Let's Get Lost

by Sarra Manning

  “Fine!” I snapped, making a mental note to reduce her to tears with some well-placed invective at a later date. “As you three are incapable of doing anything by yourselves?”

  I flounced over to the boys, who were obviously not down with my whole Amélie vibe because they looked over my shoulder to where the Trio of Evil was obviously busting some particularly slutty moves. Up close, they were even less easy on the eye. Who’d told them that so much hair gel was a good look? That person should have been executed for crimes against fashion.

  They were obviously waiting for me to stop with the filthy looks and say something, so I opened my mouth and said the one bomb-proof sentence that was guaranteed to get pikey boys really hot and bothered. “Hey, me and my friends go to the local grammar school. Do you want to chip in for two bottles of cider?”

  An hour later I could still feel the taste of Rob’s cidery tongue swirling around the back of my throat where he’d been trying to play a contact sport with my tonsils. I’d only managed to give him the slip by pretending that I needed to go and throw up behind the Crown Bowling Green because I’d drunk too much cider.

  Instead I’d set off at full pelt and didn’t slow down until I’d reached the Duke of York’s cinema. I was sure that if you stuck me under a UV light you’d be able to see Rob’s fingerprints all over me. And he’d managed to pull one of the buttons off my coat. When Smith kissed me, he cupped the back of my head, his thumbs massaging my scalp as he took his time. Like, the kissing was worth something. As if I was worth something. And once you’ve had that, you can never go back.

  I pulled out my phone, kinda surprised that Rob hadn’t lifted it during the make-out session from hell, because all he’d been able to talk about was his successful career nicking car stereos. Seemed like even I could get a break. Or two breaks because there was no one home and I could leave a message.

  “Hey, Dad, Felix, it’s me. I thought I’d stay around Dot’s after all. You can call me on the mobile if you need me and I’ll see you tomorrow after school. Bye!”

  There was no answer when I called Smith, and I needed time to work on leaving a message that didn’t repeat my pushy performance of Friday night. But five minutes later, when I was buying a metric ass-load of Freshmint gum so I could get the Rob taste out of my mouth, my phone started ringing.

  I can’t multitask in high-stress situations and some stroppy cow behind me was already muttering as I counted out the right change. I practically threw a pound coin at the shop assistant and dived for my phone, though it was probably Dad having a change of heart.

  “Look, you said it would be okay and . . .”

  “What happened to hello?”

  “Hey, Smith,” I breathed, grabbing my change and purposely bumping into the moaning bitch who’d dared to tut when my phone rang. “I just called you.”

  “I know, I couldn’t get to it in time and you didn’t leave a message.”

  “Yeah, hang on . . .” I tucked the phone against my shoulder as I unwrapped three sticks of gum and shoved them in my mouth. “Look, if you have stuff on it’s cool, but if not, can I come around?”

  Smith gasped. “But it’s Tuesday evening. Doesn’t that violate your wacky weekends-only rule?”

  “Oh, don’t you want me to come over, then?” It shouldn’t have been humanly possible for me to sound that woebegone.

  “I can actually hear you pouting, it’s kinda freaky.” Smith chuckled.

  “What are you so happy about, anyway?”

  “Well, you call and make it obvious you’re desperate to get your hands on me.”

  “You were obviously dropped on your head as a baby,” I growled, but I quickened my pace so I’d get to him quicker.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m just at the Level, so am I carrying straight on to your place—or am I turning right and going home?”

  “You’re turning right,” he said, and I almost dropped the phone in shock at the casual, cruel way he’d totally been toying with me like a cat with a poor little mouse between its paws. “Because I’m in The Great Eastern on Trafalgar Street. Wanna get some chips on the way back to mine?”

  “If you’re buying, I just spent my last pound on chewy.”

  I swung right and even though I’d be seeing him in two minutes, I couldn’t hang up the phone if my life depended on it. No wonder I was broke. I was spending every last penny on top-up vouchers.

  “Only if you give me a kiss for every chip. Might take some time, though, if you’re planning on scheduling in one of your escape bids before the clock hits ten,” he added.

  “Oh, I thought I’d stay over if it was all right with you.” I stopped under a street lamp so I could pull out my mirror and check my face for signs of stubble rash because I was the kind of skanky girl who had two boys in one night.

  “Of course it is! Gotta get up early though.” He sighed. “So no dragging me back to bed to do all sorts of rude things to me.”

  I rolled my eyes as I slicked on a coat of lipstick. “Dream on, saddo. Gotta be up at first light . . . JESUS CHRIST! Don’t do that!” I screamed as two hands snaked around my waist and someone licked my neck. “Smith! I nearly had a heart attack!”

  He stepped out of the shadows with an apologetic smile as I pressed my palm against my wildly beating heart. “You have no sense of fun, Is.”

  “I dropped my mirror,” I wailed, sinking to my knees and scrabbling on the pavement. “If it’s broken that’s seven years’ bad luck. Shit.”

