Super Awkward

by Beth Garrod

  I stayed fully clothed under my duvet until I heard her knock. She slid under the covers beside me, not even doing a double-take at me wearing her dress as my new PJs.

  “C’mon then. Hit me with it. Whatever you say will just be between you, me, and that rather fit poster of Louis.” Last week I’d turned it on its side so when I wake up and open my eyes it’s like he’s lying next to me (but without the danger of him getting a faceful of my morning breath).

  Jo tucked a loose bit of hair behind my ear.

  I didn’t know where to start.

  But before I knew it, I’d finished. Every detail, every single detail from Zac, through to detention, through to Luke’s stupid threats, through to me accidentally winding him up so much he’d ruined everything for everyone.

  “So, on the positive side. . .”

  I snorted. The only positive side to this was, if I restarted life, and just used this whole thing as a terrible dress rehearsal (in actual terrible dresses too) I could get back to a normal functioning fifteen-year-old by the time I’m thirty.

  “As I was saying, oinker, at least everything’s out there now. It’s not like any more surprises can be lurking.”

  But there was something I hadn’t told her. And I was done with secrets.

  “Well. Nor quite. There is something I need to tell you.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience, watching myself about to say something but not actually sure I could make all my speaking muscles do the saying.

  But I had to come clean. For Jo to help, she needed to know everything. I wanted a no-sister-secret-zone, whatever the consequences.

  “It’s about the camera I won.”

  “The one you never let me borrow? What’s it got to do with me?”

  Brace, Bella. One last thing and you can be officially empty of lies.

  “Well, the photo that I won with wasn’t the one I showed you and mum. The photo of Mumbles where her jowl had flapped into her eye as she jumped over a puddle?”

  Her eyebrow went up.

  “Go on. . .”

  “Well, that was Photo1. The one I sent through on email to enter was actually Picture1. It was just an accident. A total accident, cos I was about to miss the deadline.”

  “And what exactly was Picture1?”

  This was where it got awkward. And maybe illegal.

  “That arty one you took of an athletic track?”

  AKA the photo that was up in Jo’s room. That she’d taken.

  “No way?!?”

  Yes way, an award-winning accident.

  “I’m so sorry! It was a TOTAL accident. And I only realized when I walked up to collect the prize and they suddenly put it up on the screen behind me. And then I didn’t know what to do, so I didn’t do anything. And I’ve been dying about it ever since.”

  I held my breath. Was Jo going to go summon Mum up here?

  “Well, in that case –” she lifted up one of the mugs of tea she’d brought up for us – “here’s to me being a prize-winning photographer too! Who knew?!”

  She clinked her mug against mine and smiled.

  And I smiled back.

  Relieved. Happy. And not hiding anything any more. Except the stain on her dress.

  I’d survived a full sister confessional.

  “So, now you’ve got everything off your chest – except for my dress and YES I’ve noticed that stain.” Oops. “Maybe it’s my turn to come clean.”

  I didn’t understand. How could someone who never did anything wrong have something to own up to? She plumped up my pillow and sat cross-legged.

  “Remember at Christmas – how I did all the cooking for a month, including Christmas dinner?”

  “Of course I remember. It was incrediballs!” It was also the first time since Dad left that we’d not had spaghetti hoops on Christmas Day.

  “Well fanks, sis. But had you never wondered why I was doing it? And not even moaning about it?”

  Woah. I hadn’t. I just thought she was sucking up as usual.

  “It was because I was grounded.”

  I spluttered my tea back into the cup, like an Italian water feature, but without a tiny stone penis on show.

  “You what?!”

  This was like finding out the Easter bunny is actually real and lives in a giant burrow in Herefordshire.

  “Yup. Y’know this athletics tour? Well, when they sent letters out about the teams I realized they’d mixed up some details –” she buried her head in her hands – “and that they’d made me a whole lot faster than I’d really been. And that . . . that maybe I shouldn’t have quite been on the team after all.”

  SUPERGULP.

