My Secret Rockstar Boyfriend (29 page)

‘Actually she was too worried about me to be as petty as that,’ Seymour says sanctimoniously, in what I suspect is a whopping great lie. ‘Although I must admit, it’s
given me a great excuse over these A levels – if I fail, I can blame you and the fact that you broke my heart and ruined my life.’

‘Seymour . . . I mean, fine, it’s my fault, whatever – but I have to say, I did get the feeling even before all this that things weren’t exactly great between us any
more. I felt like, well, like you’d kind of gone off me anyway?’

Maybe I’m trying to make myself feel better, but I honestly don’t believe that Seymour’s broken-hearted over me at all. It seems like something else.

He doesn’t reply and manages to look even more awkward.

‘Seymour . . .’ I try again, and then I decide to be brave and voice the question that’s been nagging at the back of my head for a long time now, ‘are you gay?’

‘No! For god’s sake, Chew. Do you think
everyone
is gay? Why would you even ask me that?’

‘Because you never wanted to have sex with me and it always felt more like we were just mates really.’

I actually feel better for having said this out loud. Finally. This issue has secretly been eating away at me for so long. When we were going out together I kept trying to think of subtle ways
to bring it up, but I always chickened out.

‘It’s not me, it’s
you
,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry, but if you’re going to make me say it . . . I’m not gay, but I just never really fancied
you. I thought you were really cool and I liked hanging out with you. It was easy, I suppose. You’re good fun, but you’ve got to admit you’re not exactly a sexy girlfriend
type.’

‘Thank goodness,’ I can’t help snapping. ‘And I thought you were so enlightened.’

‘It’s just . . . Don’t let this go to your head or anything, but I thought that going out with you would make people take me more seriously. I mean, you’re so
different
and you do your blog and everything. Everyone thinks I’m just this good-looking idiot and they don’t really take my band seriously. And you and I had a laugh
together, so I thought—’

‘Really, Seymour,’ I cut in, ‘you can stop talking now. I’m kind of sorry I asked. You’re basically saying that going out with a non-hottie made you look cleverer.
Well, hopefully you can dine out on the story of getting dumped for Jackson Griffith for years now, so everyone’s a winner.’

‘Look, Chew . . .’ Seymour’s practically twitching; I swear he’s turning into Woody Allen before my eyes, ‘it’s been easy just to blame this on you, but I
have a confession as well. That night at my gig when you left early, something happened with me and Sophie – you remember, my bass player’s sister? So it wasn’t all your fault.
You might as well know that now.’

Not so long ago, this news would have convinced me that every bad thing I have ever thought about myself is true – I’m too fat, not pretty enough, a total idiot. Now I’m
actually relieved in a way – at least it explains why he’s been behaving like such an arse. Well, even more of an arse than usual – as I am only now fully realizing. I’m
surprised at the wave of relief I feel.

‘Well, she seemed very nice. She’s awfully pretty,’ I say. ‘Is she your girlfriend now?’

‘No way.’ He shudders at the very thought. ‘I don’t think I want another of those for a while. I mean, who knows what’s going to happen once we leave college? I
might have way too much other stuff going on to want to be tied down.’

‘Have you and your mum come to any agreement about what you’re going to do?’

‘Well, the compromise is I’ve said I’ll try and get a place through clearing at one of the unis this side of London, so I can live at home and commute – that way I can
keep the band going. But I don’t know if I’ll get the grades to be honest. The exams have made me realize I didn’t work hard enough – they were a lot tougher than I
expected.’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. Hopefully you’ll get the grades to go where you want to go.’

He brightens right up. ‘It doesn’t really matter – my parents are paying for me to go to Thailand for a month in August, so I’m not thinking about it yet. I’ve
always fancied going travelling. And even if I don’t get in anywhere, I’ll probably be able to get a job working for my dad. Either way I can still concentrate on the band. That’s
the important thing.’

I don’t know what to say to any of this. I kind of want to laugh.

