‘Like not gotten her pregnant, maybe?’
‘Yes. Wait, that’s a trick question, isn’t it? No. No. NO!’
And then he got stuttery about how he should have done certain things differently but he didn’t regret having me and so on until I put him out of his misery by admitting that I was trying to
him.
I love that word, ‘flummox’. Ella’s mum uses it all the time. This will be my first year of not being taken care of by Mary after school. Instead I will be going to two hours of after-school study. Because it is my post-Junior Cert year and I am now mature enough to spend an extra two hours in the marvellous establishment which I frequent so delightedly every single day of my adolescent life. Except for weekends. And holidays. But that is still a hell of a lot of days. I hope Joel isn’t going. Or Karen. They’re total besties now, all laughing at each other’s stupid jokes and being gay together.
Karen is a lesbian or bisexual or something – I can’t really keep track. The above statement comes across a bit bigoty. Unless you know how evil Karen is. Which is kind of why Joel and I are fighting. I did something very wrong and it wasn’t nice of me. But I think it is more OK to do something wrong to Karen than it is to do something wrong to other people. Because
She really is and now she and Joel act like I am the devil and I amn’t, I really truly amn’t. I’m just a girl trying to survive in this crazy mixed-up world.
I miss Joel so much, but he won’t be my friend any more, until I apologise to Karen again and I already had to apologise to her once and I will not apologise to her any more times until she apologises to me for being a horror. In exactly those words: ‘I am sorry I am such a horror, Prim. It was hurtful and wrong of me. I will try not to be in the future.’ And then she has to follow it up with being nice to everyone for six months and maybe then we can talk about me maybe drafting something in the line of an apology.
Last year I went through a big phase of wanting to be a cruciverbalist (the people who draft and assemble the crosswords that go in the papers). It still sounds cool, but I’m so sick of hinting what I want and analysing other people’s hints at what they want. It is exhausting. I just want to know what Joel wants me to do so this will all be fixed and we will be best friends since Montessori again.
It started because he fancied Kevin, I think. The rift. He really fancied Kevin and I wanted a boyfriend and Kevin seemed like he wanted to be my boyfriend and I fancied him even though he was a LARPer and so forth. Looking back, I can see that I totally backed the wrong horse. Kevin turned out to be a bad idea – not that he was cruel to me or anything, just really, really indecisive about what he wanted from a relationship and bad at texting back. And not kissing other girls. But we never really defined exactly what we were, so I suppose it doesn’t really count as cheating. It felt like cheating, though. I was quite hurt. Anyway, even though Kevin isn’t gay I totally hi-jacked Joel’s crush and made it into my own on-again/off-again dramatic thing that I (admittedly) talked about a lot. Because I was thinking about it a lot. And Ciara kind of encourages that sort of boy-obsession. The analysis of texts and looks and tones of voice.
So Joel felt kind of horrid about that, and sometimes I would kind of break up with Kevin, vowing never to kiss him on sofas, on dance-floors, in his parents’ kitchen or behind cinemas again because of that, but I kind of always ended up regretting it and getting back together. Or hooking up in Ciara’s parents’ walk-in wardrobe at her Sweet Sixteenth house party. We initially went in there to talk, but with Kevin it never really ends with talking. We say things and then there are pauses that we kiss each other to fill. I’m not even sure if we’re proper friends, not really. I kind of have always seen him as a kind of sex-object. (Not that we’re having sex.) First, he was Joel’s crush, and then he was my first kiss. Then he was my undefined-sort-of-boyfriend, and now he is my – ex? But somehow he has insinuated himself into our group of friends and now he is a part of the stuff we do. He’s still friends with Joel, at least a bit, so he helps me to find out what he (Joel) is up to. I miss just knowing. I miss being able to ask Joel myself.
