The Worst Girlfriend in the World (18 page)

I was all set for a top night moping under my duvet. I had
Steel Magnolias
and
Beaches
on the Sky planner because Mum watched them over and over again. I had loads of corn-based snacks and Polish chocolate from the 59p shop and I had a bottle of Lambrini that had been at the back of the fridge since last Christmas.

Even my mum had realised the Halloween party was kind of a big deal and expressed surprise that I wasn’t going. ‘I think I’m coming down with something,’ I insisted when she and Dad, who’d got in from Cornwall at the same time as I arrived home, wanted to know why I wasn’t heading straight for the bathroom. Normally I needed at least three hours’ prep to get ready for a Saturday night.

Going to bed yesterday had obviously done her a world of good because she even put a hand on my forehead to check my temperature in a maternal gesture, which didn’t come naturally to her. ‘You do feel a bit hot but that’s no surprise if you will wear that hat indoors.’ She folded her arms and tried to look sympathetic. ‘Tania called and told me what happened at the salon yesterday. Said to give her a ring and fix a time to come in for the eyelash extensions.’

‘I’m
never
setting foot in that place ever again,’ I muttered.

Dad, who was watching the football highlights in the lounge, shouted, ‘It’s only hair, kid. You’ll look back on this in a couple of years and laugh about it.’ That only went to show how little he understood.

‘Have you spoken to Alice?’ Mum asked and I hadn’t because after I’d been getting texts from her every five minutes saying that she was sorry and wanted to make it up to me, Raj had shown me how to download this app so I could block her number from my BlackBerry.

‘No! Stop asking me questions. I don’t feel well. I’m going to bed. I’m not home if anyone calls or comes round,’ I snapped and Dad told me not to use that tone of voice but whatever, I was halfway up the stairs by then.

I was lying on my bed in my leopard-print onesie watching
Beaches
and not even able to choke down any corn-based snacks when there was a gentle tap at the door.

‘I told you that I didn’t want to be disturbed,’ I bellowed, not that either of my parents ever listened to a single word that came out of my mouth, because the door slowly opened and then, to my horror, Sage and Dora were in my room.

Corn-based snacks flew everywhere as I yanked the quilt over my bare head. ‘What the hell! Get out!’

‘I’m not getting out,’ Sage said. ‘And you are not bailing on us. Have you any idea how much my new blonde wig cost me?’

I did feel a bit guilty about that but not enough to come out from under my duvet. I was also embarrassed that I had a Cath Kidston-style duvet cover that wasn’t actually Cath Kidston but a poor imitation from BHS.

‘Oh come on, Franny B. We have vodka and a choice of mixers and I bought the silver spray we talked about,’ Dora said cajolingly. ‘Your mum said you had hair issues but once you’ve got a metric arse ton of silver spray on it, who’s going to notice?’

Dora had a point, but mostly she had vodka. ‘It looks awful. I have a bald spot.’

They both pretended they couldn’t hear me with my voice muffled by the duvet and I knew for certain that Sage would drag me bodily out of bed. I took a deep sigh and shucked off the duvet. ‘Honestly, would you want to go out in public with this?’ I pointed at my head.

To their credit, neither of them pretended that I was making a fuss about nothing.

‘That Alice girl did this to you?’ Sage asked and she pulled a face that encapsulated exactly what she thought of that Alice girl and it wasn’t anything good. ‘You need to get some new friends.’

‘You
have
got a bald spot,’ Dora announced sympathetically. ‘But it doesn’t look so bad from the front. You look gamine.’

‘I’m meant to look like Mia Farrow,’ I told them. ‘I Googled her. She married two really old blokes and adopted loads of kids from different countries way before Angelina Jolie did.’

‘You have cheekbones. When you have cheekbones you can get away with anything,’ Sage said, peering critically at my face. ‘And you’ve had your eyebrows done and they look amazing. When my mum gets her eyebrows done, she says it’s as good as having a facelift.’

They coaxed and flattered and bullied me in an effort to get me out of bed. ‘Between the four of us we’ve spent loads of time and money getting our outfits together and so you have to stop being so lame.’

