The Kiss Off
Authors: Sarah Billington
by Sarah Billington
Copyright © 2012 Sarah Billington
Published by Billington Media at Smashwords
Cover design ©
Billington Media
Concert picture of a guitarist performing for his adoring fans © Yuri Arcurs
LICENCE NOTES
The Kiss Off by Sarah Billington is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
.
This ebook is a work of fiction. Names, characters and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to my early readers, Kellie Rose, Kathryn Billington, Angela Ackerman, Liz Czukas, Chaille Bos and LA Dale, for encouraging me and helping shape the book into what it is today. Thank you to Caitlin Darrell for your enthusiasm and ninja-like proof reading skillz. And for telling me you couldn’t put it down. I heart you for it. Thank you to Sigi Jottkandt for spending hours with me in perfecting the eBook formatting process, and NMIT Bachelor of Writing & Publishing for requiring a project on digital publishing, which is what started my whole ePublishing adventure in the first place.
Finally, thank you to my family, Colin, Hazell and Kathryn Billington for never failing to support my writing addiction, even when you end up in my books.
***
What’s Inside
Chapter One
“What rhymes with ‘douchebag’?” I asked as one of my best friends, Vanya, turned knobs and pulled the legs out on the tripod. I chewed the end of my pencil.
I had just the tune for this song. I’d been trying to find the right lyrics for a while now and I knew this was it. A match made in rock’n’roll heaven.
I sat on the end of my bed, Stella - my guitar - in my lap with a notepad beside me. I bounced the half-chewed pencil against my knee, thinking. I read back what I had of the chorus so far:
Goodbye,
You didn’t say why,
but I’m not gonna cry
Cos baby this is your Kiss Off.
Goodbye,
You cheated on me,
But I’ll get even you see,
I’m telling you to just Kiss Off.
I hummed it back to myself and nodded, a smug smile creeping onto my lips. He wasn’t going to know what hit him. Neither of them would.
It was going to be brilliant.
“Hand bag?” Vanya suggested, getting me back to the issue at hand.
“Hmm,” I said. We both knew it was bad. “How about skank-whore? Does anything rhyme with that?”
“I don’t know about skank-whore, but lots of things rhyme with skank,” Vanya said. “Bank; thank; tank; rank. Mind you, Poppy, I don’t think that’s really the message you want to-”
“No,” I said, the cogs whirring in my brain. I scribbled notes down onto the pad.
“Okay, good,” Van said with relief.
“No, I mean no, it’s good.”
“Oh.”
“Okay,” I said. “Yeah. Good. I’m ready.”
They weren’t getting away with this shit. I had been having a good night, an excellent night. In my opinion it was one of the best house parties Ravi had thrown. Until
they
showed up.
I was playing someone’s acoustic guitar, sitting in a camping chair in a circle around the bonfire, taking song requests. Pepsi had shot out my nose when I laughed at how off-key one of the boys was singing, and how the girl in the leather jacket - what’s her name…the one from the Student Council - anyway, she was sinking into the long grass as the red beanbag peed out Styrofoam balls. No one was singing anymore, we were laughing too hard. It wasn’t even
that
funny, but maybe the couple of swigs of bourbon I had earlier and second-hand weed were responsible for making things so damn hysterical. Even my other best friend, Mads, beside me on a folding chair, had stopped staring through the windows toward the front door long enough to join in the shenanigans.
Vanya had been inside, in a battle to the death, attempting to come out victorious as the best thrower of food into someone else’s mouth. I watched her through the window as she scooped up a gummy bear from the bowl of candy and tossed it at the open mouth of that guy with the wonky eye who’s friends with Ravi.
Well, of course he was friends with Ravi - he wouldn’t have been there otherwise. He caught the gummy bear and the group of them raised their hands in triumph. Vanya had laughed as she gave wonky-eyed-friend-of-Ravi a high-five.
