I’d imagined him asking me out so many times in the last few days.
And now I didn’t want it to happen. Because it wouldn’t be how I’d pictured it. Because every time he opened his mouth, a little bit of my image of him got spoilt.
If nothing ever happened between me and Jayden-Lee, then neither of us could ever mess it up, and I could keep the vision of us as the caravan park’s perfect couple in my head forever. The realization that I didn’t want to find out that the daydream I had of him wasn’t the actual reality hit me like a bomb.
Then so did Jayden-Lee, with his knees bent up to his chest, cannonballing straight into the water beside us.
TWENTY-SEVEN
In the wake of Jayden-Lee’s tidal wave, Kayla tipped back off the banana and hit the surface of the pool with a splash of her own. The back-and-forth motion of the water was almost enough to make me seasick, but I managed to stay afloat with my knees gripping the banana, and her glass of lemonade held above my head.
Kayla was treading water, head down and taking deep breaths. The fall must have knocked the wind out of her.
Twisting round, I held my other arm out to help her back on board. ‘Here, come back up.’
Kayla shook her head without lifting it. ‘No, I’m not getting back on that fruity death trap.’
I didn’t think it was exactly the banana’s fault, but Kayla and I were still in the new stages of being friends again, and if I could let a pool toy take the blame for me dragging her out on the water, I was going to do it. ‘I think it was built for speed, not security. Are you OK? Do you want me to get you a lilo?’
She hadn’t looked up yet. She was peering down into the water as though there might be a treasure chest at the bottom of it, instead of a few floating plasters and someone’s verruca sock. ‘No –’ she took a deep breath – ‘I’m fine. I think I might just swim for a while.’ I frowned. ‘Kayla?’
‘I’m fine,’ she repeated, in a tone of voice that only proved she really wasn’t. ‘Just turn around.’
‘But—’
‘Turn around.’
I didn’t want to start a new fight over how not-fine she was. I turned around.
‘Hey, Twinkle.’
. . . Just in time to see Jayden-Lee cruising up beside me, now astride an inflatable alligator.
Was Twinkle supposed to be a permanent nickname? I really didn’t think I liked it. Even the way he smiled when he said it seemed wrong, turning his mouth into an ugly sneer.
I didn’t want to complain about it and sound like the Starcross branch of Trainspotters Anonymous again, though. What I had to do was give him a nickname back. Something a little bit flirty, like Tiger, but somehow meaningful at the same time.
‘Hey, Twonkle.’
In my head it had sounded a lot cooler.
It didn’t even rhyme properly. It was like my brain had just let a massive fart out right through my mouth, and Jayden-Lee looked like he’d smelt it.
‘Is that supposed to be funny?’
He gave me a dangerous-looking glare, and I shook my head several times, fast. ‘No, I – I don’t even think it was supposed to be a word.’
I considered slipping backwards off the banana and joining Kayla underneath the water. It wouldn’t be the bravest thing to do, but maybe it would make a good first not-a-date story for me and Jayden-Lee to tell our friends, if things somehow took a better turn later. How did it go? Well, first I forgot how to speak English, and then I had a really good go at drowning myself out of shame. But otherwise, fine.
Jayden-Lee was still looming over my banana. He leaned across, but not in a romantic, wanting-to-be-close-to-me sort of way. It didn’t feel like he was going to yawn and stretch and end up with his arm around me as if it was an accident.
It felt a little bit like a threat.
‘You do though, don’t you?’ he said. ‘Think you’re funny.’
A jeering laugh went up from the side of the pool, and I looked across to see Kev and the rest of Jayden-Lee’s mates standing in a huddle, watching.
I swallowed nervously, almost sure by now that this not-a-date was really just Not. A. Date.
‘I don’t. I promise – I really don’t think I’m funny at all,’ I stammered. ‘You should hear me at Christmas; my cracker jokes go down worse than the sprouts.’ That wasn’t true, I slayed with ‘What’s orange and sounds like a parrot’ last year. But for some reason I felt I had to defend myself against the idea that I had a sense of humour. I didn’t know what Jayden-Lee thought I’d been joking about, but it didn’t seem like he was laughing. ‘I’m very serious, actually. Like . . . maths. Or cancer.’
