The Worst Girlfriend in the World

by Sarra Manning

  9

  When I woke up on Sunday morning, everything was different.

  For one thing, what woke me was the smell of bacon sizzling in the pan. Nose twitching, limbs working independently of my brain, I got out of bed and stumbled downstairs to find my parents in the kitchen.

  Dad was reading the paper and drinking tea out of his Truckers do it long distance mug, and Mum (I had to blink a couple of times to make sure that I wasn’t hallucinating) was up and dressed in something that wasn’t a tracksuit but a dress and tights while she literally slaved over a hot stove.

  ‘Morning, sleepyhead,’ she greeted me brightly. ‘You get the deciding vote. Pancakes or waffles?’

  It was like she’d had some kind of intensive therapy overnight. Except her smile was more manic than cheerful and when I sidled nearer and Dad asked how we’d managed without him, she shot me a pleading look.

  I stared down at the silver polish on my toenails.

  ‘Sweetheart, will you go and see if we’ve got any more kitchen roll in the utility room?’ Mum asked Dad and with a put-upon sigh he got up, bopping me over the head with the paper as he left the room.

  ‘Please, Franny,’ she said once we were alone. ‘I haven’t been so bad this time. You know that.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I muttered, because bad was relative. She hadn’t been as bad as when Dad was away last June, but she’d still been bad and I’d still felt like someone had taken my internal organs and tied them in knots.

  ‘Look, he’s only just come back and nobody wants a row and honestly, I am feeling better.’ She reached out with the hand that wasn’t holding the greasy spatula to touch me, then changed her mind.

  ‘I don’t want a row either. It’s the very last thing I want, but you weren’t feeling better yesterday or the day before that,’ I hissed, because I could hear Dad rummaging in the utility room, which meant that he could probably hear us, though I shouldn’t really care if he could hear us. In a way, in lots of ways, I wanted him to hear us. ‘If he knew, then he wouldn’t take on the big cross-continent jobs and stay away so long.’

  She shook her head. She’d washed her hair, I noticed. She was even wearing mascara. If she could make all this effort for him so she wouldn’t be found out, why couldn’t she make the effort every day? Until it wasn’t making an effort but just part of her routine, part of what was normal. Sometimes you have to fake it, until you make it.

  ‘Look, everyone has their ups and downs. That’s all it was. I was just a bit down and only for a little while,’ she said, gingerly pushing the bacon round the pan. ‘So, did you want pancakes, ’cause the waffles are much easier to make? I can just put the frozen ones in the toaster.’

  ‘Whatever.’ I folded my arms and we could both hear Dad coming now, singing a Johnny Cash song at the top of his voice.

  ‘Please, Franny…’

  I hadn’t told Dad what had happened the last time he went away, so it was pretty obvious that I wasn’t going to now. I wasn’t even sure if it was to protect her, or because if Dad knew then maybe it would be too much, and he’d get into his lorry and this time he wouldn’t come back.

  With Mum like she was and Siobhan at university, there wasn’t much of anything to come back to really.

  ‘It’s all right. I’m not going to say anything, but will you promise that you’ll take your tablets and start going to group again?’

  ‘I took my tablets this morning,’ she said and then we both heard the sound of the utility-room door closing. ‘So, pancakes or waffles then?’

  Dad was back with the kitchen roll and looking at me as if my answer to the pancake/waffle debate might bring about world peace.

  ‘Waffles,’ I said. Dad sighed.

  ‘Wrong answer, Franny,’ he said and gestured to a carrier bag on the kitchen table. ‘Might not give you your presents now.’

  Dad always brought me presents back from all the places he’d driven to. Though when he’d left to go away, two days after I’d got my GCSE results, he was in such a fury with me that I hadn’t expected to get so much as a bar of Toblerone.

  ‘It’s not fair to withhold when I can see the bag right in front of me,’ I protested and he laughed and pushed the bulging carrier bag in my direction.

