Good Girls Don't

by Claire Hennessy

I smile. “Nah. Not really.”

  “Still,” she says, “you deserve, I don’t know, parents who appreciate what an amazing person you are.”

  “Lucy, stop it,” I say, because once again I know where she’s going with this.

  “It’s the truth,” she giggles, moving in to kiss me again.

  “Lucy,” I say more firmly. “No, stop.”

  “What’s wrong?” she asks.

  I don’t even know where to begin with that one. It’s the same thing that’s always been wrong. The fact that she’s never had any real feelings for me, no matter what she says.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  I didn’t know what to do or what to say, so I just went along with it, her kissing me, her taking off my T-shirt and telling me that I was such a good friend, and so beautiful, so very beautiful.

  It reminded me of a dream, a dream that I’d had over and over again while sitting in school or lying in bed at night, only it was real. I was scared to blink in case I missed a single moment, in case it ended.

  ***

  Lucy was the second girl I slept with, after Izzy. And I hadn’t particularly cared about Izzy; that had just been an impulsive fling. It hadn’t meant anything.

  Lucy – Lucy meant something. Lucy meant something because I’d been crazy about her for months and because now, now she’d initiated it, and it had to mean something.

  ***

  Her stomach was still flat. You could pretend that there wasn’t really anything growing inside it, and that’s what we did.

  ***

  I didn’t think about Andrew. Not then. Not until afterwards. I don’t know if she did. I don’t know if she’d cheated on him with anyone except me. She might well have. But I wanted to think I was special.

  ***

  And she made me feel special. And loved, and peaceful, and happy.

  ***

  And it meant absolutely nothing. To her.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  “What’s wrong?” she asks again.

  “It’s just – not this again, Lucy,” I sigh.

  “Oh, come on. It’s just fun . . . you know that.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s not ‘just fun’,” I say. “It’s you cheating on Andrew. It’s me starting to think about all these feelings I used to have for you. It’s not a good idea.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t – I don’t want to mess around with you, Em, you know I don’t. I just thought that you didn’t mind.” She always thinks I don’t mind.

  “I wouldn’t, usually,” I say. “But it’s you.”

  “I hope you mean that in a good way,” she giggles. “Not that I’m really repulsive or anything.”

  I smile. “You’re not. Definitely not.” Definitely, definitely, definitely not.

  Chapter Forty

  After Lucy leaves, I go downstairs, where Janet, Mum and Dad are sitting, reading various sections of the Sunday Times. Mum reads the fashion stuff, Dad the sports and business stuff, and Janet reads the political stuff.

  “Is Lucy gone?” Mum asks.

  “Yeah,” I nod, wondering what’s coming next.

  But that’s all, it seems. I pick up the Funday Times and leave the room.

  Sunday afternoons are always depressing. It’s the weekend, but you know that the weekend is coming to an end, and that there were things you meant to do but didn’t, and that when you wake up the next morning you have a whole week of school ahead of you.

  So I call Barry, and we babble on for a while before Dad tells me to get off the phone because he needs to make a call, and no, he doesn’t intend on using his mobile when he has a perfectly good land-line, and that I really don’t need to be on the phone for someone who lives nearby and who I saw yesterday.

  Clearly he doesn’t understand that yes, I do need to talk to Barry, but arguing with him is pointless. He thinks I’m one of those teenagers who like talking on the phone for the sake of talking. I wonder what it’s like to be an adult and have grown-up phone conversations. They always seem so dull. I mean, sometimes there’s a bit of gossip, but mostly – it’s so boring and routine. I guess they must think that we’re a melodramatic bunch, turning everything into a life-or-death situation – but I think I prefer being dramatic to being bland.

  Dad is now on the phone making small talk to my auntie Mary. It is extraordinarily dull. I mean, what Barry and I were talking about – reliving Lucy’s party – was much more interesting. We were deciding on who the most attractive people there were, and agreed on Natasha and Steven. Lucy had the best outfit and Philip had the worst. Not that he looked unattractive, but he could have made more of an effort. And apparently Jean and Natasha had a fight because Jean was – allegedly – all over Philip on the way home in the taxi.

  Ah, gossip. It’s just lovely. I mean, people say it’s a bad thing to gossip, but it’s so much fun. I don’t go in for the bitching, much, just discussing stuff. Unless of course it’s about Declan and I’m in a crappy mood.

  But I don’t want to think about Declan, because I’ll just get annoyed. He’ll get over this, I’m sure, and we can go back to being friends, and in the meantime I’m going to sit back and relax and enjoy the rest of my weekend.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Everyone hates Mondays apart from my Irish teacher, who is cheerful and enthusiastic and says things like, “Look, I know you’re all tired after the weekend, but we still have work to do!” That would actually mean something if she herself was tired, cranky and wanting to be anywhere but school, like normal people are on Monday mornings. But no, she’s chirpy and yammering on about the poetry and what it really means.