They’re always off doing things together, Karen and Joel. Probably talking about how much better friends they are than he and I could ever have been. They’ve been to gay bars in town together and everything. Karen knows how to get fake age cards. Karen knows how to get fake everything. I wish I hadn’t outed her during big break over the intercom, but I paid my dues and got suspended for a week for bullying, which is rich because she is always bringing up my dead mum and putting me and my friends down, like reminding Ciara about how she used to eat her own hair. Last year at this dance thing we all went to, she actually referred to the way Mum died as ‘squishing’. But that doesn’t count because it wasn’t on school premises and I’m white and straight and incapable of being hate-crimed, even if I wanted to be. Dad was
with me and I know I was in the wrong and I did do the whole school-imposed apology thing that they made me write to her, but I didn’t mean it and I had my fingers crossed the whole time I was writing it, which meant it was all lies and nigh illegible. I did write a real one. But I don’t think sending it would sort things.
LETTER TO KAREN draft 24 (UNSENT)
Sometimes I wish there were two of me so I could give myself a smather. Sometimes I wish Fintan and I had never met at all.
Quote from Prim’s mum’s diary
saw a dead badger on the road this morning on the way to school and it looked like it was sleeping. I have always loved the black and grey and white look of badgers. There’s something so sensible about how sturdy and stripy they are. I know they’re supposed to be vicious and everything, but because they look like an illustration from a beloved childhood book, I kind of associate them with benevolence and sensible countryside wisdom. Its forepaw was draped halfway across its belly, as though it was snuggling into the side of the road to get comfortable. It wasn’t, though. It was dead. I didn’t expect the sight of it to have such an effect on me. I actually felt like I had seen a dead unicorn or something. I never expected that badgers lurked in grassy bits of Dublin. An omen, Sorrel (Mum’s co-best friend, my sort of auntie) would call that.
Mum’s diaries are kind of hard to process. I understand now why Dad left them till I was sixteen. They’re lovely in a way, but I’m reading through the time she was with Fintan at the moment, and it’s difficult. Because she is so young and even though she is older than I am now, it’s not by much and I want to protect her from her future. How strong she will have to be, how brave! I don’t know if I could be as brave and strong as Mum was but, at the same time, I kind of hope I would be. If a crisis happened, I would love to be able to deal with it gracefully. It is REALLY weird to be reading about the times that led to my conception. I mean, I know that they were together, but it kind of blows my mind that there was a time when my mum actually fancied my dad. Like, seriously fancied. The way I feel about Kevin sometimes when I am in a charitable mood or daydreaming out the window during class.
I think I am going to write another apology letter to Karen. I will read it out to Joel’s voicemail and see if it is good enough to make him be friends with me again.
LETTER TO KAREN draft 47 (UNSENT)
I miss him terribly. I don’t have a lot of family and I don’t want to lose the bits of it I have left. Especially Joel because he is a member of the family you build for yourself – the friends and allies you can call at three o’clock in the morning if you really need them. I rarely call people, though, when I’m in that sort of headspace. Because I don’t like throwing my problems all over them and I know you can’t rely on friends to, like, provide you with happiness. That has to come from yourself. Or something. Not that I’m an authority on happiness or anything, although I have my moments. Usually when I’m happy.
Joel is always such a huge part of my summer, to the point that we actually resent each other’s holidays with family. Not that Fintan ever takes me anywhere – his holidays
tend to be work-related. He should step up and fork out because I really want to go to Paris and walk around it in ballet pumps and a stripy jumper, pretending that I am an artist or some sort of muse to an artist or in an indie band with a cult following. Fintan isn’t sure about Paris, because he associates it with his lost love, Hedda, who is now married to a human rights lawyer named Gallen, whom I have never seen and always picture as an elf.
I wish that Fintan had been nicer to my mum and not flirted with her housemate, Gillian, whom I have never met but will probably automatically hate if I ever do meet her because she was a disloyal and scheming friend. I wonder if that is how Joel feels about me.
Why is Fintan even with me? He doesn’t think I’m half as interesting as the stock market or the other women he insists on flirting with even when I’m in the room. It’s like he wants me to never be too sure of him. In fairness to him, it is working a charm.
