Lottie Biggs is (Not) Desperate

by Hayley Long

  I looked at Goose, surprised. I was also extremely chuffed too, if I’m honest. Goose has been making music for as long as I’ve known her, which is almost an entire year now, and not once has she ever asked me to join in on any of her musical projects.

  ‘Wow . . . yeah,’ I said. ‘But what’s happened to Goose McKenzie and the Tribe of Pixies?’ I asked. ‘I thought you were getting loads of interest from record companies.’

  Goose pulled a face. ‘Well . . . yeah, we were. Definitely. But I wanted to go in a different artistic direction. And besides, I don’t want to be in a band with my baby brothers any more.’

  Goose’s brothers are called Bill and James. They’re in Year 9 and, being twins, there are two of them. Until very recently, they were cute midgets but when I saw them the other day, they’d both grown about thirty centimetres and developed croaky voices.

  I said, ‘I totally want to be in your band, Goose. The only potential hitch is that I can’t actually play any musical instruments. And I can’t sing.’

  Goose said, ‘No, but you can shout in an artistic and interesting way, can’t you? And maybe you could write some lyrics?’

  And that was when I made my mistake. I delved into my bag and took out the piece of paper which had my sonnet to Gareth Stingecombe on it. I’d been planning to show it to my English teacher, Mr Wood. I think he’s the sort of person who would be impressed by its charm and subtlety. He’s a bit old and he can be fairly boring sometimes, but I respect his opinion on these matters because he gave me an A for my English coursework.

  ‘You’re right – I reckon I could write song lyrics,’ I said to Goose. ‘I wrote this poem when I woke up this morning and it only took me three hours.’

  Goose stopped walking and looked at me. ‘Three hours! What time did you get up?’

  I frowned. It already seemed like such a long time ago, I couldn’t actually remember.

  In a voice that sounded genuinely alarmed, Goose said, ‘Lottie, you’re not getting ill again, are you?’

  ‘No, of course I’m not,’ I said. ‘I’m surfing a wave on the Sea of Tranquillity but I can’t expect to reach the shore immediately, can I?’

  Goose looked at me blankly then took the piece of paper from my hand. I held my breath while she read it.

  After a minute or two, she said, ‘It’s really good, Lottie. It’s got a proper rhyme scheme and everything.’

  This made me feel incredibly honoured and proud. Goose is an extremely gifted poet herself so she knows what she’s talking about. Usually.

  I said, ‘Yeah, and it’s got ten beats per line and plenty of pointless unanswerable questions so it’s a proper sonnet exactly like what Shakespeare would have written. I’m thinking of showing it to Mr Wood.’

  Goose bit her lip for a second and then said, ‘Hmmm.’ And then she just said nothing.

  My footsteps slowed right down and I said, ‘What does that mean?’

  Goose looked a bit shifty and said, ‘What does what mean?’

  ‘Hmmm,’ I said. ‘What does Hmmm mean?’

  Goose looked even shiftier and bit her lip again. Finally, after a colossal pause, she sighed and said, ‘Well, it’s just . . . I wouldn’t show it to Mr Wood if I were you.’ And then she added, ‘And whatever you do, I definitely would NEVER EVER show it to Gareth Stingecombe.’

  I frowned. And then really quickly and in a blatantly annoyed voice, I said, ‘I wasn’t actually planning to show it to him.’ This is true. Even though me and Gareth have been going out for six entire weeks, I still think it’s too early to expose him to my artistic talents. He might be freaked out by my cleverness and dump me. I couldn’t be bothered to explain all this to Goose though, so instead I just said, ‘But what’s wrong with it anyway?’

  Goose said, ‘I’m not being funny, Lotts, but it makes you sound like a stalker.’

  This annoyed me a LOT. NO WAY am I a stalker. Nor have I EVER had any stalkerish tendencies. Goose, on the other hand, once followed Neil Adam all around Freezer World. Apparently, he bought a maxi-bag of mixed vegetables and a box of eighteen fish fingers.

  Before I could remind her of this, Goose said, ‘Anyway, I thought you hated poetry.’

