Rebecca is Always Right (11 page)

‘Meet Kookie!’ she began. ‘She’s not like everyone else. But then, neither are you!’

Cass and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes.

‘Kookie likes to dance her way through life,’ Vanessa read on. ‘She’s always looking for fun, quirky things to do by herself, with her friends or with her cheeky pet pug, Handsome Dan.’

It’s good to know that Handsome Dan is being credited by name, I suppose.

‘She loves old French films, 1980s pop music and playing her hot pink ukulele,’ Vanessa continued. ‘That’s how kooky she is! But there’s one thing Kookie has in common with everyone else – she loves Yummy Scrummy Cookies.’ Vanessa looked at us as if she expected us to applaud. ‘That’s it.’

‘Wow,’ said Alice, polite as ever. I don’t know how she does it. ‘Very cool.’

Actually, I think those words crossed over from ‘politeness’ to ‘barefaced lie’. But they seemed to satisfy Vanessa, and she went off to show the site to some other unfortunates.

You know, sometimes I wonder what would happen if we all started being as rude and arrogant to Vanessa as she is to all of us. Maybe it would show her the error of her ways, but I have a feeling she wouldn’t even notice.

Also, I think it’s very unfair that she has an iPad at all. There is no chance of my parents splashing out so much money on
one for me. My mum has one but she barely lets me use it in case I ‘drop it and break it’. As if I would! I only dropped it once and it fell on the sofa so it was fine. Not that she even knows about that. Anyway, I would love a tablet, but considering my parents will only let me have a crappy phone that is like something out of the olden days and can barely go online, I think I will be waiting a long time until I get one. Every time I tell my parents how unfair this is, they just laugh and tell me they didn’t have mobiles at all until they were in their mid-thirties.

‘And we grew up perfectly well,’ says Dad, which is a matter for debate if you ask me.

Anyway, as if all that wasn’t bad enough, I think I am getting a spot. It hasn’t emerged yet, but I can feel it lurking under the surface. I suppose I am lucky because I don’t get spots that often (presumably because nature realised having hair that often looks like a bushy mop is more than enough trauma for one girl), but when I do they are awful. This one is on my chin and I just know that it’s going to get bigger and redder for ages until my whole chin looks like Rudolph the Reindeer’s nose. I asked my mum this morning when you finally stop getting spots and she said, ‘Oh, I don’t know, I still get the odd spot now.’ And she is forty-eight! It hardly seems
fair that I have over twenty more years of lurkers ahead of me.

Anyway, I am going to go and watch some telly now because my parents are out at an extra rehearsal. It seems they might have more than one rehearsal a week from now on as the self-defence class that used to be in the hall on Thursday nights has had to move to a bigger venue, so the musical society are taking advantage of the free space. Before they went, Dad said the cast were ‘coming along in leaps and bounds’. I hope he didn’t mean literally. I can imagine him leaping and bounding all over the place only too well.

Lurking spot is still getting bigger, ready to emerge in all its disgusting glory. It looks redder than ever today. I thought about covering it up with make-up, but when I tried, it looked kind of flaky which was worse than just being red, so I washed it all off. It was like the make-up drew even more attention to my hideous blemish. I wondered if I could get away with hiding it from the world by covering my face with my hands a lot, but I remembered Mum saying before that you should try and avoid touching spots with your hands because you
can spread bacteria from your hands to your face. I am pretty sure my hands are nice and clean – I mean, I wash them fairly regularly – but I’m not taking any chances. One spot is bad enough.

So I just had to go in to school and hope that my red, swollen chin didn’t look quite as hideous as I thought. Cass and Alice assured me it didn’t.

‘You can barely see it,’ said Cass.

‘I wouldn’t even have noticed it if you hadn’t pointed it out!’ said Alice.

I know they were lying, but they meant well. Unlike Vanessa. I ended up queuing in the loo next to her at lunchtime and she suddenly stared at me and said, in her usual abrupt and rude fashion, ‘What’s that on your chin?’

I glared at her as ferociously as I could.

‘A spot,’ I said.

‘Wow,’ said Vanessa. ‘I thought you had some, like, skin disease. I was worrying it was contagious.’

‘Well, it’s not,’ I said. ‘It’s just a totally normal spot.’

‘That’s a relief,’ said Vanessa. ‘I’ve got to do lots of promotional events for Bluebird Bakery this weekend. I wouldn’t want to be covered in, like, boils or whatever.’

Boils! I know I am paranoid about this spot, andI know it’s
not that bad, is it? Surely it is just a normal pimple. A lurking spot, but a normal spot nevertheless. Anyway, I wish I’d actually told Vanessa it was a hideous contagious skin disease just to freak her out, but it’s too late now.

I went to Mum and asked her if she thought I should go to the doctor about the spot. She laughed in her usual callous fashion and said, ‘No, Bex, I don’t. It’s just a normal spot. And it’s not that bad!’

‘Well, Vanessa Finn thought it was a boil,’ I said.

Mum looked very cross when I said this.

‘Well, it was very silly and rude of her to say that to you,’ she said.

