Diary of a Crush: Sealed With a Kiss (12 page)

I’ll spare you the details of Duty Free (but there were big savings to be made on all Clinique products) and I’ll gloss over most of the flight. Let’s just say that neither Dylan or me travel well. I was OK until the engine roared into life as we raced down the runway. But the moment the plane shuddered into the air and the only thing that seemed to keep it up was my blind and shaky belief in aeronautical engineering, I suddenly regretted the bacon butty I’d had earlier.

Dylan was just as bad. We spent most of the flight gripping hands and concentrating on keeping the plane in the air. That, and worrying that we were going to contract deep vein thrombosis if we didn’t get up every half hour to stretch our legs.

I don’t think Colin, the plastics salesman who was sitting next to Dylan, appreciated my little nuggets of in-flight information. Especially when I reminded Dylan that the pressure in the cabin made the air Sahara Desert-dry and we needed to drink a litre of water for every hour that we were airborne.

By the time the plane landed with a graceful lurch Dylan and I were exhausted.

‘Your skin is the weirdest shade of grey,’ Dylan muttered to me as we waited in the longest queue in the world to get through Immigration. ‘And your hair’s standing on end. We are
so
going to get our cases searched.’

Well, we didn’t. Instead we took the dinky airport bus to the subway station and got on the train to downtown Manhattan. The minute we sat down, Dylan put his head on my shoulder and promptly fell asleep. I fretted that our suitcases made us look like a pair of tourists who’d just stepped off a plane (well actually, yeah!) and that we might just as well have had a sign printed that read: ‘Please beat us up and steal all our money.’

Except no-one paid us the slightest bit of attention and as I watched the funny-shaped houses with their verandas and screen doors whizz past and heard the driver announce place names like Rockaway Boulevard and Euclid Avenue, I suddenly realised that I was in America! Home of every movie and TV show that I’d ever loved. Where people say, ‘Have a nice day’ and look like they mean it. I was sitting on a subway train surrounded by New Yorkers. I half wanted to break into a rousing song: ‘
If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere
…’ but I managed to restrain myself.

I nudged Dylan but he didn’t stir. ‘Hey D, we made it,’ I whispered and kissed the top of his head.

Building your city on a grid system seems like a logical thing to do until you realise that people from Manchester, England have no idea which way east, west, north or south is. Dylan was no help, though he got very excited when he finally came to, which was about the same time as I tried to negotiate him and our luggage up the subway station steps.

‘St Mark’s Place,’ he gushed. I didn’t even know Dylan could gush. ‘Andy Warhol has walked down this street!’

Lewis’s brother and girlfriend lived in an apartment building on Sixth Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues. They weren’t in but their room-mate (US term for flatmate) grudgingly let us in to the tiniest apartment I’ve ever been in. It was smaller than my bedroom back home.

Ed (the roomie) grunted at us and went back to playing on the X-Box and Dylan and I stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, which was dwarfed by a double bed and the biggest TV this side of a cinema screen.

‘Where are we going to sleep?’ I hissed at Dylan, who shrugged helplessly.

Eventually Ed was persuaded to budge up and make room for us on the couch and Dylan tried to bond with him over the WWF game he was playing. But when Carl and Lisa turned up it soon became clear that although we were all talking English we weren’t speaking the same language and I don’t mean saying ‘sidewalk’ instead of ‘pavement’.

They’d barely said hello before taking us down to look at the car. And I use the word ‘car’ in its loosest possible sense. Anyone who called it a wreck held together with plaster and sticky tape wouldn’t be accused of exaggeration.

‘It handles like a dream,’ Carl was saying as Dylan and I looked at each other with dawning expressions of dismay, disappointment, disgust and many other words beginning with d.

‘Well, you like vintage things, don’t you?’ Dylan said to me finally, before turning to Carl and Lisa and asking them lots of questions about insurance and MOTs and road fund licences, none of which they appeared to understand. They were too busy cracking up over ‘your funny accents’.

