The Worst Girlfriend in the World

Adorkable

Diary of a Crush: French Kiss

Diary of a Crush: Sealed With a Kiss

Diary of a Crush: Kiss and Make Up

Diary of a Grace

Guitar Girl

Pretty Things

Let’s Get Lost

www.sarramanning.co.uk
 

@sarramanning

facebook.com/sarramanningbooks
 

Table of Contents

• Other titles by Sarra Manning:
  
• COPYRIGHT
  
• Dedication
  
• Epigraph
  

• 10
  

• 11
  

• 12
  

• 13
  

• 14
  

• 15
  

• 16
  

• 17
  

• 18
  

• 19
  

• 20
  

• 21
  

• 22
  

• 23
  

• 24
  

• 25
  

• 26
  

• 27
  

• 28
  

• 29
  

Thanks to the crack team of Atom-isers: Kate Agar, Kate Doran, Karen Ball, the former Sam Smith of that parish and all the rest of the cake-loving gang. Also thanks to my amazing agent, Karolina Sutton, and Catherine Saunders, Norah Perkins and all at Curtis Brown.
 

Dedicated to the best and worst girlfriends who were my partners in crime during my own wild teen years: Karen, Caroline, Jacqui R and Jacqui J. “I’m telling you we had a time. Didn’t we? Didn’t we have a time?”
 

‘Right, so after you’ve nicked a traffic cone, you need to climb on top of the bus shelter and leave it there, along with one personal item. First one to complete the mission gets an amazing prize.’

Alice stood there, her hands on her hips, blonde hair rippling in the breeze – though it seemed to ripple even when there wasn’t a breeze, it was that kind of hair. It was obvious that
she
was the amazing prize.

It was a Saturday night and we were hanging out on the High Street, though Merrycliffe-on-Sea doesn’t really have much of a High Street, just a forlorn parade of shops. It doesn’t have much merry either, so we have to make our own fun. As we were both too broke to go to The Wow, watching Alice ensnare two lame boys and make them do her bidding was as good as it was going to get.

‘I wonder how long they’ll be,’ I said to Alice, after the boys had trooped off on their quest to prove they were worthy of her. ‘Want a chip?’

Alice sat down next to me on the low wall in front of the betting shop and shoved her hand in the grease-soaked bag of chips that one of the boys had bought for me because Alice had told him to.

Soon all that was left were the crispy bits floating in an acidic slick of vinegar. Alice looked up at the big, navy sky studded with pinpricks of starry light and ominous wisps of cloud. ‘I think it’s going to rain,’ she said. ‘If they’re not back in five minutes, we might as well go home.’

‘Next week, we have to go to The Wow.’ This week, I’d lent my mum thirty quid because she hadn’t got to the bank. It always took her ages to repay me too, not until I’d dropped brick-sized hints for at least a week about illegally benefiting off child labour.

‘How long does it take to nick a traffic cone anyway?’ Alice asked me. ‘I hope they haven’t got into trouble. Like the time Marc got caught trying to steal a wire basket from outside the pound shop, remember?’

‘Don’t be mean,’ I said as Alice hooted, but I started laughing too because Marc from Year 12 trying to bomb it down the seafront with a wire basket and two security guards in hot pursuit had been one of the highlights of the summer before last.

In the end, to get rid of the evidence, he’d thrown the basket on top of the mini-golf ticket office where it remained to this day. ‘Do you remember the security guards trying to find a ladder to get their stupid basket back? Then they decided that they couldn’t climb it because of Health and Safety regulations.’

‘And Marc didn’t get arrested…’

‘And he turned out to be quite a good snog so it was all OK.’ Alice gave me one of her sideways smiles, her little snub nose twitching, eyebrow arched. It was the look that had all the boys bringing their milkshakes, fries and extra ketchup to Alice’s yard.

Talking of which, limping down the road with only one of his trainers on was Chris, or was it Joey? He was holding a traffic cone aloft like it was an Olympic gold medal.

‘I don’t think this one is going to be a keeper,’ Alice murmured, like that was anything new. ‘But he’ll do for the next ten minutes.’

She stood up, still tiny even in her five-inch heels. Alice was small and curvy. In ye olde days they’d have called her a pocket Venus. Boys wanted to protect her as much as they wanted to get with her. She had the previously mentioned ripply blonde hair and huge blue eyes that twinkled whenever she said something suggestive, which was all the time. It was like Alice came with an inbuilt nudge and wink as standard features.

Like she said, ‘If we weren’t best friends until the day we die, then you’d probably hate my guts, Franny.’

But I couldn’t remember a time when Alice and I weren’t best friends. We’d met at a Mother and Baby group; there’s photographic evidence of us in nappies and a gummy, smiley embrace and barely a thing had happened to me, from losing my first tooth right through to almost getting my first kiss (let’s not even go
there
), that Alice hadn’t been witness to.

