The Edge of Me (2 page)

‘What’s now?’ she says.

‘Double English.’

‘Wow. Double Joe. You going to talk to him today?’

I look sideways at her. ‘What do
you
think?’

She pretends to consider the question. ‘Umm, what
do
I think? Well. I would have to say
… no
. I would have to say that you will creep in early and sit at the back of the class and shove your head in
Romeo and Juliet
or whatever, until the lesson starts, by which time you’ll know it’s safe to look up and gaze adoringly at the back of his head, while dribbling onto the desk. Sound about right?’

I laugh and push her into a hedge.

‘Listen lover,’ she goes on, ‘he’s finished with whatshername. Everyone knows that. He’s officially on
the market,
and
if you don’t get your act together soon, someone else will.’

Joe Mullins is gorgeous. Period. He started at our school a year ago and when I saw him it was like Christmas. I’d never been into boys before him. Not really. He has warm honey eyes and a surprised sort of smile. He’s tall and dark and broad-shouldered and he has to be pretty much the boy every girl in our year wants to get with. And not only is he gorgeous but he is actually in a band.

This gives me – and – let’s not kid ourselves here – practically every other sad sack in a mini-skirt and a pair of Ugg boots, the ideal and quite legitimate opportunity to ogle him from the safety of a crowd.

I think I’ve been in love with him ever since I saw him but as far as I’m concerned, people like me don’t go out with people like him. It’s like a dog with two heads. It’s just wrong.

But there it is. He’s in my head. Joe Mullins lives in my head, just behind my left ear.

It sounds stupid. I mean how can it be possible to feel so close to someone, like you know they’re in the room before you see them, and to have hardly said a single word to them? But it’s true, I do.

I turn to Lauren. ‘Ah. So that’s it? That’s all he’s waiting for? For
me
to ask
him
out? He’s been waiting and hoping all this time? That’s such a
joke
. He doesn’t even know I exist.’

‘Oooh! Jesus, Sanda. He’s just a
person
. Just
talk
to him. You don’t know – he might be a closet stamp collector or keep his scabs in a biscuit tin under the bed.’

‘You mean you
don’t
?’

‘Just talk to him. It doesn’t matter what about: coastal erosion, the Euro, anything. Just do it.’

I smile and shrug. We’re getting close to the school gates and the familiar panic is setting in. Did I say I hated school? You see, not only can I not bring myself to actually communicate with the boy I have been in love with since Year Ten, but I’m pretty lousy at it generally. It’s like someone dropped me off on the doorstep of Planet Earth without the Rule Book: the one that tells you how to get by in life and how to
communicate
with other people without getting a nosebleed or a hot flush. When Lauren spoke to me for the first time, it was the fourth of November. I’d been at school for two months and it was the first proper conversation I’d had.

She’s poking me in the ribs now and saying, ‘OK. Are you going to Rosie’s party?’

‘Er … no. Don’t think so.’

‘She says you can come if you want.’ Tactful. Basically, what that means is that Lauren’s got Rosie in a corner and talked her into saying that I can come if I absolutely have to.

‘It’s fine. I’m OK.’ I go for what feels like the right mix of regret and indignation. But we both know I don’t do parties. Ever. Because, in the unlikely event of someone actually inviting me, I’d find myself getting as far as the door, finger hovering over doorbell, and the mortifying, toe-curling embarrassment about what I was wearing, or what I would or wouldn’t say, would send me running for the hills.

We go through the gates and Lauren’s already waving to a couple of friends from her Art class. It’s always about now I feel myself disappearing.

And yes, it is English first, and yes, I do get there super early and open my book. Not
Romeo and Juliet
but
The Wasteland
which seems highly appropriate considering my current social life. Miss O’Brien is standing at the front with the book as people scuff in and spill onto chairs and desks.

Joe comes in last and Miss wants to know why. I don’t look at him but out of the corner of my eye I see heads go up, ponytails being fiddled with. He sits down in the front row and takes out his book. His neck dips, he pushes his hair back and his hands rest on his head for a moment. Square hands. I breathe out quietly. I’m alone in the room with him. Cat Power’s playing ‘The Greatest’ and we’re slow dancing and he’s kissing me tenderly. I reach up and …

‘
Sanda?
’

‘Um … Sorry. I … what was the …?’ Muffled laughter from the rest of the class.

