Let's Get Lost (8 page)

His face was in shadow, but I could still see the way those lips flattened out into a tight line. “Maybe you’re frightened that if someone manages to break down your defenses, then they’ll find that you do have that soft center. That you’re not as badass as you think you are.”

“Yeah, whatever. Thanks for that insightful analysis, Mr. Freud.”

“Well, see you around, then.”

I couldn’t even muster a grunt in reply, just stomped toward the door that led back into the club, ripping off my corsage en route because it was soggy with sick.

7

I couldn’t find the others anywhere. Normally I’d have been incandescent with rage at the mere thought of them blowing me off, but I was too busy having these really scathing conversations with Smith in my head.

“Do you think she’s going to come?” I heard someone who sounded a lot like Dot say as I staggered up the stairs that led to the balcony. “Should we call her?”

“Oh, God, do we have to?” Nancy really needed stamping on hard. “Anyway, her mobile isn’t working because she’s had all her pocket money taken away by her evil papa and aren’t I just the most pathetic little moppet in the world? Forget about Is, let’s go into the chill-out area and chat up those guys.”

For one second I contemplated going after them and giving Nancy my own special brand of hell. But my heart wasn’t really in it. So I slumped against the wall (which wasn’t doing a great job of holding me up), running my tongue over my furry teeth. It would be far more sensible to find a bathroom so I could brush

my teeth and repair my makeup (which couldn’t have survived the puking intact).

With a furtive look over my shoulder, in case the Trio of Evil were lurking, I scurried down the stairs and tried to think tactically. God, that really made my head hurt. Then I remembered that last time I’d come here I’d got off with this boy in a disused kitchen behind the top bar. I sidled through a likely-looking door and miracle of miracles! There was a sink so I could get the puke taste out of my mouth.

I took a cautious step forward and then stopped when I saw Smith sitting on a worktop with his head in his hands. He looked up as I shut the door and scowled at me.

“Piss off.”

I held up my hands so he could see that I wasn’t carrying weapons. “I need to clean my teeth, and then I’ll leave you alone to wallow in misery or whatever it is you’re doing.”

He folded his arms and made a harrumphing noise as I hunted through my bag for my toothbrush. I like to clean my teeth after lunch; it’s no big deal but the way Smith was boggling his eyes at me, you’d have thought I’d just pulled out a crack pipe.

I happily squeezed a huge blob of Colgate onto the brush, aware that Smith was watching my every move like he’d never seen a demonstration of dental hygiene before. I pointedly ignored him as I got to work. I counted to sixty in my head as I did my bottom row of teeth and then started on the top. Now there was a quizzical expression on his face as he watched my reflection in the mirror above the sink.

Now, it’s not like I’m a total neat freak but when it comes to my teeth, I can be a little . . .
precious
.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” he muttered, his features shifting into complete disbelief as I squeezed out more toothpaste and repeated the whole procedure. My mouth was full of minty fresh foam so I couldn’t snarl back at him, but when I finally finished spitting and rinsing, I glared at him.

“Take a picture, it lasts longer,” I snapped, which had to be one of the weakest comebacks ever.

Smith smiled faintly. “Excuse me, are you, like, ten?”

I splashed cold water on my face to remove my makeup because there was no other option but to start again with a blank canvas. “So, you’ve gone from thinking I’m quite cute and wanting to get to know me better to what? Getting over me in, like, five minutes?”

He stretched out his legs. “Believe me, I was never under you.”

“Huh?” I looked up from slapping on tinted moisturizer like it was going out of fashion. “What’s that meant to mean?”

“You said that I was over you, which implied that I’d been under you first.” He paused as if he were giving the matter serious consideration. “I’m sure I’d have remembered if I had been.”

If I hadn’t been doing precision work with the silvery green powder and my pocket mirror, I’d have rolled my eyes. “Do they teach you all that fancy semantic crap at University? That’s really going to help you become a worthwhile member of society.”

His shoulders slumped a bit, but then he tilted his chin and watched my attempts at beautification with interest. “You looked prettier without all that on your face.”

“Whatever. So why are you sitting up here being all mopey. I mean, what have
you
really got to be depressed about?” Because it seemed to me he had it all, apart from manageable hair and a small but perfectly formed nose.