  “Oh. My. Jonas. What did you do?!”

  “That’s the thing. I didn’t do anything. Not for a whole term. But when I came home for Christmas, I had to tell Mum. I couldn’t deal with the stress any more.”

  How did I not know any of this?! All this time I’d been annoyed at her for being the mega-sis, and actually she’d been mega-in-trouble sis?!

  “Andwhatdidshesay?!”

  “She marched me out of the house and straight to the club. And made me tell them their mistake. It was the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done.” This was a big claim, as we’d both once had to do a photoshoot for Mum’s friend’s neon yoga clothes range. “Mum didn’t even get changed out of her kaftan and slippers.”

  I would say I was speechless, but I couldn’t, as I was speechless.

  “They only let me keep my tour place, cos they appreciated that I’d ’fessed up, and then it turned out my time was good enough to qualify anyway, as one of the others had got injured.”

  So that’s why she’d been so shifty talking about tour?! No wonder she’d kept it to herself.

  “Mum didn’t want me telling you cos she hates the principle of karma not sorting life out and having to resort to normal-person punishment. But I’d always thought you’d figured it out?”

  I ABSOLUTELY hadn’t. I thought she was just buttering Mum up. Via delicious broccoli-soup skills.

  “Wow. I had NO idea.”

  “That’s why I hid the letter from Mum. I couldn’t face up to having to swallow any of your attempts at cooking. Or deal with your moaning.”

  “What letter?”

  “The detention one in my room. Unless you want it back? I recognized the school logo.”

  WHAT THE WHAT?! So my detention letter had arrived! And she’d hidden it?! I’d never seen this side of Jo before. And I liked it.

  I gave her a massive ‘thank you’ hug, smearing mascara on her cheek. She rolled me back on to my side of the bed and grabbed the tissue out of my hand to wipe it off.

  “C’mon, panda eyes. Enough about me. How about we work out what to do to fix this mess you’re in. I’ve had quite enough of you moping about the house for one year.”

  She was right. If I had been able to tell Jo the thing I’d been dreading, I could do anything. And that definitely included proving to Tegan and Rachel that I was the friend they thought I was.

  “Yup, with one clever person, and one . . . well, me . . . we must be able to fix at least something?.”

  But as I finished my sentence, I yawned. It was gone midnight and I’d shed all my energy when I saw those stupid pictures from Luke.

  Jo and I agreed to carry the convo on in the morning, and true to her word she woke me up at nine a.m. with some toast – heavy on the butter, light on the Marmite, just how I liked it.

  She even brought a laptop. She meant serious business.

  As we talked, it became clearer and clearer to me what I needed to do. I needed to prove to Rachel and Tegan that I could be trusted. And that they were more important to me than what anyone else thought. But I wasn’t sure how.

  Jo opened her laptop, and shut down her uni work. As she did I got a brainwave of EXACTLY what I had to do.

  It wasn’t going to be easy, in fact it was going to be mortifyingly a
wful. But with her help, I might be able to pull it off.

  It was time I, Bella Fisher, risked it all.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  To everyone else it was the last day of term.

  To me, it was D-day. D-isaster day. Or D-on’t You See I Was Just An Idiot But It Won’t Happen Again So Forgive Me? day.

  I’d been building up to it all week. It wasn’t that Tegan, Rachel and Mikey hadn’t been speaking to me. They had. It was just that it was just that. Speaking. Not laughing. Not arranging to meet. Not messaging me in the evenings with pictures of vegetables that look like bands. Jo said they were being ‘civil’ but the only civil I knew was ‘civil war’, so that didn’t sound too reassuring.

  Normally, the whole school filed into assembly silent with boredom, but as it was our last one for months, everyone was massively un-silent with complete and utter un-boredom, and the teachers weren’t even bothering to try and shut us up. They were as ready for the summer as we were.

  I sat down next to Rachel, accidentally catching her hair with my watch. She told me it was fine, which meant it wasn’t, as she’d normally just yank my ponytail in retaliation and laugh.

