The Worst Girlfriend in the World (12 page)

This wasn’t just Louis accepting my friend request. He knew who I was. And who I was was all right with him so he’d added me as a friend. This was huge. It was epic. This was the start of something. I knew it. I could feel it deep in my bones.

Louis had four hundred and fifty-seven Facebook friends but that didn’t deter me. Probably half of those were bands or brands and not real people that he knew on a deep, personal level.

I didn’t even notice the train stopping and people getting on or getting off because my phone had suddenly become a magical device; a key that unlocked a treasure trove that was full of pictures of Louis. Correction. It was full of bare-chested pictures of Louis, which I pored over. Correction. I perved over them. He had this ridge of muscle on either side of his hips, which made me feel funny. Not as funny as the little trail of hair that disappeared into the low-slung waistband of his skinny jeans.

Alas, once I’d finished staring slack-jawed at the many, many,
many
photos of Louis half-naked, there were many, many,
many
photos of Louis with the gaggle of Desperadettes who dogged his every move. There they were, snuggling up to Louis as they hung out in strange bedrooms in silly hats. Chased after each other on the beach as the sun went down. Drank cider around a bonfire. I wanted to be part of that world, I thought, as I moved on to the next photo.

It was Sneering Studio Tech, or Francis. I’d almost managed to repress the memory that we sort of had the same first name. Unlike Louis or Thee Desperadettes, he did not take a good Facebook shot. He could only look at the camera with arms folded and a scowl.

He did give good scowl though – really committed to his mardy expression and there were girls who liked the sneering thing. Dora seemed to anyway and just as if I’d called her name, she was suddenly standing over me.

‘Franny?’

With great difficulty I managed to tear my eyes away from my phone. ‘Hey. Did you have enough money to get all the fabric you needed?’

‘Mattie subbed me the extra,’ she said distractedly, because she was busy pulling a reluctant Sage forward. ‘So, this is really stupid because you’re both cool and the five of us should be hanging out together and so you two really need to sort stuff out, OK?’

The four of them, Dora, Matt, Paul and Sage, had formed a foursome over the last couple of weeks. They all hung out together and as Sage had made it painfully obvious that she didn’t like me, I’d never really moved past the small-talk stage with Matt and Paul. So, none of it was OK, but Dora pushed Sage down into the seat next to me, then she sat opposite us and rested her feet on the armrest nearest to the aisle, effectively blocking either of us from standing up and walking away.

‘Any time you want to start chatting this out,’ Dora prompted us.

I have to admit I was curious as to what Sage’s specific beef with me was. ‘Right, who was he?’ I asked her.

She scowled. If Sneering Studio Tech had been there, he would have sued for copyright. ‘What?’

‘Your boyfriend? Your brother? Please don’t say it was your dad.’

‘What are you on about?’ she demanded. Sage was really beautiful, even when she was giving me bitchface. Not sexy beautiful like Alice. Or pretty like a handful of other girls that I knew. Sage was proper beautiful. She had gasp-inducing cheekbones, elegantly arched brows and a wide mouth that was usually lifted in a glorious, beaming smile to reveal even white teeth. She was tall and thin and elegant and generally looked as if she should be striding down a Milan catwalk dressed in Gucci from head to toe rather than sitting on the Morecambe-to-Merrycliffe train. ‘What about my dad?’

Sage was determined to make me spell it out. ‘Obviously Alice put the moves on a guy that you were seeing or one of your mates was seeing. But that’s Alice. That’s what she does. She’s my best friend, but you can’t hate on me by association, I haven’t done anything to
you.
So, you can keep giving me the death glares if you like, but it’s ridiculous.’

‘This has nothing to do with your friend, Alice, though, quite frankly, yeah, I’m going to judge anyone who hangs out with her,’ Sage said scathingly. ‘But this has to do with you and me and my gold dress.’

‘What gold dress? I’ve never even seen you wear a gold dress.’

