Peer Pressure (8 page)

“My next door neighbor,” Jodie added. Laura’s eyes lit up.

“Are you kidding?”

“Nope, they just moved in this week. In fact, my bedroom window overlooks his.”

This sold it for Laura.

“Oh I’m coming over tonight. Tell your mother to set out an extra plate for tea. Sean can be dessert. Ha!”

Laura always ended her lamest jokes with a ‘Ha!’ something Jodie loved about her. It showed a lack of pretention that only came from best friends. It was this trust they had, not to judge each other, that made what Jodie said next, seem less of a gamble under the circumstances.

“I think I’ve got a crush on my teacher.”

Laura wasn’t surprised.

“Which one, the Head?” said Laura. There was no ‘Ha!’ but the sarcasm was implied.

“Very funny, skank. No, Mr. Peer.”

“The new guy?”

Jodie nodded and gave Laura a look that asked for advice as much as a kind word.

“I’ve never felt this way before,” Jodie added, “I mean, I’ve had boyfriends before, but...”

“He’s a man,” Laura added. Jodie thought about this, giving a sigh.

“That might be it, but he’s twenty five. Does that make him a man?”

Laura gave her a friendly nudge on the arm.

“Look who you’re asking? The only real man I have in my life is my Dad and he’s demented.”

Jodie gave her a polite laugh, but it wasn’t the answer she’d wanted.

“What do you think I should do?”

“It’ll pass,” Laura shrugged, “He’s cute, but nobody’s perfect. I’m sure he’ll say or do something, eventually, that you’ll find annoying. It usually doesn’t take guys long to fuck it up.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

Laura shrugged again,

“Well, then you use the old Jodie McPhee technique.”

“Which is?”

“Nail him in the stationary cupboard.” There was a pause as Jodie tried to ascertain if Laura was joking or not. She hadn’t implied it as such. Was she being a bitch? In the end, she needn’t have worried too much about it, as Laura then followed it with,

“Ha!”

Rob went out for post-work drinks that Thursday with some of his new colleagues. He had been invited by Jon Marker, the P.E. teacher that he had met on his first day. In the end, it wasn’t the largest of staff get-togethers, the party consisting of himself, Jon, Steve Penman from the Geography department and Amy Mackenzie, who was Head of Modern Studies.

Steve was fifty, well dressed and prone to moments in which his hippy heritage would get the better of him. Every so often, he would throw a
‘Led Zeppelin’
or
‘Thin Lizzy’
reference into the conversation, not caring whether his companions knew who they were or not.

Amy, meanwhile, was forty, smart and completely besotted with the new arrival, taking any opportunity to make jokes so that she could laugh and nudge Rob’s arm, trying to find any way to make physical contact, hoping that at some point she could work her way up to an arm on his shoulder, or possibly even a tap on the thigh.

Rob, however, could see through this and took every opportunity to pretend to check his mobile phone, to get the next round in, to go to the toilet, anything to avoid being treated like a piece of meat by the recently divorced Ms. Mackenzie.

They had met up in a local pub called ‘The Hog’s Head.’ The bar was busy, the late night shoppers having just finished and the remnants of dozens of bar meals lay strewn across many of the tables. Rob’s table was no different, a wasteland of empty pint glasses, ketchup stained plates and half-eaten onion rings.

“I think that the key to finding the right man is mystery.” Amy was on her third large glass of Pinot Grigio by the time she started on the opposite sex, which, if you knew her personally, was probably something of a record.

“The less you know about someone, the more curiosity gets the better of you.”

Steve, who was slowly drinking his second pint of cider, indulged Amy’s rant, by throwing in a literary reference.

“Sure, like
‘Alice in Wonderland’
. Look where curiosity got her.” He looked across to Rob, to see if he had appreciated his nod to Lewis Carroll. Rob, however, had his eyes fixed somewhere across the room.

“Exactly,” Amy continued, “if the white rabbit had been a good looking man and Alice a blonde bimbo...,” but she’d lost her train of thought by this point, the alcohol and Rob’s lack of interest distracting her, and could only muster, “...well, we’d have a very different story.”

Jon chipped in,

“Not to mention a really fucked up cartoon. How much have you had to drink, Amy?”

