Dead Romantic

by C. J. Skuse

  Louis swept his emo fringe aside and shrugged, shoving his hands in his cardigan pockets. He had loads of friendship bracelets on his wrists, which I thought was weird seeing as he only had two friends and never actually spoke.

  Poppy wiped her glasses and giggled. Splodge went red in both cheeks and scratched his nose with his thumb. Louis Burnett looked at me and I looked away. It was a carousel of awkwardness for what felt like forever but was only about five seconds.

  ‘How about you two hookin’ up then?’ Damian went on, as though trying to bulldoze through the unease.

  I shrugged. Louis did a kind of half-nod.

  ‘Sweet. You and Loser can come together then, can’t you? Everybody’s happy,’ said Damian, looking at both of us in turn and striding off, his arm slung around Lynx’s shoulders and his magnificent arse framed beautifully by the tightness of his jeans. Suddenly he looked back at me. ‘And you know where I am if you need help with that thing, Camille, yeah?’ He winked at me as he walked away.

  ‘What’s the “thing” Camille?’ said Poppy, sucking the flimsy orange disc of her last Jaffa Cake.

  ‘Nothing, he’s just being stupid,’ I said, scratching the back of my head to hide my blushing cheeks with my arm. ‘Come on. Let’s go and learn how to sociologise.’

  So this is the thing . . .

  Okay, so ‘the thing’ I needed help with was my virginity, which the life-ruiner Damian de Jager had found out I still had through sheer cheek on my third day of college. I’d been in the library trying to find this stupid book we had to read for English and he’d just appeared, cornering me at the dark end of the short-story section, his shirt collar all up like Dracula.

  ‘All right? I’m Damian. Your name’s Camille, right? Lynsey’s mate?’ he’d said.

  I’d nodded, blushing fiercely of course, clutching my books to my chest.

  ‘I’ll come straight to the point. I’m in the virginity business. You got it; I want it. You need hookin’ up, I’m your boy. You still got your V-plates, I’ll take you out on the roads, show you what’s what. Here’s my number.’ He’d handed me his card. ‘You’ll meet a lot of scrotes in this place. A lot of knuckle-draggers who don’t know how to treat their women. Half of ’em couldn’t find their way to a girl’s G-spot with a sat nav.’

  ‘Uh . . .’

  ‘So what I’m saying is, don’t worry about any of them. I got the sat nav. And I got the goods.’ He’d looked down at his crotch, then back up at me.

  ‘Wha . . .’

  ‘I can deal with it so you ain’t gotta worry about it, then you can just enjoy the rest of your A levels without it hanging over you. Do ya know what I mean?’

  I’d nodded, my mouth doing a guppy impression. He’d had a green t-shirt on under his shirt that said MAN WHORE in really big white letters and he had been staring at me so hard I couldn’t catch my breath. If stares could make babies, I’d have been having his triplets.

  ‘No pressure, no refusal, guaranteed good times. You keep that card safe and text me when you need me.’

  ‘Uh . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s a free service. And I’ll always answer.’ And he’d walked away, one hand in his pocket.

  I hadn’t said one word for another six hours.

  I’d thought about calling him, I really had. But it wasn’t right. Although I had all the feelings of love – my pupils dilated, my cheeks blushed, plus I fancied his face off – something felt wrong. I was scared. I was properly scared. What if I called him, we did it and I was completely rubbish at it? What then? Would it be all round college that I was rubbish at it? And how did you know if you were rubbish at it? Maybe I wasn’t ready. But I was sick of just thinking about it or reading about it in one of my romance novels. It wasn’t enough anymore. I wanted it to happen to me. I didn’t want to keep gazing at people in the street holding hands or snogging on coffee shop doorsteps, wondering, always wondering. How they did it. Where they did it. How many times they’d done it. Everyone I knew must have done it. The woman on the till in Sainsbury’s. My dentist. Johnny Depp. My parents – ugh! But I hadn’t. And now the perfect, sexy-faced opportunity was there for me to grab and I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted to.

  That was me, Camille Mabb. A sixteen-year-old girl who didn’t want to do sex stuff with Damian de Jager. Freak. The weirdest kind of sixteen-year-old. I let my race down. And this was when I realised there was something really quite seriously wrong with me.

