I watch Leo run over to my cousin, who is short even for a thirteen year old, and grab her, lifting her up in the air.
‘Hey stranger,’ I say as I shuffle over to Chris, greeting him just outside the lit area so we’re less likely to be seen. I can’t help but notice he’s wearing his lifeguard shorts – perhaps he thinks they’re a deal breaker for me. ‘I didn’t think I’d see you again.’
‘Well, your dad invited me, didn’t he? That night I saved your life,’ he reminds me.
‘Ah, yes, fond memories of that night,’ I reply sarcastically.
‘Anyway, weddings aren’t really my scene. I just thought I’d swing by, see if you wanted to ditch this lot, maybe go finish what we keep trying to start.’
He wiggles his eyebrows as he grabs me by the tutu, pulling me close.
I glance back towards the party and watch as Leo dances with Meg, holding her up in the air so she is the same height as him, and the words leave my lips before I even have time to give it much thought.
‘Sorry,’ I reply. ‘I’m taken.’
Loved Bad Bridesmaid?
Then turn the page for an extract from Portia MacIntosh’s brilliant novel
How Not to be Starstruck
Chapter One
The Fairy Tale
I wonder who started the bloody ridiculous rumour that women can multi-task effortlessly. I’d love to know so that I can send them a photograph of me right now (obviously someone else would have to take it for me) epic-failing my way to the office.
It’s 11 a.m. on an exceptionally cold Monday morning and I’m late for work. Again, and as always. Currently dodging my way through the busy streets of Leeds, I’m desperately trying not to drop anything. In my right hand I have four take-away cups of coffee – in a holder obviously, I’m good but I’m not that good – my massive Mary Poppins-style handbag hooked on my left arm and my mobile phone in my left hand. It’s still in my hand because, as I was leaving Starbucks, I received a call from work and without a free hand to put my phone back in my bag, that’s where it’s going to have to stay.
Thankfully work is just around the corner from my flat, although I was supposed to be at the office by 10 a.m. Stopping at Starbucks has only made me even later but I’m hoping the coffees will score me some brownie points with the staff. If you can’t be on time, the least you can do is suck up to people.
Just one more road to cross and I’ll be there. Balancing on the edge of the curb in my silly yet beautiful shoes, I feel like the slightest breeze could knock me off my feet. As the green man appears, I step off the pavement with the rest of the sheep. Eyeballing the window of my office for angry faces, I make it half way across the road when something hits me – literally hits me. As I fall to the ground in what feels like super-slow, Matrix-esque motion (although it probably doesn’t look quite so graceful to the people around me), my impressive coffee-handbag-phone balancing act comes to an abrupt end. Landing flat on my back, right there in the middle of the road, I feel like I’ve been hit by a bus. Was I hit by a bus? I can hear people fussing around me and the impatient blaring of car horns. They can piss off, I could be dead...although if I’m thinking that, chances are I’m probably still alive, right?
As I run my hands down my body to check for major injuries, I feel that my skirt is up around my waist. I have never been happier to be wearing such thick tights, God bless the crappy, cold weather we have up north.
There’s a strong smell of coffee coming from the double-digits’-worth of Starbucks puddle on the road next to me, which thankfully hasn’t trickled towards me, although I am tempted to roll over and lap it up.
Despite having the wind knocked out of me, I think I’m going to make it.
‘I am so sorry, let me help you up,’ I hear a deep, apologetic voice insist as a hand reaches for mine.
Flat on my back and in the middle of the road, with my skirt hitched up around my waist, I am in no position to be declining help, so I grab the stranger’s hand and let him yank me to my feet.
‘Here’s your phone, I hope it isn’t broken. Shit, there are a couple of scratches on it,’ the stranger informs me as he hands me my fairly battered-looking phone. My phone is noticeably scratched, but I don’t tell him that most of the damage probably occurred the time my phone took a tumble down the stairs, bashed against something in my handbag, magically escaped my grasp, etc. In fact, my phone has been dropped so many times it’s a miracle that it still works. I prod a button on the front with a very shaky finger and my trusty phone springs to life as usual. What a trooper. Only after making sure my phone is OK do I actually look the only person who stopped to help me in the eye. Ushering me back across the road (the side I don’t want to be on) is an absolutely gorgeous man. Shit, I can’t believe he saw me lying in the road like that. He’s wearing a very flashy suit and clutching a fat, important-looking file stuffed with papers. Oh, and he has one of my shoes tucked under his arm, which explains why I’m limping – I thought I’d snapped my ankle or something.
‘Thanks for helping me. I’m not sure what happened, I was crossing the road and―’ I stop mid-sentence. The truth is, I have no idea what happened.
The good-looking stranger sits me down on the nearest bench.
