And the piss-taking at school had been on the level of:
“All right, Noah? How much would your mum charge for a private dance?”
And:
“Hey, Noah? Say my name! Go on, say my name!”
And even:
“Oi, Noah?! You got any lemonade? Yeah, I bet you do. I bet there’s a lot of lemonade at your house!”
It had been the most humiliating day ever. Worse than the time his mum loudly accused him of “playing with himself” as they queued for chicken in a packed KFC, and he wasn’t even— SOMETIMES THINGS JUST NEED READJUSTING, OK?! Things being as they were, Noah decided he was now ninety-eight per cent certain God didn’t exist. God was supposed to reward the good and punish the bad; that’s how Noah’d always understood it to work. But he hadn’t been bad. Not bad in the sense of being an evil despot doing war crimes, anyway. The list of bad things he’d done was decidedly lame. In fact, the top three entries would be:
1)Pocketing a spare condom from a PSHE class, just in case he got lucky (obviously now well past its expiry date).
2)Sabotaging Penelope Carter’s apple crumble in Food Technology by moving her oven dial when she wasn’t looking, causing her crumble topping to burn and thereby securing his success in the Best Apple Crumble Contest in Year Eight.
3)Forging several excuse notes from his mum during football in the cold months (which was totally fair to do when the teacher was wearing ten layers of weatherproof, fur-lined survival kit you could climb Everest in, and you only had on thin nylon shorts and a threadbare T-shirt. It was a matter of human rights, right?!).
So not really all that bad in the scheme of things. Surely an all-powerful being would cut you a bit of slack at some point?
But apparently not.
“How ya’ doin’, No-ah?” came the mock-sultry voice.
Jess Jackson flicked back her dyed-blonde hair, smiled maliciously and eased herself into the empty seat next to him. Noah froze in horror. She was so close he could smell her fake tan and Justin Bieber perfume. All the lads fancied Jess. Every inch of her was manicured, primped and preened, with dark, heavy eye make-up and scary, severe eyebrows. The other boys seemed to like that, but Noah just thought she looked like a demented clown from a horror film. With her above-the-knee skirt she also blatantly flouted the uniform rules in a completely unacceptable way. Jess was trouble. In Year Five she took the class hamster home for Easter – and it came back dead. In Year Seven she threw a KitKat at a swan on a geography field trip – provoking it to attack a nearby toddler. In Year Eight she clearly faked a seizure after an assembly about epilepsy but somehow managed to get off school anyway; Year Nine, stole a horse; Year Ten, threw a drumstick at Mrs Butcher and the police were called. And this was just the stuff Noah knew about.
“What do you want, Jess?” He stared down at his desk, doing his best to sound strong and in control.
“I was wondering, does your mum do other acts as well as Beyoncé?”
“No.”
“Does she do Miley Cyrus?”
“No.”
“Does she twerk, Noah? Does she twerk it all night long?”
“No, she does not.”
Straight answers. Direct. Give her nothing.
“You’ve gone bright red. Is it because you’re getting turned on, thinking about your twerking mum?”
He swallowed hard. Ignore her. Don’t rise to it.
“Is everyone getting on with their work?” Miss Palmer said, looking over. “Jess?”
“I’m just liaising with Noah, miss, about one of the questions, but he doesn’t know the answer! Are you sure he should be top set for everything?”
“Piss off!” Noah hissed. How dare this utter clod question his hard-won academic success!
“Ooh, Noah, look how mad you getting!”
He flinched. “It’s you’re. Look how mad you’re getting!”
There was nothing more irritating to him than incorrect grammar, but Jess either didn’t understand or was deliberately winding him up more. “Not me who is angry, Noah! You crazy man!”
“Shut up!”
“You so vexed!”
“YOU’RE!”
“You bitter! You salty! You—”
“Shut up, just SHUT UP!” he shouted.
Silence. The entire class stopped what they were doing and looked at him. Miss Palmer crossed her arms and gave him a disapproving stare.
