Let's Get Lost (13 page)

I watched him bound down the hill, picking up speed until he was this fast-moving blob in the darkness, but I was just delaying the inevitable. My guts felt as if they’d shifted down around my ankles as I lifted the latch on the gate and slunk down the path. I hadn’t even got my key into the lock with the barest minimum of noise before the door swung open and I fell into the porch.

My hair was sticking to my face in tangled whorls, plastered over my mouth, and I shook my head so I could look up at the blank mask my father was wearing. There was this little tic banging away in his cheek. When I was little I used to try and chase it with podgy fingers and he’d laugh and tell me I was tickling him. Sometimes when I remember stuff like that, I think that I dreamed it or it happened to another Isabel who looks like me and has all the same memories but who’s not me.

He kept one hand on the open door so I had to sidle past him, flinching away so my arm didn’t brush his.

That wasn’t the only reason. He’d never, ever hit me, but there was always a first time.

The door closed behind me with a resolute click, and I shuffled around so he could shoot me down with another of those hydrochloric acid stares as I dripped a small puddle over the parquet flooring.

I opened and shut my mouth a few times, but getting actual words to come out wasn’t working. Then he made this “talk to the hand” gesture and snarled, “Don’t say a bloody word, Isabel!”

I never did what I was told. “I went around to a friend’s house and I fell asleep. Don’t know why you’re getting so bent out of—”

“And would this be the same friend who was mauling you outside the house?” he asked me pleasantly.

Talk about leading questions. “It was just a friend.” I knew he was expecting an apology or an explanation or some defensive bluster because he folded his arms and leaned back against the door. But my bones ached, even my hair hurt, so I just inched toward the stairs. “You didn’t need to wait up for me.”

“No, I suppose I didn’t. But I wanted to be awake in case the police phoned to say that they’d found you dead in a ditch.”

“Sorry to disappoint you but I’m still in one piece.” I concentratedon the difficult task of lifting my feet up and down. Jesus, I could
feel
his eyes boring into my back and coming out the other side. “I’ll try harder next time, if you like.”

I heard him suck in a breath and was mentally preparing myself for a blistering stream of invective, but he just sighed, long and loud. “Oh, just go to bed, Isabel. I’ll deal with you in the morning.”

His threats amounted to shit. They always do. He couldn’t ground me because then I’d be hanging around the house and sharing his oxygen. And he couldn’t stop my allowance because then he’d have to wallow in general squalor and filth. Couldn’t take away my TV privileges, either, because he’d have to come into my room and dismantle the TV and the video and the DVD player and his brain would leak out of his ears.

Halfway through the lecture from hell—as I perched uncomfortably on one of the kitchen stools while he towered above me—his voice becoming more clipped with each word, he did ponder on taking away my Internet access. But as he can’t even log on to his e-mail without referring to a detailed flowchart of instructions, I knew my days of illegally downloading songs were far from over.

The lack of suitable punishment really got to him until his lips were so thinned I didn’t think he’d be able to talk out of them anymore. He still managed to interrogate me to within an inch of my young life.

“Where were you?”

“Who was that boy?”

“How long have you known him?”

“What on earth were you thinking about when you decided to come home so late? Were you even thinking at all? Do you ever consider anyone besides yourself?”

It was like he’d entered a competition to see how many questions he could fire at me in half an hour. I didn’t bother to reply, that would have just distracted him from the sound of his own voice.

“You’re not to see him again, of course,” he decreed, pacing a well-trodden path from the sink to the pantry. “I absolutely forbid it. And you’re not to have any of your other friends around here, either. I won’t have hordes of adolescents traipsing in at all hours.”

He paused to see the effect of that little bombshell, but, as I don’t like any of my friends that much, I figured I’d be able to deal. I looked down at my hands neatly folded in my lap and hoped my bent head signaled how completely I didn’t care.

“Yes, well, let that be a lesson to you,” he finished with this note of satisfaction like he’d finally been able to make me see the error of my wicked, wicked ways.

Then he stomped back to the study and nothing had changed except that on the other side of town there was someone who might actually give a toss about me.

