Adorkable Page 4

  An hour had raced by and Jeane and her friends were now tweeting about a band they were all going to see the following weekend. I’d never heard of the band but I was pretty certain they’d be the kind of band that I wouldn’t like, either all fey and jangly and singing about holding hands in ice cream parlours or so loud and jarring that they made your ears bleed.

  I also wasn’t sure about correct Twitter etiquette. Did I say goodbye before I logged out like I did when I was in a chatroom? Or did I just go because they were all still wittering on about some band called The Fuck Puppets and wouldn’t even notice?

  In the end I was saved by the bell. Or by my mother calling from the foot of the stairs about staying on the computer for too long or about the DVD they wanted me to watch with them or possibly the dangers of eating too much cold dim sum this close to bedtime. It was hard to tell.

  I texted her to say I’d be down soon, even though I knew that drove her mad, and then made the startling discovery that in the time I’d been tweeting, I’d gained over fifty new Twitter followers, including Jeane herself. I suppose it was a big deal. Jeane might have over half a million followers but she was only following a mere thousand people herself, which made me special. It made me one in five hundred, apparently.

  My mean inner voice crowed triumphantly, ‘Ha ha! Fooled her.’ I tried to ignore it. I hadn’t fooled anyone; I’d just exchanged tweets with a girl who was friendlier on the internet than she was in the flesh. There was no more to it than that. I followed Jeane back, then turned off the computer so I could go downstairs and see what all the yelling had been about.

  I watched Barney and Scarlett closely over the next few days. Except they had no idea they were being watched because I was very, very stealth-like. Barney and Scarlett, however, were entirely un-stealth-like.

  Now I knew what to look for I saw evidence of their treachery everywhere. It’s like when you discover a brand new word, and by the end of the day you’ve heard three other people on three separate occasions say this previously unheard word, because the word had been there all the time but you just hadn’t realised it. (And can I just say if Barney and Scarlett were a word it would be something clunky that felt wrong as you tried to sound it out like rambunctious or discombobulated?) Anyway, I digress: I was talking about REAL evidence of Barney and Scarlett’s crimes.

  For instance, Scarlett commented on every single one of Barney’s Facebook status updates, even though they were very boring. ‘Thinking of eating an apple. Should I have a red one or a green one?’ he’d type, and within five minutes Scarlett would have commented with a ‘ROFL’. Except she didn’t even capitalise it, she used all lower case, like she was too stupid to figure out the shift key. She was also fond of ‘lmao’ and ‘lol’ and was obviously so stupid that I wondered how she managed to get to school without being run over.

  There were other signs, too, that suggested Barney was doing more than guiding Scarlett through the minefield that was GCSE Maths. He was meant to tutor her for one hour after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays but I noticed that actually he was nowhere to be found on Tuesday and Thursday evenings at all. He wasn’t on Twitter or Facebook or Google Chat and he certainly wasn’t answering his phone.

  When I asked him casually on the Wednesday morning, ‘Were you screening my calls last night?’ Barney stammered and stuttered his way through a torturous denial that involved his Physics class finishing early and having to get a permission slip signed in the school office and the planets realigning in some mysterious way that caused him to leave his phone in his locker. I wasn’t buying it.

  And I certainly wasn’t buying the way that Scarlett and Barney tried to ignore each other. He was ‘tutoring’ her so there was no reason for her to pretend that he wasn’t standing right behind her in the lunch queue. Especially when he looked as if he was sniffing her hair at one point.

  Biting my tongue and not saying anything was really hard – usually I spoke first, tweeted second and thought last. The evidence was piled high against them, but when I wasn’t at school or scowling at Barney’s status updates and Scarlett’s inevitable lolz, I started to doubt it. Because really, Barney and Scarlett? It made no sense. They defied all laws of God and man. I’d raised Barney in my own image: he was on my side, on the side of the dorks, on the side of all that was good and pure. Scarlett was strictly darkside all the way.

  That was the conclusion I’d come to by lunchtime on Wednesday as I sat in my favourite secluded spot behind the language lab knitting furiously and listening to a podcast about the fair trade coffee industry, rather than doing the reading on the fair trade coffee industry. I was just getting to grips with a tricky bit of moss-stitching on circular needles when a shadow loomed over me.

