by KE Payne
Barnaby Rudge: LMAO, yeah I know. It’s a Dickens thing. Blame my English teachers!
I looked back at my phone, waiting for me to text Matt back.
Matt was what everyone at college called “a catch”. He was the same age as me—eighteen—and, yeah, good-looking I suppose, if you’re into that sort of thing. He was cool too, in an Emo band called Anathema at college with his mates. He sang lead vocals and played guitar and they’d gig at places all over the city, and sometimes further away too. I’d gone along to some of his gigs but felt kind of out of place in amongst all the groupies all vying for his attention. Sometimes I thought, if they wanted him that badly, so bad they’d practically throw themselves at him, then they could have him. Perhaps I was being unfair.
He was a good guy, Matt, attentive and very into me, it seemed. I remember our first date. We’d met in town, down by Pizza Hut. I always get the impression other girls are looking at him, and our first date wasn’t an exception because he was getting hot looks from all the girls inside Pizza Hut when we went in. I kinda thought they were all wondering what someone like me was doing with someone like him but tried to push that thought from my head, because I knew it would drive me crazy or something.
Anyway, that was then. For the now, his text was still looking up at me and I kinda figured I needed to answer him. And yet…here was Fickle waiting for me to talk to her.
Fickle: A Dickens thing? Like those times tables, just never got the Dickens thing either! More of a JK Rowling fan.
She did the winky face again. I looked at my phone, flipped it open, and texted Matt back.
Course. See you at eight.
Brief, yeah, but it said everything it needed to. I snapped it closed and looked back at my computer screen.
Barnaby Rudge: Fickle, I gotta go.
Fickle: Oh, okay.
Barnaby Rudge: Soz.
Fickle: No worries. Off anywhere nice?
Barnaby Rudge: Just out. Will you be here later?
Fickle: Maybe.
Barnaby Rudge: Or maybe I’ll speak to you tomorrow?
Fickle: Yeah, that’d be good. Have a good evening, BR.
Barnaby Rudge: You too.
Nothing inside me wanted to leave my PC and go out into the cold night to see Matt. Nevertheless, I logged off and stared at the blank screen in front of me for a while before grabbing my coat and heading out of the house to meet him. I figured he was my boyfriend, after all, and I supposed I should give him the attention he deserved, whether I wanted to or not.
Chapter Two
“You’re quiet.” Matt wiped his mouth and put his paper napkin down on the table in front of him.
“Am I?” I asked, smiling tightly.
“Yeah. Long day?”
“Not especially.”
There was a silence, only punctuated by the sound of us both chewing our food, the wet, smacking sound seeming to echo loudly around the pizza place despite the god-awful piped music around us.
“We’re doing a gig at the Metro tomorrow night.” Matt licked a blob of tomato sauce from the side of his mouth. “Wanna come?”
I immediately thought about the prospect of an evening away from the message board. Boy, was I getting hooked! I smiled wryly to myself. Without me really realising it, that message board was slowly becoming my life. I made a mental note to have a laugh about it later with the others on there.
I looked at Matt blankly, almost resenting him for asking me to come out twice in as many nights.
“Well?” he opened his mouth wide and crammed in a piece of pappy pizza dough, chomping and studying me quizzically, head to one side.
“Sure,” I said, not really knowing why.
“Cool!” Matt seemed pleased.
“What time?” I mentally calculated in my head. If he didn’t want to meet until later, then I figured I could get in a few hours on the message board before I had to leave.
“I thought we’d go straight from college.” Matt swirled his Coke round, the ice clattering against the sides of the glass. “It’s gonna take, like, an hour to set up all the gear anyway so there’s not much point in me going home first.”
My mood got heavy. Going to the Metro straight from college meant meeting around five. Matt’s gigs never finished much before midnight, so that meant over six hours out with him. I frowned.
“Problem?” Matt slurped on his Coke.
“Nah,” I lied. I smiled, but it felt forced.
