Lobsters (10 page)

Even last night I hadn't realized quite how fit he was. Girls like Stella are probably just his average pull.

‘I'll tell Stella to call you,' I said.

And then there was this weird moment where we just looked
at each other. He lowered his head and his hair fell over his face, hiding it from view.

‘See you around, then.' I held my hand up and waved on the spot, like a five-year-old.

And then I walked away. I felt a momentary relief that it was all over, and then the full horror of it hit me.

I had spoken to him for five minutes and gone and made out he was the love of my life. He had spoken to me for five minutes and gone and made out with my best friend. My cheeks were still red-hot when I walked through the front door at home.

My nan could sense something had happened. She probably thought I was worried about my results. Which I am. But she didn't know about Sam and Stella.

I decided to start packing for the holiday to take my mind off it all, and she came into my room to see if everything was OK.

I wanted to tell her about how weird and awful everything had got but I didn't know how. And she might have told Mum. I felt like I didn't have solid reasons to feel bad. It's not Sam's fault he wants Stella and not me. It's not Stella's fault she wants Charlie and not Sam. It's not that boy Robin's fault that he obviously wants Stella too. I'm not even bloody in it. I'm just the puke-covered anomaly on the edge of the experiment.

Nan was looking at the hundreds of photos that cover my wall, ignorant to the fact that my life was in free fall.

‘You can't worry about things like exam results,' she said. ‘It's in the hands of the gods now, babe.'

I just smiled at her weakly. ‘I just really want to go to uni, Nan. I feel … ready.'

I didn't feel ready. But the words were just generic ones that she could understand.

‘Let's just cross that bridge when we come to it. Are you excited about your holiday? Can't believe the four of you are all so grown-up now. Where are you going again?'

‘Kavos.'

‘Greece? I don't like Greece myself. I like my food piping hot.'

I had no idea what that meant. Nan went to my wardrobe and took out the dress, handling it like a newborn baby. Looking at it didn't make me feel excited or beautiful any more, it just reminded me of everything I want to be that I'm not, and just won't ever be.

Nan smiled at me. She doesn't see I'm ugly and pale and ludicrous. She's deluded. ‘Let me teach you how to fold this so it doesn't crease.'

She folded it and laid it gently next to the suitcase.

‘Night, babe,' she smiled. Then she left me in my world to cope with it all.

I leant down and picked up the neatly folded square Nan had made. I was surprised at how heavy it felt in my hands, the rows of sequins weighing it down. I tried to keep it perfectly folded as I opened the zip compartment inside the suitcase and slid it in.

It was like I'd put a bomb in there. The thought of Stella finding out made my heart beat double speed.

I shut the suitcase quickly, and zipped it up.

6

Hannah

Four days later, by the night before Kavos, everything was back to normal. At least to some extent. Stella had been spending all her time with Charlie and I'd been watching chick flicks with Nan. I had buried the party, the Westfield date and the way that whole twenty-four hours had made me feel as far down in my being as possible.

We were all staying at Stella's so we could go to Gatwick together the next day. I'd already fake tanned and painted my nails five different pastel colours.

When I got to her house she ushered me in, all excited. Tilly and Grace were there, and so was Ollie.

They are so in love. It makes me jealous because I think Grace is normal, like me, and she's got someone who likes her so much he can't even bear for her to go away for a week. When he left, she made an excuse just so she could walk him down the road.

As soon they walked out of the kitchen Stella rolled her eyes and whispered, ‘He's been here
for ever
.'

Tilly just laughed, but it annoyed me, because she just
has
to be bitchy.

When Grace got back we made tea and went upstairs to talk about what clothes and make-up and hair stuff we'd all brought. Our suitcases were lined up in a row in the bedroom, with Stella's right next to mine. The dress was lying less than six feet from her but she had no idea. Every night since putting it in there, I had lain in bed telling myself I had to take it out. That it was mental to bring it because, obviously, I could never wear it. But I hadn't.

As we lay on the floor staring up at the glow-in-the-dark stars that have been there since we were eleven, things felt a bit more like how they used to be.

