Diary of a Crush: French Kiss (18 page)

I started to worry. Really worry. About my reputation being in ruins thanks to Mia. About how I didn’t really know Dylan at all. Like, I knew that he makes funny little snuffly noises when he sleeps but I didn’t even know if he had any brothers or sisters. But what I really worried about was whether I’d forced Dylan into going out with me when he hadn’t really wanted to. And, like, if we were dating did that mean that we’d only hang out as a couple, instead of being mates as well? I didn’t want to be Dylan’s girlfriend if it meant that I had to stop being his friend. By the time we reached Calais, I’d practically convinced myself that Dylan and I were going to split up before the end of the day. I was in the grip of a major depression. As the coach rolled into the ferry’s bowels and came to a stop, Dylan opened his eyes.

‘I needed that,’ he yawned. ‘I was so tired.’ He stood up and stretched, ignoring complaints that he was blocking the aisle. ‘I’m starving,’ he announced. ‘Are you lot coming?’

Shona and Paul murmured agreement and followed Dylan off the coach. I leant back against the window and then catching the annoyed look in Tania’s eyes as she stood by the driver’s seat, I slid out of the seat and trudged towards the exit.

‘I wouldn’t worry about Dylan if I were you, Edie,’ Tania said to me with a smile, as we walked up the steps that led to the saloon. ‘I think you’ve managed to find yourself a good one there.’

‘How did you know?’ I gasped.

‘Oh, I was young once,’ said Tania dramatically, in that patronising way that old people do. ‘Seriously, Edie, I think Dylan, despite his cool exterior, has got a good heart. He’ll look after you and, Lord knows, you need somebody to!’

‘No, I don’t,’ I said mock-sulkily. Then a really hideous thought popped into my head. ‘So, Tania, did you have a Dylan-like boyfriend when you were my age and please don’t say it was Martyn?!’

‘Ah, that would be telling,’ she teased and I felt a bit guilty for thinking such mean thoughts about her, though I still reckoned that she could do with a well-fitting support bra. ‘Now, get out of here and try not to fall overboard or anything.’

It’s funny how people that you don’t really know, or even like particularly, can tap into what you’re thinking. My little chat with Tania had made me feel a bit better. Maybe I was just worrying about nothing. I was going to find Dylan and the others but I passed a snack bar and I got side-tracked. After all they were selling chocolate, proper Cadbury’s chocolate, and it’d been five days since I’d had a bar of Dairy Milk…

I unwrapped my second bar and popped a chunk in my mouth. I’d had a quick look for the others but I couldn’t find them and the sight of people being sick (it was another rough crossing) was starting to put me off my choccy, so I’d decided to find a seat on the open deck. Last time I’d sat up here I never thought that I’d be going home as Dylan’s girlfriend. Mind you, I didn’t feel like Dylan’s girlfriend, I still felt like me; Edie Wheeler, who talked too much or not at all, had snogged four boys in her entire life and had £517 in her Post Office savings account.

‘Hey!’ I looked up to see Dylan standing in front of me.

‘Hey yourself,’ I replied.

‘You look like you’re deep in thought,’ he commented, sitting down on the bench next to me. ‘What were you thinking about?’

‘How much money I’ve got in my Post Office account,’ I said vaguely. ‘Do you want some chocolate?’

I handed him my started-on bar and watched as he broke off a couple of chunks.

‘Dylan?’

‘Hmmmm?’

‘Do you think we can still be friends even though we’re going out with each other?’ I asked him.

‘Why? Don’t you?’ he said cautiously, angling a ‘what is she on?’ look at me.

‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I hope so. We’ll still do stuff together like go and see bands won’t we? And go to the cinema and hang out with Shona? It won’t change anything, will it?’

Dylan lifted one of my hands to his lips and kissed my fingers. ‘Look, things have to change,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t mean they’ll have to change for the worse. It’s like I said last night, I think we were going out with each other all the time and we never even realised it. We’ve just made it official.’

‘But we’re more than just friends who kiss each other?’ I asked him hesitantly. ‘And I don’t just want to be your girlfriend either.’

