Page 6 of I Love You, I Love You, I Love You

They hang out by the ice rink. By the Odeon Cinema. By the chicken shop. By the bus stop. Sometimes by the train station. A lot in the park.

Usually in packs. Unapproachable. Eating. Smoking. Riding. Skating. Laughing. Walking. Talking. Breathing.

So how does one go about catching a boy? Hmmm. This is tough.

All of the suitable boys ignore us. It’s like they think we don’t exist. They don’t even acknowledge us – their eyes glide over our heads like they’re looking for their train on a timetable behind my face. Like we’re getting in their way.

As an experiment, I try crushing on Mr Paul – the IT teacher, who we all think is hot because he’s not ancient like the others and lets us call him Mr Paul. If you squint, he looks like Beppe di Marco off EastEnders. But Grace says she once saw him lift up his balls and dollop them over the back of Angelica’s chair like two tinned plum tomatoes. So it’s a no go.

It’s bothering me now; it’s grinding my gears that since leaving primary school – other than my baby brother Sonny (who’s six), Kurt Cobain and AJ McLean from Backstreet Boys fame – two of whom I have only met in my dreams, both of whom I reckon live in America and would definitely know that, if they were to ever fall for my unobvious beauty, they would instantly be pinned as paedophiles, and one of whom is sadly dead – I know NO boys, not even to test the water with.

My view becomes skewered; I try to broaden my mind. Why do I have such a block? Really try. I kiss Bianca in her bed but feel only that same warm satisfying gooey feeling as sharing a whole tub of strawberry cheesecake ice cream with her. The girls’ school has left me with a warped unrealistic altered view of the world. I no longer know what is attractive to me. I’m underdeveloped, like a half-baked brownie. I don’t know who is handsome or who isn’t. I don’t know who to fancy or even how to do it. How to go about measuring my desire in appropriate doses so it doesn’t come out in one big pour. I don’t trust my love compass or radar. I start to fancy everybody – Donatello from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Sonic the Hedgehog. Help me, I fancy a hedgehog! The tiger from the Frosties box – yeah, Tony. The rabbit from the Cadbury Dairy Milk Caramel advert. Rufio from Hook. I fancy one of my Barbies. At one point I fancy a member of Slipknot. A mask. No, not the willy-nosed one, but still. A mask. Great – now I fancy a horrible scary mask.

At one point I fancy Moe, the grey-haired barman from The Simpsons.

Do I fancy Outlaw, the shiny black horse at the stables at the top of our road?

He’s so muscly. Rebellious. Commanding. Is he sexy? Do I fancy Outlaw the horse now?

A touring Theatre Company visits our school. I whisper to Mia Bennett, a girl in my form who I mistook for a comrade, that I a bit fancy the woman playing Peter Pan. But ‘like as Peter Pan though’, I make clear, even though it isn’t entirely true: I like everything about her, especially that she is a woman playing Peter Pan with her shimmery tights. But it’s too late; Mia’s face fires up like a fruit machine, oh for fu— She’s hit the jackpot with this one and before I know it a lazy unoriginal rumour is spreading that I’m ‘lesbians with Aoife’.

Oh, of course I’m ‘lesbians with Aoife’, Mia. There has been a rumour going around that I’m ‘lesbians with Aoife’ since I was about seven years old. Plus none of us, Mia included, is very popular so nobody really bats an eyelid.

Anyway, that boat sails, and I watch the Peter Pan tour bus fly away to the next lucky school on tour for Peter to break more hearts.

I need to realign my standards if I am ever going to get lucky in love. And that means: get realistic.

Even when practising the art of fancying in hypothetical scenarios – in fantasy – I focus on keeping it achievable, even when I’m pretending, to avoid disappointment. I never set my sights on a lead singer or main character. I leave the heart-throbs to the pretty, popular girls. Perhaps it’s also a snobbery of mine about not wanting to go with the crowd and to be alternative. A self-conscious way of carving my own lane. My subject of desire has to be the underdog, the odd one out, the weird cute one, the dark horse. (Or, failing that, an actual horse.)

It doesn’t take the smartest cookie in the cookie jar to know this all stems from a fear of rejection. A fear of humiliation. I have this quite cool way of switching off my attraction and attention to anybody if they aren’t interested. I can make myself immune to boys if I choose, like a puppy without a scent. It’s a way of protecting myself whilst keeping up with the pack.