  I find it hard enough to write about what poetry in English really means. I can’t believe they expect us to be able to do that in Irish, too. I whisper to Sarah about Lucy’s party instead. I wonder if Sarah knows that she and Shane weren’t invited because Shane and Lucy haven’t been on very good terms ever since they had a little fling last Christmas, and Andrew still hates Shane for it. It’s a good thing they’re not in the same year at school; bad enough that they’re in the same building. Barry told me they almost got into a fight one day at lunch.

  Lucy and Shane are both such flirts, I don’t know why it surprised anyone. Andrew wasn’t there and she needed someone, basically. He forgave her, though. Of course he did. They’re madly in love, despite it all.

  Sometimes – when we’re not all making fun of how we just know they’re going to spend the rest of their lives together and live happily ever after and how sickening it all is – I think we all wish that we had something like that.

  Other times I’m sensible. Like Barry says, I’m commitment-phobic. He can hardly talk, though. The only relationship he’s ever had that comes close to being remotely serious is what he had with Jeremy. I guess that was serious, actually. I mean, he was throwing around words like ‘soul mate’ and ‘fate’, although he’d kill me if I ever repeated those things to anyone. But apart from that, he’s always been restless, needing to move on after a certain amount of time.

  It’s the best way to be, isn’t it? Not to be tied down when you’re a teenager? I mean, you have the rest of your life to settle down with someone and be dull and grown up and respectable.

  Would I settle down with Abi? Yeah, I suppose I would. If only. We would live in an apartment in town and it would be terribly stylish. She would be working at a magazine or a publisher or something and I would be – well, I don’t know what I’d be doing. Maybe making movies. I wish. Probably something else, something less exciting. We would go out to clubs and party all night and arrive home at four in the morning and fall into bed together.

  It’d be perfect, an idyllic life. I wonder how long it would take for me to get bored with it.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Hugh and I being together made sense to everyone. Between the fact that we’d known each other for such a long time and the fact that we were going around saying that we’d always known that there was s
omething more than friendship between us, everyone was convinced that we were going to last forever.

  Except Barry, who was subjected to my fits of melodrama and angst about why Hugh was being so very reserved with me as far as sex was concerned. I accepted his explanation that Hugh was just nervous, but it was getting to me. I wasn’t used to things moving slowly, and considering that we had been able to skip the getting-to-know-each-other phase, it seemed as if we were going to be stuck in the same place forever, with his hands firmly planted on my waist and never wandering anywhere else.

  We slept together for the first time two weeks before we broke up. I think he’d had a conversation with Shane and that had spurred him into action, the realisation that he had a girlfriend who was not going to tell him that she wanted to wait until she had a ring on her finger or talk about needing more time, someone who didn’t think it was a big deal.

  ***

  There were quite a few people from school at Sarah’s party. I was trying to avoid Hugh, who was in let’s-talk-about-nothing-else-but-music mode, and so I was talking to Christine from my maths class. I looked over at Hugh and realised he wasn’t missing me, busy as he was talking to a few of his friends. There was Shane, and a blonde girl who I’d been introduced to before but whose name escaped me, and a redhead . . . who I hadn’t seen before.

  I must have seen her before, I thought. She was one of Sarah’s friends, wasn’t she? But I’d never seen her outside of school before, not wearing the uniform. Don’t stare, I told myself, and tried to concentrate on what Christine was saying.

  He came over to me after a while, leaving his group and putting his arms around me. “You want to go?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. I was getting sleepy and I could feel a headache coming on. I hadn’t been drinking much. I thought the headache was probably from listening to Christine for so long. She was a lovely girl, but honestly, she never stopped talking.

  We walked to my house and I said goodnight at the front door, looking forward to crawling into my bed and pulling the covers over my head.

  He took my hand and said, “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  I shrugged. “Okay, if you want to, come in for a while . . .”

  The house was dark. The parents were asleep, clearly. I switched on the lights downstairs and asked him if he wanted tea or coffee.

  “Just you,” he said.

  “That’s so corny,” I laughed.

  He pulled me down onto the couch and started kissing me. My heart wasn’t in it. I kept thinking about the girl at the party and about how my head was really aching and how I just wanted to go to sleep.

  It was when he started unzipping my trousers that I said, “Hugh, can’t we do this some other time? I’m really tired.”

  He didn’t listen to me.

  “Hugh,” I said firmly, sitting up and pulling my trousers up, “I’m tired. I don’t want to do this now, okay?”

  “You don’t really mean that,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I do. That’s why I’m saying it. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

  “You’re just like all the rest of them,” he told me.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I mean, were you just playing with me all this time?” he demanded. “Making me believe that this is what you wanted, and then changing your mind about it? I thought you were better than that. I thought I knew you.”

  “Don’t give me this crap, Hugh,” I said. “You do know me, well enough to know that you can’t manipulate me like this.”

  “Oh, you’re talking about manipulation?”

  “Just go. Please. We can discuss this some other time.”

  “Forget it, Emily. You’re not who I thought you were. You’re just another tease.”

