40 Things I Want to Tell You (6 page)

“No school. Don’t you check your email?”

Good. No school. No Pete. Although half of me wanted to see him, half of me was dreading it. “I only just got up.”

“You got up late? What’s wrong with you?”

“I guess I just—”

He flopped down next to me and we lay cuddled in the cold, nose to nose. “I’m worried about Mom,” he said.

I waited for him to say more. It was rare that he wanted to share his worries. His breath came out in steamy clouds that puffed over my cheeks.

“How’s she doing?” I prompted.

“Not great. I don’t know. She left the oven on last night.”

I put my hand up to his chest. My fingers were so cold I could hardly feel the wool of his sweater.

He continued, “I don’t know what to do.”

“You can’t deal with this on your own, Griffin.”

He said quietly, “I know. But I don’t want anyone else involved.”

“Surely they have someone in Social Services or something—someone who could give you some support.”

He glared at me. “This isn’t anyone’s business but mine. She just hasn’t got over Dad yet.”

“Let me help, then.”

“I shouldn’t have said anything. It’ll be fine. I don’t need any help.”

Bile rose in my mouth—I was disgusted with myself. Griffin needed me. I pulled him closer.

He kissed me. His mouth was warm. Familiar. Nice. And completely different from Pete’s mouth.

I mumbled, “I’m sorry, G. I just have to tell you—”

“You have nothing to be sorry for. It’s me who’s been pressuring you. I get it.”

“That’s not true. It’s normal to want— It’s not you. You’re great.”

He turned so his face was in profile. “I just wish it was easier right now. I wish Mom would just, I dunno, just get back to her old self.”

I was selfish and horrible and awful to even think about ending things when he was going through such a hard time. He needed reassurance. He needed a proper
girlfriend.

I forced thoughts of Pete and what had happened from my mind, and I said, “No school, hmm?”

His eyebrows lifted. My back was freezing. The ground was very hard. He kissed me on the neck.

“What do you want to do?” His voice was low, his breath close to my ear.

I was about to answer when a white car skidded round the corner and swerved to a stop near a tree. We both sat up as the horn beeped into the still air.

“Who
is
that?” Griffin said, pushing his hair back off his face.

It was such a familiar gesture and it drove me crazy, but not in a good way. I reminded myself that he was just being
himself.
It was me who had to get my head in the right place.

The window opened and Cleo stuck out her head. Her dark brown skin and big dark eyes contrasted with the white of her car and the white of the snow around her. She wore a cute sky-blue
woolly hat and white scarf. Movie star. She puffed words into the frigid air: “Come on, lovebirds, get up and get a room. Check out my dad’s car!”

“You nearly crashed,” I yelled.

“Yeah, yeah.”

“You haven’t passed your driving test yet!” I was giggling.

Griffin’s eyes narrowed. He jumped up and pulled me after him, then dusted the snow off us both in swift, light slaps. We stumbled over to her. I grabbed my camera from my bag and took a few photos of her posing out through her car window.

“Make sure you get me at my best, darling,” she cried. She had the hugest smile on her face. She said, “Mum and Dad are away. The car was sitting there, like, calling me to drive it.
Cleo
, it said.
Cleo, come and drive me.
Too tempting.
No school
, it said—”

“You’re crazy,” I cut in.

“Come on, where shall we go?” she asked

“How about … um, I don’t know,” I said.

She said to Griffin, “I’m almost qualified. Don’t look at me like that.”

Griffin’s blue eyes deepened to indigo. “We’re supposed to spend the day, the two of us, together,” he muttered so Cleo wouldn’t hear.

“I know,” I whispered back.

Cleo honked the horn. “Enough secret talk. Get in.”

I shook my head. “You can’t drive. You haven’t passed your test.”

“Bird, live a little, would you? Come on, Griffin.”

“I’m staying right where Bird is.”

I looked at him. I looked at Cleo in the car. My blood quickened. I imagined us driving somewhere we’d never been before, the snowy road like a blank page waiting for us to write a new story on it.

I said, full of enthusiasm, “Should we, Griffin? It might be fun.”

He shrugged. “If you say so.”

I leaned in her window. “Okay, then, where do you want to go?”

She said, “Anywhere.”

Griffin said, “Bird, are you sure?”

Cleo said, “I won’t kill us. I got here, didn’t I?”

“She did,” I said, then wished I hadn’t contradicted him, because he turned away.

