The Worst Girlfriend in the World (22 page)

I scoffed and even acted like I was about to throw the rest of my sandwich at Francis, but what had happened between Alice and me wasn’t just going to be resolved with some laddish light banter. It was so much more complicated than that. Deeply and darkly complicated, but I guess I was leaning towards at least offering her some kind of olive branch. Maybe unblocking her number would be a start?

‘No way, man,’ Raj said when I saw him in the shop later that afternoon. ‘She’s a stone cold killer. If you think she’s shed one tear about you, then…’

‘Tears would be a bit much,’ I’d protested. ‘But maybe she regrets what she did. You can’t wipe out sixteen years of being friends like it never happened. We should at least try and put things right, don’t you think?’

Raj looked at me pityingly, like I needed help sounding out the big words. ‘Franny, she maimed you. You look like one of those women from World War Two who got their hair hacked off for getting freaky wit’ the Nazis.’

I glared at him because no matter how awful my hair might look, it didn’t look
that
awful. ‘Yeah, you should totally use the phrase “getting freaky wit’ the Nazis” in your S levels,’ I’d said. Then I teased him for pretending he was gangsta when he was really a history nerd until he threatened to ‘bust a cap in my ass’, just as Mr Chatterjee brought in a load of clothes that had had to be industrially cleaned off-site and cuffed him round the back of his head.

Which was hilarious, especially when Raj was forced to apologise to me three times for threatening me with physical violence before Mr Chatterjee was satisfied that his son’s words came from a place of deep sincerity. But I still didn’t know what I was going to do about Alice.

I had all these new people in my life and Alice had only me, except she didn’t even have me any more. Over the next couple of days I wondered if I could bear to bow out of our contest and let Alice have Louis as compensation. Here was my opportunity to do something nice, to be the bigger person. But then Louis would tweet a picture of himself about to eat the double burger he’d just constructed or he’d ‘Like’ the Rolling Stones clip from 1969 that Francis had just posted on my Facebook wall. (Francis was adamant that the 1960s Stones should not be judged by the same standards as the bunch of wrinkly-faced, granddad rocker, twenty-first-century Stones who’d headlined Glastonbury.) Just the slightest sighting of Louis on the internet and my stomach did that dippy thing.

Then I’d think about how happy Louis was to see me on the three occasions that we’d talked to each other. It was obvious that there was a spark between us. It was why I’d crushed on Louis for so long – because I knew we could have something really special. Alice should have respected that. But she hadn’t. Which meant that she had no respect for me or our friendship.

Call me unevolved, but whichever way I looked at it, Alice and I were over.

On Monday, after a parentally approved weekend (no Wow Club, lots of timed mock GCSE Maths exams), I was well rested and sat in a small room on the second floor of the main college building with six other people also taking their Maths GCSE.

Three hours later, I was done. There’d been one question about higher probability that had made me sweaty but generally it had been OK. I was extremely hopeful that I’d passed with a C or higher and would never have to use a protractor again at any given point in my life.

I still had English to retake but that was in June, which was light years away, and right now all I needed to worry about was easing the sleeves into the armholes on my leather dress, which were as puckered and lumpy as Karen’s caesarean scar, which she’d shown us on Friday afternoon – she and Sandra had been drinking at lunchtime.

I headed back to the art block. The workroom was deserted but there was a good luck card and a chocolate muffin on my table from the others, which made me feel warm and fuzzy inside. I sat down and stared at the leather on my dress form and waited for inspiration to strike.

Inspiration still hadn’t struck when the others trailed in from lunch. Barbara came in five minutes later and made a beeline straight for me. ‘How did you get on in your exam?’ she demanded, though her eyes glazed over as soon as I mentioned high probability. She then gave me a short armhole tutorial that left me more confused than ever and by the time she bustled out again, saying, ‘I’d start that sleeve again if I were you, Franny,’ it was gone two. This was normally when Francis liked to turn up and tell me what film we’d be watching that afternoon, but he was nowhere to be seen. Half an hour later Francis was still a no-show – maybe there was a light-bulb emergency in the catering block.