Dylan and Carl decided to take the car for a spin round the block so we could be sure that the thing actually worked and I trooped upstairs with Lisa who reckoned she might have some English Breakfast Tea tucked away somewhere.

‘So, um, the apartment’s really small,’ I said hesitantly. ‘Are you sure there’s going to be room for me and Dylan?’

She flicked her long blonde hair out of her eyes and looked at me as if I’d asked if I could murder her firstborn. Lisa was one of those people who it’s impossible to feel at ease with. She was thin, dieted-to-the-bone thin rather than fast-metabolism-thin and wearing a business suit with trainers.

‘Well, don’t you wanna, y’know, get going?’ she asked with a slight edge to her voice.

Oh where was D when I needed him? ‘Well, it’s just that we’ve been up for eighteen hours with the flight and everything and Lewis said we’d be OK to crash…’

‘Lewis had no right to say that,’ she interrupted me, getting all assertive and hard-faced like those lady lawyers in courtroom thrillers. ‘And we need to talk about how much you’re going to pay for the loan of the car.’

I blinked once, twice, three times. ‘Pay?’

She turned her icy-blue gaze onto me. ‘Well, yeah!’

‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘Lewis said we’d be doing you a favour. You need to get the car to LA, we’re going to drive it there. No-one said anything about paying.’

‘Look, if you were doing a fly-drive you’d have to pay, like, $300 a week for the car,’ Lisa insisted. ‘So Carl and I were thinking, y’know, you could give us a lump sum of $1000 and you get ten weeks to drive to LA and you save, like, loads of money.’

There was still no sign of Dylan. ‘Hang on, you can’t just suddenly decide you want money when it’s already been discussed…’ I trailed off.

Lisa raised her eyebrows. ‘Take it or leave it.’

‘$500.’

‘$950.’

I glared at her. ‘I’m not paying more than $600.’

She glared back. ‘$650.’

Still no sign of Dylan. I was going to have to make an executive decision. ‘Final offer. $625.’

She considered it for a minute. ‘OK, $625 plus the Clinique perfume you bought in Duty Free.’

‘Done,’ I said weakly, hoping Dylan was going to be OK about this.

Usually I left the executive decision-making to him. Hell, usually I left it to Grace if it meant that I didn’t have to shoulder the burden of responsibility.

‘How much?!’ Dylan shouted at me.

It was much, much later on. Carl and Dylan had come back from their ride around the block all matey in that strange way that boys do within five minutes of meeting each other. They’d already decided that the apartment was too small and that there was a cheap hotel a couple of blocks along (please note new familiarity with US lingo) where we could stay. I thought they’d already talked money, which goes to show how little I know. I was sure Dylan was going to be dead impressed at my haggling skills as I mentioned the small sum of $625 I’d shelled out.

‘Why are you shouting at me?’ I shouted back as I closed the door of our hotel room and dropped my suitcase on the floor. ‘They wanted $1000! You should be thanking me.’

‘$625!’ Dylan screamed. I’d never heard his voice go that high before.

‘That’s almost £500 which you didn’t need to give her.’

‘They’d obviously already agreed that she was going to do the money side of it while you two bonded over the fuel injection,’ I snapped venomously.

‘Oh don’t start,’ said Dylan warningly. ‘Don’t try and make this my fault. I already talked to Carl and offered to take him and Lisa out to dinner tomorrow night to say thanks. Oh, but no, you have to give them half our money…’

Dylan was ranting now. Nostrils flared, fists clenched, every muscle in his body taut with barely suppressed rage. I watched his mouth open and close as he banged on about my irresponsible behaviour.

‘… and we have to fork out for this crummy hotel room. And we’re right outside the lift so that’s going to be making noise all night… Where are you going?’

I didn’t bother answering as I slammed the bathroom door shut behind me and locked it. I was cold, dirty, tired, hungry and couldn’t cope with the shouty jerk who was inhabiting Dylan’s body.