I was trying to think of other serious things to compare myself to when he interrupted.
‘Do you always talk this much rubbish?’
My jaw got very tight, my teeth clamping shut so firmly that I couldn’t pry them open to make any more words. My cheeks were burning too, but not in embarrassment. It reminded me a little bit of how I’d felt when I’d tried to tell my friend Sam that I liked him, right before he moved to Berlin, and he’d said he liked me too, ‘but not in a gay way, obviously’. And then laughed.
And I’d had to laugh and pretend that, obviously, that wasn’t what I’d meant at all.
So I nodded slightly to answer Jayden-Lee’s question, because my stuck-fast teeth wouldn’t let me do anything else. Yes, OK, all I did was talk rubbish. He could think that if he wanted, because all I wanted was to get out of the stupid pool and walk barefoot back home if I had to.
He was still giving me that same sneer-smile that turned him from something beautiful into something mean. And he didn’t seem to be going away, despite me directing a thousand LEAVE ME ALONE thoughts right between his eyes.
I knew it. I knew if I talked to him tonight, then everything would be ruined.
‘I see you watching, you know,’ he said, very softly. It took a moment for the thudding of my pulse in my eardrums to quiet enough for me to hear him properly. ‘Every morning I see you looking out, like a little stalker. So either your TV’s on the blink, or you’re trying to get a look at something else.’
‘I –’ I managed to get a single syllable out before I realized I didn’t know how to explain. How could I tell him that I just liked knowing he was there, not that far away from me? I liked feeling like we were a tiny bit close, that was all, so I’d check when he was in, sometimes. Sometimes I might have checked for a little bit longer than I really needed to.
Jayden-Lee nodded, slowly.
‘The thing is, my mates think it’s about time I asked you – do you fancy me or something?’
Right at that exact moment, looking at him made my insides churn in a completely non-romantic way. No one had ever asked me that before. Which made sense, because it’s not like people look gay on the outside. Some people might joke about it, but it’s not like anyone ever says, ‘Wow, that guy looks soooo heterosexual.’ So no – no one I’d actually fancied had ever asked me about it.
And the only person I’d ever told was Kayla.
There were so many other people who didn’t know. A lot of the people I cared about most in the world. And now Jayden-Lee was asking if I fancied him, in public, right at the moment when I’d suddenly become unsure.
But I looked at the way his hair had turned dark bronze now that it was wet, and how it perfectly highlighted his tan. I looked at how straight and elegant his nose was, and the curve of his lips that I’d thought about kissing maybe twenty . . . hundred times.
And I said, ‘ . . . Yeah.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
‘YES, GET IN!’ The yell was loud enough to make several people turn and look at us, while I tried to look anywhere else because
1. I didn’t want any of this to seem like it was anything to do with me, and
2. I couldn’t quite believe that shout of delight had come from Jayden-Lee.
He twisted round on his alligator and called his mates’ attention with a long whistle.
As if everyone our side of the pool wasn’t already staring. ‘OI, KEV. YOU OWE ME A FIVER, MATE. I TOLD YOU HE WAS A TOTAL GAYBOY.’
And then he sat there and grinned at me, as if he’d just guessed the punchline to my joke.
‘I told him.’ He chuckled. ‘Told him you was. All that looking at me. Your sparkly shirt.’
I looked down, slowly, at the glittery pineapples that Kayla had drawn to give my usual plain outfit a kind of ‘Hawaiian Gothic’ feel.
‘I mean, you can just tell, can’t you?’ he crowed, like I was going to agree.