I tacked a sleeve on to my dress and then untacked it, but all my focus had gone for the day so there was no harm in checking Twitter, though usually I didn’t indulge when I was doing fashion. I mean, where would Stella McCartney be if she kept stopping every five minutes to tweet about what she was going to have for dinner?

Stella’s tweets weren’t even that juicy but Martin Sanderson was an excellent tweeter. He was always posting pictures of his two pugs and sneak peeks of his new designs.

He’d just tweeted a picture of a dress made from a gorgeous watered silk with what looked like a digital print of a blown-up snowflake on it, which was fascinating but not as fascinating as the little exchange I found when I scrolled back to yesterday’s tweets on my timeline.

@WorstGirlfriendInTheWorld Cant beleve how much skin u were showing last nite!
 

@LouisDesperado U can talk! But if U got it, flaunt it, amirite? ;)
 

@WorstGirlfriendInTheWorld Just healing the world with our hotness, babes. ;)
 

I thought I might start to cry when I realised that Alice was free from the parental chains. Tania, or more likely Sean, had caved and the only punishment she’d got for being totally, completely and utterly out of order was to be grounded for one measly Saturday night. Jesus, there were worse consequences for stealing pick ’n’ mix from the 59p shop because they always called the police. Usually you got away with a telling-off but they banned you from the 59p shop for life. They even put your picture up in the window. It had happened to a mate of Raj’s.

Alice was meant to be penitent and remorseful. She should also have been barred from any place where she could reasonably expect to have fun until my hair grew back. That was only fair, I thought, as I stuffed the whole of the chocolate muffin in my mouth. Then I could do nothing for a while but chew furiously and come to the slow realisation that I was maybe overreacting. Maybe even being a little immature. I was still annoyed with Alice for flirting up a storm with Louis, but that was the only way that Alice could connect with him.

Whereas I connected with Louis on lots of different levels. Except, I hadn’t quite worked out what those levels were apart from pretending to like cats in sunglasses and the Chicken Hut.

Also I had Francis. Francis was my road less taken to Louis, except actually he really wasn’t that any more. He was my friend and he was missing in action.

Francis was still absent the next day. When Sandra broke the overlocking machine with a loud and ominous crunching sound, Amir from Facilities arrived. Not to fix it, like Francis would have done, but to hang an
out of order
notice on it.

‘Um, no Francis then?’ I asked casually and very quietly because if Sandra and Karen even heard you mention a man’s name, they automatically assumed that you were shagging him and wouldn’t stop asking questions about his performance and generally taking the piss.

Amir shook his head. ‘Nope,’ he said.

‘So, he’s not in college today?’

Amir shook his head again.

‘Is he sick?’

Amir shrugged. He was a man of very few words. I gave up.

Francis was still AWOL on Wednesday. I began to wonder if everything was all right. I wanted to call him, but then I remembered that we’d only been friends for not even two weeks and we hadn’t swapped phone numbers. I could send him a Facebook message but that seemed inappropriate when we’d only used Facebook so Francis could post that video on my wall of the Rolling Stones performing an eighteen-minute version of ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ at Hyde Park in 1969 and for me to comment:
LOVE, LOVE, LOVE first ten minutes but then it gets a little samey.
Francis had replied:
Franny! I wish there was an “Unlike” button for your cruel comment.
When that was your only Facebook contact with someone, it felt really wrong to send them a very personal message about their father’s terminal illness.

All I could do was worry and hope that Francis and his dad were all right and that he’d be back at work soon because I already missed hanging out with him. There was so much I wanted to show and tell. Like, we were both obsessed with the old lady who worked in the Sue Ryder shop who wore nothing but purple and I liked to give him an outfit update each morning when I passed her on the way to college. And I’d amassed a huge quantity of YouTube clips of talking animals, and stale bananas from my 59p shop pick ’n’ mix because those were two of Francis’s favourite things.

I hadn’t known Francis that long, but he’d made major inroads into my daily routine.

