Diary of a Crush: Sealed With a Kiss

by Sarra Manning

  ‘It’s not my fault! I hope our road trip car goes faster than your Mini.’

  ‘Hey, Dylan, Edie, you do know there’s a fifty-five miles per hour speed limit in America?’

  ‘Yeah, right!’

  ‘No, really.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yeah, it says so right here in your guidebook.’

  ‘Oh. Hell!’

  More silence.

  ‘So how much money are you taking with?’

  ‘God, Paul, it’s so rude to ask about money. You don’t have to answer that.’

  ‘’Kay.’

  ‘So give us a ball-park figure.’

  ‘I saved up about £3000 from tips and wages and guilt-tripping various relatives.’

  ‘Dylan?’

  ‘I have money from when my dad left. Don’t even think about asking any more questions.’

  ‘Oh, and my ’rents gave me a credit card for emergencies.’

  ‘And a dictionary definition of what an emergency is.’

  ‘Shut up Dylan, no they didn’t. An emergency could be anything from the car breaking down to, um, my roots coming through.’

  ‘Your parents are so deluded about you, Edie. I’m one of your best friends, right?’

  ‘Right! Aw, thanks Shona.’

  ‘Yeah, but I’d still never give you a credit card.’

  London

  16th July (later)

  Eventually, after one pee break and a tense moment when it seemed as if the engine had over-heated, we got to Heathrow. With an hour to spare.

  ‘I could yell at you about the extra hour I could have had in bed but you’re leaving and I feel sad so I won’t,’ said Shona as Paul and Dylan got our suitcases out of the boot.

  ‘We could get a coffee before you go?’ I suggested. ‘Dylan?’

  Dylan nodded. ‘Let’s check in and dump our cases, then get coffee and food. Lewis says they don’t do bacon butties in America.’

  ‘Who’s Lewis?’ Shona wanted to know as we walked into the terminal.

  ‘This American guy who’s on Dylan’s course, whose brother we’re staying with in New York and taking the car from,’ I said vaguely. ‘I think that’s right… What?’

  Shona was giving me one of her patented ‘engage your brain cell right now’ looks.

  ‘Do you think that you should have organised a proper fly-drive holiday?’ she asked bluntly. ‘This all sounds a bit, y’know, doomed to failure.’

  ‘Don’t listen to Edie,’ Dylan said rather unsupportively. ‘It’s all cool. Frosty cool. Parentally approved. We’re driving the car to LA so their little sister can take it with her when she goes to university.’

  ‘In New Mexico,’ I added helpfully.

  ‘Oh well that makes everything so much clearer,’ Shona muttered sarcastically.

  I could tell, being an intuitive person, that Dylan wanted some alone time with Shona to say goodbye to his oldest friend before we disappeared into the wide blue yonder. He shot me a grateful look when I announced that they should go and do the Bureau de Change stuff because they were good with figures, leaving Paul and Grace to help me make an all important decision between a fry-up (lots of protein, less carbs) and a continental breakfast (less protein, lots of carbs).

  The three of us grabbed a table and I reached into my backpack.

  ‘Hey, guitar girl,’ I said to Grace. ‘I got you a present.’ I handed her a little box I’d plastered in anime stickers.

  Grace beamed. ‘Ooooh, I love presents,’ she squealed excitedly, opening the lid. Then her lip started wobbling. Paul peered over her shoulder.

  ‘What is all that crap in there?’ he asked, raising an eyebrow.

  I punched him on the shoulder. ‘There’s my lucky plectrum and my lucky magic marker that I used to write our set lists with and my lucky Hello Kitty hairslide that I wore when we played our first gig and…’

  ‘Oh and your lucky piece of material that you kissed before you went on stage,’ finished Grace.

  ‘It’s probably from one of Courtney Love’s dresses,’ I explained to Paul, who snorted, opened his mouth to say something really crushing and then thought better of it.

  ‘I’m not going to go there,’ he decided.

  ‘Best not to,’ I agreed. ‘So how’s Poppy?’ I added as an afterthought because I hadn’t been able to get her red, angry face out of my mind. ‘Still mad at me?’

  Grace looked uncomfortable. ‘Well, she has deep emotional problems.’

  ‘That doesn’t really answer the question,’ I muttered, taking a sip of the most disgusting cappuccino in the world.

  ‘She doesn’t understand why you don’t fancy the idea of being one of her sidekicks on the route to stardom,’ Grace finished angrily.

  I looked at her in surprise. ‘Is she still giving you a hard time about learning the songs?’

  ‘She’s giving me a hard time about everything,’ Grace complained. ‘I wish I had the chance to be the eldest… And as for Jack… he’s started spending all his time with Jesse, who is a totally bad influence on him. He’s become all flippant.’

  There was obviously trouble in Grace and Jack’s wiggy version of paradise but once Grace got onto the subject of her and Jack, I just didn’t have the energy.

  ‘Look why don’t you email me while I’m away,’ I suggested. ‘It’s cutiesnowgirl@hotmail.com. I’m going to be checking my mail whenever I can find free wifi.’