Right now, Alice was all Joey had eyes for, as he presented her with the traffic cone. ‘Trainer on top of the bus shelter by the roundabout,’ he announced. Losing a trainer lacked imagination and meant a tricky walk home but Joey was fit in a dull Merrycliffe way, which was about ten years behind the way really fit boys on style blogs looked, so Alice was eyeing him speculatively.

‘OK then,’ she said without much enthusiasm. ‘To the victor, the spoils.’ Off she went with Joey, swinging her hips in that artful sway she’d worked hard on ever since she got hips three years ago.

It was another five minutes before Chris came into sight minus a traffic cone but carrying one of those little lights that hang on the side of skips so people don’t go crashing into them in the dark.

‘Where’s Alice?’ he asked in dismay. ‘I just left my second-best hoodie on top of the bus shelter.’

‘Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but Joey beat you to it.’

Chris looked at his little skip light and sighed. Then he came and sat next to me on the wall. My buttocks were pretty much all ache at this point.

‘You got any chips left then, Franny?’

‘’Fraid not.’ I was the poster girl for bad news. ‘Got some chewy though.’

I gave him a stick of Wrigleys and he settled back with a sigh, arms folded. ‘I mean, technically, she’s not even
that
pretty. Vicky is prettier and Shayla’s got bigger tits and you, well, your legs are insane, Franny.’

‘Thanks for the validation.’ I was only being a little sarcastic. The rest of me was quite glad that my love of an opaque black tight and a very short skirt wasn’t just me trying to work a sixties mod silhouette when my legs weren’t up to it. I knew I wasn’t sexy. I wasn’t that pretty. My hair was more mouse than blonde, my eyes were blue but not deep blue like Alice’s. Just blue, and I usually had a couple of spots and I worried that maybe my lips were too thin but I had long, skinny legs and because I did work a sixties mod silhouette I had a rep for being cool. In Merrycliffe it didn’t take a lot to get a rep for being cool. Anyway, that all added up to me being attractive on a good day. But not so attractive that boys wanted to get with me on a regular basis, or, like, ever.

‘Alice is such a bitch,’ Chris huffed. ‘I don’t know why I bothered.’

‘But you did bother and you agreed to her rules so don’t start hating on her just ’cause you lost. No one likes a hater.’

‘I’m not being a hater.’ He was, but I couldn’t be arsed to argue about it. ‘I’m just saying no wonder there’s that graffiti in the bogs…’

‘This isn’t some new graffiti?’ I asked sharply.

‘No, it’s the same old graffiti.’

I slumped in relief, because I was worried that some boy Alice had cruelly rejected might have got nasty and written something rude, possibly involving blow jobs, but it was just the old graffiti:
Alice Jenkins is the worst girlfriend in the world
.

We didn’t know who’d written it, because Alice tended to snog most boys for no longer than a week. We’d narrowed it down to Rajesh, because they’d gone out for about three whole weeks, or George, who said he’d gone out with Alice when he hadn’t. Though he had gone through a phase of leaving Alice bars of chocolate on her doorstep every morning until she’d told him to stop or she’d report him to the RSPCA because Pucci, her chihuahua, had eaten one and had explosive diarrhoea for three days.

Anyway, it wasn’t like Alice had been offended. She’d persuaded someone to take a picture of the graffiti to use as the cover photo for her Facebook and Twitter profile and she was particularly fond of quoting it like she was doing the voiceover for a big Hollywood movie.

‘Alice Jenkins is,’ she’d say in a deep gravelly voice, ‘the worst girlfriend in the world.’

No, Alice could never be accused of false advertising so there was no reason for Chris to look so mopey. There was also no reason for him to suddenly shift closer to me so that his leg was pressing against mine.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ I told him sternly. ‘I’m not the loving kind. I’m wedded to my career.’

‘You’re sixteen,’ Chris pointed out, like that had anything to do with it.

‘Also I’m a person in my own right. I’m not some consolation prize when you fail one of Alice’s tasks.’ It was my turn to fold my arms.

‘Sorry,’ he said. Then we sat there in silence and it wasn’t Chris’s fault that he’d fallen for Alice’s charms. It also wasn’t his fault that he was rubbish at nicking road safety items.

‘Let’s head back to the bus shelter to get your hoodie and hang out there until Alice and Joey are done, all right?’

It was another fifteen minutes before Alice texted me. I was sitting in the bus shelter with Chris and watching old breakdance videos on YouTube on his phone. It was another fifteen minutes before she came to get me, by which time Chris had pinched the rest of my chewing gum and a blackcurrant Strepsil I’d found at the bottom of my bag. She was really pushing the limits of my good nature tonight.

Alice, inevitably, looked remarkably unsnogged. She’d reapplied her lippy, didn’t have a hair out of place and was still managing to walk in her five-inch heels. Joey, following behind her, looked like he’d just seen God.