He clears his throat ostentatiously. ‘Actually, I was thinking, maybe you can hit up Jackson Griffith for a support slot or something? He’s could at least listen to our demo. He
does
owe me one, after all. What with him stealing my girlfriend and everything.’

I can’t control it any longer. At this I burst out laughing, and I cannot stop. Even though Seymour is looking at me like it’s really not funny. In fact, I think he might actually
hate me and I don’t care even a tiny bit. How either of us managed to go out with the other for as long as we did is utterly beyond me.

‘Well, thanks for the tea,’ I say, as soon as I have stopped snorting through my nose and regained the power of speech. ‘I guess I’ll see you around. Good luck for your
results.’

He doesn’t move as I stand up to leave.

‘I’d say, “You too”,’ he informs me, ‘but there’s probably not much point, as I heard you didn’t even do the last English exam. So . . . see you
around, I suppose.’

I can’t help but wonder if Seymour has always been like this and I never noticed, or if it’s just everything that’s been going on lately that’s making him behave like a
sulky, spoiled arsehole.

Something that Nishi said to me once springs into my head – you can’t ever tell what someone’s really like until things go wrong. Some wise old cliché about not being
able to tell how strong a teabag is until you put it in hot water.

I have to let it go. It’s none of my business what he thinks of me; that’s the point. At least I can say I tried.

Never Complain, Never Explain? Nice Idea But Not for Me

All I ever wanted was to be a writer. I’ve had my eyes on that particular prize for as long as I can remember. I have always loved
books;

I have always written everything down; I never had any other ideas or future career plans. It’s been my one focus for as long as I can remember.

Luckily for me, all the other stuff – family, friends, having a life – didn’t take up too much extra room. My family was only my mum. The only friend who
ever mattered was Nishi, who I have known since I was tiny, so we have a shorthand that makes everything easy. In fact, for a girl who loves drama on the page, I even managed to get my first
boyfriend in the most non-dramatic, non-hysteric fashion imaginable. Writing was the thing.

Until about two months ago, when everything went just a little bit off track . . .

It all
started
with writing – this blog you’re reading now. It’s a throwaway medium, maybe, and I don’t write anything groundbreaking on
here; but I find it’s a good discipline. Besides, as we live in the future these days and the technology is there to make it happen, why not get my writing theoretically out there into the
world? Even if in practice it is only on a small scale.

My only readers were my mum, my best friend, her girlfriend and my boyfriend. Other than an occasional accidental tourist who had typed in an obscure Google search such as
‘foo fighters are rubbish’ or ‘weird teenage girl who hates radio 1 and loves leonard cohen’. It goes without saying that they usually left as soon as they’d
arrived.

Until the day that Jackson Griffith – pop star, noted hellraiser, possibly the sweetest boy I’ve ever met, some kind of a cross between a prince, a madman and
a puppy – became my newest reader. Turns out he had time on his hands after going through rehab the first time; plus he has an ego on him and isn’t averse to a little
self-googling.
⁷

I should admit right now that I used to have posters of Jackson Griffith on my bedroom wall when I was an immature yet precocious thirteen-year-old, so perhaps that goes
some way to explaining my brief spell of madness. In the beginning at least: once I met him, I’d have done the same whether he was the singer in a band or the shelf-stacker in a supermarket
– some people are just sort of shiny and special in a way that can’t be adequately explained. In my new and limited experience of pop stars, I’d say it’s a ‘chicken
and egg’ question, and it would be pretty much impossible to speculate on which comes first.

I don’t need to tell you the gory details of what happened. It’s all out there if you do want to know. Even if you’re not a tabloid reader, it is of
course all preserved on the Internet, for better or worse. The important bits you may not know are that: I fell out with my best friend; I totally let down my mum and ruined her romantic weekend
away with her nice new boyfriend; I completely messed up my English A level exam.

Of course, there’s always a plus side. Jackson has become a proper friend (albeit a long-distance one, which I think we can all agree is probably for the best). I
have become closer to my real friends. My mum and I are cool and it’s back on with her new man. My adventure had a point, even though it took me a while to see it.

