The Worst Girlfriend in the World (21 page)

It still felt wrong to have spent another Saturday night without Alice, even wronger not to phone her to debrief about what had happened on Saturday night. And as soon as I thought it, I heard the phone ring.

Not my BlackBerry but our home phone. I was in the kitchen peeling spuds, Dad was making a herb crust for the lamb (Shuv should never have bought him a Nigella Lawson cookery book last Christmas) and Mum was flicking through the Sunday paper. We all looked at each other in horror. Nobody ever rang the landline except…

‘It had better not be anyone trying to sell me something,’ Dad said as he picked up the phone. ‘Hello?’ After a moment, he held the receiver out to me. ‘It’s for you.’

I took it gingerly. I didn’t want anyone trying to sell me something either. ‘Hey.’

‘It’s me,’ Alice said. ‘I cannot even believe that you blocked my number. That is beyond harsh, Franny. How many more times do I have to apologise about your hair?’

Then I remembered that this wasn’t just about my hair. It was about
why
Alice had done what she did. Because getting a boy, a boy that I already had dibs on, was more important than the years we’d been friends.

Also, you didn’t fuck about with another girl’s hair. It was as bad as punching them. She’d pretty much scalped me – I had a bald spot – so she hadn’t apologised enough yet. I wasn’t sure she ever could.

‘You only apologised in the salon because your parents were there,’ I reminded her, painfully aware that my own parents were within earshot and weren’t even bothering to hide the fact that they were listening. ‘And you let me think that you’d been cutting hair for ages when you’re not even allowed to use a blow-dryer unsupervised.’

‘Well, yeah, but I’d watched people cut hair for years…’

‘Like, that’s the same thing…’

‘When you don’t know how to do some sewing thing, you look up videos of other people doing it on the internet,’ Alice pointed out.

‘Yeah, but if I bodge a seam, then I’m not going to parade around showing my bodged seam to the world, unlike my hair…’

‘It didn’t look
that
bad.’

We were going round in circles. Alice was stubborn. She’d never admit that she was wrong: not to other people’s irate girlfriends, not when she’d been busted by her mum when she was snogging Raj outside the Spar when she’d sworn she was home revising and not even when she’d tried to sabotage me in her pursuit of Louis.

‘You didn’t have to do that,’ I whispered. I wished we had a cordless phone and not an old-fashioned thing fixed to the wall with a curly wire that was always getting tangled up. ‘We both know that when it comes down to looks, you’re going to win every time. You didn’t have to do what you did and it totally violates the rules we drew up.’

‘I didn’t do it on purpose. God, you’re never going to let this go, are you? I called to apologise, to try and make this right. Jesus, Franny, you do love to play the victim sometimes.’

I gasped at the unfairness of her accusation. ‘No, I don’t!’

‘Yeah, you do. I get that stuff is hard, I really do, but you don’t always have to be such a martyr about it,’ Alice told me in a tight voice. ‘Sometimes I wonder if I should put a sign up in the newsagent’s window asking if anyone’s seen your sense of humour because it feels like it’s been missing for months.’

‘Shut up,’ I hissed, not as quietly as I thought because Dad’s eyebrows shot up and even Mum looked mildly alarmed. ‘It’s obvious you don’t give a toss about our friendship, because if you did you wouldn’t be behaving like such a dick.’

‘You’ve been behaving like a dick ever since you started —’

I couldn’t bear to listen to what Alice was going to say next and then have to think of something nasty to say in reply. It was much easier to hang up and put the phone back on its little perch with a hand that shook slightly.

I sniffed. The tears were threatening to unleash
yet again
. I took a deep breath and turned round.

Dad became very interested in smearing his herb crust on the lamb, like he was slathering a pasty child with factor 50 sunblock on a hot day at the beach. Mum was transfixed by an ad for nan trousers in the back of the
Sunday Mirror
magazine. They both looked up as soon as I turned round.

‘Everything all right, Franular?’ Dad asked. He glanced pointedly at Mum for some back-up.

She tore herself away from the nan slacks. ‘Is there anything you wanted to talk about? Um, did you want a mother-and-daughter chat?’

