If so… who? Could it have been Jordy? Was he even here? Charlie and Andy had definitely been on our coach.
My chance came much later when we all stopped for lunch. Keisha of course put down her clipboard and wandered off. She probably didn’t even care if she ever saw that worksheet again, basking in the glory of being a so-called ten as if it meant doing well at Geography was never going to matter in her world.
I quietly flipped through the pages of her clipboard, sliding a finger slowly under each leaf as if I somehow thought it made me less suspect. Chan’s sheet, Keisha’s, Dani’s, Rindi’s, Rachel’s, Fern’s… mine was right at the bottom, the same way I was right at the bottom of the girl heap. Each sheet had only a tally table, the same style we’d been using for our field work, except hand drawn roughly. It went from zero to ten.
Under the first two boxes, zero and one, there were no marks for me. One person had voted me a two, two had voted me a three, four had voted four, and two had voted five. Three had voted six. One person had voted ten, and nobody else had said anything at all. When I re-averaged it as quickly as I could, I was forced to the conclusion that Keisha only wanted people to think she sucked at Maths – she’d done all of these in a very short space of time, and accurately! If you took the ten as a joke vote, which it probably had been, considering that nobody’s really a ten (least of all me), I was more of a four.
I was a four.
* * *
It was all I could think about for the rest of the trip. Instead of a relaxing day out, one of the last patches of sunshine we’d get without rain until maybe March, I was preoccupied with the fact that, at least going by the hotchpotch sample of boys Keisha had chosen, I was THE ugliest one of my friends.
Me. As horrible as it makes me sound, I’d always been ever so slightly glad that I wasn’t Dani. It wasn’t something I thought every time I checked myself out or anything disgusting like that, but every now and then when Danielle struggled to haul herself up onto the side of the swimming pool, or tripped in the hallway and had mean comments thrown at her about watching out for the heffalumps, I’d secretly felt a tad bit lucky that I wasn’t, well, big enough for those complications.
Sure, three people had thought me a six, but that didn’t mean they would want to go out with me. Six was surely what you said if you were too nice to say anything lower – if you wanted a girl to think you liked her, why would you ever say six and not… eight or something?
Looking back on it, it wasn’t even a fair test. Keisha and Chantalle chose who to ask, and of course they asked boys that they thought were hot. They asked people they would’ve given a ten to. Of course those kinds of boys weren’t going to think me and Fern and Dani and Rindi and Rach were in their league, as they say. The uncomfortable question, though, still remained: what made me any less attractive than them?
I could’ve thought about it all day – Rachel’s legs and sporty physique, Rindi’s adorable shortness and her dimples, Dani’s giant boobs and gorgeous hazel eyes, Fern’s modelesque figure and fresh face… but then, for the worst kind of reason, I was forced to stop caring about all that.
Halfway home, one of the teachers took a phonecall. The other coach, mere metres behind us out of the car park, had been involved in a collision. One person overheard her attempts at muffling the subject matter, and it crackled and spat its way down the aisles like wildfire. The flames must’ve grown somewhat before it reached me and Fern at the front, but you don’t think about that kind of thing when the people in the row behind are insistent that the other coach has come off the motorway and several people have died.
My self-centred thoughts squelched to a halt. That changed everything. The way things ordered themselves in my brain right then will never be explicable on an ordinary day:
1. OMIGOD. Panic!
2. Thank God Charlie’s on the coach with us!
3. And Andy.
4. And my friends.
5. I wonder who died…
6. Jordy…?
7. Was he even here?
8. What about… everyone else?
OK, maybe a lot of those thoughts were still selfish, but my point is that they were nowhere near as selfish as my afternoon’s musings on the importance of looks – my looks, to be exact.
And sure, it turned out that no one had died at all. A lot of people had got whiplash, and that still wouldn’t have been very nice for us if we were in their shoes, but-
Wasn’t it great to be ALIVE?
#8 Clashes & Hot Flushes
Twas Saturday, and raining.
I was bored, and desperate.