‘Are you in love with Ollie?' Tilly said into the darkness.

We all know she is but she's never announced it or anything. She laughed a bit awkwardly, almost shyly.

‘Yeah, yeah, I am.'

We all ahhhh'ed together.

‘At least one of us is in love,' I said. ‘One out of four isn't that bad an average.'

‘I'm in love, I'll have you know.' Tilly makes me laugh.

Stella was straight in giggling.

‘Yeah but it doesn't count if they're not in love with
you
.'

Stella was talking about Jake. Tilly's loved him since Year 9, but we all know he wants Stella. It's an unspoken rule between us that we never mention it.

‘I think it still counts,' I said. ‘Look at me and Zac Efron. I mean, no one can say I didn't want him. I had the perfume and everything. Unrequited love exists. You can totally want someone without them wanting you.'

I wondered if the others were thinking about Stella and Charlie too.

‘I think only loving someone because they love you is selfish,' I went on. ‘It's spineless. It's like only admitting you want someone when you know they want you.'

Stella must have realized I was aiming that at her. She never admits she fancies anyone in case they don't fancy her back.

‘No, I know what you mean.' Grace is so nice all the time. ‘I think you can but it's a different kind of love.'

‘Yeah,' I said. ‘Like, if someone dies you don't stop loving them because they aren't there to love you back any more, do you?'

We were all quiet for a bit, partly because we were almost asleep, but I think we were all wondering what the closest thing to love we've ever felt is.

I guess Freddie is mine, by process of elimination, based on the events of Years Ten and Eleven. That's depressing. Thinking about Freddie reminded me of the buried party night, and I went cold for a second. I thought about the double date too, and Sam's face when Stella was talking about me being in love with him. Whenever I thought about it I got this guilty feeling. Like I'd done something wrong. Like I should have told them all that Toilet Boy was Sam. Stella still had no idea. Her getting with Charlie had diverted it all. Sam and that boy Robin were just a weird few minutes opposite Westfield cinema. We didn't know anyone that knew them and Sam wasn't even on Facebook – I'd checked. There are eleven million people in London. It was pretty unlikely we'd randomly bump into them.

In my daydreams, I went to uni and Sam was the person in the room next to me in halls. But he didn't recognize me at first, because I had my bob and my new wardrobe. So he fell in love with me. And we moved to California.

It was like Stella could sense my thoughts by osmosis.

‘Do you ever think about Toilet Boy?'

‘No. I think I was just drunk.'

‘And you call
me
fickle?
You
said he was your lobster. What happened to you hunting him down?'

‘
Us
hunting him down.' Grace interjected, all slow and sleepy. ‘I was totally up for it.'

‘All for one and one for all.'

That's our motto. We've been saying it since Year 7. There's a photo of us dressed as musketeers and we've each got a keyring with it on.

‘Yeah, and about that,' said Tilly, sitting up for dramatic effect. ‘When is this blowjob lesson actually happening?'

Tilly was phobic about doing it wrong and had been begging Grace to give her lessons.

Grace just rolled over. ‘Not now, that's for sure. I'm tired.'

‘You are so not a team player. You are the only one who is actually having sex and knows how to do stuff and you just lie there and keep all your sex secrets to yourself,' Tilly said.

Stella sat up. ‘Well, she's not actually.'

Stella and Tilly being sat up in the dark made me feel like I should sit up too, to mark the occasion.

‘What?'

‘I did it with Charlie yesterday.'

That made Grace leap up as well. And there in the dark Stella had her moment. Which left Tilly in limbo and me as officially the last virgin on Earth.

Sam

Every summer, me and my parents go to visit my gran in Sark. Sark is one of the Channel Islands – between Guernsey and Jersey, just a few miles north of France – and it is absolutely tiny. You can walk from one side of it to the other in about twenty minutes.