‘But you’re not just my girlfriend,’ protested Dylan. ‘Hey, you’re my Edie! You could never be anything else. That’s why I’m so into you.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

He rubbed his knuckles against my cheek and grinned.

‘I wanted to kiss you so badly when we were going to France on the ferry. You know, when I stroked your face,’ he confessed. ‘Didn’t you realise?’

‘Nah!’ I told him, my heart suddenly feeling so light that it could have been lifted away by the wind. ‘I just thought you were admiring my delicate bone structure.’

I smiled at Dylan and he smiled back at me. Our eyes met and I leaned forward to brush my lips against his. Dylan tasted of chocolate and coffee. Just along the horizon, the distant white cliffs of Dover came into view and I wondered if things could ever be the same again.

I started writing
Diary of a Crush
fourteen years ago.

At the time I was Entertainment Editor on
J17
, a teen mag for teenage girls with plenty of attitude and a fondness for indie boys.

Every month I would write an emotional feature about boys or relationships or snogging (usually a combination of all three), until I could take it no longer and in a features meeting pitched writing a fictional account of a relationship: from crush to kiss to going steady, just because I was so tired of dispensing advice on how to make spoddy boys who probably weren’t worthy of our readers fall madly in love with them.

My editor, Ally Oliver, greenlighted it; probably because I was clutching my hair and saying, ‘I don’t have it in me to write another snogging feature.’ So off I went back to my desk and began to write the 1800 words that had been allocated to the piece.

I remember sitting there thinking about my days at college where I studied for my A-levels after being asked to leave the really strict girls’ school where I’d done my GCSEs.

Going to college was when I really blossomed. I found a sense of independence, new friends and a love for the nineteen-year-old boys studying for their Foundation Art diploma. It was from this experience that Edie, a shy sixteen year old starting college, and Dylan, the tousle-haired art boy who catches her eye and her heart, were formed.

I’d only written for magazines and had no idea what I was doing. All I knew was that I was having huge amounts of fun (not to mention wish fulfilment) and
Diary of a Crush
was born.

But a couple of days later when Ally asked me how I was getting on, the news wasn’t good. ‘I’ve written 4000 words and they haven’t even snogged yet,’ I wailed.

Ally agreed to run
Diary of a Crush
over a few issues and so began a serial that lasted for more than three years. The
J17
readers completely embraced Edie, no matter how whiny she got, and her motley collection of friends. It was a lovely way to become an author.

What are gathered in these books are the monthly columns, plus the novellas I would write that were given away free with
J17
each summer (originally called
French Kiss
,
Losing It
and
American Dream
).

The bulk of the material here was written as monthly columns, so I would bang out 1200 words in an afternoon, then go to the subs and art departments and dare them to cut a single word. I took a week off each time I wrote a novella.

Before this, I’d never written fiction. Never been on a course or even read a book for budding novel writers. Instead, I learned on the job as I wrote
Diary of a Crush
and so I think Edie grows as a person as I grew as a writer.

The columns were originally tweaked to be turned into novels and with each subsequent edition I’ve made changes to some of the popular culture references, because mooning over Leonardo DiCaprio and, er, Blazin’ Squad is not really an option these days. They were also originally written in the days before teenagers had mobile phones and long, long, long before Facebook or BlackBerry Messenger were invented.

I’ve also learned a lot more about book writing since then and there were some unforgivably bad sentence structure and syntax crimes going on that I’ve corrected. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d let them slip through!

So while the trilogy hasn’t been rewritten, I’ve given it a nip and a tuck and a general tidy up for maximum reading pleasure. I hope I kept to the spirit in which I originally wrote
Diary of a Crush
and I hope you enjoy reading about Edie and Dylan as much as I loved telling their story.

Sarra Manning, London, 2013.

