Adorkable (32 page)

‘I was going to punch the air at this point but now I think it might come across as a little cheesy, so I’m just going to fold my arms behind my back to let you know that I’ve finished.’

Applause
.

People were clapping but my body was still clenched painfully tight because maybe the clapping meant nothing more than, ‘Thank God that weird girl has finished yammering and we can go to the bar.’

But they were still clapping and now people were rising to their feet, not to leave but to clap harder, and when I made my eyes focus everyone seemed pretty happy. I think this is what they call a standing ovation.

Oh yeah, Jeane, you’ve still got it. Like there was ever any doubt.

Then John-Paul, the host, strode on stage and I had to take questions from the audience, which all came down to the same thing – how can we sell our products to your generation? – and I was all like, have you not listened to a single word I’ve been saying?

Finally
some snooty-looking hipster commented that I wasn’t really a typical teenager and I said, ‘Well, duh!’ then I realised that probably wasn’t the most tactful response. ‘That’s the whole point. I’m among them but not of them, thank the Lord.’

Then I was done. John-Paul was happy. Even Oona, the really grumpy woman who’d organised the conference, seemed happy. When I walked into the green room, I had to pose for pictures with the other speakers and string whole sentences together even though the tension and the adrenalin were starting to slowly drain away so all I was really capable of doing was grunting and maybe drooling a bit.

I looked across the room as this really boring scientist guy was talking to me about really boring science stuff and saw Michael being pushed through the door by Oona. He didn’t look very pleased when he first caught sight of me. I shrugged and pulled a face to say that how I’d behaved before the conference couldn’t be held against me because I’d been stressed up the wazoo.

Michael’s telepathy skills had to be getting better, because he started to smile. As he came closer his smile got broader and then he actually picked me up and twirled me around even though I thumped his back and threatened to kill him.

‘You were amazing,’ he yelped, once he’d put me back down. ‘Seriously. I didn’t like all that “Gen Y, they’re rubbish and they just want to be famous and God help us if there’s a war” and I was really pissed off about you going on about logo T-shirts yet
again
, and then you did this complete one-eighty about how no one is going to put us in the corner and we’re going to overthrow capitalism and I might even have got a little choked up.’

‘Really
?’ I asked doubtfully. ‘’Cause that wasn’t
quite
what I said.’

‘For absolute reals. And, hey, guess what?’

Michael grabbed my hands and gave them a little shake and now I was over my conference-sponsored angst, his enthusiasm and gushing and utter approval was kind of infectious like nits and I was smiling too and entwining my fingers around his. ‘I don’t know. What?’

‘I walked out of school and went on that demo! I mean, I’d thought about it but I didn’t have the guts but when I saw Year 11 marching down the corridor, I just walked out of Maths and half the class followed me.’ Michael beamed. ‘I was never sure how we all suddenly decided to go on the protest, but I should have known you were behind it. It had you written all over it.’

‘To be fair, I think it was more a kind of mass hysteria thing, like—’

‘Oh, please, you know that modesty doesn’t suit you,’ Michael snorted. ‘Anyways, it was fantastic. At one stage someone let me shout into a megaphone. It was one of the best experiences of my life – to feel like I had a say in my own future, you know?’

I did know and then Michael was hugging me again, really hard. ‘When you were up on that stage,’ he said, right in my ear, ‘I was so proud of you I could have burst.’

‘That would have been really messy,’ I said, or I choked out because I had this massive lump in my throat. I didn’t know why Michael being proud of me seemed more important than getting a standing ovation or an editor from
The New York Times
asking if they could quote from my presentation or John-Paul
and Oona checking my availability for a conference in Tokyo.
Tokyo!
But Michael was proud of me and he couldn’t stop smiling at me and he was still holding my hand and nothing else seemed to matter that much. Except one thing.

‘Look, I’m sorry I was such a witch this morning.’

Michael nodded. ‘So are you going to admit that you were nervous?’

My hard exterior was already shot to pieces what with the extended hand-holding, but it was a point of principle. ‘I wasn’t nervous. I was stressed.’

