An Amicabubble Breakup

by Dillie Dorian

  That was an idea! Finally, an idea related to the decisionmaking I had to struggle through. It was the last night before we had to hand in our forms, and Andy had been over to help Charlie with his. They’d cheerfully announced over dinner the “obvious” choices of Double Award Music Tech, Drama and Resistant Materials. Obvious my foot! Charlie’s last woodwork project had come in unintentionally handy as a base for Harry’s weekly document burn in the garden. It had been a toast rack, which was surprisingly apt.

  I suppose I could’ve asked Devon for help, but her final words on the matter had been along the lines of “You’re taking Drama with me and the guys or else!” Before letting her terrify me about Art or any other subject I might somewhat consider, it made much more sense to start with the things I knew I was no cop at:

  Resistant Materials – I’ve probably already mentioned the green guinea pig migraine clock.

  Electronics – See green guinea pig migraine.

  Food Tech – When will I ever require cookery skills beyond the comprehension of the instructions on a packet of microwaveable Ocean Pie? Mum did Food Tech twenty years ago and it was all theory then.

  Textiles – Can’t get a sewing machine to sew straight. One would think they had technology for that by now.

  Music – Can’t play an instrument or sing.

  Music Tech – Can’t use computers and have no interest in listening to amateurs like Charlie play instruments and sing.

  Full Course ICT – See the part where I hate computers.

  Full Course RS – This would only escalate my political correctness problem. (The problem being that I’m so serious about it that I often get told to shut up.)

  PE – I’m actually glad that we’ll be down to one lesson a week.

  Spanish – If I ever have another Gerardo situation on my hands it’ll be too soon.

  French – I sucked at Spanish. This would be masochism.

  Health & Social Care – See the part where I’ve been on a fourteen year hospitality course at home.

  Leisure & Tourism – See Health & Social Care.

  Working Outdoors – I prefer to be indoors. Simple.

  Geography – Up until last month I didn’t even know where Timbuktu was, despite using it as an example. Hm, possibly a contender.

  Modern World History – Probably not a great idea, considering that this year I’ve had to pause two essays for a relaxing bath after I empathised so much with Anne Frank / all the African slaves that I was in tears. (Under the English exam definition of empathy where you’re only imagining you’ve been there.)

  Schools History Project – Seeing as this is about the history of medicine and midwifery and stuff, it sounds really interesting. I’d have to hope that I don’t get too caught up in the plight of the Native Americans, though.

  Art – There are so many different types, and I don’t know what they mean. Devon is taking Unendorsed Art, which she says means “everything”. I have to admit that I am curious as to how our awful school plans to cover the bases of “everything”, when Mrs Wright’s idea of safety measures includes banning claywork for the entirety of Key Stage 3.

  BTEC Performing Arts – This has Dance and Music in it, and I’m pretty sure Charlie said that Malice said that when she took this subject they were made to organise a Drama trip that they didn’t even get to go on.

  Dance – There’s one subject that I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. My coordination is so terrible that back in Year 8 I crashed into a crash mat which was leant against the wall, and had the thing topple and crush me.

  Drama – Or else.

  Looking back at the list, I was left with with four subjects whether I wanted them or not: Drama, Art, History Option 2, and Geography. Realising the time (let’s just say that Kitty should’ve been asleep, but because she’d had a paddy about it still being daylight, Mum was trying to get her to do her reading homework), I hastily signed my life away, licked and stuck the envelope, crawled into bed and tried not to give it any more thought.

  #16 Recycling, Innit!

  I couldn’t stop licking my teeth. It had only been an hour since my braces had been removed, and it felt so good to have my mouth to myself again. Sure, they sort-of clicked when I ate, but it was better than braces by far.

  We’d been meant to have the day off after our morning appointment. Harry had skipped work so that he could chaperone, and even taken us to a nice restaurant for lunch. The only problem was that we needed to drop our Option forms in today – otherwise we’d be shoved into random subjects for the next two years, along with everyone who hadn’t been bothered to choose.