Amy wasn’t listening.

“Take my husband,” she continued, “‘the helmet’ as I like to call him.”

“Why do you call him ‘the helmet’?” asked Steve, curiously. Jon rolled his eyes and drank heavily from his pint, knowing what was coming.

“Because he’s a knob-end.”

“Nice,” Steve nodded, “continue.”

“We knew each other for years before we got married. I knew everything about him and he knew everything about me. Then we married and...Nothing! Silence. We literally had nothing to talk about. No surprises. No mystery. I think it’s ninety five per cent of what makes a good relationship.

“What about the other five per cent,” Jon dared to ask. Amy shrugged,

“A decent sized penis doesn’t hurt.”

Jon tried to stifle a laugh, while Steve couldn’t resist adding,

“Or so you’ve heard.”

Amy didn’t take him on, instead turning to Rob placing her hand tentatively on his shoulder and going for broke.

“What about you, Rob?”

Rob, however, didn’t notice the hand, his eyes still fixed across the room. He didn’t even look at her as he replied,

“What about me?”

Jon, noticing Rob’s dis-interest, followed his gaze landing on two women who sat at the end of the bar. Jon could see from their clothes that they were smart, professional women, both good looking, but one more than the other. He looked back to Rob and smirked to himself, while Amy continued.

“What do you look for? I mean, in a relationship.”

There was a pause. Rob’s gaze, it would seem, had not gone un-noticed by the two women at the bar as they both took turns looking across in his direction. One of them even smiled at him a little.

“Rob...Rob?”

Amy’s voice was a little annoyed and it snapped Rob out of it.

“What? What were you saying?”

Jon and Steve laughed a little to themselves. Amy shot them a look of anger, before turning back with her sweetest smile.

“I was asking you what you look for in a relationship.”

And then, to everybody’s surprise, not least Amy’s, Rob started to get to his feet, answering the question with a simple;

“Something new.”

Rob knocked back the last of his pint and gave Jon, who was watching him like a hawk, a wink as he headed off towards the two women at the end of the bar.

He wasn’t really sure what he was going to say, but being the spontaneous type, not to mention two beers into the evening, he felt a surge of confidence, backed up as he remembered the advice of his father many years ago.

“If you see something you want, go for it. What’s the worst that could happen?”

He saw this as an opportunity too good to miss. It didn’t hurt that he hadn’t been in a relationship or even to bed with a woman, come to that, for nearly a year and was beginning to feel that all he did was work, eat and sleep. He felt that, now that he had established a career path for himself, perhaps it wasn’t unrealistic to think he could find someone to eat and sleep
with
. And of the two women, the one he was focused on was, as far as he could see, gorgeous.

And it was with this confidence in his heart that he approached her, focusing his gaze straight at her, ready to deliver his first, killer, opening line.

And that is exactly what he
would
have done, had some knob-end, or
‘helmet’
as Amy would have called him, not banged into Rob at the moment he stood before the woman that had caught his eye, causing him to nudge the drink in her hand.

It landed somewhere on the left side of her blouse, followed by an awkward moment of silence. Rob quickly grabbed for a napkin from the bar and handed it to her.

“I’m so sorry. That knob-end, I mean, that helmet, no, I mean, that dick just bumped into me. I’m sorry.” Rob looked in the woman’s eyes for some sense of forgiveness. In the end all he got from her was a;

“Twat!” as she grabbed the napkin from his hand to clean herself up.

Rob was crestfallen, looking to her friend for some sense that he could recover from this moment of embarrassment. However, she could give him no such reassurance and instead motioned with her eyes for him to leave.

Who was he to argue?

When Rob returned to his table, Amy was half-way through another glass of wine, while Jon and Steve were choking with laughter at what they’d just witnessed. Rob sat back down and grabbed for the nearest pint glass.

“How’d it go?” asked Jon.

“We decided it would be best to see other people,” quipped Rob, with a mixture of sarcasm and hidden humiliation. This was met with a mock round of applause from Jon and Steve, while all Amy could muster was a half-cut smile in Rob’s direction.

