Girl, Going on 16: Pants on Fire (8 page)

Mum has adjusted quite well to being tragically abandoned by a gay hypochondriac. She has seized the opportunity to mope about being ill herself, although she does it with much less panache than Dad. With Mum it’s just boring, unglamorous headaches. But Dad frequently sends me text messages describing his latest symptoms, always of some rare and stylish fatal disease. He has a pet seagull called Horace, which he probably prefers to having custody of me.

Mum’s mum, known with stunning originality as Granny, lives with us. Grandpa died recently and Granny kept his ashes on the coffee table for months so he could watch the football. Grandpa used to have a party trick which he would perform in pubs: biting the head off a live rat. He would never do it for me, though. It was an 18-and-over kind of thing.

Granny is also quite bloodthirsty. She is completely addicted to homicide – as an onlooker, I mean, not a participant
(
yet). Her favourite movie is
Pulp Fiction.
When young, Granny was wooed by a strange nerd-like man called Gordon Cranston. He proposed marriage and she refused him, because she did not like the way feathers grew out of his bottom. Tragically, he was shot by a farmer while grazing harmlessly on a field of young wheat.

Jess read through her homework. It was OK, except possibly that stupid bit at the end about Gordon Cranston. That was the only bit she had made up. It had been absolute torture, having to stick to the truth, but up till then she had managed it. Jess deleted the Gordon Cranston bit and printed it out.

Delightful though it would have been to spend the whole day at home, she was desperate to get back to school and see Fred. They absolutely had to sort things out if she was ever to have a decent night’s sleep again.

First she whizzed off a text message to Mum.
am better and going in for afternoon school. love, jess
. She would get a few Brownie points for her plucky recovery. She also left an affectionate note for Granny. And then she set off.

It was much nicer walking to school at lunchtime. It was sunny and warm, and instead of people rushing to work, there were mums out with little pre-school kids and old people having fun exercising their dogs. Jess began to feel a bit more hopeful.

Suddenly she had a brilliant, brilliant idea of how to improve her rather gloomy situation. During the summer, she and Fred had spent long days in the park writing comedy sketches, preparing for the Christmas Show. They knew Mr Fothergill would want them to do at least one sketch, maybe even two. Now, with the show cancelled and Mr Fothergill in hospital, that delightful prospect seemed to have disappeared.

But it didn’t have to! Once she’d made things up with Fred, they could plan a whole show of sketches – maybe with a couple of songs by Flora’s band, Poisonous Trash. They could put the show on anyway,
as well as
Miss Thorn’s production of
Twelfth Night
! Jess was sure she could get permission to use the school hall. Mrs Tomkins, the head teacher, always liked initiative. And what could be more enterprising than organising a whole comedy show?

Maybe they could even get an agent to come and see it! Maybe the agent would manage to get a TV company interested! Maybe Jess and Fred would become a famous comedy duo and take the world by storm!

Jess arrived at school fizzing and buzzing with the prospect of a brilliant career, and went straight to the cafeteria, where she expected to find Flora and, with any luck, Fred. She hadn’t wanted to see him in a public place, but she didn’t really have a choice – in fact it might be a bit easier at first for them to meet with lots of other people about.

However, there was nobody much in the cafeteria except Ben Jones. He was talking to another footballing guy called Marcus Dawson, but he looked up when Jess came in and gave her a big smile and an inviting wave. At least somebody was pleased to see her.

‘Hi!’ said Jess, including Marcus in her greeting, as he was rather a sweet person though his nose resembled a turnip and he smelt slightly of mice. ‘Have you seen Flora or, er, Fred?’

‘Ah, oh yeah, they’ve both gone to audition for
Twelfth Night
,’ said Ben. ‘Are you going, too? Or you could go tomorrow, right? Wanna cheeseburger or are you on salad today?’

Jess could not speak for a moment. OK, she knew that Flora was going to audition for
Twelfth Night
, but the fact that Fred was also up for a part in it was the worst news ever. If Fred turned out to be starring in
Twelfth Night
, no way was he going to have time for the comedy show with her. In fact, Jess began to wonder if he was ever going to have time for her again.

‘Yeah,’ said Jess rather limply. ‘Why not? Give me a cheeseburger, straight into the vein.’

Chapter 9

There was a class registration at the start of afternoon school. Jess knew Fred would be there. It would be the first time they had been together since that ludicrous scene in the park. Jess was desperate, desperate to get back together with him. Life had been agony since their row. But all the same she dreaded seeming needy.

She got to the classroom early, before everybody else. When Fred arrived, she wouldn’t want to be sitting alone kind of staring hopefully at the door, so she decided to grab the first person who entered and have a vivacious and attractive conversation with them. There were windows overlooking a path through the school garden, and people who were heading for Jess’s classroom often walked down this path, so you could see them coming.

Jess saw a girl called Beatrice Poole, affectionately known as Poo-face. Beatrice waved. Jess was glad it was going to be Beatrice, as she was extremely giggly and would be easy to amuse. The door opened.