He started walking back toward his house. It seemed like lately one of us was always walking away from the other. My heart squeezed to see him trudging through the snow.

I turned to my friend. “I can’t, Cleo.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, yeah. I knew it. You’re way too, you know, sensible,” she said. She wasn’t being mean, but the words crawled like wasps under my jacket and stung me hard. She chattered on. “Calm that lovely boy of yours down. I’ll leave the car here and we can hang out. Unless you guys want to, you know, spend some quality time together?”

“No,” I said, a little too abruptly. “It’s fine,” I added. “Give me five minutes. By the way, that hat is very cute.”

She looked sorrowfully at the car as she got out. “It could have been so fun,” she said.

“Look, go over to my house and see what we have for breakfast,” I said to her. “Here’s the key. Mum’s at work. And you know what Dad’s like; he won’t mind. I’ll come back in a few minutes. Let me just go get Griffin and we’ll all eat together.”

I jogged up to Griffin’s house, my shoes sliding on the ice. The air hung empty and crisp. I pushed open his front door and called to him, “Griffin, don’t be angry.”

He appeared in the corridor, definitely angry. “I just don’t get you. It’s like you’re, I dunno, just different today.”

“No, I’m not. I’m sorry.”

He pushed the hair from his eyes. “I just don’t … I don’t understand.”

“I guess we should probably talk.”

“Right.” He leaned against one of the bookshelves that lined the corridor wall. “Okay, what?”

“I’ve, um, I have to tell you something …” My voice trailed off and I grasped for the right words.

His mum burst onto the upstairs landing. She flung her arms wide. “Bird, little Bird, you’re so big now. My Griffin loves you, dearest Birdy.” She danced out of sight.

“Mom,” Griffin called, pushing away from the bookshelves. He said to me, “Sorry. I’ll come over to your place in a while. Go hang with Cleo.”

“Do you want me to stay?” I added, “Can I help? Griffin?”

“No, just go. She’s not herself.”

I said, “Cleo and I are making breakfast next door. Come over when you’re ready.”

He replied quickly, “Yeah, okay, whatever. I’ll see where things are at.”

“Really, I can stay.”

He shook his head. He was already halfway up the stairs. “It’s okay, Mom.”

She yelled, “Can I get a biscuit? I want a biscuit.”

I felt tears pricking my eyes: Griffin’s mum frightened me—I’d never seen her so childish. Griffin shouldn’t be handling all this on his own. He needed help, but I was the only one who knew what was going on and he wouldn’t even let
me
help. If I called someone in, he’d be furious.

I hesitated, not sure what to do, then I opened the door quietly and headed into the chilly morning.

I was the worst teenage advice columnist ever. I couldn’t figure out how other people made it look so easy to give advice when I was so clueless. I typed out a lame answer and deleted
it, retyped it, deleted it again. I needed to find my confident Miss Take-Control self. Everything going on in my own life was getting in the way of me being able to deal with CyberG’s question, and I was sick of being so overwhelmed with my own drama: Griffin, his mum, Pete. Okay … kissing the wrong person—with my own recent experience, I should be able to figure out the right thing to say.

I read the question over, then began to type.

Pete appeared in my mind—I could feel his skin against mine, his lips on my mouth. Thinking about him made me wince. Lying to Griffin and to everyone about Pete had turned me into … into someone I didn’t recognize.

At least now I knew it had meant nothing to him. A week had gone by but Pete hadn’t spoken to me or even looked in my direction; he hadn’t texted, hadn’t called. My secret played large in my head. Cleo had no idea, and I couldn’t figure out how to tell her—she was my best friend, but the thought of voicing what I’d done made me feel more guilty.

Griffin met me at school every day and neither of us mentioned the sex thing, even though the whole issue stood between us like a giant. Or maybe the real issue was that
I’d kissed someone else.

I focused on being Miss Take-Control-of-Your-Life as I flicked through the pages of my site. I landed on the Top Tips section and typed in:

Mum came into the room and, automatically, I minimized the screen.

“What are you doing?”

“Homework. You know.”

She nodded but didn’t seem to be listening.

“You should knock,” I said.

“Yeah. And you should keep it clean in here.”

She was distracted, not even looking at me. For weeks she’d been grumpy and unpredictable; hormones and menopause or whatever.

Her pale eyes darted left and right, clearly surveying the mess. She snapped, “Bird, I mean it. Tidy up.”