‘Haven’t seen your mate for a while,’ Paul commented as he and Mattie left college with me at Wednesday lunchtime. Two books I’d ordered on inter-library loan had come in and they wanted to see what the library had in the way of DVDs. Not much, I’d warned them but they wouldn’t be told. ‘Has he got the sack for skiving off?’

I lurched into a lamp post. ‘Do you think?’ Francis did spend a lot of time hanging out with us. ‘No! Surely Amir would have said. Though what if there are budget cuts? The news is full of budget cuts. Francis was last in so he’d be first out.’

Now I was properly worried, though Mattie and Paul didn’t understand that Francis losing his job would be kicking a man when he was already down. They were talking about the chances of finding
The Big Bang Theory
boxed set in the library and that left me free to decide that I had to Facebook message Francis tonight even if it was inappropriate.

‘Stop frowning, Franny,’ Mattie said, as we climbed up the steps to the library. ‘Otherwise you’ll be caning the Botox before you’re twenty.’

I mumbled something in reply, then headed to the Orders desk and they went to the two sparse sets of shelves that were the DVD department. I got my books, a biography of Diana Vreeland, legendary editor of US
Vogue
during the sixties, who pretty much discovered David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton, and yet another book,
Popism
, about Andy Warhol.

I ordered a biography of Alexander McQueen and was just about to join Mattie and Paul to see if the DVD shelves would cough up a copy of something cool when I saw him.

My heart, my fickle heart, did the little salmon leap it always did and then he looked up from the graphic novel he was reading, lips moving in time to the words, smiled and waved.

I couldn’t have not gone over. Besides he was now shouting, ‘Franny B! Hey, Franny B!’ with blatant disregard for keeping quiet in the library.

‘Oh, hey, Louis,’ I said in a hushed whisper when I reached his table. ‘You all right?’

‘I think I’m all right but I need to know that you’re not still mad at me.’ He pulled an exaggerated pouty face. ‘You know, for comparing your new haircut to several different dudes. Francis said you were really pissed off.’

‘Oh,
that
.’ I was over that. Had been ever since Francis had explained that Louis was… how had he phrased it? That Louis had no filter. ‘Yeah, my hair is a bit of a sensitive subject.’ I had a cute geometric-patterned Primark scarf tied round my head, but my hand was already creeping up to touch the bald spot, even though everyone said it wasn’t a bald spot any more. I still wasn’t convinced that twelve days was long enough for a bald spot to stop being bald. ‘I’m not pissed off with you. Honestly.’

I couldn’t believe Louis had given even a few moments of his time to worrying that he might have upset me, but he gave me a blinding smile as soon as I said that we were cool. ‘Great. I hate it when people are mad at me. You’d be surprised at how often it happens.’ Actually the more I got to know him, the less surprised I was that not everyone fell under his spell. Apart from girls. All the girls.

Louis looked at me expectantly like he was waiting for me to pull a rabbit out of my tote bag. There were so many things I could have asked him. If he’d noticed that I wasn’t at The Wow on Saturday and whether he really thought that Alice was the girl for him. Or I could even screw up every last gram of courage that I possessed and request the pleasure of his company on an actual date, but that could all wait.

‘I’m glad I ran into you,’ I said and Louis smiled happily again, but I wasn’t going to get sidetracked. ‘I’ve been wondering where Francis is. He hasn’t been in college for the last three days and I’m not sure if he’s been sacked or, well, if there’s stuff going on at home.’

Louis scrunched up his features like he was suffering a thousand agonies. ‘Home?’ he echoed. I could
feel
the effort he was making not to blurt out what he obviously wanted to blurt out. He had one of those faces where you could tell exactly what he was thinking.

‘Yeah.’ I leaned in closer, not to take great big whiffs of Louis but so I could lower my voice. ‘You know, um, with his dad.’

‘Oh! So he told you about his dad?’ Louis let out a sigh of relief that ruffled my ridiculously short fringe. ‘OK! Cool!’