  ‘Go away,’ I muttered without looking up, because I could see boy feet in a pair of off-white Converses and the only boy I talked to at school was Barney and he knew better than to wear off-white Converses like every other boy in Years 12 and 13, so it was no one that I wanted to talk to. ‘You’re in my light and this is my special spot so go away.’

  ‘You’re the rudest person I’ve ever met,’ said a voice that I recognised, even over the heated debate about fair trade farming in Peru. Yes, bloody Peru. With a put-upon sigh I looked up at Michael Lee. ‘Why are you so hostile?’

  ‘Why are you still in my light?’ I said, putting down my knitting so I could unhook my earbuds because he was still blocking the weak rays from the late-September sun and showing no signs of moving. Obviously we were going to have to chat this out. ‘What do you want?’

  I was pretty certain I knew what Michael wanted and part of me wanted it too. Because thoughts of Barney and Scarlett (or Barnett as they’d be known if they were celebrities) were going round and round in my head and I had nobody I could talk to about it. I had friends. I wasn’t some sad-sack Betty-No-Mates, but I didn’t like to overshare when it came to deep stuff. I had no problem with oversharing about undeep stuff though.

  I’d used to talk to Bethan about the deep stuff but it was different over Skype, especially when she was working eighty-hour weeks and always sounded so tired. My frustration at my current lack of a confidante had to be written all over my face, making me even more scowly than usual, because Michael took a hurried step back even as he said, ‘Oh, I was just passing and I thought I’d come over and say hi.’

  ‘Why the hell would you want to do that?’ I asked very coldly. ‘Did you think that because we had one unpleasant conversation at the jumble sale we’re now on hello terms? We’re not. We have nothing to talk about so just, like, go away.’

  Michael narrowed his eyes. He really was ridiculously pretty for a boy. It was another reason why I was harshing him – he was so used to girls going swoony in his presence (I once saw someone from Year 9 walk into a tree rather than tear her eyes away from him) that I didn’t want him to think that I was, too. That was the deal with the really good-looking boys: they automatically assumed you were pining and panting for them and wouldn’t be satisfied until you’d had their babies, no matter how ugly their personalities might be.

  Apart from narrowing his eyes, Michael didn’t react in any way to what I’d said. I decided we were done and so I picked up my knitting again and began to retrace my stitches.

  ‘Look, I was just trying to be friendly,’ he suddenly said.

  ‘Is this part of some lame-o student council outreach programme?’

  ‘It’s funny but I’m starting to figure out what this whole deal with Barney and Scarlett is about,’ Michael remarked casually. Then he had the nerve to sit down next to me on the wall. I tried to ignore him. ‘If I was going out with you, I’d be looking for an exit strategy too.’

  ‘And if I had the incredible bad luck to be going out with you, my exit strategy would involve running into oncoming traffic,’ I snapped. ‘Now, why don’t you go and share your paranoid little delusions with someone who actually gives a toss?’

  Michael jumped up from the wall, knock
ing into me so I dropped about twenty more stitches, and muttered something under his breath that sounded like the word ‘Bitch’ said ten times, really fast. I kept a cool smile pinned on my face because I knew it would enrage him further, though I didn’t know why the need to take Michael Lee down a peg or fifty had suddenly become my life’s vocation.

  I watched him stride across the scrubby patch of grass where the stoners often sat and when he rounded the corner by the bins I got to my feet, stuffed my knitting and iPod into my bag and marched off to English.

  Scarlett was sitting at the back with her little posse of friends. They all thought they were perched on the cutting edge because they bought their clothes in American Apparel and went to gigs on school nights. They weren’t evil per se, but they sure had a lot to say for four girls who wore exactly the same clothes, listened to exactly the same music and had the same opinion about everything. Apart from Scarlett – she wouldn’t know an opinion if it moved in next door and played death metal all night long.

