Let's Get Lost (18 page)

“It’s the guy from the party,” I admitted unwillingly, because she was going to get it out of me sooner or later and, at least, sooner meant it would be over quicker. Like yanking off a plaster in superfast time so it hurt for a second and then the pain was just a distant memory.

“I knew it!” she said triumphantly. “So how long have you been shagging him, then?”

“It’s not like that,” I snapped, because she made it sound so dirty and cold. When it should have been private. It
was
private; it was between me and Smith, just like all the things we said to each other in the dark. “I bumped into him a couple of days after the party and we swapped iPods and started hanging out. And last night, I popped around and I ended up crashing at his place. No shagging, no big mystery, no big deal, okay?”

“Oh, please,” she snorted. “You were in bed with him this morning.”

“I was on the sofa,” I insisted doggedly. “We fell asleep on the sofa.”

“Yeah, right, and your dad was all sunny smiles this morning after you stayed out all night. I don’t think so! He thought you were staying around at my place while that geek ravaged your tender young flesh.”

She gloated, and held up her hands dramatically. “Now, there’s an image that’s going to be permanently etched in my mind.”

I jiggled around in the chair for a bit. “He’s not a geek,” I said finally.

“Looks like a geek. Talks like a geek.”

“He’s said about three words to you ever!” I protested. “It’s hardly enough to base an opinion on.”

“What
ever
. I’m not leaving until you tell me all the gory details.” She settled back on the bed and peered around curiously before her hand crept out to the drawer of my nightstand.

“Don’t open that!”

“Is that where you keep your stash of condoms for when you’re having sex with geeky boys?” Dot’s hand closed around the drawer knob and I was off the bed in a flash, slamming it shut so hard that she squealed as I caught her fingers.

“How fucking dare you?” I was right in her face, so close I could see the mascara clinging to her eyelashes. “Who the hell do you think you are? You just come in here and start trying to trample over my life . . .”

“Is, Is. God, I’m sorry,” she wheezed, giving my arms these jerky little pats to calm me down. “I was joking. Please, chill.”

I slumped down heavily on the bed next to her. “What is wrong with you? Why are you being like this?”

Dot finally had the good manners to look sheepish. It didn’t last long, though, before she gave a tiny, couldn’t-care-less shrug. “What? Like, you and Nancy have the monopoly on hurting people’s feelings?

I’ve tried being nice and that didn’t get me very far, did it?” She took a deep breath like she’d suddenly had a great epiphany. “Do you ever wish that we weren’t like we were? That we’d never started it? I don’t even remember how it all happened.”

“Neither do I,” I said, but that wasn’t exactly true. It was the very first day of the first term at Brighton Girls’ when I’d made myself a solemn vow that I was done with being bullied and tormented and letting anyone walk all over me.

“So sometimes, maybe I need to take my inner bitch out for a walk,” Dot muttered, staring at her nails.

“You don’t. You really, really don’t,” I told her, stretching my legs out in front of me. “It doesn’t solve your problems, just makes them more complicated.”

I expected Dot to make some dismissive remark and call me a loser, because she seemed to have been taking lessons from Nancy and Ella, but she leaned over and touched my leg. “It sounds lonely.”

“Being alone and being lonely are two different things,” I pointed out. “Y’know, I used to be happy being quiet, but no one would let me get on with it.”

“Well, you’ve managed to hook a foxy boy somehow, so it can’t be too bad,” Dot said carefully.

“You just said he was a geek!”

“Well, he’s a foxy geek or a geeky fox, whatever.” She patted the bed invitingly. “So, what do you talk to him about?”

I gave up after that. Instead I sat cross-legged on my bed and I told Dot about how Smith made me feel like I wasn’t just some awkward loner, but an enigma that he wanted to unravel. And how I liked it when he unraveled me. Liked how he looked at me and smiled at me and held my hand. Liked how he didn’t want me to hide my oddness but to wear it like a shield.

But what I didn’t tell her was all the stuff that she was dying to hear. That the first time we’d had sex, it hurt for a second. Like, stubbing my toe. And that I’d never get used to being naked in front of him. Or, well, anyone. Didn’t tell her about all the lies I’d told him, either, and that there was no hope that it was going to last or be meaningful because I’d built our whole relationship on this precarious web of deceit.