I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t even move. Half a pool full of people suddenly knew something about me that I hadn’t even been able to tell my mum, and I was pretty sure I could feel every single pair of their eyes on me. If I could just stay perfectly still and quiet, maybe I’d become invisible, and their focus would drift right past. I didn’t think I could form words, anyway. My brain was operating on two levels: fight or flight. My fists balled up by my sides. I wanted to hit him, and I wanted to run – and stuck between the two options, all I could do was sit there, looking like a waxwork model of a teenager that had been sculpted at the precise moment his life had ended.
‘Oh, of course.’ There was a loud splash behind me as Kayla pulled herself back up on to the banana, like a vengeful mermaid dragging itself on to the rocks. ‘Of course you can tell when someone’s gay. It’s so obvious, they may as well all be walking around wearing badges saying “I’m a homosexual – ask me how.” No wonder you figured it out.’
Jayden-Lee stopped smiling. He looked the way I must do when I panic and all the words spill out of my head. Like I’m trying to pick the right ones out of a puddle on the floor, but everything I’m coming up with is useless and mismatched.
‘ . . . He’s not wearing a badge,’ he said, finally.
‘Isn’t he?’ Kayla snapped from just over my shoulder. ‘My goodness, so he isn’t. Well you must feel very, very clever then, for figuring out something that’s none of your business and shouting it to the whole world.’
The alligator squeaked between Jayden-Lee’s legs as he shifted uncomfortably.
‘Look, if he’s going to decide to be a gaylord then you can’t blame me fo—’
‘Decide to be?’ Kayla cut him off. ‘Decide to be? I don’t think you understand how these things work. Or maybe you do. When did you decide to be straight, exactly?’
Jayden-Lee’s eyebrows hunched into a furrow of confusion. ‘I didn’t. Just always have been, yeah?’
‘Are you sure though? Really?’ Kayla was on him like a dog mauling a squeaky bone.
I wanted to turn and watch, but I was scared I’d interrupt her flow.
‘Because you don’t look straight to me,’ she continued. ‘I mean, why don’t you try being gay for a while? You probably just haven’t met the right boy yet. I’m sure that, when you do, you’ll realize this whole deciding-to-be-straight thing was just a silly phase.’ She paused for one long, deep breath. ‘And now you know how stupid you sound.’
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that Jayden-Lee’s gang of friends had edged closer along the side of the pool and were straining to listen. Jayden-Lee had the look of someone on the kill-screen of a game, who’d just run into an enemy area and realized he was all out of ammo.
Pretty desperate, in other words.
He worked his jaw slowly, looking from his friends on the poolside and back to Kayla again. All out of defences. Then he said, ‘All right, splotchy, calm down. I’m not the one who spat the ketchup in your face.’
That was when I turned round. I should have realized why she’d been keeping her head down, and why she hadn’t wanted to climb back on the inflatable with me. The chlorinated water had washed off all her Coverclear. It had been so long since I last saw the deep red stain down one side of her face that I’d almost forgotten what it looked like.
She made a strangled sound in the back of her throat that could have been the beginning of a sob.
Before I’d thought about what I was doing, I’d taken the glass of lemonade I’d been holding on to for her since she fell, and thrown it straight into Jayden-Lee’s face, twirly straw and all. Then I shoved him off his alligator. Hard.
He toppled backwards, a flail of arms and legs vanishing under the water, while the gator sped away in the tide his fall caused. And there must have been something in the lemonade that triggered the colour-changing dye they used to show up when little kids had wet themselves in the water, because by the time he’d come to the surface he was surrounded by a cloud of billowing red.
‘Gross,’ a girl near us called out. I thought she was the one who’d had the bikini malfunction before. She turned and started paddling away fast.
In seconds, the whole of our side of the pool was doing the same thing. The banana was tugged along by the crowd swimming around Jayden-Lee with repulsed expressions, all rushing to get out at the side.
The banana suddenly got a lot lighter as Kayla climbed out too. I called after her, but she broke into a run towards the deep end as a voice that sounded like Stacie from the children’s party started crackling through the tannoy.
‘Could the gentleman who has urinated in the water please report to the shower room immediately. That’s the gentleman with the weak bladder, reporting to the showers for a hose down.’