I don’t regret any of it in the end, although it will probably be a source of sadness and embarrassment to me for evermore that I did not do as well as I could have
on my English A level – the one where I was Most Likely To Succeed, MY subject, the most important one.

However, I have to tell myself that the writing, the doing, is more important. I have more to write about than I ever have before. I feel so much older than I did only a
couple of months ago. If, despite my own folly, I am lucky
⁸
enough to get the university place I have always wanted – well, then I feel
better prepared for it than I would have been otherwise. Maybe this is ironic, given that it might mean I miss my chance, but it’s a risk worth taking. I know I can do it.

I now know that, whatever happens, I am a writer. I have always talked so much about wanting to be a writer, it never occurred to before that I might already be one. For
better or worse. Down to my bones.

So, this blog triggered the events that led to my downfall. To even things up, I’m hoping that it might also kick-start my climb back up.

I am writing, more than I ever have. I will keep writing. It is what I do. I will work hard at it no matter what, because if I don’t then I am not doing what I am
here to do.

That’s all I can do. I hope it’s enough.

Comments

Glad to know you, Ruby Tuesday. I’m proud of ya. j x

jackson_e_griffith

Hi, Jackson! Yeah, me too – well done, Chew.

Nishi_S

It looks to the naked eye as though we’re back where we started, but it all feels so different. I’m sitting opposite Anna and Nishi in Macari’s, and I am
eating a bowl of chips.

Some of the differences are immediately obvious. Anna has cut her hair off in a brutal crop that would make any other girl look like an ugly boy, but that makes her look like a cross between
Edie Sedgwick and a stray cat, or a cool version of Mia Farrow. She says it’s just because she suddenly fancied a change, but I like to think it represents the newly independent spirit she
has discovered since our Glastonbury adventure. The great irony is, if I ever tried to get a haircut like that, with my lack of cheekbones and collar bones or any other kind of defining bones, I
know that the scariest meathead boys my age would shout out in the street that I looked like an ‘ugly butch dyke’. Whereas if those same boys discovered that Anna was gay, they would
probably jump off a cliff.

By coincidence, this is the longest in at least three years I’ve been without dyeing my hair. The red is fading down to a dull orange and the bleach beneath it is growing out to dark-brown
roots. It looks horrendous, but it feels right somehow.

Every time I dyed my hair, I used to think that this would be the time I would find my perfect colour – the one that would make me pretty
and
interesting, the one that would sum
up my perfect style so that people would recognize me at first glance. I longed for a signature look that I could stick with for longer than a week, and I believed that every new possibility might
be exactly that. I even had my next new colour all picked out – a dark purple, a bit goth to take us into the autumn and represent my new maturity. I was all set to do it, but then I realized
that it would really make no difference to my life, or to my pale moon face. If that sounds depressing, it actually isn’t. The little plastic bottle is still in the bathroom cabinet, its
snap-off nozzle intact.

Of the three of us, Nishi is the only one who remains gloriously the same. She was always completely herself to begin with.

‘Come on, Nish. You’ve got to eat something,’ Anna urges, brow all furrowed.

Luckily – or not – unlike Nish, anxiety does not stop me from eating. All that’s left of my ‘brunch’ – although we all agreed that we hate that word and will
instead call it ‘lunkfast’ – is a single crust and a few manky brown chips left at the bottom of the grease-smeared bowl. Nishi has barely touched her toast, and is unlikely to
now it’s gone all cold and hard. She has consumed nothing but black coffee all morning, and is thus constantly jiggling one foot against the table leg, but we can’t bring ourselves to
tell her that it’s deeply annoying. She has already excused herself three times to go and be noisily sick in the cafe’s loo.

My usual gargantuan appetite aside, I genuinely feel quite calm. Maybe it’s because there’s no hope and I am past caring. Today is results day. We’re on our way into college to
find out our final scores. Nishi is practically chewing her fists off with fear. I know this seems excessive, given that she’s expected to do better than anyone – but it also means more
to her than it does to anyone else.