We walked home from Pizza Hut in near silence, primarily because I felt in a rotten mood. Matt tried striking up a conversation with me, but as much as I tried to make my voice sound light, I was aware—as I’m sure he was—that my answers to his questions and observations were abrupt. He had his arm round my shoulders as we walked down through the centre of town and headed up towards my house, and it felt heavy, leaden, like it didn’t belong there, but there was nothing I could do about it, so I just let him leave it there.
We walked towards the little bridge that goes over the canal that runs just down from my house, and Matt slowed down. I knew what he wanted to do because he’d done it there before. Matt’s kinda old-fashioned when it comes to dating, a rarity some would say in the twenty-first century. He feels awkward about kissing me outside our house, probably just in case either my mum or dad happened to look out of the window at the very moment he was going in for the kill. The bridge is, like, a thirty-second walk from my house. Matt always walked me to the bridge, kissed me, then watched as I headed to my front door, waiting until he saw I’d opened it. Then he’d wave, turn away, and disappear into the darkness. The same routine every time he walked me home, but it never felt normal. Certainly not the kissing bit, anyway.
“You sure you’re okay?” Matt looked concerned. “You’re very quiet.”
I nodded, then stared down into the murky, dark water of the canal beneath us. A barge was parked up alongside the canal’s edge, the lights inside it glowing cosily, and I wondered for a minute who was inside it and what were they doing? I was aware of Matt’s arm still round my shoulder and my stomach knotted.
“So, tomorrow, yeah?” Matt said, turning me round to look at him. “It’ll be cool you coming. I always play better when you’re there.” He smiled down at me and looped his arms loosely round my waist. I was suddenly conscious of my arms hanging limply by my sides so put them round his waist too, instantly pulling him closer to me. He looked at me a bit more, then bent his head to kiss me, his lips feeling cold and wet against mine. I think I made a fair show of kissing him back, even though I didn’t feel particularly comfortable.
You see, I never felt comfortable kissing him. It was like it was expected of me, like it was something I ought to do, rather than something I wanted to do. I suppose part of me thought that if I didn’t kiss him back then he’d think something was wrong, and then we’d have this whole, deep conversation about what was wrong, and I didn’t want that. I just wanted to get the kissing over and done with so I could get back home again.
I guess that made me some sort of fraud, didn’t it?
Anyway, we stood there in the darkness on the bridge kissing a bit longer and I grew tenser and tenser until, at last, he pulled away. He rested his forehead on mine and breathed out long and slow through his nose, so I could smell stale pizza and Coke.
“I better go. I’ve got lessons at nine tomorrow,” I said, kinda lamely.
Matt pulled his head back away from mine and smiled at me again, kissing me briefly on my forehead and removing his arms from my waist.
“I’ll wait here till I see you’ve gone in, okay?” he said, nodding his head in the direction of my house.
“Thanks,” I said, unlooping my arms from his waist and turning to go. I turned to face him again. “See you tomorrow at lunch?” It was a bit halfhearted, but I was trying to make an effort.
“Can’t, sorry.” Matt shrugged. “Got to see Mr Parker about my coursework.”
A sense of relief washed over me. “No worries.” I turned towards
home again, waving as I went.
“See you at five, though,” he called out. Then, “I’ll text you.”
I reached my front door and turned back to see him still standing there on the bridge, illuminated under the moonlight, watching me. I waved again, fished my keys from my pocket and let myself in, poking my head back round the door just in time to see him disappearing into the darkness.
I breathed out slowly, feeling as I always did when a date with Matt was over, both a sense of relief and a sense of emptiness. I leant against the closed door and began to wonder what excuse I could come up with to cancel our date the next night, but before I had time to begin thinking, a voice from inside the lounge called to me.
“Immy! That you?”
Mum.
“Yup.”
“Good. S’long as we’re not being burgled.”
I heard Dad give a sort of snorting guffaw before calling out to me too.
“How was your evening?”