  However much I fancied him, he actually quite scared me. He was so easy about s.e.x. and I really wasn’t. Lynx was pretty whatever about s.e.x. too. She was always talking about things she’d done, things she’d touched, things she’d tried. I didn’t know what half of it meant but I always nodded along, and afterwards I’d have to look it all up on the Internet.

  The last Sociology lesson, I was so grrrrr about both my best friends dumping me for boyfriends that I decided to unpick the last stitch. The Sociology classroom and the Chemistry lab were opposite one another but in different blocks, and from my seat I could look across the way and see Zoe through the window. I barely heard a thing our teacher, Mr Atwill, who looked a bit like a nerdy Jesus, was saying about crime and deviancy. I was too busy gazing at Zoe pouring liquids and examining jars of blue stuff. I wanted to be where she was. I wanted to be near her. Everyone gave her a wide berth in the corridors. She didn’t seem to be bullied or ignored; people just stayed away, like they’d stay away from someone with a disease. But I was desperate to be in her orbit in some small way. And to find out exactly what she had been digging up in the churchyard on freshers’ night.

  So after a lesson where the only things I’d really learned were that Splodge now puts five kisses on every love text to Poppy and that Damian’s texts to Lynx were, well, let’s just say ‘photos’, I told Mr Atwill I was quitting and taking up Human Biology instead. He laughed. Poppy laughed. Lynx laughed.

  But I wasn’t actually joking.

  And it was all because of Zoe Lutwyche.

  By Wednesday lunchtime, having done my own head in with my confusing fears about sexy times with Damian and my sudden lusting over Digging Girl, I’d fully convinced myself I must have become a lesbian overnight. There was no other explanation for it.

  I wondered if that was a recognised thing – if it did come over you all of a sudden or whether it had to be something you always knew, like when you were a baby or something. Did babies know they were lesbians? All I knew for sure was that I couldn’t stop thinking about her, couldn’t stop looking for her in the corridors. I also really liked the way she did her eye make up and I wondered if I could borrow her eyeliner when we became friends.

  I did the tests to see if I was actually in love with Zoe. Did my heart rate speed up when I saw her? Yes it did. Did my knees go to jelly? A bit, yeah. Did my pupils get bigger? I didn’t know – I was too busy staring at her to check. So I had all the signs of being in love even though I’d never fancied either Lynx or Poppy or any other girl for that matter. I was in a ‘tumult’. I’d remembered that word from English.

  A highly distressing agitation of mind or feeling; a turbulent mental or emotional disturbance.

  That was me, Camille. In a tumult.

  I couldn’t concentrate on anything, couldn’t focus. At lunch, I left half my ham salad with no dressing which was really odd for me because normally I’m so starving I start chewing on a napkin once my food’s gone. I knew I needed help. I decided to go to the counsellor’s office at the end of the day, see if he had any advice or leaflets about rapidonset lesbianism.

  But I forgot to go to the counsellor. My first Human Biology lesson saw to that.

  When Zoe walked into that Biology lab, it was like I could breathe again. And she went from my fastest ever girl crush to a code-red all-out bleach-stinking obsession.

  What she did in that lesson was, in a word, electrifying.

  She was electrifying.

  Weird Science

  Two girls ran
out of the lab crying. Others pressed their hands over their mouths like they were going to puke. Most just went all squinchy-faced and jumpy on their stools. I thought one girl with glasses was going to pee herself. Mr Chaney, the Human Biology teacher, was striding between our desks with a jar of dead hamsters, leaving one on every workstation. He came to me and plonked one down.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  The door at the back of the room burst open and everyone, including me, turned around to see Zoe walk in. I actually smiled. I didn’t know anyone else’s name in the class and suddenly I felt like I had a friend there. Dressed all in black and keeping her head down, she made her way to the only free seat in the room: the seat next to mine. Something in my chest swallowed something else.

  ‘See me after, Zoe Lutwyche,’ Chaney boomed, as he took up position behind his desk, scrunching up his crotchety face to read his notes. Zoe scrabbled in her bag for a tatty black book and pen. She didn’t seem to notice me at all.

