The Worst Girlfriend in the World (4 page)

‘Yeah, she does. She’s a total whore. She’s, like, riddled with STIs obvs.’

I couldn’t believe that Krystal with a K would say that about Alice, about anyone. ‘You know nothing about her. Just ’cause guys want to get with her doesn’t mean she ever does anything more than snog them and why should it be her responsibility to check their relationship status?’ I drew myself up to my full height, five foot seven inches, and my wedge heels took me all the way up to five, ten. ‘Also, Krystal, it’s really reductive to call other girls whores and condemn them for owning their sexuality.’

The last bit I’d totally nicked from my older sister Siobhan. Since she’d started university, she’d become a feminist and was all about reclaiming words like slut and sending me links to articles about expressing my individuality and not following the crowd. Whatever. Like I didn’t already know that. I was the only girl in Merrycliffe brave enough to do double leopard print.

Dora stared at me like I was some kind of enigma. Matthew and Paul exchanged raised-eyebrow looks. Like it was impossible for a friend of Alice Jenkins to have any depth.

Which just went to show how little they knew.

‘I can’t believe how judgey they all were. It’s not like any of them know you. They didn’t go to St Anne’s. We’ve never seen them down The Wow,’ I said the next day to the girl herself as she sat on the counter of Sparkle Drycleaners and rummaged in a bag of pick ’n’ mix. ‘Krystal with a K, who’s everything you hate about trainee hairdressers…’

Alice looked up. ‘How orange is she on a scale of one to ten?’

‘She’s at least a seventeen. She’s… thermonuclear orange.’ I shook my head. ‘She wears pink frosted lipgloss too. It does her absolutely no favours.’

‘She sounds horrific.’ Alice sat up straighter. ‘Poor Franny! Having to put up with all those losers. You’d think fashion students would be more open-minded, but if there’s one thing worse than being talked about, it’s not being talked about.’

‘Though
maybe
you could rethink the whole using-boys-as-blood-sport thing or at least confine it to a three-mile radius. Krystal with a K, and even Sage, live nearer to Lytham and they knew all about you. Oh! Don’t look so happy about it!’

Alice tried to be serious but her serious face lasted five seconds and then she went back to looking very pleased with herself. ‘But all I do is snog them for a little bit, then toss them back. I don’t dole out blow jobs, I never shag them, I hardly ever let one of them even feel me up. You know it and I know it and we’re the only two people whose opinions I value.’

It was like arguing with a slab of concrete. I shook my head, but I was smiling as I turned my attention to the jeans I was meant to be hemming. ‘Just as long as you do value my opinion.’

‘I do. Without you I’d never have mastered doing the flicky thing with liquid eyeliner,’ Alice insisted, swinging her legs restlessly. It was four o’clock – the afternoon lull. It would get really busy twenty minutes before closing as people rushed to pick up their dry-cleaning or brought in dirty clothes that they wanted ready for collection first thing the next morning. ‘Don’t you mind being stuck in the window like that?’

I worked part-time doing alterations on Tuesday and Thursday after college and all day Saturday. I took up hems, let down hems. Sewed on stray buttons. Mended rips and tears and occasionally took apart a whole garment and put it together again with some extra material added in for Mrs Ayers, a yo-yo dieter who couldn’t bear to abandon a perfectly good dress just because she’d put on a stone.

It was a great way to learn how clothes were put together. And it was a great job for a fledgling fashion designer, but it wasn’t the most glamorous part-time job in the world. Sometimes the clothes that we had in for mending were quite whiffy and Mum was convinced that the dry-cleaning fumes I was huffing were carcinogenic. And no, I really didn’t like sitting behind the huge sewing machine in the window so people could gawp at me like I wasn’t even a real person, but at least I could watch the world go by. Not that there was a lot of world to go by.

‘It’s all right. At least I don’t have to work in Burger King.’

‘Or what about Katie? She stinks of fried fish.’

We took a moment to ponder Katie’s sad lot in life, forced to serve behind the counter of her parents’ fish and chip shop. That took a good thirty seconds and then we were back to matters in hand.

‘So, basically you’re saying that everyone on your course doesn’t like you because they don’t like me?’ Alice clarified.