  There was perfume from Hungary, though the writing on the box was in French and promised me that the contents smelled of ‘figues et garçons’, figs and boys. Lavender-flavoured chocolate from the Czech Republic. And the mother lode: Dutch Vogue, German Vogue, French Vogue, Russian Vogue – lots of lovely foreign editions of the greatest, most beautiful, most sumptuous, most inspiring fashion magazine currently in existence. But the best Vogue of all, the Vogue all the other Vogues bowed down before and worshipped, was Vogue Italia.

  ‘Oh my God! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!’ I gathered Vogue Italia to my chest, pressed it against my heart, as if all the ideas and the beautiful pictures of all the lovely clothes would sink through my pores and enter my bloodstream. ‘OK, right, I’m going up to my room now. Seriously. Don’t expect to see me for the rest of the day.’

  They weren’t having that. Or Dad wasn’t having it. He made me sit down and the three of us ate breakfast together and he must have resigned himself to the fact that I was no longer planning to do five A levels, because he wanted to know how college was going, though mostly he wanted to make sure that I was going to retake my Maths and English GCSEs.

  At least there was no shouting this time. Just Dad looking sorrowful and saying, ‘You’ll never amount to anything in life if you haven’t got qualifications in Maths and English.’

  ‘Well, Franny knows that and she’s doing fine at college. They put too much pressure on her at that school, expecting her to do all those GCSEs. You love it at college, right, Franny?’

  She smiled at me desperately, imploringly, so I nodded. ‘It’s great,’ I said, though I didn’t love college at all. Not with my GCSE retakes hanging heavy over my head and Barbara on my case and not having any friends. Then I thought about the friend I did have, Alice, and suddenly I couldn’t finish my waffles.

  Playing at happy families took all morning, until Mum and Dad went out for a long walk along the clifftops because Dad had been stuck in the cab of his lorry for weeks and he wanted to stretch his legs and breathe in the sea air. It was the first time Mum had left the house in days. I waited at the top of the stairs, tense in case she had a panic attack on the doorstep, but all I heard was Dad call out, ‘I’ll call you when we’re done so you can come and meet us at the Golden Dragon for an early tea. All right, kid?’

  It was more than all right. The door closed behind them and I gave it two minutes in case they came back but they didn’t. It meant I could run up the stairs to my room, jump on my bed and pore over my precious Vogues. It turned out that mostly I lay on my bed and thought about Louis. Thought about last night and the way he’d tilted his head so he didn’t miss a single thing as he watched Alice’s arse when she walked away from him.

  Probably she had only flirted with him because Dora had been hanging out with us all evening and when I let her come to the diner with us and we’d had a conversation that Alice wasn’t part of, it had made her mad. Mad enough to exact a tiny but painful revenge by puncturing the little bubble I kept around Louis and stepping inside.

  I wondered if Louis had ever checked me out. Not that I was hot or pretty, not like Alice was, but I did have good legs. And Louis didn’t have a girlfriend, so it wasn’t within the realms of total impossibility that we might get together. I mean, Merrycliffe was a small town – we were always running into each other, hanging out at the same places, there was no reason why I couldn’t make this thing with Louis real.

  I tried to imagine what it would be like to go out with Louis. How we’d be Merrycliffe’s It couple, not that that would be a difficult feat to achieve. I could see myself standing in the wings when Thee Desperadoes played (though The Wow Club didn’t actually have any wings) as Louis sang just to me. Though T
hee Desperadoes were going to have to improve drastically before they could write the kind of songs that a girl would want them to play just for her.

  ‘Yeah, Louis was a bit of a twat before he started going out with Franny,’ people would remark. ‘The love of a good woman and all that.’

  I hugged myself at the deliciousness of it until I remembered that these were dreams that would never come true because I didn’t have the first idea of how to make them a reality. Boys were another country. And Louis wasn’t a boy. He was almost a man. A manboy.

