Let's Get Lost (11 page)

The door opened and this pretty girl with a MRS. SETH COHEN T-shirt and an aggravated expression gave me a quizzical look.

“Yeah?”

I was planning on taking my sunglasses off but thought better of it. She was really cute and I wasn’t having a good hair or a good anything day. “Is Smith in?”

She nodded and then stepped aside. “Come in and mind the bike. I just banged my hip on it.” She laughed. “Hence the bad language.”

There was something really familiar about her. Like I knew her from somewhere, but maybe she’d been at the club the other night.

I followed her up the stairs and into the living room. “Wait here and I’ll see if he’s up,” she said. “I’m Molly, by the way.”

“Isabel,” I murmured, perching gingerly on the edge of a chair. Molly? So this was the paragon of perfection that Smith was hopelessly crushing on. She flicked her honey-blonde hair (which in no way was natural) back from her elfin face and, yup, she was definitely crush-worthy. Molly seemed to be waiting for me to say something else. I pulled the iPod out of my pocket. “I need to give this back to him.

So, like, maybe you could do that and get mine?” I asked hopefully, but she was already out the door.

“I’ll just go and get him,” she called over her shoulder.

I looked cautiously around the room. Everything I’d heard about student accommodation was true. It was a complete hovel. There were magazines and newspapers obscuring the carpet. Dirty cups and saucers, most of them doubling up as ashtrays, littered every surface, and I shuffled my buttocks further along the seat to minimize contact. Just sitting there made my skin crawl.

“Sorry, it’s a bit of a mess in here,” Molly said as she came back into the room. “We keep having people around and they keep making a mess and we keep not clearing it up. It’s a never-ending cycle of untidiness.”

I smiled weakly and racked my brains for something to say to her. “It’s really not that bad,” I lied. “You could shove most of it into a bin bag and it would look better.”

Hi, I’m Isabel and housework is my passion.

“Yeah, we could,” she agreed, nudging a stack of magazines with her socked foot. “Anyway, Smith says you can go up if you like. Do you want some tea or something?”

There was no way I was drinking out of any mug that lived in this flat. Not without getting dysentery or Legionnaires’ disease or something. “Oh no, that’s okay. I’m fine.”

I stood up and tried not to look clueless. “So, where am I going?”

“Up the stairs, last door you come to.” Molly was still poking at the debris on the floor. “He’s in a foul mood. He’s got a bitch of a hangover,” she added cheerfully.

I was really careful going up the stairs so that I didn’t have to touch the banister or the walls, which were probably coated in years’ worth of dirt. Yeah, they looked freshly painted, but bacteria lurks everywhere.

There was music leaking out from under Smith’s door as I tapped on it lightly. No reply. It wasn’t until I hammered on it with both fists that I heard a grunt and pushed the door open.

All I could see was him. Not just because the sun was streamingin through the windows and backlighting him in this golden glow that made his eyes bluer than normal and cast this little halo around him, but because his room was tiny. There was a double bed, a ton of CDs scattered over the floor, and a complicated stereo system perched on a milk crate.

“It’s you,” he said, in a way that suggested that he wasn’t exactly pleased to see me. But for once, my hackles weren’t rising. I’d never been on my own in a boy’s room (Felix’s didn’t count), especially not

one where the bed was the dominant feature. I was so far away from anything approaching a comfort zone.

In the end I lifted a limp hand in his direction. “Hey.”

Smith took a step toward me so I could get the full benefit of his bloodshot eyes, stubbly chin, and damp hair; he must have just come out of the shower.

“You got my iPod, then?” he asked tersely, and I pulled it out of the back pocket of my jeans.

“It’s fully charged.” I wedged the bag of doughnuts under my arm and prayed that I didn’t get grease stains on my Topshop wrap top. Then I yanked out my headphones and handed him the iPod.

He held it up to the light and scrutinized it as if he couldn’t quite believe that it was still intact. “I thought about flushing it down the loo but I had a change of heart,” I said, and he showed me all his teeth in something that didn’t even remotely resemble a smile.

“That’s big of you. Stay here, I’ll get yours.”

