The Worst Girlfriend in the World (8 page)

‘I am! I totally am! Oh my God, I can’t believe you think I’m a bad feminist when all I do is try to make things better for other girls. Alice has no respect for any girl.’

My good deed had gone bad. I held up my hands in surrender. ‘It wouldn’t kill you or put the feminist cause back to say hello to Alice each morning.’

‘Excuse me!’ said a furious voice from the doorway where Alice was suddenly standing. ‘I don’t need you to scrounge up friends for me, Franny, and actually, Ash, I’d have loads of respect for other girls if they didn’t try and slut shame me just because I’m hot and they’re not.’

I was mortified, though I hadn’t done anything wrong. Not really. I was trying to do a nice thing but it had all backfired. Ash and even Vicky were glaring at Alice and she was glaring back at them and I was caught in the painful epicentre where their glares all collided. ‘But if you take the boy thing out of the equation, then you guys would really get on,’ I bleated.

‘I don’t think so,’ Ash said, her eyes resting on Alice, who had her hands on her hips and looked like a tiny, furious Valkyrie. ‘We have nothing in common. Not one thing.’

Because I was looking out for it, I saw the hurt flash up on Alice’s face for a mere nanosecond before she sneered it away. ‘You can say that again. I wouldn’t be seen dead in a flannel shirt. And Franny, I came to tell you to hurry up otherwise you’re going to miss the band, so move it!’

I moved it. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said as I followed Alice’s stiff back as she stalked through the club. ‘I’m pretty lonely at college and I know you’re lonely too so I just figured that I’d try and find a way to make you, like, less lonely.’

Alice whipped round. ‘Like I’d want to hang with that bunch of losers and haters.’

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Louis surging through the crowd, the rest of Thee Desperadoes trailing after him. But Louis wasn’t important right now. I turned to Alice, who was standing there, determined to chat this out even though we were right in the middle of the dance floor. ‘Look, we’ve been through this a hundred times. They wouldn’t be haters if you just maybe took a solemn vow that you wouldn’t have anything to do with a boy who you knew was in a relationship.’

‘It’s very hard to keep track of these things, Franny,’ Alice said. She held up her iPhone. ‘Am I meant to make a note every time someone from school snogs someone? Or should I just stick to avoiding the male half of couples that have been together longer than a week? Or a fortnight? Or does sending a picture of your tits to a boy mean that you’re in a relationship, because Josie seems to think it does?’

I wish I’d never started this. ‘I don’t even know why you’d want to get involved with any boy from our school. Even the Year 13s are immature.’

‘You got that right,’ Alice muttered. ‘Look, with you not there, the boys are the only ones who will talk to me. And anyway, you’re not lonely. You’ve got Dora, your new best friend.’

I shook my head. ‘No, she’s not. She’s barely even a friend. She hardly talks to me at all when we’re at college.’

‘You’re just saying that.’ Alice didn’t look quite so furious any more.

‘I’m not. Why do I even need a new best friend what I have an old best friend who totally rocks… when she’s not being a pain in the arse.’

‘Ha! You’re a pain in the arse too!’ Alice scoffed as she tucked her arm into mine. ‘Just as well we’re friends ’cause nobody else would put up with us, right?’

‘Their loss,’ I said and I grinned at Alice as we carried on walking. My heart was no longer sinking, but lifting higher and higher. Then suddenly my heart was as free as the birds when two hands shot out to stop me from cannoning right into him and Louis,
Louis
, looked at me, really looked at me and he smiled and he said, ‘Careful’.

Our eyes met, even though it was very muted lighting. I could feel the connection between us and his fingers burned where they touched. Yes, I was wearing my Chanel-esque jacket, but it was like we were skin to skin.

‘Oh…’

Then he was gone. He brushed past me and took his heat and his touch away and it was like everything had gone cold and dark.

My knees were so weak that Alice had to help me across to our table. I sat down so heavily that it jarred my spine and I smiled weakly at Dora, who looked like a very young, very cross Queen Victoria in her big black dress. I was just about to apologise for leaving her on her own for so long when Alice gave me a slow handclap. ‘Wow! You almost managed to speak to Louis this time.’