12

Smith never called, though. As I floated through the next week, I learned to live with this sick feeling of expectation every time the phone didn’t ring. Why would he ring when he’d already had the toy surprise?

My new favorite thing in the world was to obsess over how I should have played him. If I’d been funnier, or smarter, or hadn’t dropped my knickers so quickly, he’d be calling and
begging
to take me out. I was going slowly mad as I had all these conversations with a lovesick Smith in my head. The only thing that made me come up for air was when the school exploded. Not literally, because that would have been very cool and I’d have had more time at home to dwell on my stellar skankiness; it was more of a metaphorical explosion. One of the inner clique of Year Ten was found in the science block loos throwing up her lunch, so we had to have a special assembly about eating disorders and self-cutting and other fun things.

It all fell on deaf ears. Because my school is stuffed full of overachieving girls who try to outdo one another with extra homework assignments, like it’s going to impress some stuffy old academic at their Oxbridge interview because they stay up till 2 A.M. every night writing essays on the causes and effects of the Hundred Years War. Occasionally, one of the parents would kick off at a PTA meeting about the school’s impossibly high standards and we’d have to troop off to see Ms. Richie “just call me Hazel,” the guidance counselor, who’d trot out some well-meaning platitudes about a healthy life/work balance, and it would all blow over.

But not this time.
The Argus
got wind of little Saskia puking up her spaghetti marinara and ran with the headline BULIMIA EPIDEMIC HITS TOP GIRLS’ SCHOOL on the front page. A meeting was held, questions were raised, parents were concerned. Bothered.

And Smith
still
hadn’t called. It was all I could think about as I sat with Nancy in the canteen at our usual table. I tried to avoid alone time with Nancy on account of pretty much hating her guts, but Ella and Dot had some science project to finish, so here we were.

I pushed a twirl of pasta around my plate, trying to avoid the congealing cheese sauce as Nancy cast dark looks at the Year Ten bulimics who were all not eating their chicken salad, hold the dressing.

“It’s all their fault,” she said savagely. “Last night . . . God, last night, they came in from the meeting and it was all, like, are you depressed? You’re looking pale, do you have an eating disorder? Did your dad go?”

I glanced up from my farfalle Alfredo, or whatever it had been in a previous life. “He had some reception to go to at the University. ’Sides, he never goes to school meetings because he despises Mrs.

Greenwood ever since she took Classics off the syllabus.”

Nancy snorted dismissively. “Whatever. Your dad is so weird.”

“‘Studying Euripides, Sophocles, et al, is essential to any well-rounded course of education,’ ” I parroted. “ ’Platonic theory is the tenet of every civilized society.’ ”

“You need to come with subtitles. But anyway, this meeting turned into a huge shitstorm and Hazel’s been sacked and they’ve got some new tree-hugger coming in.”

I shoved my plate away and leaned my elbows on the table. “Why do you care?”

“Letters are being sent, we’ve all got to have a one-on-one with the new guidance counselor, and there’s this big ruckus that it will go down on our permanent record so it can and will be used against us on our

University applications.”

“That’s crap,” I said, rolling my eyes. “It’s like this whole data protection thingy—and they can’t force you to see a counselor if you don’t want to.”

“Yeah, they can, unless you have a note from your parents,” Nancy insisted, giving me a wicked grin.

“Heads are gonna roll, Is. Bet the new counselor can’t wait to get her hot little hands on you, you poor, motherless thing, you.”

I stuck my tongue out at her. “Piss off. No way am I going to a guidance counselor. One upside to having a freak as a father.”

“We’ll see,” Nancy said slyly, and then gave an exasperated groan as I pulled out my phone and looked at the screen to see if it had rung in the three minutes since I’d last checked, even though it had been silent and Smith didn’t have my number, anyway.

“You expecting a call?”

I shoved the phone back in my pocket. “No,” I said shortly. “We should probably get to French. Did you even understand any of the homework?”

“Don’t change the subject. It’s that boy, isn’t it? The drunk one with the squishy face from the party.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to defend Smith and his decidedly non-squishy face, but I’ve known Nancy long enough not to get dragged under. “Him?” I asked, wrinkling my nose like the very thought filled me with abject disgust. “Hardly. Just checking it was switched on.”