‘What
ever
. It’s the same thing.’

‘It is not. Being stressed has a totally different energy to being nervous,’ I insisted. ‘But anyway, I’m sorry, and I’m also sorry that I’m going to drag you to the post-conference party in one of the bars upstairs. It’ll probably be an ungodly bore but we can duck out after an hour.’

Michael grinned. ‘Free drinks and food in some swank bar with wall-to-wall hipsters that we can laugh at? I’m all over it.’

Three hours later we were sat on a leather bench in a corner of a bar that was really a glass-enclosed garden. It had slate floors, wrought-iron chairs painted black, blue and purple, and was lit with huge red lights dangling down from the ceiling.

I’d kicked off my boots so I could tuck my legs under me and had made the discovery that scallops wrapped in Japanese bacon were my new favourite things to eat. I was washing them down with a cocktail called a Peachy Lychee, which was meant to have vodka in it, not that I could taste it, peach schnapps and lychee juice. They were very moresome.

When I wasn’t stuffing my face or drinking, my head rested
on Michael’s shoulder as we took pictures of ourselves on my iPhone. ‘This hardly even looks like you,’ I told Michael as we scrolled through the photos. ‘It’s just your left nostril and your mouth. Pity, though, it’s a great one of me.’

‘Well, in that case, if you want to post it to your Twitter then that’s OK,’ Michael said amiably. He was still in a ridiculously good mood and we hadn’t argued for at least an hour, which was a personal best. He’d wanted to circulate but I’d pointed out that if you stayed in one place then, sooner or later, everyone that you wanted to speak to would drift over. Eventually Adam and Kai, two guys from San Francisco who were doing something with artificial intelligence and hundreds of thousands of dollars in start-up capital, had indeed drifted over. While I guzzled down Peachy Lychees, the three of them had had a conversation about human genomes and DNA and
Grand Theft Auto
that had slid right over my head so I’d amused myself by taking pictures of Japanese canapés and posting them on Twitter, and then they’d offered Michael an internship in Palo Alto next summer. Ever since then I could do no wrong in Michael’s eyes.

Mind you, he had been knocking back sake, even though it tasted rank. I don’t think either of us were in our right minds because there’d been a lot of tension and then the hyper good mood that comes when the tension goes away and a lot of alcohol and there had also been a lot of snuggling and nuzzling and maybe even a bit of snogging in between visitors to our table. All these things added up to my judgement becoming as cloudy as the sky on a cold, damp November day. I’m just saying.

What I was saying then was, ‘So it’s OK to post this photo on Twitter?’

‘Who
cares?’ Michael waved his hand languidly about to show how much he didn’t care. ‘I think most people are on Facebook, not Twitter.’

Soon Twitter would be overrun with the suburban hordes LOLZ-ing and PMSL-ing all over the place but I was pretty sure that no one at school followed me on Twitter and we were just talking about a picture of me looking adorbz and his nostril and mouth. I posted it on Twitter, then Michael, not to be outdone, faffed about on his ancient BlackBerry, and then we could get back to snogging until the waiters brought round more bacon-wrapped scallops.

On
the six other occasions when we’d slept together, I don’t think Jeane actually slept. She always had her eyes glued to some kind of electronic device as I fell asleep. Then, when I resurfaced hours later, she was already scanning through her blog feed.

But when I woke up at eight on Sunday morning, Jeane was fast asleep. And she was sleeping
hard
, lying on her side, clutching the quilt tightly to her. She hadn’t taken her makeup off the night before so there was glitter and black smudges all over the pillow and she was snuffling gently. It was the stillest she’d ever been and I didn’t have the heart to wake her.

Though there had been a few incredibly bitchy put-downs in her speech, generally Jeane had rocked it right out of the park and she’d introduced me to the two guys from the artificial intelligence start-up in San Fran and demanded that they gave me an internship. Besides, she’d been knocking back these
gross peach-flavoured cocktails all night whose main ingredient was vodka. I’d switched from sake to soft drinks so I could keep an eye on her but it had turned out that Jeane was a happy, sweet drunk and the least I could do was let her sleep off her drunken stupor.