He walked across the room, or took about three steps toward what I thought was just a really big
Lost in
Translation
poster but was actually a door. I peered over his shoulder as he disappearedinto a narrow strip of a room, with a long desk taking up one wall and cupboards along the rest of it.

Smith was fiddling around with a computer and then turned to me with a frown. “I’m just taking some stuff off yours but it’s not quite finished,” he said. “Do you mind waiting?”

“I could come back,” I heard myself say when I realized I had to get out of there before the silence killed me. “Like in an hour maybe?”

“No . . . hang on . . .” he mumbled, fiddling with his keyboard. “You can come in here if you like.”

Anything was better than being rooted to the spot, so I squeezed through the narrow doorway and crept up behind him so I could watch him, whizzing through my playlists on iTunes.

“I tried to do that,” I blurted out. “Transfer some stuff across, I mean, but I couldn’t work out how to do it.”

He stiffened as I leaned closer, like I was about to jump his sorry bones, then said in a much friendlier voice: “You need to download this program off the Internet. I’ll show you. Here, you can sit down and I’ll crouch.”

We spent the next hour ripping songs off his iPod onto mine and bickering happily about music. I even let him eat the rest of the doughnuts because he hadn’t had any breakfast or lunch.

“And oh, can I have The Hormones’ songs, too, please?”

Smith grinned and started uploading them. “Do you like them, then?”

“They’re okay. Well, they were, they kinda suck now. I liked them better when Mol— Shit! Oh, my God, it’s
her
.” My hands flew up to cover my flaming cheeks. “I’m so lame.”

He nudged me with his arm. “You didn’t recognize her? Well, I guess she looks different now.”

I shook my head. “She seemed familiar, but I thought she was at the club and, anyway, she used to have pink hair.”

“Well, if you hadn’t been such charmless company, I’d have introduced you,” Smith said, propping his arm on my leg. “Her and Jane are in this new band called Duckie.”

“Don’t say anything else,” I begged him. “I need time to process this information.”

He gave me about thirty seconds. “Are you done processing?”

“Okay, you’re trying to tell me that Molly Montgomery, ex-lead singer of The Hormones, is now living in a grimy student flat in Brighton . . .”

“That’s because she’s a student, Isabel. It’s what we do, we live in student flats, we go to lectures. And in Molly’s case, get sued by her former record company for walking out on her contract.”

“Ouch.” I winced.

He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Really sore point. Never bring up The Hormones, lawyers, or ex-boyfriends called Dean who’ve just landed their first film role.”

I nodded gravely. “Right, I’ll remember that.” Then I flash-backed to the conversation I’d overheard.

“So is she your girlfriend, then?”

“Hardly.” The look he gave me was pretty intense, and I don’t think it was my imagination that he seemed to be less resting his arm on my leg than stroking my knee. “We’re just friends. C’mon, we

should leave this doing its thing—I’m getting a cramp.”

He got up and stretched, which made all his muscles shift, T-shirt riding up to show a faint trickle of hair on his belly. I looked down at the frayed hem of my jeans because I just knew he was smiling at me. One of those smiles that made me want to touch the corners of his mouth.

“Do you want some tea?”

I shook my head and wriggled off the stool.

“Now, look, you’ve gone all quiet again,” he teased, and laughed when I pouted at him.

“I haven’t.”

“Yeah, you have. Come back into the other room.”

There was nowhere to sit except the bed, but I didn’t mind because Smith flung himself down on the mattress and started telling me about how he went to the first ever Hormones gig at some girl’s sixteenth birthday party after he met Jane and Molly in a garage. I sat cross-legged next to him and listened, not to the story (even though it was pretty engrossing), but to the quiet pride in his voice when he talked about Molly and what she’d been through. She might not have been his girlfriend but there was something there that was about more than just being mates. Something like a major case of unrequited love.

“So we kinda became friends during what she calls her blue period, which means she wore a lot of black and stayed in bed most of the time,” he finished, and rolled over onto his side.

“Well, I guess it must have been tough for her.” I couldn’t stop myself. “So has she got a boyfriend?”

Smith’s eyes were closed, but they snapped open then. “No. I think there’s some DJ guy she fancies,” he said neutrally, so I couldn’t tell what he thought about that. “So have you?”

“Have I what?”