Sage normally wore skinny jeans and big clompy boots, though once she’d totally rocked a jumpsuit. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know. The gold brocade dress my mum took into your shop for alterations. I’d pinned it. I wrote down really clearly what I wanted done and…’

This was actually starting to ring some bells. Quite loud bells. I tried to assume a clueless yet innocent expression.

‘… when I went in to collect it, the owner said that they had a policy that items that had been in the shop for three months or longer were disposed of. It was barely three months! It was, three months and half a day and then Raj admitted that you’d marked the date on the calendar and taken the dress home with you as soon as the three months was up.’

Oh, yeah.
That
dress. ‘OK, well, you didn’t want that dress altered. You wanted that dress totally remade. I had to unpick all the seams, take it up, take it in, take off the sleeves and redo the armholes,’ I said hotly. ‘Mrs Chatterjee told your mum that it was too big a job but your mum begged and pleaded and said that you were desperate.’

‘I was! I paid forty quid for that dress from a vintage shop in Leeds!’

‘I’d
never
pay that much for vintage. Especially if it didn’t even fit me,’ I said, because Sage had moved closer and technically she was all up in my face and I hated when people got all up in my face. ‘You were ripped off.’

‘You. Stole. My. Dress,’ Sage growled and Matthew and Paul, who’d been unashamedly listening to every word, held up imaginary handbags and Dora
tsked
.

‘Ladies, please,’ she said. ‘This isn’t about blame.’

‘Good, because I’m blameless. I spent
hours
working on your dress even though Mrs Chatterjee completely underestimated how much time it would take so I earned twenty-five quid for, like, three days’ work, because I get piece rate. That’s, like, slave labour. Then you left the dress mouldering in the shop for over three months!’ I’d forgotten how angry I’d been about the gold brocade dress but it was all coming back to me.

‘Three months and a half-day!’

‘That’s still over three months, so you couldn’t have wanted to wear the dress that badly.’ I folded my arms. ‘The shop policy was printed very clearly on the back of your receipt.’

Sage looked at Dora imploringly like she was Judge Judy. ‘Um, well, I guess possession is nine-tenths of the law,’ Dora said. ‘Though I don’t really know what that means.’

‘What do I have to do to get my dress back?’ Sage asked sullenly.

I hadn’t even worn the dress. It was really scratchy and I’d been planning to put a lining in but I hadn’t quite figured out how to do linings. Also gold didn’t work so well with my complexion, but Sage was being such a bitch about it and acting like she had the moral high ground when she
so
didn’t that I was tempted to tell her that I’d been using it to line the cat’s litter tray. But we didn’t have a cat and I didn’t want to spend every day with Sage all up in my face.

‘Pay me a fair rate for the work I did,’ I said. She opened her mouth like she was about to protest, but I glared her into silence. ‘It was really good work. I had to
hand-stitch
the armholes in the end.’

Sage rested her chin on her chest. ‘This is why I’m doing this course; so I can alter my own vintage without being ripped off.’

‘I’m not ripping you off. If you’d picked up the dress within three months, you’d have had the benefit of my bloody good alteration skills at a fraction of what they’re worth.’ I was bored with talking about this. ‘But you didn’t and here we are and you could have just talked to me about it instead of treating me like I had really terrible BO.’

‘Well, it’s just… I’ve had nights I didn’t sleep I was so mad about the dress and I didn’t pick it up because I used to go to the grammar school in Lytham St Annes and I spend weekends at my dad’s in Leeds and the shop was never open when I was around.’ Sage scowled her hardest scowl yet. ‘When I asked my mum, she said I treated her like a lady’s maid.’

‘God, mums always say stuff like that,’ Dora remarked and Matthew and Paul agreed with her and I made similar noises, though it was the other way round with my mum. I felt more like staff than a daughter.

Finally, after some tense negotiations, we agreed that Sage would give me an extra twenty-five pounds for the dress, a fiver a week, and I would hand over the dress once payment was complete. ‘Most bloody expensive dress I’ve ever bought,’ she muttered, then she asked me if I’d made a whole item of clothing before or if I just knew how to alter things.

