And Then He Kissed Me

by Various

  “Wait – I’ll walk you home—”

  “No,” she says quickly, wriggling into her damp dress. “I’ll be fine. Thank you.” She kisses me. “‘Parting is such sweet sorrow, That I shall say good night…’”

  “‘Till it be morrow.’” I smile. “Meet me in the morning.”

  She hesitates, so I catch her hand. “At Myrianthe’s castle. Ten a.m.”

  She squeezes my hand. “I’d love to.” She kisses me again, more fiercely than ever, then she dives into the sea of stars, trailing the swirling galaxies glittering behind her.

  But by 10.45 a.m. there’s still no sign of Juliet. The day stretches, my eyes glued to the pathway from the woods, and I feel like Myrianthe, waiting. Except her lover never came. I swallow hard and check my watch for the hundredth time. Maybe something’s wrong; something’s happened. I can’t even go looking for her – I don’t even know her real name…

  Restless, I wander back into the woods and meet an old woman trudging up the hill. “Have you seen a girl?” I ask her quickly. “About eighteen, long dark curly hair?”

  “You’re Romeo?” she says.

  “Yes! Is she all right? She was meant to meet me at Myrianthe’s castle.”

  “Where?”

  “Myrianthe’s castle – here.”

  “Oh, the old lighthouse.”

  I frown.

  “I have a letter for you.” She passes me a folded sheet of paper.

  Dear Romeo,

  By the time you read this I’ll be gone. I’m so sorry to leave without seeing you, but I hate goodbyes.

  Thank you so much for making my last summer here so perfect.

  Your

  Juliet xx

  I frown. “She’s gone?”

  The woman nods.

  “I can’t believe it.” I crumple the letter in my fist. So much for love.

  “No!” The old woman grabs my arm. “Don’t be angry.”

  “I didn’t mean anything to her,” I say bitterly. “There’s no phone number, no email—”

  “There’s no point,” the woman says quietly.

  “What?” For the first time, I notice the tears shining in her eyes.

  “She’s sick … of goodbyes.” She frowns, her voice cracking. “There have been far too many.”

  I stare at her, at the terrible, achingly sad look on her face, and I can hardly breathe. “What? But she never…” I falter. “I didn’t…” I glance down at her note and suddenly all the things Juliet said come back to me with a whole new meaning.

  Her last summer…

  Her scar gleaming in the moonlight. The operation that gave her a new hunger for life.

  “You should seize every moment and just squeeze every last drop right out of it.”

  “At least I’d have died living!”

  “We can sleep when we’re dead.”

  But most of all the way her eyes clouded when I told her her star sign.

  Cancer.

  I swallow the tears scorching my throat. “But I … I don’t even know her name.”

  “It’s—”

  “No,” I say quickly. “Don’t tell me. She’s Juliet. To me, she’ll always be Juliet.”

  The old lady nods. “She’d like that.”

  I close my eyes and instantly Juliet’s beaming face fills my head, those eyes sparkling in the moonlight as she glowed with the light of a thousand stars.

  When I open them again, the woman is gone. Slowly I wander back to the tower – or lighthouse, or whatever – and sit down on the grassy clifftop. The seagulls wheel carelessly overhead and I watch the empty waves for what seems like forever. Then I pick up my pen.

  Star-Crossed (lyrics)

  I only knew you for a day;

  You said our love was cursed

  Like Romeo and Juliet,

  Ill-fated from the first.

  You taught me how to live and love,

  To dive straight in, head first;

  To make each single second count,

  For life can’t be rehearsed.

  No sighs, no lies, no long goodbyes,

  Our bubble never burst.

  You were, and are – will always be –

  The girl that I loved first.

  Just twenty-four short fleeting hours,

  Our time was brief, it’s true.

  But my life was changed forever

  By one day of loving you.

  Cool gangs run schools. It’s a law. The Law of Coolness. Like the laws in chemistry and maths, only easier to understand than anything to do with isosceles triangles or the periodic table. If you are cool, you get to ignore people or make them popular simply by inviting them to join the gang. I need not point out at this stage that I am not a Cool Person. You will have figured that out by now. I don’t want to be one, either – not if it means being that sort of girl.