Who in their right mind would want to trail around the shops on a day like that? The answer is (for once, no, not Network Q) Keisha and Chantalle. No amount of dragging on and off leafy-bottomed jeans and sludgy shoes in changing rooms would divert them from outfit-shopping for the talent show. That same talent show for which we hadn’t decided what we were being yet, and thus hadn’t auditioned. Yet for some reason, the wardrobe department had opened.
That’d be why we were trekking around the not-so-local “local” shopping centre – a not-so-local shopping centre that I’d had to tell myself I was allowed to go to, because I wasn’t actually on my own.
“Ooh, that top is gorgeous on you!” (Dani.)
“Aww, how cute!” (Rachel.)
“I know right? I’m gonna look amazing in this!” (Keisha, starting on again with the self-complimentation and general distractedness from actual costume shopping.)
It was right then that I decided to brighten the day up a little – I’d just spotted the most repulsive boys’ T-shirt ever (yellow with what looked to be a deformed cartoon chicken) over on a rack by the door. Unsurprisingly, it was labelled “Sale! 75% off.”
“Yeww, look at this monstrosity!!” heckled Keisha, pointing to the chicken abomination. “It’s just disgusting! And yellow. Chan, doesn’t yellow just look gross on everyone?”
“Ugh, exactly.” Chantalle grimaced. “It clashes with every hair colour available,” she added, in auburn self-consciousness.
Sure, that had been exactly what I was going to say (in less hideously loud words), but as I opened my gob to agree, I noticed Dani hurriedly zip up her Lonsdale, covering the last hint of sunshine yellow.
No, she wasn’t shoplifting – she was hiding something. Something like, ooh, she owned an identical one. I knew I’d seen it somewhere, but would’ve guessed Andy.
I was suddenly glad I hadn’t got in first. So what if my gripe with that top was the disturbing chicken, rather than the showy yellowness of it – a snipe at a friend’s top is a snipe at their top.
I tactfully turned my attention to the “75% off” bin next to the rack and mirror. On top of the pile sat a really nice little faux-leatherish bag, amongst the stack of not-so-nice-ones. I picked it up, grinning with disbelief at my find – this would be the first time I saw any bag in my price range that I’d be comfortably flattered by. £2.50 with the reduction!
When I went to pay, the girl at the counter struggled to find the price tag. “Could you go and find another one the same, so I can scan it for you?”
I scuttled back to the rack, only to find that there were no others remotely like it. (Lucky me, getting the last one!) So I schlepped over to the desk to let the till girl know.
“-black leather clutch handed in? I put it down for a second! It was two hundred pounds just last week; it’s designer!” fluttered a woman who now stood between me and the till. “It’s got my phone and all my work contacts!”
I unclipped the bag in a great big panic, to find a Blackberry, slim purse and other bobbins. Oops. That woman ought to have been glad I’m not Zak. Sometimes I think that boy has either broken his conscience or developed a selective kindness disorder, for instance the very same morning when he’d swept Kitty’s doll clothes off the coffee table, just so he could put his feet up.
I did the honest thing:
“Excuse me. Is this the bag?” I ask
ed her.
“Oh, yes!” The woman smiled. “Thanks so much, love.” She unclipped the bag and peered inside. “My sunnies were in here.” She frowned at me. “They’re gone. What’ve you done with them? Thief!!”
I was practically paralysed with terror – only I could end up arrested and accused of stealing something the shop didn’t even stock! Fortunately, Dani flew to my rescue. “I’m not being funny, but they’re on your head.”
So they were. The lady had nothing on me, but needless to say that’s another shop I won’t be returning to in a hurry…
#9 Torrential Brain
“House-ton, we have a problem!”
“Zak, I’m not doing this anymore. Go and rehearse with someone who hasn’t got Maths homework!”
Charlie was mad and sulky that afternoon. He was blaming the fact that his second hand CD player had jarred on him, on everyone but himself. Zak had managed to alienate the entire family by being bratty about the whole stepdad thing – Mum and Kitty being chuffed the bits with the idea (and thus mad at Zak), and me and Charlie generally sick of his bolshiness.
