Diary of a Crush: French Kiss

by Sarra Manning

  Because now that Dylan’s my boyfriend, I have to handle his weirdness head-on. His weirdness has, like, rules. Not that he’s given me a written list but if he did, it would go something like this:

  1.

  Don’t ever come round to my house. Ever.

  2.

  Don’t hold hands with me in public.

  3.

  Kissing and touching and boyfriendly behaviour should be restricted to dark corners.

  4.

  Pet names are strictly prohibited.

  5.

  Don’t expect me to call when I say I will or be on time for anything or come round for Sunday lunch with your parents.

  Some of it is good. A lot of it is good. And my kissing technique has drastically improved with all the extra practice I’m getting but Dylan was way more affectionate when we were bickering mates.

  9th April

  I was sitting by the piddly college fountain with Shona when Dylan sauntered over to us.

  ‘God, Edie,’ Shona muttered when she caught sight of Dylan, ‘you can’t be planning to go off and make out again. You look like you’ve had collagen lip implants as it is.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I said plaintively. ‘You make me feel like I’m just a big kiss slut.’

  She arched an eyebrow. ‘Oh, I must be getting you confused with someone else then.’

  Then Dylan was there. ‘Which hand?’ he drawled, putting his arms behind his back. My heart leapt. Had he bought me a present?

  ‘The left?’

  Dylan gave me a huge, sunshiney grin. ‘That was the right answer,’ he said, swinging a key in front of my eyes.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked, though it was pretty obvious what it was, but I felt like I needed some clarification.

  ‘It’s the key to the darkroom. You coming?’

  ‘Who said romance was dead?’ I heard Shona hiss to no-one in particular as I jumped off the wall and followed Dylan in the direction of the art block.

  I had been planning to tell Dylan a few truths, I really had, but once we got into the darkroom he immediately reached for me and I kind of forgot. Dylan had me wedged against the enlarger so I couldn’t move but I didn’t want to. I felt sort of boneless and lethargic like Pudding does when she’s all sleepy and lying in the sun. Dylan’s tongue was causing havoc everywhere it went when we were suddenly interrupted by the door banging open.

  ‘Sod off,’ snarled Dylan, not bothering to turn round, which was a pretty stupid thing to do. Or at least that’s what Martyn, our Photography tutor, said when he proceeded to give us a major, major bollocking. With, like, knobs on. No pun intended.

  Martyn frogmarched me to my personal tutor who sent me home for the rest of the afternoon. Which actually is my kind of punishment.

  As I stood outside the college gates applying some Vaseline to my lips, which seem to be permanently desensitised from over-use these days, Dylan caught up with me.

  ‘Soooo, are we going back to yours?’ he purred.

  ‘No! I was this close to being sent home with a note,’ I snapped. ‘You know my parents don’t trust us to be alone.’

  It’s true. They don’t seem overjoyed about me dating Dylan and he’s forbidden from my room unless the door’s open. It hasn’t occurred to them that we could get up to all sorts of inappropriate touching in plenty of other venues but I’m not going to be the one to shatter their illusions.

  ‘Oh, c’mon Edie,’ he said, nudging me. ‘I don’t want to go home and Martyn told me to get out of his sight for the rest of the day.’

  ‘Well, OK, then,’ I conceded. ‘I need to talk to you anyway.’

  ‘That sounds ominous,’ Dylan said out of the side of his mouth but then we spent the rest of the walk to my house in silence, which hacked me off.

  It was like Dylan had forgotten how to speak to me.

  ‘What the hell is your problem?’ I blurted out the minute we got through the front door. ‘Why aren’t you talking to me?’

  ‘I am,’ he protested, following me up the stairs. ‘You’re the one who’s not talking to me.’

  ‘You’re treating me like a… a… a kiss slut!’ I said furiously.

  Dylan snorted. ‘Like, you don’t treat me that way too.’

  Then he sat down next to me on the bed and put an arm round my shoulders. ‘Look, Eeds, this is a bit weird for both of us. So, what do you want to talk about then?’

  I shrugged. ‘Stuff. Like, y’know, stuff about each other. You never tell me what’s going on with you.’

  ‘The only thing going on with me is you,’ Dylan snarked. ‘There’s nothing else to tell you about.’

  If there was nothing else to talk about there was only one thing else to do: investigate each other’s mouths with our tongues.

  Two minutes later we were rolling about on my bed. I think it was when we landed on the floor with a loud thud that my mum realised that the house wasn’t empty. She came charging up the stairs and banished Dylan from the house forever for daring to lay his evil boy hands on her innocent, virginal daughter. It was all I could do to stop her from grounding me.

  10th April

  I didn’t speak to Dylan today. I think the credit had run out on his phone. Which led to the revelation that I didn’t have Dylan’s home number. He always, always calls me. And that’s weird. It’s very weird. It’s a whole world of weird. I’ve known Dylan for more than six months now. Been on intimate terms with his mouth for a little less time than that so you’d think I’d have his home phone number. I could have done the whole telephone directory thing but instead I went round to Shona’s.

