Wow. I have messed up. Big time.
Chapter Eleven
Once home, everybody knows I am being a weirdo, especially me, but what do I do? I go to pick up the phone and then I remember Will asking me to never call him on the phone again. I don’t want to upset him even morer but I can’t help myself but to dial his number. I do it really quick so that I don’t change my mind.
Annie answers.
‘Hello, Annie, it’s me, Darcy.’
‘Oh hi, Darcy?’ Annie sounds awkward, like she was warned not to answer the phone to me a bit, I can really tell.
‘Is Will there?’ I ask.
‘Errrm . . . let me just go check.’
Who has to errrrrrrm let me just go check to know if somebody is home or not, it’s not like they live in a gigantic palace with fourteen hundred and a zillion bedrooms where people can come and go without anybody noticing.
Annie lifts up the phone again. ‘Hi, Darcy. Will . . . William doesn’t really feel like speaking right now, he has a headache . . .’
William? William?
‘Please let me speak to him, Annie.’
‘I want to, Darcy, but he . . . William . . . doesn’t want to . . . I’m sorry.’
‘Annie, please?’
‘Hold on,’ she says, and then I hear her murmuring mixed in with the TV followed by Will’s whispers.
‘Yeah?’ It’s him.
‘Will!’ I say brightly.
‘It’s William now,’ he bites back.
‘OK.’ Ouch ouch ouch. ‘I didn’t know, you didn’t tell me you changed your name.’
‘Yeah, well . . . I actually didn’t change it, that is my real name.’ His words cut me up like squashed fruit in a blender.
‘How are you feeling?’ I ask, trying to sound light and breezy.
‘Like rubbish.’
‘I heard what happened, I came to the nurse’s office but she wouldn’t let me see you.’
‘Yeah. I heard you outside.’
This was horrible. Really horrible.
‘I’m really sorry I didn’t make it to see you play football.’
‘You know what, Darcy, since you’ve started wearing your hair in that plait you’ve become a new different person, one that I just don’t like. I always am there for you, and when I ask you to be there for me, the one time, you’re not . . . I don’t want to be your friend, not now, not today, not tomorrow, not with that brushed hair.’
It’s the most words Will . . . iam ever said in one go and they are the worserest words I’ve ever heard. They don’t sink in. I am not upset just yet; I am mainly really very shocked. He hangs up the phone and I grip onto Lamb-Beth. The hang-up beep noise is ringing in my ear; so final like the machines in hospitals on TV that beep when somebody’s heart has stopped beating.
At the table, Poppy’s going on and on and on and on about some stupid new friend she’s made at her stupid dance lesson who’s a boy and she’s all excited but it’s making me madderer and sadderer. I don’t eat hardly any of the curry Dad has made. I just eat a few blobs of rice and then head upstairs and open up my writing book. My lungs are squashing under the guilt and sadness.
Sorry is a word that aches our mouths, that hurts our teeth and scratches our tongue. Sometimes it’s craved for like a hot milk or a bath or a favourite song on the radio, a hand hold from somebody that cares. Sometimes it’s oversaid and overdone and as normal as taking a shower. Other times it smothers you completely, it falls in the eyes and the nostrils, chokes the throat like swallowing a rag, clogging up the earholes and bruising everything it can in its warpath. It can be known to be patient, timed perfectly, folded away into a brown envelope. Others are spring-action sorrys, meticulously technified, hinged and perfectly constructed with timed spines like the beauty of a pop-up book. Some are sloppy and unexpected, pour out of the messy mouth like a swear word or a regret. Some are ‘Cry wolf’s, shamelessly singing the words and sounds to their own apologies like memories from childhood that are too sweet and too fatty. A chubby sorry.
Sometimes a sorry is a boomerang and hits you back on the head in a good way or more often in a bad way. Sometimes you get a sorry back.
When I finish writing a spider crawls out of my hair and lands on my hand. Oh, hi so much, spider. It feels good to see a creature in my groomed flat straight nest. Maybe Will’s right, maybe the hairbrush is tidying all my Darcy-ness away?
I hate this brushed hair, it isn’t who I am or who I am wanting to be either. I’m never doing it again. Ever.