  “Hey, that’s just a stupid superstition,” Smith said, crouching down and helping me hunt for it. “Look, here it is. It’s fine.”

  I snatched it from him and held it up to the light to check for any hairline cracks. It looked okay. I, on the other hand, looked decidedly unokay. Why was it that my hair could never just lay all flat and docile on my head but had to make its tufty presence felt? I also had a slash of lipstick halfway up my nose, thanks to Smith scaring the bejesus out of me.

  Maybe that’s why he was frowning at me. Then he raised his eyebrows meaningfully.

  “Okay, I’m sorry that I freaked out about my mirror but I need all the luck I can get,” I muttered, wiping away the excess Lolita lipstick from my face.

  “C’mere,” Smith said gruffly, and I went into his arms to let him repair the damage. Or, if we’re going to get technical about it, I let him kiss me until I couldn’t think straight and my entire mouth was lipstick-free.

  We ate vinegar-doused chips in Smith’s bed and washed them down with this acidic red wine that made me squinch up my face every time I took a sip.

  It was all kinds of romantic, curling up under the covers and feeding each other chips. Though the grease stains on the sheets were kinda gross, and mostly we’d got into bed because the thermostat was broken on the central heating and the flat was like an icebox.

  Smith devised this ingenious way of keeping warm, which ironically involved taking off all our clothes, and then I wasn’t worrying about grease stains or the current power struggle with the Trio of Evil. I wasn’t thinking at all.

  Afterward, I cuddled up against Smith, brushing his arm with my fingers and watching, engrossed, as an army of goose bumps marched across his skin.

  “This is nice,” I said. “Us, y’know, hanging out and stuff.”

  “Yeah, I particularly liked the stuff.” Smith smiled, kissing my shoulder.

  I rolled on to my back and gave him my best doe-eyed look. “Just the stuff?”

  “I like you,” he said gravely. “I like you even more than the stuff.”

  I was pretty relieved to hear it. But liking me a lot, well, it seemed a little lackluster when just being near him made me feel like it was the night before Christmas.

  “I like you, too,” I said carefully, and he beamed, snuggling against me so he could wrap his arm around my waist. It was all his fault for looking so happy that I liked him. He was practically daring me to say it. So I did. “In fact, I’m kinda in love with
you.”

  It sounded so pathetic when I said it out loud. I shut my eyes, but that just made the silence even more unbearable. It wasn’t like I expected him to say it back, except I did and he wasn’t.

  Suddenly, I was aware of everything: the sheet wrinkled up underneath me, the faint scent of vinegar and how my skin was going from warm to clammy as I waited and waited for Smith to say something.

  “God, it’s not like I want to get married or anything!” Of course I had to open my big, fat mouth and make a horrible situation a million times worse.

  Smith tried to kiss my shoulder again, but I wrenched away from him. “Isabel . . .” he said imploringly. I gave him my heart and all he could do was whine my name after, like, half an hour.

  “Don’t Isabel me,” I snapped, sitting up and clutching the sheet around me so he couldn’t see the way every single inch of me was blushing. “So, like, is this just a sex thing for you?”

  Smith sat up and I noted with some venom that the dim lighting from the lamp made his nose look bigger than normal. He tried to run his fingers through his hair, then remembered he’d cut it all off. “I thought you were cool with it,” he said eventually with trace amounts of anger.

  “Cool with what? That I thought we were having a relationship, and all you wanted was a no-muss, no-fuss hookup. And I don’t love you, anyway, just seemed like the right thing to say,” I backtracked and the hole I’d dug was so big now that I couldn’t even see over the top of it.

  “If I wanted a no-fuss fling, you’re the last girl I’d have chosen,” Smith snarled, getting out of bed and snatching his jeans up from the floor. “You’re so high-maintenance it’s not even funny.”

  “And, like, Molly’s a little ray of low-maintenance sunshine,” I hurled at his back as he started to get dressed. “I don’t bloody think so!”

  “What the hell’s Molly got to do with it?”

  “Everything,” I burst out. “I know that you’re in love with her. I heard these girls talking, and now you’re just making do with me until she wakes up one morning and realizes that she can’t live without you. Well, it’s never gonna happen!”

  Smith didn’t say a word. Which I was getting really bored with. He could at least have denied the trumped up Molly accusation; instead he tugged on his T-shirt. “I hate it when you get angry,” he said dully, striding over to the door. “You start talking a whole lot of shit about stuff you don’t know anything about. Why can’t you just be like other girls and start crying when you’re mad?”

  “Because I’m not like other girls,” I reminded him icily.

  “Don’t I bloody know it,” he said, slamming the door so hard behind him that I swear the whole building shook.

  I sat there sulking for a bit, but there didn’t seem to be much point when there was no one around to see it.

  Getting dressed seemed like the best option, even though it was freezing cold outside of the covers. I dragged on my jeans and assorted top layers as quickly as possible, then sunk back down on the bed in despair when I looked at the time. It was almost midnight.

