Authors: Sarra Manning

Adorkable (8 page)

BOOK: Adorkable

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Scarlett frowned. ‘Well, I have stuff to do so I don’t need a lift, but, like, thanks.’ She didn’t say anything else. Instead she gave me a pointed look, which was something I hadn’t known she could do.

Mind you, it was nothing compared to the look that Barney was giving me. I’d only ever spoken to him a couple of times – once I’d said hello to him at a gig and once I’d had to write him up for texting in the middle of a Maths lesson – and both times he’d stammered and blushed and stared at the ground. But now he looked at me like he had every right to be sitting next to Scarlett, so close that from shoulder to knee they were touching. He gave me a tight smile.

‘Actually
,’ he said, ‘me and Scar were having a private conversation.’

‘Fine,’ I said, like I really was fine with this distinctly unfine situation, but I wasn’t going to be the guy who lost his temper and let loose a torrent of angry words that I’d regret later.
Be the bigger person
, my dad always says,
even when someone is trying to make you look small
. I could do that. Or I could at least try. ‘Well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘OK, or I’ll text you,’ Scarlett said weakly, and I think all three of us knew that she’d do no such thing.

On the way home, I knew for certain that I had to end things with Scarlett ASAP. By rights she should be the one to do the dumping, but instead she was being indifferent and unreliable and hanging out with the geeky ginger kid who was tutoring her in Maths so she could
force
me to be the bad cop. The thing was that I’d never had to dump someone. Yeah, I’d broken up with girlfriends before but it was more a mutual decision that we weren’t into each other any more. Then there was Hannah and that had been a case of, ‘You know I love you, right, but you also know my dad works in the Foreign Office and I’m being shunted off to boarding school in sodding Cornwall to do my A-levels because he’s being posted somewhere where there’s a good chance that he and my mum might get kidnapped by rebel forces. For fucking real.’

We’d talked about long-distance relationships and how we could Skype every night but in the end Hannah was in so many tiny pieces about her parents that I didn’t want to be one more thing for her to worry about. The break-up was awful. I’m not going to lie: I cried. Hannah cried. Even our mums cried and
I still have a Post-it note in my wallet that Hannah gave me just before she left on which she’d written: ‘Even when I’m a greyhaired little lady I’ll always think of you as The One Who Got Away.’

Thinking about Hannah and how she was the only girl who’d ever reduced me to tears, apart from Sun Li in kindergarten who’d spurned my amorous advances only after I’d given her a tube of Smarties, made me so distracted that I overshot a red light and nearly crashed into the back of the car in front of me.

Somehow I managed to get home without mowing down any stray pedestrians. Then I had to go out again, on foot, to get garlic and onions after a bollocking from my mother about shirking my responsibilities and it wasn’t until she was making a lasagne that I was able to go to my room and begin to brood properly.

After the first five minutes of ‘Woe is me’ I decided that brooding was boring. I switched on my computer but I didn’t want to go on Facebook because before I knew it I’d be cyberstalking Scarlett, so I drifted over to Twitter at exactly the same time as Jeane Smith, who wanted the world to know that she’d just posted a new blog. I was already in that mindless internet haze that had me clicking on the link without really registering what I was doing and then I was rocking back in my chair and nearly upending myself in the process.

