Adorkable (18 page)

‘Kind of. Ben said it might take a bit more toner.’

‘Maybe a
lot
more toner,’ Gustav said, and he didn’t sound very confident in my hair’s abilities to reach the exact same shade as Madonna, Lady Gaga and Courtney Love back when she hadn’t been quite so batshit insane as she was now. ‘Still, is good to have goals.’

‘Why? What colour is my bloody hair?’

‘Back in Austria when I was a boy if I’d spoken to my mother all snappy like that she’d have washed my mouth out with soap.’

‘What
fricking colour is my hair, Gustav?’ I demanded, wrenching myself free of his grip, drops of water splattering everywhere but mostly over Gustav, who moaned in protest.

Thanks to my earlier efforts with a damp cloth, the mirror was sparkling and there was nothing to dull the colour of my hair. My bright, fluoro, neon, is-that-the-core-of-a-nuclearreactor-no-it’s-just-Jeane’s-head orange hair. I love orange as much as the next person, probably even more. I have a lot of time for orange. Orange tights. Orange jelly sweets. I have even been known, on occasion, to eat an actual orange, but on my head: no, no, a world of utter NO.

I have attitude in huge quantities but I didn’t have the complexion and strong features necessary to carry off such a blaze of colour. Gustav certainly agreed with me ‘You look like one of those troll dolls,’ he mused. ‘They were very big in Austria.’

‘This is all your fault! If you’d let me wash the bleach off instead of making me clean then this would never have happened.’

‘Oh God, what is that on your head?’ Harry asked from the doorway and then he started laughing so hard that he had to sit down on the floor.

Even Gustav was smirking and there was only one thing I could do, which was grab my iPhone, take a scowling picture of myself and tweet my Twitter followers:

	adork_able Jeane Smith Hair emergency! Already bleached & toned, can I put more dye on or do I have to shave it off?

I’d
pretty much reconciled myself to a grade-one as Gustav began to assemble a foul-smelling broccoli bake, but Twitter came to my rescue. The general consensus was that I needed to buy some hair dye that was as close to my natural colour as possible, then set up a shrine to my favourite personal gods and pray for a positive outcome.

I was just on the verge of ordering Harry to leg it to Boots before it shut when I got a text from Michael:
Is it OK to come round or are you busy working on your masterplans for total dork domination?

Just this once, I decided to let his snarking go unmentioned. It wasn’t important. What was important was briefing him on the catastrophe that had befallen me and sending him a link to the hair dye he was going to purchase on the way over.

I tried to get rid of Gustav and Harry before Michael arrived but it proved impossible. Harry insisted that I went through all the piles he’d made and put at least half of them in the recycling and Gustav wanted to force-feed me green leafy things that he swore were vegetables but tasted like pond slime. As it was, when Michael knocked on the door, they were still working my very last, most tattered nerve, and sorting out the rest of the garbage sacks to be chucked down the rubbish chute.

‘I’m in the middle of something,’ I said to Michael as I opened the door. ‘And by the middle of something, I mean planning the grisly murder of my two gay dads.’

Michael swallowed hard. ‘If I’ve caught you at a bad time …’

‘We’re just leaving,’ Gustav snapped from somewhere behind
me, then he dared to shove me out of the door. ‘After we see Jeane put at least five black bags down the rubbish chute.’

It wasn’t as humiliating as, say, the time I turned up to DJ at a club in Shoreditch, misjudged the clientele and cleared the dancefloor three times by sticking on choons that were deemed far too tuneful to actually dance to. Goddamn hipsters.

Anyways, I could have done without an audience as I lugged seven (seven!) huge black sacks down the rubbish chute. Then I had to introduce Michael to Gustav and Harry. I hadn’t been planning to, but Harry clamped his arm around my shoulders and said, ‘So, Jeane Genie, are you going to introduce us to your little friend?’

I wasn’t sure how to describe Michael to them. Gustav was ridiculously over-protective about gentleman callers. When I’d been seeing a French boy called Cedric (mostly because he was French and called Cedric), Gustav had come round at one in the morning and ordered Cedric off the premises, even though he was about six months too late to prevent the technical loss of my virginity. He’d even subjected Barney to his squintyeyed, lock-jawed disapproval, though Barney had suffered a fit of the vapours just from touching one of my boobs over three layers of clothing.

Now he was staring at Michael with icy blue eyes like he’d recently seen his name on the Sex Offenders Register. ‘This is Michael Lee,’ I said. ‘He’s come round with hair dye so I can salvage the damage that’s all your fault, Gustav. And Michael, this is Gustav and Harry who live next door and are the bane of my existence.’ Attack is
always
the very best form of defence.

The
three of them nodded at each other, then Harry drawled, ‘Michael, what are your intentions towards our Jeane? I hope they’re honourable.’

‘Um, they’re very honourable,’ Michael muttered, holding a paper bag aloft. ‘I really have brought hair dye.’

Gustav sniffed dubiously. ‘It’s a school night, so …’

‘It’s five in the afternoon, Gustav!’

‘ … don’t stay too late,’ he continued. ‘Harry and I are meant to be going out for dinner, though we’re both exhausted. You’re very tiring, Jeane.’

I pulled a face but decided to let that one slide. ‘Thank you for bossing me to within an inch of my life,’ I simpered, but the hug that I gave both of them was heartfelt. Not that I was appreciative of the enforced tidying or the ingestion of vegetables but I was glad that they cared enough to get all up in my domestic business.

Finally Gustav and Harry were in the lift and Michael was standing in my hall and blinking in wonder. ‘You have floor,’ he commented faintly. ‘Actual floor and a sideboard.’ He wandered into the living room. ‘It’s funny but the place looks much bigger now that it’s not totally covered in pizza boxes and crap.’