  I always sat at the front because I always got to class too late. Besides, it was easier to keep an eye on the teacher and berate them loudly if they were trying to stick us with extra coursework. As I pulled out my chair, I made sure to catch Scarlett’s eye and give her my most blank-faced stare. Always worked better than a glare – it let the recipient know that they weren’t even worth the trouble it would take to scrunch up your facial muscles.

  Scarlett went as red as her stupid name and shook her head so her hair fell over her face (a move she could only have learnt from Barney), as Ms Ferguson shut the classroom door, smiled at us all brightly and announced that we were going to have a debate about the two novels we were studying for A-level: The Great Gatsby and The Fountainhead.

  There was a collective groan as I reached into my pocket for my iPhone. The chances of a rigorous literary debate were slim and if I arranged my books just so on my desk, I could probably do some tweeting without anyone noticing. Ms Ferguson was cool, but she wasn’t that cool.

  I let the chatter buzz around me. It wasn’t a debate, just a rehashing of the plots of both books, though I heard someone say incisively, ‘That Daisy Miller, she was really up herself.’

  It was almost worthy of a tweet, but I had an unwritten rule that I would never badmouth anyone I knew in real life on the internet. We also had an unspoken rule in class that everyone’s opinion deserved to be heard, no matter how rubbish and misinformed it was.

  ‘So, Scarlett, which book did you prefer?’ Ms Ferguson asked gently. All the staff treated her as if she was made out of spun glass.

  There was a reedy whisper from the back of the room, like wind whistling around the chair legs.

  ‘I’m sorry, Scarlett, I didn’t quite catch that,’ Ms Ferguson said, her jaw moving even after she’d spoken, as if she was grinding her teeth.

  ‘Well, see, hmm, I didn’t really understand what the guy in The Great Gatsby, not Gatsby but the other one, um, what he saw in Daisy.’ I swivelled round in my chair to watch Scarlett look pleadingly at her friends, until one of them, Heidi or Hilda or whatever her name was, whispered something to Scarlett. ‘Yeah, like, well, Daisy: it didn’t even sound like she was that pretty.’

  I actually heard Ms Ferguson’s swift intake of breath (another reason why I sat at the front – you really got to sniff out a teacher’s weaknesses) then she caught my eye as I grimaced at Scarlett’s extreme moronitude.

  ‘Jeane,’ Ms Ferguson said, and she sounded a little desperate. ‘Why do you think Nick Carraway is in love with Daisy?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that he’s necessarily in love with Daisy,’ I said slowly, my eyes still fixed on Scarlett, who squirmed unhappily. ‘He idealises her and imagines she’s his perfect woman, even though it’s obvious that she isn’t. I think what Fitzgerald is showing is that nobody ever knows what someone else is like. Not really. They just end up projecting all this crap on to the other person. And, yes, people might say that Daisy didn’t ask for his adoration but she takes advantage of it all the same, you know?’

  Scarlett was staring at me blankly and it was pretty obvious that she didn’t know. She was the Grand Poobah of not knowing. ‘OK,’ she said, looking down at her hands. ‘OK.’ She sounded a bit gulpy and I wondered if she was going to cry. ‘I don’t really know what you mean.’

  ‘Have you actually read The Great Gatsby, Scarlett,’ I said, ‘because Nick’s unrequited love for Daisy is pretty much the cornerstone of the book?’

  There was a deathly hush in the classroom. Even Ms Ferguson seemed to be holding her breath, instead of jumping in and telling me to back off.

  ‘I know that,’ Scarlett said a little huffily, which was the first time in six years I’d ever seen her exhibit some backbone. ‘I just, well, I get it mixed up with The Fountainhead. They are kinda similar.’ There was a murmur of agreement around the room. I felt like banging my head on the desk.

  So, in my defence, when I said, ‘The Great Gatsby is about the death of the American dream and The Fountainhead is about the theory of objectivism and the strength of the individual. They couldn’t be more different unless you’re completely retarded,’ it was directed at the whole class, not just Scarlett.

  Scarlett bent over so her face was entirely obscured by her hair and burst into tears hard enough to make her shoulders shake. ‘Oh, Scarlett, I don’t think Jeane’s bad mood is worth crying over,’ Ms Ferguson said dryly, as Heidi/Hilda and another girl rushed to throw their arms around Scarlett and coo at her. My lips curled with contempt as Scarlett got to her feet and ran from the room, ricocheting off desks as she went.

