A is for Apple

by Kate Johnson

  Docherty got in the beautiful car and it made a beautiful noise before gliding beautifully away.

  “What did he say to you?” Luke wanted to know.

  “I—nothing.”

  “Sophie…”

  “He says I owe him an apology.”

  Luke glowered at the driveway where the Koenigsegg had been. “He’s not getting one.”

  “No. He’s not. Anyway. I need more than just a beer now. Did we finish that vodka?”

  “You can’t drink vodka.”

  “Why not? I’m a grown up.”

  “No, you’re not, you’re seventeen.” Luke grinned as he pushed the door open. “And anyway, you have to go bowling tonight.”

  I gave him a death look. “No, I don’t. Were you not listening back there?”

  “So they didn’t invite you. Turn up at the next lane and have a better time than them.”

  “All by myself? I’m enough of a Norma No Mates as it is.”

  “Not by yourself,” Luke said patiently as I picked up Tammy’s bowl and started searching for cat food. “With your cool SO17 friends.”

  I put down the can I was holding. “I don’t mean to burst your bubble,” I said, “but you three are not really the sort of people a seventeen-year-old girl should be hanging around with.”

  “Ask your other mates then. Eva and…”

  “Evie and Ella. Yeah, ‘cos they’re not ripe for ridicule. They were as uncool as me at school.” Besides, then I’d have to explain to them how I knew all these teenagers in the next lane.

  “But you’re cooler now,” Luke said, looking exasperated. “Angel, then. She’s very cool.”

  He was right. Angel’s mother had been a gorgeous sixties diva. Angel was baby-faced—she might get away with seventeen, even though she was ten years older. And she was undeniably cool.

  “Okay,” I said, “so that’s Angel and me…”

  “And me,” Luke said. “What, you think I’ll leave you all on your own when there are men like Docherty around?”

  “I can handle Docherty,” I said as haughtily as is possible when forking out Whiskas.

  Luke shook his head. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  I dressed for the occasion. Bowling in my mind has always been a Fifties thing, Grease and teenagers and rock’n’roll. I love Fifties style—its a curvy girl thing. I wriggled into a circle skirt and a little wrap top, put my hair into a ponytail and watched it fall out. Well, hell, I was trying to look younger, so I fastened it into pigtails instead.

  Luke, who’d gone home to change, came by to pick me up, dressed in jeans and a faded T-shirt. His pale blue eyes were hidden behind dark contact lenses and his hair had been darkened a shade and ruffled into spikes.

  “What’s this in aid of?” I asked, running my fingers through them as we settled in Luke’s car.

  “Disguise. Do I look like a seventeen-year-old?”

  I looked at the muscles filling out his T-shirt, the fine lines around his eyes and the chiselled shape of his beautiful face.

  Damn if I ever knew a seventeen-year-old like that.

  “You’ll do,” I said.

  “Are we meeting Angel there?”

  I nodded. “She said she’d bring someone but I don’t know who. I think Harvey’s still working—trying to get something on these guys who are,” I looked at my watch, “somewhere over London as we speak.”

  “So long as he shares it with us.” He glanced at me. “You look hot.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You want to be a little bit late?”

  Jesus, start him off and he never stopped. “You’ve had me once tonight,” I reminded him.

  “Can’t I get you again?”

  “We have a job to do.”

  He made a face. “Sodding job.”

  I knew how he felt.

  We parked up and sat outside MacDonalds to wait for Angel. I was slightly nervous about who she was bringing, and when I saw her tripping up to us in massive heels and tatty jeans, I looked behind her to see someone with peroxided-blond-and-green hair, a nose ring and massive, massive jeans, slouching along, looking pissed off. He looked like the sort of kid mothers have nightmares about their daughters bringing home.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I muttered to Luke, who looked horrified.

  “I know. Does she have a cousin or something we don’t know about?”

  “Her parents were only children,” I replied, and then Angel and her friend got closer, and Luke suddenly started laughing.

  “What?”

  And then the nightmare looked at me and grinned, and I nearly fell off my chair.