  ‘You have before you Phodopus sungorus, the Russian winter white dwarf hamster. We will examine the digestive and respiratory systems, skeleton and muscle groups. On your worksheet, note down the organs you can identify and their primary functions . . .’

  I caught my breath as I leaned over to say something to her. I couldn’t believe how nervous I was. ‘It’s me. From the graveyard,’ I whispered. She was rubbing her hands with an antiseptic wipe. She looked at me and then back at the teacher.

  ‘Take your dissection pins . . .’ said Chaney, and he went on to describe what we had to do. ‘Lie your specimen ventral side up on your dissection pan and pin the four paws to the baize . . .’

  Zoe Lutwyche had already taken out some squiggly organ stuff before I’d even worked out what a dissection ‘pin’? was. I just wanted her to speak back to me. Say anything, just so I could hear her voice. I leaned in to her again. ‘Wow. You’re really good at this, aren’t you? You’ve done this before.’

  Chaney tapped the board diagram. ‘Pinch a skin fold in the mid-ventral line as seen here and take your scalpel to make your incision down through the centre . . .’

  I had a little go at snipping open my hamster’s stomach but I made a bit of a mess of it. I couldn’t get a nice clean cut like Zoe. I looked at her. She was full to the brim with concentration. I so wanted to talk to her about the other night, maybe ask if she wanted an assistant with whatever she was doing.

  I leaned in yet again. ‘I haven’t told anyone, you know. About . . . that night at the graveyard. About what you were doing.’

  ‘What was I doing?’ she murmured, still focussed on her hamster surgery.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I won’t tell. I won’t tell anyone.’

  She didn’t say anything.

  ‘If you tell me what you were doing . . .’

  She stopped briefly, threw me a blue-eyed glare and went back to her work. She was so cool and intelligent. And not to mention pretty. And it amazed me how . . .

  ‘Miss Mabb, pay attention to your own specimen, please,’ came Mr Chaney’s crackly old voice suddenly.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ I said, almost falling off my stool. A smile split Zoe’s mouth.

  ‘I mean, I won’t tell anyone what you were doing. Not that I know anyway. Can I . . . come with you, next time? I want to see.’

  ‘See what?’ she said. By this time, her hamster had been skinned so perfectly he looked like a sausage lying on a tiny fur rug.

  I whispered, checking to see if Chaney had turned back to the board. ‘Bodies and stuff. I don’t want to rob anything though . . .’

  ‘You’d better make a start,’ she said, looking across at my hamster. ‘He tours the workstations.’

  I frowned, looking at my hamster every which way. ‘I don’t know how to do it without slicing into anything. You don’t fancy doing mine as well, do you?’

  Chaney’s crackly old notes rose again into the lab’s petshoppy air. ‘Now the inner organs are exposed. Can you identify the liver? Yes. Good, very good.’

  Zoe had already identified the squiggly organ stuff and started stitching her hamster back up the middle. When she was done and when Chaney’s back was turned again, Zoe switched her dissection pan with mine and started on my hamster, all without saying a word.

  ‘Thanks a really lot,’ I said.

  She sliced down my hamster like she was cutting into a tiny pie and picked up her magnifying glass to get a closer look. Chaney started doing his rounds, so I picked up my scalpel and poked at Zoe’s hamster sausage like I was interested. He stopped at our table. For a split second I thought he was going to make some comment about us switching hamsters, but amazingly he didn’t.

  ‘Excellent, Camille. You’re a natural, it would seem!’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, my voice breaking in shock. He moved on to the next desk and I twirled my scalpel around in my fingers like a baton, rather pleased with my first ever praise from Chaney. I looked at Zoe. ‘Thanks, Zoe.’

  She turned her head, stared at me, and went back to her surgery.

  I continued to twirl my scalpel until the knife nicked my thumb.

  ‘Ah!’ I unzipped my pencil case and reached in to grab a happy flower dressing. ‘Are you going to the Halloween party?’ I said when Chaney had clacked back towards his desk.

  ‘Pardon?’ she asked.

  ‘The Halloween party. It’s at the end of the month.’

  ‘So why are you asking me at the beginning of the month?’ she muttered.