‘“Oh.” I said, “Oh.” Next time I’m planning on a whole sentence with a noun and a verb. Maybe even an adjective if I don’t lose my nerve.’

Alice shook her head. ‘How can you be the most edgy girl in Merrycliffe…’

‘Not
the
edgiest,’ I protested. ‘I mean, there’s that girl who runs the milk bar on the seafront in summer. She’s a vintage queen…’

‘Just ’cause she wears a lot of second-hand tat doesn’t make her edgy,’ Alice insisted. ‘You are really edgy apart from when Louis Allen is within fifty metres of you, then you turn into a complete sap. I’m telling you this because I’m your best friend.’

Alice was right. It was lame the way Louis reduced me to a wobbly pudding of hormones and girl gloop. I needed to be told so I could at least pretend I wasn’t rendered mute by him the next time our paths crossed.

Then the strobe light started flashing as it always did, five minutes before the band came on stage.

‘We got back just in time!’ I yanked Alice to her feet. Even though she was wearing a HUGE crinoline, I kept forgetting that Dora was still there and looking pretty pissed off that we kept ignoring her. ‘You too.’ I yanked her up as well. ‘Come on, we’re going down the front, but to the right.’

‘To the right?’ Dora asked, as I pulled her in that direction.

‘Yeah, we don’t want to go right down the front because we’d be the only ones down there and it would look really sad and Louis would know that I have a crush on him,’ I explained as I wedged the three of us into a gap by one of the speakers. Dora groused but I didn’t care because Thee Desperadoes were trooping on stage, shoulders hunched like they were walking in front of a firing squad.

Sneering Studio Tech crouched down in front of us to mess about with his guitar pedals. He looked up and caught my eye and I wished he hadn’t but then Louis suddenly leapt on to the stage like he’d been jet-propelled.

SHOWTIME!

‘Hello, Merrycliffe! Are you ready to rock?’ Louis shouted into his mic.

He was met with a deathly silence.

As usual, there were a clump of older indie girls at the front that Alice and I called Thee Desperadettes because they were sad and desperate and followed Louis everywhere – they weren’t even subtle about it. There was also Mark the mad dancer, ready to spring into action in the middle of the dance floor, and the two middle-aged men who went to The Wow every Saturday to leer at girls young enough to be their daughters, but everyone else in the club had now gathered at the bar.

That didn’t stop Louis. ‘Well,
we’re
ready to rock! Come on, people!’

His exuberance was endearing and generally Louis was the bomb. Tonight he was wearing skinny black jeans held up by a big leather belt and a black Motörhead T-shirt. He looked like a lovely, sexy, black-clad angel, I thought as I rummaged in my pocket for a small plastic box.

Alice already had her earplugs in. I handed my spare, unopened pack to Dora. ‘You’ll need these,’ I said, as I slipped my manky ones in.

‘It’s all right,’ she shouted, as Thee Desperadoes launched into their first song with a squeal of ear-splitting feedback. ‘I saw them last week. I’ve brought my own.’

Even with earplugs in, we could still hear Thee Desperadoes. Each of their songs lasted no more than two minutes, which would have been a good thing, if they didn’t have so many songs to get through. The guitar sounded like it had been filtered through mud, the drummer couldn’t keep time, I don’t even know what a bass player is meant to do but the bassist wasn’t doing it very well, and Louis was squawking and screeching about a ‘blackhearted woman with legs as long as sin who done gone and left me’. His singing always reminded me of the time when Siobhan stepped on her plugged-in hair straighteners with bare feet and the unearthly screams she produced.

But, oh,
oh
, Louis was so very good at strutting and throwing shapes. Excellent at jumping up on the speakers and holding a pose. And he aced thrusting his hips every time.

I knew all his moves and exactly when he’d pull them out, but I was never prepared for the moment when Louis tugged off his T-shirt during every gig.

‘Oh my,’ I murmured as he ran a hand down his bare,
naked
chest.

‘I’ve seen more muscles on my gran,’ Dora shouted in my ear, like it was perfectly all right to diss the father of my future children.