“If you say so,” she hissed. “Not like you’d
want
to see that fugly creep again anyway, would you?”

Nancy is such an evil troll—it’s been a long and illustrious career. Before I let her and Ella hang with me and Dot, they’d been cast out of every clique in school with their double-crossing, backstabbing tricks. I know Nancy doesn’t think I should be the boss of her and really, I preferred it when lunch meant that Dot and I could just tune out everyone for one sweet hour. I don’t see what the big deal is about social interaction.

“Oh, come on, Is. Move that fat arse of yours or we’ll be late for French,” Nancy snapped, jumping to her feet and looking at her watch pointedly.

God, I
loathe
her.

Felix had his after-school fencing club because poking people with a pointy stick is such a healthy hobby for a nine-year-old with violent tendencies. But it meant I’d have the house to myself so I could *69 to my heart’s content and telepathically will the phone to ring, even though it wouldn’t because Smith was a beautiful loser who obviously wanted nothing else to do with the skeevy girl who’d had sex with him as if it was a free gift that came with the loan of an iPod.

But what do you know? The little red light on the answerphone was bleeping merrily away as if it had all sorts of secrets it couldn’t wait to share. I didn’t even take off my jacket before jabbing at the “play”

button.

“Hey, this is a message for . . .”

“Isabel! I’ve had a very odd letter from your school.”

“. . . Isabel. Um, it’s Smith here. Hi. How have you been . . . ?”

Now I was stabbing at the “off” button frantically before Smith could go into details of . . . it really didn’t bear thinking about.

I whirled around to face Dad’s horrified expression. “I take it that was your friend from the other night,”

he said sourly. “I made it perfectly clear that you weren’t to have any contact with him.”

“You said that I wasn’t to see him, so it wasn’t like I could go around there and tell him never to call me again,” I snapped, and ha! Try and wriggle out of that watertight logic.

“I don’t want people calling at all hours of the day and night,” he fussed. “It’s why you have a mobile.

Not that you’re going to stay in touch with him.”

“Why? Have we turned Amish? Am I not allowed to have friends who are boys all of a sudden?”

He frowned and rubbed the bridge of his nose in exactly the same way that he does when he’s grading a particularly imbecilic dissertation. “You’re not allowed to have friends of either sex who think it’s a wonderful idea to keep you out until three in the morning.”

“I fell asleep!”

“So you keep saying in that extremely querulous tone. It’s getting very tiresome.” He waved a piece of paper at me. “Could we move on to something new, or do you have a few more phone messages from irresponsible young men to listen to?”

I gave the phone a longing look. “Okay,” I said unwillingly. “My, that’s an interesting letter in your hand, and from the school you say?”

“A little less sarcasm, please.” I guess he was worried that I was infringing on his copyright. “It appears that ‘there’s grave cause for concern about certain elements among the student body who have been exhibiting symptoms of stress and depression. ’ Anything you’d like to tell me, Isabel?”

He almost looked disappointed that I wasn’t speaking in tongues, frothing at the mouth, and displaying other symptoms of stress and depression.

“No,” I barked, my hands clenching into fists, which I hid behind my back. “You know what the place is like. Everyone’s like, ‘Ooh, I’m so depressed because I’m not allowed another Louis Vuitton bag, which is like only big enough to hold a lipstick, and I’m going to write really shit poetry and post it on the Web.’

”

I was so on a roll. I hadn’t even realized how much I hated my school and all the tragic little girls who went there until I opened my mouth and all this vitriol came pouring out.

“And they have half a salad for lunch because they think it’s really glamorous to have an eating disorder, and they pretend to carve boys’ names into their arms with their compasses during geometry so they have these barely-there scratches, and then they go on and on about self-cutting like it’s a worthwhile pastime . . .”

To say that Dad looked astonished would have been an understatement on the same level as saying that Renée Zellweger is the most annoying woman alive. His body was statue still, like I’d shocked him into immobility, apart from his left eyebrow, which was stuck somewhere up around his forehead. BUT I STILL COULDN’T SHUT UP!