Dylan
You are such an arse! No wonder Edie broke up with you. If she was me, you’d be getting used to life without your kneecaps.
I’m seriously freaking out about our girl. I hope Edie will pull through – it sounds like she’s been so stressed out that it’s no wonder she’s ill. But she’s a tough little critter and I know she’ll be making your life hell in a couple of days’ time. Just because she can.
I’m going to give you some advice although you don’t deserve it. I think she does still love you. And I think if she didn’t care about you in such a big, important way she would have come home. I’m not convinced about this whole friend thing. I don’t think you and Edie will ever be friends, you’ll either be in love or you’ll hate each other. If you want to get her back, you have to show her that you love her. And you have to do some serious grovelling. I’d start with jewellery and work your way up!
As for your dad, I’m really, really glad that you went looking for him. I don’t exactly approve of your methods but I think you really needed to get ‘some closure’ (assume cheesy American accent here).
Let me know what’s happening with you, you big jerk.
Love
Sho
(No kisses for you ’cause you ain’t worthy of them.)
El Paso Memorial Hospital, Texas
28th August
When I woke up this morning I was in a hospital bed, with a drip in my arm and Dylan asleep in a chair next to me. Oh and my insides felt like someone had rubbed sandpaper along them.
I leant over, which hurt a lot, and prodded Dylan who came to with a start.
‘D, what’s going on?’ My voice sounded rusty. ‘I remember throwing up yesterday.’
Dylan clutched my hands. ‘Edie, you’ve been in hospital for three days!’
I frowned which also hurt a lot. ‘Oh yeah, I remember someone doing something painful to my back.’
Dylan was pressing a buzzer. ‘They were giving you a spinal tap, they were taking fluid from your spine, it was awful. You cried all the way through it,’ he said with a grimace. ‘How do you feel?’
‘Crappy,’ I replied. ‘My throat really hurts.’
‘You had an endoscopy.’
‘I had a whatty?’ I asked, sitting forward. ‘Can you straighten these pillows for me?’
Dylan rushed forward and started plumping up my pillows and fussing with the bedclothes. ‘They stuck a tube with a camera down your throat ’cause they thought you might have an internal bleed somewhere.’
I pulled a face. ‘Ewwww!’
Just then a nurse came into the room. Check, I was in a private room.
‘Oh you’re back with us,’ she said brightly. ‘I’m Cathy. How do you feel?’
I opened my mouth to answer her and she shoved a thermometer in before wrapping a cuff round my upper arm and pumping a rubber bulb attached to it until she almost cut off my circulation.
‘I’m just checking your blood pressure,’ she said when I made ouch faces.
‘What’s wrong with me?’ I asked, when she took the thermometer out of my mouth.
‘I’ll get Dr Greenbaum to come in and see you,’ Cathy replied. ‘But your temperature’s down a couple of degrees and your blood pressure’s almost normal.’
‘Can I have some water?’
Dylan was already on his feet. Cathy smiled at him. ‘Dylan why don’t you come with me and we’ll get Edith some ice?’
I settled back down. ‘D?’
He turned round and looked at me expectantly. ‘I’m hungry,’ I whined. ‘Can I have some ice cream?’
Dylan looked at Cathy. ‘I think she’s feeling better. Can I get her some ice cream?’
‘After she’s been checked over,’ Cathy said firmly, holding the door open for Dylan.
Dr Greenbaum was there within minutes and after poking and prodding and saying ‘uh-uh’ a lot as he asked me loads of questions, he said I was over the worst of it.
‘Over the worst of what?’ I asked.
‘Oh, probably a non-specific viral infection,’ he replied breezily. ‘You’re young, you’re in good health; you should rally round in no time. You gave us quite a fright.’
‘So when can I leave?’
I saw Dylan peering through the glass panel in the door and I beckoned for him to come in.
Dr Greenbaum carried on. ‘We want to keep you in for another twenty-four hours and then you need to take it easy for a little while.’
‘So we can carry on driving to LA?’
‘No we can’t,’ interrupted Dylan. ‘We are booking into a hotel and then we’re flying back home.’
‘We have to go to LA,’ I argued. ‘I’ll be sitting in a car. Selecting our song stylings and giving you directions is not exactly strenuous.’
Dylan had a mutinous expression on his face but Dr Greenbaum smiled. You could tell he was thinking, hey what a crazy pair of kids.
‘OK, time out, guys,’ he said. ‘A hotel would be a good idea for three or four days and then you can get back on the road.’
‘I told you,’ I said smugly to Dylan.
‘But regular rest breaks,’ continued Dr Greenbaum. ‘And if you’re going to the Grand Canyon, no hiking. Take the helicopter tour instead.’
‘So, can I have some ice cream now?’ I asked.
Dr Greenbaum nodded and Dylan rolled his eyes. ‘At least when you were ill, you weren’t so demanding. What flavour?’