He was thoughtful. “I don’t really need a reason. I have maudlin tendencies.”

“It’s probably because of all that whiny boy-rock that you listento. You need to start getting into disco. A bit of Gloria Gaynor and you’d soon be feeling all kinds of perky.”

Smith made this funny snorting noise. “Was that a joke?”

“Yeah, you wish.” I looked better. I wasn’t going to be approached by any model scouts, but I looked a little less like a walk-in to the nearest plague hospital. And it might have been because I didn’t have any deep desire to go downstairs, and it might have been because I genuinely wanted to know, but I asked him again. “Really, why are you sitting in a deserted kitchen, looking like you’re about to slit your wrists?”

Smith sat up and hauled his legs over the edge of the worktop, leaving his feet dangling forlornly as he rubbed a hand through his hair. “I’m not. Not thinking suicidal thoughts, anyway. I’m just having an off day, you know?”

“Yeah, I know,” I said quietly, and there was something resigned enough in my voice to make him look up, startled.

“Girls like you don’t have off days,” he said. “You’re pretty and you can have anything or anyone that you want.”

I opened my mouth to spit out a furious protest, but he held his hand out.

“Shut the hell up, Isabel,” he growled. “You’re all, ‘oh, no one understands me. My bitchdom is such a burden’ but you have it easy. God, you have it so easy.”

There should have been another furious protest bursting and I could see the words “you patronizing bastard” scrolling across my cerebral cortex in fancy type. But I wanted to be that girl. The girl he thought I was. Who had nothing else to angst about but how her hair looked and why her friends didn’t understand her.

And Smith? Did he not just tell me to shut the hell up? No one would ever dare say that to me. Well, not if they still wanted to have kneecaps come Monday morning. He was watching me from under his lashes with a wary smile, like he knew that I was mentally weighing up whether I should slug him or not. I decided not.

“Maybe I do have it easy. Maybe I have all sorts of dreadful secrets that you don’t know anything about.” I smiled in a manner I knew to be extremely annoying when he snorted in disbelief. Then I padded over to lean against the bench, right next to his bony ankles in their red woolly socks. “Everyone has secrets,
Atticus
. You should know that.”

That snapped him out of his mopey mood pretty damn quickly. “I told you not to call me that.”

“So what’s bugging you?” I knew it was me. I was what was bugging him, when I’d made it abundantly clear that he wasn’t going to be getting a guided tour of my lady parts. “C’mon, you can tell me. It’s not like we know the same people or, like, even each other. Call it your reward for holding my hair back while I puked.”

“You don’t really want to know,” he protested with just the barest hint of a pout—way to make it obvious that he was pining for the touch of my lily-white hands.

“Sure I do.” I prodded his leg with my finger. “Spill.”

God, talk about milking it for all it was worth. He nibbled on his bottom lip for a little while, brows furrowed with indecision, before he sighed. “It’s a girl. It’s always a girl, isn’t it?”

I resisted the urge to gloat. I’d had a few boys tell me that I was a prick-tease because I never went past second base. But I’d never had a boy utterly desolate because I’d given him the brush-off.

“She doesn’t even know I exist,” he continued morosely. “And I have to listen to her talk about all these other guys who aren’t half as devoted as I am. I mean, they don’t care about her, not really. They just want to have sex with her. They’ve never sat up all night and checked her source notes for an essay that she has to hand in the next morning, and they don’t know that she’s all bad-tempered and hissy first thing in the . . .”

It was dawning on me at, like, the speed of light that actually I wasn’t the cause of Smith’s existential crisis. I was just the girl who’d walked in during the middle of it. All that scamming on to me when he was pining for some uptight student skank? What fucking ever!

“Lame, you’re so lame,” I hissed, banging my elbow into his knee and not even bothering to make it look like an accident.

Smith’s head jerked up, but I was already striding toward the door, as he swore under his breath. I distinctly heard the word “bitch.”

“You’re totally
pathetic,”
was my pithy, parting shot as I shouldered the door open.