‘Quiet!
What do you understand by a wasteland?’

Everyone turns to look at me. And I say without thinking, ‘Er … something neglected? Unattractive? Something nobody notices any more?’

For a split second I look at Joe. He returns my glance with a kind of puzzled smile.

The lesson pretty much curls up and dies for me after that. It lasts forever – it always does. When everyone’s
left, I pack up as usual and I’m weaving through empty desks, head down with bag and coat under my arms, when something completely unexpected happens.

‘Hey.’

I look up.

It’s Joe. Just Joe. All the air in the room gets hoovered out under the door. There’s silence and somehow even the school noise stops and all the birds stop singing and hold their breath.

He’s half playing with his phone but when I stop, he looks up and sort of squeezes himself in between the chairs and the front desk, and folds then unfolds his arms.

‘Did you …? Were you …?’ I say.

He smiles then and I manage to smile back but my face is burning. He crosses his arms again and backs into a little tray of pens which leap out onto the floor like angry salmon and scatter themselves under the tables. I’m down there before he is, pinching them up, and there’s a red one that’s rolled out of reach and I’m grabbing for it, and he’s grabbing for it and then two things happen in quick succession. The first is that our hands brush and the touch of him, it’s like hot tea on my skin and although he pulls away, I know the feeling will stay with me for the rest of the day; and the second thing is that Miss comes back into the room and sees us on the floor.

‘What are you doing down there?’ All I can see are her legs.

Joe gets up quickly and I follow, hitting my head on a table.

‘Pens,’ he says with a kind of yawning cough. ‘We … I dropped a load of pens.’

I slope up behind him and drop them into their box.

‘Out,’ she says.

I pick up my things and follow him out into the corridor. ‘Sorry,’ I say.

‘What for?’ He’s looking straight at me, smiling. His dark hair falls forward onto his face. He’s growing a scrubby beard and it suits him. He looks way older than sixteen. I lean against the wall and straighten myself up to face him, then deciding this is too out there, I fall back again into what I hope looks like a nonchalant pose. Then my trainers go and make an ugly farty squeak on the lino.

I grin and snort a laugh. I’m an idiot.

‘Just for … you know …’

He waits, shakes his head; looks up and down the corridor. Message received: he wants to leave. I make it easy. I say, ‘Well … I’ll … I’ve got …’

But he’s not ready to let me go.

‘
The Wasteland
. Crap isn’t it?’ he says.

Now I love poetry and I think TS Eliot is pretty cool but of course I say, ‘Huh! God Yeah! Shit.’ Again I manage a desperate piggy snigger.

He looks at me for a minute while I force myself to face him with what I hope looks like a normal expression.

‘Wow,’ he says, ‘I just noticed: your eyes.’

I look at him, waiting for an ironic laugh or a smirk. Nothing. He looks back with an intensity that completely takes me by surprise.

I struggle to fill the silence, ‘Oh. Yes. I … most people think they’re odd.’

He smiles his surprised smile. ‘No. No. They’re good. Different. I mean different good … you know …’

Long pause while I try to look casual. I look at the notice board on the wall. Apparently the girls’ toilets on the third floor block are out of use this week. Interesting. I see him shuffle a bit and I wait for him to leave but he doesn’t.

Instead he says, ‘Um … Are you free Friday night?’

2

I need time. It’s like I need a whole ten minutes before answering. I mean what does ‘free’ mean? Of course I’m free, I’m always free, but does he mean ‘free’ for him? To do something with him?
Together?

I decide to play it cool. ‘Friday night? Er … yes … I … I think so. Um, is it your band?’ Lifeline. Maybe it’s just a gig – some hall to fill. I’d be making up the numbers.

He looks sideways at me frowning. ‘No.’

‘Are you …?’ I don’t even know what I’m going to say next. And my teeth start chattering entirely of their own accord, beating out a tiny tattoo in my head.

‘Are you OK?’ he says.

‘Mmm,’ I squeak.

‘So …?’

I wrestle with my mouth and finally the words fall out of me like vomit and magically arrange themselves into a wormy little sentence.

‘Yes, I’m free Friday.’

‘Cool.’

‘Shall I …? Do you want me to …?’

