The Worst of Me (3 page)

So Josette was having a party and I wasn’t invited, because . . . well, what they said, probably. I just wasn’t on her mailing list because we didn’t know each other. None of my friends was trying to leave me out or make me feel bad – exactly the opposite – but it was still big news and everyone’s main subject of conversation. I
did
want someone to ask if I could go, but they all seemed to be offering without anyone actually doing it, and I didn’t want to keep saying ‘Did you ask, did you ask? What did she say?’ So eventually I said, ‘Nah, it’s okay, if she wanted me there she’d have said. It’s not really fair to put Josette on the spot.’ I still hoped they would ask her anyway.

The worst thing about being lonely isn’t even the way you feel, it’s the fear that people will notice. That’s nuts, isn’t it – that loneliness should be more okay when you’re on your own? During lunch break I drifted away from my mates and headed off towards the library to hide out there. It was spotting with rain outside, but I’d left my
coat in the classroom and I was shivering without even feeling very cold. It was weird, like I wasn’t quite inside my body. I hadn’t seen the Malton guys at all, except from a distance when I’d been on my way to a French lesson and they hadn’t seen me. They were looking very tall and not very real. The way I remembered talking to them now seemed to me like a story I’d retold a lot, adding more exaggeration every time till it was miles from the truth. My shirt had become untucked, the way it always did with my school skirts, and I felt scruffy and small. I’d been hoping they wouldn’t notice me, but was sad when they didn’t. I didn’t look for them now, I just watched the raindrops making marks on my blazer and moved as quickly as I could without running. Out of the rain, through the echoy corridor, and on to the soft mossy library carpet. Safe.

And Sam.

Sam was sitting in the corner with his dark head bent over a sci-fi book, the only person I knew with hair curlier than mine. And he was the only person in there. I watched him for a moment, but that sixth sense people have, where they know they’re being watched, kicked in. He looked up, and his face relaxed.

‘Hey, Cass.’ He put his book down.

‘Hey.’ I slung my bag over a chair and sat next to it. I tilted my head so I could read the writing on his bag. It said,
Resist peer pressure: all the cool kids are doing it.

I was only friends with Sam for about a month before he came out so there was no way I knew him well enough to have stopped him. And I wouldn’t time-travel back now and tell him not to. It didn’t take the wind out of their sails, those people who always made his life hell, but it didn't make things worse. And you could see the difference it made for him, not having to keep the secret that they were ‘right’ all along, and having good comebacks when they called him names. Still, there were boys he used to talk to, sort of geeky sensitive boys – I don’t mean gay, although they might have been – who you could tell had withdrawn from him a bit because they were scared of getting the same thing. Being called his boyfriend, that stuff. I worried it had made Sam lonelier, but I always think everyone is sad.

‘Are you hiding from Ian?’ he said. Sam talked very softly, even when he wasn’t in a library.

‘I’m over Ian,’ I said.

Sam raised his eyebrows.

‘No, honestly, I fancy other people now.’

‘Which other people?’

‘It’s no one. Not someone who would take me seriously, anyway.’

‘Do I know him?’

‘He’s one of the new Malton boys.’

‘Right.’ He narrowed one eye suspiciously. ‘Do
you
know him?’

‘Ha ha. We’ve spoken. Look, nothing’s going to come of it, I just wanted you to believe me. I’ve moved on.’

‘The new Maltesers are all right. There’s one I’m hoping is gay, actually. Oh, but what if it’s the same one?’ He made an ‘O’ with his mouth and clapped his hand over it. I laughed, and wanted to shove him, jokily, but fought the urge. Sam was the least tactile person who ever lived, you could feel him tense up if you leaned against him or touched his arm.

‘I probably wouldn’t have less of a chance with him if he was,’ I said.

‘I probably wouldn’t have
more
of a chance.’

The door opened and the librarian came in. She said hi to both of us, but looked at me suspiciously. Recognising me – I’d been in there before to talk at Sam for the whole lunch hour. I shuffled my chair back a bit, as if I was there to read.

‘So who
are
you hiding from?’ Sam said, in a whisper.