“And he thinks I’m a complete bitch, too,” I finished. “Because that’s the only thing I know how to be, but he never lets me get away it. Not for one second. He’s all, like, ‘You’re being nasty, stop it right now,’ and the really weird thing is that usually I do. Like, he’s my Kryptonite or something . . .”

There was this dreamy tone to my voice and I knew that it sounded as if I was madly, hopelessly, irredeemably in love with him, but I somehow couldn’t shut up.

16

Dot finally left, after a lazy day of homework, eating our body weight in chocolate, and curling up on my bed to watch
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
again. She swore that what had happened in Smith’s room would stay in Smith’s room, but I knew how easily she caved in under pressure. ’Sides, Monday morning meant a brand-new week, which meant a brand-new power struggle.

“Snogged any geeks lately?” was Nancy’s cheery greeting as I strolled into the common room, and Dot, who was perched on the arm of her chair, became engrossed in the rickrack around the hem of her skirt and wouldn’t look me in the eye.

“Not lately, no,” I said blandly, heart pounding, but then Nancy started a convoluted story about some girl from her drama group and someone who played football with her brother and nothing had changed.

Except everything had changed because just after lunch, I got a text from Smith: “When can we hook up again?”

I looked up to see the Trio of Evil, power-walking down the corridor
Mean Girls
style, and settled for a cryptic, “Patience, Grasshopper, patience.” It sounded far more alluring than the sad truth—that I wasn’t allowed out on school nights under pain of death.

“You’re surgically attached to your phone today,” Dot said, linking her arm through mine so she could haul me off.

“He just texted me,” I hissed once we were sitting on the stairs that led up to the Domestic Science kitchens. I couldn’t hold it in any longer, despite all the stern lectures I’d given myself about trusting no one, not even Dot. “Do you think he’s really into me?”

I’d officially turned into one of those sappy girls who had no topic of conversation other than a boy. It didn’t help that Smith and I were now having text sex, like, all the time. Man, he could be really rude without using any vowels. Not that I showed Dot his hundred and sixty character eulogy to my “bttm,”

but the way I went on about Smith, you’d have thought that he was the main reason why the sun rose up every morning and the earth rotated and there were stars in the sky.

Dot took it in very good humor. She listened dutifully, every afternoon, eyes wide and head nodding gravely as I glossed over that day’s text messages and speculated on how I could string him along until the weekend. But all she really wanted to know was about the sex, because obviously the scant details I’d already provided weren’t enough.

“What did it feel like? Did it hurt? Did he say weird stuff while you were doing it? Did you have an orgasm?”

It was like I’d become the Oracle of doing it. She followed me home so she could keep throwing these X-rated questions at me out of the side of her mouth. Felix was lurking, and every now and again, his eyes would go really wide and he’d squeak, “Ewwwww!” He sounded uncannily like Summer from
The

OC
, which freaked me out.

I could just imagine the great delight he’d take in asking Dad what a condom or a multiple orgasm was, too. There was only one person in my life who didn’t make my skin itch with irritation and that was Smith. He made my skin itch in an entirely different way.

“Is! I just asked you if you got completely naked,” Dot hissed at me frantically, and I blinked at her in horror.

“Oh, God, just stop going on about it.” I shoved my Art History textbook at her. “I thought you wanted to look something up in this.”

After she’d gone and after I’d all but written her essay on Cubism for her, I didn’t feel good. Wasn’t that how you were meant to feel when you and a friend had exchanged some deep, meaningful bonding? I felt horrible and grubby, like she’d rooted through my knicker drawer. Letting people into your life really and truly sucked. Not for the first time, I wished that I could be homeschooled, if the homeschooling was done by someone who wasn’t my father.

But it wasn’t quite that simple, and when I got home from school the next day—so grouchy that I nearly punched Felix when he burped in my ear—I realized that the irritable, “just lost my keys” feeling was because I was missing Smith.

I wanted to tell him about how the Kit Kat I’d eaten at lunch had turned out to be solid chocolate and no wafer. And the A-minus I’d got on my French literature test. I wanted to tell him all the boring shit that had happened to me during the day and I couldn’t. Or maybe I could.