The Holiday Inn, El Paso, Texas
30th August
Staying in a hotel is so much more fun than motel living. I was angsting about the cost but Dylan insisted that we had plenty of money left and during the difficult phone call home when I had to persuade my parents that I wasn’t dying any more, they were adamant that we should use the credit card to pay for a hotel.
In fact, my mother was contemplating chartering a plane to fly me home but Dad took the phone off her, asked me a few pertinent questions about my general well-being and told me to ignore her.
Dylan has been annoyingly kind. I guess having your girlfriend, I mean ex-girlfriend, throw up and then pass out on you is a bit of a shock. He’s bought me flowers, more ice cream than I know what to do with and even sourced some Ribena. Every time I stand up, he hovers next to me and generally treats me like the princess that he used to accuse me of being.
I insisted that we went out for dinner tonight because much as I love staying in a hotel I was going stir crazy.
‘Are you sure you’re ready?’ he kept asking as I put make-up on for the first time in weeks.
‘I’m fine,’ I told him for the fiftieth time. ‘This is a dry run and then we’re getting in the car tomorrow and heading for Arizona.’
Dylan refused to commit. ‘We’ll see,’ he said.
The other benefit to being ill is the fact that I’ve lost so much weight that I feel it’s my duty to eat as much as possible. I’m talking three meals a day plus hourly snacks.
‘I must be iron deficient,’ I told Dylan as I started cutting into a steak that was the size of my plate. The chips came in a separate bowl.
Dylan looked slightly horrified as he picked at his chicken Caesar salad. ‘It’s too hot to eat,’ he pointed out.
I shrugged. ‘I’ve missed out on four days of eating. And I’ve lost a stone. That’s fourteen pounds! Surely it’s not possible to lose that much weight in such a short amount of time. They don’t tell you that at Weight Watchers!’
‘I don’t know how you can joke about it,’ he said, pinching a handful of my chips.
‘Well I feel fine now,’ I stated, smacking his hand. ‘It was probably worse for you than for me. I mean, I didn’t know what was going on.’
Dylan put down his fork. ‘I thought you were going to die,’ he said quietly. ‘And I went to pieces. There were two paramedics checking your airway and asking me how long you’d been unconscious and I couldn’t even speak. I didn’t even think about starting resuscitation until they got there.’
Dylan looked so racked with guilt that I didn’t know what to do.
‘Well, I had just been sick,’ I teased. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to get too close to me.’
‘Don’t joke about it!’ Dylan exclaimed. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done if you’d died.’
I touched his hand across the table and he wound his fingers through mine and didn’t let go. Dylan looked deep into my eyes like he was trying to tell me something deep and profound. Then with one last squeeze he let go of my hand.
‘Maudlin much!’ I said lightly, to try and defuse some of the tension. ‘I’m not going to waste another minute worrying about “what ifs” and “might have beens”. I feel loads better and that’s all that matters.’
It seemed like Dylan was going to argue the point but he thought better of it. ‘I guess you’re right,’ he muttered. But he shot me another loaded look as if to suggest that me feeling loads better wasn’t all that mattered. Not even close.
Albuquerque, New Mexico
2nd September
I can’t stop thinking about Dylan’s mouth…
Did I really write that? No matter how I try to condition myself to keep my Dylan emotions on the friendship setting, these strange treacherous thoughts creep in. When he’s concentrating on something, the tip of his tongue creeps out of the corner of his mouth and I’m mesmerised by it.
And when I crack a funny and Dylan does his usual I-don’t-want-to-encourage-her-but-I-have-no-control-over-my-mouth smirk, I remember how he used to kiss me and I could feel him smiling.
Like I said, I can’t stop thinking about Dylan’s mouth.
Dylan is still being an über sweetie. It’s actually becoming quite a strain. I wish he’d crack under the pressure and revert to his usual sardonic self. Fr’instance we’re meant to be back on a schedule, we have seven days to get to LA and drop off the car but he made a day’s detour because I said in passing that it might have been interesting if we could go to Roswell and check out the UFO museum.
And if I so much as stretch my arms because I’m getting stiff from sitting for so long, he insists on stopping the car and making me lie down on the back seat so ‘You can have a nap’. To be quite frank, he’s treating me like a frail, elderly auntie. But Roswell was, well, kind of cool. No alien sightings though.
Flagstaff, Arizona
3rd September
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Oh Edie
I’ll quickly ask after your health and hope you haven’t done any projectile vomiting lately. But that was only to be polite and now we need to talk about me!
So when you last heard from me things were all right with Jack. No great progress and no smooching but I really felt like we had a connection and maybe I was laying the groundwork to smooching. But now he’s shown himself to be just like other boys! He’s turned into a player. And obviously I blame Jesse. Everything is always Jesse’s fault. It was Jesse who decided that being cooped up in a van with four girls all day meant that him and Jack were ‘getting too in touch with their feminine sides’. So Jesse has started referring to us as ‘his bitches’ which Poppy, Atsuko and Darby think is hysterically funny and Jack has started hitting on girls!