He felt the blood drain from his cheeks. He’d let Jess get to him. You didn’t answer back to people like her. Better just to take it and not give them bait. When would he learn?
“Wanker,” Jess said, getting up abruptly so the chair fell backwards. “Nice boner.”
On the bright side, having to see your own mum in a leotard did at least put a stop to any boy-type issues. “I haven’t got…”
“You so have. Everyone! Noah’s got a boner ’cause he’s thinking about his pop star mum!” she shouted, to cheers from the rest of the class.
“Jess! Enough!” shouted Miss Palmer.
Jess sauntered off in the direction of her desk as the noise subsided. He clenched his jaw and seriously considered throwing his pencil down really hard, or maybe snapping it in half or something. Only it was a freshly sharpened Paper Mate Mirado Black Warrior with classic medium-firm lead and pressure-bonded cedar wood that encased the ultra-smooth core. He wasn’t prepared to sacrifice premium stationery for her.
He sighed. He’d never done anything to Jess. Why couldn’t she just get on with her own pointless life and he would get on with his? Why did the day have to get worse and worse? He snuck a look across the room to see if Sophie was also joining in the fun at his expense.
No.
Of course she wasn’t. Because Sophie was lovely and all-round A-star fantastic and wouldn’t do something like that. She was just quietly finishing her worksheet – with all the correct answers and with perfect handwriting, Noah guessed. Perfect Sophie. Perfect, intelligent, hard-working-but-still-popular-not-that-she-cared-about-popularity Sophie.
If only he could be just a bit more like her.
Why had he been dealt such bad cards?
Damn it. He was now ninety-eight-point-five per cent certain God didn’t exist. Ninety-eight-point-five per cent certain there couldn’t possibly be such a miserably vicious and malignant force at work. Life wasn’t a miracle courtesy of some higher power; it was just bad luck.
And yet…
What if, in fact, his near-atheism had angered a very real and vengeful God, who was now determined to make life hell for this apostate? What then?
Well, God, if you do exist, he thought, this is it. This is your final chance. You have a literally one-point-five per cent window in which to prove yourself to me. Make something good happen. Just one thing. Prove it. Prove it by the time the bell rings at the end of the lesson and I might reconsider.
“Right, everyone!” Miss Palmer began, wearily moving to the front of the class.
Noah looked up, point-blank refusing to give his usual encouraging smile because Miss Palmer had completely failed to reprimand Jess in an acceptable way.
“Listen up; here’s what I want you all to do over the weekend ready for Monday’s lesson…”
“Monday?!” said Jess, looking up from where she was filing her nails.
“Yes, Monday. I’m going to put you in groups of three and assign you the roles of either being ‘for’ or ‘against’ the building of a new fictional supermarket in Little Fobbing. You’re going to imagine that we’re having a big town council meeting, and you’ve got to present your views. Everyone understand?”
There were general discontented murmurs from the cool kids, who didn’t want their weekend of underage drinking and being popular to be put in jeopardy. Noah got his best fountain pen out and selected a fresh page of his homework journal, ready to make notes. There would be time for fun when he was a millionaire. And that would be fine. Really, it would.
“Right!” Miss Palmer survey
ed the room, deciding on the groups. “Jess with Jordan and Tom… Ella and Louise with Eric…”
“Jesus Christ…” muttered Ella.
“Sophie, you can go with…”
Noah held his breath and looked up like an enthusiastic meerkat, hoping to catch Miss Palmer’s eye and make her choose him. Being in a group with Sophie might solve everything! Thanks to his mum, his social status was in negative balance, but Sophie would help raise it back up again; her enigmatic coolness would rub off on him! Not only that, she was an intellectual match so she would play an equal part in the project and not make him do all the work whilst taking all the credit herself.
“You can be with Jon and Lauren…”
Noah sank back down. Ninety-nine-point-nine-four per cent. What was the point? Things were terrible, and they were always going to be terrible. He wallowed in misery whilst Miss Palmer rattled through the rest of the class, the percentage points of his atheist certainty going up like the display on a stopwatch. Ninety-nine-point-nine-five per cent. Ninety-nine-point-ninety-six per cent. The All-Powerful Being just had the perfect opportunity to prove his existence and had blown it.
