You Don't Know Me Page 21

  I probably do, under my makeup. At six-thirty this morning I was dressing as a chambermaid, ready to ambush a major new recording artist. Was that really only this morning?

  ‘Yeah, it’s been a busy day,’ I grin.

  ‘Oh, what happened?’ Dan asks.

  ‘Sorry. Can’t talk about it.’

  I have his full attention after that. Maybe it’s being a woman of mystery (because I stick to the pact and don’t say anything), or maybe it’s just the left-over buzz from being in the studio . . . Maybe it’s just that the time is right. Something is brewing between Dan and me. Something exciting and unspoken, following on – belatedly, perhaps – from our talk under the stars. Dan knows it, and so do I.

  The gig is hot, sweaty, overcrowded, chaotic and fabulous. They run out of beer and soft drinks early on and we’re reduced to drinking water from the taps in the ladies’ loos. It doesn’t matter. The band is brilliant: better than Call of Duty, better than us, better than loads of acts in the charts. They deserve a recording contract. Dan says the rumour is that there’s a couple of record company scouts in the audience tonight, which may be why they’re putting on such an inspired performance. The style is sort of indie-folk-punk, with a tiny girl at the front roaring out the words and holding it all together with her magnetic stage presence.

  When she lingers on the high notes, her voice has the same honey warmth as Ella Fitzgerald. Yet again, I wish Rose was here, because she’s the only person I could explain this to. However, Dan’s right behind me, moving to the music. That feels pretty good too.

  Cat watches us all the time. The closer Dan gets to me, the more she tries to get his attention, asking for drinks, asking what time it is, reminding him of songs they’ve played together. Dan simply ignores her most of the time. In the end, she grabs his elbow and says she’s not feeling well. She needs to get home but she doesn’t have enough money for the taxi.

  I sigh to myself. As a ploy, this is brilliant. Gentleman Dan – it’s the perfect way to grab his attention. Presumably we’ll have to end the evening now. But, when he looks at her his jaw is set, his eyes are angry. He’s not stupid and she’s finally exhausted his patience.

  ‘Really?’

  Surprised by the strength of his reaction, Cat wavers, hesitates.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she says. ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘No, you’re obviously not well,’ he snaps. He pulls his wallet out of his pocket and gives her all his spare money. ‘Here. This’ll cover the taxi. I’ll help you get one.’

  He goes out, and Cat can’t help but follow. When he comes back, he’s alone.

  ‘She’ll be fine,’ he says. ‘They use that cab firm all the time. I told her to call us to let us know she got home safely.’

  Poor Cat. Stuck in a taxi, in her tight leather dress, far away from Dan and me. The exact opposite of the effect she wanted. Without her, Dan is visibly more relaxed. He puts his hands on my hips as we dance to the music. I wish all nights could be like this.

  The band plays its final number and it’s time to go home. Nell offers to go with Raj in his beaten-up Polo. Ed offers to drive the rest of us in the Land Rover, and makes a point of asking Jodie if she’d like to travel beside him, so she can show him the way to her house. Which leaves Dan and me to climb in the back together. I don’t say anything, but I light up like a beacon inside.

  As soon as we’re moving, Jodie starts fiddling with the radio, searching for a station she likes. Soon we’re all singing along to Bruno Mars. Dan casually puts his arm over the back of the seat, so his hand is resting near my shoulder. The fact that we’re both pretending that nothing’s happening makes it better still.

  Now it’s Girls Aloud on the radio.

  ‘God!’ Ed groans, ‘Radio South West will play anything.’

  ‘We love this one!’ Jodie protests. ‘We were singing it this evening. Turn it up, Ed.’

  He does. We sing along raucously, except for Ed, who’s laughing, and Dan, who isn’t concentrating on the music. I can feel his warm breath against my neck, and the heat of his body next to mine. Even though the strongest thing I’ve had all day was Jim’s coffee, I feel as if I’ve been injected with powerful happy-making drugs, and they make me want to hug the world.

  ‘Something kinda OOOOH!’ I sing, keeping up with Jodie in the front, and trying to keep the grin off my face. When Ed takes a corner too quickly, Dan’s thrown against me. Somehow, when he straightens up, he’s still just as close. When I turn slightly to look at him, his eyes are half closed. I stop singing, and stay with my face turned towards him. He moves his lips towards me, slowly, slowly.

