Diary of a Crush: Kiss and Make Up (19 page)

I shook her a teeny tiny bit and she finally came up for air. ‘They bought me some water,’ she said dazedly. ‘And it made me feel all funny.’

‘Do you need some help?’ asked the beautiful hippy boy who told me his name was Azure as he gently took hold of Grace’s other arm so we could get her to the First Aid tent. He was so stunning that in more normal circumstances I’d have been fighting for breath and losing myself in his amazing turquoise eyes, but I sternly told myself to stop it. This was not the time or the place. And besides Grace was babbling about how much she loved me and how some people looked like they had animal spirits inside them and she was beginning to seriously freak me out.

Azure disappeared once we got to the First Aid tent, after telling me that if I ever needed his services I could find him on the astral plane. The paramedics looked Grace over, told me that she’d probably taken some acid and the best thing I could do was sit quietly with her and make sure she drank plenty of fluid. Of course, then I realised I’d left my mobile in the tent so I had to fill in a form to get the DJ on the main stage to make an announcement so the others knew where to find us. Have I mentioned that I’m never going to another festival as long as I live?

Once the medics were sure that Grace hadn’t ODd and wasn’t about to go completely bonkers, they led us to a little Portakabin with a bed in it and I persuaded Grace to lie down. I sat there with her head on my lap while I stroked her hair and half-listened to her non-stop chattering.

Grace was all sunburnt and the curly blonde hair that looked all rock chick on Poppy, just looked like a bird’s nest on Grace. I’d never noticed it before but she was actually very pretty. Much prettier than Poppy – though don’t quote me on that. Grace was all soft and creamy, like the angels in my Renaissance art book. Yeah, she was very Botticelli. But she had to do something with her hair, possibly involving some intensive conditioning treatment and she also had to stop hiding her face behind her hands all the time. I s’pose it was hard having a sister like Poppy. Poppy was so determined and cool that any little siblings were forced to flail helplessly in her wake.

Anyway, Grace started trying to kiss my hands. I tugged them away gently.

‘I’m so glad you’re here, Edie,’ she said, trying to focus her eyes on me. ‘You’re my friend, too, not just Poppy’s. I wish you were my best friend.’

‘Of course I’m your friend,’ I patted her hand in what I hoped was a consoling manner. ‘Why don’t you try and get some sleep?’

‘When I close my eyes I see this satanic version of Donald Duck’s nephews,’ she informed me solemnly. ‘I wish I could remember their names.’

‘Huey, Dewey and Louie,’ I supplied.

Grace gave a chuckle. ‘You know everything.’

I laughed. ‘Remind me to come and see you next time I need my ego boosted,’ I said.

But then Grace clutched my hands tightly and started saying how she wanted to be just like me and have boys fighting over her. ‘You’re my girl hero,’ she insisted, getting more and more distressed.

‘Please calm down,’ I begged her. She looked at me all hurt. ‘I’m not girl-hero material,’ I told her bitterly. ‘My life’s a complete mess. I’m meant to be making all these big decisions about my future but I can’t even decide what I want to do tomorrow. And I don’t have boys fighting over me. I just have Carter and, y’know, he’s, well he’s
Carter
!’

Grace was silent after my outburst and I thought she’d dozed off but all of a sudden she opened her eyes and hit me with the question from hell. ‘So why did you snog Dylan?’ she asked baldly.

‘Me and Dylan?’ I whimpered. ‘That’s a whole other story.’

But Grace wanted to hear it and so I told her. Everything. All the gory, post-watershed details. All the stupid ways we’d managed to hurt each other. And why it was now over. When I finally got to the end, which must have been about an hour after I started, Grace looked at me with the steadiest of gazes and said, ‘Why are you with Carter when you’re still so in love with Dylan?’

I started trying to deny it but Grace interrupted: ‘I hate Carter,’ she announced dreamily. ‘He tried to kiss me at your barbecue. After I’d seen you and Dylan and I was coming down the stairs and he was coming up the stairs and he pressed me against the wall and said he’d give me a go when I got a bit older. And then he kissed me and I didn’t do anything because I knew that if he went upstairs he’d find you and Dylan.’

‘Oh Grace, I’m so sorry.’ I had this strange urge to wrap her up in the biggest blanket I could find and hide her away from all the shitty things in the world. I also had a less strange urge to find Carter and kick him right in the place where he did most of his thinking. Grace might have been on Planet Acid but it was obvious she wasn’t lying. And Poppy hadn’t got her version of events wrong either. It sounded exactly like Carter, I could even hear his voice in my head drawling out the line about waiting till Grace was older. I felt sick at the thought of what I’d been prepared to do to keep him. He must have been laughing himself stupid at me for months. He was an evil bastard. An evil, lying, two-faced bastard.