I charged down the stairs like the hounds of hell were snapping at my ankles. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so angry. Smith’d had me convinced that he was different, but he was strictly regulation-issue. Talking of which, I started to hunt around for the others. I found Dot loitering by the cigarette machine so she could gaze adoringly at this bunch of guys who were shotgunning cans of Special Brew. Really, you couldn’t leave her alone for a minute.

“This completely sucks,” I shouted over the strains of Franz Ferdinand. “Come on, let’s go.”

She didn’t look particularly pleased to see me. In fact, she had the audacity to scrunch up her face like

she was in severe pain. “Do we have to?” she whined, gesturing at one of the boys who was jerking around spastically to avoid the foaming fountain of beer that was spurting in all directions. “I think he likes me.”

I glanced at the object of her affections, who was okay if you liked Neanderthals. “He’s revolting,” I said witheringly, folding my arms and giving her the full benefit of my disgust at her dubious taste. “We’re going to have to get your eyes tested.”

Dot did her chin wobble, which she always pulls out on these occasions. “He’s kinda cute,” she said doubtfully. “Sort of.”

“Yeah, if every other boy in the world suddenly dropped down dead. And it’s not like he’s going to fancy you,” I snapped. Dot added in a lip tremble that wasn’t faked, and I felt the teensiest, tiniest pang of guilt. “I’m just looking out for you,” I protested, but she was already brushing past me.

“I’m going to find Ella and Nancy,” she called over her shoulder, and I got the message loud and clear that she didn’t want me to come with her.

After trailing through the club a couple of times with a “don’t even think about talking to me” look on my face to fend off the attentions of any sweaty-handed lads, I found myself on the edges of the dance floor again. I leaned against the wall and watched everyone else having a really good time. Though maybe they were just faking it and that smiling and gyrating to The Faint was all show, and even that pretty blonde girl in the silver top would go home and pig out on ice cream because she used food as an emotional crutch and she couldn’t connect with anybody. Jesus, I needed to lighten up or ship out.

But when I tried to smooth out my frown, because surely it couldn’t be permanent, I caught sight of Smith sprawled on a sofa, all of him slumped, like keeping any bit of his body upright was too much effort. I wasn’t buying what he was selling for one second—he thought that if he sat there long enough, looking as if he’d been told that he had a week to live, some naïve, little airhead would feel sorry for him.

Or if that didn’t work, he’d pretend to be drunk because that had worked so well for him in the past.

He was awfully good at looking tortured, though. His fingers tapped nervously against his knee and he was gazing forlornly off . . . I followed his eye line and caught sight of two girls huddled by the DJ booth.

They were crouched in the shadows so it was hard to see what they looked like. But I could see Smith and all the longing on his face so clearly—he wanted someone who didn’t want him back.

My feet started walking over to him, like they were acting independently from my brain. My brain still thought he was a treacherous skank who shouldn’t hit on girls when his heart wasn’t in it. But my feet were off message and intent on planting me right in front of him.

He flicked his eyes upward. “Go away,” he shouted over the harsh beats of Bloc Party.

“I want to talk to you,” I said, because now my mouth was getting in on the act. “It’s important.”

“You thought of a few more really hurtful accusations to fling at me?” he sneered, trying to angle his body away from me so I was talking to one bony shoulder.

Well. it felt bony underneath my hand because I was touching him now, leaning down so I wouldn’t have to shout, and up close he was strangely beautiful. All of him quivering in misery.

“Don’t be sad,” I pleaded, and I rubbed my thumb against the corner of his mouth as if I could smudge away the pain. “Come with me.”

His hand was warm in mine, and he let me haul him up from the sofa. “You need to start watching these mixed signals of yours,” he grumbled, but he was following me out of the room, and as we got caught in the doorway, all of a sudden he was leading and I was winding my fingers through his and there were a thousand tiny electric shocks running through me.

Smith led me up the stairs to the street and even the sudden blast of cold air couldn’t sober me up.

Because I was still drunk. I must have been drunk. That was the only explanation for why my hands were all over him, stroking his face and tangling in his messy hair.

I wasn’t the only one, though—he lowered his head to make it easier for me, and his arms snaked around my waist and they didn’t slide to my arse, but stayed there, holding me, hugging me, and it felt amazing. It felt even better when I wrapped my arms around his neck so not even the fierce breeze that was tugging at my hair could come between us.