Apparently knowing how to hook up a PA system turns boys into complete gods. I can’t see it myself. All these girls come up to him after we’ve played and last night he got off with this horrible skank who was at least in her early twenties. I used to be the only person who saw something special in Jack and now it’s like all these girls are after him as they think he’s cool because he hangs out with a band. A band that I’m in! They don’t see the special side of him, the side that I see. But that doesn’t stop him from snogging them and telling me to go away when I say that I have to speak to him! I was only going to ask if he wanted a drink but he was all like, ‘Not now Gracie, I’m busy,’ and then him and the skanky ho started laughing at me! I hate him. And I’m never going to find anyone who wants to kiss me. Or sees something special in me.
The only good thing is that in ten days, I’ll see you again! I really, really can’t wait. And yesterday when Jesse was being too much even for Poppy to handle she gave a deep sigh and said, and I quote, ‘It’s at times like this that I wish Edie was here so she could give you a lecture about the finer points of third-wave feminism.’ I know Poppy’s all psyched about seeing you and keeps asking me if you’ve dropped any hints about presents that you might have bought for her!
Anyway, Jesse’s standing in front of the window of Caffè Nero and pulling faces at me, which is his Neanderthal way of saying that I have to get back in the van.
Love you
Gracie xxxxx
I really felt for Grace. I could relate to her pain and the pain was not a friend. Dylan was sitting next to me and looking through the maps for about the millionth time to see how quickly we could get to Los Angeles via Las Vegas. I’d told him till I couldn’t tell him any more that it was a bloody five hour drive. Five hours! Pfffft! That’s nothing compared to how far we’ve already come. But he was starting to get really antsy about having the car back in time. Not to mention repeatedly telling me this without raising his voice or being sarcastic. I never thought I’d miss Dylan being a sarky git but, oh, I so do.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Hey sweet thing
I am in the rudest health. No projectile vomiting or headaches but thanks for asking. Jack is displaying all the symptoms of boy disease. And he’s acting like an idiot for no other reason than because he can. I also think that he’s trying to make you jealous but I’d have to do some in-the-field research to be sure of that. It’s like boys have penises and they think their penises are so great that they can act like complete prats ninety-nine per cent of the time and still be cool. All because of their penises. Well, that’s my theory anyway.
Dylan doesn’t act like a prat though. Very rarely. He doesn’t act all ‘hey little girl, I’m the boss because I have a penis’ with me. Well, hardly ever. I love him to bits. But as a friend. Strictly as a friend. Don’t start thinking that we’ve got back together because we so haven’t. We made a rational decision to break up and we’re both grown-ups and handling it very sensibly. And it’s easy to think of him as my friend and nothing else. Oh, the friend thing is working out fine. It’s all kinds of fine. Yeah…
Anyway, this is the travelogue bit; so pay attention. I’m in a small college town called Flagstaff in Arizona and we’ve just driven through this place called The Petrified Forest which is full of, wait for it, petrified trees. It’s something to do with fossils and silica and I’ll shut up ’cause I don’t know what I’m going on about. We’re heading towards the Grand Canyon. It’s seriously too hot to hike through it (does the temperature ever drop below one hundred degrees in this country?) and although my lovely Dr Greenbaum at El Paso Memorial Hospital said we should take a helicopter ride, Dylan and I are too chicken. We’ve already started mentally preparing ourselves for the plane ride home.
I can’t wait to see you too. But I’m trying not to think about coming home because then it’s all about university and leaving all my friends behind and I want to cry.
See you soon
Edie xxxxx
Grand Canyon, Arizona
4th September
We drove around the Grand Canyon, getting out every now and then to do these weedy fifteen minute walks to the little vantage points that were mapped out along the way. We’d scoffed all the way there that it was just a ‘big hole’ but it was a very awe-inspiring big hole, especially when the sun started going down and cast weird shadows on the chasms in the rock. Ooooh, am getting far too tour guidey.
We were going to find a cheap motel for the night but the only place that had any rooms was the rather swank El Tovar hotel and they only had a double room. That would be a room with one double bed.
Dylan’s so not bothered. H
e keeps yawning and muttering about how we have to drive 300 miles to get to Las Vegas tomorrow and he needs his sleep. I mean, he could at least try and make a move on me. If he loved me. One kiss isn’t too much to ask for.
Route 66, Arizona
5th September
We’re in the sodding car again. I didn’t sleep a wink last night and I’m feeling really cranky. To sleep next to Dylan and not be able to touch him is a surefire way to have insomnia. I could actually feel the heat from his body as he lay a foot away from me. Not sexual tension heat, just actual heat because it was so hot.
Diary of a Crush: Sealed With a Kiss Page 17