  ‘See me after class, Jeane,’ Ms Ferguson sighed, then set us a thirty-minute writing exercise on the themes of loss and longing in The Great Gatsby. I could feel twenty-eight pairs of eyes shooting laser beams between my shoulder blades.

  ‘That was totally uncalled for,’ Ms Ferguson said, once the class, including a still-sniffing Scarlett, had trooped out. ‘It’s hard enough to get Scarlett to contribute, without you eviscerating her when she does.’

  ‘I was including the entire class in that last comment,’ I pointed out and Ms Ferguson rested her chin in her hands and rolled her eyes.

  Usually when she rolled her eyes it was more conspiratorial. I’d roll my eyes too and we’d share a look that said, ‘God, what are we doing here?’

  Ms Ferguson, or actually Allison as I call her outside of school, was an almost-friend. I saw her at gigs and art shows in Hoxton and we followed each other on Twitter. That said, what happened outside school stayed outside school. I even knew she was in a band called The Fuck Puppets and it was a secret I’d take to my grave, which must have been why she was finding it so hard to give me the bollocking that I sort of deserved.

  ‘I shouldn’t have said “retarded”,’ I conceded. ‘Because it’s offensive and, er, disablist, but how can anyone get The Great Gatsby muddled up with The Fountainhead if they’ve actually read both of them? It’s like muddling up monkeys and daffodils or baked beans and Pez dispensers or—’

  ‘Yes, I get the idea,’ Ms Ferguson snapped, then she folded her arms and tried to stare me down. I obediently lowered my eyes so I looked a little contrite. ‘I expect much better of you. You let yourself down.’

  I hate it when people give you the whole ‘I’m not angry at you, I’m just disappointed’ speech. It was so predictable and, quite frankly, I expected much better from Allison. But that wasn’t the point right now. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, though my usual monotone delivery made it sound as insincere as it did in my head.

  ‘It’s no use saying sorry to me. You have to say sorry to Scarlett. In front of me, and, Jeane, I want an unambiguous apology that isn’t some clever play on words that could be misinterpreted. OK?’

  She knew me so well. ‘OK.’

  I shoved my folder and my dog-eared copies of Gatsby and The Fountainhead in my school tote bag, which I’d made myself and had ‘I Dork, Therefore I Am’ embroidered on it,
because I thought we were done, when Allison made an awkward choking sound.

  ‘Everything’s OK, isn’t it? With the whole living by yourself deal because if there’s anything you need to talk about, you know that I’m he—’

  ‘No, no,’ I said quickly, standing up. ‘Everything’s fine. It’s better than fine. It’s absolutely dandy.’

  Allison actually followed me to the classroom door. ‘We could talk outside school,’ she murmured meaningfully. ‘If you like.’

  ‘I have to go. I’m going to be late for Business Studies,’ I said, and it wasn’t just to get her off my back: I was horribly late and I hadn’t managed to listen to all of the podcast because Michael Lee had interrupted me.

  I tried to keep my head down for the next forty minutes but the lesson took an alarming turn when Mr Latymer decided to drill me to within an inch of my young life about the positive effects of fair trade farming in the developing world. There was only one thing to do and that was to launch into a skin-stripping rant about the negative effects of so many corporate owned coffee chains taking over Britain’s high streets.

  It turned out most of the class preferred to argue over who did the better Frappuccino – Starbucks or Caffè Nero – than about fair trade farming. It got very heated very fast and I could sit back and tweet to my heart’s content as Heidi/Hilda threatened to wallop Hardeep when he tried to introduce Costa Coffee’s Frescatos into the debate.

  The bell went as Mr Latymer was trying to restore order and I could quietly slip out of the classroom, while all around me people were being given detentions and shouting things like, ‘I don’t care if there are five hundred calories in a Double Chocolate Frappé made with skimmed milk. Why do you have to ruin everything for me?’

  All I had to do was get my bike basket and pannier out of my locker and I’d be free of this hellhole that reeked of cheap disinfectant and failure until 8.40 the next morning.