  I came to a complete halt on the pavement. Goose stopped too.

  ‘I used to hate poetry,’ I said, ‘but that was before I fully understood its power.’

  Goose smirked. ‘Its power?’

  I closed my eyes and did a big dramatic pause. And then, in my best ever intellectual voice, I said, ‘One day, Gail . . . one day, you will read a piece of poetry and it will speak directly to your heart and then you will be so moved with emotion that you will cherish that poem always and then, Gail, you will understand the power of poetry. Trust me.’

  I opened my eyes and started walking towards school again, secretly feeling very pleased with myself. I learned these words off by heart after Mr Wood said them to me last term. I think they sound dead clever and this moment provided the perfect occasion to use them. Also, I’d used Goose’s real name and I know that really winds her up.

  Goose’s eyes went a bit narrow. Then she handed my sonnet back to me and said, ‘OK, Charlotte Beryl Biggs, I’ll bear that in mind.’

  This time I went red. My middle name embarrasses me. In actual fact, I’m thinking of changing it by deed poll to something a bit more contemporary. Like Beyoncé. Or perhaps Brontë. Yeah, probably Brontë. Charlotte Brontë Biggs has got quite a sophisticated tone to it, I think.

  We walked the rest of the way to school in silence. I don’t like having disagreements with Goose but sometimes we get on each other’s nerves. I know that now and again I can be slightly annoying but it isn’t always my fault. I think Goose occasionally forgets that just because she happens to have been blessed with an amazing pair of cheekbones, it doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s always right about everything. In fact, sometimes she is just PLAIN WRONG.

  But I still don’t like it when we fall out. And to be honest I was starting to regret the whole stupid conversation. I was even starting to regret that I’d actually got out of bed in the first place. And the closer we got to the school entrance, the more I just wished and wished I was by myself, under my duvet with my bedroom light switched off.

  But then I remembered what Blake had taught me about being positive. And I took all my rubbish thoughts and I did this:

  It made me feel a whole lot better – although I must admit that I was still having some trouble getting over the fact that Goose had called me a stalker.

  When we reached the entrance to the main school building, I hesitated for a moment and then, in my best Kentucky accent, I said, ‘Share a bag of fries with you at lunchtime, Janice?’

  And even though Goose was still being a bit sulky, she gave me a small grin and drawled back, ‘Well, hey, I guess, Jonice.’

  In my normal voice I said, ‘Last one to the chippy is a useless numpty.’

  And Goose made a big L-shape with her hand and held it up in front of my face and said, ‘That’ll be you then, loser!’

  Then we separated to go in our different directions and I walked off feeling a lot less wobbly and a whole lot happier because it seemed as though me and Goose were pretty much back to being a box of budgies again.

  three Is a traGIC NumBer

  When I arrived at the tuck shop, Gareth Stingecombe was turning away from the front of the queue with a hot dog in each hand. As soon as he saw me, he gave a big massive grin and shouted, ‘Biggsy! Over here, Sexy!’ And then, almost immediately, he crinkled his face into a frown and boomed, ‘What’s with the black hair?’

  Gareth has got a huge and beautiful smile. This is one of the things that first attracted me to him. When he smiles, it gives me a warm glow which starts in the bottom of my stomach and spreads its way right to the very furthest tips of my fingers and toes – just like a mug of steamy hot chocolate on a cold wintry day. Other aspects of him that I really like are his thighs, which are very colossal and manly
and, individually, are probably as wide as my entire body. He has also got a very loud voice. I’m less keen on this.

  I walked over to him, fluttered my eyelashes teasingly and said, ‘Gareth, I’m not a sex object, thank you very much.’

  Gareth’s cheeks went a bit red and he looked down towards his hot dogs. ‘I got one for you,’ he said and held it out to me. I took it and looked down at it. It was wrapped in a soggy piece of kitchen roll and was covered in tomato ketchup and mustard, which had mixed together and turned a putrid pinky-orange colour.

  ‘Ta, Gaz,’ I said. ‘But I’m not really that hungry.’

