be able to go to prom,” he says as an afterthought. I see Cammie bristle. Clearly Mr Peters doesn’t think banning someone from prom is much of a punishment. I’m inclined to agree with him.

  Hannah makes a beeline for Dermot and me at breaktime. She looks desperate to get away from the other three, but keeps getting dragged into argumentative huddles. Cammie is always grabbing her friends, pushing and pulling them around with elegant, slender hands that are bizarrely strong. Melia and Nicole must be covered in tiny bruises. Hannah isn’t taking her intimidation any more, though. I hear her say, “Stop hissing at me, Cammie! You’re spitting in my mouth.”

  Obviously, it’s nice to have my friend back but I am staying well out of this drama. I’ve had enough this term, especially with Lavender’s problems on top. I see her at lunchtime, sitting with Roman, huddled in
a massive hoodie. Roman on the other hand, is chatting away animatedly, trying to get her to look at something he’s discreetly showing her on his phone. (Seriously, no one pays attention to the phone ban any more – they’re going to have to start ripping them out of our hands at the school gates.)

  I don’t usually go and chat to them at lunchtime. I don’t want Ro to think I’m trying to form some kind of gang of the four of us. But I wander over, to see if I can inject some cheeriness.

  “What up, dawgs?” I greet them breezily. Lav doesn’t look up, Ro frowns at me like I’m mad and a girl I don’t know laughs at me. Thanks, guys.

  Nevertheless, I persist.

  “Everything OK?” I ask.

  “Yeah.” Ro looks his usual cocky self. “Less than two weeks to go.”

  “To the—”

  “The announcement of the winner?” He nods at Lav. “I think she’s got a great chance. She’s easily the hottest of the lot.”

  “The lot?” Lav finally looks up. Yeah, I’m not loving this tone either. “I’m not a prize cow,” she snaps at him.

  Ro looks baffled, so I expand.

  “In a cow competition?” I say. “And you’re not her farmer,” I add helpfully.

  “I have no idea what’s wrong with either of you,” says Ro, laughing. “This is the most exciting thing to happen to us ever. Can you stop being so sour about it?”

  Lav says nothing, just looks sour.

  “By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask, what are you going to wear to the ceremony?” Ro asks and Lav looks panicked.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Do we have to go?”

  He ignores her question. “That’s cool,” he says, “I’m talking to some brands.”

  “Bran? Bran Flakes?” I ask and he just shakes his head slowly at me as if he doesn’t have time to explain to Idiot McThick. I was trying to lighten the mood, sor-ree.

  “Don’t try and get free stuff, it’s embarrassing,” Lav tells him.

  “No, it’s an opportunity,” he corrects her. “Who wouldn’t want to dress the winner of a national modelling competition? They’d PAY for a chance like that. I’ll make some calls now. See you in class.” And he gives Lav a kiss and leaves us to it. She looks ready to hit him. Or anything near by. So I back away too.