The Bad Karma Diaries (23 page)

He tried to hold my hand, and I fluttered it away from him because he isn’t my boyfriend and I don’t know if I want him to be my boyfriend, but he didn’t put up with that, he reached for my hand again, and I moved away again, so then he said menacingly, ‘Well,
I’ve
got arms’ and put an arm around me, so I said ‘And I’ve got arms’ and knocked his arm off me. I can see we’re going to be using our arms a lot to make jokes to push away the embarrassment!

Then he said, ‘Dave fancies your friend Heeun.’

I said, ‘Oh’ and thought about this. There was no explosion of jealousy. So obviously I never actually fancied David Leydon. Not really fancied. Not like J.P. ‘Well, he should tell her so,’ I said impatiently.

‘He wants me to tell you to tell her,’ said Derek.

‘Well that’s
lame
,’ I said, ‘but sure, whatever.’ I sounded kind of annoyed. Maybe I did fancy David Leydon? But I think it’s more that I was unimpressed by his cowardly tactics. I think I wanted him to be stronger and cooler and more confident than he actually is.

Anyway I did tell Heeun and she just giggled. She didn’t
song anyone although I think she was asked to dance (a.k.a., to song) a lot. I think she is gonna be like me (well like I
was
), way choosy (actually, I have to admit, she has more to be choosy about then I ever did, which is lucky for her. Because frankly there’s no point being choosy, unless you’ve got lots to be choosy about. Otherwise it’s not choosy, it’s rejected).

Keith is still Anna’s boyfriend. For the moment.

Wrote up our last day of school on the blog:

Okay people, Christmas stuffing over. Wanna hear about our last day at school? It was Charity Day. We raised €110 for charity at our stall. Our stall was a fashion stall. We took old clothes and sold them on.

Some people have a strange idea of what is acceptable to sell on. Jeans rubbed down to the bum anyone?

Another stall was the kissing stall. You paid to kiss whoever was in it. Hefto went in. She got loads of paying kissers. (Just a peck, not
songing
).

Later that night at a disco Demise kissed (songed!) for FREE. Charity did not benefit. She is so selfish!

But the most important thing we did is:
vanquished bullies by a three-pronged attack. We cannot say more in case someone from our school reads this. But here is our advice: when vanquishing bullies you must a) inform authority, b) wreak private vengeance [i.e. injure the bully in some way, but make sure you don’t get caught!] and c) big up the victim [i.e. improve their self-confidence by concentrating on what they do really really well].

This approach will certainly work. From us to you, for free: Beating the Bully
™
.

Oh whoa! Jesus! Well …!

At Anna’s today we went up to the computer to log onto the blog to read our comments. Well, there were the usual:

ZeeZee:

Glad you’ve found a way to bring your two obsessions, songing and charity together, but girls, I don’t think charity demands
that
of you

CuriousinDenver:

Thanks for the Christmas present, girls. Looking forward to Beating the Bully
™
– have you patented it?
 

And a few more messages like that, just the usual. But then there was
this:

DriftinginDublin:

Bomb, Demise and Hefto, you don’t specify but I guess you live in Ireland – you left clues – Stephen’s Day, Taoiseach – and I’m guessing it’s Dublin … well I live there too! So let’s meet up!

‘Anna!’ I squealed.

It was incredible, weird, just plain
bizarre
reading that. Our readers seem so far away, so remote, little words on a screen. And now … it was like a hand – a real, fleshy hand – had reached out from the screen and grabbed us. Or like one of our toys stood up and started talking. Or like a character in a book walked out from the pages and addressed us.

Truth is we didn’t really think Xena or ZeeZee or curiousinDenver or any of them was actually
real
. Not a person you could
meet
.

But once I’d absorbed the shock I thought,
well yeah, it could be fun to meet driftinginDublin.

‘Where will we meet? In the shopping centre?’ I giggled.

But Anna was looking way serious, very, very serious, ‘Denise,’ she said, ‘what happens if he’s … forty!’

‘Forty!’ I said, ‘why would he want to meet us if he’s
forty
. He knows we’re at school …’

Then I stopped, appalled. My mouth hung open. I was
remembering those articles I’ve read. This is exactly how dodgy forty-year-olds
do
meet school girls. Through the internet! This was terrifying! It wasn’t just a hand reaching out to us. It was a
criminal
hand.

‘Who says it’s a
he
?’ I said finally.

‘We don’t know,’ said Anna, ‘that’s the point, isn’t it? We just don’t
know
.’

‘We could ask him …
her
,’ I said.

‘Like he’s gonna tell the truth,’ said Anna impatiently.

‘But maybe it
is
a school girl. Or a school guy,’ I said longingly, ‘he might be amazing.’

‘Oh for God’s sake!’ said Anna.

‘We’d have to get our parents to come to the meeting,’ I admitted, ‘or Renata!’ I preferred that idea. Renata wouldn’t compromise our street cred as much as parents.