“Aargh!” I grumbled. Homework wasn’t going my way either. (I.e. off the face of the earth, where Zak’s project was set.) “I’ll do it then; at least it’s a break from Geography. Don’t they think a field trip is enough for one week?”
I’d been staring, pointlessly, unmesmerised at the kiddies’ world map in the kitchen, trying to develop photographic memory and know where all the countries in Europe are (and their capitals) for a test on Tuesday. I was not doing so well.
“At least you haven’t got Maths,” Charlie repeated himself, huffily.
“I’ve done my Maths.” I smiled, smugly, being his twin and annoying him back for disturbing me. “You didn’t even get Geography homework in your stupid set.”
“Well, I do Geography,” he snarled. “I just didn’t get homework this week. They probably didn’t think anyone would do it.”
I sighed. “I need to concentrate.”
“Will you help me? Pweeaaaze?”
“When I’ve prioritised me and Zak.” I grinned. “If you even know what that means.”
He stuck out his bottom lip. “I do too. It means you and him are more important.”
“Yes, we are. Go and daydream about one of your rock heroes…” I muttered, hating every second of this homework.
Oh well, I tried to think. At least it wasn’t as bad as the time I accidentally glued my hair to my History project at school, and had to walk to the nurse with it stuck there and rationalise: a) why Hitler how had an even wilder moustache, and b) why the trench rat had sprouted lifelike brown fur, realistically matted with superglue. If it had been an Art lesson, I’d’ve received points for authenticity…
“Let’s start again, Zak,” I sighed. “And it’s Who-ston.”
“Houston, we have a problem!” he yelled enthusiastically into his invisible mouthpiece.
“GUINEA PIG BABIES! GUINEA PIG BABIES! COME AND SEE!” Kitty shrieked excitably, flying into the kitchen dressed in her hutch-cleaning outfit of lilac tutu and matching glittery fairy wings. Sibling No. 3 on my to-help list.
I wondered what on earth she could have been gibbering about, and fearing the worst, rushed out into the garden. Zak followed, having a similar idea knocking about in his ten-year-old noggin.
In the open hutch, there was a proud mother guinea pig nestled in the bedding with her little pink babies. I groaned. “Have you been racing the boy guinea pigs and the girl ones again?” I asked, worried.
“Nope,” she promised, with a puzzled look. “And so what if I had?”
Zak saved me from having to answer that question. “We only had them since Wednesday; there’s no way she got pregnant and had them already.”
“I did race them on the playground with Matty…” She trailed off with a blissful look on her face, much like the one I used to notice when thinking about Charlie Simpson before a mirror. “Only ’cause he said he’d kiss me if mine won!”
I began to wonder where the teachers were at Primary these days, but remembered how when I was in Infants one boy had managed to flash me during the register before, while absolutely no one noticed.
“Was it this brown and black one?” I asked, putting on my sensible head and indicating the mother.”
“Does it even matter?” asked Zak, impatiently. “I need help with my presentation!”
“Did your guinea pig win?”
We hadn’t noticed a distracted-looking Charlie had joined us.
“What?”
“Did she win?” he repeated, innocently.
“No one won,” said Kitty. “They ran off and we had to find them.”
* * *
Lying in bed that night, a strange thought popped into my head. Rather, it zapped in, email-style, like a tiny explosion in my mind.
I had this brainwave, or, brainstorm, or whatever. No, not brainstorm – Mr Wordsworth says we can’t use that anymore because it’s offensive to epileptics. Like in PE when we’re not allowed to call crash mats “crash mats” anymore, because it implies that we’re going to crash. Really, who thinks that far into things? (Except me.)
Next, “brainwave” will be insinuating that your head’s gonna flood. And that would be offensive to a bunch of other people. On it goes…
I’m prattling.
You probably want to know what that thought was, rather than how to categorise having it: for the school talent show – we could do a spoof of a spoof on life. Little Britain or The Catherine Tate Show. Point out the ridiculousness of the deliberately ridiculous?