He looks at me, leans in, ‘Sanda,’ he breathes, ‘what is it with you? I don’t want you to
do
anything. I’m asking you out. Is that OK?’

I swallow air. My throat is dry.

‘Where do you live?’ he says.

‘Um – 35 Durham Road,’ I rattle.

‘Can I take your number?’

The rest of the afternoon is a blur. I go to registration. I think I have a conversation with Mr Hall about Geography homework and sunspots but I can’t be sure.
Real
Joe is filling my head, squeezing out
dream
Joe. But I’m not sure I want the real one. Not the one with the ex-girlfriend, who by the way, is French which makes her at least two hundred billion percent more interesting and sexy than anyone else on the planet. Not the Joe who, for all I know, may be a part of some mass class joke on me. I want the old Joe back,
my
Joe
:
the one where I’m in charge. I doze through French and leave school feeling sick with apprehension.

There’s no wind and the sun hangs low in the sky as I walk home. The vomity feeling is replaced by something like a lorry-load of evil little midges wriggling and burrowing under my skin, biting and stinging me all over my body. I feel so hot that when I get in, I go to my room, take off my clothes and stand in front of the mirror in my underwear. I run my hands down my sides. No fleshy softness, no curves, nothing a boy like Joe would want
to hold on to. What I see, what I feel, are bones that jut and scrape. Even in the laciest undies, even bending and arching my back and tossing my hair, I’d still look like a fourteen-year-old boy.

Anyway, all I own are jeans and T-shirts. Mostly from charity shops. I’ve been buying my own clothes forever. Mum doesn’t do shopping – not for me. I certainly don’t own anything that says
come get me tiger
, which is just as well really because Friday evening – if it happens at all – is probably going to be humiliating enough without me dressing up like some Beverley Hills hooker.

You see.

I’ve never kissed a boy.

I know what you have to do. I know all that. But the thought of it, of how to
be
with him makes my stomach turn.

All I want to do is hide. All I ever want to do is hide.

I do a lot of hiding; in fact I’ve made a bit of an art of it. I lie on the bed with the duvet pulled up over my head, my arms flat against my sides and my hands clenched into fists so tight that my knuckles crack and my fingernails cut into my flesh. I slow my breathing until the covers are barely moving and the space around my body is a warm orange bloom like a rind on cheese.

I
need
a rind, a shell, something to crawl into when the going gets tough. And yeah, I know I’m not Vin Diesel: I don’t have to blow up a train or cross Niagara Falls in a waste-paper basket. I just have to
be with
people and talk to them. And what’s so wrong with me that I can’t even
have a proper conversation with a boy I like? That I’m too congenitally fucked up to just say,
Yeah, I’d love to go out. Pick me up at eight?

The thought of it shrinks me like a slug in salt.

I’m frying now and I shift and curl and push the covers onto the floor. I stand up and look at my reflection in the mirror again: drawn and rigid and scared.

And that’s when I know I don’t want to do this any more.

If it
is
real, if it’s not a joke, then what am I doing?

Either I’m going to get an Xbox or take up online chess and effectively check out of the human race altogether, or maybe, just maybe, if I can actually stop feeling sorry for myself, then I can do this.

I practise my smile. I’m in the corridor, nonchalant, preoccupied, super-cool: ‘Hey Joe.’

I say it a few times.

Fuck.

I think about texting Lauren but I’m not ready to have the conversation, not ready for her to get inside of it and tell me what she thinks.

I’m pulling on my clothes when I hear a scratching sound coming from the ceiling: like the sound of fifty pigeons on the march, then a thud and silence. I go out of my room onto the landing just as Dad’s coming down from the loft, the ladder trembling under his weight. He’s holding a great bundle of papers wrapped in a manila file and tied with string. He’s still in his pyjamas, and the creases in his face bubble with sweat. I don’t know
what it is but there’s something different about him. He seems distracted somehow – bothered.

He looks at the wall behind me, nods and hurries down to the hall where Mum’s working the spray polish like a little Gatling gun. They snap and grunt at each other like a couple of seals then I hear the door to the sitting room bite.

Above me the black space in the ceiling yawns. I go to push the ladder back into place when I see something at the top. A wink of colour catches the ceiling light. A tooth of white in the dark hole: a photograph.