By then I was almost at the end of my first vodka and Red Bull and the world was looking like a slightly better place, but only slightly better. Sage drew herself up so she was suddenly taller and fiercer and pointed a finger at the leopard-print onesied heap that was me. ‘It’s at times like this that you have to ask yourself what would Edie Sedgwick have done if she’d suffered some kind of style malfunction,’ she said sternly.

‘If it was later Edie, she’d have done a huge amount of drugs and attempted suicide,’ I said grumpily because this was not the time to summon the spirit of Edie.

‘Yeah, and if it was early Edie, she’d have styled it out bigtime,’ Sage rapped back. ‘Like, like… like that time she broke her leg and she went clubbing with a whopping great plaster cast and crutches and took to the dance floor and worked it.’

‘Really? Did she?’ Dora looked very impressed. ‘She sounds awesome. I need to Google her.’

‘I’ll lend you my Edie biography as long as you promise to give it back,’ I told her.

Sage was right. Edie wouldn’t moulder in bed because of a bad haircut. I was behaving more like my mother and that could never, ever happen. I jumped off my bed. ‘Right. OK. I’m up. Let’s make this happen.’

We made it happen. I showered and got dressed in the stretchy silver T-shirt dress I’d made, black opaque tights and the kitten heels I’d bought in Morecambe, which I’d spray-painted silver.

Then while Dora was working on my hair, adding mousse to make it look thicker and give it texture then applying the silver spray, Sage helped me with my make-up. We painted two thick stripes of black eyeliner over each eye and then applied not one set of false eyelashes, but two. I felt like I needed a hoist to blink because my eyelids were so weighed down, but I was happy to suffer when my eyes looked so fantastic.

Staring back at me from the mirror was a slinky silver sprite of a girl who’d stepped from another time and place. I looked like I should be frozen and photographed in black and white and pinned to a Pinterest board. I was the past and the future and actually, yeah, maybe I needed to go easy on the vodka and Red Bull.

‘Well, I think I’ll do,’ I said, stepping back from the mirror. ‘Thanks for helping me out and you two… you’re looking pretty fine, ladies.’

Sage was wearing a tight white trouser suit, black shirt and black fedora over a long blonde wig with a fringe. She could have stepped out of the pages of a 1969 edition of US
Vogue
and Dora, well, she didn’t look much like Ultra Violet, she just looked like a more purply version of herself but she’d made the effort.

I knew then that Sage and Dora were my friends. Not people who were friendly to me when Alice wasn’t around but people who liked me for me, even though they’d witnessed the part of me that could be an absolute mardy bitch.

‘We all look amazing,’ Sage said with satisfaction. ‘We are going to walk into this so-called Wow Club and rule the school.’

I’m not sure that we ruled the school, or that I’d ever want to become supreme monarch of anywhere as crap as The Wow, but when the five of us strutted in, everyone turned to look.

We’d picked up Paul and Matthew at the Red Lion en route. They both looked the part in tight jeans, black leather jackets and shades. Matthew had borrowed one of my stripy T-shirts and we’d found a really bad grey wig in a charity shop. Andy Warhol had been known for wearing really bad wigs so it was fate or something. I just hoped that my hair didn’t look like a bad wig too, but I got the feeling that Sage and Dora would smack me if I mentioned my hair again.

It felt weird to sit at my usual table without Alice, but Sage was a Wow virgin so I was busy pointing out who everyone was, from Mark the mad dancer to Thee Desperadettes to Louis. Thee Desperadoes weren’t playing but Louis was there, because where else would he be?

‘Oh, so that’s him,’ Sage said doubtfully. ‘I thought he’d be much… Well, that he’d be, y’know…’

‘What? You can’t deny that he’s foxy.’ She couldn’t deny it, but then I didn’t want her to agree with me too much.

‘He just doesn’t look like the sharpest pencil in the box,’ Sage said, flicking a glance in the direction of Louis, who was attempting to balance a bottle of lager on his nose. He was wearing a pair of flashing red devil horns but even they couldn’t eclipse his beauty.

‘He has a sense of humour, what’s wrong with that?’

‘I don’t think it’s his brains that Franny’s interested in,’ Matthew said drily and then we had one of those conversations about fashion (specifically how we all agreed that Lady Gaga wasn’t a style icon because she wore costumes rather than clothes) that thrilled me until, unbelievably, the DJ put on a Velvet Underground song, ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’, and the five of us took to the dance floor.