Turn the page for a sneak peek at the next instalment from Edie’s journal:

KISS AND MAKE UP
 

I have this photograph of me and Dylan tucked into my diary. We’re standing on the deck of the ferry on our way back from France in a force-ten gale, so his tufty dark brown hair is even more dishevelled than usual and that tender smile of his is diffusing the sharp lines of his face. Dylan’s got his arm around my shoulders and he’s squinting down at me and smiling fondly like I’m the greatest thing in the world. Even greater than our recent discovery that chopping up chocolate chip cookies and scooping them into vanilla ice cream will give you twice the sugar rush you normally get from eating them straight.

He certainly looks happy to be my boyfriend.

But over the last week I’ve made the startling discovery that having a boyfriend is nothing like I imagined. No. Scratch that. Having Dylan as a boyfriend is
exactly
how I imagined it. Or thought it might be in my worst nightmares.

All that stuff he came out with on the boat about how being boyfriend and girlfriend was going to be like we were before but even better? And we’d hang out with each other like we did before but there’d be all this amazing kissing and touching and, I don’t know, boyfriendly behaviour? Well, not so much.

Because now that Dylan’s my boyfriend, I have to handle his weirdness head-on. His weirdness has, like, rules. Not that he’s given me a written list but if he did, it would go something like this:

Some of it is good. A lot of it is good. And my kissing technique has drastically improved with all the extra practice I’m getting but Dylan was way more affectionate when we were bickering mates.

I was sitting by the piddly college fountain with Shona when Dylan sauntered over to us.

‘God, Edie,’ Shona muttered when she caught sight of Dylan, ‘you can’t be planning to go off and make out
again
. You look like you’ve had collagen lip implants as it is.’

‘Shut up,’ I said plaintively. ‘You make me feel like I’m just a big kiss slut.’

She arched an eyebrow. ‘Oh, I must be getting you confused with someone else then.’

Then Dylan was there. ‘Which hand?’ he drawled, putting his arms behind his back. My heart leapt. Had he bought me a present?

‘The left?’

Dylan gave me a huge, sunshiney grin. ‘That was the right answer,’ he said, swinging a key in front of my eyes.

‘What’s that?’ I asked, though it was pretty obvious what it was, but I felt like I needed some clarification.

‘It’s the key to the darkroom. You coming?’

‘Who said romance was dead?’ I heard Shona hiss to no-one in particular as I jumped off the wall and followed Dylan in the direction of the art block.

I had been planning to tell Dylan a few truths, I really had, but once we got into the darkroom he immediately reached for me and I kind of forgot. Dylan had me wedged against the enlarger so I couldn’t move but I didn’t want to. I felt sort of boneless and lethargic like Pudding does when she’s all sleepy and lying in the sun. Dylan’s tongue was causing havoc everywhere it went when we were suddenly interrupted by the door banging open.

‘Sod off,’ snarled Dylan, not bothering to turn round, which was a pretty stupid thing to do. Or at least that’s what Martyn, our Photography tutor, said when he proceeded to give us a major, major bollocking. With, like, knobs on. No pun intended.

Martyn frogmarched me to my personal tutor who sent me home for the rest of the afternoon. Which actually is my kind of punishment.

As I stood outside the college gates applying some Vaseline to my lips, which seem to be permanently desensitised from over-use these days, Dylan caught up with me.

‘Soooo, are we going back to yours?’ he purred.

‘No! I was
this
close to being sent home with a note,’ I snapped. ‘You know my parents don’t trust us to be alone.’

It’s true. They don’t seem overjoyed about me dating Dylan and he’s forbidden from my room unless the door’s open. It hasn’t occurred to them that we could get up to all sorts of inappropriate touching in plenty of other venues but I’m not going to be the one to shatter their illusions.

‘Oh, c’mon Edie,’ he said, nudging me. ‘I don’t want to go home and Martyn told me to get out of his sight for the rest of the day.’

‘Well, OK, then,’ I conceded. ‘I need to talk to you anyway.’

‘That sounds ominous,’ Dylan said out of the side of his mouth but then we spent the rest of the walk to my house in silence, which hacked me off.

It was like Dylan had forgotten how to speak to me.

‘What the hell is your problem?’ I blurted out the minute we got through the front door. ‘Why aren’t you talking to me?’

‘I am,’ he protested, following me up the stairs. ‘You’re the one who’s not talking to me.’