  I rocked back and forth on my chair, full of nervous energy as Mrs Hitchman did her yearly tradition – a look back over the whole school year. I hoped she didn’t hear the sniggers as she described the Christmas play as a traditional ‘affair’. People had been talking about her and Mr Lutas all week. I’d been trying to correct them, but who wants the truth when gossip is more entertaining?

  But I wasn’t listening to Mrs Hitchman droning on about the success of the first-ever pacifist boxing team. All I could think about was what was coming up. Could I actually do this?! I wanted to lie flat on the floor and hyperventilate with fear, but the dust might suffocate me and that would be even more embarrassing. Could I not think of an emergency Plan B? I looked at the others sitting beside me. Nope. They were my best friends in the whole world, and I’d let them down. This was something I had to do.

  Despite never being more scared in my life, thinking about the tiny possibility that I could make things right gave me the boost I needed (sadly just a mental one, and not a chocolate one, which would have calmed my nerves more).

  Mrs Hitchman clapped her hands together and my ears tuned back into what she was saying.

  “So, as you can all agree, it’s been yet another exceptional year.”

  Not one person made any noise that could be construed as agreement. Unless you counted a sneeze from Mikey, but I didn’t. Ignoring the silence, she carried on.

  “So, enough from me.”

  “More than enough, actually,” Mikey whispered. I inwardly winced at yet another of his attempts to make Tegan laugh and get back in her good books. It was my fault he was out of them.

  “Now it’s time for MY favourite school tradition. Hearing from YOU.”

  Mrs Hitchman smiled out at us, as if, for the first time ever, hands would fly in the air and we’d all clamber to share our most personal moments with a room full of people who would despise you for dragging out the painful assembly for even longer. What was it that they put in the staffroom coffee that made teachers so delusional?

  But this year, one hand did go up. And when it did, Tegan, Mikey and Rachel looked like they’d seen a ghost (and not the one that finished Tegan’s banners, because that had turned out to be Mikey, not that Tegan had given me an opportunity to tell her).

  The hand was shaking with nerves.

  The hand was mine.

  I couldn’t believe I was doing this.

  An excited, and fair to say surprised, Mrs Hitchman called me up to the stage. I tried to block out all the evils that were being thrown up at me from everyone aged sub-teacher. My legs felt so wobbly, I was worried I was going to have to crawl the last few steps.

  The whole hall was the hushed, excited silence you only ever heard (or didn’t hear, seeing as it was a silence) when someone was about to do something so mortifying it could lead to a permanent change in nickname. For someone who was too self-conscious to go bowling or play Jenga, this was unbearable.

  Deep breath, Bella.

  The IT teacher nodded at me. She had the file I’d emailed last night ready to put up on the screen.

  Was it too late to turn back and pretend this was the first-ever case of delayed sleepwalking? The bit of my brain that made this plan shouted at me to carry on. The rest of my brain told me to stop shouting at myself, and turn and run and never look back. My legs, which didn’t have a brain, made the final decision by hardly managing to walk forward, let alone run away.

  I saw the concern on Tegan’s face. Fingers crossed this wasn’t going to just make matters worse. But with two hours left of term, this was the last chance I had to put things right. There was no going back.

  I stepped up to the microphone. Here goes nothing.

  “IS THIS THING ON?”

  My voice boomed around the room. The back row looked at each other, already on the verge of laughter. Say something cool to win them back round.

  “YES IT IS.”

  I took a deep breath and remembered what Jo had said in practice. Not the bit about me looking like a Jack Russell when I was panicking, but the bit about trying to blur out everyone in the room except for the three people I cared about most.

  “So, erm, here we are.”

  Mrs Hitchman nodded encouragingly.

  “Here I am.”

  The voice that echoed back at me sounded like a complete stranger. Could I be the first girl to experience their voice breaking? In front of an entire school.

  One of the sixth formers did a ‘get on with it’ tap on their watch. Must blur harder.