‘Well, apart from Sandra and Karen but they’re in their forties so, whatever.’ I sighed. ‘Anyway, I’m not there to make friends.’

‘You sound like a reality TV contestant.’ Alice held her finger up. ‘The show’s called Merrycliffe’s Next Best Fashion Designer, not Merrycliffe’s Next Best Friend. Look, I’m sorry if I’m cramping your style…’

‘You’re not. I don’t want to be friends with them if they’re going to hate on people they don’t even know,’ I said, because it was true.

‘Yeah! You have to hate the haters. Is it wrong that I’m kind of glad?’ Alice suddenly asked, swivelling herself round so she could sit cross-legged on the counter. ‘I’ve been worried that you’d meet loads of cool people at college who’d get all your obscure fashion references, and then I wouldn’t see you quite so often and when I did, you’d want them to tag along and you’d all have these little in-jokes and we’d drift apart and eventually we’d stop hanging out together. That would be awful. It would be even worse than if we had a big row. I mean, you can say sorry after a big row, give each other make-up presents, but if you just grew tired of me, well, there wouldn’t be much I could do about that.’

This was the thoughtful side that no one else saw of Alice. They also never saw the really funny side of her. Once Alice had made me laugh so hard with her impersonation of Nicki Minaj at the self-scanning checkout in the supermarket (you kind of had to be there) that I wet myself a little bit. But it was OK because I knew I could trust Alice to take the secret that she made me wet myself just a little bit to her grave.

‘You don’t have to do anything about it because it’s never going to happen,’ I said, reaching across the sewing machine to give her a friendly punch on the arm. ‘We’re going to be little old ladies together, remember? Raising merry hell at the bingo.’

‘Racing each other along the seafront on our mobility scooters.’

‘Our pimped-out mobility scooters,’ I added, because I planned to add hot rod flame decals to mine and do something with the horn so it played Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ at anyone who dared to cross my path. ‘And we’ll tear up the dance floor at the – Oh!’

‘What? What dance floor?’

I was only dimly aware of Alice squawking in the background. All I could see was a smirky grin and a mop of dirty blond hair with bleached ends all tousled and rumpled like he’d only just got up. Then he was gone in a blur of a battered black-leather jacket and a hand maybe raised in greeting, maybe just scratching his nose.

Oh, Louis, Louis, I’ve got a crush on you
.

I must have murmured it out loud because when I came back down to earth, Alice was giving me a knowing look. ‘When you see him, I swear your ears prick up in exactly the same way that Pucci’s do when she hears the postie coming up the path.’

Pucci, Alice’s chihuahua, also yapped furiously and ran around in mad circles whenever anyone dared to approach their house.

‘My ears are covered by my hair,’ I pointed out, but it was less pointing out and more sighing rapturously. ‘I just know that the world can’t be
such
a terrible place when Louis Allen exists.’

Suddenly, none of it mattered. Not hostile lecturers and even more hostile new classmates. Mum and her inability to function on any kind or level. Dad never being around. Siobhan being in Manchester and hardly ever coming home.

It wasn’t important because there were still reasons to cheer and the biggest reason was that Thee Desperadoes, Louis’s band, were playing The Wow Club on Saturday.

‘Oh great, I was looking for a new way to make my ears bleed,’ Alice said sourly when I reminded her.

‘They’re not that bad.’ I waved her disdain away. ‘Anyway, who cares what they sound like…’

‘They sound like what I imagine bowel surgery sounds like when they haven’t given the patient any anaesthetic…’

I waved
that
away too. ‘I don’t care. All I know is that for half an hour they’ll be playing and for half an hour I have gawping rights at Louis without anyone thinking that I’m a sad stalker.’

Alice smiled at me kindly. ‘But you are a sad stalker, Franny. You’re the girl who followed Louis all the way round all the amusement arcades in Blackpool.’

I regretted nothing. ‘It was an afternoon well spent.’ I grinned. ‘I think he just waved, Ally! To get my attention!
My
attention. Like, he noticed me and he thinks I’m on his level. This is huge. It’s a total game-changer.’

