Let's Get Lost (9 page)

“What’s going on with you?” he asked me gently, and his arms tightened around me. “Can’t you just pick

a personality and stick with it?”

I didn’t answer because I had my face burrowed in the crook of his neck, which was toasty and soft and my new favorite place in the world. When I kissed him there, he giggled, then tried to turn it into a manly cough. But really there was nothing to say because all my mouth wanted to do was kiss him, and it turned out his mouth was totally down with that, too.

When he kissed me, it felt like he meant it. His lips . . . it’s hard to describe this stuff, too intimate. But it was strange how his mouth moving on mine could make me feel hot and cold and light and dark. His arms cradled me to him: one hand stroking my hip, the other cupping the back of my head were the only thing stopping me from floating away.

“Do you want to come back to mine?” he whispered in the wafer-thin gap between our mouths when we remembered that we had to breathe.

His hands were in places that there had never been hands before, not without someone getting slapped around the face, so I knew he wasn’t talking about a coffee before he walked me home.

If there’d been some sci-fi movie device and the street had started shimmering around us in a slo-mo special effect so the next thing I knew we were in his bedroom, there wouldn’t have been much I could do about it. But the street wasn’t doing anything much and Smith was looking at me expectantly.

“Back to yours?” I repeated breathlessly. “Could be tricky. Maybe you should kiss me again.”

“Maybe I should,” he agreed with this quirky smile that I wanted to lick off his face—and that led to more kissing and swooning and, hmmm, hair stroking.

“Oh! My! God! What is that and why the hell is she snogging him?”

Nancy’s piercing shriek killed the mood as effectively as a bucket of cold water. I unpeeled my lips and turned my head to see Nancy, Ella, and Dot, arms folded, faces incredulous, and Smith was
still
sucking on an incredibly sensitive patch of skin behind my left ear.

I squirmed away from him. “Get off me,” I muttered furiously,and there was no nice way to do it. If there had been, I’d have much rather played it that way.

“It’s him,” Nancy declared in a stage whisper. “It’s that freak show from the party the other week.”

I was too busy slapping Smith’s hands away to answer at first. “Tell them to piss off,” he said softly, hands around my wrists so his thumbs could press against my thundering pulse. There was this second when our eyes collided, and I tried to tell him I was sorry. That what I was about to say was just for their benefit.

“Jesus, will you stop mauling me!” I announced dramatically, wrenching myself out of his embrace. I turned to the others, feigned a coughing fit, and then made my eyes go really big. “I’m like,
so
drunk, please tell me I did not just suck serious face with him?”

8

“I mean, can you say fugly?”

If the streets hadn’t been almost deserted, and if she hadn’t just bought me a bag of chips, I’d have pushed Nancy into the path of an oncoming car. It would have been the most justifiable homicide in the history of justifiable homicides.

“I know,” Ella chimed in. “I was about to tell him that Seth Cohen wanted his DNA back, but he stormed off before I could get a chance. Funny that.” I could feel the stinging heat of their sly little glances as I trudged along ahead of them with Dot.

“Just ignore them,” she warned me quietly. “They want to get a reaction out of you. Don’t give them one.”

And since when did Dot think she could give me advice? But I was too busy racking my brains to come up with some devastating retorts that would whip Nancy and Ella back into line to start in on her. “What were they doing when you found them?” I muttered out of the side of my mouth.

“Ella was getting off with that acne-fied guy she gets off with when she can’t find anyone else, and Nancy

was peeing in a broken toilet with no door,” Dot recalled with a fair amount of malice.Didn’t know she had it in her. We shared a conspiratorial smirk.

“How far down her throat was his tongue and you could totally dust her tits for fingerprints ’cause—”

I whirled around and pointed a finger at Ella, which stopped her in mid-flow. “What?” she asked belligerently.

“Nothing. Well, it’s just . . . I think you’re breaking out,” I said innocently, squinting at her flawless complexion. “Maybe all of Gary’s suppurating sores have finally become contagious. You really need to find someone else who’ll snog you.”

Ella’s hands were already scrambling over her face as Nancy turned to look at her. “Ewww! And what’s suppurating mean?”

