Super Awkward (2 page)

By
the time I'd flipped it out, Mum was already asleep, snoring.

I wriggled my way between the sheets, trying to ignore that my pillow smelt of ham (the linen cupboard doubled up as our food cupboard), and plugged in my headphones that I'd hidden in my pants. But even 5 Seconds of Summer and the 1975 couldn't cheer me up. Because being trapped in a human tin full of mum-snores, fragranced with Eau De Piglette, wasn't even the worse thing. Something far worse was looming. The most awful thing since Mum accidentally posted her camera roll to my Instagram.

Being stuck at Black Bay for the rest of the week meant missing Saturday. The event of the year. My best friend's sixteenth birthday party. Mum couldn't see what the big deal was, as the day before we left, on Rach's actual bday, the three of us had spent an awesome day together, completing her fifteenth year bucket list by having pizza for breakfast, lunch and dinner. But Saturday was The Big One. An epic night, complete with parentless house, a playlist that's been six months in the making, the most Ben and Jerry's ever seen in one freezer – and absolutely, completely zero me.

I pulled my duvet further over my head to hide the
glow
of my phone as I tried to load Maps again. Even if I'd started walking home this second, I wouldn't make it back till two days after the party finished. And that was without time to sleep, eat or share pics of my epic journey (while probably doing impressions of Frodo Baggins). My fate was sealed. Half term was officially now barf term. So instead of adventuring across hill and dale, I ventured across rug and small pile of my pants to retrieve the sock full of caramel Digestives I'd smuggled out from the house. As silently as I could, I munched my way through four toes' worth of biscuits, wondering just how bad party FOMO was going to be.

But little did I know that at that very same moment someone else was thinking about the party. And their perfect plan to make it the biggest disaster of my life.

CHAPTER

TWO

Can weather laugh at you? Because as if this holiday, or more precisely hell-iday, hasn't been bad enough, it's been raining for four days solid. NOT FUNNY, CLOUDS. You've turned my bob into head pubes.

Why couldn't Black Bay be one of those parks that Lou (a girl in our year that got boobs two years before anyone else) goes to every summer that sound like a real-life version of
Hollyoaks
(but in a good way, without the sporadic multiple-murders). I'm the youngest person here, except for children (and they don't count, as I'm not hanging out with anyone who eats nose-morsels). Eurgh. I swear the best entertainment here has been the daily food-poisoning gamble of eating the buffet. Still, on the bright side, I did an excellent
job
of getting out of the life drawing class that Mum and Jo are at. I pleaded that I needed to work on my fancy dress outfit for tonight. It sounded slightly more dignified than, ‘AS IF I'M GOING TO SAY YES TO SEEING MY FIRST EVER MAN-DANGLE IRL IN THE COMPANY OF YOU TWO?!'

I stabbed at the cardboard cereal boxes I was using for my costume, as if they were to blame for this evening. We've been looking forward to Rachel's sixteenth ever since I met her. Which was basically birth.

Rachel, AKA Rach, is one half of my two best friends, Tegan and Rach. (She's obvs the Rach half). Three's an odd number, but so what? It works for us. They're my person-equivalent of breathing and have kept me sane since for ever. I sometimes wonder if I know more about them than I do about myself. Like, Tegan is so on-it and brilliant, she'll probably run the country one day. And she can do the splits both ways. Not that she'd do that if she was Prime Minister – she only does it when she's competing with her gymnastics team. And she wears socks that have days of the week on them (she sews on the days herself, but never wears the same day on each foot).

Rachel is always happy and always smiling (and
always
looking like a search result for #lifegoals) and she makes us laugh every single day. She's constantly doing dead arty things, like painting pictures of dogs, but only using triangles. Our art teacher saw one and put it forward for an award, which it won, even though they hung it upside down. When Rach isn't sketching, or painting, she'll be curled up with her head in a book, which is weird because for all the words that go in, some really nonsensical ones come out. She also has an extreme phobia of when fork prongs get stuck together in cutlery drawers, and can't walk past squirrels (she says she was once bitten by one, but her dad insists it was their neighbour's hamster gone wild).

Rachel has The Best parties too, and that's when they're just normal ones. This one's been a full year in the planning. She's got an insanely great house, and her mega-loaded parents will make sure it's the kind of evening Kendall and Kylie would turn up to. I'd die for parents like that, instead of a mum who thinks the height of hospitality is splashing out on upgrading to non-supermarket brand cheese puffs. Eurgh. It's more gutting than a fishmongers' convention.

I checked my phone. No pre-party update from either of them. I put it back on the floor, trying to will it into action with threatening glances. Mum reckons
I'm
chained to my phone, but it's not my fault no one had invented interesting technology in her day. She just had wood and washing machines and kettles and boring stuff like that.

I chopped open another cereal box. If Tegan and Rach were here, we'd have found a way to make Black Bay fun. Props to Jo for trying. She's in on tonight's Project: Survive The Evening, and once she gets back from her class she's taking me to the campsite's Pop-Swop Night to take my mind off the party. It's fancy dress karaoke, which isn't exactly an amazing house party with all my friends, or the
X Factor
tour at Wembley, but it'll do. It's not as if anyone else has to ever find out; what happens at Black Bay Caravan Park stays in Black Bay Caravan Park.