There’s a new thing going around at school where an attractive person, instead of ‘fit’, is described as ‘spicy’. It’s gone one step further where there now seems to be a grading system, where good-looking-ness gets ranked. ‘Saffron’ means the most smoking, because saffron is the most expensive luxurious spice of all.

‘They are so saffron.’

Well, if this is the case, label me ‘mixed herbs’. I pretty much decide that, for the time being, it’s probably safest if I just forget that I own a fanny at all. And so that’s what I do. I try to pretend my vagina doesn’t exist, in the hope that, if ignored and neglected long enough, the flesh down there will politely sort of seal up completely, scab over, with fresh skin, in its own time, like a doll’s, with just a simple small round ‘O’-shaped hole for wees.

Chapter 3

My first proper kiss is in Ireland. We’re there for Aoife’s great-grandma’s eightieth – a dark function room with a giant cream cake and loads of pissed-up adults. We sit there, awkward as hell with our sleek fringes, nursing our lager tops to fit in and eating 500,000 dry-roasted peanuts. Aoife anxiously picks her spot scabs. I pick my fingers. We were hoping boys our age would be here. But it’s just Aoife’s cousin – who has a diamond earring and is quite fit but he’s brought his girlfriend, who has streaky fake tan. The kiss takes place the next day with a boy called Connor who works on the miniature steam train opposite our hotel. He has a Nike tick shaved into the back of his head. He’s Irish and calls kissing ‘going away’. He says, and I quote, ‘Do you want to go away with me?’

‘Where to?’ I ask innocently looking at the nearby lake and wondering if he owns a rowboat, anxiously biting the dead skin around the edge of my thumb until blood comes. But with a twinkle of his lazy eye, oh I know where we’re going alright. On a fast ride to Adulthood, that’s where alright. This is my chance. A crash course in snogging. If it goes badly, nobody has to know. I may as well get it out the way. And so we agree.

The Kiss takes place on a grassy shrubby hill in the playground by the tree next to a windswept carrier bag, a twist of dried-up dog poo and the hipbone of what I’m pretty sure is a rat. I press my bleeding thumb into the sleeve of my hoody to soak up the blood and the soft locked bruise of a kiss. For a minute, the electricity of oxytocin surges through me but actually I think I just got a static shock from Connor’s shell suit rubbing against my thigh.

The going away with me is a contract. One of those spit pacts they make except with our actual faces. When the painful everlasting seven seconds are up, THANK GOD, I unashamedly wipe my mouth in victory in front of him. Right there on my sleeve is the evidence. A snail trail of saliva that snaps back at us like snot. The deal is sealed. I am no longer a real snog virgin.

Thanks for that, Connor. Thanks for that, Ireland.

And away I go back to grey London feeling like I’m made of gold. Like I’ve been invited to the Ambassador’s Reception off the Ferrero Rocher advert. Like people will notice that something about me has changed. My boobs that bit bigger, my hair that bit shinier in a swingy pony-tail. At last, I stand, a woman.

It seems I am on a roll. More mosquitos want my savoury blood. Now that the seal has been broken, my second snog follows swiftly after. Lex goes to the Steiner school behind mine that has an intake of about fifteen students between the ages of toddler and teenager, with a sheep ratio of about seventeen to every child. He has impressive acne and wears it confidently – a constellation upon his bum-fluffed cheeks. I admire this about him. His hair is bleached like Eminem’s – FIT – and gelled into stiff spikes like snowy mountains, and, better than that – Lex is a skater.

I ‘meet up’ with him one weekend at Brixton Bowls, where we ignore each other for the entire day and only when it’s time to say goodbye do we finally say hi. We go ahead and do the snog over a hip-height wall, him on one side, me on the other, his skateboard in-between as a metaphor of why it will never work. How a money-grabber kisses someone for their debit card – poor Lex must know that, deep down, the only reason I like him is because he skateboards. I’m such a skateboard-grabber.

It is the driest snog of my life, like licking the seal of an envelope. Like I’ve been dared to eat all the salty maize snacks from the shop. Still, there is much to celebrate: I’ve just snogged a skateboarder on home turf, which feels ten times more legitimate. I race for my bus home, tingling. Feeling like I want to do something crazy like … Oh, goodness … I don’t know … get the top bit of my ear pierced or something. But I just press my face into a pillow and squeal.

Then once again: drought. Like when the hyenas take over in The Lion King. There is a thirst.

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