Adorkable (16 page)

Truthfully, it hadn’t been that sucky. I’d actually bumped into the postman for once, instead of making my weekly trek to the sorting office with a shopping trolley to collect all my parcels. In the post had been fanzines, a Pez dispenser I’d won on eBay, two cheques, six bottles of nail varnish and a gingham dress from my friend Inge in Stockholm.

Then I’d made it into school with enough time to bang out half an English essay, got an email from a branding agency in New York who’d asked me to be a keynote speaker at a conference confirming my FIRST CLASS travel details, and I’d been on a two-hour cycle fest. It had been an awesome day. The
only blight in all the awesomeness had been realising that Michael Lee was every bit as evil as I’d suspected.

You shouldn’t kiss someone just because they were a good kisser and ignore everything else about them, I told myself, but I’d been telling myself that for the last two weeks and I’d still found myself attached to Michael Lee’s mouth.

My computer beeped and I realised I had another tweet from @winsomedimsum.

	winsomedimsum is yum @adork_able I promise it’s not Pad Thai but thought this YouTube clip of dogs on skateboards might hit the spot.

It wasn’t as good as dogs surfing because, quite frankly, what could be? Still, it was a close second and I forgot that I was hungry because there was an English Bulldog looking all kinds of happy on a skateboard.

I tweeted @winsomedimsum to thank them but they were nowhere to be found and none of my usual Twitter buddies were about and I didn’t have any outstanding coursework or articles to write and there was nothing I wanted to Google and I could have written a blog post but I didn’t feel passionate enough about anything to blog about it right there and then and mostly I just felt feh and meh and kinda blah. I had a sneaking suspicion that it was all to do with the argument I’d had with Michael Lee, but I couldn’t allow myself to think like that, to give him that kind of power over me. I was much, much better than that.

I
didn’t know what to do with myself. Well, I did. I wanted to talk to Bethan because even when I didn’t want to say what was bugging me, Bethan could always tell when I was bugged and she always knew how to chivvy me out of it. But Bethan was in Chicago and this week she was starting her shifts just as I was getting in from school so she wasn’t even Skype-able.

There were people I could call, even Barney, but to admit I was furious because I’d let someone like Michael Lee use me and then discard me like a tissue stiff with dried-up snot (ewwww!) was not something I could do.

What I could do was put on Duckie really loudly and attempt to dance my way out of my existential crisis. It usually worked.

The song descended (or should that be ascended?) into a cacophony of squalling guitars and a driving beat as Molly, the singer, shouted, ‘
Dumb, dumb, why are you so dumb?
’ over the top and I shouted along as I jumped up and down on the sofa and actually it was all very cathartic until the song ended and I realised someone was banging on the door.

It
was probably Gustav, my neighbour. We had an agreement about loud music, which stated quite clearly that after half an hour I’d give it a rest, but I’d been playing the same song over and over again so many times that I’d lost count.

I leapt off the sofa. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said breathlessly as I opened the door. ‘I’ll let you play awful dance music for an hour straight so we’re even.’

‘OK, good to know.’ Oh, God, it wasn’t Gustav, it was Michael ‘dead man walking’ Lee. I should have slammed the door in his face but what would be the point of doing that when I wanted to shout at him?

I hadn’t had time to get the first, ‘Just what do you think you’re doing here?’ out of my mouth when I registered that I could smell the siren scent of hot chips and Michael Lee was thrusting a tightly wrapped parcel at me.

‘I’m sorry,’ Michael Lee said quickly. ‘I’m sorry that everything came out of my mouth wrong at lunchtime. And I’m sorry if I upset you and I’m sorry if I implied that I could do better because it’s not about that and I thought I could make it up to you by, um, buying you dinner if you haven’t already eaten.’ He shoved the bag into my hands with more gusto so I was forced to take it. ‘And generally I’m just sorry, OK? Except I’m not sorry for throwing you off your bike because I
didn’t
throw you off your bike. It was an accident, I swear.’

There was so much information in that speech that I could only hit the highlights. Michael Lee was sorry for a whole slew of things that had hurt my feelings. He did sound as if all his sorrys were sincerely meant and he’d actually taken the time to wonder if I’d had dinner and then brought me food. Hot food.
It had been a long time since anyone had cared enough to make sure I had a hot meal inside me.

I could smell yummy chip-shop smells wafting out of the bag and it would be so easy to have it all be forgiven but I never did nothing nice and easy. ‘How did you even find out where I live?’ I asked as I stood my ground. ‘And how did you get into the building?’

‘Well, I had to do the whole ask Scarlett to ask Barney thing with this flimsy excuse about still owing you for the bicycle repairs and I was about to ring your buzzer but these two guys came out while I was standing on the doorstep and when I said I was here to see you, they let me in.’ Michael frowned. ‘One of them, I think his accent was German, said to tell you that you’d violated the loud music treaty and to expect payback.’

‘Gustav, he’s actually Austrian,’ I mumbled, dreading the inevitable moment at some ungodly hour on a Sunday morning when he’d start blasting Deep House. ‘He’s like my gay dad.’

I stood there and Michael stood there, both of us very still, like we were afraid to make any sudden movements and it was really stupid after all that had happened not to step aside and say, ‘Do you want to come in?’

I’d
never seen anything like the inside of Jeane Smith’s flat. It was like walking into one of those
Extreme Hoarders
programmes – everywhere I looked there were piles of crap.