  ‘Cutiesnowgirl?’ Grace spluttered.

  I glared at her. ‘What? It’s a cool address.’

  ‘Whatever!’

  I definitely liked Grace better when she was too scared to even say hello to me.

  Check-in was torturous. It was all ‘Who packed your suitcase?’ and ‘Did anyone give you a package to take on to the plane?’ I mean, duh! Dylan, in particular, was given a good old grilling. I guess his torn jeans, Powerpuffs T-shirt (an ironic statement, apparently) and haircut with nail scissors was never going to get us upgraded to first class.

  Saying goodbye to Shona and Paul and Grace was horrible. Shona alternated between murmuring endearments about how much she was going to miss us and dire warnings about drive-by shootings and the dangerous additives they put in American food.

  We loitered by Passport Control, trying to say goodbye but not really getting anywhere until Dylan grabbed his bag with one hand and me with the other.

  ‘We’re going,’ he said firmly. ‘They’re about to call our flight and Edie reckons she can get a sizeable shopping hit in the Duty Free.’

  ‘So this is goodbye then,’ Shona sniffed. She hugged us fiercely and started walking away. I knew she was crying, the sappy cow. Grace looked like she was about to seriously lose it too. I flung my arms round her and took deep breaths of her scent: vanilla perfume and fabric softener and Hubba Bubba.

  ‘Go on, get out of here,’ I muttered, giving her a little push and she gave a sob and rushed after Shona.

  Two down, one to go. Paul shifted from foot to foot and then gave us a little wave before rushing after Shona.

  Going away would be all right if it wasn’t for the goodbyes.

  New York

  I’ll spare you the details of Duty Free (but there were big savings to be made on all Clinique products) and I’ll gloss over most of the flight. Let’s just say that neither Dylan or me travel well. I was OK until the engine roared into life as we raced down the runway. But the moment the plane shuddered into the air and the only thing that seemed to keep it up was my blind and shaky belief in aeronautical engineering, I suddenly regretted the bacon butty I’d had earlier.

  Dylan was just as bad. We spent most of the flight gripping hands and concentrating on keeping the plane in the air. That, and worrying that we were going to contract deep vein thrombosis if we didn’t get up every half hour to stretch our legs.

  I don’t think Colin, the plastics salesman who was sitting next to Dylan, appreciated my little nuggets of in-flight information. Especially when I reminded D
ylan that the pressure in the cabin made the air Sahara Desert-dry and we needed to drink a litre of water for every hour that we were airborne.

  By the time the plane landed with a graceful lurch Dylan and I were exhausted.

  ‘Your skin is the weirdest shade of grey,’ Dylan muttered to me as we waited in the longest queue in the world to get through Immigration. ‘And your hair’s standing on end. We are so going to get our cases searched.’

  Well, we didn’t. Instead we took the dinky airport bus to the subway station and got on the train to downtown Manhattan. The minute we sat down, Dylan put his head on my shoulder and promptly fell asleep. I fretted that our suitcases made us look like a pair of tourists who’d just stepped off a plane (well actually, yeah!) and that we might just as well have had a sign printed that read: ‘Please beat us up and steal all our money.’

  Except no-one paid us the slightest bit of attention and as I watched the funny-shaped houses with their verandas and screen doors whizz past and heard the driver announce place names like Rockaway Boulevard and Euclid Avenue, I suddenly realised that I was in America! Home of every movie and TV show that I’d ever loved. Where people say, ‘Have a nice day’ and look like they mean it. I was sitting on a subway train surrounded by New Yorkers. I half wanted to break into a rousing song: ‘If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere…’ but I managed to restrain myself.

  I nudged Dylan but he didn’t stir. ‘Hey D, we made it,’ I whispered and kissed the top of his head.

  Building your city on a grid system seems like a logical thing to do until you realise that people from Manchester, England have no idea which way east, west, north or south is. Dylan was no help, though he got very excited when he finally came to, which was about the same time as I tried to negotiate him and our luggage up the subway station steps.

  ‘St Mark’s Place,’ he gushed. I didn’t even know Dylan could gush. ‘Andy Warhol has walked down this street!’

  Lewis’s brother and girlfriend lived in an apartment building on Sixth Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues. They weren’t in but their room-mate (US term for flatmate) grudgingly let us in to the tiniest apartment I’ve ever been in. It was smaller than my bedroom back home.

  Ed (the roomie) grunted at us and went back to playing on the X-Box and Dylan and I stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, which was dwarfed by a double bed and the biggest TV this side of a cinema screen.

  ‘Where are we going to sleep?’ I hissed at Dylan, who shrugged helplessly.

  Eventually Ed was persuaded to budge up and make room for us on the couch and Dylan tried to bond with him over the WWF game he was playing. But when Carl and Lisa turned up it soon became clear that although we were all talking English we weren’t speaking the same language and I don’t mean saying ‘sidewalk’ instead of ‘pavement’.

  They’d barely said hello before taking us down to look at the car. And I use the word ‘car’ in its loosest possible sense. Anyone who called it a wreck held together with plaster and sticky tape wouldn’t be accused of exaggeration.

