by Various
“No wonder your self-esteem is so low.”
“She’s not all bad. She works two jobs to help pay for me and my younger sister to go to private school. Mum can’t afford it.”
“Well, maybe all the hard work is affecting her eyesight.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You look like Nicole Kidman.”
I snorted. “Nice try, but I know you’re just saying that because you feel sorry for me.”
“I don’t say things I don’t mean.”
“Seriously? For real? You’re not just saying that because you witnessed me being publicly humiliated in a fancy restaurant?”
He shook his head. “You’re a dead ringer for Nicole Kidman. Same hair, same mouth, same body.”
I began to smile. Maybe this holiday wouldn’t be so bad after all. I now knew that slobbery, dribbly, cold, wet kisses were not something I had to put up with for life. I now knew that a kiss could make your stomach flip, your legs go weak and your heart flutter. And for that, Carlos, I have to say muchas gracias!
And despite the public humiliation, Dylan had come to save me and he thought I looked like Nicole Kidman! Now all I had to do was explain to my best friend, Chloe, that I fancied Dylan too…
It was a movie kiss.
It was Leonardo diCaprio and Claire Danes in armour and angel wings on the balcony in Romeo and Juliet. It was Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr on a black and white beach from here to eternity. It was Rhett and Scarlett, Holly Golightly and Paul, Jack and Rose.
It was me and him on the front step, on a rainy night in Nowheretown.
But that’s what made it perfect.
I’d been kissed before. No less than three times by the age of seventeen. A near low in the history of high school, where success is measured in bases and popularity hangs on your choice of lipgloss.
My kisses were, in no particular order:
1. Jake Westville.
My ill-fated target in spin the bottle at Julie Newbery’s twelfth birthday party. I ended up getting sick on chocolate fudge sundae; he ended up getting off with Julie. They are still together. Jake and Julie. I like to think my lack of prowess in the lip department somehow contributed to this alliterative union.
2. Ant McReady.
Film buff, Smiths devotee and year twelve’s most committed emo. But it turned out his Brokeback Mountain obsession wasn’t all about the horses or the sweeping scenery shots.
3. Luke Wright-Watson.
Behind McDonald’s on the main street. Cheap cider blocked most of the two minutes twenty-seven seconds of this hell from memory. The rest I strive to do myself on a daily basis.
None of them made the earth move, the world stop, my toes tingle inside my black Chuck Taylors. None of them would make a cheap cable drama, let alone the Oscars.
Olly, my best friend, said I was suffering from film fatigue. That I’d overdosed on John Hughes high school high dramas, and as a result nothing on this side of the silver screen was ever going to come close. That I’d go to my grave never having had the perfect kiss if I measured it by Andie and Blane in a stable at a country club. It was like waiting for Godot. He was never going to show up to the ball.
But I liked to think of it more as perfectionism. I mean, who wanted to settle for Mr Goodenough when Mr Right was out there somewhere? Besides, Olly was just mad because he was still yet to kiss anyone besides Cat Walmesley in year six. We thought he might be gay for a bit – he totally hearts High Society and knows way too much about the oeuvre of Baz Luhrmann – but we borrowed a no-label DVD off his uncles Max and Norman, and nothing moved, let alone the earth.
But, two years later, mine did. Just like I knew it would.
Have you ever wished someone would walk into your life and change everything, just by being alive? That their mere existence would nudge your world off its axis and send everything spinning into a new and brighter orbit?
Well, it happened. On 9 September at 12.35 p.m. Drew Lacey walked into our canteen like Batman and the Joker all packaged up in one neat slick-quiffed, check-shirted, wry-smiling Rockabilly God. His brown eyes met my baby blues as he walked past, his cowboy boots clacking on the Coke-stained concrete, and in that instant I fell in love.
If I could have written the perfect boy, it would have been him. He radiated intrigue and boredom in equal measure, and with a determination bordering on the Olympic. The way he stood outside the chemistry lab, his shoulders leaning against the Dulux orange, bouncing a tennis ball off the wall like he was Newman in the cooler in The Great Escape, made my heart ache with want.