  “I didn’t mean to –” I began, feeling the tears in my eyes. Maybe he was right. I had led him on, after all, and wasn’t it completely hypocritical of me to turn around now and say that I didn’t want the very thing that I’d been asking for since the moment we started going out?

  “Oh, you didn’t ‘mean to’!” he said in disgust.

  “Hugh, stop it,” I said.

  He was about to leave. It wasn’t until he opened the front door that I called after him. I knew I had to make things better, make up for what I’d done. So I went along with his original plan, and we pretended we’d never fought.

  ***

  But things were different after that, even though we wanted to pretend that they weren’t. Something had disappeared, the magical thing that had made our relationship work. So he turned his attentions to Fiona, and I turned mine to Abi, and when we broke up, we weren’t shocked, even though everyone else was.

  I don’t know what to say about what happened that night. I cried, you see, after he left. I didn’t know why I was crying. Maybe it was because I really hadn’t wanted to sleep with him that night, or maybe it was because I’d let myself be manipulated, or maybe it was because I was weak and I was a tease and a tramp and I knew that I deserved it.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  He was still mine, though. I think that’s the part that upset me. That he was supposed to be my boyfriend and that he decided that I wasn’t good enough anymore. What an asshole! It’s guys like him that make me want to exterminate the entire male species. (And thoughts like those that get me a reputation for being a man-hater, but I digress.)

  I’m over it, like I said. I’m not the type to sit around moping over an ex, and in retrospect it was the best thing that could have happened. We’re good at being friends, even though we haven’t been real friends in a while. It’s been a casual, off-hand sort of thing ever since we broke up. It’ll take a while for things to get back to normal, I suppose.

  But it always does, doesn’t it? It’s what’s happening with Declan right now. I really must call him sometime this week and get everything sorted out. I don’t want this becoming a big deal.

  It isn’t. It shouldn’t be.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Monday seems to last forever. I am incredibly relieved to get home, and even more relieved that it’s a Janet-free environment at the moment.

  I head for the TV, of course, and debate which DVD to watch. I find myself wondering if my parents ever look at my collection. If Janet had ever examined it closely, she wouldn’t have been so surprised at seeing me kissing Lucy.

  I’m annoyed about that, I think. Not intensely annoyed, but irritated that she’s barged into my private life and made judgements based on five seconds. My friendship, or relationship, or whatever you want to call it, with Lucy, is something rather complicated. And Janet has no idea. She just makes assumptions.

  I hate her for intruding on this part of my life, the part of my life that I keep for just me and my friends, the part I don’t want my family knowing about, and it’s not out of any sense of shame or fear, but the fact that they don’t know who I am, the sort of person that I am, and that we’re just people who live in the same house and are bound by blood but not by anything that really matters.

  I’m moving out as soon as I can, not because I hate them – I don’t – but because I need my own space. I need to have my own life, and right now it feels like I can’t have that here.

  I want that stylish apartment in town where I will live with someone I care about. Since Abi’s out of the question, realistically speaking, I’d probably end up sharing with Barry. I imagine living with him. We’d always be laughing at something. I’d come home from a long hard day at work and he’d give me a back massage. Then I’d give him one – because he would have had a tough day too – and then we’d –

  No. I’m not going down that route. Roisín and the others must be getting to me with their ‘spark’ nonsense.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  I spend Tuesday lunch-time talking to Lucy about Andrew’s proposal.

  “I called him yesterday,” she says. “He said he didn’t understand why I wasn’t excited about this.”

  I sig
h. “He’s being a little unreasonable, isn’t he? I mean, you’re eighteen.”

  “I tried telling him that. He says that he’s ready to commit, and that he doesn’t get why I’m not willing to. I think I’m going to end it.”

  “End it?” I say fearfully. Being friends with Declan has made me paranoid about people saying things like that.

  “Break up with him,” she elaborates, and I breathe a sigh of relief.

  “Do you mean it?” I ask.

  She nods. “This isn’t just going to go away, you know? I need to deal with it, and I think the only way I can is by telling him I can’t be involved with him anymore.”

  “But it’s Andrew. I mean – you’re mad about him, right?”

  “Of course,” she says, “but what else can I do? So I’m going to talk to him today after school.”

  “There has to be a better way of dealing with this than dumping him, Lucy,” I say. I’m still stunned at the idea that the perfect couple are going to be no more. “I mean, you’ve had fights before, but you’ve always stayed together.”

  She looks at me in an almost condescending manner. “Emily, I know you don’t understand this. But someday you will.”

  Make that an extremely condescending manner.

  “Okay,” I say. “Call me later if you need someone to talk to, okay?”

  She nods. “Okay. Thanks.”

  She goes back to her classroom and I go into the bathroom where I take out my phone and call Andrew.

  “Heya. We need to talk.”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Once again I am leaving school early in an attempt to sort out someone else’s life. I meet up with Andrew outside his school just before his lunch-time is over. He has a study period after lunch he can get away with missing. I have forty minutes to talk some sense into him.