‘Shut up!’ Who wanted a chiselled six pack bashing into you every time you kissed? Louis’s chest was thin, hairless and totally rock ’n’ roll.

Thee Desperadettes obviously thought so because they were all screaming and waving their arms. I would never behave like that. Instead I stood there trying to sway in time to the music, even though there wasn’t much of a rhythm to work with, and memorised Louis’s performance so I could play it back in my head over and over.

Half an hour later, they left the stage. I could tell that Louis was thinking about stagediving but it was doubtful whether Thee Desperadettes would catch his fall so he just bounced off with a casual wave of his hand, and didn’t even catch my eye though I was willing him to with all my might.

‘I didn’t think it was possible, but they were actually worse than last week,’ Dora said, as the three of us removed our earplugs.

‘Yeah, they’re weird like that. Every time you think that, yes, that was their crappiest gig yet, they still have it in them to be even crappier the next time.’ Alice grinned slyly at me. ‘Right, Franny?’

‘I’m not saying anything. It would be disloyal.’ I caught the eye of the sneering studio tech, who was unplugging something on stage. He gave me a stern look like he knew Dora and Alice had been slagging off his band, or maybe he thought I fancied
him
, what with all the catching of eyes, and he wasn’t having it.

I wasn’t having it either. There was only one Desperado I was interested in. I turned away. ‘Let’s go back to our table.’

The mood at The Wow always took a little while to recover after Thee Desperadoes had done their thing. By the time Alice and I had had another glass of vodka and diet Coke and Dora some red wine, the DJ had binned the moperock and was playing some shouty, boppy music that we could dance to.

Dora did really gothy things with her arms when she danced and Alice always does hoochie mama gyrations like the girls in r ’n’ b videos. I just dance like a normal person with a few sixties flourishes I’ve incorporated after watching clips from really old music shows on YouTube. My favourite move is holding my nose and shimmying right down to the floor like I’m going underwater but I only pull that one out when I’m drunk.

I certainly wasn’t drunk enough yet and there was no way I wanted to make a show of myself, especially when Louis took to the dance floor. He was with Thee Desperadettes, who had much more of a sexy vibe than the younger indie girls that went to The Wow. They were all at college too, but the year above me, and hung about on the patch of grass by the art block, smoking and poncing about with their iPads. It was quite hard to tell them apart. They all merged into a pretty, shiny-haired, ‘Oh. My. God’-ing mass. Tonight, they were all wearing flouncy little skater dresses with Converse and Louis, my Louis, had his arm round two of them as they danced around to a Grimes track and all of a sudden I felt ridiculous and out of place in my silly cropped trousers and boy shoes and my jacket that didn’t look
anything
like a Chanel jacket.

‘You are worth more than the whole lot of them,’ Alice said, because she could see where my gaze had come to rest. Her gaze was resting there too, but she had a superior smile on her face. ‘I mean, did they get a group discount on the same skater dress from ASOS?’

I knew that Alice had the exact same skater dress from ASOS in black ‘for my bloat days’, but it was so like her to make me feel better.

‘Girls like that are so boring and safe,’ Dora said without pausing from waving her arms ethereally to the music. ‘We are what we wear, so they must have really dull personalities if they all wear the same things.’

I looked at the three of us – Alice in her slinky blue dress, Dora looking like Helena Bonham Carter’s little sister and me trying to do elegant, understated Chanel chic – and wondered what it said about our personalities, but then the music changed to an infectious thugstep and Alice took my hands so we could spin round and nothing else mattered for the three minutes that the music took us somewhere else.

After The Wow closed at midnight, it was time for another Merrycliffe Saturday night tradition. One of the few advantages of living in a town that was Europe’s eleventh largest container port was the Market Diner.

For starters, it was open twenty-four hours to cater for the port workers, drivers and haulage contractors who rolled in and out of Merrycliffe at all hours. And secondly, it did the best bacon sandwiches in the world. Thirdly, its chips weren’t too shabby either and lastly, everyone went there after The Wow because there was nowhere else to go.