After all, everyone watches that stuff.
OK, most people do.
Most people our age do, even if they are actually fat / gay / ginger / whatever’s being poked pratty fun at this week. Maybe not an excellent idea, but probably the most original and enjoyable any of us had had so far…
But how could I get my friends to cosplay as chavs and the elderly for the sake of a few laughs?
#10 Batty Boy
Charlie clapped his hands together as if he was about three. My approach yielded company without a Y-chromosome, and I could kind-of understand, if the positions were switched.
“Could you help us with something please?” asked Chan, sharply, making him spill the orange juice he’d been squirting out of the machine into a polystyrene cup.
“Nope,” he replied, shaking an orangey foot. “Agh, OK. Here’s an Andy joke I guess you can have: What d’you call an angry wardrobe?”
We glared.
“Tough audience? Here we go: A cross dresser!” He smirked, understanding the crapness of the joke. “Anyway, no.”
“Pleasey-please, my one and only favourite twin brother…” I begged, sounding as girlishly girly as I could muster.
“Hmm…” He pretended to consider, stroking the beard he doesn’t yet have. “Firstly, I’m taking into account how I really am your only twin brother and you love me. Secondly, maybe – but for a price…”
“A date with Asta Price?” Chantalle offered.
“Ah!” he exclaimed. “That reminds me. A date. I’ve got this mate, and I’m not gonna tell you who, but we’re kinda doing this double date thing so we’ll… have one, for the Halloween disco. I’d need you to be the other girl. Please!” I noticed how he’d shifted into the Pleading Seat and I satisfyingly vacated it for good. “I really, really want this!”
“Done!” rushed Chan, gleefully.
“Hang on, Chan,” I said. “If you’re so eager, why can’t you be the date?”
“Nope,” said Charlie. “Has to be Harley I’m afraid. Deal or no deal?”
Oh bless, my brother obviously wanted me for moral support or something. And hey, it could even be Jordy!
“Deal.”
“I thought you’d see it my way…” He smiled this mysterious (orsohethought) smile. “So what did you want help with?”
“We have to do something funny for our comedy sketches,” I grum
bled. “But we can’t think of anything that hasn’t already been done…”
“A see, ma leetle comediennes!” he answered in a totally crap French accent. “Yeu nid zee boom-boom facteur, ma leetle fruitbats!”
Well, yeah, in a less eccentric, at least marginally giggleworthy way…
#11 Double Dates (& Single Raisins)
It was four fifteen, and the only rehearsal had gone improvisationally swimmingly.
This whole talent show fandango was proving to me over and over that I was only doing “exciting” things so I’d actually have something to write to you about.
“So, what’s my date look like?” I asked Charlie.
“Repulsive. But then again I’m heterosexually orientated. Except the exception of Avenged Sevenfold, and certain other tanks.”
I actually hoped he meant the sort of who are bodybuilders – not the sort that army guys (possibly sexy) drive around in. If there’s one thing that’s probably hard to come out with, it’s object sexuality. (“Mum, Dad, I’m marrying a double decker bus!”)
I moved on. “How old?”
“Same. Thirteen.”
“Hair?”
“Um, blonde.”
Could still be Jordy…
“Length?” I asked, before specifying hastily. “His hair, I mean.”
“Bit shorter than mine and floppy.”
Oh.
“In a cute way?”
“I can’t answer that!” he protested, before sighing and giving in all too quickly. “OK, fine. Yeah, in a ‘cute’ way. Dare tell him and I’ll… I’ll… have to be asking for my Vengaboys CD back because my straight status will be dead!”
“Whatever, I know you’re not gay!” I yawned. Not that a day went by when someone didn’t accuse him of such. “I remember your crush on Chantalle.”
He dipped his head.
I smirked to myself. “Eyes then?”
“Like, does he have them? He has eyes,” Charlie reassured me, jokingly.
I wasn’t sure how reassuring that was, really. I’d totally date a blind guy if it removed the whole issue of whether I should iron my hair. “Colour.”
Double Dates & Single Raisins Page 4