Let's Get Lost (17 page)

There was this whole to and fro when he got back of too many people and not enough seats, and I found myself perched on his lap. Molly smirked knowingly, as if she’d just discovered how to split the atom, when Smith wound his arms around me and absentmindedly kissed the back of my neck.

He was always touching me after that. He talked to Molly and Jane and Jane’s not very pretty boyfriend, and I tried to listen but mostly I just felt his hands, so very warm, settling on the violin curve of my waist and raising a host of goose bumps as they traced a path along my arms.

Then on the way home, fingers clasped together, lagging behind the others because it was hard to walk fast with my head on his shoulder and that rock-steady arm around me.

By the time we got back to their place, it already smelled of tea and toast, and Smith finally had to let me go so he could eat four pieces with peanut butter and raspberry jam. His teeth crunched into it and I could have snatched it straight out of his mouth I was so hungry, but their kitchen was a cesspool of filth and I’d have probably gone down with one of about a thousand deadly diseases that can happen when soap and water are alien concepts. Just as well they lived in a second-floor flat because otherwise they’d be the party house for a colony of cockroaches.

I lasted say, ooooh, about five seconds before I gingerly opened the cupboard under the sink with my thumb and forefinger and pulled out a crusted bottle of dishwashing liquid.

“You don’t have to do that, Isabel,” Smith said through a mouthful of toast as I let the hot water run until it was scalding.

“Yeah, I really do.” I sighed feelingly, and I didn’t care that the two coolest girls I’d ever met plus an assorted group of people in ironic logo tees and cords were staring at the weird girl doing what looked like a year’s worth of washing up, and that was just a conservative estimate.

“She’s such a freak,” Jane stage-whispered and I heard a slap and an ‘Ow!’ before Molly

stage-whispered back, “Ssssh! She’s doing the dishes, just shut up before she changes her mind.”

They didn’t have pan scourers or a scrubbing brush or a pair of rubber gloves so I was slightly handicapped, but after I’d done the washing up, it seemed kinda silly not to wash down the worktops or wipe the toast crumbs off the table, and by the time I’d finished, it looked better. It was no Flash commercial, but it was clean enough that I could shove two pieces of bread under the grill and not worry about my stomach lining being eaten by unfriendly bacteria.

“I guess I scared everyone off with my mad housekeeping skills,” I said to Smith, who was still sitting with his legs outstretchedso he didn’t get footprints on the newly washed floor.

“Wouldn’t say scared.” He smiled. “And I think Jane and Molly want to adopt you if you promise to do the washing up every day.”

I smiled back. So typical of me that I couldn’t make friends by being really good at doing Paris Hilton impersonations or sharing a passion for Bright Eyes. No, I had to do the dishes for them.

“Hey, turn that frown upside down,” Smith said, patting his thighs, and if I liked sleeping with him curled around me, I was starting to like sitting on his lap, too. I leaned back against his chest and let him rub little concentric circles on my nape with his thumb.

“I could do your living room next time,” I murmured, half to myself. “Before you get rats. Do you, like, ever throw anything away?”

“Housework would ruin my dangerous mystique,” he protested, and I snorted inelegantly before I had to get up and rescue my toast, which was just one second away from burning.

The flat was silent as we crept upstairs, holding hands and our shadows on the wall loomed large and long so I couldn’t recognize myself. But in Smith’s room with the red lightbulb in his bedside lamp turning everything pink, there was nothing to be frightened about.

15

I had eight hours of bone-melting, soft as lace sleep. It was as simple as putting my head on the pillow, dragging Smith’s arm around my waist and closing my eyes.

I didn’t suddenly get shocked awake by bad dreams that made the sweat drip off me, either. Instead the world came gently into focus, shapes and colors becoming sharper and brighter as I realized that the insistent beeping noise was my mobile phone.

Smith groaned, turned over, and huddled into the duvet as I groped on the floor for my bag and pulled out my furiously shrieking, vibrating phone.

Dot’s name was flashing on the screen and my finger hovered over the “off” button until Smith groaned again. “Just answer the bloody thing.”

I held it up to my ear cautiously.

“Dot, hi.” My perky, “no, you really didn’t wake me up” voice needed some work. “Why are you calling me so early?”