‘Are you all right?’ he asks me with a very concerned look on his face. He looks like every portrayal of Prince Charming I have ever seen in the movies, with an added (and well-used) gym membership thrown into the mix.
‘I’m OK, just a bit shaken up. Did you see what happened?’
‘Please, wait here,’ handsome stranger insists. ‘I have to get this file to someone in that building.’ He gestures towards the offices behind us with the fat file. ‘Just...don’t move. I’ll be back in five minutes, I’ll explain everything then. Get your breath back, OK?’
I nod my head and watch him dash into the building behind me, my shoe still tucked under his arm which means I couldn’t leave if I wanted to – not that wearing only one shoe concerns me, but just one of these particular shoes is worth more than most of my other pairs.
Whatever happened to me, I am so lucky that I landed on my bum because I think it broke my fall. I’ll never complain about the size of it again, I promise.
I check my phone again and then my bag to make sure nothing is damaged – or even more damaged than it was before I fell. Everything seems to be OK, and despite feeling a bit achy and a lot embarrassed, I think I’m OK too. The only things that suffered are the coffees – the poor coffees! It breaks my heart watching cars driving over the empty cups in the middle of the road.
‘Right, are you OK?’ the gorgeous stranger asks when he returns. ‘I feel like such a dickhead. I was in a bit of a rush, I completely knocked you off your feet.’
Ah, so that’s what happened.
‘No harm done. I’m fine,’ I assure him, although part of me is thinking I should be a bit pissed off – but who could be mad at that silky black hair and those perfect teeth? To be honest, I just want to get another coffee (for medicinal purposes) and get to work.
‘I feel terrible. Can I replace your drinks? It’s the least I can do. I’m Tom by the way.’ He offers me his hand for the second time, this time for me to shake.
‘I’m Nicole, nice to meet you. I think,’ I reply as I shake his hand. He has a tight, manly grip and I’m certain I’m blushing right now.
‘Nice to meet you too, Nicole. Let’s get those drinks.’
‘Honestly, it’s fine, I—’
‘Please?’ Tom flashes a smile that I can’t bring myself to say no to and so I give in, but not before he gets down on one knee and delicately places my shoe back on my foot. If the smile didn’t have me saying yes, then the Cinderella moment sealed the deal.
Soon enough I’m in Starbucks, again, only this time it’s much busier and we’re forced to wait for our order. We chat for a few minutes and it turns out that Tom works for a firm of solicitors not far from where I work and, despite the fact that he practically assa
ulted me, and the fact we’ve only known each other for about twenty minutes, we’re getting on really well.
As soon as the drinks are ready, we walk back towards our offices. This is the second longest time it has ever taken me to walk the short journey from my flat to where I work. My record was set a couple of months ago when I spied a sale at one of my favourite shops, or a ‘dental emergency’ as I explained it to my colleagues, bursting through the doors several hours late with lots of suspicious-looking carrier bags.
‘This is me,’ I say as we arrive at the revolving doors that lead to my office. ‘I’m sure I can handle it from here.’
‘I’m sure you can.’ He smiles that smile again. ‘I know this must seem a bit weird considering the circumstances, but I’d really like to see you again. I’ve already swept you off your feet.’
That’s the kind of cheesiness that would normally make me sick all over a man’s shoes, but being so gorgeous, even a line as lame as that sounds utterly charming as it leaves his lips.
‘Erm, knocked me off my feet,’ I correct him, and he laughs.
‘I’ll give you my card, give me a call if you want to go for a drink sometime.’
After thanking him again, I take the card and say goodbye. As soon as I am in the building and out of Tom’s line of sight, I toss the card into the nearest bin, because there’s no way I’m going to call him. Yes, he’s good-looking, charming, funny and has a really good job, but that’s just not my type. He may be any normal/sane girl’s type, but I’ve never been that normal. Or sane.
Anyway, I’m late for work. Better get a move on.
Chapter Two
The Rebel
My name is Nicole Wilde, and I don’t live in the ‘real world’. Well, that’s what my Great-aunt Dorothy is always telling me. Maybe she’s right. I guess I am kind of lucky with the way things have worked out.
As tacky as it sounds, I have always wanted to be a celebrity. When I was a little girl, as shy as I was, I wanted to be an actress, a singer, a dancer or a musician, and I tried my hand at each one – it turns out I was crap at all of them. My singing voice wasn’t terrible but it wasn’t amazing either, acting gave me the giggles, trying to make my hands do different things at the same times just wouldn’t happen no matter which instrument I tried to learn and as for dancing, well that’s pretty much just exercise, and who wants to do that for a living?