I danced with Mattie because we were a matched pair and we danced in character. He stood there stock still with his shades on and I flailed my arms and shimmied the way I’d seen Edie dance on clips I’d found on YouTube. It wasn’t
that
different to how I usually danced.

It seemed as if everyone in the club were suddenly gathered round the five of us, not dancing, just staring. But the really weird thing was that I didn’t care. It wasn’t just Alice and me against the world. I had four people who had my back. I was part of a gang. I was part of a larger something. It was a relief not to have to rely on only one other person.

It was also a relief that I didn’t have to make my own fun while Alice copped off with someone she wouldn’t even acknowledge a week later.

Not that any of us were likely to cop off. Matthew and Paul could hardly start snogging; Merrycliffe wasn’t ready for that. Sage had already said that every lad in the place was a loser compared to the lads in Leeds and there was no one at all like Dora. That left me. There was only one person I wanted to cop off with and though he was no longer trying to balance a bottle of lager on his nose, Louis was hemmed in by an adoring throng of Desperadettes. They never left him alone for a minute.

‘I need to adjust my eyelashes,’ I said, when the DJ started playing Coldplay and we all decided as one to go back to our table. ‘I think one’s coming untethered.’

The Wow Ladies bathroom was its usual grotty self. The floor was wet and covered in grimy loo roll. You had to hold your breath so you didn’t breathe in the stench of toilet, twenty different body sprays and something really fetid and undead. There was a massive queue for the one loo out of three that a) flushed and b) had a lock on the door.

Mouth clenched shut, I fixed my eyelash and hurried out, gulping in huge lungfuls of air as soon as I opened the door.

‘Hey, Franny B, where’s the fire?’ Louis asked as I barrelled right into him.

‘Oh, sorry,’ I gasped. The shock and lack of oxygen became too much and I started coughing. Technically, it was more like a choking fit.

‘You all right?’ Louis patted my back with so much enthusiasm that for one terrible moment I thought I’d throw up on his pointy-toed, Cuban-heeled boots. I didn’t, but only because one of Thee Desperadettes suddenly thrust a bottle of water at me.

I was red and my mascara and liquid eyeliner were running as I glugged down the water, which always tasted of dry ice in The Wow. ‘Er, thanks.’

I didn’t know any of Thee Desperadettes’ names but she had red hair and like most of the girls in The Wow was wearing black leggings and top, cat’s ears and had painted whiskers on her face. She looked me up and down. ‘You and your mates, don’t know who you’ve come as but you look really cool.’ She was right up in my face. ‘Two pairs of eyelashes. Aces!’

‘They hurt like you wouldn’t believe,’ I confessed, because what with the itchy eyelash glue and the strain of keeping my eyes open, it was all I could do not to rip them off.

‘Kirsten, you must know Kirsten,’ she gestured towards a blonde girl at the bar. ‘The only time she wore false lashes, it turned out she was allergic to the glue and her eyes swelled up like golfballs.’

‘That sounds horrific,’ I said in alarm. Maybe the itch wasn’t due to the eyelash glue. ‘Do my eyeballs look normal-sized to you?’

She laughed. ‘They look fine. You’re Franny, right? Friend of that Alice?’

I stiffened at the mention of Alice’s name. ‘I suppose,’ I said unenthusiastically.

‘So do you think you’ll be making more of those sequinned T-shirts that you made last year? My sister got one.’

Lexy was the older sister of a girl in the year below me at school who’d asked me to spell out
Hot Bitch
in sequins on one of the American Apparel T’s I’d bought in a job lot on eBay. Her mum had pitched a fit and forbidden her from wearing it outside the house. I still had loads of T’s stuffed in a box so we swapped deets and Lexy said she’d think about what she wanted written on her shirt.

Lexy was doing the art foundation course at college and she casually invited me to hang with her and the other Desperadettes (though she called them ‘my mates’) during breaktime. ‘Been meaning to say hello to you at college,’ Lexy told me. Alice and I had always imagined that Thee Desperadettes were really stuck-up but Lexy wasn’t a bit like that. She looked back towards her friends and it was my lucky night because Louis was heading our way again. ‘I’d better go to the bar before I get shouted at for not getting my round in. Love your hair, by the way. Like Rihanna’s when she cut it all off.’