Adorkable (15 page)

Kissing
Michael Lee the first time was an accident. Kissing him the second time was just plain silly. And the times after that were sheer Oh-my-God-what-is-wrong-with-you-ness.

It was obvious it wasn’t going to last but I never thought it would end with him calling me fugly and untrustworthy and just about the most evil, calculating person in the world. Like I would ever blog about what we were doing. Like I was
proud
of what we were doing.

I was meant to be working on a stupid seascape in Art because Mrs Spiers had said that if I didn’t she’d fail me for that module. It really was the least of my problems but I was just in the right mood to paint a storm-tossed ocean with lots of greys and blacks and purples. I even added a little sailboat getting pulled under with a teeny-tiny little man onboard, and if he hadn’t been so teeny-tiny then I’d have given him an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt and a faux-hawk because the
teeny-tiny man was Michael Lee and the little sailboat was his miserable life, which was going to be nothing but a source of frustration and disappointment to him once he wasn’t the most popular boy in school any more and was forced to join the real world.

Of course I couldn’t tell Mrs Spiers that so I described my painting as a metaphor for the savagery of nature and how it would ultimately triumph over all the wrongs man had done. Mrs Spiers was really big on metaphor so she actually dared to pat me on the head and said that she expected great things from me this year if I kept up this standard.

Triple whatever.

I couldn’t wait to get out of school, though I had to steel myself to go and unlock Mary in case Michael Lee was loitering around the bike shed because he wanted to hurl some more insults at me or, worse, somehow I ended up kissing him again. I’ll say one thing for him, and only one thing: he was a really good kisser. That was a large part of the problem.

I’ve kissed seven boys and two girls and Michael Lee was definitely in the top three. He did this thing with my bottom lip and his teeth that made me want to squeal and swoon a little.

Anyway, he wasn’t there, which was fine by me because it meant that the thing, the stupid thing that should never have started, was over. I didn’t even cycle through the staff car park in case he was hanging around but took the long way down the grass slope and through the junior school.

It was cold with that crisp nip in the air that made me think of toffee apples and crunching through fallen leaves and mugs
of hot chocolate and all the other things that were ace about autumn, but it was still light enough that I decided not to go straight home but huff and puff my way up the big hill, then up an even bigger hill until I was cycling to Hampstead and even then I didn’t want to stop.

I love standing up on my pedals but keeping my body low so I can go extra fast and feel the breeze lift through my hair and all I am is the ache in my legs as I pedal faster and I don’t have to think, I just am.

I cycled on to Regent’s Park, craning my neck so I could see the giraffes through the canopy of plane trees as I whizzed past London Zoo and I thought about cycling right through the park but the sun was getting lower and lower, so I cycled back through Camden, slowing down to save my energy for the big steep hill that I couldn’t avoid on the way home.

My legs were shaking as I walked through my door. God, the flat was such a mess. Normally I didn’t mind the mess. Mess is a sign of a creative mind, after all, but right then it just seemed like one more aspect of my life where chaos reigned.

The fridge was another place where there was no order. There was also nothing in there for dinner and I’d spent my lunch-hour eating Michael Lee’s mouth off his face, then two hours cycling around north London, so I was ravenously hungry. I couldn’t even order a takeaway because a quick scavenge through bags and pockets and the back of the sofa only netted two pounds and thirty-seven pence. My debit card was somewhere in the flat, or maybe in my school locker, but right then it was lost to me.

Luckily
I’m never more than five seconds away from some Haribo, so, ripping open a bag of Tangfastics, I switched on my MacBook and headed for Twitter.

	adork_able Jeane Smith Sartre was wrong. Hell isn’t other people. It’s other people AND the complete absence of Pad Thai in my life right now. Please send food.

Immediately people began tweeting me pictures of Pad Thai and also cake, which was sweet but wasn’t really helping the hunger pangs that the Tangfastics weren’t doing much to quell.

	winsomedimsum is yum @adork_able Sartre had nothing to complain about – he wasn’t doing five A-levels or was related to my mother, as far as I can tell.

It was a tweet from a new follower of mine, @winsomedimsum. I mean, I had new followers by the hundred every day, more if I had something published or one of my tweets was retweeted by a celebrity, so I didn’t take much notice of them and I very rarely followed back. But @winsomedimsum shared my love of weird foodstuffs and we’d just
connected
. And at least they weren’t one of the fifty-seven tweeters to now send me a picture of Pad Thai.

	adork_able Jeane Smith People, please stop tweeting pics of food I can’t have. Not that I don’t appreciate the sentiment but it’s making me cry actual tears.
	adork_able Jeane Smith @winsomedimsum I like to think that Sartre’s mum was constantly getting on his case about leaving his gym kit lying about unwashed.
	winsomedimsum is yum @adork_able ‘I don’t care if you are writing about Existentialism, Jean-Paul, those clothes won’t walk to the washing machine by themselves.’

I
almost choked on a Tangfastic. This was what I loved most about Twitter: riffing on utter nonsense with a complete stranger who turned out to be on the same bizarro wavelength as me.

	adork_able Jeane Smith @winsomedimsum ‘I’ll give you Nausea, young man. Of course you’re feeling sick with ten unwashed plates mouldering under your bed.’

That was the sum total of my Jean-Paul Sartre knowledge so I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to come up with any more tweets about him.

	winsomedimsum is yum @adork_able You’d better amuse yourself while I try to Wiki some more fun facts about Jean-Paul Sartre.
	adork_able Jeane Smith @winsomedimsum I was just about to tweet the exact same thing!
	winsomedimsum is yum @adork_able Must have been a bad day though if you’re channelling JPS (can’t be arsed to keep typing his name).
	adork_able Jeane Smith @winsomedimsum Not just a bad day, one of the suckiest days.