Fast forward a few years to my mid-teens. I rebelled. Black nails and make-up, rainbow-coloured hair, fishnet tights and ‘fuck my life’ T-shirts – that was me. However, like any scary-on-the-outside, good-girl-on-the-inside teenage faux rebel, music was my life. I might not have been able to make it, but I could certainly surround myself with it. No more of the cheesy 90s pop that I loved growing up, instead I started listening to proper bands that played proper instruments.
I would go to the local venue a few times a week and check out unsigned bands from all over the country, stopping by the quiet little Yorkshire town where I grew up just to have another leg of their little self-funded tours.
I would watch the bands and then hang out chatting afterwards, and hitting it off with the musicians was just something that came easily to me. Maybe this was down to the fact that – as my Great-Aunt Dot put it – my grungy, punky outfits were ‘suggestive’ and gave off ‘the wrong impression’, but I think it probably had more to do with the fact that we shared a love of music.
Hanging around with these unknown musicians gave me a taste for the music industry (and a passion for band boys) so I started following big name bands around, doing anything and everything to meet them, have my photo taken with them and ask them to sign my CD/T-shirt/body part. This only increased my desire to be famous and to surround myself with famous people – it was a case of befriending the unsigned bands, sitting back and waiting to see if any of them ‘made it’. Of all the friends I made back in those days, some quit their bands, cut their hair and got real jobs but others stuck with it – one of the bands I know is actually getting pretty big at the moment which is very exciting.
By the time I was eighteen, I was tagging along on tours – low budget, of course – sleeping in the back of vans and converted old buses. I’m not even embarrassed to say it, but by the time I’d finished school, unlike most of my other friends, I didn’t want to get a job or a house or a husband – I just wanted to have fun. So, after my A-levels I took a gap year and became a professional hanger-on and I just loved it. I also ditched the scary teen rebel look, trading in my brightly coloured ‘do for sexy blonde highlights, and that’s when I became a slave to fashion, rather than dressing like an actual sex slave.
Sadly, everyone has to go home sometime, and one day I arrived at my parents’ house to find my mum and dad waiting for me, armed with a question: what are you going to do with your life? The truth was that I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I decided to go to university – because, as bad as it sounds, that would buy me three more years of messing around. I wasn’t some ambitious teen, packing my bags for uni with big dreams of becoming an architect or an artist or an astronaut, so the selection process was a little random. I decided to do journalism, because it sounded glamorous and could potentially involve celebrities. It turned out to be the best decision I have ever made because during my third year I got to go to ByteBanter for my work experience. To this day I don’t fully understand what the heck they do – they’re some kind of techy news website – but I enjoyed my time there and I really clicked with the editor, Eric Tucker, or ET as he’s known around the office. When I turned up on my first day it was like being transported to the future – or teleported to the future, as ET corrected me when I said this out loud. Everything was chrome and black leather, there were all kinds of machines making lots of noise, lights flickering like crazy and the desks were just a mass of gadgets – I had entered geek world, and it was everything I thought it would be. The first thing I noticed was that there weren’t any female employees. I remember asking ET if any women worked there and he replied: ‘most of these guys haven’t ever spoken to a girl, let alone worked with one’.
They might not have realised it, but a lot of the guys working there were accidentally cool. They were rocking the geek-chic look – you know the one, braces, thick-framed glasses, bow ties – I’m fairly certain that if they walked into a branch of Topman, they would blend right in, not that any of them would ever go near Topman.
Most of them wouldn’t talk to me at first but some were friendly. They didn’t make me feel stupid for not understanding HTML or JavaScript (which, sadly, has nothing to do with coffee) and they could have easily put me in a corner sharpening pencils (I made a joke about this at the time, they don’t have pencils) but they didn’t. Instead they gave me things to write about like iPods and music download services and, unsurprisingly, I managed to write about my favourite thing: bands. To make a very long story very short, at the end of my time there ET was so impressed, and so happy that almost all of the office had at least spoken to a member of the opposite sex, that he offered me a job, starting as soon as I’d finished my degree. I didn’t think he meant it, but as soon as I graduated I gave him a call on the off-chance and, just like he said he would, he set me up with my own little department. Two rooms of their huge office were assigned to my project – a main office for my team and a little private office for me. The ByteBanter guys would build and maintain an online magazine for me, but I was in charge of everything else.
If the ByteBanter office was futuristic, the rooms they gave me to use were practically prehistoric. The decor reminded me of a film noir detective office – old wooden desks, proper filing cabinets, frosted glass on the doors and even a coat stand. Anything that wasn’t actually made of wood was a similar colour.
I managed to poach Jake – my favourite member of the ByteBanter team – to come and do the day-to-day techy stuff for me and recruited my best friend from uni, Emily, to help me with the writing and there you have it, that’s how I became edito
r of Starstruck, an online magazine.
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Bad Bridesmaid
Copyright © 2014 Portia MacIntosh
Published in Great Britain (2014)
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