‘I’m not hiding!’ I said. ‘I’m just tired today. Well . . .’ I told him about all the party talk. I had to keep remembering to whisper, even though we were the only people in the library. I kept getting more agitated, doing impressions of my friends’ voices.

‘So what, it’s one party!’ Sam said. ‘Will the boy be there?’

‘Probably not. I mean, he
might
, but there’s no reason he would be.’

‘It’d be a waste of a new outfit, then.’

But the closer we got to Friday, the day of Josette’s party, the more that thought of ‘saving’ a new outfit – which, by the way, I didn’t own – didn’t really feel like an upside. And just because it was finally about to happen, that didn’t mean an end of it. There’d be the analysis – which would last at least a week – and then references to it that went on for ever, just like that concert I’d missed.

When you’re in the middle of something it seems a lot bigger than it is, and although it sounds nothingy and meaningless now, it was getting to me. I wanted to sleep and stay asleep and only wake up when things were nicer: when my mum had broken up with Paul and no one could even remember being that excited about Josette’s party, and some boy was waiting for me to wake up so he could ask me out. Trying to concentrate on homework was tiring me out, and I went to bed early and woke up with only just enough time to get ready and had to go to classes unprepared and feeling thick.

I was paired up with my friend Dee in English – we were once best friends, when we were really little, but had drifted quite a bit in the last few years. We hadn’t
fallen out or anything, just made other friends that we saw more of. It was great getting some time to talk to just her again, on her own. We were supposed to be writing a modern version of a scene from
Wuthering Heights
as a read-aloud play and halfway through the class, Dee was asking me what I thought about a bit with a grave and I was trying to bluff, and she said, ‘Why do I get the feeling you haven’t read this?’

‘Well, the thing about that is . . .’

‘Ah, come on, Cass,
naugh-tee
!’ Her eyes flashed with humour. Dee had this way of telling me off and making me feel better at the same time, I’d forgotten that about her. She always looked like she was trying not to laugh. This time she really
was
trying not to laugh: she explained the plot to me and the fact that I seemed to have confused it with
Jane Eyre
, which I also hadn’t read but had seen the film of. We both cracked up.

‘What’s up? Have you been having too much fun to stay in and read?’

I gave a long sigh. ‘I wish!’

She looked up from her book and studied my face. ‘Oh. You know what, a few of us are going to the pictures Saturday evening – do you fancy coming along?’

‘I’d
like
to, yeah.’ I was happy to be asked. I didn’t think my mum would be mad about the idea after my
last
un
scheduled cinema visit. Even though she hadn’t made a fuss when I came in, there was no way of telling she wouldn’t use it against me when she wanted an excuse to be angry. ‘Listen, I’ll let you know if I can make it, but right now I’m not sure. My mum’s a bit mental at the moment.’

Dee rolled her eyes. ‘They don’t let you become a mother unless you fail the psychological evaluation. Crap, we’re supposed to have finished! Can I just write it for us?’

‘Oh, I’m going to say no to that!’

She put her head down and scribbled away with a pencil for about a minute, stopping sometimes to cross things out with zig-zagged lines, filling the page. I watched as these perfect sentences came out of her head fully formed. What would I have given for a brain like that? Dee was a bit like my fairy godmother. She turned up just in time to cover for me in class, took the piss so I got over myself a bit, and made me feel like less of a social outcast. When we read out our scene, we were a bit hyper because we’d been laughing, and it stood out in the half-asleep class. Afterwards, the teacher raved about it and I sat and took the praise for someone else’s talent, feeling bad about that, but grateful too.

We were walking out of class together and I heard a voice behind us – Alison Francis, not my biggest fan, or Dee’s – doing an impression of us reading our scene out,
giving us both stupid singy voices and making us self-deluded wannabe actresses. Her friend Mia laughed extra loud to make sure we could hear her. My ears kind of popped as if I’d put my head in water, and I felt hot and sick. Dee and I didn’t turn round or look at each other, but I could sense her whole body stiffening and we stopped talking and didn’t start again. We had different lessons next, and she gave a little sigh and said, ‘See you later, then?’ and I nodded.