Olly said my chances, on a scale of one to The Sure Thing, were nil. Because Charlie Patel saw him kissing Lily Dean on the football pitch and he had his hand up her mini kilt and his tongue so far down her throat it was like he was trying to eat her alive. I said it was just a kiss. And not even a pretty one. But Olly said even if it was just a kiss, I’d still have to wait for the Triple As – Amber, Alexa and August – to have their share. Those girls swapped boyfriends like they swapped cheap earrings. No one seemed to know who was dating who, and maybe it didn’t even matter.
Don’t get me wrong, Olly didn’t put me at the bottom of the list. I was way ahead of Verity King and Emily Button. I even pipped Hannah Holden, who had DDs and a daddy who owned a drug company. But Olly had to say that. That was what best friends did. They held your hand when you were scared, and held your hair back when you were sick.
They told you the truth, but couched it in a little white lie.
But like I said, I was good at waiting.
So I waited. And I clocked up Drew moments like I was collecting pennies in a jar.
I had seven.
1. That first look in the canteen. The opening credits. The beginning of everything.
2. The time he brushed my shoulder in the crowd at the vending machine. Olly said Stan Havory pushed him and it was an accident. Nothing more. But even though he barely touched me, I felt it in every inch of my body. And that was no accident.
3. The time I opened my locker and a lifetime of kitsch and Johnny Cash CDs fell out. And while Lily and the Triple As stood there laughing like Disney hyenas, Drew knelt down on one knee and handed me a purple-headed troll like it was a Tiffany diamond.
4. The time our lab partners both got the flu and Mrs Pennington said we might as well buddy up than waste sodium nitrate. The significance of “chemistry” was not lost on me.
5. The time in French when Madame Leblanc asked everyone to name a Paris landmark and we said “Jim Morrison’s grave” as one voice, and he jinxed me.
6. The time he stood behind me in the canteen queue and asked me if I was harbouring suicidal thoughts when I picked the macaroni. I said I was the kind of girl who liked to live on the edge. Which would have worked a whole lot better if I hadn’t also had a carton of skimmed and a cookie on my tray. But the line was a good one and he knew it.
7. The time he bust the G on his six-string in the common room one Friday lunch and I gave him a spare from my duffel bag. He’d been playing chart cheese to Lily. A ballad about beauty and the blues. But after he got the string he switched straight to Johnny Cash. My song. Our song.
Seven moments over seven months. Straws, Olly said. And I was clutching at them. But then in the eighth month Aphrodite and Venus and all those other goddesses of love looked down on me. And I went from seven to heaven in one week.
It was a week of fortuity. Of fates colliding and fortune smiling. Serendipity, I said. Only without John Cusack or Kate Beckinsale or the glove counter at Bloomingdale’s.
On Monday Amber told August who told Alexa who told Drew that Lily had kissed Finn Shakespeare in the back row of the Odeon on Saturday night.
On Tuesday Lily was crying in the upper girls’ bathroom at first break and it was clear from the conversation I caught from stall two that this was not just a bad time of the month or a broken nail.
On Wednesday Amber’s aunt got cooties, aka colon dise
ase, and her parents flew out of town for the weekend to be at her bedside. Amber decided not to go on the grounds that she had an algebra exam on Tuesday next, a full drinks cabinet, and an overwhelming urge to have a bunch of randoms chuck up in her downstairs toilet while listening to overloud R ’n’ B.
On Thursday Charlie Patel, who was August’s flavour of the month, invited Olly to the party during AV club and told him he could plus one.
And then on Friday I hit jackpot. I was in the canteen making Sophie’s choice between the lasagne and the chicken pie, when someone behind me said, “Just eeny meeny miny mo them. That way you can blame fate instead of yourself when you’re praying to the porcelain god by home time.”
I didn’t need to turn round to know it was him. His voice was sand and glue, like Dylan’s. A low, cool drawl. And I smelt him. Cigarettes and Doublemint and possibility. But I did turn, and I smiled. And he smiled right back.
And then it happened. He said, “So you’re going to Amber’s, right?”