Not actual crap but just mess, rubbish, junk. Like, I thought Hannah had been untidy because she was always starting projects and getting distracted halfway through so her bedroom was littered with abandoned collages and knitting and scraps of dressmaking material, but if you took Hannah’s mess and multiplied it by a hundred, it still wouldn’t come close to Jeane Smith’s mess.

‘Yeah, sorry about the clutter,’ Jeane said, as she crunched her way over Jiffy bags, magazines, old pizza boxes and God knows what else into what I supposed was the lounge though it looked more like a shanty town after a tsunami had swept through it.

As Jeane threaded and weaved her way through to the sofa,
it was obvious that that was where she spent most of her time because that was where the rubbish reached critical mass. On either side of the sofa were stacks upon stacks of magazines and papers as if Jeane discarded whatever she’d finished reading and chucked it on top of the nearest pile.

The sofa was just about clear enough that she could throw herself down on it.

‘Oh, let me make some room,’ she said, and she scooped up magazines, envelopes, books and some empty sweet wrappers and simply threw them on the floor. It was one of the most shocking things I’d ever seen and it wasn’t as if I’d led a very sheltered life, but you just didn’t chuck stuff about. My mother would have expired on the spot from sheer disbelieving rage. I stood there, mouth agape, until Jeane looked pointedly at the space beside her and then at me. I began to carefully pick my way through the chaos.

Jeane began to unwrap all the steaming packages I’d brought her. ‘I didn’t know what you liked, but I figured most people like chips at the very least. You don’t have to eat it all.’

‘It’s very kind. Let me know how much I owe you,’ she said. It didn’t suit her sounding all stiff and starchy like that, I thought, as I finally reached my destination and perched uncomfortably on the very edge of the sofa. It seemed inevitable that there’d be something gooey stuck to her cushions that would transfer itself to my jeans.

‘You don’t owe me anything,’ I said, just as tightly. ‘It’s a peace offering to make up for behaving like a twat.’

‘Yeah, but I couldn’t … Oh! You got me mushy peas? They’re about the only vegetable that I actively like. And little
packets of vinegar and ketchup? You rock at providing hot meals.’ She gasped.

‘Condiments can be tricky,’ I muttered because I knew we were going to have to talk, really talk, and all this chat about food was just the warm-up act. ‘Some people like vinegar on chip-shop chips, but some people are ketchup junkies.’

‘See, I like them both equally. I couldn’t decide between them. It would be like the
Sophie’s Choice
of condiments,’ Jeane burbled as she held aloft the plastic fork I’d also remembered. ‘Look, y’know, thank you for this and, well, you know, I may have behaved like a twat too. Actually, I think I was behaving like a total arse, but your mileage may vary.’

I thought about it for five seconds. ‘No, you’re right. You were being a total arse.’

As soon as I said it, I wondered if there was going to be another temper explosion but Jeane just ‘Hmm’ed and then she smiled around a mouthful of chips. ‘I’m glad we’ve got that cleared up. Do you want to put the TV on or listen to some music because I’m starting to get really self-conscious about chewing loudly?’

She had this really complicated but cool set-up with a Mac mini wired up to her TV so I could whiz through her iTunes. I hadn’t heard of a lot of the bands so I put her songs on shuffle. At least that way I wouldn’t put something on which she’d only had in her iTunes as some kind of cool test so she could mock me mercilessly. I wondered why I cared if Jeane Smith mocked me mercilessly but apparently I did. I gingerly sat back on her couch and stared at her coffee table and the two MacBooks open and running, an iPhone, an iPad and three remote controls.

‘It’s
so weird. I was on Twitter wailing about my lack of dinner options and then you show up,’ Jeane suddenly said and my heart did this unpleasant stop/start thing. ‘Are you on Twitter?’

The easiest thing would be to tell Jeane the truth. That, yes, I was on Twitter and actually we’d been sharing links of dogs doing extreme sports and had enjoyed several amusing exchanges about weird food and Jean-Paul Sartre. It would be so easy. ‘I don’t really get the whole Twitter thing,’ was what my brain told my mouth to say.

I expected Jeane to launch into a passionate defence of Twitter and all who sailed in her, but she just shot me a smirky glance, then took a gigantic and enthusiastic bite of battered sausage. I had to look away.

And I hadn’t lied. I still didn’t get Twitter and if I told Jeane that I was actually @winsomedimsum, it would lead to yet another argument and for once we weren’t arguing and it was kind of … nice. Besides, if (and it was a really big if) this thing with Jeane continued for a little bit, it was handy to be able to have a way to chart her moods so I knew when to stay away. If she was tweeting about food, puppies and general mundane trivia about her life, everything on Planet Jeane was good. But if she was tweeting about politics and feminism, retweeting mean things people had said about her or getting into pointless arguments, especially pointless arguments with minor celebrities, then I knew to avoid her.

Jeane seemed to think that we were done talking about Twitter anyway because she was rooting through the bag of chips for the crispy bits. ‘Are you hungry? Do you want some
of this? You’d better speak now before I scoff it all,’ she said warningly.

I shook my head. ‘Already had dinner, thanks.’

‘So, does your mother know you’re here?’ She sounded amused like she already knew my mother’s views on being out on a school night. Though, to be fair, I was allowed out until ten-thirty on school nights if all coursework assignments were complete and I remained in phone contact.

‘Sort of,’ I admitted. ‘I said I had to help a school friend with a problem.’