  ‘It handles like a dream,’ Carl was saying as Dylan and I looked at each other with dawning expressions of dismay, disappointment, disgust and many other words beginning with d.

  ‘Well, you like vintage things, don’t you?’ Dylan said to me finally, before turning to Carl and Lisa and asking them lots of questions about insurance and MOTs and road fund licences, none of which they appeared to understand. They were too busy cracking up over ‘your funny accents’.

  Dylan and Carl decided to take the car for a spin round the block so we could be sure that the thing actually worked and I trooped upstairs with Lisa who reckoned she might have some English Breakfast Tea tucked away somewhere.

  ‘So, um, the apartment’s really small,’ I said hesitantly. ‘Are you sure there’s going to be room for me and Dylan?’

  She flicked her long blonde hair out of her eyes and looked at me as if I’d asked if I could murder her firstborn. Lisa was one of those people who it’s impossible to feel at ease with. She was thin, dieted-to-the-bone thin rather than fast-metabolism-thin and wearing a business suit with trainers.

  ‘Well, don’t you wanna, y’know, get going?’ she asked with a slight edge to her voice.

  Oh where was D when I needed him? ‘Well, it’s just that we’ve been up for eighteen hours with the flight and everything and Lewis said we’d be OK to crash…’

  ‘Lewis had no right to say that,’ she interrupted me, getting all assertive and hard-faced like those lady lawyers in courtroom thrillers. ‘And we need to talk about how much you’re going to pay for the loan of the car.’

  I blinked once, twice, three times. ‘Pay?’

  She turned her icy-blue gaze onto me. ‘Well, yeah!’

  ‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘Lewis said we’d be doing you a favour. You need to get the car to LA, we’re going to drive it there. No-one said anything about paying.’

  ‘Look, if you were doing a fly-drive you’d have to pay, like, $300 a week for the car,’ Lisa insisted. ‘So Carl and I were thinking, y’know, you could give us a lump sum of $1000 and you get ten weeks to drive to LA and you save, like, loads of money.’

  There was still no sign of Dylan. ‘Hang on, you can’t just suddenly decide you want money when it’s already been discussed…’ I trailed off.

  Lisa raised her eyebrows. ‘Take it or leave it.’

  ‘$500.’

  ‘$950.’

  I glared at her. ‘I’m not paying more than $600.’

  She glared back. ‘$650.’

  Still no sign of Dylan. I was going to have to make an executive decision. ‘Final offer. $625.’

  She considered it for a minute. ‘OK, $625 plus the Clinique perfume you bought in Duty Free.’

  ‘Done,’ I said weakly, hoping Dylan was going to be OK about this.

  Usually I left the executive decision-making to him. Hell, usually I left it to Grace if it meant that I didn’t have to shoulder the burden of responsibility.

  ‘How much?!’ Dylan shouted at me.

  It was much, much later on. Carl and Dylan had come back from their ride around the block all matey in that strange way that boys do within five minutes of meeting each other. They’d already decided that the apartment was too small and that there was a cheap hotel a couple of blocks along (please note new familiarity with US lingo) where we could stay. I thought they’d already talked money, which goes to show how little I know. I was sure Dylan was going to be dead impressed at my haggling skills as I mentioned the small sum of $625 I’d shelled out.

  ‘Why are you shouting at me?’ I shouted back as I closed the door of our hotel room and dropped my suitcase on the floor. ‘They wanted $1000! You should be thanking me.’

  ‘$625!’ Dylan screamed. I’d never heard his voice go that high before.

  ‘That’s almost £500 which you didn’t need to give her.’

  ‘They’d obviously already agreed that she was going to do the money side of it while you two bonded over the fuel injection,’ I snapped venomously.

  ‘Oh don’t start,’ said Dylan warningly. ‘Don’t try and make this my fault. I already talked to Carl and offered to take him and Lisa out to dinner tomorrow night to say thanks. Oh, but no, you have to give them half our money…’

  Dylan was ranting now. Nostrils flared, fists clenched, every muscle in his body taut with barely suppressed rage. I watched his mouth open and close as he banged on about my irresponsible behaviour.

  ‘… and we have to fork out for this crummy hotel room. And we’re right outside the lift so that’s going to be making noise all night… Where are you going?’

  I didn’t bother answering as I slammed the bathroom door shut behind me and locked it. I was cold, dirty, tired, hungry and couldn’t cope with the shouty jerk who was inhabiting Dylan’s body.

  I heard him shout, ‘Typical’ and kick one of the suitcases over before I started running a bath.

  17th July (st
ill New York)

  We still weren’t talking the next morning. I’d been so pissed off with Dylan that when I came out of the bathroom I hadn’t let him share the last of Mum’s sarnies and he’d had to go to bed hungry. For the first time ever we’d slept with six inches of bed between us but when I woke up we were doing our usual conjoined twins impersonation. Dylan had an arm around my waist and one of his legs curled around mine. But we still weren’t talking unless you count muttered one-liners about going down for breakfast and who had the guidebook as conversation.