“I have to go to church in a minute,” she spat, because her parents were freaky religious types who expected her to save her virginity for her wedding night. Double whatever. “I’m in such a state. I need your Art History notes, so I’m going to come over now.”

It was a bad dream. Just had to be. Because I was sitting bolt upright in bed, waiting for the sweat to pop out any minute. “No! You can’t. No. Can you borrow someone else’s?”

Cue sorrowful snuffles and even without the puppy-dog eyes that usually went with them, I was squirming under the covers. “I can’t,” she whined. “Nancy and Ella are, like, terminally stupid and they’re not doing Art History. You’re it, Is. Please! You’re meant to be my friend, and if I don’t get those notes I can’t do my essay. So I’ll be around in ten minutes.”

There was no reasoning with Dot when she was getting hysterical. “You can’t,” I whimpered, trying to think of an excuse that would stop her turning up on my doorstep when Smith snuck his head out from under the quilt.

“Do you have to talk so loud?” he demanded plaintively. “This is meant to be the day of rest.”

“Ssssh, go back to sleep,” I soothed, trying to drop my voice so low that Dot couldn’t hear.

“Who’s that? Is that Felix? Didn’t sound like him.” I could hear the cogs, or maybe that should have been
cog
, slowly whirring. “I know why you don’t want me to come around! You’re not there. Oh, my God, where are you and who are you with?”

“Where else would I be?” I hedged, trying desperately to play for enough time to get dressed, run back to my house, and be there to give her my Art History notes. There was never a handy temporal fold around when you need one.

“You always get pissy when anyone else tries to answer a question with another question,” Dot said waspishly. Religion always puts her in a fiendishly bad mood. “Boy, am I glad that I didn’t ring your house first . . .” She tailed off meaningfully, and she must have grown a pair since Friday when I’d made her cry by relentlessly mocking her new shoes.

“I’m not there,” I prevaricated, looking around the room for some divine inspiration and meeting Smith’s sleep-befuddled gaze instead.

“Tell whoever it is to piss off,” he suggested helpfully. “I’m still aiming to have a lie in.”

There was an outraged gasp from the phone. “You’re with a boy!” she deduced with the logic that had put her in the top twenty percentile of her class. “I don’t believe it! You spent the night with A BOY!

Who is he?”

“No one,” I said automatically. “It’s just the TV.”

“Yeah, right,” she practically crowed. I could hear her mother shouting in the background. They were probably late for their weekly spot of God-bothering. “I have to go. I’m going to come around after church and then you’re going to tell me everything.”

“But . . .”

“Everything
,” she repeated in a distinctly unDot-like way. “I can’t believe you, Is. Always the quiet ones.”

And on that clichéd note, she rang off.

“Shit!” I threw my phone across the room and flung back the covers in preparation for banging my head repeatedly against the same spot of wall, except there was a hand holding tight to my arm. “Get off me!”

“Come back to bed,” Smith said in his most cajoling voice, trying to brush my hair away from my cheek so he could kiss me, but I gripped the side of the mattress with one hand and attempted to work myself free.

“I’ve got to go now,” I bit out, because he was not appreciating that I was on a Code Red. “My friend, who’s turned into a gloating bitch overnight, is coming around to my house and I have to be there.”

“Hmmm,” he mumbled into my neck, still trying to make with the smoochies—and I didn’t want to do it, but desperate times call for desperate measures and all that, so I pinched him really hard on his upper arm. Hard enough that he yelped like a girl and immediately let me go so he could rub the red mark and do the reproachful, “you really hurt me” thing with his eyes, while I scooped up my clothes.

“Sorry,” I said, crouching down so I didn’t flash him with any bits of girl flesh because everything was different in the morning when we were both sober, and daylight made the shadows go away.

“This hot and cold thing is getting really boring,” he said flatly, and I yanked my T-shirt over my head so I didn’t have to look at the disappointment on his face.

“It’s not a thing, it just is,” I said through a mouthful of cotton. “It’s not you. I just have stuff going on and I need to go home and sort it out.” That sounded better. Like, the kind of thing that an eighteen-year-old girl would say. Get me! With my sort-outable stuff.