‘
Yeah
,’ he thought, ‘
THAT’S the worst that could happen. Thanks Dad.’

“Are you wearing makeup?”

It was a fair enough question for Katy to ask, given her daughter had never worn makeup to school before, not even during the brief acne breakout of her fourteenth birthday. And despite having a mild hangover and no breakfast, Katy was sharp enough to notice Jodie’s cheeks looked redder than usual, as did her lips.

Jodie, however, just shrugged grabbing a slice of toast as she rummaged through her bag, making sure she had all her notes with her, but also as an attempt to divert her mother’s attention.

“Yeah, why?”

“It’s just an observation sweetie. Is there any reason for it?”

Jodie didn’t want to tell her mother the truth. However she was smart enough to know that it was, in the short term at least, an easier alternative to lying. In the end she told a half-truth. It was a risky half-truth but a half-truth just vague enough as to warrant no serious investigation on her mother’s part.

Or so she thought, anyway.

“There’s this boy.”

“I thought so.”

Jodie looked up at her mother, who had a faint smile playing across her lips, surprised.

“You know? How do you know?”

“Well the make up for one thing and your eating habits over the last few days for another.

You’ve got something on your mind. That and I
am
your mother, I can just tell.”

“Really?” asked Jodie, a slight panic setting in at the back of her mind.

“Sweetheart, I’ve got a headache and I have an eight hour shift ahead of me, I’m incapable of lies at this moment, so yes, really.”

Jodie didn’t trust her honesty and was already concocting scenarios in her head as to how she had found out, most of them involving her mother running into Laura at some point.

Laura never did know when to shut her mouth. But in spite of Jodie’s flights of fantasy, Katy was in fact telling the truth. She
could
tell and one day, when Jodie had kids of her own, her daughter would understand just how easy she had been to read just by an expression or a change in habits.

“So who is he?”

This was the question that had helped Jodie decide that lying was probably the smarter option in this instance.

“Oh, he’s just some boy in my English class.”

“Is it our new neighbor?”

“What?”

“What’s his name? Sean? ”

“No, what makes you think that?” asked Jodie, with genuine puzzlement.

“Your windows face each other. I thought maybe you two had been talking.”

Jodie thought on this, but the idea seemed preposterous, even if, to Katy, it made a certain amount of sense.

“It’s not Sean Lewis.”

“Sure?” asked Katy, with a distinct raise of her eyebrows.

“It’s not Sean Lewis. Trust me.”

Katy nodded at her daughter, the smile still playing on her lips. Jodie tried to ignore this, but the silence didn’t last long.

“The skirts a little short too” her mother whispered. Jodie rapidly shot her down with a

“Mum...”

Katy, teasing all the way, held up her hands in a ceasefire gesture.

“I’m just saying. I’m your mother, what do you expect me to say? ”

Jodie was starting to feel ill, surprised that this conversation had lasted as long as it had.

She put her toast down and closed her bag.

“I’d prefer it if you said nothing at all.”

Katy nodded and began rustling through her work papers.

“Fine, it’s your life.”

There was a pause, but Jodie knew her mother wasn’t finished. She was right, as Katy slowly brought her gaze back up to meet her daughter’s and added

“Is he good looking?”

Jodie stopped what she was doing and stared at her mother, now really annoyed.

“Leave it. Aren’t you supposed to be getting ready for work?”

Katy shrugged.

“I’m just waiting for the tumble dryer. Some moron spilled his drink on me last night.

Aren’t you supposed to be on your way to school?”

“I was just leaving.”

And with that, Jodie slung her bag over her shoulder and walked down the hallway. Katy called after her.

“Good. Go and learn, have fun...but no tongues.”

Jodie opened and closed the front door, simply shouting

“I’m leaving!”

During the course of Jodie’s walk to school, the rain went from a light drizzle to what one could only describe as a torrential downpour. The first bell had already gone and she was running late, jogging with her bag above her head, desperately trying to protect her freshly made up face from the downpour. Her feet, however, were not quite as well protected and as a car sped past, it splashed the rain across her legs, before pulling in to the staff car park.

Jodie slowed down to survey the damage. She would have probably cursed had she not noticed that the driver behind the wheel was Mr. Peer.