by Judy May
‘Oh yeah, Lemony Smith, the one that got a Golden Globe and an Oscar. Did you know her mum still picked out her clothes when she was a teenager? Good thing she has a team of stylists now, not a shiny tartan grocery bag in sight!’
And then they will get back to inviting each other round for barbecues without me.
It was just the most evil moment of my life and there isn’t even anyone to blame. Even though it is not yet lunchtime I am now going back to bed. Forever. And I am not speaking to anyone.
LATER
I am now speaking to Ro, Paul and the folks, and that’s all.
Ro brought around a clipping from the local paper about acting classes so I had to explain to her that I don’t actually want to be an actress, it’s just that being a film star is as far from being me as I could imagine, so it made for a great way of testing the idea that you can make things happen by using the power of your mind. It’s a life-as-laboratory kind of thing.
I told her about the wall fiasco and she says that the others probably thought that maybe I didn’t want my mum to know that I’m friends with them, what with some of them looking so close-to-the-edge with the piercings and hair. I still believe it is more likely that they don’t want to know me since finding out that I go shopping with my mum (who just HAD to be talking about lost underwear in the laundry room at the time) and that I am capable of carrying such unfortunate objects as the grocery bag. If Bonnie, Dairne or Amber ever even saw a shopping bag it would be Gucci or Prada. I’m not ashamed of Mum or anything, it’s just that I already have to work hard to get anyone’s approval that I don’t have any coolness credit in the bank when something like this happens.
Ro is so much more of an insider socially. I don’t know how she manages to do that and still spend so much time with me. Everyone knows and loves her. She looks like the cutest little pixie you ever saw, with her dark green eyes, tiny frame and black hair in dreads to her shoulders, all the guys fancy her and the girls admire her. I’ve never felt jealous, but I do wish I had some more of that magic myself.
‘Ro’ is short for ‘Aphrodite’. She’s been called ‘Ro’ for as long as I’ve known her. When we were tiny I really wanted to have a cute nickname like hers – everyone called me ‘Sam’ back then, which was the same name as one of Ro’s dogs! It was Paul who started calling me ‘Lemony’; I ran into the kitchen one day when I was about five wearing a yellow t-shirt and he said,
‘You look like a lemon! Yeah, lemon-y, definitely.’
It became sort of a nickname that stuck. Of course a few months later the first in a series of books came out, written by someone with the same first name! But no one mentioned it, so I guess they just associated Lemony with me by that stage.
Then Paul decided he wanted to be called Charles for about a week, but that changed when Dad began to yell up the stairs, ‘Is Bonny Prince Charlie in?’ whenever someone called.
I know it’s weird to hang out with your brother, but he’s only a year older than me and he’s really hilarious to be around. Most importantly, he doesn’t think that me and Ro are annoying just because we’re younger. He thinks we are annoying for a whole bunch of other reasons.
Ro locked my bedroom door and we did the visualising and declaring for our wishes again this evening, and this time I put Nick in as the leading man. I thought, ‘What’s the harm?’ Have to be a professional about it after all.
Still dying about the other thing.
DAY FIVE
Avoiding cake and chocolate may be less than easy, but it’s almost impossible not to daydream. It may not be my intention to get lost in Nick-and-Lemony’s loveland, but I know it must be happening because it doesn’t take anyone forty minutes to brush their teeth. Either I was daydreaming for a large chunk of that time or I have been blessed with the gums of a rhino.
The parent party looms. Luckily Paul warned me that they had a plan for us that involved washing and ironing tablecloths and suchlike so we crept out early this morning and switched off our phones. Once we got to the café Paul was too busy entertaining his fan club of older waitresses, so I didn’t get to share the whole wall-bag-silence disaster with him as I’d planned. And the chance never came because just as I cleared the layer of foam from my hot chocolate, in walked half the regiment from yesterday’s little stand-off.
The evidence is in, the votes have been counted and there is no denying, I am REALLY bad at not speaking to people. The moment Nick, Hanna, Alice, Dairne, Jonty and Gussy walked over to where Paul and I were sitting, my mouth kicked into action and didn’t stop until it had said ten times more than the moment required.
I do believe my actual words were,
‘Oh hi, … hi, .. yeah, … sorry about yesterday, you know, … with my mum, … you know, shopping, well of course, … good to see you, … funny, wasn’t it? … or not, maybe, well, … how are you?’
And thank goodness Hanna cut in and went,
‘Great, all doing great, thanks Lem,’ because she fancies Paul on-and-off and wants to look all kind and uncomplicated in front of him.
Just when I thought that it was all over, that the ice had been broken and the incident might be put behind us, Nick goes,
‘So where’s your shopping bag, taller twin?’
Gussy laughed, but that’s OK because he suffers badly from idiot syndrome and everyone knows it. But why did Nick have to do that to me???
Alice was lovely and while the others ordered drinks she whispered that they all thought I wouldn’t want them saying ‘Hi’ in front of my mum, and that some of them felt bad about it after I left. Later she told me that they all talked about how funny and intelligent I am, which made me feel worse because it was really them NOT saying that I was pretty or cool or anything. Also Alice is really sweet and always wanting people to feel good so sometimes it’s hard to tell how much she is exaggerating the good stuff.
