Read Me Like a Book (2 page)

Sometimes, but not right now.

We get talking. His name’s Dylan, and he’s in a band. He works at a clothes shop in town (“just till the band takes off”). He’s come with some friends, but they’re all getting drunk in the next room and he’s bored because he’s the driver.

We’re getting on really well when Luke comes over, looking flustered.

“Ash, you’ve got to talk to Zoe. Nick’s just broken up with her, and she’s locked herself in the bathroom. She said she won’t speak to anyone except you.”

“Why me? You’re her brother!”

Yes, I know it’s selfish, and I’m sorry, OK? But, come on. It’s my birthday and I’m talking to the only decent guy in the place.

Luke gives me his sad, pleading eyes. “Will you go up?”

I glare at Luke while simultaneously trying to smile seductively at Dylan (not easy — try it sometime), and head for the bathroom.

Zoe opens the door a crack to check that there’s no one with me. Then she pulls me inside and plonks herself down on a wicker laundry hamper in the corner of the room. I perch on the edge of the tub, waiting for her to say something.

She’s heartbroken. Kind of. She’s been seeing Nick for three weeks and thought he was The One. But let’s be honest here. Zoe does tend to have slightly unrealistic ideas of what might constitute The One. And, to be fair, after a few days of utter despair, another One generally comes along quite quickly.

Zoe is a year younger than us. She has long blond hair (which she swears doesn’t come out of a bottle, but which was totally mousy brown for at least the first fourteen years of her life), enormous blue eyes, and pretty much her pick of all Luke’s friends.

It seems her rebound rate is speeding up, as it turns out the only reason she wants me is to find out if Dylan’s here on his own.

“It’s just that, if I met someone else, it would help me get over Nick,” she whimpers between sobs.

“He’s just asked me out, actually,” I reply quickly.

And yes, OK, hands up, I admit it isn’t
technically
one hundred percent true. But I’ve learned that you don’t take chances with Zoe.

She makes this kind of choking noise as she stares at me, as if I’ve just said the most unlikely thing in the entire world. Thanks, Zoe. Then she recovers and hides her shock with a cough. “Oh. Right. Great.” She yanks a towel off the radiator, wipes her nose on it, and chucks it into the hamper. “Go for it, then.”

I feel a pang of guilt. “Are you sure?”

Zoe’s leaning over the sink to squint at herself in the mirror, already over it. “Of course,” she says, getting out her lipstick. As I generally don’t have quite the same pickings as her, I decide to accept her blessing and give it a shot with Dylan.

I check myself out in the full-length mirror on the wall. My hair looks OK. It’s sort of blond, thanks to highlights, and sort of straight, thanks to straighteners. Not short, not long, it peters out somewhere around my shoulders. It’s got one obstinate kink down the left side, which I try to flatten with my hand, but fail. I look at myself sideways and hold my tummy in, even though I’m not fat. I’m kind of average, I guess. Average clothes, too. I suddenly wish I’d gone for thicker mascara, brighter eyeshadow, and something a bit more interesting than jeans and a T-shirt. But I haven’t. I don’t; it’s not me.

“You’re positive you’re all right?” I say as I turn to leave.

Zoe looks at me from the mirror. “’Course I am. I’m fine, honest.” She smiles. “Go on. Go. I’ll be down in a minute. Good luck!”

I give Zoe a quick hug from behind and charge back downstairs.

Dylan’s nowhere to be seen.

After I’ve sauntered casually into every downstairs room twice, and all the upstairs rooms that aren’t locked and/or don’t have any noises coming from inside, I give up and go in search of Luke instead. He’s in the kitchen. There’s a long wooden table with about twenty cans of Stella and two boxes of wine at one end and five plastic bowls of nibbles at the other. I slide onto the bench next to him and grab a handful of cashews.

“So. Where’s that what’s-his-name?” I ask in my best indifferent voice.

“Who’s what’s-his-name?”

“Umm, what was it, now . . .? Dylan, I think.” Dead casual.

“Oh, him.” Luke’s hand hovers briefly over the pretzels before plunging into the tortilla chips. “Had to go. One of his friends threw up, and Dylan offered to take him home.”

My heart sinks under the table. “Is he coming back?”

“Don’t think so.”

My head drops. And so do my hopes. The perfect ending to a perfect birthday.

Then Luke mumbles through a mouthful of peanuts, “He asked for your phone number, actually.”

“
What?
Did you give it to him?”

“I couldn’t remember it — sorry.”

“
Sorry?
That’s
it
?”

Luke looks crestfallen, like he’s only just this second realized that he’s messed up. “Ash, I’m really sorry, mate. I’ll make it up to you. I’ll get his number and tell him you like him. . . .”

I can’t stay angry at Luke. “It’s OK,” I say, trying to smile. “It’s not your fault. I wasn’t that keen on him, anyway.”

Luke gives me a “Yeah, whatever” look, and I turn to my Coke, ready to sink back into my birthday blues.

Then I notice something. A piece of paper stuck in the top of my can of Coke — like in the old days when they used to put a note out for the milkman saying, “Two pints tomorrow.” Except, obviously, better than that.

Under his name, he’s written his phone number.

I read the note three times.

After that, I no longer care about the music or the dancing or the couple in the corner who are, by the way, still so intent on snogging each other’s brains out that I’m surprised they haven’t died from lack of oxygen.

Dylan liked talking to me. He gave me his phone number!

I sit smiling to myself as I finish my Coke. After a bit, I decide it’s time to call it a night. I fold the note, put it carefully in my pocket, grab my coat — and Luke — and drive the two blocks home.

The teachers used to tell us we’d be treated differently when we got to high school. “Like adults,” they said. But high school hadn’t been invented a hundred years ago, when they were young. No wonder they were so wrong.