I did not. Things weren’t
that
bad. Things would never ever be
that
bad.

‘Everything is fine. It’s better than fine. In fact, it’s cool,’ I said in a tone of voice that brooked no denial. ‘Anyway, I’d love to stay here and chat but I have GCSE revision to do.’

It was my get-out-of-the-kitchen-free card and it had never failed me yet.

I was primed now for my GCSE Maths retake. I’d taken so many timed mock exams and never scored less than 70 per cent that I wasn’t even panicking any more. I just wanted it done, marked, then I could get on with the rest of my life.

When I wasn’t taking timed mock GCSEs, I worked on my leather dress. I’d done the really scary bit, which was pinning my pattern pieces to my scant metres of leather and cutting them out. Now I was slowly and carefully sewing them together with surgical gloves on my hands so the leather didn’t get grubby, though even Barbara said she thought that was going a bit too far.

I was starting to really love college. A place had opened up on one of the beauty courses so Krystal with a K had disappeared and Karen and Sandra were actually hilarious when you got to know them. They entertained us with very rude stories about their ex-husbands and their cut-price package holidays to Turkey where they did unspeakable things with men half their age, so when Barbara wasn’t in the workroom I seemed to spend a lot of time listening to their sexcapades and giggling.

Even Barbara wasn’t as bad as she had been at the start of term. In fact, she was a mine of information about Martin Sanderson if you caught her in a good mood or she’d had a glass of wine at lunchtime. ‘He once tried to make a tartan jacket that I still see in my nightmares’ was just one of the gems she’d come out with. ‘He worked on it for weeks but he just couldn’t get the tartan to match up. It was what you young people would call a hot mess.’

Mostly though it was the five of us: Sage, Dora, Mattie, Paul and me hanging out. I loved that I could talk about fashion for hours on end and no one told me to shut up, like Alice used to; and five should have been an odd number, someone should have been left out, on the sidelines, but it didn’t work like that. Anyway, sometimes we became six when Francis hung out with us. Not all the time, but there was always a reason for him to come into our workroom. It was surprising how many times one of the sewing machines stopped working and it was against Health and Safety for us to mend them ourselves.

Once Francis was around he tended to stay so he could join in our heated debates about whether his boss, Ted from Facilities, used to be a woman or if it was true that one of the girls studying Leisure and Tourism was boffing the canteen cook who always scratched his armpit with whatever serving utensil was to hand.

As a new friend, Francis was shaping up quite nicely. We didn’t mention that walk home, the secrets we’d shared, but it was like we didn’t need to mention them. And because we both knew all this deeply private stuff about each other, it felt like we’d skipped through a lot of the opening chapters in being friends and had settled into a comfortable familiarity that I didn’t quite have with the others yet. With Francis, I could just be quiet. Sometimes it was a relief to just be quiet. Also, Francis was an amazing source of cool girls in old films that we’d watch during lunch break or when Barbara wasn’t around. ‘You need to see Anouk Aimée in
La Dolce Vita
,’ he’d say. And ‘Brigitte Bardot in
And Man Created Woman
is totally inspiring.’ Or ‘Let’s watch Jean Seberg in
Bonjour Tristesse
.’

Occasionally Sage would join us if she was around, but usually it was just me and Francis, though he jumped every time we heard a noise in the corridor because he was meant to be mending broken sewing machines and logging borrowed equipment, not watching films on a college laptop and sharing my bag of stale pick ’n’ mix from the 59p shop.

After so long knowing everything there was to know about Alice, getting to know all these new people was exhilarating. There was so much to discover. Like, I didn’t know why Sage’s parents had got divorced or how Mattie and Dora got together. Or how Francis felt about watching a kissing scene in a film when I was sitting next to him, because it made
me
feel a bit weird and self-conscious. Or whether he’d mind if I ate all the fizzy cola bottles that were so sour they made my tongue shrink back in my mouth.

The flipside to getting to know so many new people in such a short period of time was that it was also exhausting. It was a relief to be able to talk about hemlines and how there was always a fine dusting of dressmaker’s chalk over everything in your bag, but I missed Alice.