There are no cars and there is no mobile phone reception. It's an idyllic haven of unspoilt pebble-strewn beaches and sweeping, majestic cliffs. The dusty roads throng with cheerful, ruddycheeked men on horseback, pulling carriages full of elderly, camera-wielding American tourists. The lush, verdant fields are lined with huge old chestnut trees that bend and dance crazily in the blustery ocean wind.

Basically, what I'm saying is, Sark is beautiful. However, like many other beautiful things – Kate Middleton, for example – it is also
massively
fucking boring.

There are about two hundred people living on the island and two hundred is also their approximate average age. My dad (forty-nine) is frequently called ‘young man' by the old women who run the village shop.

The majestic cliffs and dancing trees kept me entertained for about ten minutes when I was eight. Now that I'm seventeen
they've lost their appeal completely. There's no internet. You can't even get Channel 5. Not that anyone watches Channel 5, obviously, but it's like a life jacket – you might not need it but it's still reassuring to know that it's there.

Anyway, this year's visit to Sark promises to be even more massively fucking boring than usual, because it represents my crazy, hedonistic post-exams summer holiday.

It's a real shame that me, Robin and Chris didn't organize a proper trip together. Back in January, we decided we'd go to Crete in July for a two-week piss-up. Every day, one of us would ask, ‘Has anyone looked into flights yet?' or ‘Any news on accommodation?' Then, July came and no one had looked into flights yet and there was no news on accommodation.

So, I ended up bound for Sark, as usual. Robin was in Florida (for purely Potter-related reasons) and Chris was visiting Berlin with his parents.

Still, at least we had Woodland Festival coming up. Two days of music, camping and getting pissed in a field in Devon. That was going to be our real chance to celebrate.

As I sat in the kitchen with my parents, waiting for the taxi to take us to the airport, I started thinking about Hannah. It wasn't the first time I'd thought about her since that awful evening in Westfield. I don't know why. She said she had a boyfriend, so I guess that's that. But if she was so into this boyfriend, why did Stella say she was ‘literally in love' with
me
?

I was wrestling internally with these questions when my mum, who doesn't cope well with travel anxiety, interrupted my train of thought by starting to polish the mantelpiece so hard I
was worried it would collapse.

‘I thought the cleaner was coming later?' I asked.

‘She is.'

I waited for further explanation but nothing came.

‘So, why are you cleaning then?'

‘Because I don't want the place to look like a pigsty when she gets here,' she replied, scrubbing some invisible dirt off an old school photograph of me. ‘I don't want her thinking I can't keep my own house tidy.'

‘The very reason you employ her suggests that you can't keep your own house tidy. What's she going to do when she gets here and finds that's everything's already clean?'

‘That's her business,' she said, dusting a drawing of a giraffe that I did when I was five. ‘Now, have you packed all your books?'

My mum was becoming increasingly obsessed with my Cambridge reading list. For her, any moment I wasn't staring intently at
Paradise Lost
was a moment wasted.

‘I'll do it now,' I sighed and went upstairs to squeeze half my bookshelf into a rucksack.

A cab ride, a flight and a stomach-churningly rough boat trip later, my parents and I stepped out on to Sark's cobbled harbour.

As we climbed the hill that leads up to the village, I noticed a hot girl ahead of us. This was a pretty big deal, as she was the first hot girl that I'd seen on Sark since the village shop mistakenly ordered a few copies of
ZOO Magazine
six years ago. Which made her the first three-dimensional hot girl I'd
ever
seen on Sark.

She had long, black hair and a delicate, doll-like face. Her lips seemed to be frozen in a permanent Instagram pout. Even though they were partially obscured by the straps of her extremely large rucksack, I could tell her tits were amazing. She was lagging behind her parents, looking even less happy to be on this tiny island than I was. As her mum pointed out a particularly attractive clump of flowers, she turned and caught my eye.

She flashed me a smile and carried on walking.

My stomach bubbled. I watched her as she disappeared over the top of the hill, her rucksack bouncing gently against the top of her bum.

I felt the splat of raindrops on my hair and yanked the hood of my coat up. There is only one thing more boring than three days on Sark, and that's three days on Sark when it's raining.

Hannah