Girl, Going on 16: Pants on Fire (19 page)

EEEEEEEEEERUYEEEEARUCH!
yelled the plastic. Mr Powell looked up and glared.

‘No food and drink in my office!’ he snapped.

‘Sorry,’ said Jess. ‘There was such a queue at the –’

‘Never mind that,’ said Mr Powell. ‘Put it on my desk.’

He pulled a tissue out of a box on the side shelf and laid the tissue out on his desk like a tablecloth for a dolls’ tea party. Jess got up and placed her sandwich on the tissue, still in its plastic container but now with the side panel gone, so the fabulous smell of bread, cheese and pickle could waft through the room and torture her.

‘Anything else?’ asked Mr Powell.

‘Only a chocolate milk,’ replied Jess.

‘Out here, please,’ he said, tapping the desk with a fatigued sigh, as if a chocolate milk was tiresome and irritating, rather than the best drink in the world. Jess fetched it and placed it on the tissue next to the sandwich. Then she went back to her work.

Her tummy rumbled again. Mr Powell got up, put the document back in his filing cabinet, stretched, mussed up his hair, looked out of the window, and then said, ‘Right. I’m going to lunch. You just carry on. What are you working on now?’

‘Maths, sir,’ said Jess. He nodded and went out.

It was really weird being in Mr Powell’s room on her own. She was right next to his filing cabinet, probably full of the most private stuff about people in school.

Maybe Rory Burnett, a famous stud in year twelve, had been flirting with gorgeous Miss Parfitt.

Or maybe the head teacher, Mrs Tomkins, had secretly given birth to multi-racial twins during the school holidays. Or maybe Mr Powell and Miss Thorn had got a thing going and were planning to elope to Martinique, and all Miss Thorn’s love letters to him were hidden away in there, tied up with pink ribbon and liberally doused with perfume.

Jess shook her head to wipe out these distracting possibilities and plunged back into her maths. The smell of the sandwich came creeping across to torture her. Yet another salvo of tummy rumbles broke out, like distant shelling in a war movie. She was so tempted just to have a bite – or one tiny swig of chocolate milk. But she knew that the first thing Mr Powell would do when he got back was look at her lunch to make sure it hadn’t been touched.

She soldiered bravely on. Then another thought occurred to her. Maybe CCTV was set up in this office – so if she gave in to temptation and devoured her food, ransacked his drawers and drew moustaches on the photo of his wife and children, every heroic moment would be captured on priceless footage. She couldn’t actually see a CCTV camera, but she’d been caught out that way before, at Tiffany’s party.

She closed her eyes tight to wipe out the memory of that awful episode, and then went back to maths. Amazingly Jess finished her maths homework shortly afterwards. She was now up to date, having done all the homework set that day – and it wasn’t even the end of lunchtime. The feeling was absolutely glorious.

Being On Report with LOL was certainly a prison sentence, but on the other hand, having finished her homework already was quite a liberation. Even more liberating was the moment when the bell went for afternoon school, when Jess performed a speedy exit from Mr Powell’s office and consumed her lunch in three minutes flat on the way to registration. It wasn’t much of a lunch, but she would be able to pig out in front of the TV tonight without lying to Mum or experiencing a moment’s guilt. Or maybe she’d even be able to establish contact with Fred and sort everything out between them.

The afternoon passed swiftly: English (in which Miss Thorn completely ignored her, which was restful) and Double Art. Then she went back to Mr Powell’s office as instructed. Oh no! He was shouting at somebody in there! She didn’t dare knock. She just waited outside in misery.

Eventually the shouting stopped and the door opened. A large boy with ginger hair came out. His face was very red and his eyes were kind of moist. He and Jess confronted each other for an instant, and she knew that whenever she ran into him in school again, they would both think of this moment.

Then she knocked, and Mr Powell called her in. She presented the card, signed by all the teachers who had taught her that day.

‘All right,’ said Mr Powell. ‘See you tomorrow at 8.45 sharp.’ He handed over her mobile phone.

‘Yes,’ said Jess. ‘Thank you. Goodbye.’ It sounded a bit odd, trying to be polite. Walking on eggshells.

‘Goodbye,’ said Mr Powell, turning back to some papers and picking up the phone.

Jess went out to the school gates, where a lot of people were getting on buses. She looked around for Flora and Fred.

‘Jess!’

She turned. It was Ben Jones and Mackenzie.

‘Hey, I told Mackenzie all about your comedy show and he’s, like –’

‘I’m well up for it,’ said Mackenzie.

‘Er, just a min – have you seen Flora?’ asked Jess.

‘Oh, she’s gone to the drama studio,’ said Mackenzie. ‘They’re having a readthrough of
Twelfth Night
.’ That meant there was no chance of seeing Flora or Fred.

‘Let’s go down the cafe,’ said Mackenzie, ‘and make some plans for the show, then, yeah?’

Jess’s heart sank. She had a feeling that after the restful day with Mr Powell, things were now going to get quite stressful again. And she was right.

Chapter 23

The Dolphin Cafe was as cosy and steamy as usual, but somehow being here was already an ordeal.

‘Right,’ said Mackenzie, rubbing his hands together in an irritating way, as if he was in charge. ‘How many sketches have you written so far?’

Jess was offended by his brisk manner. It was
so
not his business. She had written those sketches with Fred.

‘Oh, about four or five,’ she said. ‘But –’

‘Yeah, well, if you can let us have some copies of them, that would be great,’ said Mackenzie. ‘So I can see what we’re working with.’