  “So . . . you might not know me. Or maybe you do. . . I was the one who accidentally got that massive blu-tac ball stuck in my hair last year? It was HUGE! Honestly, you have NO idea how hard it was to get out.” No, Bella. Get back to what you practised.

  “Aaaaanyway. I’m here to tell you the truth. About this year.”

  I paused.

  “About me. Bella Fisher.”

  I heard a voice shout out ‘AKA Fishy Balls’ and a small group laugh, but I had too much to think about without bothering to care what Luke did.

  Tegan and Rachel looked nervous. If only I could discreetly reassure them this was all for them. But as I had about 250 pairs of eyes on me, which is like 500 individual eyes, there was no way I could.

  I gestured for the first picture to go up. Jo had spent the week helping me make them. A ripple of laughter went round the room as a picture of me beamed up – complete with bird poo. Zac had sent me the original when I’d told him what I was planning. After I’d explained about PSSSST and he’d accepted my apology for what went down at prom. When he’d given me his landline number so I could ring and do the same with his dad, who’d had to patch up things with Mrs Hitchman. Possibly the most awkward phone call I will ever have, especially when Mr Lutas said ‘Thank you for rrrrrrecitfying the matter’ and I misheard and asked him what rectal-fying meant.

  Zac gave me a massive thumbs-up from the back of the room, which gave me the lift I needed to get back on track. I was going to miss him.

  “Sooooo, this is me.” I guess they could tell that by the fact I am me, and the person in the photo was also me. “And I wanted to take a couple of minutes to clear some things up. Because I’ve made some really bad decisions this term, and the people who have been the absolute best, and the most innocent-er-ist, have been the ones who have got hurt.”

  The faces staring up at me looked as confused as when an interpretive dance group had come in to assembly to perform a routine about the dangers of plastic bags.

  “I’m here to give you the truth behind some of the things you might have heard these last few weeks. Especially the ones from prom.” Tegan and Rachel looked like they wanted to bolt out the door. But they HAD to stay. To hear what I’d been working on all week. My plan to stop everyone laughing at
them, and focus it on the only person who deserved it – me.

  “First up – me. This term I’ve been trying hard to be a better student, to be more, er, normal. But guess what? I have no idea what normal is. For example, this –” I gestured at the screen – “isn’t even the worst photo of me. Not by a long way!”

  I probably shouldn’t have said that so proudly. I nodded for the next picture to come up – me freaking out when I got a Kinder Egg toy container stuck on my chin.

  “See? I’m a total doofball. And this is what I’d be like ALL the time if I didn’t have the best friends in the world to help me get through every day.” I smiled apologetically at Tegan and Rachel. “And not get things stuck on my face. ”

  Mrs Hitchman did a ‘please don’t say doofball again’ cough. Must win her back round.

  “Like Mrs Hitchman said, it’s fair to say this year has been a bit exceptional.”

  Her smiled returned.

  “An exceptional disaster.”

  Her smiled disappeared.

  “So, here’s what else you need to know about me. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learnt this term, it’s that secrets, and pretending to be things you’re not, only lead to bigger problems. And potentially poo on your head.” This time I looked at Luke. He had his trademark scowl on. And I was delighted. Because if I told everyone everything, he would have nothing more to try and ruin my life with, and nothing more to hurt my friends with. I smiled.

  “Fact one.” The screen clicked on to a picture of one of the pieces of art I’d done before Christmas.

  “I am terrible at art. I once got an A for this picture of my cat. However, Mr Lutas, I need to tell you something.” He raised an eyebrow. “It’s not really my cat called ‘Cat’. I was just under pressure when you asked. It was meant to be my dog, Mumbles. And she’s not even a cat-like dog because all she does is sniff trouser areas.”

  Mr Lutas didn’t smile. Oh no. Had I made things worse?!

  “Sorry. Not the point. The point is, that Mr Lutas deserves a massive shout-out for making someone like me able to do something like this.”

  A picture of the prom decorations went up. A few vaguely impressed ‘ohhhhs’ went round from the years who hadn’t seen them.