I heard him shout, ‘Typical’ and kick one of the suitcases over before I started running a bath.

We still weren’t talking the next morning. I’d been so pissed off with Dylan that when I came out of the bathroom I hadn’t let him share the last of Mum’s sarnies and he’d had to go to bed hungry. For the first time ever we’d slept with six inches of bed between us but when I woke up we were doing our usual conjoined twins impersonation. Dylan had an arm around my waist and one of his legs curled around mine. But we still weren’t talking unless you count muttered one-liners about going down for breakfast and who had the guidebook as conversation.

We finally emerged from the hotel at ten thirty and nothing could prepare me for the humidity of New York in mid July. Flying always leaves me feeling cold and clammy so I hadn’t noticed it yesterday but today I felt like I was stepping into a hot, wet, smelly fog and within seconds sweat was dripping down my face. I must have looked like a hunk of red, sweaty cheese. I took off my cardigan and stuffed it into my Cath Kidston messenger bag.

Dylan gave me a considered look. ‘What do you want to do today?’ he asked finally.

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. What do you want to do?’ I knew exactly what he wanted to do: a couple of art exhibitions and a trip to some trendy minimalist artboy shop to buy T-shirts but he wasn’t playing.

‘No, I asked what you wanted to do,’ he hissed belligerently.

‘Don’t try and pick another fight with me,’ I snarled, fronting up to him. ‘You go and do whatever it is you want to do and I’ll see you later.’

And with that I flounced off. If ever I was on
Mastermind
, then flouncing would be my specialist subject. And as an added bonus, I know it really pisses him off. I flounced as far as the deli that was two doors down, which is basically a fancy US corner-shop with a cold meat counter and fresh fruit salad in tubs and was counting out all the weirdy coinage to pay for my bottle of water when Dylan caught up with me.

He stood at the counter while I counted out dimes and nickels and tried to remember what each one was worth.

He still didn’t say anything while I rummaged in my bag for my sunglasses and sunblock. It was a little unnerving. All of a sudden he swooped down and kissed me gently on the lips.

‘Sorry,’ we both said in unison.

I held out my little finger. ‘Friends?’ I said in a tiny voice.

He gravely hooked my little finger with his. ‘Friends.’

‘Look, about the money—’ I began.

Dylan shook his head. ‘Forget it, I overreacted. They probably planned the whole thing. It’s only £500, we have plenty of money.’

I nudged him with my hip. ‘I should have waited for you.’ I looked up at him. I’ve known Dylan forever, or nearly three years anyway, and even now all I have to do is look at him to get quite giddy with longing. Dylan is all angles; long limbs and sharp features softened slightly by his terminally messy dark brown hair, and the audacious curve of his bottom lip. Right now he was looking at me with a small smile, his hands shielding his green eyes from the sun so I couldn’t read his expression. He could make me do anything sometimes just by looking at me in a certain way. Pretty much the way he was looking at me right now.

‘So… c’mon, I know you want to go to the Guggenheim and admire its unique rotunda architectural feature as designed by Frank Lloyd Wright,’ I said.

Dylan grinned then boffed me lightly on the nose. ‘You can read me like a book.’

‘Yeah – a cheap airport novel,’ I mock-sneered. ‘Let’s find the subway station.’

We spent the morning getting lost on the subway and looking at art. It was all very cultural. But the best thing was getting our lunchtime hot dogs and pretzels from one of those street carts they always have in the movies. Dylan and I were back to being love-shaped although the air was far too sticky to even think about holding hands.

We made our way back downtown in the afternoon so Dylan could stock up on art boy T-shirts but there’s only so many skate shops a girl can visit.

‘You carry on,’ I told Dylan as we made our fourth shop stop. ‘I’m going to pop into that café and check my emails.’

As I suspected there was an email from Grace waiting in my in-box.

I shook my head. It was so easy to see where Grace was going wrong with her life. Much easier than sussing out my own problem areas. I clicked on the reply button.