  I wouldn’t mind being cool in a sort of general, casually chic way, but I would not want to be one of the Cool People in my new school, Laurence O’Toole Tech, because the local version of cool is a horrible, vampiric, life-draining type of behaviour without any of the nicer, softer characteristics of vampires. I mean, vampires don’t play with their prey, do they?

  But sometimes, just sometimes, the Cool People lose. And the Uncool People get to fall in love.

  My first day in Laurence O’Toole Tech made me feel sick. That was before I even got there.

  At breakfast that morning, I honestly couldn’t say, “Mum, I feel sick,” because my mother was already upset enough about us having to move from our house in Sycamore Avenue, where we had lived since before I was born, to a tiny bungalow five miles away – which meant I had to move schools. The recession sucks, is all I’ll say.

  When we moved house during the summer, Mum cried a lot. She cries nicely, so she looks pretty, just with wet skin. I do not take after her. I cry and instantly turn into human strawberry jelly: red, blubbery, ugly.

  I hate it when Mum cries. It just feels wrong.

  “I’m so sorry, Izzie,” she said the day she and Dad told me just how broke we were. “You’ll have to leave all your friends, your school, and you’ll have to leave Susie.”

  Susie’s my best friend (BFF if you’re ten, or the person who carries all your secrets around with her if you’re fifteen, like me).

  “Mum, everything’s going to be fine!” I said sternly, trying to sound like a movie heroine when she and the hero are about to face a firing squad/alien encounter/whatever. “We’re a strong family; we can take it.”

  This type of statement makes grown-ups remember that they are the grown-ups and then they stop crying. If you are being brave, then they can be brave.

  I hugged Mum. Our dog, Rua, jumped onto my dad’s lap then and bounced around happily, wagging his tail with his tongue hanging out. Rua thinks everything is a game. He was definitely dropped on his head as a puppy.

  “So what if we have to move? It might be fun to start new lives somewhere else,” I added.

  I really am a brilliant liar.

  After that speech, I simply couldn’t have told Mum and Dad that I felt sick and didn’t want to go to my new school.

  I definitely looked sick, though. My new uniform was a burgundy skirt and jumper with a white shirt, and tie. White doesn’t suit me because my hair is black and my skin is on the cool side of blue. Combined with the burgundy, it made me look like the undead.

  Or a goth – whichever is worse.

  Mum made pancakes for me for breakfast. Since she lost her job, she cooks a lot, and this is lovely when it’s cakes on Saturday – but not so lovely when your stomach is doing cartwheels of worry and you are expected to eat two huge pancakes.

  “Thanks,” I said, still cheery.

  I had said it was going to be fun and I was not going to let them all down. IT WOULD BE FUN!

  The thing is, I had this instinct that it wasn’t going to be fun.

  Nobody at Laurence O’Toole Tech had wanted me to come in a day early for orientati
on, which seemed odd to me. In my old school, the head nun would have dragged any new pupils in a week early. She’d have shown them every square inch of the place, including the tampon machine in the upper-floor bathroom of which she was very proud (I don’t think they have one in the convent), and told them her door was always open. Mum and I drove past Laurence O’Toole last week, but that was as close as I’d got. (I do miss Sister Mary-Louise. She was totally mental, but in a nice way.)

  Mum insisted on driving me to school that morning because it’s a fifteen-minute walk. Plus, she wanted to wave goodbye, possibly even see the classrooms – which is the sort of thing Sister Mary-Louise would have encouraged.

  When we arrived, pupils were sullenly marching in on the first day back after the summer holidays and I had another of those sick feelings. This one said it would not be a good plan for Mum to come inside. Only the smallest of kids were being dropped off by parents, and even they were flinging themselves from the cars at high speed, because they knew that parental lifts would get you jeered at in the playground.

  “Mum, I’d like to go in on my own,” I told her and hugged her.

  Mum bit her lip, so I turned off the radio and turned on the CD player until Glee Four was belting out of the car. You can’t feel sad to Glee, can you?