I hung around a bit more before guilt kicked in at the thought of Mum and Dad doing all the work themselves. Paul keeps his guilt in a much smaller box and stayed while I headed home (as soon as Nick left, of course) to take over the chopping board and cut the crusts off ten loaves of bread.
I hoped I might pass someone good on the way back, but I only saw that awful Stephen Brown who used to be in Paul’s class and now goes to an international boarding school. We used to call him ‘Brown Stephen’ because he always wore brown jumpers and trousers and tortoiseshell glasses. I guess if he’s home from school he’ll be at the party with his dad tonight … just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water of life.
Having spent the last six hours polishing already perfectly shiny bits of furniture and silverware I am now pretending to take ages to get ready, even though less than four minutes will do the job.
I can hear people being relieved of their coats. Within five minutes I will be listening to people say how much I’ve grown and how they’d better stop feeding me string beans. Must remember that all the great people of history had to have miserable beginnings in order to make the ‘hero bit’ look and feel good.
Right, time to get courageous and pitch in for the glory of the Smith family armed with only a fixed grin and a tray of sad-looking hors d’oeuvres.
DAY SIX
OK, it is now late morning and the best thing I can say is that everyone survived, even most of the sandwiches survived and are alive and well and stocking up the fridge for us to eat over the course of the next millennium. I think Mum got overly confident about the ability of ham and fennel to mix, and the ability of people to eat more than ten mini scotch-eggs each after sundown. Pear and anchovy was another bold move on her part.
The worst thing is that Stephen Brown was there as predicted and he is a proper geek whereas I am an undercover goddess of wit and sophistication masquerading as a geek for the time being. Heavily masquerading, granted. You could tell that he was loving it, probably the only time he’s been out since he was here four years ago. And this isn’t one of those things where a boy you
knew when you were younger was annoying and then he is all transformed and magnificent when you meet him in your teens. Although he no longer dresses exclusively in brown, and seems to have lost his glasses, he still looks as if nothing quite fits. And if there was a Nobel prize on offer for being inane and conceited he’d be well famous by now. And it’s not going to be one of those Mr Darcy things where I turn out to be wrong about him and he was actually lovely all the time. Honestly, the guy is INFURIATING, the way he picked all the onions from the quiche before eating it, and the way he laughed at what my mother was saying even though I know for a FACT that she has never been funny even once in the last fourteen years. I mean she is an absolute darling, just not funny. Luckily he is my brother’s age and for some strange reason Paul wasn’t as allergic to him as I was.
Oh, AND of course geek-boy is very tall and speaks fluent Chinese, which for some reason made all the adults assume I would be fascinated by him. I mean, he didn’t even have to learn it because he lived in Shanghai until he was six, so it’s not like its a real accomplishment, but he grinned so much whenever his dad mentioned it that you can tell he thinks it makes him amazing. Which it doesn’t. I mean, if the leftover sandwiches could speak Chinese that wouldn’t be enough to make them palatable either. I am off to buy scones.
DAY SEVEN
Sorry, sorry, I take it all back! My life is incredible! Nick called to the door at ten in the morning, and luckily I had just spent half an hour getting ready to go into town. So I took my boots off before walking downstairs so that he would think that I normally look this good for hanging round the house. Anyway, he asked me to go to the junior musical-and-dramatic society dance with him next week. I don’t need to be a film star after all, I’ve got what I really wanted all along.
I now have to go and spend twenty hours talking this over with Ro.
LATER
I’m glad the whole Nick asking me out thing happened this morning so I was in good enough shape to hear the news from Mum about having to repeat last night’s torture in a whole new venue. Tomorrow night we are being made to go to Professor Brown’s house, The Grange, for dinner. What is it with these college lecturers and their need to congregate over bad cooking and talk about things that have been dead for centuries? Worse still, Paul is excused because of cricket practice. I begged them to let me take up cricket, but by 6pm tomorrow I am doomed to being more bored and starving than a supermodel. I hope Dad was joking when he recommended I brush up on my Chinese.
I have taken everything out of my wardrobe and will spend the rest of the evening practising looking casually and effortlessly fantastic in several different outfits for the dance. The girls are coming over in the morning to help with the final decision.
In three days I will be Nick’s girlfriend and all will be right with the world.
DAY EIGHT
It hurts, it hurts, it hurts. I can’t believe it, just when I thought that maybe I wasn’t a complete social stain and he goes and ruins it all on me, telling me he has a new girlfriend. AND he said it as if still going to the dance, but ‘as friends’ was good idea!!!!! I don’t even hate her for it, or him, I just hate me right now. I asked him why he’d asked me in the first place and he said it was because it would be obvious that we were going ‘as friends’ and there would have been no pressure. So he never thought of it as a date in the first place AND he thinks that going out with me would be something no one would ever believe!!
And Paul was no help whatsoever, talking as if Nick was a massive hero for being honest about the whole thing. I mean, if he’d gone and stuck his head in a moving sawmill, THAT might have been the kind of heroic gesture I could celebrate. Being honest?! An honest-to-God MISTAKE OF A PERSON!