  ‘And now for something a bit different,’ the radio DJ says. ‘You know the one. You’ve heard it a million times already.’

  There are four chords, and a small sigh. Then Rose starts to sing the famous opening lines of ‘Breathless’.

  Oh no no no. Not Rose now. Not that song. Every time I hear it, I picture #dropthefatgirl trending on FaceFeed. I freeze.

  Dan freezes too. He leans away from me, with pain in his eyes. Then he rescues his arm from behind me and looks out of the window, breathing fast.

  ‘God! Not again!’ Ed shouts. ‘Not bloody “Breathless”. That has to be the biggest breakup song in the world. We were having fun here!’ He starts punching buttons to change the station.

  The radio burbles classical music, then the news, then a talk show about whether or not to vaccinate badgers.

  Badgers? I don’t care about badgers. Dan and I are still frozen in the back. Was it me? Did I just ruin the moment?

  Whatever it was, it’s over. When Ed eventually manages to find some smooth late-night music, it’s far too late. Dan’s staring at the passing countryside, pretending I don’t exist. I’m wishing I didn’t. I notice Ed flick his eyes at me in the driving mirror, and they crinkle with concern at the corners when he sees me sitting ramrod straight, a foot away from this brother, clutching my knees.

  Jodie remains oblivious to it all, humming to herself in the front seat until Ed finally pulls up outside her house. She waves us all a cheerful goodbye. The next seven minutes, as Ed negotiates the country lanes from her place to mine, are pure purgatory.

  ‘Thanks for a great evening,’ I say dutifully, as Dan leaps out of the Land Rover like a scalded cat so I can get past him without having to touch him in any way.

  ‘Yeah . . . great,’ Ed mutters, without much enthusiasm, watching us both.

  Dan, Gentleman Dan, gives me a short nod, which will have to do as goodbye.

  This time, Ed chooses to walk me across the silent, still road to my house. Standing in the porchlight, he says, ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘You saw?’

  ‘Yeah. He, er, he had a bad breakup last summer. I thought he was OK now. Maybe not.’

  Yes. I nod but I can’t bring myself to speak. It all makes sense now: the nearness without touching, the kisses that never quite happened, the feeling that he was holding something back . . .

  But there was something I missed.

  At four in the morning the final piece of the puzzle slots into place. I must have been asleep, because I wake up in bed with a start, cold but sweating, and suddenly it’s clear.

  It wasn’t just the words of ‘Breathless’ that reminded Dan of his breakup: it was the voice that sang them. Because of course, I’ve just been talking to a girl who went through a breakup last summer. A breakup so bad she wrote a number one song about it. And she comes from the same part of the middle of nowhere as he does. It can’t be a coincidence.

  Dan’s secret ex-girlfriend is my ex-best friend. And he is So. Not. Over. Her.

  Falling

  Rose. She got everything. The talent. The music. The boy.

  I don’t really sleep after that. When morning comes, I feel as though my body is filled with lead.

  Jodie calls me at ten. She’s still buzzing from last night.

  ‘Woo! Sasha and Dan, sitting in a tree . . . So what happened, then
?

  So she’d noticed.

  ‘Nothing,’ I mutter dully into the phone. ‘Nothing happened.’

  ‘What? Wait. What? That guy was all over you. What d’you mean, nothing happened?’

  ‘He didn’t touch me. They played “Breathless”.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I think he used to go out with Rose. Look, I don’t want to talk about it, OK?’

  ‘WHAT? HE USED TO GO OUT WITH ROSE? God, Sasha, how can you say that and not talk about it?’

  ‘There’s nothing to say.’

  ‘Shut up, Sash! There’s everything to say. I’m coming over.’

  ‘Please don—’ But she’s already put the phone down. She’s on her way.

  She arrives twenty minutes later, bearing chocolate. ‘I would’ve bought croissants, but your mum makes the best breakfasts anyway.’ Mum has in fact made me a stack of pancakes, sensing something was seriously wrong. She leaves us to it while Jodie helps me eat them. Or rather, while Jodie eats them. I’ve lost my appetite.