  I was just cobbling together a story about having a row with Dot that would explain my sudden appearance back home way after my curfew when there was a hesitant knock on the door.

  If he’d got Molly, or God forbid, Jane, to come and have a girl-to-girl chat with me about the correct timetable for declarations of love, then I’d stab him through the eye with a fork before I made my excuses and left.

  There was another knock, which made me wonder if I shouldn’t just hurl myself out of the window, when Smith’s head appeared around the door.

  “Are you planning to throw anything at me?” he asked hesitantly.

  “I was leaning toward blinding you with a fork,” I replied with a sour look, but he must have thought I was joking because he sidled in, a cup of tea in each hand like that was going to make everything miraculously better.

  I folded my arms and decided that it was about time for me to play the silent card.

  Smith placed the two mugs on the bedside table and then held up the family-sized bar of Dairy Milk he’d wedged under his arm. “Peace offering?”

  “Might work if I was normal.”

  “You couldn’t be normal if you tried,” Smith said gently, perching next to me on the bed and smiling faintly when I inched away from him. “And maybe that’s why I meant it when I said I liked you.” Smith brushed my forehead with his lips, while I tried to squirm away. Then he sighed so all my baby hairs lifted in the breeze. “I’ve only known you for a few weeks and I didn’t think either of us wanted to get into some heavy relationship. And yeah, I’m into Molly and I know that she doesn’t feel the same way, but it’s not up for discussion. Not ever.”

  But before I could move seamlessly into my next monumental snit, he kissed the little patch of skin behind my ear, which has a gazillion nerve endings all waiting to go into sensory overload from a tiny smooch. “I’m not in love with you,” he repeated to make sure I got the message. “But thank you for being brave enough to say it to me.”

  “I already took it back.”

  “You can’t take it back.”

  “Says who?”

  “There are rules and I made you tea and broke into the girls’ secret chocolate stash that they think I don’t know about, which is pretty damn lovable in anyone’s book,” he said, coaxing me out of my cardigan and under the covers in one movement.

  Smith was the only person in the world who could chase away my woe-is-me mood with chunks of chocolate and silly jokes about my nose turning into an icicle. And I giggled and wriggled just like he wanted me to so we could simply pretend that this was just a casual, no-strings relationship/hookup/ whatever. But we both knew that he was in bed with the wrong girl.

  Let'sGetLost

  Let's Get Lost

  20

  I’d had to be annoyingly vague when Smith asked why I was getting up so early when I didn’t have a job or a place of higher learning to go to. I muttered something about a dentist’s appointment, and he got distracted by wondering out loud if I’d be the first person in the history of forever to be told off for brushing my teeth too much.

  Still, as I slunk into school five minutes after Registration, I knew that I’d have to come up with some bulletproof explanation for what I actually did all day. He was pretty fond of the whole master spy theory so maybe I should go along with that.

  My first lesson was Art, which suited me just fine because it meant I could hang out in the back of the studio with some paint and my headphones. Even better, the Trio of Evil didn’t take Art, so I had plenty of time to work on revenge tactics for making me get off with that delinquent lout—nothing like a little vengeance to take my mind off the sugar coma from all that chocolate last night.

  I hadn’t taken one step inside the studio, though, before Miss Hansen was bearing down on me. Usually she doesn’t bear down, just gives me a vague smile and compliments me on what I’m wearing, so I was a little nonplussed.

  “Isabel, there you are!” she exclaimed worriedly.

  I gave a tiny shrug and tried to look apologetic. “Sorry, I’m late. My alarm clock didn’t go off and er, I seem to have forgotten all my books and stuff.”

  She didn’t seem remotely bothered about that, because she was an art teacher and being all heavy about punctuality would have got her kicked out of the cool club.

  “Mrs. Greenwood wanted to see you as soon as you arrived,” she informed me with a sympathetic smile. “I’m not sure what it’s about but it would probably be best if you hurry along now.”

  It could have been so many things. Maybe Claire had ratted me out for missing the last four care and share sessions. Or I’d given one of the juniors a funny look, and she was too scared to come back to school. Or, hey, maybe I wasn’t in trouble at all and she just wanted to thank me for being such a joy to have around the place.

  The mystery was solved as soon as I walked into her secretary’s office and saw my fa
ther pacing agitatedly in front of the door that led to Mrs. Greenwood’s inner sanctum.

  “What are you doing here? What’s wrong? Is it Felix? Has there been an accident?”

  The moment he heard my voice, his head swiveled around like it was completely independent from his neck. Which wasn’t half as scary as the look on his face, which did nothing to reassure me that everything was AOK and he’d just happened to be passing and thought he’d pop in to see if I’d had a good time last night.

  “We’re going home,” he said, each word carefully and precisely enunciated as if English was not his first language.

  I wasn’t going anywhere with him, not when he was in an inexplicably filthy mood. “I’ve got Art and a French lit test after that, so maybe this can wait till this afternoon,” I said hopefully.