I said, “Maybe I am; maybe I’m not. But I’m surprised you are. Aren’t you persona non grata round the mock Tudor mansions these days?”
And he laughed. A proper, guileless laugh. “I think Amber weighed up the odds and decided Lily’s comfort and convenience were worth less than a free crate of beer.”
Which wasn’t generosity on his part. I mean, his dad owned a chain of off-licences. But I got his point. I always got his point. “She’d never make the maths club,” I dead-panned.
“Not with those thighs,” he batted back.
And then I realized we could be playing safe net shots for a while here. So I took a risk. I hit a smash, hard and true. “So maybe I’ll see you there.”
“Not if I see you first.” And he winked. He actually winked. Not a cheesy game-show host one, but an “I have seen Stand by Me and know it’s in your Top Ten Films of All Time list, even though Kiefer Sutherland is in it and he gives you the hives” nudge.
And then it was done. The moment was over. Because a dinner lady in a pink hairnet was telling me to hurry up and Charlie had pushed in between us to get the last piece of pie. But it didn’t matter. Because those few words and seconds were worth a cold plate of pasta. Because I knew he knew. I knew he got it. And got me. And that Saturday night would be the scene I’d been waiting for. Saturday night, in a bedroom on Mulholland Drive, would be our first kiss.
But like any great movie kiss, it was all in the set-up. And I had scripted it like a skinny-jeaned Scorcese.
Costume was easy. Emerald green fifties prom dress. Trusty Chuck Taylors. My mother’s Chanel No. 5. Dietrich meets Marilyn, with a little bit of Juno thrown in as a nod to the indies. Like me, but better. A 3D technicoloured remake of a much-loved black and white classic. For props I travelled light. Just my smile, and my guitar. Because I didn’t want to be the girl nodding and swaying while some wannabe Cobain strummed out sub-Nirvana grunge on a swing chair. I played a mean “Folsom Prison Blues” and I wanted Drew to know it.
And dialogue – well, I knew it word for word. I had lines from Bergman and Hitchcock, and a whole scene from Zeffirelli down pat. Of course, this would rely on there being a balcony somewhere, but at Amber’s house I figured this would be a real possibility.
But like all great movie plans, there was a hitch. A villain who twirls his moustache at the eleventh hour and sends it all to hell in a handcart.
I just never figured mine would be Olly.
“I can’t face it,” he said, when I called round to collect him.
“What?” I asked.
“The whole thing. The shit sound system and the cheap shots.”
“But you have to come,” I said, pulling his jacket off the hook. “You have a key line. The scene won’t work without you. You’re the sidekick, the buddy, who gets the best lines and the laughs.”
“But not the girl,” he said.
I shrugged. And then he lost it. Went scary crazy in a monologue worthy of De Niro.
“What if I don’t want to be a bit player in the big movie of your so-called life any more?” he spat. “Christ, it’s not even a movie. It’s a pathetic little made-for-TV drama. A soap. You’re not Cathy and he’s not Heathcliff. He’s just another MTV extra who hands it out to anyone with tits and a credit card.”
And just when I thought it was over, he came back for a grand finale.
“Oh, and don’t kid yourself. There isn’t going to be a movie kiss. At best you’ll go straight to third base on a pile of coats in the corner.”
Nobody puts me in a corner, I thought.
But the door had slammed. He was gone.
And scene.
And I stood on his doorstep, the rain beginning to fall. And I wanted to go home. I wanted to sit on my bed with my graffitied wall behind me like Duckie while Morrissey begged to get what he wants, this time.
But I wasn’t Duckie. I wasn’t best supporting. I was the leading lady. I was Marilyn and Marlene and Molly. I didn’t need him, I just needed myself. My guts, my guitar and my cute dress.
In any case, Olly might miss his line, and mess up the whole scene.
But in the end, I managed to do that all by myself.
Drew’s on the deck with Charlie and Stan. They’re jamming to – my, oh my – “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, an appreciation society of preppy and perky wannabe princesses nodding in time like those plastic rear-window dogs, not really hearing it. Not getting it.