I couldn’t wait for the day to be over, but I wasn’t mad about going home either. Paul was often back early on Thursdays; he worked at the university and had a half-day. He usually started making dinner to get brownie points with my mum. He’d also try to make conversation with me until she got back, for the same reason. I usually said I had homework to do and went straight upstairs to listen to music. But that narked him off, when he was trying to make a good impression and being ignored. He came up sometimes to see if I needed help, or ask if I minded ‘nipping’ to the corner shop for him to get him an onion or whatever.

Because I lived so close to the school I didn’t have any excuses for taking my time getting home. There were no buses to let me down, no traffic jams or road diversions. So on Thursdays, just to stretch out the walk, I used to go to the cake shop in the row of shops
next to the school, buy a sticky cream cake, and eat it messily as I walked home slowly. It made me feel a bit better, and also meant I wasn’t starving when I got back – Paul was always annoyed if I came home and headed straight for the fridge on days when he was cooking.

That day I went for one of those weird round chocolate ball things with chocolate vermicelli all over it. I’d bitten into it even before I’d left the shop.

Then I saw Jonah at the empty bus stop.

‘That looks nice,’ he said, when I was close enough to speak to.

‘What?’

‘Your little cake.’ He nodded at it, smiling. I almost threw it away, straight up in the air, like a little kid getting rid of the thing they’ve been told they’re not allowed – it felt incredibly kiddy to be eating a cake. ‘You don’t have to look so guilty,’ he said. ‘You’re obviously not dieting.’

I frowned at him, pretending to look slightly shocked. ‘You know, there are
some
people who could be a bit offended by that.’

‘No, I meant ’cause you’re so slim,’ Jonah said. ‘Sorry, that sounds like the kind of thing one of my dad’s sleazy friends would say.’

‘How many sleazy friends has your dad got?’

He rolled his eyes upwards as if trying to remember
and count them. ‘Er . . . two,’ he said. His eyes glinted with fun.

We looked at each other. I didn’t feel nervous now. I wasn’t even nervous about the fact that I didn’t feel nervous. I was excited, the way you are when your favourite programme is about to come on telly, and you know you’re going to love every second but it’s going to be over too soon.

‘This is kind of a weird conversation,’ Jonah said. He rocked back on his heels and grinned.

‘Is it?’ I said, with a kind of sigh. ‘I was trying to sound normal.’

‘You’re not that normal,’ he said.

‘Oh . . . cause, you know, there are
some
people who could be a bit offended by that, too.’

‘But not you.’

But I would be. If someone said it about me in school, like a girl, especially a girl, I would probably crumple up and stay in a ball until they let us go home. But his voice was low and those black coffee eyes were soft and it seemed like one of the nicest things anyone had ever said to me.

‘How come you missed your bus?’ I asked him. I knew it must have come and gone because there was no one else from school at the stop.

‘I stayed behind to talk about changing one of my courses.’

‘Really? What to what?’

‘Oh, um, maths to economics.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah, it’s not very interesting.’

There’s a point when you’re getting to know someone and you’re still on the edge of them. Maybe you already know that this person is right for you,
your kind
. You can sense it: behind the words, something in you is speaking to something in them. But to get to that place where you can let go, you have to say enough of the things that other people say. And I was so desperate to get to the next stage that I almost couldn’t come up with anything for this stage – it felt like a waste of time. I always, with Jonah, right from the start, felt that I was running out of time.

Jonah swallowed. ‘So look, do you have to go straight home?’

Probably.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Wanna grab a coffee?’

‘Yeah.’ I wrapped the chocolate ball in its paper bag and stuffed it in my rucksack, and wondered how chocolatey my mouth was. I was looking at the ground as we walked, watching our feet, perfectly in step. I thought about my legs looking sort of all right in my shoe-boots, which were quite high-heeled, and hoped he was looking at my legs, just so he could see
they could look all right. He started telling me a funny story about the teacher he’d just seen, doing his voice, the way it went from really quiet to really loud. Sometimes I stopped listening to him because my head was just having a stupid conversation on its own, going,
Ooh, look at you then! You’re walking down the road with Jonah as if you weren’t some Year 11 kid he wouldn’t look twice at. You’d better not be boring him
! But between his story and me trying to tell my head to shut up so I could
listen
to the story, we got to the coffee shop and we got to that next stage too.