Quote from Prim’s mum’s diary
ad is kind of with me yet against me on the whole Karen thing. He is with me because he understands that she is the devil, yet he thinks that I went ‘far too far’, what with announcing her sexual orientation over the intercom. He thinks that the teachers realise that Karen is evil incarnate, but came down hard on me because they were worried that me ‘breaking in’ (how is it breaking if the door isn’t even locked?) to the principal’s office and ‘commandeering’ (how is it com mandeering if no-one else was even using it?) the intercom for purposes that were ‘not school-related’ (I could argue this one, but – honestly – fair enough) would set a worrying precedent. It totally did, too. While I was suspended (but before Ms Cleary put the padlock on the office door) a second-year invited the whole school to her ‘free gaff’ over the intercom in the hopes of popularity.
My outing of Karen, while hardly a public service announcement, had a sort of an odd justice to it. I did not do it for personal gain. I did it to get back at the devil. Which is kind of in keeping with my school’s Catholic ethos. If anything I should be
I am not looking forward to September. So it’s a good thing I have two and a bit months. One positive thing about the whole Karen situation was that I didn’t stress about the Junior Cert at all. By the time all of that nonsense went down we were just going over stuff in most of the classes anyway, so it’s not like I lost out. It was horrible not talking to Joel during the exams, though, because he’d be there talking about however things had gone for him and I’d pipe up and join in and he would just cut me dead. He’d do this thing where his eyes would sweep over me as if I wasn’t there and it felt absolutely horrible.
Ciara was no help with the Joel situation. ‘I need to focus, Prim,’ she kept saying whenever I wanted to talk about things that weren’t whatever-exam-we-were-having-that-day-related. I mean, she’d talk about it for a while – she didn’t, like, cut me dead or anything – but her heart wasn’t in it. I could tell she really wished that, instead of asking her how to make Joel be my friend again and analysing his every mid-exam bathroom break, I would shut up and start pop-quizzing her on notable Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. Who kind of reminds me of Fintan, if Fintan was a fifteenth-century man, with a beard and a ridiculous velvet hat.
Ferdinand Magellan is hotter than Christopher Columbus, but not by much. And, to be fair, there are very few people in all of history who are not more attractive than Christopher Columbus. The most handsome explorer of them all is charismatic conquistador Hernando Cortés. But you couldn’t hit that and live with yourself because he was properly evil and massacred the Aztecs and stuff.
Fintan spent twenty-five pounds on a tie yesterday. What a ridiculous man he is! (Still fancy the pants off him, though.)
Quote from Prim’s mum’s diary
ad was mad stressed from work today. When he came home to find me reading Mum’s diaries at the kitchen table he got all awkward. Which he should be, because he mostly comes off as an idiot in them. Whenever I find myself getting angry at past-Fintan, I take a break and read the diaries from long before she met him. (Fourteen-year-old Mum had yet to kiss a boy, much less a stupid man who didn’t appreciate how wonderful she was.) It is weird, seeing bits of your mum most people never get to see. She hated business studies and loved English. She had a crush on a boy called Ruairí, who worked in the local shop. He was two years older than her and already had a girlfriend, called Maeve.
It is weird having little fragments of your mother all stored up to dole out to yourself. I was kind of hoping there’d be deep dark secrets and some sort of guide to how to live your life out as a decent human being enclosed with the diaries. No such luck, though. Mum seemed to mess up almost as much as me. Except she hasn’t been suspended for homophobic bullying yet.
I think, back in the day, homophobic bullying was kind of normal. It was actually illegal for a man to make love to another man. It would be horrible to be put in prison just because you fell in love with someone or met someone you really wanted to do stuff with. And they didn’t have a special sexy prison for people who were convicted of doing stuff that shouldn’t even be illegal at all. They’d just be bunged right into normal prison with the murderers and rapists and drug dealers and what-not.
I would totally have visited Joel if he had been arrested and put in prison. In a way, if we lived back in the days when Mum was young and he was arrested for sexy times, it would be kind of a good thing for our friendship. Because he would have to talk to me then, if only to complain about how unfair the situation was. I am a bit Machiavellian sometimes. Which is probably a good thing because I quoted him in my history paper.