I rolled my eyes to heaven in the gloom of our hallway as I took off my coat and flung it onto the stairs. I wandered into the front room to find my mum, dad, and Sophie watching some programme on the telly which appeared to be showing a bunch of mean-looking big cats eating something red, bloody, and very, very dead.
“Cheetahs in Africa.” Dad jerked his head towards the telly as if by way of explanation. “Very interesting.”
“How’s Matt?” Mum asked, not moving her eyes from the screen.
“Yeah, good,” I said, perching on the edge of the sofa. My phone beeped from somewhere deep in my jeans pocket and I saw Mum and Dad look at each other in amusement.
“Ahh, he only left you five minutes ago and he’s missing you already.” Sophie pulled a soppy face at me.
“Shut it.” I glared at her, feeling myself reddening.
“He’s keen, isn’t he?” Mum kept her eyes fixed on the TV but there was a look of mischief on her face.
“Hmm.” I fixed my eyes resolutely down on my trainers. “Right, I’m off to bed.”
“To text Matt, more like.” Sophie giggled.
I glared at her again and, without another word, left the room, secretly cursing Matt for making my phone beep and for making my stupid family feel the need to make even more stupid comments. That was, assuming it was Matt that texted me, of course, but I instinctively knew it had to be him.
Sure enough, up in my room I flipped open my phone to see his name flashing up at me. I read his message.
Thanx 4 this evening, blondie, it said. It was wkd.
I looked at the message and felt a sudden annoyance at the “blondie” comment. I knew that Matt loved my blonde hair, but I always grimaced when he called me that, and it irritated the hell out of me, I dunno why. Probably because most things Matt did irritated me. I guess that’s what happens when you’re not totally into someone, right?
I thought about Matt and our date, and rather than feeling irritation this time, I felt, well, nothing really. I typed out some lame message back to him, telling him I’d had a nice evening too and that I’d see him tomorrow, and then I hit the Send button, watching as my message disappeared and headed over to Matt’s phone. I looked over to my computer, waiting patiently for me in the corner of my room, and wondered briefly if anyone would be around. Fickle? Joey? Twiggy? God, I needed to talk to someone, but something held me back from logging on.
I rubbed at my eyes grouchily and tossed my mobile down next to me on the bed.
You know when something niggles away at you but you just can’t put your finger on it? That was what I was feeling right now—a sense of worry that just refused to leave me, no matter what I did or thought.
I looked at my phone again and sighed. I had an inkling of what was troubling me and made up my mind there and then that I would have to do something about it. I knew that if I wanted the worry to go away, I had to do something to make it go away, because that’s the way it works, right?
If only it was that simple.
Chapter Three
I had a crap night’s sleep that night, punctuated by dreams of Matt, the images of which just refused to leave me all day. After giving up any hope of more sleep by six a.m., I decided to get up and arrived at college just after eight in a foul mood that kept getting darker every time I remembered I was having another date with Matt that night.
I’d lain in bed the previous night mulling things over and over in my head and had finally come to the conclusion that the root of my worry was that I wasn’t into Matt as much as he was into me. But believe me, that wasn’t really any surprise revelation, so I didn’t know why it had taken me so long to realise it.
Here’s what I had realised, though. I decided that I had been kinda into Matt when we first started dating, but I sure as hell didn’t have feelings for him anymore. You know how exciting it is when you first start seeing someone? I had a piddling little bit of that, a kinda excitement of the newness of it all, of the attention he heaped on me, but the excitement never turned into the exhilaration, the goose bumps, or the mushy tummy that I thought it should. After all, you should have all that when you’re first dating, shouldn’t you? And then it turns into something deeper, more intense, if you’re both really into each other. If you’re not, then…well, I knew what happened when you weren’t into someone because it was happening to me. I’d been with Matt for six weeks and I hadn’t even got to the mushy tummy stage once, let alone any of the intense shit. Matt was bending over backwards to make things good with us, so I figured it had to be me.