‘Well, I made this,’ I said, gesturing at the miniskirt I was wearing. It was nothing special. Just two pieces of denim sewn together, hemmed and…

‘Oh my God, you put a zip in? How do you even know how to do that?’

‘It’s easier than you’d think.’ Then I told them that there were videos on the internet of people doing all sorts of complicated sewing stuff and we talked about making clothes all the way back to Merrycliffe.

It was amazing. It was liberating. I was finally with people who spoke the same language as me. Who knew that when I said YSL, I meant Yves Saint Laurent. Who got the difference between being on-trend and being directional. And they were as confused about seam allowance as I was.

Alice understood me in the way that you only could when you’d been best friends with someone for as long as we had. When their face and their dreams and their secret fears were as familiar to you as your own, but I’d never had any fashion friends before and I thought that I might just have found some. Alice was going to kill me, but if I kept my college stuff separate from my Alice stuff, then maybe she never had to find out.

‘See you tomorrow then,’ Sage said and as we walked up the road from the station, Dora asked for my phone number and Matthew and Paul had already added me on Facebook.

I’d been down for so long that being up and positive felt strange but it also felt really good. It felt good for the time it took to check my phone and see that Louis had added another new friend on Facebook.

It was Alice.

‘I don’t know why you keep going on and on about this so-called best friends code,’ Alice said, after admitting that she’d sent Louis a Facebook friend request. Even worse, by the time I rang her to ask her what the hell she was playing at she’d written,
Hey handsome, thanks for the ketchup. Must do it again some time
, on Louis’s wall. ‘I should think it must be against the best friend code that you’ve just made up, to rub my nose in it that you’ve got a whole bunch of new friends who you’d rather hang out with.’

‘What new friends? What am I rubbing your nose in?’

We were sitting on the wall outside the sandwich shop, which was an equal distance from our two houses. It was starting to get too cold to sit on walls, but when I shivered but it was nothing to do with the chill, but more to do with Alice waving her iPhone in my face. ‘These four new friends you added on Facebook! And the hilarious in-jokes on your wall about seam allowance. I don’t even know what seam allowance is but it sounds really, really boring.’

‘It is really boring.’ I paused. Shut my eyes. Took a deep breath. ‘You can’t expect me to spend all day sharing a workroom with people and refuse to interact with them. It doesn’t mean I like you any less. What you and me have is special, so stop being so stupid.’

It was Alice’s turn to not say anything. I could see all the emotions slugging it out on her face; fear, doubt, sadness and finally she ended up at defensive, stuck out her chin and decided to stay there.

‘No, what’s stupid is that you’ve had a crush on Louis for four years, but you’ve never done anything about it and that makes Louis fair game.’

‘He’s not fair game and you
know
it,’ I said to her in a low voice because I didn’t trust myself to turn up my volume knob. ‘OK, maybe I’m overreacting if this is never going to go any further than you and Louis being friends on Facebook but be honest, do you want to take it further?’

Alice shook back her hair. ‘You’re being really unreasonable about this, Franny. You’ve never gone out with Louis or got off with him, or snogged him.’ She counted off on her fingers all the ways that I’d failed to connect with Louis on a meaningful level. ‘You can’t just place indefinite dibs on a guy, Franny. You’ve had
years
to make a move.’

‘I could hardly make a move when I was twelve, could I? That would have been wrong and gross.’

‘Yeah, but you could have made a move at any time over the last two years and you didn’t,’ Alice pointed out, like making a move on a boy was the easiest thing in the world, which it was… to her.

How could you explain your irrational but crippling fear of rejection to someone who had never been rejected? But it wasn’t just about that. It wasn’t even about me and Louis, or, God forbid, Alice and Louis. It was about me and Alice. It was about
us
. Our friendship.

‘You know how I feel about Louis.’ I put my hand on her arm, because I had to get through to Alice, reach out to her, remind her that this was me. ‘There’s a whole town of older boys, why do you have to pick
him
?’