‘Hi, Poo-face!’ yelled Jess. But, disaster! It was Miss Thorn. There was another way to get to the classroom, unfortunately: down the corridor. People who chose this route arrived unexpectedly. Miss Thorn closed the door behind her and glared at Jess.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Jess, blushing. ‘I thought you were somebody else.’

‘Why were you absent this morning?’ asked Miss Thorn.

‘I was sick,’ said Jess.

‘Do you have a letter from your mother or father?’

‘Er – no,’ said Jess. ‘My mum works in the library, so she had to go off early. I think she was expecting me to be ill all day. I can bring a note tomorrow.’

‘Yes, please do,’ said Miss Thorn. ‘And what about your homework?’

Jess handed it over. Somehow it had got a bit crumpled in the cafeteria, and there were a couple of ketchup splashes on it. Miss Thorn held it fastidiously and her savage eyes devoured the page. Again, she showed no reaction. Her face was a mask. Jess almost wished she’d left in the bit about Granny’s fictional suitor who had the feathers growing out of his bum.

Miss Thorn finished reading and looked up. For a moment they locked eyes. Jess felt uncomfortable.

‘You’ll never make a journalist,’ said Miss Thorn brusquely.

‘I don’t want to be a journalist,’ said Jess, feeling quite insulted. ‘I’m going to be a stand-up comedian.’

Miss Thorn sighed and shook her head as though dealing with someone of very limited intelligence.

‘It’s a rough old trade,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t want any daughter of mine to go into it.’

Jess had a brief and horrible hallucination in which she was Miss Thorn’s daughter. She arrived home every evening to dine in silence on a thistle omelette off a stainless steel plate. She then did her homework for five hours, and afterwards endured a light thrashing with a hairbrush before being locked in an unheated bedroom. She slept on a hard mattress on a wrought-iron bed. There was a CCTV camera in the bathroom, and even her teddy bear was bald and hostile.

The classroom door opened and a gang of kids came in: Beatrice, but also Gina and Tom and Caz and Jules. They looked surprised to see Miss Thorn, and their conversation sort of died.

‘Sit down,’ said Miss Thorn.

They all scattered. Jess started to make her escape towards the back of the room.

‘I haven’t finished with you, Jess Jordan,’ said Miss Thorn. ‘I’ll accept this piece of work as a goodwill gesture, despite its facetious tone. But I will not accept paper which is covered with filth. Copy it out neatly on to a clean piece of paper,’ she went on, holding out the original.

Jess took it out of her hand. She was so tempted to snatch it, but she knew if she did she would be in deep, deep trouble. She went to the back of the room and sat next to Caz.

The door opened and another group walked in. Flora was there, and she grinned at Jess and came right over. Still no Fred. A few stragglers entered. Still no Fred. Jess’s heart started to pound madly.

‘Right,’ said Miss Thorn, ‘in a minute, there’s going to be a –’

The door swung open and Fred strolled in. Jess’s whole body kind of exploded. He looked a hundred times nicer than she remembered. He grinned cheerily at Miss Thorn, then turned and, for a moment, their eyes met, and then:

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRING! BRRRRRRR-RRRRRRRRING!

The most deafening bell started to ring.

‘It’s the fire alarm!’ said Gina.

‘It’s a Fred alarm!’ said Tom.

‘OK!’ shouted Miss Thorn. ‘Walk in an orderly fashion and assemble on the field!’

‘Of course it is important, if one is being burnt to death, to perish in an orderly fashion,’ said Jess as they all marched out. Flora grinned, and once they were out in the corridor she grabbed Jess’s arm.

‘I had the most fantastic time at the auditions, Jess,’ she yelled (the bell made confidences rather difficult). ‘I read a scene with this new guy who’s just come into year twelve. He was uber-gorgeous! His name’s Jack Stevens and he’s got five-star eyelashes!’

Jess was hardly listening. She was mesmerised by the sight, up ahead, of Fred’s back as he marched off down the corridor, talking to Buster Beresford, without even turning round to pull a satirical face at her. Fred was blanking her! He was just kind of strolling along, talking to Buster of all people! Buster who frequently insulted Fred and was basically a no-brain. Jess could hardly believe her eyes.

‘Honestly, babe, he’s so gorgeous.’ Flora was jabbering away in her ear about the hunky new guy at the auditions, but Jess could not concentrate on anything. The certainty that Fred hated her was squeezing the breath out of her, rather like a size 10 Lycra top.

Out on the school field they all lined up and the teachers took registration, but Fred still avoided her. Then the normal bell rang for afternoon lessons. Jess was desperate to escape, to get out of Fred’s company. Luckily it was food technology this afternoon, not one of Fred’s options. They had often discussed how they would spend their future lives on the sofa and never cook, just ring for a pizza to be delivered. But now it seemed they would never even speak again, let alone share a DVDs ’n’ Junk Food To Go lifestyle.

Flora didn’t do food technology either – she was obviously going to be rich enough to hire a chef.

‘OK – see you at 3.30 by the gates?’ whispered Flora. ‘We might even see Jack Stevens. I can’t wait for you to meet him!’

Jess nodded in an automatic kind of way, but she felt blind and deaf. Fred was walking off with a gang of lads, and they burst into a huge explosion of laughter. Maybe they were laughing at her! She had to get out of here!