  I threw myself from the car and began the death march up to the gates. The Laurence O’Toole architect had obviously been in an industrial-wasteland-sort-of-mood when he drew the plans for it. Everything was grey, even the grass.

  “Cheery,” I muttered to myself.

  Inside, the building was grey with paler grey highlights and red stripes on the floor that looked like those ones you see on documentaries about prisons. Follow the red line. Do not move suddenly or the guards will shoot you. There were lots of prison-style signs with directions, so I found the registration office OK. But it took ages to check in with the nervy young guy on the reception desk who didn’t look old enough to be a teacher. He handed me a class timetable based on the subjects I’d been doing at my old school and gave me a very chunky printout on “Forbidden Behaviour”. (No make-up is to be worn. Do not write in spray paint on the walls. No piercings allowed other than earrings.)

  I smiled at him, asked for a map of the school and then headed off to my first class, which was a meeting of my entire year in the fourth-year form room.

  Due to going to registration, I was the last person to arrive. There were at least sixty people there, some squashed up against the walls, with the sweet nerdy kids sitting at the front, looking up at the teacher, pens or laptops at the ready. At the back, lined up like sharks, were the bad kids. None of them was obeying the piercing rule, that was for sure. Among the sharks was a cluster of girls so glossy and lovely that they looked as if they’d been beamed straight down from an America’s Next Top Model shoot. Their make-up was perfect, their hair rippled in honey blondes or lush chestnuts. Their school uniforms had been subtly altered to look almost fashionable, which was a miracle in itself.

  Yes, they were the Cool People.

  I shuffled into the room and leaned against a wall while everybody in the whole room eyeballed me. I knew what they were seeing:

  My eyes are such a dark brown that they’re nearly black, and my best friend, Susie, always complains that I never need eyeliner or mascara as I look as if I’m wearing eye make-up anyway. I do not tan, so I don’t bother trying, and among a load of kids with golden tans from the summer, I looked like a total goth-head who’d been shipped in from Alaska. I am also tall for my age. You get the picture: the Strange New Girl.

  I eyeballed them all right back anyway. Show No Fear is the best bet.

  And then I saw him, lounging against the window nearest to the teacher. At that moment, all the other people: cool girls, nerdy kids, huge sporty guys, everyone, seemed to disappear. The drone of the teacher telling us about the year ahead and what was expected of us disappeared too.

  We stared at each other across the classroom.

  I stopped worrying if I was too tall, too pale or too spikily different to the other girls.

  Instead, I stared into eyes that looked as dark as my own and a face that said this guy thought, imagined, had dreams of a life outside Laurence O’Toole Tech.

  He was just as tall and strong as the super-sporty jocks, but his face, with the dark hair swept low over his brows, said he liked the library, wrote poetry and would be kind to little kids. I instinctively knew he would play guitar with those long, strong fingers. He wasn’t pale like me. He was the colour of sun-baked caramel, and he was so handsome that I felt something inside me, well … flip. I know that sounds insane. Who knew bits of you could actually flip?

  Nothing inside me had ever moved in any meaningful way for any other guy before, although I’d had a moment once with my first boyfriend – but that was more a locking of braces, and it was a relieved flip that we weren’t stuck together permanently.

  This guy, staring across the fourth-year classroom, was the One.

  Fifteen minutes into lunchtime, I was tripped up by a Top Model, who stuck her foot out when I passed her in the canteen queue with my full lunch tray as I was looking for somewhere to plonk myself.

  “Sorry,” she said insincerely, flicking back her hair (blonde) and smirking as everyone else in her gang laughed out loud.

  “Amelia, what are you like!” Somebody behind her in the queue laughed.

  My lunch was all over the floor, I had landed painfully on my knees and for the second time that day, everyone in a room was staring at me.

  I looked up in time to see one of the Glossy-Hair Brigade nudge Amelia and point. “Jake’s looking over at you,” she hissed.

  In my dazed state, I looked in the direction she was pointing and saw Him, with his gang, his dark hair even more ruffled and his shirt’s top button open, his school tie loose. He was staring intently at us and I felt myself go pink with embarrassment.