“Have you got a boyfriend, then?” he asked me really casually.

“As if!” The very concept of me having a boyfriend was so freaky that I started giggling.

“Oh, now I’m getting smiley Isabel,” Smith drawled, and his hand was back on my knee, and the warm weight of it was comforting,like it was anchoring me so I couldn’t float away. “And what do you do when you’re not being shy or mean? You on your gap year?”

Lies get so complicated. You tell one lie. And it makes you tell another lie. And another one. And another one. Until you’ve got this big tangle of them that you can’t even begin to start unraveling.

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe if I get a job, I’ll go traveling.”

“S’weird.” He frowned. “August birthday, right?”

“August 8, 1987,” I said emphatically, like there could not be even a smidgen of a doubt.

“Well, shouldn’t you still be doing your A-levels, if you’ve only just turned eighteen?”

I imagined loose pages of a calendar fluttering in the wind, like they do in old films when they want to show that a big-ass amount of time has gone by. Then all the pages disappear, until all that’s left is a big sheet of paper with huge red letters that say, “She lied about her age. She’s sixteen!”

“No . . . no,” I stammered. “You got it wrong. See, I’m the youngest in my class. I
was
the youngest in my class. ’Cause the end of July is the cut-off point, right? If I’d been born nine days earlier, I’d have been in the year below.” As explanations went, it was far too garbled to be believable, but Smith was nodding in all the right places.

“Do you think you’ll go to University?”

“I’m not sure. I’m kinda over the whole academic thing already, with my dad and all,” I mused, pleased we were back on safer ground. “I’d like to do something artistic, but I really suck at it.”

Smith propped himself up on his elbows. His hair had dried into this mess of curls and sticky-up bits, the ends tinged with bleach, and I wanted to touch them to see if they were as soft as they looked. “So, what do you want to do?”

I’d told him so many lies already. I couldn’t even begin to remember just how many, so for once he deserved an honest answer.

“What do I want to do?” I echoed. “I want to kiss you.”

He didn’t say anything, just lay there with his eyes closed again and I knew I’d blown it. That he didn’t want me to kiss him after what had happened the last time. Or I’d short-circuited his brain with too many mixed messages. Then he opened one eye and smiled at me.

“Go on, then,” he said with just a hint of challenge.

I crawled up the bed, focusing on his slightly pursed lips like I was climbing up the freaking beanstalk and they were the pot of gold. He was smiling so it made it that much easier to rest a hand on either side of his head and kiss the upturned corners of his mouth.

I kissed him so many times—just tiny little presses of my mouth against his. I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing but I didn’t care because those hundreds of kisses made my lips tingle. My fingers stroked the arch of his eyebrows and the bridge of his nose and even the plump, tender flesh of his earlobes. I mean, who ever really thinks about earlobes? But I couldn’t keep away from his, gently pinching them between thumb and forefinger, and all the time I was kissing him.

Could have stayed like that forever; the sun beating down on us, warming his skin and turning it the color of toffee. But nothing is forever and my gentle assault made him groan right into my mouth and his hand cupped the back of my head as he rolled me over so he could show me how it was done.

And suddenly I got what the big deal was about kissing. How someone could suck on your bottom lip and make you come completely undone. That someone stroking the hair back from your face could make you swoon and someone sliding his hands underneath your top could make you feel wanted for the first time in your life.

“Is this all right?” he whispered in my ear as he traced figures of eight over my skin, and I nodded.

He kept asking me that over and over again as we dragged the covers over us and our clothes fluttered away like feathers on the breeze. Except it wasn’t as poetic as that, it was more real. And I couldn’t explain what I was doing in fancy phrases and metaphors. Just that it felt good and the way he looked at me and touched me; like I was precious, like he cared about me, made the decision for me.

Because he just wouldn’t stop asking me if all the delicious things he was doing were all right. And “yes”

was the only word I could force out. It wasn’t until he stopped holding me so he could reach the nightstand and I heard the rip and crinkle of the foil wrapper that I really understood what I was committing to.

But there wasn’t time to analyze the whys and wherefores of losing my virginity in the middle of a chalk-bright Sunday afternoon on bedclothes that smelled of fabric softener and cigarettes. I had to lose it sometime, right?