I think I might be in love with Fintan. Either that or I really want to sleep with him some more. Definitely one or the other.
Quote from Prim’s mum’s diary
MESSAGE TO KAREN draft 92
Dear Karen
I was wrong to do what I did. And I am very sorry that I did it. Please tell Joel you forgive me so he will be my friend again.
Prim
private-messaged Karen this and when I went back to see if she’d replied I realised she had blocked me. She must have blocked me as soon as she read it. I’m so angry I could punch her in the face. Again. Oh, God, that really does make me sound like a bully, doesn’t it? Even though it was almost three years ago and I was defending Ella and it didn’t really hurt Karen at all.
I can throw a really good punch now, though. I could probably do some real damage after all those kick-boxing lessons I took last term on the advice of my therapist. I kind of like the way Caroline gives me head-fixing homework. Like – I go to kick-boxing because endorphins will make me happier and punching and kicking will be a violent thing I can do that does not harm me or anyone else. Not that I’ve ever harmed anyone. Except my own hand when I made a complete hames of punching Karen.
Like the way people think about someone else’s unopened box of chocolates in their fridge. Like I shouldn’t but I kind of really want to. What is it about being blocked on a social networking site that’s so IRRITATING? I’m surprised Joel hasn’t blocked me yet. He did un-friend me though. Which hurt a lot. Because I felt, like, he can’t just un-friend me – we’ve been friends since we were four years old. That is, like, three-quarters of our lives. It seems really dramatic. (Although my life does tend to swing that way, what with the cemetery break-ins and the self-harming and the manslaughtered mum.)
I love my friends, though. I don’t see how you can just cut someone out of your life (except for Kevin, whom I probably should, from a kissing point of view at least). I am a nice person and he knows full well that I’m not homophobic. I’ve helped him through so many things around his sexual identity and him being OK with it and other people being OK with it and other people not being OK with it because they are stupid and wrong. Dad took him for post coming-out-related-drama
for God’s sake.
Crepes are the most supportive food there is, next to toffee-pops. Joel is good at being angry and mean, but even if he was the kind
of angry that involves yelling at me, I could win him around. I know I could. I’m very good at being friends with Joel. But he has never not talked to me before. I’ve always been the one who didn’t talk to him. I don’t like this shift in the balance of friend-power. It makes me feel like things might actually be over for us. And that doesn’t bear thinking about and leads to over-analytical thought spirals where I try to rewrite the past by regretting it and am no good to anyone.
I think getting with Kevin was a big mistake, friendshipwise. Friends shouldn’t kiss other friends’ crushes, even if there is no actual way that the friend with the crush could get with his or her crush and the friend who is supposed to get away is feeling vulnerable and also a little bit tempted to keep kissing the first ever boy to show any sexual interest in her in the hopes of getting an actual boyfriend. I really wanted Kevin to be my first boyfriend. I wanted him to like me as much as Syzmon likes Ciara and to want to do stuff with me that we both enjoyed. Sadly, he is a teenage boy. (I know Syzmon is as well, but he doesn’t really count because I suspect Ciara and he are mutants whose super power is happy-ever-after-getting and monogamy.) And I don’t want ‘a boyfriend’. I want the real thing. Love, or something that I think is love right now. Someone who likes me and wants me and thinks that the stupid stuff I say and sometimes do is somehow charming. Someone who will be as close to me as Joel is but who I will also want to do sex things with and to. Not loads of sex things. But some definite sex things. Cosy, consensual, mutually enjoyable sex things.
Reading Mum’s old romances has given me strong guidelines as to how it should be. Except without the brawny (yet weirdly progressive in terms of open-mindedness and personal hygiene) Viking protagonist kidnapping me and taking me to his keep as a hostage, with whom he ultimately falls in love. Not that that isn’t nice to think about sometimes, but I have no desire to actually be kidnapped, even if it is by a sexy Viking with a booming laugh who will shower me with mead and gilded pleasures for years to come. However, I do want to have a love story, even if it’s a tragic one. I don’t think anyone will ever make me as sad as Dad made Mum, though.
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