  Gareth went even redder and I felt a bit bad for being so ungrateful. I’ve noticed that Gareth is one of those people who goes red very easily. He’d be absolutely rubbish as an international con man or a Las Vegas card player because you can always tell exactly what’s going on inside his head just by looking at the colour of his cheeks. Fortunately, Gareth has already decided that when he leaves school he wants to be a professional rugby player. This is an ideal career choice because everyone has a red face when they’re playing rugby. He will blend in perfectly.

  ‘It’s quarter past eight in the morning,’ I said, trying to explain. ‘Normally, this hot dog would look very appetizing to me but I’ve only just had my breakfast.’

  ‘No worries,’ said Gareth. ‘I can always manage a second. Coach Jenkins says I gotta keep my bulk up for the rugby field.’ And then he crammed half his hot dog into his mouth, gave a couple of slow and massive chews, and then squashed in the rest of it. I passed my hot dog back to him and he went through the process all over again. I’ve never seen two hot dogs disappear so fast in my entire life. To be honest, if it weren’t for the fact that Gareth has an incredibly sweet face and colossal rugby thighs, I might have felt a bit sick.

  ‘Anyway, Biggsy,’ said Gareth moments later, after wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his sweatshirt. ‘What’s with the black hair, like? You’re not going all weird and goth on me, are you?’

  I gave him a moody, sexy stare. To tell the truth, I was starting to get a bit fed up with having to explain to everybody my Ancient Egyptian styling decision. So instead I just said, ‘So what if I am?’

  Gareth turned purple-red and said, ‘Well . . . nothing really, I suppose. It’s totally up to you, isn’t it? And I’ll always like you whatever. It’s just that . . . well . . . I’d be a bit gutted if you started looking like a zombie and began shoving bolts into your face and stuff because I kind of think you actually look really incredibly pretty as you are.’

  Then he smiled at me.

  And a weird thing happened.

  INSTANTANEOUSLY, I stopped being annoyed and started feeling actually quite stunned and amazed because this is just not the sort of thing that anyone who has a nose shaped like a potato expects to hear.

  I smiled back at him and said, ‘Incredibly pretty?’

  And Gareth turned totally scarlet-pimpernel-red and looked a bit shifty and said, ‘Well, not incredibly pretty. More like a bit pretty. From a distance. In the dark.’

  He was so embarrassed that even his ears had gone red.

  I said, ‘Well, for your information, I’m having a big spider’s web tattooed on to my cheek this evening and I’m getting a spike put through my lip at the weekend. So deal with it, Caveman.’

  And Gareth said, ‘Second thoughts, Biggsy, I reckon that’d be a big improvement.’

  And then he smiled another one of his massive smiles and punched me in the arm. Not hard. Just friendly. And I got that warm glow in the bottom of my stomach which spread its way right to the very furthest tips of my fingers and toes. And then I punched him back and we walked off to registration with our arms around each other.

  The rest of the morning passed me by in a bit of a blur. I’ve always found the first day of term particularly stressful. Over the holidays you sort of forget about school, and when you have to go back it’s a nasty shock. It’s not easy being forced out of the house at eight in the morning to sit around all day in a place where people waffle on about random topics like William Shakespeare and Bunsen burners and Central Business Districts6 for hours and hours on end. It isn’t easy at all. In fact, I’ve been doing it for eleven years now and I’m still not entirely comfortable with it. To make matters even worse, Lee Fogel – who is definitely the most annoying person in my school and probably the most annoying person on the entire planet – turned up to registration with a string of putrid love bites all around his neck. I was really glad then that I hadn’t eaten the hot dog that Gareth offered me because if I had done, there is a serious likelihood that I would have totally and utterly and physically hurled right then and there in the classroom.

  This is the kind of horrific experience that school exposes us to on a daily basis.

  I was really glad when registration was over and I could get out of that room and head off to English. Along with art and history, English is one of my all-time favourite subjects. I’m genuinely quite interested in reading and writing and, also, it’s one of the few lessons where I get to sit next to Goose. It’s a scientifically proven fact that teenagers always work harder and get better results when they are allowed to sit next to their best friends. Anyone with half a head knows that this is absolutely true.