  It was all right for Alice because she knew how to talk to boys. Alice could make a boy feel like he was the centre of her universe. It was quite something to behold.

  Whereas I had one of those faces that are like a mirror to the soul and what my soul was usually saying to boys was stuff like, ‘Even though you’ve doused yourself in Lynx, you still smell of unwashed gym socks.’ Or ‘Please stop staring at my lack of breasts and, by the way, you’re not even a quarter of the man that Louis, my imaginary boyfriend, is.’

  It was hopeless. I didn’t know how to begin showing Louis that I would make an exemplary girlfriend. Or did I? Maybe it was as easy as picking up my ancient BlackBerry and sending him a Facebook friend request. That was a good starting place. Except, what if he ignored my request or blocked me or reported me for spam? That was the least of it.

  There were so many awful repercussions to sending a friend request but before I could explore each one, my treacherous finger had already clicked on Add Friend. Why would my index finger do that?

  I stared at my finger in horror. I wasn’t strong enough to handle that kind of rejection. I could already hear Thee Desperadoes’ mocking laughter as Louis told them he’d got a friend request from the flat-chested girl who gawped at him wherever he went and who had been told off by her father for going out on a Saturday night without any socks on.

  Jesus! My day-to-day existence wasn’t exactly puppies and chocolate milkshakes and now I’d made things a million times worse. I stared at my phone in frustration and was just about to delete the friend request before Louis got it (there was no way he was getting up before lunch on a Sunday) when something dawned on me. While I was on the theme of rejection and having my dreams cruelly dashed on the rocks of life, I realised that my phone had been completely silent ever since I got up.

  Which meant that for the first time since I could remember Alice and I had gone… I glanced down at my mobile… ten hours without any kind of communication. OK, we’d been asleep for most of those ten hours, but usually I woke up to a text from Alice or I tweeted her like I did every morning to tell her the state of me and she’d tweet me back. This morning I am 70 per cent bedhead, 12 per cent Regina George from Mean Girls, 10 per cent Cheerios and 8 per cent false eyelashes.

  It was our thing. It was what we did. But not today.

  I couldn’t believe Alice had suddenly flipped out on me. Then I came to my senses and got over myself.

  It had only been ten hours and we’d been drinking last night and God knows what time she’d got in. She was probably still asleep.

  Hey U, I texted her. Sorry 2 bail last nite. U get home ok? Shall we hang l8r?

  Alice texted me back within a minute. On my way 2 grans 4 church. 4 realz. Just f-ing kill me now. Let’s Facetime l8r. Luv U! xxxxxxxx

  I’d been stupid. It was Alice. Alice! My Alice. Best friends for ever. I’d put last night’s flirtation with Louis down to too much vodka and diet Coke and move on because there was absolutely nothing to worry about.

  I loved not having to worry about stuff.

  When Dad had done a big transcontinental stint, he was only given local jobs for a while. He’d mutter about the call of the open road and how delivering sacks of sand to Runcorn wasn’t really cutting it, but he only worked six-hour shifts and was back home every day in time to cook tea, which meant that Mum was his problem.

  Not that Mum was anybody’s problem right now. She was pretending to be a fully functioning adult and if she was a bit too thin and a bit too OCD about the housework and had a minor fit when Dad bought non-organic milk, well, that was just because it was her ‘special time of the month’. We were all really good at pretending in our house.

  And at least now I could get on with my own stuff.

  Alice and I were good again too. She’d even bunked off so we could have lunch together on Monday. She didn’t mention what had happened on Saturday with Louis so she’d obviously never meant it to be a big deal and I wasn’t going to let it become one. It was why I didn’t tell her that I’d sent Louis a friend request, especially as it had been forty-eight hours and he hadn’t responded. If he hadn’t responded in forty-eight hours, then he wasn’t going to and I was going to be grown up and philosophical about Louis shunning my clumsy overtures.