‘I wish my first kiss had been different,’ mused Grace.

‘They get better,’ I promised. ‘When Dylan kisses me it feels like, like I have this itch that only he can scratch but way, way, way better than that.’

Grace smiled and promptly fell asleep and I sat there going over my life since Carter had arrived to screw it up. I also tried not to think about whether I was still in love with Dylan like Grace reckoned. But what did she know? She’d just managed to get spiked, she wasn’t exactly first in the queue when they were handing out great big bags of common sense, was she? By the time Poppy, Will and Robbie arrived, I was sunk into a big, bad gloom.

When I started to explain what had happened to Grace, Poppy burst into tears. Then Grace woke up and started crying too. I was severely tempted to join them. Once she’d calmed down, Poppy was so sweet to Grace. It was quite a sight to behold. I thought she might have given her a lecture about no-good boys and accepting drinks from them but she was more concerned that Grace was OK. I wished then that I had a big sister. I might not be in the mess I’m in now if I did. While I sat there cuddling Grace and Poppy, Will found a paramedic to give Grace another check. The medic reckoned that she just needed to sleep and that she might be a bit shaky tomorrow and then Will (his super-hero tendencies kicking in) picked Grace up and Robbie put his arm round Poppy and I trailed along behind them as we went back to the tents.

All I wanted to do was go home, crawl into bed (preferably one with freshly-washed sheets on) and stay there till the ’rents got home. While everyone was fussing over Grace I snuck into my tent and looked for the site-map to see how I could get home using public transport. I heard the tent flap open and steeled myself for a confrontation with Carter. I whirled around but it was Shona.

‘Oh, it’s you!’ I said and then realised how that sounded. ‘I didn’t mean that the way it came out.’

‘Glad to hear it,’ she said reproachfully. ‘Well you’re a little heroine on the quiet, aren’t you? I guess Poppy’s forgiven you for the Cartergate incident.’

I shuddered. ‘Don’t talk to me about him. He’s as good as dead.’

Shona raised her eyebrows, opened her mouth to say something and then thought better of it.

‘Sorry, didn’t mean to take it out on you,’ I mumbled. ‘I bet you’re fed up with me and my psycho-dramas.’

‘Hey, what are friends for,’ Shona said lightly. ‘So what I actually came to tell you was that I’ve just spent a fiver on a box of Tampax. Rip off, much.’

I goggled at her. ‘So you’re not… ?’

She bounded over and hugged me. ‘Yay! My period’s come! I’m not pregnant,’ she crowed.

‘Oh, I’m so pleased for you,’ I said, wondering if that was the right thing to say. ‘You’re happy, right?’

‘Ecstatic but I wish I wasn’t surfing the crimson wave at a festival with primitive toilet facilities,’ said Shona pulling a face.

‘I hear you.’

‘So what has Carter done now?’ Shona asked.

‘Oh I don’t want to talk about it,’ I groaned. ‘Put it this way, we are over. We’re more over than any couple have ever been. But I haven’t got the energy to go into the details. He’s just a pathetic, cheating, conniving…’ I ran out of adjectives and stood there, breathing heavily and trying to come down from my hissy fit.

Shona didn’t ask any more questions but said that her and Paul were going to get something to eat and then planned to spend what was left of the evening in the cinema tent and I’d better have a damn good reason for not coming with them.

Carter was waiting for me as I left the tent.

‘There you are,’ he said with a flash of irritation. ‘I’m going to have to get you micro-chipped.’

I was in no mood to have it out with him especially as I could see the others (minus Veronique and Dylan who’d been missing in action all day) watching us. Though when I glanced over at them they all pretended that they were looking at something particularly fascinating on the ground.

I glared at Carter, throwing every ounce of hatred I felt into it. He stepped back.

‘What have I done now?’

‘Just stay the hell away from me,’ I snapped. ‘Don’t talk to me, don’t touch me, don’t even sodding breathe near me.’

‘Edie, you’re being very melodramatic—’ he began but I cut him off simply by flouncing over to the others while he was still in mid-sentence.

‘Are we going to get something to eat or what?’ I asked them and it was clear from the looks I got that Shona had filled them in on what I’d told her earlier, so they all sprang into action and spirited me off down the hill, while Carter stood there looking furious.