  “Harvey?”

  “Close enough.”

  “Xander?” Of course, he still had the cut on his face. “What—but you look—your hair!”

  “I know,” he said ruefully, touching it. “She made me,” he said pointing to Angel, who rolled her eyes.

  “You’re supposed to be in disguise,” she said. “There are people after you, you know.”

  “So how come when there were people after you, you didn’t dye your hair green?” Luke wanted to know.

  “And what about Harvey?” I asked.

  “Oh, partly we did it so I could tell the difference,” Angel said.

  “No, I mean, what if someone thinks Harvey is Xander and…” I mimed taking a potshot.

  “Harvey can look after himself,” Angel said, but without absolute conviction. “Shall we go in?”

  We’d timed it so we were there well ahead of Marc and the cool gang. Luke gave everyone ludicrously fake names on the scoreboard, even me. Taking his cues from Buffy, he christened us Randy and Joan, then looked speculatively at Angel for a while before adding her as Darla, and started to type in Xander’s real name before thinking better of it and adding him as Oz.

  “After all, you have the hair,” he pointed out, and Xander scowled.

  “The green will wash out by tomorrow,” Angel whispered to me, “but he doesn’t know that.”

  I always start off really well at bowling—well, sort of well, anyway—and go rapidly downhill. I got two spares and two eights, and then three gutterballs. By the time the school gang had turned up, I was clutching at Luke and wailing, “I’ll never score anything ever again!”

  “Well, you can score with me later,” he said, playing with my pigtails, “if it’ll make you feel any better.”

  I nodded. “Much.”

  “In fact, why don’t we slope off now—joke,” he added, seeing me open my mouth.

  “They’ve just come in,” I said, nodding over my shoulder.

  Luke looked at them for a while. They were getting bowling shoes, the girls giggling, Marc silent. Laurence was with them, and another guy who was getting very tactile with Amber, whose mascara was so spiky I was amazed she could see. He wasn’t up to much, but he had “boyfriend” written all over him.

  “Your turn, Randy,” Angel said, but Luke ignored her.

  “He’s the one in the black shirt, right?”

  “Right.” I frowned. “He hasn’t changed.”

  “Maybe he’s in mourning.”

  “He never mentioned it, that’s the thing.” I blinked. “Ready, Randy?”

  “Ready, Joan.”

  Luke bowled a strike, his fifth of the evening. “Can I switch my name with yours?” I pleaded, and he shook his head, grinning at me.

  “You can get me a drink, though.”

  I made a face and picked up my bag, a very kitsch little thing shaped like a corset, with ribbons and padded breasts. I called it my booby bag. Xander adored it.

  “What are we drinking?”

  I went up to the bar with the order in my head, and while I was waiting, Marc came up and stood beside me.

  “Small world,” he said, verbose as ever.

  “Sure is.”

  “Like your bag.”

  “Thanks. Me too.”

  The barman came over, and I ordered pints for Luke and Xander and soft drinks fo
r me and Angel, who were both driving.

  The barman looked at me, and Marc, and the girls twittering over their shoes, and asked me for ID.

  I was mildly insulted. I’ve never been seriously ID’d in my life. And then I remembered that I was trying to be seventeen, so I reached in my wallet and pulled out my driving licence.

  “Okay.” He handed it back. “That was two pints of IPA and two diet Cokes?”

  I nodded, and as he moved away, Marc asked, “Was that real? Or did you go back a year?”

  I deliberated. “I have a cousin at the DVLA,” I said. “He fixed it for me.”

  “It’s fake?”

  I put my finger to my lips. “Just the birth date. How do you think I drove to school?”

  I got my drinks, paid and carried them back to our lane.

  “He thinks my ID is fake,” I told Angel. “This is great.”

  I bowled my next turn and hit two pins, then another three.

  “Maybe going to the bar has done you some good,” Luke said, flicking my pigtails. “You can get every round in.”

  I saw Marc sloping back to his lane with a round of Cokes, and had to hide a smile.