  “My foop too hot,” complained Charlie, who’d wriggled and snapped so much during the more-or-less painless ordeal that they’d had to numb his mouth. I secretly suspected that it had been intended as a punishment.

  “Thank you for the lovely pasta bake, Harry,” I said, smugly.

  It served him right. Charlie had publicly called me “brace face” and “metal mouth” for a good fortnight after I’d had mine fitted, and no amount of shouting “crooky pegs” or “buck tooth” back seemed to have got to him. Now, of course, he knew what I’d gone through and then some.

  “How cmmmph arr ijection dit hurt ‘n’ dis did?” Charlie sulked, through a mouthful of roll.

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” said Harry, who thought it perfectly polite to have an open newspaper on the table but often told me off for reading books over dinner.

  “How ca you tell?” Charlie replied, inbetween chews. “You dit loof uh.”

  If I hadn’t been in such a good mood, I would’ve wanted to sock him. For once, I was content to be breezily, cheerfully, chirpily confident and let his indignancy do all the work.

  I was high in the runnings for Harry’s favourite stepchild. The only thing between me and the general top-spot was that Lemmy was too young to have ever annoyed him even once. (Or at least, not that Harry would admit to being that petty.)

  So far today, Aimee had torn up all her own baby photos because they were “unflattering”, leaving Harry with only a tiny picture from his wallet and the framed one from work which he intended to leave there to be safe. (Yes, this girl was due to give birth in only a few weeks!) Charlie had angered Dr Vassiliadis to the point of retaliation. (“If it hurts so much, we had better to numb the pain.” At which point he drove a needle deep into my brother’s gum.)

  The family still had a severe Zak deficiency, and it had turned out that yesterday, Mum had had an accusational phone call home from Kitty’s school because she had snuck one of Zak’s Cokes into her lunchbox. (This is a school which now has a blanket ban on nuts because of one allergic pupil, so don’t be surprised that a fizzy drink raised the dinner ladies’ hackles.)

  Yep – my siblings’ misbehaviour had finally made it apparent to Harry that I was his only remote ally. I almost pitied him in a way, knowing that he didn’t know how much I’d helped hide from him in terms of the others’ mistakes.

  “Eat up, Charlie,” I teased. “Or does it hurt too much to bear? Does it burn your skin when Devon tickles you?”

  Charlie’s face started to match his tomato soup. “Shuh uh Arely!”

  Revenge was sweet. Maybe if he hadn’t been such a brat over Zak leaving, I would’ve kept this to myself. Just wait until my friends, oh, and his friends, were informed of how he’d reached the pinnacle of wussiness…

  * * *

  “…so Charlie was squirming about so much that the orthodontist visibly wanted to put him through the window. If Harry hadn’t been there, I’m not sure he would’ve been able to help himself! He had to give him one of those roof-of-the-mouth injections before he believed the braces themselves weren’t going to hurt!”

  Keisha nearly fell backwards down the canteen steps in her heels. Being Keisha, though, she recovered from that without so much as cringing. “Have you any idea how much those hurt? And that’s supposed to be to numb out summin’ worse!”

  “Yeah,
” said Dani. “I had that when they took out my extra teeth. It was so bad that I thought I was going to faint!”

  “Ew, wouldn’t you just imagine it going right up into your brain?” winced Chan.

  Fern looked about to be sick.

  “He actually might be the dumbest boy who ever lived,” added Keisha, in a way that usually I’d call out as excessive.

  This was sweet. So what if I’d been ordered to wear my retainer during school for the rest of the week? If Charlie didn’t watch out, he was going to be a laughing stock.

  “Here they come!” said Rindi, excitedly. “Are you really going to tell Jordy?”