  ‘So tell me everything,’ she says, reaching over for the Nutella. ‘Oh blimey. He’s not Breathless Boy, is he?’

  It took me months to work it out, and Jodie about thirty minutes. I cry silent tears. Jodie abandons the Nutella for a moment, and enfolds me in a tender hug.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asks eventually.

  ‘I don’t know. I mean, I am sure, but I can’t prove it.’

  ‘So how did she meet him?’

  I think it through.

  ‘The jackets! Those damned military jackets. Dan said they got their gig gear from Mrs Venning. Rose did my summer job for me for the extra cash, remember? She could have met him then.’

  ‘I s’pose so,’ Jodie agrees, going back to her pancake. ‘Or maybe in the music shop on the high street. They could’ve been looking at sheet music, and their eyes met. Or checking out guitars . . .’

  ‘Look – can you not keep picturing their eyes meeting?’

  ‘Yeah, sure. Sorry.’

  Jodie eats in silence for a while as I take it all in. Impossible to imagine now that I felt so fabulously good last night, and it felt like it would last forever. It was as if I was speeding towards the edge of a cliff without knowing it, and now I’m falling.

  ‘But why didn’t she tell anyone?’ Jodie muses. ‘Oh, wait: nobody to tell. I was on holiday. So was Nell. You were in America. Still, she could’ve emailed.’

  I find my voice, or what’s left of it. ‘Rose doesn’t do email.’

  ‘She could’ve called.’

  She could have, but maybe she didn’t want to. I think of myself as a girl with secrets, but Rose has far more. And I can’t help thinking back – painfully – to how I felt about Dan, until last night. Dan’s the kind of boy you want to hug all to yourself. If you can.

  ‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘it was over by the time we all got back. She told me about it yesterday. She didn’t say it was him, though.’

  ‘What happened, d’you think?’ Jodie muses. ‘I mean, if “Breathless” is anything to go by, it was bad.’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘Are you going to talk to her about it?’

  I shake my head. ‘She obviously doesn’t want to.’

  ‘Yes, but if it’s stopping him from—’

  ‘Nothing’s stopping him,’ I sigh. ‘Only himself.’

  Jodie offers to tell Nell about it for me, but I beg her not to. If she does, Nell will spend her whole time fussing over me. I’d rather she just stayed her usual, cheerful self.

  But that doesn’t happen. By the time we get to school next day, Nell is not her cheerful self at all. The news has leaked out that we were with Rose on Saturday. A blurry picture of the four of us sneaking out of Lockwood House is already plastered over Interface, and half the gossip websites too.

  You’d think people might be pleased that the band got back together. It doesn’t work that way, though.

  Looking thin and drawn, Rose Ireland has been seen secretly getting back together with the girls who originally dumped her for being overweight.

  ROSE BACK WITH BULLYING BANDMATES – SEE PIC

  RT @RoseIrelandSinger Stay away from the #manicpixienightmares #dropthefatgirl

  Suddenly our band page is filled with hate-filled comments again. Almost every FaceFeed message is an angry rant. It’s like having a bucket of cold water thrown over you repeatedly, by people who’ve never met you. They think they’re protecting her. We just feel tired and sick.

  In school everybody, it seems, is staring. We take refuge in the practice rooms, but when the lesson bell goes, we have to head back to class. There’s a blockage caused by maintenance men with stepladders, dust sheets and paint pots. The Head is having all the corridors repainted in honour of the visiting TV crews for the ad launch. While we wait, several people start crowding round us, asking about Rose. Some even take pictures. They’re not threatening, like the FaceFeeds, but I sense Nell starting to get claustrophobic.

  Somebody muscles through, all elbows and aggro. It’s Nina Pearson, the self-confessed chief ‘Rosebud’, who seems to have forgotten she always ignored Rose in class because she was ‘weird’.

  ‘Can’t you just leave her alone?’ she spits at us. ‘Don’t you think she’s had enough of you? She’s coming to school for that launch soon and I don’t want to see you anywhere near her.’

  She stands in front of us, shaking with righteous fury.