  By the end of the evening, Luke was winning by about a million points. Xander was doing pretty well, Angel not too badly, and I had about thirty points, most of them flukes.

  “Can we go now?” I said grumpily.

  “Wait until they’ve gone,” Luke said. He was on his third pint and reasonably happy.

  “But it’s half past ten! Don’t they have school tomorrow?”

  “Don’t you?” Angel said, and Xander laughed really hard. Jesus, American beer must be really weak if he was that pissed.

  Finally the kids played their last game. Nothing interesting had happened. Marc was a good bowler, Laurence okay and the three girls and Amber’s boyfriend were as bad as me. But I’d caught all of them looking over at our happy little group. I think Marc fancied Angel. But then, everyone fancies Angel. I’d think he was abnormal if he didn’t.

  “So,” I said to Luke as we watched them troop outside to wait for various lifts, “am I cooler now?”

  “Oh, you’re subzero,” Angel assured me as Luke played with my hair some more.

  “They loved you,” Xander agreed. “Can we go now? My arms are aching. I haven’t bowled in, like, years.”

  “Since you left Ohio?” Luke asked, slightly nastily. He always said Harvey was from a backwater. I kept reminding him that Harvey lived in a village with a population around the six thousand mark.

  “Yeah, since I left,” Xander said, not noticing the undertone, or at least brushing it off. “Jesus, I was younger than these kids.”

  “You left home at sixteen?”

  “Yeah.” He shrugged. “Had a bust-up. Don’t need to tell you what about.”

  “Is that when you went to New York?”

  He nodded. “It was so rough back then. I wanted to live in Manhattan but I ended up in this revolting place in Queens…took me years to work my way out of there. I cried every night.”

  “Poor baby. Hey, Xander,” I thought of something, “is it true all Manhattan apartments are shoeboxes?”

  He shrugged, tugging on the laces of his (or probably, Harvey’s) trainers. “Pretty much. Why?”

  “Your apartment,” Luke said, realising.

  “It’s really big. And nice.”

  “That’s because it’s not really an apartment,” Xander winked. “It’s a warehouse. And I get a discounted rate anyway.”

  “How come?”

  He smirked. “The guy who owns it is—what’s that phrase, Angel?”

  “Bent as a nine bob note.”

  “Yeah. But he doesn’t want people to know.”

  “So he lets you live there really cheap?”

  “Not just cheap,” Luke said. “Illegal, too, if it’s supposed to be warehouse space.”

  Xander shrugged again, his smile fading. “Doesn’t matter now,” he said. “I guess it’s gone.”

  I tried to think what I’d feel like if I had to leave my home and everything in it, with no notice. Like being a refugee. It’d kill me.

  We went outside, Luke with his arm around me, and I forgot about school and started to feel pretty good. Sharing body heat with a sexy man will do that.

  We walked past Marc, Clara and Lucy. Clara looked pissed off that she had to share Marc, but I had a feeling it was Lucy providing the lift home.

  How did I ever manage without Ted?

  “Are they looking?” I asked Luke quietly. “Are they watching, am I cool?”

  Luke suddenly stopped and swung me into his arms and kissed me with cinematic intensity. Randy and Joan never had moments like this.

  When he let me go, I was dizzy.

  “Wow,” I mumbled, and he grinned.

  “Now they’re watching. Now you’re cool.”

  Is this man the best, or what?

  “Exhibitionists,” Angel called as she walked off, backwards, after Xander.

  “Jealous,” Luke called back.

  “Of you? Never.”

  Luke stuck a finger up at her and then used it to stroke the hair from my face.

  “Now then, cool girl,” he said, “wanna go back to my place?”

  I nodded, incapable of speech.

  It was the hair that did it.

  I tried to slip into the back of the art class as quietly as I could, but everyone turned and looked at me, and I knew they could tell. I was wearing yesterday’s clothes, but only Marc and Lucy would be able to tell that. I was wearing minimal makeup—applied in the car—but so were a few of the other girls.