  ‘So, are you going to have a go at me for not telling you about Dylan’s dysfunctional family?’ she wanted to know, a tad belligerently, when I asked her for his number.

  I was like, woah!, but reined it back in. ‘Look, I wouldn’t expect you to betray Dylan’s confidence,’ I said sweetly. ‘You’re his oldest mate.’ Which was actually her cue to explain what the hell she meant by her strange and cryptic remark about Dylan’s family. His surname was strange, Kowalski (I think it’s Polish or Czech or even Ukrainian or something), and I allowed myself a small daydream that Dylan’s parents were dissidents from the former Eastern bloc and had come over to England to start a new life with their little baby Dylan away from the harsh totalitarian regime and the jackboot of Communist oppression, but I think that was heavily influenced by the module I was studying in History.

  I came back from a vision of Dylan’s very young, very beautiful mother shielding a baby Dylan away from a granite-faced Communist soldier to find Shona looking at me with an exasperated expression on her face. ‘Did you enjoy the little trip you just took with the fairies?’

  ‘Dylan hasn’t said anything about having a dysfunctional family,’ I said grumpily. ‘In fact, he hasn’t even admitted to having a family. I was beginning to think he was hatched in an art boy factory.’

  Shona fiddled nervously with some of the piles of junk on top of her bedside cabinet. ‘Sorry,’ she muttered. ‘Sometimes it’s hard being stuck in the middle of you two.’

  Then Shona started telling me about the eye-raising stuff (can I just say, ewwwww?) she was getting up to with Paul and how she reckoned Mia was behind these weird phone calls she was getting and I forgot about ringing Dylan.

  By the time I got home, it was really late and The Mothership was fuming. So, like, what else is new? She and Dad were heading off to the grandparents in Brighton for a long weekend (thank the sweet baby Jesus) and they were convinced I had Dylan stashed down the road somewhere and was just waiting for them to leave so he could enter the house and violate me on the new IKEA rug. She said as much. When your mother doesn’t want to have the sex talk with you any more but instead wants to talk to you about the possibility that you might have sex on her soft furnishings, it’s a watershed moment in any girl’s life. I know I’ll remember it fondly for many years to come.

  Anyway after much foot-stamping and gagging noises, which I�
�ve found work much better than rational debate, I managed to persuade them that I hadn’t seen Dylan all day and they left. Then they came back to harangue me with instructions about the boiler and not forgetting to give Pudding her worming tablets. Then they left again. Time for some fish fingers and Mum’s Downton Abbey box-set, I think.

  10th April (later)

  Oh God, Dylan’s on his way round. I wasn’t going to let him but when he heard that the ’rents were off the premises for forty-eight hours there was no stopping him. He didn’t exactly ask if he could stay over but then it’s 10.30 pm now…

  Oh, hell, that’s him at the door now…

  Adorkable

  Because we like to spoil you, turn the page for an extract from:

  1

  ‘We need to talk,’ Michael Lee told me firmly when I stepped out of the makeshift changing room at the St Jude’s jumble sale, which was actually four curtained rails arranged in a square, to have a good preen in front of a clouded mirror.

  I didn’t say anything. I just stared back at his reflection, because he was Michael Lee. MICHAEL LEE!

  Oh, Michael Lee. Where to begin? Boys wanted to be him. Girls wanted him. He was star of school, stage and playing field. Enough brains to fit in with the geeks, captain of the football team so all the sporty types bowed down before him, and his faux-hawk and carefully scuffed Converses also pulled in the indie crowd. If that wasn’t enough, his dad was Chinese so he had an exotic Eurasian thing going on; there was even an ode to his cheekbones on the wall of the second-floor girls’ loos at school.

  He might have been all that and a bag of Hula Hoops but, as far as I was concerned, if you were one of those popular types who got on with absolutely everyone then you couldn’t have much of an edge. To be all things to all people, Michael Lee had to be the least interesting person in our school. That took some doing because our school was bursting at the seams with mediocrity.

  So I couldn’t imagine why Michael Lee was standing there in front of me insisting that we needed to have a chat, chin tilted so I had a great view of his poetry-inspiring cheekbones. I could also see right up his nostrils because he was freakishly tall.

  ‘Go away,’ I said in a bored voice, wafting my hand languidly in the direction of the other side of the church hall. ‘Because I can guarantee that you have nothing to say that I’d want to hear.’

  It would have sent most people scuttling back from whence they came but Michael Lee just gave me this look as if I was all hot air and bluster, then he dared to put his hand on my shoulder so he could turn my stiff, cringing body round. ‘Look,’ he said, his breath hitting my face, which made me flinch even more. ‘What’s wrong with that picture?’

  I couldn’t concentrate on anything other than Michael Lee having his football-playing, prize-essay-writing hot fingers on my clavicle. It was just wrong. Beyond wrong. It was a whole other world of wrong. I screwed my eyes tightly shut in protest and when I opened them again, I was looking at Barney, who I’d left in charge of my stall, against my better judgement, talking to a girl.