I don’t do the groupie thing. Not my style. I wait until he sees me. Then I turn and walk, real slow, back into the house, onto my set. And I wait.
There’s no balcony. Which is a huge oversight given the frankly staggering views across the rooftops. Mr Barrett was missing a trick when he designed this late twentieth-century monstrosity. But there’s a fake Tiffany lamp, and a bed and a poster of Audrey. And I can work with these. I’m a professional, after all. And in the end the set blurs into the background, because the camera focus is on my face as I hear the door handle turn, and I dampen the G chord and look up.
It’s him. Of course it’s him. His hair slick with wax, his mouth pulling into that catlike grin.
“Nice notes, Johnny,” he says, and leans back against the door, clicking it shut behind him.
God, even the way he leans is beautiful. He could say nothing, do nothing but lean, and I would be mesmerized.
“You took your time,” I say.
“Well, I’m worth the wait,” he replies.
I falter. Because that’s just a tad too confident. He’s supposed to be endearingly nervous. Because it’s not just going to be a kiss; it’s going to be the start of something. Of everything. But I take the material I’m given and I work with it. I rise, letting the guitar fall onto the duvet, and I walk towards him, my lips parted, waiting to say my next line.
But he’s already coming at me, and before I can get the words out his mouth is on mine, and he’s pushing me back, towards the bed.
The earth isn’t moving.
I stumble, falling onto my guitar, a discordant minor filling the room.
There are no violins.
His weight pushes me down as his hand pushes heavy green lace up.
A thousand doves do not fly to the heavens.
And as his fingers reach towards the forbidden, it hits me: John Hughes is not directing this scene. I am not even directing this scene. He is. His raging hormone-fuelled, Internet-porn-filled, lame frat movie brain is in charge. And I know how this one ends. And it’s not going to be with a happy ever after.
I twist my head so his tongue slides, doglike, across my cheek. “Get off me.”
“What the—” he protests.
But I am incredulous. And incredible. Un-scripted now, but the lines keep coming.
“What did you think this was going to be? You were supposed to be the hero. The James Mason or Jimmy Dean. But you’re just another two-bit dime store hoodlum like the rest.”
But my words are wasted. Falling like ripe cherrie
s on concrete.
“What are you on?” He stares at me. His brown eyes black with fury and broken pride. Not getting me. In any sense. “Lily was right about you. Total freaking nut job.” He stands, straightening his T-shirt. Making sure his hair and ego are intact.
I say nothing. I have nothing left to say. Nothing that fits. Nothing that I could speak aloud without the sobs starting. So I stand, and walk towards the door, in a cloud of Chanel and quiet desperation.
“Where are you going?” he demands.
“Nowhere. Somewhere. Stardust Freaking Avenue.”
Cut to me at the punch bowl downing a plastic Incredibles cupful of courage.
Cut to the jacuzzi, where Drew is half naked with August, a ten minutes later caption fading in and out at the bottom of the screen.
Cut to me throwing stones at Olly’s window. A guitar strapped across a ripped and ragged prom dress. Snot mixing with salt tears on my skin.
“Wake up,” I plead. “Olly, you have to wake up. I’m sorry. You were right. I’m a bad person, Olly.”
“You’re not bad.”
The voice comes from the doorway. I turn and see him, the light from the hallway a halo around him, like a Hallmark Card angel.
“You’re not asleep?” I sniff.
“Couldn’t.” He shrugs.
I nod. I know. “I’m sorry,” I repeat. “It… He—”
“I know,” he cuts in. Saving me. Like he always does.
And so I let him. I let him put his arms around me, and hold me, and tell me it’s going to be all right. That tonight doesn’t matter. That it will happen. The kiss.
I pull back and look at him, into him. “When?” I ask.
He smiles. “If this was a movie, you know what would happen, right?”
“No,” I lie.
“If you won’t say it, I will.”
My heart beats louder. But steady now. Not the flutter and fear I felt with Drew. But something stronger. I dare him. “So say it.”
“Fine,” he says, his eyes still on mine. “I would say, ‘It’s you. It’s always been you.’ And then—”
“I’d say, ‘It just took a while to know it,’” I continue.