After putting the spider on the windowsill I take my hairbrush and I start scuffing it up again and making it deliberately morer and morer knotty, and it’s not working and I am getting so crosserer and fed up with this straight and normal hair that I just take my scissors and chop my hair off.
Just. Like. That.
I look in the mirror. It looks bad. Lamb-Beth looks at me, like ‘Oh dear’. She can shut up. But it does look really so bad. So bad and not one bit nice. It looks all wonky and disastrous, like a big animal has eaten a chunk of it out. Oh no. I am mad. I am crazy. I can’t be upset or else I’ll get in trouble. I have to stand by this. I find Mum’s hair mousse and I fizz a big dollop of it into my hand like a giant mash potato bun of marshmallow, and it smells of chocolate and vanilla and then I flop it into the bad haircut.
I run down to my mum who is plucking her eyebrows on the couch and is talking to the TV like it’s a politician she doesn’t agree with. Dad has got his feet in the washing-up bowl filled up with hot bubbly water but his feet are a bit too big for this makeshift foot bath and the water is splodging and spilling out and also I wish he wouldn’t give his feet a jacuzzi in the same place we wash up our knives and forks.
‘Mum, Dad, I cut my hair,’ I announce, attention-seeking, naturally.
‘Cool,’ says Dad, his eyes flickering – he’s always enjoyed my rebellious streak because he has a couple of tattoos and back in the day he wore leather jackets.
‘Fruit loop,’ says Mum, but that’s before she can tear her eyes away from the TV, and once she looks up she screams, ‘Darcy! What have you DONE?’ and I burst into tears about my whole entire life.
‘I can’t take it,’ I dribble through the tears.
‘Take what, love?’ Mum hugs me close; her eyebrow hairs float onto my hand like hairy tears from her eyes. Dad turns the TV down and comes and sits next to me. I am smudged in the middle of them like a caterpillar and they are my butterfly wings, either side, really wanting me to fly.
‘Any of it.’ I put my head into my hands and think about how to explain. Dad does a clicky thing with his mouth that invites Lamb-Beth immediately into the living room and she bundles in straight away and up onto my lap.
‘Go on, monkey, tell us . . .’ Mum says. ‘I can guarantee you that everything you’re feeling, one of us will have felt the same before.’
So I start from the top, about Will and Clementine and the story and Olly and how Koala said my story was rubbish – well, she didn’t exactly say that but she didn’t have to, I knew what she was thinking.
I sometimes can’t take the fact that mums and dads just have to love you. Sometimes I can be so difficult to love. I know not all kids get that. Some kids get no love shared out to them at all, but if you are one that’s loved it’s probably a good idea to drink it up a bit. Mum’s right, I am a fruit loop.
Chapter Twelve
‘What happened to your hair?’ Poppy says over breakfast.
‘What happened to your general whole whatever the hell on earth you are?’ I stutter back, embarrassed. I get up and throw my cereal into the sink to make an impact. Annoying. I wanted to eat that.
‘Darcy had a little experiment with the scissors, didn’t you, chick?’ Mum smiles. She helped me even the other side of my hair out a bit last night so that I don’t look so completely mental, and I think our chat on the sofa has made me feel a little lighter . . . although maybe that’s just from being now a bit bald.
> ‘Well, anyway, Timothy is coming over to our house tonight for dinosaur chicken and chips and letter-shaped pasta.’ Poppy sips her juice; she still holds it with two hands like an absolute animal creature child.
‘Who’s Timothy?’
‘My new friend that’s a boy as well even.’ Show-off.
‘Is he imaginary?’
‘No, of course he is not, and you’re horrible.’ Poppy looks hurt.
I do an inside sigh. I’ve upset her now. Mum looks crossly at me. Poppy has wanted a friend that’s a boy ever since Will and I became friends. I am being nasty ruining it for her.
‘Sorry, Poppy, I was joking, I didn’t mean it. I can’t wait to meet Timothy.’
‘Good, you better run home from school so you can meet him because I told him you were cool.’
‘You told him I was cool . . . well, why did you do that?’
‘Well ’cos you are, aren’t you?’