Ro and Lorna came over to tell me the news and Nick himself phoned an hour later. They left Alice behind because she was actually in tears about it and it wasn’t even about her. Apparently a few of them were at Johnny L’s house and somehow Nick and Donna ended up on the patio kissing. He told her that he was going to the dance with me, but ‘as friends’, which she then told Amber so now half the country knows.
If Paul says, ‘But he wasn’t officially your boyfriend’, one more time I swear I will do something unnatural. How can that be helpful? It’s like saying to someone whose rented house burned down,
‘But it wasn’t yours and you were only living there for two years.’
Two years is how long I waited for him to ask me out. Two years! Most Hollywood marriages don’t last that long and Paul thinks I can shake it off just because Nick never kissed me or gave me his leather bomber-jacket to wear or whatever. I want to do something, anything to make Nick sorry, but I know I’ll just act really pally with him and Donna next time to make people think I was never into him in that way.
I cried a bit and then stopped and paced around, and then started joking about hoping Nick was still going to pay me for agreeing to go to the dance with him in the first place. So Lorna thinks I’m over it, but Ro knows me better than that. Tough girls like Lorna and really soft girls like Alice have it easier when it comes to making a fuss. I wish I could shout or cry or anything to get the bad feeling out of me. But instead I am choosing the journal-as-therapy route.
Even during writing this I have checked my messages so often my thumb is sore from pressing the keys. As if he might be trying desperately to contact me and tell me he has made the biggest mistake of his life and it’s made him see that it’s really me he wants after all.
And I still have to go to the stupid dinner at The Grange in two hours time.
DAY NINE
I have decided to have the mumps. Not for real of course, but for the purposes of getting out of being Nick’s friend for the evening of the dance while he makes eyes at Donna who will no doubt be busy being all mature about the situation across the room.
I called Ro and Paul into my room for an intervention.
‘Why can’t he get himself sorted and like me?’ I wailed.
Paul said something about Nick liking me just not in that way, which was so uncalled for and outrageously too much truth given the situation. Good thing Ro always has a practical-sounding answer that makes me feel good. She is the most practical person I know, she even has her own screwdriver set and emergency cash, which she doesn’t spend on shoe emergencies the way I would. Very weird for someone so fashionable and cute not to be in the least bit flaky. She doesn’t even get crazy over guys, she just sees one she likes, dates him them dumps him when she feels she’s outgrown him (usually after three weeks or so).
Anyway, when I asked why Nick isn’t into me, she said,
‘It’s because he’s a guy and they are always at least five years behind where they should be. My mum said that Dad is now exactly the man she wanted half a decade ago.’
‘You could be right,’ I sighed, ‘I mean Paul here only stopped wetting the bed last week! Hey! You’re not allowed punch me when I’m depressed! Hit Ro instead, it’s her theory.’
‘Three years from now Nick Collins will be kicking himself,’ Ro continued. ‘And where will you be, Lemony my girl? Off in a private jet with some guy who doesn’t fancy Donna.’
‘Or I’ll be here, with you and Paul and a new cinnamon candle and the same problems,’ I said.
‘No, Lem. You’ll have much better problems by then,’ Ro smiled.
‘We’ll make sure of that,’ Paul added helpfully.
Somehow I didn’t feel that much better. It seems that ever since the summer holidays began I’m either having a bad day or recovering from one.
‘When does it all get good?’ I wondered.
‘Soon, funny girl, very soon,’ Ro reassured me.
‘And when do I get to be one of the beautiful ones?’
‘That happens, dear sister, as soon as you can afford the surgery.’
And with that Ro ordered Paul out of the room. She is the only person who can control him. I think this is because she has three dogs and there are training similarities.
Oh, and the dinner last night was fine. It was made easier by the fact that The Grange is such a cool place, and they have a caterer or cook to do the food and Stephen has a friend called Alex staying with him who is very easy on the eye and doesn’t speak a word of Chinese. Alex’s dad is a film producer and is shooting a film in town so he’ll be here for the summer. He’s not the kind of guy for me as he has really dark spiky hair and he’s at least five inches shorter than me, I know that shouldn’t matter, but it does to me so there you go. After dinner Stephen, Alex and I went off to the upstairs library while our parents good-naturedly debated something that you need to be fluent in dull to understand.
I admit to being a complete sucker for a house-library and this is the best I’ve ever seen. It has floor to ceiling mahogany shelves and huge leaded windows, and the books are all over a hundred years old, leather-bound with gilt lettering. It had grown a bit chilly so their housekeeper lit a turf fire in the fireplace, and we sank into these huge leather armchairs. Alex told us about a film he worked on last summer as an extra, while Stephen and I listened, which I think suited all of us just fine. I hope Stephen doesn’t think we’re friends because of being in his company twice in one week. Imagine if he came up to me when I was with the others in town and presumed he could hang out. I don’t want to be mean, but I’m close enough to being an outcast as it is, and a geek like him would hardly make anyone look like a social superstar.