  “Of course I am,” I said, proudly. I’d just about reached the point of cutting my losses. Even if Jordy didn’t want to go out with me, I intended to get his respect before we started our GCSEs. I pictured the great class reshuffle lumping us together for PSHE or ICT or something else timewastey, and we could waste that time together as friends.

  I turned to the wall, and pulled the retainer out of my mouth with difficulty. I hadn’t been successful in growing my nails, and it was stuck fast to my teeth. When I finally got it out, it was slimy and bubbled with spit.

  “Ew!” shouted Chan again. “That is so gross!”

  Oops, maybe I’d forgotten that it might bother other people. I mean, I came from a house where slobbery dog toys got plopped on top of your mash if you dared attempt a TV dinner.

  “Sorry,” I muttered, snapping it into its case and shoving that into my bag. “I’ll be right back.”

  At a table by the window sat Jordy and Andy. They’d no doubt been told a heroic tale, or at least given a shrugworthy account of how totally fine it had all gone. Charlie had been sort-of able to talk by the time we’d rocked up at school.

  “H-hey,” I giggled, as my belly flopped upon the realisation that I was less than two metres away from Jordan Johnson.

  “Hey,” said Andy, with a wiggle of the eyebrow. He’d taken to teasing me whenever he was around, and I really wished he wouldn’t. It was like having your dad try to dance with you at your birthday party – not that that was something I’d ever experienced.

  “Did Charlie tell you-?”

  “Hey-ya!” shouted Devon, who had just emerged from the till area with Charlie in tow.

  I ignored her.

  “…about… about the orthodontist?”

  “What’s an author…whatsit?” asked Jordy, thickly.

  “A doctor for your teeth,” sighed Andy, rolling his eyes to me hopefully.

  “I thought that was a dentist,” Jordy continued, confused.

  “An orthodontist fits braces and stuff,” said Devon, who had joined us.

  “Oh yeah!” said Jordy. He looked from me to Charlie, and then from Charlie back to me. And then from me to Charlie again. “Didn’t you used to have the braces?”

  Oh. My God. He’d actually spoken to me! I didn’t care how mundane a thing it was about – I had finally made a breakthrough! Just as I’d been on the brink of giving up and calling him a friend. Remind me to threaten to surrender more often… I thought to myself. Dido had it right. Or wrong. Whatever, I don’t really remember. Eep! Answer him!

  “…yeah.”

  “Blimm’ ’eck!” shouted Jordy, with genuine excitement. “They took the braces off of her, and put them on him! Recycling, innit!”

  I looked at Charlie, and Charlie looked at me, and it was in that moment that we decided once and for all that if we didn’t stick together, the world wasn’t going to compensate. I’d only got one twin brother, and one brother, and one sister, and one stepsister, and one half-brother, and it only made sense to keep mortifying orthodontic freakout stories within the family…

  #17 Most Certainly One Of Those Sometimes…

  Kitty was already home when I got in on Wednesday. I’d been to her school, where the secretary informed me that she’d been collected by Mum hours ago.

  She was sat on the sofa, and weirdly smiling, displaying a huge gap where her front-left tooth should have been, and quite a large bruise on her top lip. “Hi, Harley…”

  I went to sit with her. “Kit, what happened?”

  The following has been converted from Lispy Gap-Speak by a loving elder sister:

  “It was at playtime, and these girls were chasing me, and I ran and tripped over the concrete squares by the basketball hoop and hit my mouth. And then my tooth came out and there was lots and lots of blood-”

  “Oh, poor you,” I said, sympathetically. I wondered if she would’ve been OK if she’d had what she called a “retamer” on her teeth at the time. Suddenly my now ordinary-if-not-perfect smile made me feel self-conscious in itself, with my sister sat before me with such a huge, sore gap. At least she’d been late losing her baby teeth and had adult ones to come.

  “I’m not done: I hurt my knee really bad too, then Zak came along and he kissed it better and then we walked all the way to First Aid, through the Junior playground where I’m not supposed to go but that’s the way to First Aid, and all the big boys and some of the girls laughed, but he didn’t care and then he went to his class, and Mum had to come. And she took me to the dentist and he said I am ‘A-OK’!”