It’s Friday. Thank goodness, I think, as I walk up to the school gates, I could do with two days away from this wretched place. I find Maggie the moment I go into the building. She looks all relieved and excited because the magazine is ‘put to bed’ (this is what you do to magazines, I am such a professional journalist) but I am about to crash and wreck all that for her.
‘Nice hair,’ she says, grinning. I don’t have the time to work out if she’s being sarcastic or not as this is clearly an emergent . . . or is it an urgent? Oh, not now.
‘I want to try and write another story for the magazine,’ I rush out.
‘What?’ She looks like she’s about to collapse. ‘Darcy, you can’t, the magazine’s deadline was yesterday – remember the crazy mayhem in the computer room, that wasn’t for a joke, you know? You can’t do that.’
‘I have to.’
‘Darcy, I’m sorry, you just don’t have time.’
‘I have to. Please?’
Maggie bites her lip and scrunches her face up. ‘I don’t understand, it’s not something Olly said, was it? Ignore him, he’s a fool.’
‘No, no, it’s not to do with him . . . I want to, have to put a special story in.’
‘Can’t it go in the next issue?’
I really notice I am sounding horribly spoiled and stubborn and ridiculous to think I could put the whole magazine at risk but I just need to fix things. I hang my head. This isn’t going to go down well with the others. Gosh, I feel crazy with this ugly hair and bonkers head. Maggie looks pale.
‘Lunch time. Meet me in the computer room. Don’t be late,’ Maggie breathes out and closes her eyes. ‘Now get out of my sight.’ She squeezes out a smile showing me she’s not cross in real life too much and then rushes away not looking at me once.
The whole morning is spent scribbling and thinking and speed writing as quick I can. I get in trouble only once by Mr Hatfield in science because he thought I wasn’t concentrating (which I wasn’t, actually) but the limelight soon swam off me when Ellie Richards got told off for making everybody laugh by pretending two magnets were doing snogging and then Marcus Wilde took it one step further by eating a mouthful of iron filings. People will do anything to get a laugh. I meet Maggie at lunch time, as promised, with my finished story. I hand it to her, out of breath. Koala walks past me and doesn’t smile. I’ve annoyed her, I can tell. I really am a troublemakerer.
‘Don’t worry about her,’ Maggie tuts and lets me hand the story over. ‘We’re just stressing. I’m sure your story is worth the wait.’
‘Yeah, right!’ I hear Olly’s gurgle from across the room, twirling round on his stupid seat, shaking his head. ‘Nice work, Burdock . . . not!’ He snarls and pretends to flick through a book he’s reading.
Maggie opens the first page of text. ‘Darcy,’ she whispers privately as quietly as she can to not embarrass me, ‘mate, this isn’t typed up.’ She grits her teeth.
‘I know, I didn’t have time,’ I apologize.
‘We can’t, Darcy; the magazine is going to print, on a file, how can we sort this now? It will take ages to type up and—’
It’s too late, Koala stomps over, and I’ve never seen her so irritated, her fringe is almost standing on end.
‘Let me see!’ she spits and scans my pathetic sprawl. ‘It’s full of mistakes and errors too, Darcy, we can’t publish this. It will let the editorial team down.’
Olly begins to laugh and does lots of cartoon pretend-crying like the clowns do at the circus followed by lots of upside-down thumbs. I want to slash his head off.
Suddenly Maggie, Queen Saviour, pipes up:
‘Hold on . . . we can scan it. As it is. Scan it in, save it as PDF, drop it in. It will take two seconds. It’s Darcy’s story, so Darcy’s choice. We support our writers. We should let her publish it. As it is. Not everything needs to be polished: this is real.’
There is an empty minute where nobody quite knows what to do. Everybody looks at Koala, my insides are jumping. She flashes me a brief eye glance, her eyelashes patter, angered.
‘Oh—Be quick about it.’
‘What? You’ve got to be joking me? I can’t believe this is happening?’ Olly is screeching at the top of his voice, getting more and more high-pitched. Koala gets up and walks out and then Olly leaps after her, shouting, ‘Koala, Koala bear!’