“It means to produce a discharge of pus,” I explained patiently before I gave her the swift once over.

“Urgh! What are those weird stains on your legs?” All four of us turned to look at Nancy’s white jeans. I could have pointed out that when your arse is the size of a mountain, white jeans are not your friend, but it would have been too easy. No finesse to it. “It kinda looks like . . . no, it’s too gross, but have you wet yourself?”

Now it was Ella’s turn to “Ewwww!” as Nancy cast a horrified look downward. “No! It’s just . . . It’s the streetlights, they make everything look yellow-y.”

“Whatever you say, sweetie.” With all signs of rebellion firmly squashed, I could enjoy the rest of my chips in peace.

It had been a long and strange night, but it wasn’t until I was curled up in my bed next to Dot, with a very subdued Nancy and Ella on the floor beside us, that I realized how bone-weary I was.

I could feel my eyelids drooping before Dot even switched the light off. There wasn’t even time to tell Nancy that she was snoring, even though she wasn’t, before I fell asleep.

We were on a plane, which was strange because the only time I can remember flying was the year
we lived in America when Dad was teaching at Amherst College. Usually we’d load up the car
and have to spend two sticky days driving to fricking Umbria to be bored godholy.

But we were on a plane. Mum and I were on a plane, and I was small enough that my feet didn’t
touch the ground, and I was wearing this pink flowery dress from when I was little.

She was holding my hand tightly, the weight of her wedding ring digging into me, but I didn’t
want to tell her that she was hurting me, otherwise she’d let go.

“You have to be brave, Bella,” she said soothingly. “Have to get used to flying. Here, have some
peanuts.”

Then this little bag of nuts suddenly materialized on my lap and we both sat there and looked at it.

She unpeeled her fingers from my tight grasp so she could pick up the nuts and rustle them
enticingly.

“Go on,” she urged me. “Open them.”

It took ages to tear into the bag, my sweaty hands fumbling with the plastic, and when I finally
tore them open, there weren’t nuts inside but these dried-up insects that suddenly swelled into life
and started climbing out of the packet.

I turned to Mum and
—
oh, God, not again!
—
I couldn’t scream or speak or even whisper. She
peered over at the rapidly multiplying cockroaches and spiders and insects bursting out of the bag
and crawling all over me. Furry feet skittering up my arms.

“Oh, Belle, now what have you done?” She sighed wearily. “It’s no use pulling those faces. It’s
not you they’re after.”

And she was right because I was just the climbing frame they were using to get to her. I tried to
brush them off her, I really did. But my hands hung limply by my side, and I tried to call for help,
attract the attention of a stewardess, but no one would look at me.

“It’s all right,” she said, sitting there calmly, even though there were tiny rivulets of blood
streaming from her face and her neck and her arms as the insects bit at her. “Worse things
happen at sea, don’t they? Or should that be worse things happen in the air? I
told
you not to open
the bag but you never listen.”

I could feel her blood dripping onto me as she suddenly lurched to one side. . . .

“Is! Jesus! Wake up!”

There was this strangled yelping noise and as I opened my eyes, I realized it was coming from me.

“Nance, get her a glass of water. Is, are you all right?” Dot touched a hand to my face. “You’re really hot.”

I struggled upright and balled my hands into little fists so nobody would see them shaking. “Just had a bad dream. I’m fine,” I said in this scratchy voice.

Ella was hovering by the bed, which looked like it had been caught in a hurricane: duvet on the floor, pillows scrunched up. “We thought you were having some kind of fit,” she reported gleefully. “Is there, like, epilepsy in your family?”

There were icy fingers clutched around my heart and squeezing it so tight that it was forced to beat in this frantic rhythm. “No. I had too much to drink,” I snapped, and I hated that it came out all quavery. “Made me have a nightmare, that’s all. Sorry about the bed, Dot,” I added, and she sat down next to me and shrugged.

“It’s okay, worse things happen at sea. God, now you’ve gone really pale. Shall I go and wake your dad up?”

I closed my eyes in the hope that when I opened them, Dot and Ella would have disappeared. No such luck. “Really, I’m okay.”

