Page 21 of Fundamentals in Flirting

“What was that about?” he asked when we were driving out of town and up towards Coatley Park.

“What?”

“Why were you so rude to Mandy when she was being nice?”

It still amazed me that he had never picked up on her inherent nastiness. Were boys really so unaware of the digs and bullying that girls – and she in particular – had subjected me to every single day that we had been in school? Clearly he was still oblivious.

“I apologised, not that she’d care.”

I could feel Teddy’s scrutiny across the car. “You don’t like her much, do you?”

I laughed bitterly. “Whatever gave you that idea, Ted?”

“Call it a sixth sense.” He shrugged. “Why though? What did she do?”

Speckly skin. Mole face. Freckly freak. Blot on the landscape. Those were just a few of the names she’d called me. Then there was the day she’d held me down in the girls’ toilets with her gang of cronies, and forcibly applied concealer to my whole face in an attempt to make my freckles “less offensive to look at”. Or the time on our cross-country run when she’d pushed me head-first into a muddy puddle to give me a helping hand at “evening out my skin tone”. These were just a few instances that had stuck in my mind, but there had been a lot more. So many more that I had eventually stopped crying, and stopped reacting to her attacks. I had remained mute and sullen as she rained down insult after insult on me, shutting down to try and survive the abuse and get through another day in the seventh circle of hell.

But no matter how hard I have tried to forget it, or how many times I told myself that looks aren’t important or that there are people worse off than me, it never really helped. All I ever see in the mirror, even now, is that repulsive teenager, the ugly duckling, who never became the beautiful swan.

“Because she’s a mean girl, Teddy.”

“Mandy? Mean? Is she?”

He was genuinely perplexed.

“She is if you don’t happen to look like a film star,” I replied, gesturing at him, glossing over the true depth of my issues with Mandy Shaw – and with myself.

“You think I look like a film star? Which one?”

I parked up and turned to him with a frown. “Oh, I don’t know. How about that guy they kept in the cellar inThe Goonies?”

Teddy laughed delightedly.

“I really thought you’d compare me to Danny DeVito.”

“Nah, he’s way better looking than you.”

Teddy continued laughing and handed me a warm package of food from the bag on his knee.

“When are you going to take her out for a drink and continue your wooing, anyway?” I asked, trying to push away the totally ridiculous hurt feeling that was skimming under my skin at the thought of them hooking up together. It’s not like they hadn’t done it before. Probably.

“I’m not.” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “And I wasn’t wooing her – which is a ridiculous term, by the way.”

“But you told her you would?”

“I was letting her down gently.”

“By telling her you’d go out with her and then not actually going out with her? How is that ‘letting her down gently’?”

Teddy glanced over at me as he ate, the little wooden fork hilariously small in his large hands. “I wouldn’t want her to read anything into it if we went for a drink and, if I’m honest, she’s not really that interesting to hang out with. I used to avoid her like the plague when we were at school. She’s a bit vacuous.”

Curious.

I thought they’d been best buddies as she’d always been trailing along in his wake. “Didn’t you two go out in school?”

Teddy almost choked on the chip he had just swallowed. “No!”

Oh. A smug bloom of pleasure warmed behind my ribcage.

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