He realized only when Miss Palmer started recapping exactly what the exercise involved that he didn’t have a group at all, never mind one with the best girl in the class in it. Noah panicked. Everyone else had a group. Why had he been left out? He raised his hand.
“I’ll answer questions at the end, Noah.”
Transparently, that would be too late. If it waited until the end, the bell would ring and everyone would be leaving the room, so he wouldn’t be assigned to a group in time. He would have to do the exercise all by himself, with no help. That might mean he wouldn’t get top marks. Intolerable! Ninety-nine-point-nine-seven per cent.
“Noah’s still got his hand up!” Jess said, with relish.
“I will answer questions at the end!”
Ninety-nine-point-nine-eight per cent.
“Maybe he needs the toilet, miss,” suggested Ella.
Oh, here we go! Noah thought, knowing damn well what was coming.
“He might piss himself again, miss, like he did on the Year Eight trip to the London Dungeon,” Jess added.
“What is it, Noah?” Miss Palmer sighed.
Ninety-nine-point-nine-nine per cent. He lowered his arm. “I haven’t got a group, miss,” he muttered.
“Right. Well, why didn’t you say?”
“Nobody’s gonna want to go with him,” Jess said.
The bell rang. That was it. The end of the lesson. The window of opportunity for the All-Powerful Being to prove himself had closed. A hundred per cent. It was over.
And then the clouds parted, angels sang, a blinding light shone down as the earth quaked and a million cherubs shot arrows of bliss into the joyful air … and the miracle to end all miracles occurred.
CHAPTER THREE
“Actually, I’ll go with Noah.” It was Sophie. She had volunteered herself to work with him. But seriously, WHAT?!
“Great. This is for first band on Monday!” Miss Palmer shouted, barely audible above the din.
Noah stared down hard at his desk, unable to stop his right leg jiggling up and down. He didn’t dare look at Sophie. He didn’t dare do anything except sit there, motionless, in case it was all suddenly taken away from him, as quickly and easily as it had been given. This was crazy. Why would she want to work with him? Why would she put her coolness at risk by actually offering to work with him, rather than being reluctantly forced by the teacher?
“Hi, Noah.”
It was her. It was Sophie. She was standing over him. Speaking words. Oh God.
“Do you want to arrange a time to meet, then?”
Noah looked at her blankly. “You want to meet up?”
“Yes.”
“With me?”
“We’re working together for the presentation.”
“Right. Yes. Of course.”
He couldn’t believe it. She was asking to meet up with him. His mind spun: he’d wear his blue hoody, he looked OK in that. And he would lather himself in Lynx Africa. He had it on good authority that girls loved that smell. If his mum lent him some cash, he could take her to the cafe. Buy her a milkshake. That’s what people did when they met up, wasn’t it? He was pretty sure he’d seen that type of thing on the telly, before they…
“Shall we just go back to your place now and do it?” Sophie suggested.
He looked back at her, wide-eyed. Surely she didn’t mean … not it? Not that? Surely? Not so soon… He cleared his throat. “When you say do it, I mean… What do you mean?”
“Do the homework,” she continued, patiently. “Then we don’t have to worry about it all weekend.”
“Yes, I see. Good.” That was excellent news. He would hate to be rushed into some sort of sexual liaison. “But … now, did you say?”
“Yes.”
“At my house?”
“It’s just my dad’s in and he’ll only be annoying. You know how it is with parents.”
Did he ever. “Yeah…” He managed to nod. But now? Bloody now?! He was in his school uniform, the house was a tip, he knew there wasn’t any Coke or anything nice to drink in the fridge and his room was littered with dirty pants and used tissues and other stuff he didn’t want her to see. No. “Now” was not good. “Now” was a disaster. “Now” was…
“Now’s cool,” said Noah. “Now … is really great.”