  Mr Wood has given us a new book to read. He told us as soon as we came in that it was called The Picture of Doreen Gray and it was written by a very famous Irish writer called Oscar Wilde who everyone has heard of. Apparently. We spent the entire lesson just talking about Chapter One. As I said before, I’m genuinely quite interested in reading and stuff but this might be about to change. During the lesson, I got so bored I went into a trance and almost stopped breathing. I can tell you right now, Oscar’s book is going to be terrifically-horrifically tedious. This is blatantly apparent just from reading the first sentence – which is this:

  The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

  Mr Wood thinks it’s a marvellous opening sentence. He thinks it’s bursting deliriously with olfactory images. Apparently, this means we can smell it. What Mr Wood is forgetting, though, is that it’s a bit hard to appreciate the delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn when:

  a) You’ve never smelt the pink-flowering thorn and

  b) You’re sitting in a classroom being suffocated by olfactory images of Lee Fogel’s stinky trainers and a general heavy scent of BO.

  Mr Wood was walking around the classroom reading to us. It’s not really his fault, I suppose, but everything he says sounds like it’s coming at you through a megaphone. It’s all one volume and that volume gives you a headache. As soon as he had read as far as the first full stop, he came to a standstill in front of the desk that I share with Goose, and put down his book.

  ‘Charlotte Biggs, can you make sure you are reading along?’

  ‘Is it OK if I just listen, Mr Wood?’ I said.

  Mr Wood said, ‘I’d prefer it if you followed the words on the page.’

  I did a big noisy sigh and sat up. I was about to open my book when I hesitated and said, ‘Can I ask a question?’

  Mr Wood looked at me a little suspiciously and then he said, ‘Fire away, Charlotte.’

  ‘I’m not being funny,’ I said, ‘but why do we have to read books about gardening anyway?’

  ‘Gardening?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Books which bang on about roses and lilacs and women called Doreen don’t really interest me that much, to be honest.’ I was being as polite and as tactful as I could. Not like Lee Fogel, who seized the opportunity to shout out, ‘Yeah, sir, this book is a steaming crock of horse—’

  ‘Thank you, Lee,’ said Mr Wood very quickly. Then he smiled at me and scratched his head. ‘What about if I promise you that this novel is neither about a woman called Doreen nor gar
dening. In fact, you’ll see that Dorian Gray is a very interesting and complex male character. Will you give it a chance?’

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  Mr Wood smiled again. ‘Trust me, Charlotte, I think you’ll enjoy this story,’ he went on, and then he said, ‘Would you like to read to us?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said. But I quickly picked up my book and started reading it out loud anyway because I thought it would be a charitable act of kindness to save everyone from Mr Wood’s mega-boring megaphone voice.

  I’d barely been reading for a minute before Mr Wood said, ‘Stop!’

  And then he said,

  I put my book down and looked at him to see if he was joking. He wasn’t. Sometimes, I feel like I’m the only sane person in the entire world – which is weird really because I’m the only person I know who actually isn’t. I’m OK most days though.

  After that, I had geography.

  By lunchtime, I was feeling pretty much like this:

  The nanosecond that I was let out at twelve o’clock, I hurried to Pat’s Plaice, the chip shop on Merthyr Road, so that I could get a good place in the queue and get myself served before the chips dried out and went too chewy. Despite our last one’s a numpty challenge, I knew that Goose would probably be late. After all, she’d just had music and Goose is always late out of her music lessons. She is a very musically gifted person but she has a personality clash with her teacher and this means that she usually has to stay behind for a few minutes to be moaned at and issued with a detention notice.

  I was next in line to be served when Goose finally arrived, all breathless from having run up the high street. She pushed her way through the queue of waiting people, handed me some change and said, ‘Sorry, Lotts, I got kept behind because Mr Howells caught me playing the guitar with my teeth. Can you get me a battered sausage and chips?’