‘I hope you’re not going to spend all of Saturday night mooning around Louis with a line of drool hanging down from your chin,’ Alice said. ‘Note to self: remember to pop a pack of tissues in my bag.’

‘Except you’ll be far too busy putting the moves on some poor, dumb lad to worry about my drool issues,’ I assured her and she brightened.

‘You’re probably right.’ She looked pensive for all of five seconds. ‘I need to think about who I’m going to snog on Saturday. Indie disco. Pickings are going to be slim unless some university students wander in by accident. I mean, there must be some who live in Merrycliffe to take advantage of the cheap rents and excellent transport links.’

If they were we’d yet to meet them. I was saved from having to think up some names of boys that Alice hadn’t tormented yet by the bell over the door tinkling, and talking of which…

‘Yo! Yo! Yo! Looking superfine, Franny B!’ The Chatterjees’ son, Rajesh, swaggered his way through the door. ‘When you gonna get with me?’

‘Um, some time like never,’ I said as I always said every Tuesday and Thursday at four-thirty, when Raj turned up and asked me the same question. ‘But thanks for asking.’

Raj was pretty superfine himself, apart from the fact that he tried to talk like he was from South Central LA, which didn’t really work with a Lancashire accent. Also, there was the fact that he was the apple of the Chatterjees’ eyes and no girl was good enough for him – Mrs Chatterjee was quite adamant about that – and I intended to keep this job until I (hopefully) buggered off to do my fashion degree and then there was…

‘Alice,’ Rajesh said thinly, dropping his fresh and fly routine. ‘You’ve got some front.’

She looked down at her breasts and smirked because she knew that it would really wind Raj up, the boy she’d dallied with for actual weeks, weeks in the plural, longer than she’d ever dallied with another boy, which made him her most long-term boyfriend. That had been over a year ago, and when she realised that there was a conflict of interest because dating my employers’ son made things totes awk for me with the Chatterjees, Alice had dumped him.

‘No way am I letting a boy come between us,’ she’d said when I’d told her that Mrs Chatterjee kept telling me that Raj was out till all hours with Alice and it was interfering with his studies. Then there’d been the whole incident with the lovebites. Mrs Chatterjee had come close to tears over that. Though I had told Alice that she could keep seeing Raj if she was
really
into him. ‘Oh, but I’m not
that
into him. His snogging skills aren’t up to my own high standards. Also, that whole gangsta thing is tragic, especially when the closest he’s come to a ghetto is… well, Raj has never, ever been close to a ghetto in his life. He’s heir to a dry-cleaning dynasty.’

So, Alice had dumped Raj and now they were sworn enemies, which still made my life awkward because I was friends with both of them.

‘Anyway, you were just telling me about all the hot guys at college,’ Alice reminded me, though I’d been telling her no such thing.

‘Yeah, the hot gay guys,’ I said and I still had buttons to replace on three shirts, a pair of cords to take up and the hem on a skirt to let down before closing time. ‘Both of you are distracting me, so you’ll have to leave now. Either separately or together. Your choice.’

‘I is flying solo these days on account of all the pretty ladies who want a piece of me,’ Raj said with a leer in my direction, which I pointedly ignored by hiding my face in a pink-striped shirt.

‘Yeah? Name three of these co-called pretty ladies,’ Alice said sweetly and Raj stopped leering and stared down at his trainers. ‘Anyway I’ve got to go.’ Alice lowered herself down from the counter. Raj’s eyes were now fixed firmly on her boobs as Alice did a little shimmy like she was ironing out all her kinks. ‘I’m meant to be Face-timing fit Declan from the Academy and Skyping my gran at the same time. I hate being double booked. I’ll see you tomorrow, Franny B.’

Then she was gone.

Sometimes, I wondered if making boys fall at your feet was worth all Alice’s time and effort. I’d much rather stay in and watch
The Great British Bake Off
instead of juggling boys like they were flaming torches.

Raj reached up to pop the collar of his hoodie, then remembered that his hoodie didn’t have a collar to pop. ‘Whatever. She’s such a bitch,’ he muttered and he looked to me for confirmation but I shook my head and pressed down on the foot pedal of my sewing machine so whatever else he wanted to say was drowned out.