She gave him a little smile. This was a good turn of events. He may still have been the butt of jokes, but as they walked along the corridor and out into the yard, at least nobody said anything to his face. They whispered. They may have stared for a bit too long. And yes, they may have performed an entire Beyoncé routine, which had clearly taken a considerable amount of time to put together, and included choreographed backing dancers from Year Seven, but nobody said anything to his actual face.
Harry was waiting as usual by the little wall near the gates, lazily chewing some gum whilst he watched Noah and Sophie approach.
“All right, Harry?” said Noah, doing his best to play things cool. “You know Sophie, right?”
“Yes, I can easily remember everyone we’ve grown up with. Hey, Soph. How you doing?”
“Good, thanks, Harry. Feel like we’ve never really hung out, have we?”
Harry shrugged. “We should fix that.”
“We should.”
How was Harry able to be all natural and flowing with his conversation? How did he suddenly manage to come across as some sort of all-American high school hero, all cool and good with the ladies, whilst Noah was clearly showing himself to be some sort of blabbering child?
He decided to take control. “Anyway … Sophie and I are working on a project for geography, so we’re going to my house now to finish it ’cause it’s due on Monday, so…”
“So, you’re blowing me off?” Harry said.
“I’m … what? What am I doing to you?”
“Blowing me off.”
Noah went red. It all sounded terribly sexual and awkward, but they were with Sophie, and she was cool and zeitgeisty and stuff, so he supposed he should indeed make an effort with modern Americanized language, even if it drove him completely crazy. “Erm – well, I do need to blow you off, if that’s OK, Harry, because Sophie and I are just going home now to do this thing. But then we’ll blow each other off, so after that maybe I’ll see if you’re about?”
“Whatever, that’s cool.”
Harry was being nonchalant about it all, but Noah knew this was a major deal, and he felt terrible. This would be the first time they hadn’t hung out after school together. First time since Year Seven. “I’ll make it up to you, Harry.”
“Look, guys,” Sophie said, holding up her hands, “we could totally do this another time. I mean, now would have been good, but if you’ve already got plans…”
“No!” the boys chorused.
Sophie looked at Harry and then at Noah. “Right. Fine.
Well, shall we all walk in the general direction together anyway?”
Noah locked eyes with Harry, sending an important subliminal message. A message that read I am with Sophie. This is important. It’s my chance to impress.
“Actually, I gotta see some peeps,” Harry said, breaking eye contact.
“OK, great.” Noah nodded. “Computer club?”
“No,” said Harry.
“Oh? Then … then who?”
“Noah, will you just, you know, go?” Harry suggested, popping another piece of gum in his mouth. Now he was chewing two pieces of gum. That was serious rebellion. Gum was not permitted on school premises. Harry stood up. “I’ll catch you later. Good luck!” and he winked. Harry winked.
Noah looked at him aghast. “What do you mean?!” he squealed. “What do you mean, ‘good luck’? Why would I need luck? Nothing’s happening, everything’s normal! It’s not a date!” He turned to Sophie in an attempt at damage limitation. “It’s not, Sophie, honest – I don’t know what he’s on about!”
“I think he just meant with the geography project,” Sophie offered.
“What?”
Harry shrugged again. He was shrugging a lot. And chewing gum a lot. What did this mean? “Exactly. Good luck with the project. What did you think I meant?”
“But you winked when you said it, so it sounded like you meant…”
“Like I meant ‘goodbye’, maybe?”
“No, but winking can sometimes mean that the thing you’re talking about is really, like … sex … stuff.”
“WHAT?!” Harry and Sophie both chorused.
Noah gulped. He’d got it all badly wrong. He wanted to bang his head against the brick wall. Why are you such a social disaster? Why are you not locked away to save everyone else’s embarrassment? He brazened it out, because he didn’t want to draw any more attention to fact he was a TOTAL GORMLESS MUPPET. “Anyway. Good. I see what you meant now. Of course. That’s fine. Good luck with the geography project. Thank you.”
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