Jess already wanted to kill him, and they’d only been here for two minutes.

‘The thing is,’ she said, speaking slowly so as to avoid losing her temper, ‘I wrote them with Fred – in fact, Fred wrote most of them.’

‘Yeah, yeah, whatever,’ said Mackenzie. ‘He’ll get a credit on the programme, right?’

Jess bit her lip and tried to banish the feeling of being mugged in public. She said nothing and took a sip of her hot chocolate. It was too hot and burned the lip she had so recently bitten. Ben was looking at her with a kind of worried frown. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he spoke.

‘Maybe that stuff you wrote with Fred . . . maybe you’d want to keep it for later, when you can, like, uh, perform it with him?’ said Ben.

Jess gave him a grateful look. ‘Well, it does seem a bit tight to use the material without at least asking him,’ she said.

‘No problem,’ said Mackenzie. ‘You can ring him tonight, yeah? I’m sure he’ll be cool about it.’

Jess didn’t want to admit to them that she and Fred were no longer in daily communication, so she shrugged and said OK.

‘I’ve had some brilliant ideas anyway,’ said Mackenzie. ‘And we’ll need lots of new material. We could even revive the band.’

‘Flora wouldn’t be able to be in it,’ said Jess. ‘She’s in
Twelfth Night
.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know,’ said Mackenzie. ‘But you could be the singer instead.’

‘Me, sing?’ said Jess in dismay. ‘You cannot be serious. My voice is a sound that can make babies cry in the womb.’

‘Hey, that was funny!’ said Mackenzie. ‘Write that down!’

He turned to Ben, who didn’t even have a pen or paper. Ben just shrugged and looked at Jess with an apologetic air.

‘Anyway,’ Mackenzie went on, ‘the worse you sing the better, because it’s supposed to be a comedy band anyway, OK?’

‘There’s no need to explain that to me of all people!’ Jess couldn’t help snapping. ‘It was my idea to make the band a comedy act in the first place.’

‘Yeah, yeah, brilliant, I know,’ said Mackenzie. He had the hide of a rhino.

‘I don’t want the band to be in it anyway,’ said Jess. ‘I’d rather do something new. Something like, “
Here’s a performance by some folk musicians from Jacuzzistan, where hairdressing is a performance art
.” Then you perform a tune on the scissors, hairbrush and comb.’

‘Yeah, great idea in principle, I like it,’ said Mackenzie, as if he was the director or something. ‘But there’s going to be problems with the amplification with a sketch like that. They’d never hear it at all at the back row of the gallery.’

‘Well, why stop at making it quiet?’ said Jess, trying desperately not to get rattled, but all the same getting rattled. ‘Why don’t we have a totally silent musical number? Two of us could come on and open our mouths in a kind of synchronised miming, total silence, and the other one could do that sort of signing stuff they do for deaf people.’

‘Yeah, yeah, fantastic, great idea,’ said Mackenzie, as if he wasn’t really listening properly at all. ‘Anyway, I was going to tell you about my ideas, yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ said Jess politely. ‘OK.’ He might have some good ideas after all.

‘Well, I could present the show as Bart Simpson. Like, “Hey, dudes, what’s cookin’?
”
’ Mackenzie grinned.

‘Hmmmm,’ said Jess. How could she tell him politely that this idea was rubbish and his imitation stank?

‘I don’t think,’ Ben said, ‘we should do too much, like, based on people from films ’n’ stuff. I think it’s better . . . if it’s, you know, um, original?’

‘Quite right!’ cried Jess, giving him a radiant smile. ‘Tell you what, Mackenzie, why don’t we all go away and make a list of ideas for sketches, and meet again to discuss them tomorrow?’ She couldn’t wait to escape. ‘Sorry, but I’m in a major homework crisis and I’m On Report with LOL. So I’ve got to get organised for a couple of weeks. After which, of course, I can slump into my usual swamp.’

‘OK, but email us your scripts, yeah?’ said Mackenzie in a bossy way.

Jess ignored him. She got up. Ben also got to his feet. He looked right into her eyes, and he seemed in a strange kind of state. He so obviously wanted to apologise for Mackenzie behaving like an idiot.

‘Yeah, well, thanks for letting us . . . be in your show,’ he said. ‘Hope we can, uh, contribute something – you know.’ He shrugged. Jess squeezed his arm. He was the sweetest guy in the world.

‘Don’t worry, Ben,’ she said. ‘It’s going to be wonderful.’ Then she rushed out and raced off towards home. It was, in fact, going to be terrible.

Still, at least the evening stretched ahead of her, gloriously free of homework. She sent Flora a text, asking her to ring when she got in. Jess was desperate for a jolly good moan. Flora would also be able to tell her how Fred seemed. Maybe she could even ask Flora to ask Fred . . . no! That was madness.

Jess barged in through the front door, calling, ‘Hi, Granny, I’m home! It’s a jungle out there! Bring me that cooked breakfast you promised me! It’s only nine hours late!’

‘We’re in the sitting room, dear!’ called Granny in a strange public sort of voice. Jess waltzed in. And, oh, spit in the custard again! Nori was sitting there.

‘He’s come for his lesson, haven’t you, dear?’ said Granny. ‘Your mum’s still in bed so she can’t do it, but he says he just wants to practise a few things. Would you mind taking him off and going through with it, love? I want to get back to my programme.’ She said the last bit very fast and quietly, as if she was ashamed of it. As indeed she should be. Granny was a pathetic daytime TV addict.