Must. Not. Look. At. Phone.
It's so hard, though; my eyes are magnetically drawn to it. Lucky they're attached, or they might fly out and cling to it, like some sort of freaky all-seeing iron filings. It's not even a phone any more, just a ticking torture device. Last time I looked it was 8.28 p.m. –
if
I can just hold off looking till 10 p.m. then I'll have made it through the first third of the party. Based on pre-party gossip (Mikey told Rach who told Tegan who told me), Luke's
probably
going to cop off with Lou, the school trophy snog. Bothered? Me? Well, yes, obvs, but I'm not going to admit that to anyone. I wish I wasn't even admitting it to myself, but I'm hard to lie to.

I can't believe I used to go out with Luke. He puts the ‘ex' in ‘extreme idiot'. That doucheball was my first actual proper boyfriend. I'd been so excited to get together with him, but turns out he's a total disaster that should only be available to girls who have successfully passed the level five boy-handling exam. I haven't even graduated from level one, which is just the basics of non-sweaty hand-holding, and understanding the appeal of cricket. I am a boyfriend first-baser, and Luke is the sort of boy Taylor Swift could get at least three songs out of.

Luke and I haven't spoken since just before Christmas when he'd responded to my suggestion that maybe we needed to see each other a bit less, by laughing in my face and telling me I'd been a joke to him all along. Word soon got round, and I ended up getting actual high-fives in the corridor for being the first girl ever to turn the tables and dump him. I was so fuming at Luke, I never bothered to correct them. Eurgh. I would like to Ctrl-Z his whole existence please.

8.30
p.m
. DammitIlooked. I'm so rubbish at keeping promises to myself. I must promise to do better in future.

I wonder what was already happening? Was Lou already functioning as a human mirrorball in one of her trademark glittery boob tubes? Was Mikey finally going to tell Tegan how he felt? Had Rach already accidentally broken someone's heart? It's not that she means to be mean, she couldn't be mean if she tried, it's just what happens when you look like a walking version of a Disney princess. Her hair looks like it's blowing in the wind, even when she's indoors. Although she'd get a U for common sense. She once said to me, ‘I know April Fool's Day is the first day of a month, but I can never remember which one?'

8.32 p.m.
Argh. How has only two minutes gone by since I last checked?! Will this torture never end? At least I know what missing out on the most important social event of the year feels like. Kind of like being too ill to get out of bed at Christmas, but multiplied by one million.

Hurry up, tomorrow, when I can be back home. It's cringe that I'm excited about going back to Appleton. It's my dive of a nothing-to-do and nothing-to-see
village,
whose only highlight is that we have a weird rock, which if you look at it from an exact angle resembles William Shakespeare. Sadly, that is only interesting for 0.5 seconds, and I've had to live there for 15.5 years, which is quite a lot of seconds more. Thank goodness the others live there or I'd probably have already become Britain's Youngest Hermit, which sounds like the name of a TV show I'd probably watch while being one.

I picked off a rogue cornflake which had glued itself to my knee and tried to focus on tearing up the cereal boxes for my DIY costume. It should really be called BPDDIY – Bella Please Don't Do It Yourself (as it's potentially the worst idea I've had yet). As I glued down flaps of cardboard, blobbed on spots of nail varnish, I reassured myself that this bad idea was a good one.

BEEP.

FINALLY! Information from the outside world. But the name on my screen hit me like a tennis ball in the boob. Luke. Why oh why did God invent mobiles?! And why does He enable intermittent reception in caravan parks when He can't manage decent hot water or food that isn't beige? Priorities, please, beardy one. Maybe he'd bum-messaged me by accident (Luke, not God). I opened it up. Two words.

Guess
who?

There was something else. A picture. A picture that made my insides knot before my mind had even figured out what was happening. Proof I really do think with my stomach.

If only there was an emoji for throwing up on a caravan floor. There on my phone, invading my space, my eyes, was Luke. Doing what he does best. Thumbs up. Winking at the camera. Not paying any attention to the poor girl he was kissing, cos as always, it was all about him.
Was it Lou?
All I could see was the back of a wide brimmed purple hat, which was more fabric than Lou would normally wear on her whole body. But why send it to me? We hadn't managed eye contact, let alone phone contact, since we split up, so why start messaging me all of a sudden? Did he think I'd be bothered? I totally am, but how dare he think that! None of it made sense.

I rang Rach. Answer machine. No replies to my messages either, same for Tegan. I even called Mikey, even though he can't form sentences if it's over a verbal communication device. Crapballscrapballscrapballs.

I shouldn't care what Luke does. It wasn't like I liked him any more. So why did I feel so gross about it? Out
of
everyone in the world, it should be easy to understand myself, but I swear there's a secret bit of my body that hides away information from my own brain, eurgh.

Whatever happens, I MUSTN'T reply. He'd think I cared. And it doesn't matter what I
really
think, but it really
does
matters what he thinks I think. WWBD? What would Beyoncé do? Yes, I was a strong, independent woman, who could rise above being stuck in solitary caravan confinement while my ex prods at my pride.

Guess who cares, more like.

Oops. As soon as I sent it I regretted it. Well, I regretted it before I sent it, but it takes more than concrete logic to stop me making bad decisions. So, I was a strong independent woman with the willpower of someone who once threw up after eating an entire tin of Quality Street. I don't even like strawberry creams.

My phone beeped.