365 Days (19 page)

I nodded meekly but still tried to have a conversation with her about school, just so I could talk to her, but she just told me she was busy and walked off down the corridor, leaving me standing there feeling like a right prat.

I’m not sure if I feel better for having spoken to her or not. On reflection, I think I feel worse!

Thursday 6 September

We’ve got some student teacher person teaching us French until Christmas. He’s called Henri and he’s proper, genuine French with an accent and everything! He’s very excitable and prone to talking louder than what I consider acceptable. He’s also got shocking halitosis, so we all try and avoid doing anything that requires him to stand any closer than a foot away from us.

Friday 7 September

Was thinking about my all-too-brief conversation with Alice on Wednesday, and now I’m wondering if I should try and talk to her again or do as she asked and just leave her alone. I want to talk to Han about it but the realist in me tells me it ain’t such a good idea, bearing in mind what a hothead Han can be. If she gets so much as a whiff of someone else fancying me, she’s just as likely to rip their head off, and as much as I secretly like the idea of someone being jealous over me, my conscience won’t let me allow Han loose on Alice. Besides, Mrs. Unwin would have us drawn and quartered in the school yard if even so much as a drop of blood got spilt in her shiny corridors!

Saturday 8 September

Mum and Dad had their friend Celina over for dinner tonight. I can’t stand Celina. Her biggest claim to fame is that she once hiked across the Andes wearing nothing but a bikini to highlight the plight of cashmere farmers in Peru or something, and she never fails to manage to drop it into the conversation. Big, fat, hairy deal! I could slip a leotard on and tap dance through the Grand Canyon in my flip-flops if I wanted to, but I’ve got far better things to do with my time.

Couldn’t face listening to her telling Mum about how the local press were amazed she was 47, and how everyone in Primrose Avenue
bought a paper the week she was in it, even the ones who normally hated the local rag and only considered the national papers
worth spending their money on. So I invited myself over to Han’s for tea. We went down to the chip shop ’cos her mum was at her tae kwon do class until seven. That’s the second bad meal I’ve had in as many days (I had baked beans for tea last night), so have vowed to eat just greens until next weekend!

Sunday 9 September

Tried to find something green in the fridge but the only green thing I could find was a piece of Gorgonzola
with mould on. Was buggered if I was going to eat that so had fish and chips, apple crumble and ice cream for lunch, and baked beans on toast and three Oreos for tea.

Well, you can’t say I didn’t try!

Monday 10 September

A new girl has started today and
I
have to sit next to her in English ’cos my name’s the nearest to hers on the register. Her name’s Susan Divine. If there was a prize for the most inappropriate surname, it would go to her ’cos she’s anything
but
divine! She’s about six foot tall in her socks and nearly as wide, and she looks like she’s been chasing parked cars. Even Mr. Pritchard looked scared of her.

Caroline found out at lunchtime that she used to go to All Saints School but was expelled for ‘misdemeanours’. I’m not sure what classifies as ‘misdemeanours’ but you can bet your life it had something to do with violence. Great! Not only does she
look
like a psycho,
she is one!!

Tuesday 11 September

Went up to the library with Han during our so-called private study time with the intention of doing some research for our coursework, but ended up holding hands at the back of the linguistics section instead.

Refused to feel guilty for not doing any studying. I’m in love, and that feels way too brilliant to be wasting precious time on bloody reading!

Wednesday 12 September

Han says it’s really hard to get booted out of school these days, so she reckons this Susan Divine girl must be as hard as nails. This isn’t really what I want to hear, bearing in mind she sits within touching distance of me in class. I made a mental note to steer clear of her, and to avoid eye contact with her at all times, in case I antagonise her and get stabbed with a pen or something.

Han caught up with me in the corridor this afternoon and told me how much she loved being up in the library with me yesterday. She said, ‘It was dead clandestine, don’t you think? I liked that, made me feel real hot.’

I wasn’t sure what ‘clandestine’ meant, so I just nodded and linked my fingers in hers when no one was looking. Made a note to make an effort to see what clandestine means later, to kind of educate myself, so that it doesn’t feel like our secret liaison at the library was all for nothing.

Thursday 13 September

Really hot day again, so me and Han ate lunch outside on our own. We found a quiet corner over by the tennis courts and if it wasn’t for the fact we were at school, we could just as well have been on a date! There was no one else near us, and Han leant over to me and told me she loved me!! How cool is that? I mean, she’s said it in passing, like in texts, and when we’re
doing it
and things, but never actually face-to-face with me. She said, ‘I love you, Clemmykins—you do know that, don’t you? You make my life complete,’ and my legs went funny, even though I was sitting down. I didn’t really know what to say so I just kinda smiled and grunted something back at her and she looked down and started to tug at the grass. She asked, ‘Do you love me?’ which gobsmacked me! Of course I love her! I adore her! Why would she think otherwise? So I told her that—that I adored her and that she was the best thing that ever happened to me, and she seemed to cheer up a bit. She said, ‘I’ve told you, like, three or four times that I love you, but you never say it back. Just makes a girl wonder.’ So I told her that I’d been scared to tell her in case she ran a mile from me, and she laughed and said, ‘Quite the opposite, you silly sausage.’ I felt a bit daft.

Women! I think this gay dating lark could be more complicated than I imagined!

