Girl, Going on 16: Pants on Fire (11 page)

At break Flora had to go to the music department, but it was quite near Mr Powell’s room, so Jess needed to be very much elsewhere. She said she felt like some fresh air and went out and sat in the furthest corner of the school field. Immediately she became aware that it had rained in the night, and she had sat down on a swamp. She got up in a kneeling position to examine the back of her skirt, and then realised she was also kneeling in mud.

Nightmare
, thought Jess in horror, examining the back of her skirt. It was covered with a huge smear of mud. It made her look like a toddler who has had what is diplomatically called ‘an accident’. What could she do? There was only one thing for it: an enormous panic attack. She was halfway through her first silent scream when she heard someone call her name. She looked up. It was Ben Jones!

Hastily Jess sat down again. She didn’t want Ben to think she had pooed in her pants. As she sat down, though, her bum kind of skidded on the muddy patch, her skirt slid up, and she felt, with awful certainty, that her underpants had also acquired a ghastly brown smear. She pulled down her skirt, covered her muddy knees with her bag, and tried to switch on a sophisticated and elegant smile.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, squatting down beside her. ‘Squatting’ sounds rather undignified, but Ben managed to do it with style. He was more kind of hunkering down on his haunches, like some sort of chic cowboy by a camp fire.

‘What’s the
matter
?’ sighed Jess. ‘Where do I begin?’

She couldn’t bear Ben to know about her mud crisis. She didn’t really want to mention her problems with Fred. And she didn’t even want to
think
about the looming trouble with Miss Thorn and Mr Powell.

‘Oh, you know,’ she said, ‘I’m a bit fed up because we’re not having the Christmas Show this year. The revue thing we usually have. I hate Thorn. She’s a total beast.’

‘You said you and Fred had written loads of, er, sketches, yeah?’ said Ben.

‘Yeah.’ Jess sighed again – more deeply this time, remembering her wonderful summer with Fred. ‘Well, maybe a few.’

‘Well, why don’t you do a show anyway?’ said Ben. ‘You could put it on in the lunch break or something. You know – the week before Christmas. There’s always loads of extra stuff going on then.’

‘I did have that idea myself,’ said Jess. ‘But it would be a nightmare to organise it all on my own.’

‘I’ll help,’ said Ben. ‘I’d do, well, anything. Although I am a dumbo, so I know it wouldn’t be much.’

Suddenly, far away in the school, the bell rang for the end of break. Ben got to his feet with an agile leap and held out his hand to pull Jess up.

‘There’s a problem,’ said Jess, staying put. ‘Just before you arrived, I realised I’d sat down on some kind of primeval swamp. My lower clothing is covered with what looks disastrously like poo. Don’t laugh.’

She grabbed Ben’s hand, he hauled her up, and they both inspected the back of Jess’s skirt. Ben didn’t laugh at all. He looked concerned and sympathetic.

‘You can borrow my football shorts,’ said Ben. ‘I brought a clean pair today. They’re in my locker.’

Jess wasn’t sure whether to be touched or appalled. Shorts were so
not
her thing. It was something to do with the shape of her thighs. In shorts, she looked like a cello on holiday. But here was nice, kind Ben Jones offering his very own! A year ago she would have fainted with delight. And, candidly, what choice did she have?

‘OK, thanks,’ she said, staring in horror at the mud slick on her bottom. ‘But how am I going to get to your locker without everybody seeing?’

Ben took off his jacket, an ultra-cool basketball-style garment in navy blue, with the words
New York
across the back. He held it out to her.

‘Here – tie it round your waist,’ he said. ‘It’ll hide the – erm – mud.’

‘But your jacket will get filthy dirty!’ said Jess.

‘It’s washable.’ Ben grinned. ‘And I was too hot anyway.’

‘You are my ultimate guardian angel!’ said Jess, tying the jacket round her waist. Luckily the arms were quite long. The muddy patch at the back was totally covered, and the arms kind of swung about in front, veiling the full horror of her muddy knees.

‘Oh no, I’m going to be late – again!’ wailed Jess, looking at her watch. With a sickening lurch she realised it was English next lesson. Miss Thorn would certainly eat her alive. ‘I’m in big trouble!’

Jess set off in what she suspected was a strange duck-like waddling run. Ben jogged at her side with ease. It must be so wonderful to be physically fit.

By the time they reached the corridors there was hardly anybody about. This was later than Jess had ever been. They raced to Ben’s locker, and he got out the sacred shorts. Jess accepted them with a mixture of gratitude and foreboding. Would they even fit? Ben’s bum was so tiny. Not that she had ever studied it. Well, not for months, anyway.

‘Go and try them on in the girls’ loos,’ said Ben. ‘I’ll go to physics now, OK? Don’t want to hang around the girls’ loos – might get a, um, reputation. We could go out at lunchtime if you like – there’s a launderette next to the Dolphin.’ And with a shy smile, he was gone.

Jess ran to the girls’ loos, locked herself in a cubicle and ripped off her skirt. She also took off her knickers and examined the damage. A vast smear of mud, still wet and oozy, was plastered right across the back of both skirt and knickers. She couldn’t wear Ben’s shorts on top of that. It would ruin the shorts, and the horrible muck might even drip down her legs . . . urghhh!