It had crossed my mind that this year might be different. Wrong again. So a few days after my birthday party, it’s back to school with a thud.

We’ve hardly been back five minutes when the headmaster, Mrs. Banks, has Cat and me in her office for a Verbal Warning. She says she wants to start the term on a positive note, make things clear before we get into any bad habits. We have to sign this contract she’s drawn up.

How am I expected to get through the lessons, then?

I sign it when I see Cat scribble her name on hers, although when she tells me later that she’d signed it Lady Gaga I could kick myself. I wouldn’t exactly call it a positive start to the term, unless Banks means she wants to make us positive we hate everything about this place.

Mr. Kenworthy’s gone. Which is kind of good as we never learned anything in his English lessons — other than to avoid sitting in the front row unless you wanted to be poisoned by alcohol fumes. But kind of bad in case we get a new teacher who insists on us actually doing any work.

Turns out we’ve got a temporary replacement: Miss Murray. She’s all right, I suppose. Fresh out of teachers’ college, I reckon, so she’s brought the average age of the staff down by about fifty years.

We’ve got English after lunch. She makes us play this game where you have to pick someone in the room and describe them by saying what they’d be if they were a flower or a car or an animal. Then everyone has to guess who it is. I normally hate that kind of thing, but she makes it OK somehow. She smiles a lot and laughs at the same kinds of things we laugh at, not like the rest of the teachers, who just glare at you the minute you look as if you might actually be enjoying the lesson. Not that that happens often, but if it did, they’d probably think they were doing something wrong.

Robyn describes me. I don’t really know her that well. She sat on the other side of the class last year, but they’ve moved the desks around and we’ve ended up next to each other. She’s OK, I guess. She’s kind of mousy-looking: brown bob, brown eyes, glasses. Quite pretty when she smiles. Gets along with teachers. You know the kind. Harmless enough, just not really my kind of person.

Anyway, she has me down as a cactus, a lion cub, and a Mini Cooper. I’ve no idea what she’s going on about, but Miss Murray works out that it’s me after a few others make wrong guesses.

It’s beginning to feel like we’re goofing off when Miss Murray glances at her watch. “Right, enough of the fun and games,” she says. “We’d better get down to some work.” A muffled grumble spreads through the room.

She goes to the front of her desk and half sits, half leans back against it, as if she wants to show us she’s totally cool and laid-back but can’t bring herself to go all the way and sit on the thing.

“So.” She clasps her hands together, brings them up to her mouth. It reminds me of morning prayers at primary school.

“Hands together, eyes closed,” Mr. Jackson, the headmaster, would say, and we’d deliver the Lord’s Prayer in three hundred synchronized monotones.

“Our father, who art in heaven, Harold be thy name,” I intoned earnestly every morning. It was years before I realized God wasn’t actually called Harold.

I look up at Miss Murray. She’s propping her lips on her fingertips, eyes almost closed, and, for a second, I wonder if she’s praying too.

“So,” she repeats. “Can anyone tell me a poem they’ve read and enjoyed recently?”

No one says anything. A
poem
? That we’ve
enjoyed
? I stifle a laugh and look down at my desk like everyone else.

“Oh, no!” she suddenly exclaims and goes back behind her desk. She picks up a piece of paper and frowns at it. “I must have written down the wrong room. I thought this was an English A-level class.”

Why do teachers
always
have to be sarcastic?

But then I notice her cheeks have gone red. Just a bit, just enough to make me feel sorry for her, and I don’t care about the silent agreement. So I do something I haven’t done for as long as I can remember. I put my hand up.

“Does it have to be an actual poem, miss?” I raise my eyes to look up at her without lifting my head.

“What did you have in mind? Ashleigh, isn’t it?”

“Ash, yeah.”

“What did you have in mind, Ash?”

“Well, there’s this song I wrote the words out to; I think it’s kind of like a poem.”
What am I doing?

“That’s great,” she says with a smile that feels like it reaches right into me and looks around inside. Can a smile even
do
that?

“Can you remember it?” She’s leaning forward, looking at me so intently I’m afraid she’s wading through all my hidden secrets.

I can feel a room full of gobsmacked eyes zoning in on me. So I pull myself together and give the only answer that’ll save me. “No. Sorry.”

Miss Murray purses her lips, still looking at me.

“But I know it’s good,” I add feebly. She’s going to think I’m an idiot now. Not that I care what a teacher thinks of me. At least, I never have before now.

“Maybe you could bring it in sometime,” she says as she turns away and picks up a book from her desk. I feel dismissed, and I’m not sure I like it — although it does mean I’ve gotten away with not looking like a total weirdo in front of my peers.

“I’d like to see it.” Her head, slightly tilted, turns her smile into a question, and I shrug in reply.

“Good.” She opens the book. “Now, here’s one of my favorites.”

Then she says, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”

I look around the class. Everyone has stopped doodling and passing notes to one another; the air’s tightened.

“They may not mean to, but they do.”

Is it a poem?

She holds our attention all the way to the last line, when she puts the book down and says, “Philip Larkin.” Into the silence, she adds, “He’s a poet.”

As she passes photocopies around the room, we study them with suspicion.

“Any thoughts?” Miss Murray asks.

I find myself nodding as I read the poem, as I relate to every word. It’s as if the poet knows exactly what’s going on in my head. I want to say so, but I’ve already done my bit, so I do the looking-down-at-my-desk thing again and wait for someone else to speak. The tension spreads awkwardly around the room, seeping into every little space.

Finally, Luke breaks the silence. “Is that really a poem, miss, or did you make it up for a laugh?”

But before she has time to answer, the bell rings. Bags are instantly on top of tables, chairs scraped back.

“Excuse me!” she shouts over the racket. “I didn’t tell anyone to go anywhere.”