Friday 14 September

Another really hot day. Sat outside the Art block at lunchtime and saw that Susan Divine girl sunbathing over by the toilets. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Caroline leaned over to me and whispered in my ear, ‘I didn’t know they did teenagers in that size,’ and I got a fit of the giggles. She looked like she was on a slow cook in the sunshine; every time she moved, I half expected to get a whiff of roasting pork crackling…

Saturday 15 September

Han rang me up first thing this morning and asked me if I wanted to go ‘scrumping’ (???!) I thought scrumping was a sort of dance or something, so I was a bit disappointed when she told me it’s taking apples from someone’s garden but it’s not classed as stealing. Not sure how that works, but never mind.

Han has this old lady next door who lets Han pick apples from her tree. Han says it’s ever so handy having an old lady living next door, ’cos they can take her down to the DIY store with them and buy hammer drills and shelves and CD racks and the like with her 10 percent off pensioners’ card (that is, 10 percent off purchases, not 10 percent off pensioners). Anyway, in return for using her discount card, this old lady asks Han to go round every autumn and collect apples from her tree ’cos she can’t do it. So Han was exaggerating when she said it was scrumping, ’cos it’s nothing more exciting than doing an old dear a favour, really. I didn’t think EMOs did that sort of thing!

We took Joe with us ’cos we could hang him by his arms from the branches, pull on his legs, and make all the apples fall down. Result! We managed to pick over 20 lbs. of apples in the end, so we shared them out amongst ourselves, but when I took my 8 lbs. home and triumphantly presented them to Mum, all I got was a sour look from her and a grumpy ‘Do I look like I’ve got time to peel all those?’ for my efforts. This is typical! The government’s always telling us to eat more fruit, and all I get is grief for trying improve my family’s dietary habits.

Next time I’ll just throw the market’s
finest
apple pies at her and hope she feels a stab of guilt when I’m struck down with rickets by the time I’m 21.

Sunday 16 September

Had an emergency text off Matty telling me that Ben had dumped her. She wrote, ‘You understood him’ (did I??) and ‘Maybe you can tell me why he broke my heart.’ Was tempted to text back and say, ‘You’re well off out of it, love, I thought he was a prat,’ but instead I sent her my sympathies and agreed to meet her in town so she could cry over me.

When I met her she looked like she’d already been crying. She told me he’d finished with her ’cos he thought he was too young to be tied down to one person, and that he wanted to ‘play the field’ a bit. She kept banging on about what a fabulous kisser he was (must have missed that one) and what an even more fabulous shag he was (
definitely
missed that one—thank God!). Then she said, ‘You must know what I’m going through ’cos he broke your heart too, didn’t he?’ I didn’t have the guts to tell her that the only person capable of breaking my heart was Han, and that the memory of kissing Ben was so bloody awful that it still makes me shudder just to think of it. Instead I put on my caring face, nodded in all the right places, and thanked God for my Hannah!

I think she felt a little bit better by the time she left me, ’cos she’d replaced tear-soaked eyes with a determined stare, and had started talking about binning everything ‘that measly little bastard’ had ever given her. I assumed she meant Ben. Hell hath no fury and all that…

Monday 17 September

Caroline told me today that she’d had something called a Brazilian wax done at the weekend. I had no idea what this was, so asked Han at lunchtime. Apparently it’s when you have all your
lady hair
waxed off, except for a neat little vertical line, rather like a goatee beard. I’m not surprised I didn’t know this; I was fourteen before I found out what a scrotum was…

Brazilians sound like too much hard work to me! I mean, Caroline had to go to a beauty parlour place to get it done! Can you imagine the shame? I go to the hairdressers to have a trim and feel my scalp reddening with the hairdresser’s every touch. No, it would be far easier, less embarrassing and, most importantly, far cheaper, just to shave everything off with your Venus and draw a neat line with a Berol marker. Granted, it wouldn’t be permanent, but it would save a few pennies. Maybe I should approach some entrepreneurs with the idea?

Tuesday 18 September

Had a dream last night about Brazilians and Susan Divine. It wasn’t pretty! She handed me a pair of garden shears and told me she wanted some
Lady Topiary
then hopped up on a snooker table and started knitting scarves.
She wasn’t wearing anything either. It was one of those dreams that stays with you all day; every time you shut your eyes, you get images of it, like it’s burned into the back of your eyelids or something. I couldn’t look at her during History today, and I shall
never
think of hedge-trimming in the same way ever again!!

Wednesday 19 September

Am trying to really knuckle down in school at the moment. It’s less than nine months until our exams start and they’re really pushing us in classes. Tonight I had three lots of homework to do, plus stuff for my English coursework, AND we’re having a mock test in Spanish next week so I gotta study for that. It’s not fair. I bet even Einstein wasn’t pushed as much at school as we are!

Thursday 20 September

Susan Divine asked to borrow my ruler today. After getting over the initial fear that she was going to try and garrotte me with it or something, I tried to drum up a conversation with her. I noticed she had the name ‘Benji’ tattooed on the fingers of her left hand, each letter on a finger and her thumb, so I asked her if Benji was her boyfriend. She glared at me and said, ‘No. He’s my dog. He died,’ so I asked her what he died of and she glared at me again and said, ‘electrocuted’.

I told Han, Matty, Caroline, and Ems about it at lunchtime and we nearly coughed up a lung laughing. Ems said she didn’t know what was funnier—that she had her dog’s name tattooed on her fingers, or that Benji’d gotten electrocuted. Han said it was just as well it had a short name like Benji so it could fit on her fingers, and not a long name ’cos she’d have to have it tattooed somewhere bigger. I said she could have it tattooed round her belly ’cos that’s sure as hell big enough, and everyone fell about laughing again.

I don’t think I’ll bother having my dog’s name tattooed on me. I think if I walked around with the name Barbara on me it would cause a few raised eyebrows!

Friday 21 September