Nancy padded back in with a glass of water. Knowing her, she’d probably spat in it. “There you are,”

she said without a shred of sympathy. “I’m never going to get back to sleep after that.”

“Yeah, can you say drama queen?” Ella snickered and I knew what she was thinking: that with my hair all sticking up, face drained as I tried not to drop the glass, I wasn’t anyone special. Wasn’t someone you had to respect.

I placed the glass on the nightstand and got to my feet so I could help Dot straighten up the bedclothes.

“I mean, it’s not really normal, Is, this whole
Exorcist
routine. Maybe you should see someone,” Nancy suggested with saccharine sweetness as she snuggled down on the nest she’d made out of sofa cushions and blankets. “You might be going mad. Delayed reaction and shit. I’ve read something about it.”

“Yeah, like post-traumatic stress syndrome,” Ella piped up. “Would probably explain why your cute boy radar has got seriously malfunctioned because, y’know, you’ve gone insane.”

“Well, I might be going insane but you’ve always been retarded,” I snapped, practically hurling myself back under the covers. “And if you’ve all finished diagnosing my mental condition maybe we could get some sleep.”

The three of them were snoring happily within minutes of turning off the light, and I had to lie there on my back, limbs rigid, counting the shadows on the ceiling because I was too scared to go back to sleep.

Thankfully, Nancy had to piss off at the crack of dawn because she goes to this lame drama group on Saturday mornings in the vain belief that she has star quality. And that meant that Ella slunk off behind her because without Nancy there, she’d have to take some serious shit from me for the big can of whupass she tried to open last night.

It wasn’t until Dot and I were finally alone that I could let out the breath I’d been holding.

“I thought they’d never go,” she said feelingly, turning and giving me a tired smile. “I know we’re all friends and stuff, but sometimes I really don’t like them.”

“They’re a pair of evil little trolls,” I admitted with a wry twist of my lips. “But you know what they say.

Keep your friends close . . .”

“And your enemies closer,” Dot finished for me and because it was her and we’d been friends for ages, I let her put her arm around me and we shuffled toward the kitchen so we could eat our body weight in toast and scrambled eggs.

We sat there in a silence that didn’t have claws for once. Just me and Dot hanging without the gang, like we used to when life was simpler and we were eight and there were Barbie dolls and Jammie Dodgers and we really thought that if you were nice to people they’d be nice right back to you. Then we grew up and got over it.

That’s why I let Dot come along for the ride. Even though she’s really built for better than being one of

my evil henchmen.

She knows me, the real me, no matter how deep I’ve buried her. Which is another reason why we’re still friends. She’s got far too much on me to ever let her kick it freestyle.

She looked up and gave me a smile. “Just like old times, isn’t it?”

“I guess. Wanna braid my hair after this?”

“So, okay, I want to know what’s going on with you,” she said calmly, ignoring my feeble attempt at humor. “It’s like Isabel has left the building. No, it’s more than that. Even when you’re here, you’re not here. You know what I mean?”

“Not really,” I replied, and gingerly speared a little heap of egg with my fork.

“Is,” she tried again, this time with a lowered voice for added dramatic emphasis. “I know that you’ve got stuff going on, but I’m here for you.”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Really, I’m fine. Just lighten up, will you? Jesus, you’d think someone had died the way you keep going on.”

A mottled flush swept over her face. “That’s so not funny, Is. It’s kinda harsh, actually.”

And then she glared at me because I wasn’t fitting into any of the acceptable patterns of behavior she’d read about in the manual on
How to Deal with the Recently Bereaved
that she’d obviously been consulting.

“What do you want me to say?” I asked her and I was completely serious. “Would you like me to walk around weeping and wringing my hands and getting all snotty? ’Cause I could have a go, if that would make you feel any better.”

“I don’t know,” she wailed helplessly. “It’s just, like, you’re not you.”

“Well, who the hell else would I be?” I shrugged and I could see that she was struggling, forehead pitted with effort and oh no, her eyes were filling up. “Dot, I’m fine. I just want things to be like they were, and I want people to treat me like they normally do, okay?”