‘Like she’d bother,’ said Anna, ‘this is
Renata
you’re talking about. Did you have her confused with Meg from
Little Women
?’

I giggled.

‘But you’re right about the parents,’ said Anna. ‘We’d better tell them now.’

‘
Tell
them …
now
!’ I said.

‘Denise,’ said Anna, ‘If it is a … lepidopterist who’s trying to catch a school girl to pin her to a slide, he has to be stopped.’

‘A lepidopterist!’ I shouted, ‘A lecherous lepidopterist!’

So
that
was the hand coming out from the screen. A hand with a net trying to catch butterflies …

‘Oh my God! Warn Heeun!’ I cried hysterically.

‘Calm down!’ said Anna, ‘He doesn’t even know where we live yet.’

So we went downstairs to her kitchen, where actually
everyone
was. The whole family. Because her Dad was on holidays.

So we explained and then everyone trooped up to have a look at the blog. They read bits out. Which was mortifying! We should have censored first! Luckily nobody actually read out the bit about Heeun’s party and Anna switching boyfriends.

‘Jesus Christ!’ said Renata, ‘What fresh hell is this? You’re not just lurching from crisis to crisis like the government … you’re Zimbabwe – a total
illegal
mess.’

We waited. ‘Oh, Renata!’ said her mother, but good-natured. It seemed like she could hardly keep from laughing. Everyone kept reading out bits from the blog and laughing. It was mortifying! I wished we hadn’t told them.

But then Anna’s dad said heavily, ‘I am not happy about men, or even boys, sitting in bedsits, sweating over my daughter’s accounts of kissing.’

We gulped and the mood changed.

Anna’s mum said, yes, it was ill-advised to communicate with total strangers without your parents’ knowledge, and there was a reason Facebook protects your profile so that only approved people can read it etc. She said of course we imagined our readers were our own age and probably lots of them were,
but we’d no way of knowing, that was problem. Then everyone discussed, like we weren’t there, what we should do about it.

Renata said we’d created a Greek chorus and it was genius and we should just keep going! (Anna smirked at me then, really proud).

And their mum said yes, it was an impressive narrative, and maybe if we kept the parents in the loop … but their dad said it was a frivolous waste of time and a potential risk.

In the middle of all the arguing, I just looked at Anna and she nodded and we said, ‘It’s fine, we’ll close it down,’ and then we put on the faces of long-suffering martyrs, although actually I knew we were both looking for an excuse to shut it down.

How will our readers cope? I feel bad about them, but I also feel released. It was a burden having to meet those expectations every day.

Went round to Heeun’s. We told her the sad news of the blog. She said, ‘Oh no! Awful! It will be
ishikoro
.’

‘What’s “
ishikoro
”?’ we asked.

‘It’s a Japanese word for abandoned blogs,’ said Heeun. ‘It means “pebbles”. You know like pebbles you pick up by the sea and then chuck away. Japan is full of abandoned blogs. It has thousands and thousands of
ishikoro
!’

We contemplated all these blogs chucked by the wayside. It
made me feel very sad, and more guilty than ever over our poor little blog.

‘What happens to them?’ I asked.

‘I think they just drift in cyberspace,’ said Heeun.

Horrible! Even Anna was looking a bit choked up at the thought of our poor little
ishikoro
drifting round cyberspace for ever.

‘We’d better explain,’ I said heavily. We needed to post one last time to say goodbye and thanks to our readers.

Actually of course they were one step ahead of us.

CuriousinDenver:

Bomb, Demise and Hefto! You do know it’s very unwise to meet strangers who contact you through the internet. drifitinginDublin, who ARE you? Why don’t you tell the girls which school you’re in? Your name? And gender?

‘Good old CuriousinDenver’ I said. ‘Who needs parents or the police?’

We wrote:

Keith has invited us to his New Year’s Eve party. So I will see Derek, and Heeun will see David Leydon, and let’s see what happens!

Our parents are so relieved that we’re meeting boys our own age that they’re letting us stay till half one in the morning to see in the New Year! We’re not going to the party till 10pm anyway. We are having a New Year’s Eve dinner at home in my house first. Anna and Heeun are coming.

Everyone is making resolutions because of how the year’s changing. For instance Justine is resolving to sing with Tommy’s band and make more friends, and my mum is resolving to do more fun family things at the weekend, and Renata is resolving to win the Booker Prize or something, but if you remember, Anna and I don’t do New Year Resolutions, we only do New
Term
Resolutions … and I am getting a bit scared

BRIDGET HOURICAN has lived in a lot of cities beginning with ‘B’ – Belfast, Brussels, Budapest – but now lives in Dublin, where she rides her bike everywhere and writes articles for newspapers and magazines. She went to an international school in Brussels, which was a bit like the school in this book except with more languages. This is her first book for girls.