Smith reached for his cigarettes and sat there, propped up by the pillows, looking totally unamused at my endearing attempts to locate my phone.

“It skidded under the crates when you threw it.” He sighed. “I hate this. I feel like Paul Varjak in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
.”

“Huh? What the hell are you talking about?” I lay flat on the floor, swatting my hand through a mound of dust bunnies to get to the phone. “Are you too good to plug in a vacuum cleaner?”

“It always ends up the same way,” he elaborated. “You scrambling to get out the door as fast as possible

and I’m left feeling like a mug. Like, I’m just convenient.”

“You’re not convenient,” I said, then realized how it sounded. Though it was true in a way. He was one of the most inconvenient people I’d ever met. I managed to get a fingertip on my phone and concentrated on prying it free.

“Here, let me. I’ve got longer arms than you,” Smith said behind me, and I shifted over so he could pull out my phone with an ease that was really, really irritating. “Not gonna give it back, though, till you at least give me a kiss,” he drawled.

I bussed my lips against his for a count of three and rolled my eyes when he tried to slip me some tongue because we were kinda in the middle of an argument, and he knew I had my sort-outable stuff going on, so it was just inappropriate.

“Thank you,” I said snottily, snatching the phone from him, but it was too cold to just leave him kneeling there on the floor when things were getting scratchy and I wanted to come back. Wanted him to want me to come back. I kissed him again and I think it worked.

“I’ll call you and you can come around and start on the living room,” he said when he saw me to the front door.

“Make sure you get some proper cleaning fluids and bleach,” I reminded him. “Bleach is good.”

“Isabel, I was joking.” He laughed, even though household hygiene is not something I can ever laugh about.

I spent the whole morning hanging in the hall, waiting for Dot and her usual two rings on the doorbell.

There was no way I could risk her bumping into Dad and having an illuminating little chat about the sleepover that never was.

He’d even acted pleased to see me when I got home, though that might have been because I had a hankering for toasted bacon sandwiches and made him one, too, as I craned my neck and kept the front door in my line of sight.

But even I had bodily functions and, of course I was in the downstairs loo when she arrived. Still zipping up my jeans, I hobbled toward the hall, but I was far too late.

“Hello, Dr. Clarke,” I could hear Dot chirping. “Jeans! I didn’t know you had anything but suits.”

She was such a little suck-up at times.

“Thank you, yes, Dot. On weekends I’ve been known to experiment with other forms of clothing,” he replied, which would usually be the cue for awkward silence as Dot tried to figure out whether he was joking or being deeply sarcastic. But she was too het up about the Art History notes for it to even register.

“There you are!” she said as I hurried toward them, like she’d been waiting for hours. She was wearing a pale blue twinset and a tweedy skirt designed not to offend the eyes of the Lord, who obviously hadn’t seen the bum-skimming dress she was wearing the other night.

“Let’s go upstairs and I’ll get those notes for you,” I muttered, dragging her stairwards.

Dot nodded eagerly. “We’ve got so much to talk about!”

“But you only saw each other a few hours ago.” Dad chuckled, shaking his head in bemusement and all but vibrating with joy at the way I appeared to be exhibiting the normal tendencies of an adolescent girl.

Dot’s head swiveled around and I watched her slowly and succinctly get a clue, her eyes opening wide and then closing slowly as all the facts slotted themselves into the right order.

“You know Isabel, it’s hard to shut her up when she starts talking.” Dot grinned, and I could feel her hand tight against my shoulder, see the malice behind her smile, and I never knew she could look like that. Nancy and Ella, yeah, but not Dot.

“Stairs, now,” I growled, and I knew it looked like I couldn’t wait to drag her to my inner sanctum so we could settle down for a long girly gossip. But, really? I just wanted her as far away from him as possible.

Which was just as well because we were barely out of earshot before she started.

“So, spill,” she ordered bluntly, throwing herself down on my bed with total lack of regard for my clean quilt and her dirty shoes. “Who is he?”

I pulled out my computer chair and plunked myself down. “No one you know.”

Dot rested her head on my pillow, which made me grit my teeth and make a mental note to wash it when

she finally left and please, God, let it be soon. “Oh, c’mon, Is, I promise I won’t tell anyone! Where did you meet him?”