He was right but the flat being bigger wasn’t necessarily a good thing. ‘So, hair dye?’ I prompted and he threw the bag at me. I dropped it, retrieved it from the floor and pulled out a box of ash-blonde hair dye. It made my heart sink but girls with neon-orange hair couldn’t be choosers.

‘There’s a disgusting vegetable bake in the kitchen if you want some,’ I told Michael, but he shook his head and squinched up his face.

‘Sounds
delicious but I think I’ll pass,’ he said, and I wasn’t sure if he was going to stick around or if I wanted him to but he gestured at the towel that was wrapped around my hair. ‘Let’s see it then.’

With a put-upon air I whipped off the towel.

‘God! Wow! It’s much brighter than I thought it would be.’

‘Too bright.’

‘You like things that are too bright,’ Michael said, looking at the blue and white polka dot playsuit I was wearing with pink tights. ‘It’s almost the same colour as those tights that got ruined when I … when … you know …’

‘When you
accidentally
tipped me off my bike?’

He nodded. ‘Yeah, those ones.’

‘Tights are one thing. You can take tights off, but I can’t take off my hair and I’m not going to be in the mood to have bright orange hair every day,’ I explained. ‘Anyway, if you’re staying, you can help me.’

Michael wasn’t any help at all. He just sat on the edge of the bathtub and helpfully pointed out when I got splodges of hair dye over the white tiles I’d just scrubbed, but he did go out to get me a coffee while we waited half an hour for the colour to process and helped me wash all the murky brown-coloured dye out of my hair, though he did bitch about getting splashed. He even went to the kitchen to get me some Haribo as I deepconditioned because my energy levels were flagging.

‘Oh God,’ he said when he returned with a bag of Cola Twists. ‘Bloody hell, Jeane. You can’t dye it three times in one afternoon. It will fall out.’

I’d been too busy towel-drying my hair to worry about the
colour but now I was seriously worried. I was one worry away from having a complete meltdown.

‘Don’t say that! Don’t look at me like that.’ His eyes were so wide with horror that I thought they might slip out of their sockets. ‘It’s brown, isn’t it? A boring, muddy, drab, blah brown. Brown hair! I don’t deserve brown hair.’

‘Oh, shut up and stop being such a drama queen,’ Michael snapped at me. ‘Anyway it’s not brown. You’ll wish it was.’

I steeled myself to take off the sodden towel that I’d draped shawl-like over my head when Michael had started doing a good impersonation of the Harbinger of Doom. I turned to face the mirror, shut my eyes and removed my head covering. Then I opened my eyes and …

‘Oh! Oh! Oh, well, it doesn’t look
that
bad.’

Michael groaned as if he was in great pain. ‘Your hair is the same colour as peach yoghurt.’

‘Or apricot yoghurt.’ I stared in wonder at my hair, which was a creamy, pastel orangey, pinky, peachy shade that I could totally work with. ‘Now this is much better. This is a neutral.’

‘In what world is
that
colour a neutral?’ Michael demanded.

‘In
my
world, boring boy,’ I rapped back, but my heart wasn’t in it. I much preferred to gaze at my new hair in the mirror. It looked kinda French and I decided that I might experiment with pinning it up and possibly investing in a tiara. And maybe a foofy skirt with another foofy skirt over it and why not a big flouncy net petticoat under both of them?

I love the endless possibility that comes from changing your hair colour. Now that I didn’t have grey hair, I didn’t want to dress like a little old lady any more but like a Fifties prom
queen on mild-altering drugs. There was definitely a blog post in there: Hair or Flair – which comes first?

‘I like it. I really, really like it,’ I said decisively. Michael was still acting as if it hurt to look at me. ‘At least you’re spared the humiliation of being seen out in public with a girl with peach-coloured hair.’

‘Well, there is that,’ he agreed, and then he was by my side so he could run his fingers through my damp hair and I didn’t know what this strange, intoxicating pull was but all he had to do was touch me and I began to wonder how long it would be before we were done with talking and could get to kissing. ‘But I don’t mind being with you in private.’

‘That works for me,’ I said, and Michael was staring at my mouth so I was self-conscious about how my lips moved as I was talking but I think he wanted to kiss me too. ‘Shall we move this to the sofa?’

We’d never kissed lying down before, probably because usually we were either at school or there was so much stuff on the sofa that lying down wasn’t an option. For once we weren’t craning and stretching to kiss standing up, or bodies twisted at awkward angles to kiss sitting down, but lying on the sofa, legs tangled together, and we could concentrate on the kissing.

It was such good kissing that it deserved to be savoured. He tasted of tea and tangy cola sweets and every time we stopped kissing, because we needed that pesky thing called oxygen, Michael Lee would sigh. Sad-sounding sighs and I didn’t want to think about why he might be sad so I’d kiss him again and because he was Michael Lee, he didn’t freak out when he realised his hand was on my breast for the first time but kept
it there. It wasn’t just a motionless hand clamped to my boob either, he was stroking and pressing and finally unbuttoning my playsuit, which was sodden and chafing me from being continuously soaked with water throughout the afternoon.

But the stroking and the pressing and the unbuttoning all seemed a bit one-sided and what was the point of kissing Michael Lee on your sofa if you didn’t get to see what all the fuss was about? What made the other girls short of breath and weak at the knees? Besides, I was only too happy to rid him of his American Eagle T-shirt, because his allegiance to fauxheritage American brands offended my eyes and my sensibilities.

Up until then I thought I was in control of myself and the kisses, but with all that caramel-coloured skin rubbing against me, it was impossible not to wriggle and writhe and maybe even shimmy until Michael’s hand slid under my bra and I could feel his hard-on digging into me.