  The crowd around us loves it: the drama, the passion, the serious possibility – they hope – of a fight. They watch us all to see if anyone’s ready to start brawling. Instead, Nell crumples in tears, and I catch her. Nina storms off, satisfied, and the others slowly start to melt away.

  ‘This is all your fault!’ Jodie shouts out across the heads of the parting crowd.

  I look up from Nell to see who she’s shouting at. At the far end of the corridor, Elliot Harrison is staring at us, pale and horrified.

  ‘You did this! You made this happen!’

  ‘Shut up, Jodie,’ I whisper under my breath. ‘If people know what he really did, he’s in more trouble than you think.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she fumes. ‘He stole your phone, he stole that video. He had no right . . .’

  There are tears in her eyes too.

  ‘It’s never going to end,’ Nell whispers. ‘Is it? Whatever we do, they’ll always hate us.’

  I try and hold the moment of us all being back together in my head – how much fun it was, the buzz it gave us – but under the weight of the glares and hatred, the memory shrinks and fades, until it hardly seems real any more.

  Beautiful Girl

  On the bus on the way home, I’m not exactly in the best of moods. And then a text arrives. Two words:

  Sorry. Dan xxx

  Gentleman Dan is back, politely apologising for breaking my heart.

  Because, you know, it’s not as if I needed cheering up or anything. If trending on FaceFeed again feels like being hit by cold water, getting a ‘sorry’ from Dan feels like being hit by a truck.

  Unfortunately, the memory of Dan feels real, very real. Wherever I look, he’s there. Up in the hills, where we walked. At home, where he helped me tune my guitar. Up in the sky. I can’t even look at the sky without imagining it darkening, and him showing me the constellations, and us disagreeing about philosophy.

  Where do you find another boy like that? When will that happen? What if he was the one, and he was never even mine?

  Mum gets back from the café to find me at the kitchen table, with a pile of home-made brownies and a cup of tea. I tried baking. It didn’t work. She can see from my face that something’s wrong.

  ‘Oh God, it’s not the internet again, is it? Is it that picture of Rose and all of you?’

  ‘Wha—? How did you know about that?’

  She looks guilty. ‘Someone at the café said something had happened. I thought I’d better look it up.’

  Oh great. Even my own mother has been Googl
ing me.

  She leans over, hugging my head into the front of her dress, promising me everything will be OK. That’s Mum: she cooks, she bakes, she hugs, she’s reassuring. It usually works, but not today. Today, I’m beyond reassurance, because each time something’s gone wrong I’ve tried and tried to recover, and I thought I was a survivor, but each time something new happened and it got worse.

  Mum puts cheerful music on the radio and sets about making chicken soup. She has this theory that nothing can ever be so bad that chicken soup can’t make it better. Today, even the sound of her chopping celery makes me depressed. The internet hates me and I’ve just been dumped by a boy I didn’t even go out with. Soup is not going to solve this. Seriously.

  I go up to my room and do what homework I can face, which isn’t much, before going through my playlists and listening to every sad song I can find. Downstairs, I can hear the kitchen radio and smell the stock starting to simmer. Outside, it’s a beautiful spring evening. The darkening sky is flecked with pink clouds. A bird in the bushy verge beside the road is chirping happily. Lambs are gambolling in the fields next to their mothers. Actual lambs. Irritatingly fluffy ones, bleating away.

  Why do I have to live in the heart of Somerset? Why can’t I be in Florida, where the news says there’s a threatening hurricane? If this was a movie, there would be thunder and lightning for me to go out into, so I could rage against it and get soaking wet. The best I can do is Crakey Hill at sunset. It’s pathetic.

  I grab my phone. There’s only one person I can think of right now who might get the mess I’m in because frankly, from what I’ve heard, he’s been in worse. As I head up the hill, away from the house, I call his number. To my relief, he answers on the fourth ring.

  ‘Dad?’

  There’s a long pause at the other end. I can hear the sound of clinking glasses and bar-room chatter in the background.

  ‘Sasha?’

  He sounds astonished that it’s me. I suppose he would be: I haven’t spoken to him since I got back from Vegas, except when he called at Christmas. To apologise for forgetting to send a card.

  ‘Dad? How are you?’ I wish my voice wasn’t so thin and reedy, but keeping tears at bay is harder than I’d like.