  Not just any girl but Scarlett Thomas, who happened to be Michael Lee’s girlfriend. Not that I held that against her. What I held against her was that she was vapid and had a really annoying voice, which was breathy and babyish and had exactly the same effect on me as someone crunching ice cubes. Scarlett also had long blonde hair, which she spent hours combing, spritzing, primping and tossing so if you stood behind her in the lunch queue there was a good chance you’d get a mouthful of hair.

  She was tossing her hair back now as she spoke to Barney and, yes, she was grinning a vacant grin and Barney was smiling and ducking his head, the way he did when he was embarrassed. It wasn’t a picture that made my heart sing, but then again…

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with that picture,’ I told Michael Lee crisply. ‘It’s just your girlfriend talking to my boyfriend—’

  ‘But it’s not the talking—’

  ‘About quadratic equations or one of the many other things Scarlett doesn’t understand, which made her fail her Maths GCSE and have to retake it.’ I gave Michael a flinty-eyed look. ‘That’s why Ms Clements asked Barney to tutor Scarlett. Didn’t she mention it?’

  ‘She did mention it and it’s not them talking to each other that’s wrong, it’s how they’re not really talking at all. They’re just standing there and gazing at each other,’ he pointed out.

  ‘You’re being ridiculous,’ I said, even as I surreptitiously glanced back to where Barney and Scarlett were indeed gazing at each other. It was obvious they were staring at each other because they’d run out of things to say and it was awkward, nervous gazing, because they had absolutely nothing in common. ‘There is nada, nowt, not one thing going on. Well, apart from the fact that you and Scarlett are slumming it at a jumble sale,’ I added, turning my attention back to Michael Lee. ‘Right, now that we’ve cleared that up, feel free to go about your business.’

  Michael opened his mouth like he had something more to say about the utter non-event of Barney and Scarlett gurning at each other. Then shut it again. I waited for him to leave so I could go about my business, but he suddenly moved closer to me.

  ‘There is something going on between them,’ he said, bending his head. His breath ghosted against my cheek again. I wanted to bat it away with an irritated gesture. He straightened up. ‘And nice dress, by the way.’

  I could tell he didn’t mean it from the almost-smirk on his face, which made me wonder if Michael Lee might actually have some hidden depths buried way below the surface of his bland exterior.

  I sniffed loudly and contemptuously, which made the quirk of his lips blossom into a full-blown smirk before he strode away.

  ‘Jeane, my love, don’t take this the wrong way, but he was being sarcastic. That dress doesn’t look at all nice,’ said a pained voice to my left and I looked over at Marion and Betty, two volunteers from the St Jude’s social committee who manned the cake stall and policed the changing room. One of their stern looks would scare off even the most determined perv. I didn’t doubt that they’d pelt peeping toms with rock buns if the stern looks failed.

  ‘I know he was being sarcastic but he was also being very mistaken because this dress is made from all kinds of awesome,’ I said, stepping back so I could get my preen on, though my heart wasn’t really in it now.

  The dress was black and I didn’t normally do black because why would anyone want to wear black when there were so many fabulous colours in the world? People with no imagination and Goths who hadn’t got the memo that the nineties were over, that’s who. But it wasn’t just black; it had these horizontal patterns all over it – yellow, green, orange, blue, red, purple and pink squiggly lines that made my eyeballs itch – and it fitted so well that it could have been made just for me, which didn’t happen often because I have a very odd body. I’m small, like five feet nothing, and compact so I can fit into children’s sizes, but I’m sturdy with it. My grandfather used to say that I reminded him of a pit pony – when he wasn’t telling me little girls should be seen and not heard.

  Anyway, yes. I’m sturdy, stocky even. Like, my legs are really muscly because I cycle a lot and I’m kind of solid everywhere else. If it wasn’t for the iron-grey hair (it was meant to be white but my friend Ben had only been training as a hairdresser for two weeks and something went badly wrong) and the bright red lipstick I always wore, I could have passed for a chubby twelve-year-old boy. But this dress had enough nips and tucks and darts and horizontal lines that at least it looked as if I had some kind of shape because me and puberty hadn’t got on very well. Instead of womanly curves, it had left me with a general lumpiness.

  ‘You’d look so pretty if you wore a nice dress instead of all this nasty jumble sale stuff. You don’t know where it’s been,’ Betty lamented. ‘My granddaughter’s got lots of clothes she doesn’t wear any more. I could sort you out some things.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ I said firmly. ‘I love the nasty jumble sale
stuff.’

  ‘But some of my granddaughter’s old clothes are from Topshop.’

  It was very hard to restrain myself, but I didn’t immediately launch into a rant about the evils of buying clothes from high street chains, which peddled the same five looks each season so everyone had to dress just like everyone else in clothes that were sewn together by children in Third World sweatshops who were paid in cups of maize.

  ‘Really, Betty, I like dressing in clothes that other people don’t want any more. It’s not the clothes’ fault that they’ve gone out of fashion,’ I insisted. ‘Anyway, it’s better to reuse than recycle.’