Barney’s gone and got boy disease
When I started this blog, I made a solemn vow to myself that I would never blog about people I know. I would not talk shit about people I know. And when people I know do crummy, mean things, I will not call them on it. Not on this blog. No, sir.
Except
for now, because I’m outing The Boy. Regular readers will know all about The Boy, I mention him often. He’s part boyfriend, part sidekick, part kiss-buddy. Well, he
was
, and I always called him The Boy to protect his privacy and to, well, protect him, but he’s not worthy of my high regard or my protection any longer.
HIS NAME IS BARNEY AND HE’S A TOTAL NO-GOOD, TWO-TIMING RATFINK! Worse, I was training him up to be a sensitive, well-rounded, free-from-macho-bullshit boyfriend (I even bought him a ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ T-shirt) but you can’t train up someone when it turns out they’re the MOST LOW-DOWN SNAKE IN SLITHERTOWN so now I’m breaking all my blogging rules and I’m USING SHOUTY CAPS AND I HATE SHOUTY CAPS!
Before he met me, Barney was pretty much a cultural embryo. He’d been nowhere, experienced nothing, never had a single, solitary adventure until I made space for him in my life. I introduced him to people and places and tastes and sounds that expanded his world (which wasn’t difficult when his world was a TV screen hooked up to an Xbox).
Before me, Barney hadn’t even
heard
of roller derby. He’d never eaten sushi or chilli-infused chocolate. He’d never been to a jumble sale or listened to Vampire Weekend or The Velvet Underground and cried during ‘Pale Blue Eyes’. Never seen a foreign film. Hadn’t stayed up all night and climbed to the top of a really big hill to watch the sun rise. Still let his mum buy his clothes and, worst thing of all, he downloaded music off the internet and
never paid for it
.
He
leeched my cool like he was trying to jump-start a car battery, and how does he repay me? By mooning over another girl. Having wrong thoughts about another girl. Wishing he wasn’t with me, but with this other girl.
People fall in and out of love the whole time and it’s not like Barney and I are
Romeo and Juliet
Redux (though I’m quite sure his mother would love it if I drank some poision and, like, died), so if Barney wanted to fall in love with someone else, there’s not a whole lot I can do about it.
But it turns out there’s been something going on for
weeks
and I had to find out, from, like, one of
them
. You know, one of the anti-dorks. Even then I refused to believe it, because Barney would never do that to me, because I’d made him listen to Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill and added the F-bomb to his Google Blog reader and showed him in a million other ways that he had to be cool and treat me with respect in order to make amends for centuries and centuries of patriarchal domination and boys thinking they’re better than girls just because they have a lump of flesh dangling down between their legs.
What he did was extremely not cool. Even if there hasn’t been actual physical cheating, which I guess would be handholding and kissing and all that other mushy stuff, there’s been emotional cheating, and if Barney had closed down the space in his heart that he’d let me rent out then he should at least have had the decency to tell me. Right? Of course, right!
Also, another thing that’s speeding me on my way to a total rage blackout is that even the geeky boys with the flicky
fringes and the need to fumble adorkably in their longfingered way with guitar picks and mix CDs and Moleskine notebooks will always throw over geeky girls in favour of the easy option, especially when the easy option has long blonde hair, size-eight skinny jeans and zero personality.
I’m not saying that all size-eight blonde girls have zero personality, of course I’m not, and, hello, do you not know about my out of control girl crush on Lady Gaga? And I’m not girl-bashing, not even on this particular girl, rather I’m asking: When will being independent and strong and not following the pack and daring to be different and being brave in my opinions, my fashion choices and my hair colour be enough?
Aren’t those all admirable qualities for a girl to have? They are when you’re a boy with no confidence and no ability to stand out in a crowd until a girl like me drags you into the limelight. And I
liked
Barney. I liked having him in my life and I’m trying to be philosophical, though it’s hard when I can taste anger and disappointment in the back of my throat and it tastes the same as licking a battery – and let’s not go into why I know what licking a battery tastes like.
Mostly I’m mad and ranty because there’s nothing I can do. ’Cause Barney’s so blinded by love that all he can see in me are all the ways that I’m not like this other girl.
Actually there are lots of things I can do. Sixty-five of them would get me arrested, forty-seven of them would reflect badly on me, so all that’s left is declaring right here, right now that Barney never deserved me and he’s a traitor to dorkdom.
And
no, outing Barney and turning the hurt into words hasn’t made me feel even a teensy bit better.

To start off with I was pissed off to be side-swiped as an antidork, like that was a bad thing. Then I wondered why someone had to document their every last thought and feeling for total strangers to pick over and, when I was done with that, I thought about Jeane.

Before I’d thought of her as Barney’s bossy girlfriend who made his life such a living hell that he had to sniff around Scarlett, but now I could see that they’d been a proper couple. OK, she was still really bossy and it seemed like their whole dynamic revolved around Jeane giving Barney a crash course in her brand of loser cool, but they still had something between them: friendship, affection, a crappy taste in music.

I’ll say one thing for Jeane though: when she was hurt and upset, instead of being all ‘Like, whatever,’ or ‘I wasn’t really into him anyway,’ she wasn’t afraid to get real, even if getting real meant getting messy. I had to respect that because I was always worried that people would start to hate on me, or lose respect for me, if I was anything less than perfect. Being perfect isn’t always easy.

Back on Twitter, instead of holding court like I expected, Jeane was fielding off all enquiries.


	adork_able Jeane Smith It’s all in the blog. I have nothing to add, unless you want to send me chocolate or pictures of dogs in amusing outfits.

I
could kind of empathise with what Jeane was going through, because I was kind of going through it too. Also, when I thought about it, Jeane didn’t have anyone at school to hang out with, apart from Barney. Besides, who doesn’t love a picture of a dog in a comedy outfit? I could do better than that though.


	winsomedimsum is yum @adork_able Dogs on surfboards totally pwn dogs in amusing outfits

I tweeted Jeane with a link to pictures from the annual dog surfing competition in California, which I had saved in my bookmarks for when I needed a laugh.

Then I went downstairs because it was time for dinner and a lively family discussion about Al-Qaeda, if it would be possible to clone Alice so cloned Alice could go to school and real Alice could stay home and watch CBeebies, and why both Melly and Alice were too young to have mobile phones. I made my escape once Melly started crying because apparently she was the only seven-year-old in her class who didn’t have an iPhone.

I headed straight for my computer because I had a Comp Sci essay that wouldn’t write itself and was amazed to find that I had over a hundred emails. I wondered if my spam filters had broken until I saw they were all Twitter follow notifications though I wasn’t sure why.

Then I checked Twitter and I knew exactly why. Jeane had retweeted my tweet, as well as replying to me.