  It was my hair—tousled, unbrushed, wiggly from being left in plaits all night, and almost still bearing the imprints of Luke’s fingers—and the scent of his deodorant that did it.

  I’d have brushed my hair, but all I had was the booby bag which contained my purse, phones and a lipgloss. Besides, those pigtails had done a damn good job on it last night, not to mention Luke’s added tousling. No three-second brushing would have made it look tame.

  It was pretty clear that I’d spent the night at Luke’s place, and pretty clear we hadn’t been playing Scrabble.

  Lucy was giggling. Marc looked at me with his cool blue eyes, and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

  “Boy, he’s going to be mad at you,” Lucy whispered, and I looked around for the new teacher as I slunk to an empty bench. I was fifteen minutes late for the lesson and I had no artwork at all. It was all in the back of Ted, who was still sitting in my car park at home. I didn’t even have a pencil.

  This morning I’d woken in Luke’s soft bed, tangled up with him in a hot, gorgeous mess. I stretched out, feeling pretty damn good, and wondered what I had to do today.

  And then I remembered.

  And then I looked at the clock, and screamed.

  Luke’s eyes slammed open and he reached for the gun by his bead.

  “What?”

  “I was supposed to be at school ten minutes ago!” I leapt out of bed, tripping over Luke’s leg and landing painfully on my knee. “Ow! Bollocks, shit…”

  He dropped the gun on his beside table and looked at me lazily.

  “Blow it off,” he said.

  “Are you nuts? Luke, this is the first time I’ve been given something like surveillance all by myself. I am not going to screw it up. Now where the hell is my underwear?”

  I sat there and tried to look composed. This is a look I’ve been practising my entire life, and I still haven’t managed to pull it off. God knows how I got my Drama A level.

  “What’s he like?” I asked Lucy now in an undertone. She, like everyone else, had her entire portfolio out on the desk and I remembered my induction letter telling me to bring everything to the first lesson for assessment. Which was why I had put it in my car. But Luke had dropped me off this morning and I’d hardly had time to put my knickers on. My feet were killing me because they hadn’t been parcelled up properly, and my pret
ty shoes were grating on the raw patches.

  “The new guy?” She shrugged. “He’s really cute. And he’s really pissed off you weren’t here.”

  Oh God.

  I looked up to the little office at the top of the room. So much for me trying to charm him into lending me a pencil and some paper. Not that I felt up to drawing much as it was.

  “I’m only fifteen minutes late.”

  “He’s calling Devvo now to see if you’ve come in. Did you sign the late book?”

  I looked at her blankly.

  “In the office.”

  “What office?”

  “The main one. In A Block.”

  “I don’t even know where A Block is!”

  “Down by the Drama Studio…”

  “Wouldn’t that just make me later?”

  She shrugged, grinning. “Like it’s supposed to make sense.”

  The office door opened and a voice said, “No, she’s still not—Sophie?”

  I stared. I think my mouth fell open.

  Lucy nudged me. “Told ya.”

  Oh, he was cute. He was very cute. But he was also living with my best friend.

  The compulsion to yell “Harvey, you wanker, what are you doing here?” overwhelmed me, but somehow I managed to control myself.

  “I’m really sorry I’m late,” I said, “I overslept…”

  “This is only your second day,” he said, looking stern.

  And it’s only your first. “I’m sorry,” I began again, and he crooked a finger. Lucy sighed.

  “Can you come into my office?”

  I got up, and every single eyeball in the large room watched me walk slowly, on sore feet with aching legs (ahem) up to the door at the top of the room. Harvey closed it behind us, then turned to face me.

  “Surprise!”

  I bashed his arm. “You nearly gave me a heart attack!”

  “Likewise.” He fingered my tousled hair. “Luke?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  He nodded, grinning. “You even smell of him.”

  “In a good way?”

  “I guess.”

  Cheers. “Didn’t you know I was going to be here?”

  He nodded. “That’s why I was worried. Shapiro’s men got in last night—Doyle and Maretti—and they haven’t been seen since. When you didn’t turn up I panicked… I was about to try your cell.”