I got up, showered, dressed, and, when she still showed no signs of waking up, I quietly slipped out of the room and walked around the Meatpacking District. All the stores were shut but a roadsweeper was getting rid of the Saturday night debris from the pavement, or sidewalks, whatever. Even though it was freezing cold and I could feel the wind whipping through my T-shirt, shirt and hoodie, tables were being set up outside restaurants and people were already queuing for first service.

I stopped at a coffee shop to get Jeane something sugary and a triple-shot espresso with the last of my dollars, then hurried back to the warmth of our suite. As I shut the door, Jeane’s eyes fluttered open and she slowly sat up. She was still wearing her prom dress because we hadn’t even done more than kiss last night. Or if we had then I’d fallen asleep before it got interesting. Maybe that was why she was scowling.

No, it was just a yawn. ‘What time is it?’ she croaked.

‘Nearly ten,’ I said, and she flopped back on the pillow with a tired groan. ‘I’ve been up for a while but I didn’t want to wake you.’

Jeane grunted something unintelligible but I saw her nose twitch. It was bizarre: one hand groped in the direction of the coffee I was holding as the other one reached for her iPhone.

I didn’t even try to talk to her until she’d gulped down her
caffeine and checked her email, by which time she was upright, vaguely alert and maintaining eye contact. ‘Right, so, let’s head to Brooklyn for brunch,’ she said. ‘Shall we cab it?’

‘Couldn’t we have brunch around here? I saw a nice place a couple of blocks away.’ It was too cold to go far and I wasn’t sure what time we needed to be at the airport, but Jeane just snorted.

‘Blocks? Dude, you’re talking American!’ She snorted again. ‘I said last night that it would be
really
lame to come all this way and only leave Manhattan to go to and from the airport. And you agreed!’

‘I have no memory of that.’

‘Well, you did have a lot of sake and you were falling asleep as I was telling you about how amazing the thrift shops are in Brooklyn. In fact you said, “Shut up, I’m trying to sleep.”’

That wasn’t quite how I remembered it. ‘I only had two sakes.’

‘Er, yeah, and about four bottles of beer,’ Jeane said, as she scrambled out of bed, but she didn’t seem to mind that I’d fallen asleep while she was talking or that I’d been drunk. Allegedly drunk. Because I hadn’t actually been drunk. Anyway,
everyone
knows that American beer hardly has any alcohol in it.

By now Jeane was walking across the bed but instead of jumping off the end like she usually did because she couldn’t just get out of bed without acting like a freak, she stopped, her eyes wide.

‘What’s that?’ she asked, pointing her finger at the desk. ‘Did you do a trolley dash or something?’

I
followed her gaze to where my many bags from Dylan’s Candy Bar were piled on the desk. ‘No, I just bought candy like a normal person.’

She clutched a hand to her heart. ‘Is it all for me?’

‘Well, they didn’t have any Haribo …’

‘God, what kind of one-horse town is this?’

‘But I managed to find stuff that would appeal to someone with an obsession for chewy jelly sweets.’

I could see that Jeane was trying, unsuccessfully, to quirk one eyebrow. She settled for a smirk in the end. ‘I don’t know why you’re sounding like my obsession is a bad thing. It’s a very, very good thing.’

‘It will rot your teeth.’

‘Not if I brush and floss a couple of times a day.’

Sometimes there was no arguing with Jeane and though she wasn’t a morning person, she was still in a good mood from the triumphs of yesterday so I decided not to push it.

‘Anyway, most of it’s for you and the rest is for Alice and Melly … oh, shit!’

‘Why oh, shit?’ Jeane bounced into a sitting position and patted the spot next to her. ‘What’s up?’

‘I can’t give them sweets I bought in New York, can I?’ I sat down and let Jeane rub my back. Her hand kept going over the same spot again and again like she was trying to wind me but I did appreciate the effort. ‘I’m not meant to be in New York. I’m meant to be in Manchester.’