I couldn’t help it.

Alice and me had our own language; our own personal shorthand. She knew that I took two sugars in my hot drinks, the same way that I knew that she would always have a diet Coke with her chips and that she secretly believed the lack of calories in one totally cancelled out the calories in the other.

My history was tangled up in Alice’s history. From all the times we’d cried together and learned to swim together and got scratched by her next-door neighbour’s cat when we were six and ever since then we always said we were dog people, to the year when we watched the entire ten seasons of
Friends
again and again. Even now, if either one of us catches two seconds of a repeat on TV we can name the episode and pretty much recite the entire scene from memory. We shared chocolate brownie recipes, fashion disasters, experiments with hair straighteners and liquid eyeliner, long bitching sessions about our parents and teachers, lamented our lack of boobs and got our first period within weeks of each other.

She wasn’t family but Alice was imprinted on my DNA and so, just as how I never stopped loving Shuv even though I was mad at her for bailing on the whole Mum thing, I couldn’t help loving Alice. Not in a lezza way, but in a way that there was no Franny without Alice. I wouldn’t be the person I was today if I’d been best friends with some other girl. But then I’d catch sight of my hair in a mirror or shop window, and Alice was dead to me all over again. Stalemate. Then, when we were hanging out Thursday lunchtime, Francis asked me: ‘So, what’s the deal with you and that Alice girl? I used to think that you two were like non-identical conjoined twins.’

I noted that even Francis called her ‘that Alice girl’. Then I noted that Francis had been aware of Alice and me enough that he’d had a theory about us. I paused with my cheese and pickle sandwich halfway to my mouth. ‘There is no deal,’ I said. ‘You can’t have deals with people who are dead to you.’

‘Is it because of what she did to your hair?’ Francis was sitting next to me and fiddling about with the Quicktime programme on the laptop in front of him, so he couldn’t see the dark look I gave my sandwich.

‘Well, not just that.’ I pulled a face. I could tell Francis about my mum, but talking about Alice seemed so much harder. ‘It was
why
she did this to my hair.’

‘Yeah? Why?’ Francis was deep in the Quicktime settings, double-clicking on stuff I didn’t have a clue about. Sage still reckoned that Francis had potential but I wondered if he ever felt like Louis’s sidekick, the junior partner, something much less when Louis was around. Did boys have thoughts like that?’

‘To do with Louis,’ I muttered, though I didn’t know why I felt the need to mutter. Francis knew how I felt about Louis. It wasn’t exactly a news flash. ‘I’ve fancied him for ages.
Ages
. Then Alice decided that she was going to make a move on him, which is totally against the best friend code…’

Francis looked across at me. Now that he didn’t sneer so much, it was quite hard to get a read on his facial expressions. ‘Oh, I didn’t know there was a best friend code.’

‘Well, there is,’ I said quickly. ‘So, then we both agreed that we’d make a move on Louis but she… God, it’s impossible to try and explain and not sound really immature.’

‘You realise that then? Good, ’cause I was worrying about how I was going to break that to you,’ Francis said. He straightened up from his hunch over the laptop. ‘Please tell me you haven’t fallen out over a bloke, over
Louis
? I thought you were better than that, Franny.’

I thought I was too, but apparently I wasn’t. Though in my defence… ‘It’s not just that. It’s, like, it was always just the two of us, Alice and me, but there was also Alice and all her boy-related dramas, which is why she hasn’t got any other friends. It was why I didn’t have many other friends either, until I started college and began hanging out with Dora and the others and then Alice felt like I was abandoning her, even though I wasn’t.’

There was so much more to it. I hadn’t even told him about our pitched battle to win Louis’s heart but Francis just said, ‘Right, OK, I get it now,’ and I knew that he did. ‘It’s much easier hanging out with lads. You just call them on it when they’re acting like tools and it’s sorted.’

I shook my head. ‘It can’t be that easy.’

‘Really is. I suppose boys are just more… what’s the word I’m looking for?’ Francis paused to consider. ‘Oh yeah, we’re just more evolved.’