“I was just talking about you,” he said when I rang him. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” I squeaked. “What were you saying about me?”

“I was musing out loud about your plans for next weekend,” he said, and I could hear him breathing heavily, footsteps, and then a door shutting. “That’s better. So, yeah, what are you doing next Saturday?”

I lay back on my bed and closed my eyes so his voice sounded even huskier. “I don’t know. Painting my nails. Washing my hair. I might even go really wild and rearrange my sock drawer.”

“Well, what if I said you were already pretty enough to skip your thrilling beauty routine and go out with me instead?” he purred.

“I’d say that you were being really cheesy.” I giggled.

“No, I’m flirting with you; you’re meant to flirt back.”

I racked my brains for something flirty to say that didn’t contain the phrase “big boy” anywhere near it and came up blank. So, I changed the habits of a lifetime and told the truth. “I missed you today,” I blurted out. “Does that count as flirting?”

“Oh, that’s much better than flirting,” he assured me, and there was a click and then a long slow breath and I knew he’d just lit a cigarette. “And I missed you, too. Wish you were coming over.”

At 9:47 P.M., on a school night? Never going to happen. “I wish I was, too.” I was overdosing on the warm fuzzies, and I needed to stop that right now. “’Cause then I could make a start on cleaning your lounge.”

“God, that’s romantic. I did go out and buy some bleach, though. Just for you. I got the expensive kind that smells of meadow flowers.”

“Toilets should always smell of meadow flowers. So what’s happening next Saturday?” I asked him, and then I got bolder than ever. “You want to hang out?”

“Of course I do. But, see, Duckie have got a gig in London and then there’s going to be a party . . .”

“Oh . . .”

“Don’t ‘oh’ me in that hurt little voice. Do you wanna come? There’s room in the van, and I think we’re going to sleep on someone’s floor and then drive back the next day. You’ll have to promise to leave your evil alter ego at home.”

“I don’t have an evil alter ego,” I hissed. “I have layers.”

“And some of your layers are more evil than others,” Smith teased. “I really want you to come.”

“It sounds cool. Can I let you know?”

“By tomorrow? ’Cause there’s a hot competition for places in the back of the van. Isabel?”

He sounded so serious that I could feel the pitter-patter of impending doom. “What?”

“This time can you promise not to pick your usual fight with me before you flounce off?”

“I don’t flounce,” I protested, squirming from the unfairness of his accusation. “Actually, I have a hissy fit, storm out, and then regret it when I’m five meters down the road.”

“That’s good to know. I’ll make a mental note not to get offended next time.”

“I never mean to offend you. It just kinda happens. Like, every time I open my mouth without thinking first.”

“You really open up on the phone. Maybe we should just talk on our mobiles when I finally get to see you.” Smith chuckled, and I had to bite back the crushing retort that was nicely coming to the boil.

“Oh, whatevs,” I muttered, then cast a sorrowful look at the pile of books and papers on the bed. “Got to go now. I have stuff to do.”

“Ah, the infamous stuff. I have this theory that you’re an international spy, which would explain why you’re mysteriously unavailable.”

“You’ve been watching too much
Alias
, Smith.”

“Admit it. You’re on a secret mission to recover some shiny little gizmo from a lab in Uzbekistan that could destroy the world with its evil death rays.”

I could hear my dad yelling at me from the hall about dinner or possibly a Martian invasion. It was hard to tell.

“Going now, sad boy,” I told Smith, but he was still knee-deep in international master-spy land.

“And all the labs you break into are attached to dodgy night-clubs for some strange reason so you have to dress up in these really outlandish costumes and . . .”

“My God, you really need to get out more. I have to go, things to do, worlds to save from shiny little gizmos,” I said, like it was no big deal.

“I knew it!” he exclaimed excitedly. “How many wigs have you got?”

“Okay, going now . . .”

“Have you got a gun and a lipstick that doubles up as a . . .”

And I was in such a good mood as I went to investigate Dad’s plaintive cries that when I passed Felix on the stairs, I couldn’t stop myself from ruffling his hair in a manner that could have been misinterpreted as affectionate.