Which I knew already, but it was quite nice to hear Mum say it.

Band practice in the Knitting Factory tomorrow. Hopefully my spot will have disappeared by then. Or if that’s too much to hope for, maybe it will have just gone down a bit. Maybe it will never burst forth at all and just sink back down again? I can but hope.

So … something a bit weird happened today. Not huge and weird like Vanessa being famous, and not sad and weird like Tom dumping Rachel. Just …

Oh, I might as well just say it. I think I like Sam. In fact, I might have liked Sam for a while. And I mean, I like-like him. Not just in a cool-boy-I’m-friends-with way. In a fancying way. But I don’t think he likes me back. In that way. At least, I’m not sure. Oh God, it’s so weird! But I have to admit, it’s been sort of sneaking up on me for ages.

It happened like this. We had booked a practice room at the Knitting Factory for twelve o’clock, and we had decided that we’d get sandwiches and meet Ellie in the arts space afterwards for a sort of indoor picnic lunch thing. The practice was pretty good, although we did almost have an argument over whether to change the ending of ‘Pistachio’ or not. We didn’t come to a fixed conclusion in the end because Alice and I thought it should just end suddenly after the last chorus and Cass thought we should repeat the chorus about a million times until our listeners fell asleep (she didn’t say that last bit, but that’s what would happen if she had her way). Clearly she
was wrong, but neither of us would back down. Still, we’re having a workshop with our old band mentor Kitty next week (hurrah!), so maybe she can decide what sounds best.

Anyway, we agreed to disagree for the moment and went off to Centra to get our sandwiches. They were a bit manky, but sadly manky Centra sandwiches are all us youthful musicians can afford. I must admit that, despite my hideous spot not having gone away, I was sort of hoping Sam would be there when we went back to the Knitting Factory, and my hopes were fulfilled because when we went into the big art studio there he was, sitting on a drawing table talking to Ellie, Lucy and a boy we hadn’t met before, who turned out to be called Senan. Sam and Lucy seemed pleased to see us (Senan seemed happy enough, but I presume he wasn’t hugely excited to see us, considering he’d never set eyes on us before that moment).

They had just done a class with a visiting artist and were all excited about it. Her name is Maria Hanff and she usually makes giant sculptures out of trowels and old flower pots (maybe she goes to the same garden centre as my parents?), but apparently she can draw as well so she was teaching them about life drawing. This is when some poor person sits there without moving for hours on end while a bunch of people draw them. Sometimes the person is in the nude, so the artists learn
how to draw the human body in all its glory, but of course this does not happen in an art class for teenagers who are in secondary school, so they all just drew a fully clothed man who Maria Hanff had dragged in from the Knitting Factory offices.

Ellie, Lucy, Sam and Senan’s pictures were pretty good, even though the Knitting Factory office man looked very bored, as most people would if they had to sit there for ages doing nothing while several strangers stared at them. Alice said she thought it might be quite peaceful and like meditating, but I tried meditating once after reading a book belonging to my Mum (well, I read the back of the book and the introduction), and it was pretty boring. I only lasted about two minutes. Alice says if I’d read the rest of the book, I might have learned how to do it properly, which is fair enough.

Anyway. We all sat there looking at the pictures and eating sandwiches and chatting for a while. It was so relaxed and fun that, after a while, I forgot to be self-conscious about my stupid giant spot. In fact, I forgot all about it. All the art people are into different sorts of art: Lucy and Sam like comics, Ellie likes designing and making clothes, and Senan wants to make giant oil paintings (which is why, as he said, it’s so useful having access to the studio. It’s not easy to do giant oil paintings in a semi-detached house in Killester). But they all agreed it was really
useful learning how to draw actual people properly.

‘I’m still not very good at doing hands, though,’ said Ellie. ‘But I bet I can figure it out eventually.’

‘And if you don’t,’ said Cass, ‘it won’t be the end of the world. I mean, it’s not like you need to draw hands to be a fashion designer. Unless you’re designing gloves, of course,’ she added.

‘Hmm, I suppose I don’t really care about designing gloves,’ said Ellie. She was wearing a pair of tweed shorts she made herself. They are really cool, actually, though sometimes when she stood a certain way they looked a bit like a woollen nappy. But not much. I wonder if I could pay her to make a pair for me?

‘When I started doing comics I just used to draw people with their hands behind their backs,’ said Sam, running a hand through his hair. He’d had his hair cut but it was messy already. It’s always a bit messy. His hands were all stained with charcoal. He always seems to be covered with some variety of art material. ‘But I’m a bit better at drawing hands now. Well, I hope I am.’

We all instinctively looked at his picture, which was on the drawing table next to him.

‘They look pretty hand-like to me,’ said Cass.

‘Thanks, Cass,’ said Sam. He looked at his watch. ‘Ah,
afraid I’d better go. I’m meeting Daire and some of the other lads from school in a few minutes.’

Most of the others had things to do too, so we all gathered up our stuff and strolled out. Everyone seemed to be going somewhere apart from me and Lucy, so we ended up walking towards the bus stop together.