“Okay, relax.”

“When did you get so slovenly? You’re as tidy as I am, normally.” She picked up a couple of books and put them next to me on the desk.

“Mum, I’ll clean it up, all right? I’ve just got a lot on. I don’t know, it just got away from me. It’s like the first time ever. I promise it’ll be tidy by the end of the day.”

She stopped and gave me a quizzical look, her fair eyebrows furrowing together. “You have no idea, do you?”

“What?”

My phone beeped on the desk. A text flashed up.

Thinking about me? Pete

Mum leaned forward, blatantly looking at the lit-up screen of my phone. “Who’s Pete?”

I spun round in my chair. “God, Mum, don’t read my texts.”

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are. Anyway, he’s no one. Just someone who I’m doing a project with. Look, do you want something?” Pete’s text felt like a code for the fact
he
was thinking about
me.
Which made no sense—he hadn’t
spoken
to me all week.

She blinked a couple of times. “You know, I spent so long wishing for another baby that I wonder if I did a good enough job of being your mum. Did I?”

I concentrated on what she was saying. “What are you talking about?”

She spoke softly. “You should have another quotation on your board:
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
Mahatma Gandhi.”

“Mum, what do you mean about the baby? What’s going on?”

Her eyes moistened. She kissed me on the top of my head.

“Don’t worry about it now, darling. Just get back to work. Perhaps when you’ve got some time, I could take some photos of you, like we used to.”

“Sure. Is everything okay?”

But she was already on her way out the room and she didn’t reply.

IT WAS LIKE MY ROOM WAS A STATION THAT EVENING AND MY PARENTS
had trains to catch. After Mum left, Dad wandered in.

“Hey, Birdy,” he said.

“What is this? Parents-Gone-Mad Day?”

“Just seeing how my sweet Bird is.”

“Uh, trying to do homework.”

“Right. I’m going for a run.”

I burst out laughing. “What sort of run?”

“I want to do an Iron Man. It’s not funny.”

Wow. He was being serious. I thought,
Why don’t you try running to the end of the road first?
But I didn’t say anything. He was so busy chatting about the distance he needed to complete that he wouldn’t have heard me anyway.

“Sounds good, Dad. Look, is Mum all right?”

He paced across the room and sat on the bed, resting his hands on his knees. “Ah, little Birdy, I don’t know.”

“She was a bit—”

“Don’t worry yourself. It’ll all fall into place. The solar bricks are such a good idea. I can just feel it.”

“Right.”

“I’ll let you get back to work, then,” he said, standing abruptly.

“Did you, you know, want something?”

He jogged on the spot. “Got to get training,” he said, and puffed out the room like an elephant.

It would have been funny if everything hadn’t felt so weird.

Finally alone, I uploaded some photos onto my computer. I’d started work on a photography project on the theme of colour. I looked for groups of the same colour and photographed them—a white building against a milky sky; a purple flower in an oily puddle next to an indigo boot; a green umbrella resting on the grass. Then I uploaded some neat images of a discarded newspaper caught in a breeze, which I took on the afternoon of the snow day. The white-and-black pages against the white of the snow looked cool. Next were the photos of Cleo in her car. I emailed them to her. For a while, I’d been toying with the idea of getting a job at a photographer’s studio—extra money wouldn’t hurt and it would be interesting work. I wasn’t sure it would help with applying for Oxford, though—perhaps I should try to do something that might lead to a job later on. Temping in a lawyer’s office or something. Although I didn’t think I wanted to be a lawyer, it sounded good on paper.

The photograph of Griffin standing in the snow came up on the screen. Automatically, I glanced out my window. He was sitting at his desk, probably playing a computer game. I watched him. I was just about to text him to look up when my phone rang. It was Pete.

I answered, knowing I shouldn’t. “What do you want?”

He said softly, “What do
you
want?”

“Pete, stop. You’ve ignored me all week. I don’t want to play your games.”

“
You
haven’t even looked at
me
all week,” he said. “I miss your little glances my way.”

My tummy flipped. Griffin leaned back in his desk chair, saw me through the window and smiled.

I said, far more firmly than I felt, “Don’t think you can just text me and call me whenever you want. I’ve got a boyfriend. Look, I’m sorry, but we should just forget it. It shouldn’t have happened.”

He said, “Call me when you know that’s not true.”

The silence on the end of the line told me he’d ended the call and the conversation. For the moment.