  Or I was going to try and be grown up and philosophical and carry on treating Louis as my own personal sex object until I was old enough to leave Merrycliffe and find a real boy who dressed impeccably and knew who Alber Elbaz was and never ever joked about farts or any other kind of bodily function. Until then, my crush on Louis would just have to do and I could only hope that my friend request was a little secret between the two of us. Please God, let it be so.

  Even a few days ago, I’d have been ripped in two over Louis’s cruel rejection, but I could deal with it now because Dad was home, Alice was cool and in the little corner of the art block given over to our fashion fiefdom Barbara had given us our first project. It didn’t involve filling in an annotated diagram of a sewing machine either. We were going to make an actual piece of clothing!

  Before that, we had to suffer three excruciating days of being taught how to follow a dressmaking pattern, which I already knew how to do. I decided not to share that in case Barbara put another black mark by my name, to go with the ten or so that were already there.

  So I sat at my table with one of my beloved vintage Vogue patterns that I’d bought on eBay and once Barbara was satisfied that we all vaguely knew what we were meant to be doing, Sneering Studio Tech appeared.

  ‘Where do you want them then?’ he asked Barbara gruffly. I knew before he’d even opened his mouth that he’d sound gruff.

  ‘Why don’t we let everyone choose their dress forms?’ Barbara suggested and he sniffed like that was a bad idea, then wheeled in the first dress form.

  Everyone, even Krystal with a K, greeted the dress form with oohs and ahs – Paul, who had the workstation next to mine, even clapped his hands in glee. I already had a dress form at home, an eBay purchase that Dad had picked up from Manchester for me, so I had a game plan. While everyone oohed and aahed, I quickly snagged the form that was my size rather than one of the adjustable ones that looked as if they’d fall apart if you tried to adjust them. As it was, the wheels stuck as I rolled it to my workbench.

  Sneering Studio Tech gave me a knowing look, but I wasn’t sure if it was in acknowledgement of my mad dress-form-getting abilities or if it was because he’d witnessed Louis laughing himself stupid about my friend request. Then I saw him give Paul a knowing look when Paul asked if there were any male dress forms, so I figured that that was just the way his face was designed. It had two settings: the sneer and the knowing look.

  ‘He’s in that terrible band. Do you fancy him too?’ Dora hissed from where she was sitting behind me.

  ‘No! I’m a one-Desperado kind of girl,’ I hissed back, one eye on Sneering Studio Tech. ‘All men are somehow less, compared to Louis.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ Dora, who was wearing leggings, white shirt and a black velvet tailcoat, what she called a ‘casual Wednesday look’, gestured at Sneering Studio Tech, who was standing with his arms folded and staring at the ceiling as Sage and Krystal with a K almost came to blows over the two dress forms that were left. ‘He’s much better looking than Louis.’

  ‘No, he’s not,’ I said automatically, because my research had been both exhausting and empirical. Louis was the best-looking boy in Merrycliffe.
Sneering Studio Tech was, well, he was…

  I shuffled round on my stool so I could peer at him over my dress form’s shoulder. He was tall, but not as tall as Louis. He was thin but not rock-god thin like Louis, just thin. He didn’t have Louis’s amazing cheekbones either, but he had one of those thin faces that looked intelligent rather than ferrety. His eyes… well, I couldn’t be sure without making it really obvious that I was staring but Louis’s eyes were blue and Sneering Studio Tech’s eyes weren’t blue. He had mousy brown hair that could have done with cutting to stop it falling in his indeterminate-coloured eyes and he was wearing navy overalls and he played guitar in Thee Desperadoes very badly. Definitely not crush material.

  ‘Well, I think he has a certain charm,’ Dora said. ‘What do you reckon?’

  Paul and Mattie, who had the workstation next to Dora, both nodded and Sage, victorious in her battle over the dress form, came over. She gave me a nasty eye flick, because her and Krystal with a K were still fully paid-up members of the hate club. ‘Reckon to what?’