  ‘Well, it’s quite a big event,’ I explained, ‘and I heard people usually start asking people out now and hiring their fancy dresses and limos and everything. It’s like a second prom. We have to have special outfits and masks and stuff, which the Art Department are making, and the boys have to ask us to dance, it’s like the law of the party. And we have, like, a buffet and one of those horse things you hit with a stick. I’ve got an orange dress and I’m going as a pumpkin.’

  She looked up. ‘And you have to go, to dispel the memories of the Eat, Drink and Be Merry, I take it?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ I nodded.

  ‘Is that all people care about here, parties?’ she said. ‘Is that all they like to do, stumble from one party to the next? Freshers’. Halloween. Christmas, Valentine’s?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ I said again.

  ‘What types of human waste will they persuade you to ingest for that one?’ she muttered.

  ‘Halloween will be different,’ I said, trying not to let her comment sting me.

  ‘I’ll have to make sure I’m either dead or in jail by then,’ said Zoe.

  The strip light was flashing above Mr Chaney’s chair. He set down his papers and stood on top of his desk to wiggle about with the little thing at the end of it.

  ‘I suppose he’s the preferred dancing partner,’ said Zoe, tapping the spine of my ring binder where ages ago I’d written ‘Mrs de Jager’ in bubble writing.

  ‘Yeah, totes,’ I said, going violently hot in the cheeks yet again as I tried scratching over the bubble-writing with my Biro. (One day, I’m going to have surgery on my cheeks to take the blush out of them, it’s so annoying.) ‘Except Damian’s asked Lynx to go with him. Lynx is – was – one of my best friends . . .’

  ‘De Jager,’ Zoe interrupted. ‘Yes, he’s in my Chemistry class,’ she murmured. ‘I caught him in the teachers’ store cupboard last week, stealing chemicals.’

  ‘Did you report him?’

  ‘No,’ she scowled at me.

  ‘Why were you in the teachers’ store cupboard?’ I asked her.

  ‘I hope you’ve been listening, Camille. You won’t know what to do next.’ Chaney stepped down from his chair but the strip light was still flashing.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ I really wasn’t listening any more though, it had to be said.

  ‘And here we have it,’ he announced, pointing to the whiteboard diagram of a squiggly brain thing. ‘When you have cut through the abdominal wall you will have exposed the
large intestine . . . What’s so amusing, Tamsin?’

  Mr Chaney was telling off Tamsin Double-Barrelled for laughing at her hamster’s bottom, while Harvey With A Squint and Kayden No Neck were in hysterics, having stitched both their hamsters together. I watched Zoe working on her hamster and within seconds, she had stitched it totally back up again, her fingers so furious they could have been playing a really fast tune on a piano. Chaney went back to fussing about the strip light and announced he was going to have to get a new bulb from the store cupboard.

  ‘Damian’s cute though, isn’t he?’ I grinned. ‘I mean, he’s a bit of a head case but he is lush. I thought I might be in love with him but . . .’

  ‘I’m not really interested in boys,’ said Zoe.

  ‘What?’ I said, trying not to let my face in on the fact my brain was shocked. ‘Well, that’s great. That’s really cool. But I wouldn’t tell anyone that you’re . . . like that if I were you. Not yet anyway. Your old school was probably really relaxed about it but girls here might get funny. You know. It might stop you fitting in.’

  ‘Funny about what?’

  ‘Well, girls worry when they know a new girl might . . . fancy them.’

  ‘Why would I fancy them?’

  ‘You said you weren’t interested in boys.’

  ‘I’m not interested in boys. And before you ask, I don’t fancy girls either.’

  I chuckled. ‘Well, what else is there?’

  ‘Science,’ she said. She removed a black zip-up case from her bag and opened it. Inside were lots of syringes filled with a blue liquid, as blue as her eyes.

  I frowned. She, in her starey way, stared back at me. How weird. I’d never met anyone who fancied science before. I’d watched this documentary once about a woman who was in love with the Berlin Wall but cheated on it with the fence post in her garden. Sometimes I wished I could be happy with a fence post. But I wasn’t. I wanted a boyfriend. A sweet, sexy, funny, warm boyfriend who’d treat me well and hug me all the time. Was it too much to ask? I’d love to hug a boy. Or just have my hand held for a bit. I dreamed about it. I ached for it. Hang on, I’d thought boy. Not girl. Maybe I wasn’t a lesbian after all?