There was no choice: she had to cram herself into Ben’s shorts. Amazingly they were not too small. And luckily there wasn’t a full-length mirror in the girls’ loos. Jess just knew she looked like some overweight bumpkin out of a children’s nursery rhyme. She bundled up her skirt and knickers and zipped them into a secret inner pocket of her school bag. And then she swiftly washed the mud from her knees, and ventured out into the corridors.

For an instant she was tempted to go straight home. That would solve everything. She could wash her dirty clothes there, maybe even find a clean skirt and rush back to school. But it was strictly forbidden to bunk off school without permission.

Only one course of action was open to Jess. She had to go to English. Already about fifteen minutes late, Jess approached the classroom with intense dread. She opened the door a crack, and tried to creep in very slowly, unobserved. But the door was right at the front, next to Miss Thorn, who was reading a war poem in a tragic voice.

‘
My soul looked down from a vague height, with Death
. . .’

Jess wanted desperately to turn round and go out again, but she was already halfway into the room. As the class saw her in Ben’s shorts, they just could not help themselves: there was an explosion of laughing. There was only one person in the room who wasn’t laughing: Fred. He looked embarrassed and weird.

Miss Thorn turned from her book. It seemed to Jess that she wheeled to face her almost in slow motion. With a terrible long cruel glare Miss Thorn took in the vision of Jess standing there in her ridiculous shorts, with her silly fat knees, like some kind of terrible clown. The gales of laughter went on and on, blowing away the serious, tragic atmosphere of the war poetry. Miss Thorn’s face turned to granite and Jess knew her life was over.

Chapter 13

Miss Thorn turned her cold eyes to the class, and somehow the laughter faded. Jess was usually pleased when people laughed at her, but not this time. She tried to stand there looking dignified, but it was hopeless.

‘I’m not wasting any more time on you,’ said Miss Thorn. ‘No doubt Mr Powell will be surprised to see you again so soon. Off you go – now.’

Jess was only too glad to leave the room. She closed the door behind her and stood in the corridor for a few seconds, fighting off a terrible desire to burst into tears.

Fred had looked so shocked and appalled. He was embarrassed ever to have been a slight acquaintance of hers, never mind An Item. Maybe what he’d said in the park hadn’t been a joke after all. ‘If everybody knows we’re together I shall lose whatever street cred I ever had.’ Maybe he really
had
been scared of looking like ‘a doting nerd’. And now that she’d made a complete spectacle of herself, he’d never speak to her again.

She had been kind of hoping that if she could only get him on his own for a moment, she’d be able to say a few magic words, and everything would be back to normal. But Fred had a habit of going into his shell and sulking if misunderstandings arose. He hated and feared rows. Even before they’d got together he’d blanked her for weeks just because he thought she was with Ben Jones.

What on earth could she do now? How does a girl retrieve her dignity when it lies in a million pieces at her feet? How does a girl retrieve her dignity while wearing football shorts which are a bit too tight and reveal her fat knees and massive bum? How could she possibly go to see Mr Powell without proper protective clothing? If he shouted at her in her present outfit, she feared her knees would buckle with nakedness and horror and she would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

Suddenly Jess was overcome with a crazy impulse. She ran out of school and headed for home. She tried to look like a jogger so the shorts wouldn’t be so much of a mystery. But it’s hard to jog when you’re wearing slip-on black shoes with a hefty heel. Especially when you’re carrying a heavy school bag. She knew she was getting into much worse trouble, bunking off like this. But she simply could not handle being undressed in public. She didn’t care about the big trouble that would await her in school tomorrow. She just had to be reunited with her own clothes.

The journey home consisted of part jogging, part walking, a couple of rest stops, when she sat gasping on convenient low walls, and a mad lurch when her heel turned over. But eventually Jess arrived at her own dear front door. She let herself in, dashed upstairs and dived into her beloved bedroom. Granny’s door had been open when she whizzed past, and Granny came out and stood at the bottom of the stairs.

‘Jess!’ she called. ‘Is that you? Or is it a burglar?’

‘It’s all right, it’s a burglar!’ Jess called back, ripping off Ben Jones’s shorts and ransacking her lingerie drawer for a magic pair of knickers that would transport her straight to the centre of an extremely private rainforest on an undiscovered continent somewhere. Magic pants rather like the old Arabian carpet, only slightly more downmarket.

‘Are you all right, dear?’ called Granny.

‘Yes, fine!’ shouted Jess. ‘I just slipped and got some mud on my skirt, so they told me to come home and get changed.’

‘There’s a terrible famine in Africa again!’ said Granny. ‘I’m going to send them part of my pension next week.’

As Jess struggled into a pair of soothing white cotton knicks and a short but sassy grey skirt, a huge wave of hunger ripped through her tum. She hoped the starving in Africa wouldn’t mind if she went downstairs and made herself a cheese sandwich the size of Jupiter.

Jess went downstairs. She was relieved to discover she was still hungry. She knew that people with broken hearts were often unable to face beans on toast, but she was sure she could manage a double portion – with loads of grated cheese and a chocolate milkshake. Food was some comfort for the loss of her brilliant career.

All her plans for comedy celebrity with Fred had turned to dust and ashes. They had planned to start their brilliant career with a fortnight at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where they would be spotted by a TV executive who would offer them a series. The T-shirts and the
Fred ’n’ Jess
cereal promotion deals would surely follow. The house in Malibu, the apartment in Paris, the sleigh drawn down a snowy Fifth Avenue by a team of sturdy King Charles spaniels . . . all were revealed as a pathetic fantasy.