Bit affectionate, if you ask me, but that’s not for now. I want to squeal I am so excited, but there is no time for that either and I don’t want to annoy anybody even more than I already have. But seriously, phew.
I finally see Will at the end of the day but he doesn’t see me or at least pretends not to. I can only watch from afar as he is surrounded by a wall of boys that seem to know he is the best thing ever mixed with a tired hero as he shows them his bumps and bruises. Tomorrow is Clementine’s birthday so no doubt she will fit snug into my best friend’s shoes and I’ll be forgotten. Fine. I just want to go home and wrap myself up in Lamb-Beth and be as tiny as the garlic that comes out from the garlic crusher and let myself have one more day of feeling sorry for myself before I can get back to being an excellent thing.
But so much for that! When I get home I can hear all this boshing and stomping around upstairs, and a wild shrilling scream is coming from Poppy’s room. Mum looks like she’s about to crack up and then I remember . . . Timothy.
‘You have got to meet Timothy,’ she smirks.
I pretend I’m not excited, pick up Lamb-Beth for a cuddle and go to eat a Dairylea triangle. It’s certainly one of those snacks that I prefer unwrapping than eating, unlike chocolates.
‘Darcy’s home!’ Mum calls up the stairs and winks at me. Hector is eating a few books on the floor; he has been eating pages for ages these days.
A sudden rumble pours down the stairs.
Poppy is wearing her ballerina tutu. She is all excited. ‘Darcy, you’re home, and it’s Friday!’ she announces as though she’s made Friday. As though Friday was her idea. And then she says, ‘Darcy, meet Timothy.’
I see a ballet shoe land on the top stair, then the next stair and then the next, perfectly timed, accurately placed, as delicate as a cat. Timothy’s skin is the colour of caramel, his eyes are hazel, his hair is curled and gelled, his features are exact and dramatic. His gaze is focused on Poppy and he is in FULL pink tutu himself, tights and all. When he reaches the last landing he curtseys, beautifully, and then bows.
‘Well, when I saw this tutu I thought, Get me in that immmmediately.’ He laughs a tiny tinny cackle. ‘You must be Darcy, I’ve heard so much about you.’ He throws his arms into the air.
I laugh. ‘Really nice to meet you, Timothy.’ I go to shake his hand because I have never really felt this introduced to anybody before, but Timothy doesn’t really want me to do any of that. He pulls me in close and kisses the air either side of my face four times, making an over-dramatic ‘M-WAH, M-WAH, M-WAH’ sound, just like we are American girls going shopping on TV. Mum hides her face in her jumper to stop herself from laughing. Timothy is her new favourite, I can tell.
/> ‘I love your hair, babes, it’s so rocky.’ Is this boy really in Poppy’s dance class? She’s so lucky. ‘Poppy, let’s get your mum to make us a glass of fizzy pop and then let’s play Barbies. Darcy, do you want to play Ken?’
‘What do you mean, play Ken?’ I ask. My eyebrows are confused but I really like this Timothy.
Timothy sneaks a smirk and then begins. ‘OK, well, it’s a long story but Poppy’s character, Bianca (to be pronounced kinda French like Bea-yunk-ha) is like the nicest girl in the world, I mean like Taylor Swift nice, blonde hair, blue eyes, works as a vet, I mean wouldn’t hurt a fly, total babe. Now she’s been dating Ken for like ever. My character, Brittney-Charlotte Mariah Holmes, is Bianca’s long-lost sister; she has come back, for good. She’s like a total meanie, I mean like major, but she’s also mega fierce and hot and all the guys like totally fancy her, so she steals Ken off Bianca, things are about to heat up in the face-off between the love triangle, gonna be tragic, up for it?’ Poppy screws her face up; she is worrying this isn’t going to work out between Timothy and me.
‘So let me get this straight, you know how you said that Brittney-Charlotte Mariah Holmes stole Ken off Bianca?’ I ask, trying to work this out in my head.
Timothy nods.
‘Did Ken have a choice in this?’
‘Duh, like Brittney-Charlotte Mariah Holmes is like mega hot, like spicy.’
‘So maybe it’s time for Bianca to steal something off Brittney?’ I am plot-thickening, obviously.
Darcy Burdock, Book 2 Page 8