I took another swig from my Pepsi and turned my focus back to the guitar. Just as I strummed a note, Mads groaned and kicked at the grass.
“When do you think he’s going to get here already?” She’d checked her watch with a huff.
“Who are we talking about, chica?” I had said.
She narrowed her eyes at me.
“I don’t know,” I said, plucking a string and letting it twang. “Do you even know if he’s coming?”
“You’re useless,” Mads said. Her gaze roamed around the backyard, to the cubby house, the trampoline with the broken springs and back at the house again.
Then she sat up straight and clamped her hand around my arm.
“What? What is it?”
“He’s here! Oh my God, he’s
here
,” she said.
Sure enough, Dev was in the hallway, unwinding his scarf. He gave Ravi a big smile and they talked for a second before starting one of those complicated guy-handshakes where there were so many hand movements they might as well have started break dancing.
Mads took a deep breath, turned in her seat and looked at me expectantly.
I’d looked from her to Dev and back again. “He’s here,” I said.
“I know!” she slapped me on the arm for being annoying. “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”
“Happy to help.” I took another sip of Pepsi.
She bit her bottom lip. “So what do you think I should do?”
I shrugged and looked back at the inside party, and any small hint of a smile fell away as Dev stepped to the side and Ravi started talking to who he had come with. It was Cam. And
Nikki
. That was the moment that my good time turned craptastic. Right then.
Shit, w
hat were they even doing here?
“God he looks so hot tonight,” Mads said, absentmindedly smoothing down her hair. Clearly she hadn’t noticed who Dev had arrived with. I couldn’t believe they were here. Cam and Nikki. Together. Did Nikki even know Ravi? No, it looked like she didn’t, as Cam motioned to Nikki, and then to Ravi, and Ravi did that guy nod of acknowledgement thing.
Now
they knew each other. I glowered at her and her awesome thick brown hair (which she knew I coveted) which was in a shiny side ponytail. She had her trademark red lipstick and smoky eyes and was looking extra hot tonight.
Bitch.
I shoved my mess of dirty blondness out of my face and watched Cam and how as they talked to Ravi, he put his arm around Nikki, all relaxed, all normal like, “hey yeah, this is my girlfriend. We’re together”. The way he used to do with me.
Pfft. Whatever. As long as they didn’t come out here I’d be okay.
“Should I go in there and talk to Dev?” Mads said. “How do I look, is this too much?” She was wearing a brown tweed vest over a fitted black tee that had splotches of hot pink and blue puff paint in random places. Her lipstick matched the pink and she had this cute mini top hat sitting jauntily off to the side on her hair.
“No, you look great,” I said. It doesn’t sound like she would, but she could always pull it off. “No one dresses like you do.”
“Well, yeah, I know, but is that a good thing?”
“Go and talk to him Mads. It’s just Dev.”
Her gaze fluttered to the grass, where she dug her ballet flat into the dirt self-consciously. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “He may be ‘just Dev’ to you but he’s not ‘just Dev’ to me, is he.” She let out a sigh and stared at the bonfire. Then she took a deep breath, stood up and held out her hand to me. “You have to come with me,” she said. “I can’t do this alone. Please, please, pretty please?”
I looked from her face to her hand and back again. “I’m not going in there,” I said.
“What? Why?”
I eyeballed her and pointed inside to where Nikki was leaning in to Cam, her head on his shoulder, hand on his chest and they both laughed at something Ravi was saying. “You saw who Dev came with, right?”
Mads followed the direction of my outstretched arm and cringed. “Oh.”
“Yeah, ‘oh’.” I said. “Big ‘oh’.”
We weren’t even broken up when that whole Cam and Nikki thing happened. Did you know that? My family went to the shore for the one week the stars aligned and both my parents could get time off work, and when I got back they were a couple. My boyfriend and my work-friend. Like I had just been the third wheel that whole time, like they’d been waiting for me to step aside, to have a moment alone, so they could finally-