As we trailed aimlessly about the food stalls trying to find somewhere that didn’t look too vegan or too likely to give us botulism, everyone kept a tactful silence about what had just happened between me and Carter. I could tell that Darby was dying to get all the dirt but I think Atsuko kept pinching her ’cause she kept rubbing her arm and hissing, ‘What did you do that for? I wasn’t going to say anything.’

We were queuing up outside the cinema tent when I saw Dylan striding towards us. Without Veronique. It was funny Carter could touch me in places that were meant to be erogenous zones and I felt nothing but the sight of Dylan in his torn Levi’s and an old T-shirt reduced me to road-kill.

‘Where’s Veronique?’ I heard Shona ask him.

‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ was his terse reply. There was a muttered exchange between the two of them, during which I saw Dylan glance my way before he scowled, ‘It’s got nothing to do with me. She does what she wants, she always has. That’s half the problem.’ I couldn’t help but wonder if he was talking about Veronique or me.

As we pushed our way into the tent, the crowd surged forwards shoving Dylan into my back and almost knocking me over. He yanked me to my feet then dropped my hand like I’d burnt him, before pointedly going over to find a space next to Simon. And although I hadn’t expected to drop Carter and pick up where I left off with Dylan I couldn’t help the little pang of hurt that settled in my stomach.

That night I didn’t get much sleep. In fact, it had been weeks since I’d managed a full eight hours’ worth without interruptions and weird dreams. It didn’t help that the ground underneath my sleeping bag was lumpy and had more stones per square inch than your average quarry. Everyone else was fast asleep which just made me feel more frustrated and lonely. And when I did finally manage to catch a few zzzzzs I was woken up by a cacophonous drumming noise outside. I pulled on my jeans and quietly clambered out of the tent.

I could hardly take in what my eyes were seeing. There were naked hippies. There were bongos. There were naked hippies making mucho noise with the bongos. I was tired, I was dirty and I had had enough.

‘SHUT UP! SHUT UP!’ I screamed at them. ‘It’s half five in the morning.’

‘Hey we’re just thanking the earth for welcoming us,’ breezed this middle-aged guy with dreadlocks who had a huge spliff in his hand. ‘Don’t be so uptight, little sister.’

‘You woke me up!’ I yelled. ‘You woke me up with your stupid bongos.’

‘Here have a toke on this,’ the holdover hippy suggested, brandishing the joint at me.

‘I don’t want it,’ I protested. ‘I just want you to be quiet.’

‘You’re the one making all the noise,’ said a voice behind me. I turned round to see Dylan standing a little distance away from me with an amused look on his face. ‘I was standing here listening to the bongos, as you do, when you come out of your tent and start shrieking loud enough to wake the dead.’

‘Why aren’t you asleep?’ was all I could think of to say as the bongos started again.

‘I thought I’d get up early and brave the communal showers while it was quiet,’ Dylan said.

‘I’d love a shower,’ I breathed.

Dylan smiled evilly. ‘It was nice, all that hot water and soap making me squeaky clean. And you want to know what was really amazing? When I washed my hair, I rubbed all the shampoo in and then the water sluiced it all away, all those bubbles—’

‘Stop it,’ I moaned.

Dylan walked over to me. ‘You look awful,’ he said, cupping my face in his hands. ‘You still not sleeping?’

‘Yeah,’ I sighed.

‘Listen, why don’t you go and get your wash stuff and have a shower while there’s no-one around and then I’ll buy you breakfast and we’ll watch the sun come up?’ suggested Dylan.

It sounded like my idea of heaven. I nodded.

‘Off you go then,’ said Dylan, reaching out to ruffle my hair but I pulled away. You could have fried chips on my head. And, besides, I was all right as long as Dylan didn’t touch me. It was when he touched me that things got heavy.

I never thought I’d strip off and have a communal shower. Well not since I finished school anyway and no longer had to participate in their hideous competitive sports activities. But actually there was a women’s shower block and there were cubicles and the two other girls that I did see looked as embarrassed as me. As I stood under the water and scrubbed off the dirt and felt the water cascading down on me, I started to cry. I didn’t even know why I was crying. I used to cry all the time. Even last year I could always be relied upon to start blubbing over silly things like a particularly harrowing episode of
EastEnders
. I was making great strides in self-control these days. But in that shower I wept like my heart was breaking. And I guess it was the strain of exams and the whole Carter thing but it was also because Dylan was outside waiting for me and although he was offering me breakfast, what I really wanted from him he wasn’t able to give.