Page 51 of I Love You, I Love You, I Love You

‘That’s why you’re wearing the shirt?’ I ask (even though my mum’s wedding is obviously what gave him the idea), smiling, finding out that yes, it still hurts, that I still hold feelings for him. Trying not to cry, I reflex with humour. ‘Cos you want to look like a bloody accountant?’

‘Ha, yeah … does it look OK?’

He really wants to know, popping his collars up adorably; my opinion matters to him.

I could be a bitch but I can’t.

‘You look really lovely,’ I say, because it’s the truth.

‘OK, thanks.’ I’d never seen him so self-conscious. ‘I just … really like her.’

Stab. K, bye. I’m dead now.

He squints, the cigarette smoke waters his eye. He rubs them with his fingers, childishly. ‘You’re the best.’ he inhales. ‘You’re the best girl in the world.’

He exhales and puts his arm around me. And I’m where I should be, my favourite place of all – in his arms. But he’s positioning me just right for the bullet to sink into my chest.

‘I’ll point her out when we get inside.’

Oh, will you now? Oh, FUCK OFF. Make sure you do.

‘Great,’ I say, even though I’d rather stick pins in my eyes.

And he does. The whole room is dancing to Cameo’s ‘Candy’, leaving me out (I’m just jealous because I don’t know my lefts from rights).

‘That’s Rachel … ’

I see her in slow motion, sitting on a leather couch, sipping her drink. And that’s when everything stops. Her head twists back, her long dark-brown hair swishing past, to look at me in the eyes, her face in full beam when she sees Lowe return. She likes him back, I can tell. She looks so much like me. But the Goddess version. Oh God.

I text Nile: Are you still out? Would it be weird it I came to your film thing now? x

He writes back: it would be SO weird It would make me happy if you came. X

Chapter 21

Well, Rachel may look like (a very much prettier version of) me, but it turns out she is nothing like me. The girl is seventeen and acts like a woman, clopping up and down Clapham High Street in a heel, getting blow-dries and takeout coffees in Chelsea like a divorcee. Rachel can drive. She and Lowe have actual sit-down meals at expensive restaurants like Café Rouge. I hear Rachel’s tantrums are award winning. That she says , ‘Oh, fuck you,’ and then speeds off in her car. That her dramatic ultimatums are the stuff we only see in movies like Ten Things I Hate About You. That she has plans to move to California and work in fashion. The closest I’ve come to going to California is drinking a family bottle of Sunny-D by myself.

I know better than to compare myself but I can’t help but think this is it for Lowe and me. It’s over. For good. He’s moved on. I can too.

And so, I kiss Nile.

We kiss at the bottom of the stairs at Sam’s house. We kiss on The Twins’ trampoline in the rain, raindrops on our faces. We kiss at Dean’s party. On the common, under the willow tree. We don’t need to make a handshake because we kiss. We kiss in the overgrown garden, our feet with the rotten apples and the weeds. He rides me home in the dark and kisses me goodnight.

I kiss Nile for every missed opportunity with Lowe.

Rapture.

‘So … do you wanna be my girl then?’

I silently count down five, four, three, two, one, before managing a ‘Yeah!’

I have secured myself my first proper boyfriend.

We do all that stuff I dreamt of doing with a boyfriend. Way cooler stuff than Lowe and Rachel do. Who needs a car like Rachel when we can miss the night bus and follow the route by foot so we don’t get lost, many, many, many times? Who needs Café Rouge’s unctuous onion soup and chive flecked cheesy crouton, when you can Eat As Much As You Like at Big Tums for £5.99 and get a twenty-four-hour bellyache because you ate yourself into a coma? We go on train journeys and fall asleep on each other’s shoulders. We go to gigs. He makes me fruit salad and each piece of fruit is cut in such a perfect dice shape that if his acting dreams don’t materialize he could get a job at a hotel breakfast buffet in a heartbeat. We take photos kissing in the train station photobooth. Although I find myself waiting at the mouth of the booth’s printer, imagining that by some inexplicable twist of fate, it’s actually Lowe’s face developing in there on the four little photo squares … but it’s Nile. We buy a whole loaf of tiger bread and scoop out the inside, tearing it off into little squidgy doughballs. But when we listen to music, every song reminds me of Lowe. I reckon I’ll need that memory eraser like in Men in Black to ever forget him.

Nile lives with his Aunt Linda – for cheap rent, paid by Nile’s parents. He has a cousin called Kirsty-Lee who hates us but apparently, ‘it’s not targeted.’ Nile’s bedroom is attached to the house like an after-thought, not too dissimilar to how he has been welcomed into Aunt Linda’s home. Nile’s two favourite charity-shop shirts hang on the back door. The carpet is the colour of sand. His single bedsheets are the colour of Blu-tack. The walls are covered in ticket stubs and band posters ripped from NME, stuck on with actual Blu-tack. And for the first time I am saying the words I love you out loud to a guy, and his name is not Lowe Archer and it’s OK.

Even though it isn’t love love. He doesn’t hear the silent caveat: ‘I love you as much as I possibly can love someone who isn’t the person I actually love but they don’t love me back in the same way I love them, so with all that in mind – I suppose I love you.’

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