‘You’re treating me like a… a… a kiss slut!’ I said furiously.

Dylan snorted. ‘Like, you don’t treat me that way too.’

Then he sat down next to me on the bed and put an arm round my shoulders. ‘Look, Eeds, this is a bit weird for both of us. So, what do you want to talk about then?’

I shrugged. ‘Stuff. Like, y’know, stuff about each other. You never tell me what’s going on with you.’

‘The only thing going on with me is you,’ Dylan snarked. ‘There’s nothing else to tell you about.’

If there was nothing else to talk about there was only one thing else to do: investigate each other’s mouths with our tongues.

Two minutes later we were rolling about on my bed. I think it was when we landed on the floor with a loud thud that my mum realised that the house wasn’t empty. She came charging up the stairs and banished Dylan from the house forever for daring to lay his evil boy hands on her innocent, virginal daughter. It was all I could do to stop her from grounding me.

I didn’t speak to Dylan today. I think the credit had run out on his phone. Which led to the revelation that I didn’t have Dylan’s home number. He always, always calls me. And that’s weird. It’s very weird. It’s a whole world of weird. I’ve known Dylan for more than six months now. Been on intimate terms with his mouth for a little less time than that so you’d think I’d have his home phone number. I could have done the whole telephone directory thing but instead I went round to Shona’s.

‘So, are you going to have a go at me for not telling you about Dylan’s dysfunctional family?’ she wanted to know, a tad belligerently, when I asked her for his number.

I was like, woah!, but reined it back in. ‘Look, I wouldn’t expect you to betray Dylan’s confidence,’ I said sweetly. ‘You’re his oldest mate.’ Which was actually her cue to explain what the hell she meant by her strange and cryptic remark about Dylan’s family. His surname was strange, Kowalski (I think it’s Polish or Czech or even Ukrainian or something), and I allowed myself a small daydream that Dylan’s parents were dissidents from the former Eastern bloc and had come over to England to start a new life with their little baby Dylan away from the harsh totalitarian regime and the jackboot of Communist oppression, but I think that was heavily influenced by the module I was studying in History.

I came back from a vision of Dylan’s very young, very beautiful mother shielding a baby Dylan away from a granite-faced Communist soldier to find Shona looking at me with an exasperated expression on her face. ‘Did you enjoy the little trip you just took with the fairies?’

‘Dylan hasn’t said anything about having a dysfunctional family,’ I said grumpily. ‘In fact, he hasn’t even admitted to having a family. I was beginning to think he was hatched in an art boy factory.’

Shona fiddled nervously with some of the piles of junk on top of her bedside cabinet. ‘Sorry,’ she muttered. ‘Sometimes it’s hard being stuck in the middle of you two.’

Then Shona started telling me about the eye-raising stuff (can I just say, ewwwww?) she was getting up to with Paul and how she reckoned Mia was behind these weird phone calls she was getting and I forgot about ringing Dylan.

By the time I got home, it was really late and The Mothership was fuming. So, like, what else is new? She and Dad were heading off to the grandparents in Brighton for a long weekend (thank the sweet baby Jesus) and they were convinced I had Dylan stashed down the road somewhere and was just waiting for them to leave so he could enter the house and violate me on the new IKEA rug. She said as much. When your mother doesn’t want to have the sex talk with you any more but instead wants to talk to you about the possibility that you might have sex on her soft furnishings, it’s a watershed moment in any girl’s life. I know I’ll remember it fondly for many years to come.

Anyway after much foot-stamping and gagging noises, which I’ve found work much better than rational debate, I managed to persuade them that I hadn’t seen Dylan all day and they left. Then they came back to harangue me with instructions about the boiler and not forgetting to give Pudding her worming tablets. Then they left again. Time for some fish fingers and Mum’s
Downton Abbey
box-set, I think.

Oh God, Dylan’s on his way round. I wasn’t going to let him but when he heard that the ’rents were off the premises for forty-eight hours there was no stopping him. He didn’t exactly ask if he could stay over but then it’s 10.30 pm now…

Oh, hell, that’s him at the door now…