Safely out of the water, people were starting to laugh. I had to push my way through a mass of them, including Jayden-Lee’s friends, who were loudly pointing him out to anyone who’d listen.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, please do not be concerned. Chlorine kills most known infectious diseases. The festivities will continue once more has been added to the pool.’
I was just in time to see Kayla vanish through the door of the girls’ changing room, her shoulders heaving. Racing after her, I smacked right into a furry, orange blockage.
Not now. Nibbles must have been the only person in the pool who hadn’t heard what Jayden-Lee yelled at me, and probably thought I was taking advantage of the distraction to sneak in and watch girls getting undressed. As if I would.
I yanked myself out of the vice-like grip of his pink paws. ‘Fine – I’ll wait for her outside.’
And, while Stacie’s disembodied voice reassured everyone that pee probably wasn’t one of the really bad biohazards, I headed for the door.
TWENTY-NINE
Emerging from the bright lights of the pool, I slammed into total darkness outside. I had to put a hand out to the wall to get my bearings while my eyes adjusted to the change.
I needed to find Kayla, as soon as possible, and make sure she was all right. I couldn’t believe she’d climbed on to that banana in front of everyone. For me.
In the distance, I could just pick out lights from the caravans in their neat, straight rows, like very orderly constellations. Slowly, though, they were blotting themselves out, as their inhabitants decided to go out for the evening, or go to bed. Mum and Dad and Jude were down there somewhere. Jude with a freshly buzzed head of prickly black hair, and Mum restocking the fridge with a few less heavily protein-based snacks.
She’d told me the beef bomb wasn’t my fault, and that I wasn’t who she was angry with. Though she did expect me to be more helpful in clearing up any future leaked stewage.
I still felt bad though. None of it would have happened if I’d watched Jude more carefully. If Mum hadn’t had to step in to defend me. Now it was happening again – Kayla never even answered the phone without her make-up on, but she’d confronted Jayden-Lee without it for my sake.
All I’d done since we got here was obsess over my imaginary love life with the imaginarily perfect boy-next-door. I didn’t even listen when she tried to tell me who he really was. I’d forgotten to ask how her dad was, or if he’d burned anything down yet. I’d even stolen her slot at the karaoke.
The only thing I’d cared about all holiday was Jayden-Lee, and he didn’t even like me. It had taken me way too long to understand wh
y she hadn’t wanted me to like him either. He was spam, just like she’d said.
I didn’t know how she’d been able to tell that, though. It must have been some kind of psychic superpower.
I heard the door open behind me and spun round quick, one hand waving to attract her attention in the dark. ‘Kayla?’
A set of bony fingers pinched around my wrist. ‘Mr Kershaw, I did have a sneaking suspicion that you might be found at the heart of this disturbance.’
Margaret the manager’s yellow hair loomed out of the darkness like a dimly lit halo.
‘Is a disturbance worse than an incident?’ I asked, and she gave a whinny of irritation, the way a horse might if it was getting ready to aim a swift kick. I scrambled for something else to say as a distraction as I tried to tug my hand free. ‘Oh and, um, sorry about the beef.’
It might not have been the best thing to go for. She probably wouldn’t want to fondly reminisce about her day spent smelling like gravy. Her hand closed tighter, locking like a human handcuff. I half expected her to frogmarch me out of the park right there.
‘You do appear to be at the epicentre of a number of these . . . incidents . . . disturbances . . .’ She drew in a breath so deep I worried she was preparing to blow out flames. ‘These catastrophes, Mr Kershaw. You are, quite simply, a magnet for disaster. And I’m sure you can appreciate that it would be imprudent for me to allow such antisocial behaviour to continue. The judges for Park of the Year are among us as I speak. We have standards to uphold.’
I couldn’t believe I was being told I lowered the tone of somewhere with a restaurant called the Pie-O-Ria.
‘I haven’t been antisocial! Trying to be social’s what’s caused all the problems in the first place!’
Boy Meets Hamster Page 12