  “Wow… Zak spoke to you, then?”

  “Nope.”

  NOPE?!

  I just didn’t know anymore – I needed something, anything weird and wonderful enough to get me out of my trademark worrisome mood.

  Not TV, not books, not even writing seemed like a good enough way to make it all better.

  I was sure from that point onwards that Zak most certainly did not want to come back.

  I knew he most certainly hadn’t stopped caring about Kitty.

  And I knew he’d most certainly awarded Charlie a World’s Most Crappy Brother medal right where he wanted his Young Shredder awards and whatnot to be…

  Then I knew that Mum was most certainly going through worse pain than childbirth every time she saw Zak in baby Lemmy and had to think about how her eldest two sons couldn’t get along enough to live under the same roof, and wonder where she went wrong.

  But the thing I knew most certainly of all was that Andy’s dad could not keep Zak forever, and soon enough we would actually have to hear him moan and huff and insist that he really didn’t want to live with us. We’d have to hear him protest so wildly that it offended all of us (and probably Ryan) when he said that he would rather be fostered by Hugh than be forced to live here with the family that had loved him for eleven years. It was only a matter of time.

  “Harley, come and hear this new song we’ve got going!” yelled Charlie from upstairs, breaking my depressive train of thought with his unnaturally optimistic tone.

  “I don’t really want to hear any of your grunger stuff right now,” I called back, trying to hide that inside I felt like he must feel most of the time. How ironic that I was the one who felt bad about Zak, and Charlie wasn’t even sorry…

  Or was he?

  “It’s called ‘Little Brother Is Watching You’!”

  I trotted upstairs; following the sound of Charlie’s squealing lead guitar (with annoying whammy-bar), the low hum of Andy’s bass, and the more-than-bearable tinkle of Jordy’s attempts at playing the keyboard. To be fair, it was slightly sweet that my brother and his band actually thought they knew what they were doing (and compared to the non-studio-literate me, I guess they did), but only sometimes was I willing to put up with the all-out hyper-crap noises that they considered music…

  Today was one of those “sometimes”…

  P.S. I’m much more ready to tolerate the said grungy, topical squealing than I had been to tolerate High School Musical. (Which I still believe to be questionable.)

  P.P.S. Although I am starting to see his point – not about HSM; about being an emo. It feels sort of nice to dwell on things instead of shoving them in boxes and taping them tight.

  P.P.P.S. Er, not that you’re gonna catch me in Emily Strange gear anytime soon.

  P.P.P
.P.S. The whole school does sorta still think me and Charlie shared a set of braces. Neither of us are quite assertive enough to put anyone right about that, and Keisha, Chan and Devon are all finding it too hilarious to fix the situation.

  T.T.F.N. Harley & Co – (“Co” meaning “two idiot teenage boys, one gorgeous teenage boy, a lispy sister and a mum, surrounded by soppy, sappy musical wailings”)

  The next book in the recommended reading order is: Ging Gang Goolie Watcher

  Connect With Me Online:

  Website:

  https://www.dilliedorian.co.uk

  Personal Blog:

  https://muzzyheadedme.tumblr.com

  Facebook:

  https://facebook.com/dilliedorianofficial

  About The Author:

  Dillie Dorian is an English author of child and YA realistic fiction. She is notable for offering all fourteen titles in her debut series, A Bended Family, for free online.

  Dillie has been “writing” since a very young age, and her mother probably still hoards innumerable sellotape-bound “sequels” to everything from Animal Ark to The Worst Witch.

  Her first serious project began in September 2006, with “Oops! Did I Forget I Don’t Know You?”, which sparked countless official sequels of its own within months. Working on this series between the ages of thirteen and fourteen taught her everything she knows about writing, and she hasn’t stopped expanding on the Hartleys’ lives since!