Diary of a Crush: Sealed With a Kiss (22 page)

They did all the old songs and some new ones that I didn’t know and were just coming to the end of the set when Poppy suddenly stepped up to the microphone.

‘There’s someone very special in the audience,’ she announced. ‘A former member of Mellowstar, in fact.’

I felt icy fingers of dread clutching at my heart as Dylan turned and arched his eyebrow at me.

‘She’s been touring the United States of America,’ Poppy added in the peculiar Southern American accent she always used when she was making onstage pronouncements. ‘But now she’s back for one night only, so can you find it in your hearts to give the girl a round of applause, Miss Edie Evil!’

Dylan gave me an amused look.

‘You know it was my stage name,’ I hissed.

Poppy beckoned for me to get up on stage but I was too embarrassed. And besides I was wearing a really short dress and I didn’t want to flash my pants.

‘C’mon, Edie Evil,’ Poppy shouted, reaching forward so Dylan could push me towards her outstretched hands. ‘Don’t be shy.’

Everyone was turning to look at me and with a resigned sigh, I let Dylan lift me on to the stage.

I gave a little curtsey as the clapping got louder and whispered to Poppy, ‘I’m going to eviscerate you.’

‘Edie Evil and me would like to sing a little song we wrote a long time ago,’ she told the audience, putting an arm around me. ‘It’s called ‘
Welcome to Loserville’
and it’s about boys ’cause they break your heart and they never walk you home.’

Secretly I loved being back on stage with my best girls and Dylan looking at me as if his heart would burst with pride while I dissed on the rest of boykind through the medium of song.

It was cool to spend five minutes of my last night with him looking at me as if he couldn’t quite believe that I really was his.

And that’s how I want to remember that night; Dylan looking up at me and laughing. Because after that, there were kisses that tasted salty from tears and a goodbye that took so long to say but was over way too soon.

The band had packed their gear away and driven off and Paul and Shona were in the car with the engine running waiting for Dylan as we clung to each other like he was going off to war.

‘Dylan,’ Shona said softly. ‘We have to go now.’

He gave me one last bittersweet kiss before getting into the car.

‘I’ll phone you tomorrow,’ he said because everything else had already been said. He wound down the window and held out his hand. I grabbed it.

‘It was a great trip, D,’ I called out over the sound of the engine, as Paul started to ease away from the kerb.

‘It was more than a trip,’ Dylan shouted. ‘It was like, I don’t know, this life-changing experience.’

The car started to speed up and I ran and ran until Dylan had to let go of my hand. He stuck his head out of the window so he could watch me as I waved. And even though he was on his way back to Manchester, I felt like he was standing right beside me.

’Cause we’d been on this epic voyage that had nothing to do with the miles that we’d covered or all the weird places that we’d visited. Although we’d had all these adventures and mucho angst and changed in all these unique and exciting ways, we were still together. I guess sometimes you have to go a long way to get right back to where you started.

I stood and watched the car’s tail-lights until they were tiny specks that eventually faded into the night.

THE END (really, really, really)
 

And so to the end.

And it really was the end of Edie and Dylan’s story.

Though the question I get asked more than any other is a variation on the same theme: Will you write a sequel? What happened next? Do you think that Edie and Dylan are still together?

The answer is always no. No sequel.
Diary of a Crush
was always meant to be a teen series. I originally wrote it for a teen magazine after all. If I’d continued with Edie and Dylan, it would have left the teen domain and it would have had none of that wonderful drama and tears and tantrums.

But also I felt that there wasn’t much left to say and that their story had been told. I liked to think of them frozen in time on a London street; Dylan with his head stuck out of a car window and Edie waving and waving and waving even when the tail-lights were a tiny glowing speck of light in the distance.

So, are they still together? I don’t know. They were fictional characters who lived in my head for four years and then they left, which was another reason why I stopped writing
Diary of a Crush
. I don’t think about Edie and Dylan any more but it has been lovely to hang out with them again as I got the trilogy ready for republication.

I love that people still want more; it’s a huge compliment and something that every writer hopes for – that they’ll create a story and characters that connect with the readers. Even though I didn’t have a giddy clue of how to write fiction when I started
Diary of a Crush
, because people like me didn’t get to write novels, I must have figured it out along the way.

I owe everything to
Diary of a Crush
. It taught me how to write. It got me my first publishing deal. It gained me readers that have stuck with me from the heady days of 1999. And there’s a line running through the years from that afternoon at my desk at
J17
when I plotted out the first few chapters of
Diary of a Crush
to this evening at my desk in my study, with actual books that I actually wrote that people have actually bought sitting on my shelves.

Diary of a Crush
changed my life. I hope in some small way, it changes yours.

(Oh, you know where I said that there will never be a sequel? Well,
Diary of a Crush
continued for over a year in
J17
after the end of this book.

Step forward Grace, who picked up the reins of crushdom and ran with them. I’m really pleased to say that
Diary of a Grace
is now available as an e-novella from online retailers. We can even call it a sequel, if that’s what you want. But that really is the end.)