  He smiled suddenly and I smiled back. I couldn’t help it. That little flip in my stomach happened again, and I knew I was probably looking at him goofily. I didn’t care. Until Amelia caught sight of my smile.

  “He’s not smiling at you, moron,” she snapped. “How stupid can you be? Jake is so out of your league, he’s on a different planet. Your planet is Planet Dork, by the way.”

  And she moved further down the queue, grinding my blueberry muffin into the canteen floor as she went.

  Don’t cry, I told myself as I tidied up, feeling every eye still on me. Nobody came to help. They would have in my old school. But then nobody in my old school would have got away with the sort of blatant bullying Amelia had just displayed.

  I threw what was left of my lunch in the bin and headed to the library. I still wanted to cry, but I knew it would be fatal to do it in public. If this place was Bullying Central, then I needed to lick my wounds in private.

  In the library, I found one of those pony books I used to love when I was little. Knowing it would cheer me up, I read it till the end-of-lunch bell. There were quite a few other students in the library – they all looked as if they were used to making themselves as unnoticed as possible, which was probably the way to go in this school. A few of them smiled nervously at me and I nodded back. We were like inmates in a nasty prison.

  “How was it?” Mum was eager and worried in equal measure when I got home.

  I’d spent the walk home exercising my smiling muscles, so that I could summon up a big beam when I saw her. “Great,” I said. “Big, you know. It might take some time to get used to the size of the place, but it’s nice.”

  I might enter myself into the lying event in the Olympics.

  “Darling, that’s wonderful,” she said, and hugged me, clearly letting go of a whole day’s worth of anxiety. “I texted, but when you didn’t text back, I figured you weren’t allowed to use your phone.”

  “Absolutely not,” I said. “Lots of rules – which everyone obeys.” Another lie. Gold in the Olympics, for sure. “I’ve tons of homew
ork,” I added – which was not a lie.

  I dragged Rua upstairs with me, shut my bedroom door, then curled up on the bed with him and sobbed. Rua is great for this type of thing: he licks your tears away and doesn’t mind when you squeeze him tightly in misery. I listened to Lady Gaga and imagined a world where I dressed in lethal leather and karate-kicked Amelia and her hench-girls to the kerb.

  Day Two and I had a new strategy. Since nobody else was following the no-make-up rule, I used my Mac eye-shadow kit to give me Lethal-Karate-Girl eyes and took my biker boots out of hibernation. With my skirt hitched up a bit, holey black opaque tights, the boots and my hair straight, I certainly looked cool – and the precise opposite of Amelia. I was Tough Cookie to her Golden Girl.

  “You’re not going to school dressed like that?” Dad looked a little shocked when I stalked into the kitchen. (You’ve got to practise things like stalking – get yourself into the zone, you know.)

  I toyed with the idea of telling Dad the truth and explaining that if I was dressed to kill I would feel more “Warrior Girl” and so more ready to take on the bullies. I didn’t want to worry him or Mum, though, so I smiled and said, “It’s a dress-up day today, Dad. Fun, huh?”

  I just hoped he’d have enough money to bail me out when I was arrested for stabbing Amelia in the bum with my protractor – but I didn’t mention this. The stabbing-her-in-the-bum plan was only if she got physical with me again. Last resort sort of stuff.

  “I’ll walk to school, Mum,” I said. “I need the exercise and it’ll wake me up.”

  I’d been awake since six with nerves, but there was no point telling her this. I was stuck with Laurence O’Toole Tech, so I needed to learn how to cope with it.

  On the way to school, I phoned Susie.

  “You never rang last night,” she said instantly. “Was it that bad?”

  “Worse,” I said and told her everything.

  “The bitch,” she hissed.

  There is something utterly comforting about talking to a friend who loves and understands you totally. Susie has known me since we were four. She knows I’m a total softy who cries at animal cruelty programmes on the TV. She was with me the day I gave all the money in my purse to a blind guy with a whippet begging on the side of the street because it was Christmas and I couldn’t bear to think of him and his lovely dog being poor and unhappy.