I decided, at four in the morning—ha!—that it was time I made more of an effort to be into him as much as he seemed to be into me, then the worry would go away. It’s a two-way thing, after all, isn’t it?
So, despite arriving at college the next morning in a foul mood that I knew would most definitely be lifted by talking to the guys on the message board the minute I got home, I concentrated instead on that night’s date with Matt and tried to feel positive about it, hoping that I might find some spark inside me that would make me give a damn about him. And besides, I figured it was better to be with someone in person than a group of anonymous people on the Internet.
The day at college seemed to go on forever, though. Even sneaking out to the pub with Emily and Beth at lunchtime didn’t seem to break it up too much, and I ended up kinda wishing I’d never gone out with them in the end anyway, because they spent the whole hour and a half quizzing me about Matt, which was definitely not what I wanted or needed at that moment.
“He’s a catch, Immy.” Emily shook her head and sighed in mock exasperation.
“You think?” I looked at her over my glass.
“And what he’s doing with you is anyone’s guess!” Beth poked her tongue out at me.
“Thanks!” I threw my beer mat across the table at her. Why couldn’t they change the record? Why did everyone have to keep telling me what a catch he was?
“So you guys serious, then?” Beth looked at me as she took a sip of her drink.
“Define serious,” I answered, knowing I was sounding unhelpful but not really caring.
“Well, you know.” Beth raised her eyebrows.
“Dunno,” I said, sounding more sullen than I wanted to.
“You’ve been going out for ages,” Emily said. “So you’ve gotta know whether it’s getting serious or not, surely?”
“You slept together yet? That’s what she really wants to know!” Beth leant back in her chair and grinned widely.
“Well, firstly that’s none of your business.” I grinned back at her. “Secondly, it’s not been ages, we’ve only been dating, like, for, God I dunno, about six weeks, and thirdly,” I laughed, “thirdly, I’m far too much of a lady to divulge such a thing.”
“Yeah, right!” Beth snorted.
“That means they have.” Emily nodded to Beth, who looked back at her with a smirk. “She’s teasing us.”
I could feel myself reddening, as I always did when the subject of me and Mat
t came up.
“So is he the stud we think he is?” Beth sipped at her drink again.
“I wouldn’t know,” I replied truthfully, trying not to sound coy.
“And you wouldn’t tell us anyway, would you?” Emily laughed, apparently ignoring my comment.
I looked at Emily.
“He’s cute, though, don’t you think?” Emily turned and wrinkled her nose at Beth.
“I’d have him.” Beth looked back at Emily and wrinkled her nose too.
“C’mon, so how is he in the sack, then?” Emily raised her eyebrows at me.
“I told you, I wouldn’t know, and I wouldn’t know ’cos we haven’t done anything yet.” I dropped my eyes before I could have the chance to see the look on her face and picked up Beth’s beer mat, turning it over and over in my hand.
“Let me get this right.” Beth put her elbows on the table and leaned closer. “You’re going out with the fittest guy at college and you’ve not…you know…yet?”
I wondered why she thought that was so beyond the realm of possibility but said nothing; instead I carried on turning the beer mat over in my hands and stared down at the table.
“Aren’t you gagging to, though?” Emily blew out her cheeks. “How can you keep your hands off him?”
“I know I bloody well wouldn’t be able to.” Beth grinned. “Love that Emo thing he’s got going on, don’t you, Em?”
I shrugged. “I dunno.” I started ripping the corners off the beer mat. “It’s just not something we’ve done yet.”
“But you’ve been seeing him for long enough, though, haven’t you?” Emily looked at Beth, then back to me.
“Yeah, but…it’s just not happened yet, okay?”
FFS! I was aware I was sounding sullen, so I stopped ripping at my beer mat and took a large gulp from my drink, wiping droplets of beer from both corners of my mouth with my finger and thumb.
“Besides, we’re not all slappers like you.” I laughed at Emily, trying to sound as casual as I could, like it was no big deal to me that Matt and I hadn’t slept with each other yet.
