Crushworthy Read online

  They sat there and for two nonstop hours endlessly dissected the note—not that it was particularly nuanced, but whatever!—, what Jinx could possibly wear on Saturday, and what, exactly, she should say on the phone that evening.

  Eventually, every possible permutation of everything covered, the girls—who had also run out of weed by this time—rapidly decided it was far too cold to be skulking about like tramps in the dark like this. The four of them linked arms and hot-footed it across the pitches back to Tanner House in search of their three current main interests: central heating, crumpets loaded with butter and jam, and the newest episode of America’s Next Top Model.

  Katie Green sat by the window of her small cubicle room in Steinem House and stared avidly out past the drive in front of her house towards the tuck shop area. She had been sitting like that—in the dark, with her face pressed up against the cold glass of the resolutely not double-glazed window and her hands hugging her chunky knees tight to her flat chest—for at least three hours without moving. Katie had seen Jinx and Liv dash down the steps and let themselves into the garage from the window of the sanatorium, where she had been unsuccessfully begging Mister Sinton for a note to let her off games. At the sight of them, Katie had suddenly—and to the great confusion of Mister S, who’d been waiting patiently for the inevitable waterworks—lost all interest in her losing battle, made her excuses, dashed back to Steinem, and settled down to her vigil, only hoping she wouldn’t miss them leaving in the short time it took her to get from the san to her room. She was not disappointed.

  Only a few minutes after sighting two of her big five fascinatingly engaged in some extracurricular and no doubt illegal activity, Katie felt she’d practically won the jackpot when she spotted Liberty and Chastity making their own way towards the garage. About an hour after they’d also disappeared behind the sliding door, Katie’s excellent vantage point afforded her the interesting montage of Charlie—she could hardly believe her luck at spotting all her heroines in one sitting like this—nearly fall out of a taxi as it stopped abruptly by the main gates, throw some money in the direction of the driver, sway, almost fall, and then begin staggering up the drive as the taxi turned round and sped off towards Brighton’s bright lights.

  At first, Katie thought the older girl must be drunk. It was only when she noticed Charlie dragging her right leg behind her that she realized the sixth-former was sporting a terrible limp. Katie watched, thoughtfully, as Charlie struggled up the drive, keeping close to the shadows of the small hedge that ran the whole way alongside it. Katie’s reverie was destroyed a few seconds later by someone banging on her door as they passed, giggling and then running away. She glowered as she got up to put the light on and thought about how much she really, really hated being at this bloody school.

  15 Phone Banter

  Jinx Sat On Liberty’s bed, rather incredulously watching her best friend pull item after item of sheer fabulousness from her wardrobe, and then carefully assess its suitability for Jinx’s date. Liberty, her wild hair bunched on top of her head in a gorgeously messy bun, scrutinized each garment before throwing it either towards the “possible” pile to her left or the “definitely no” pile to her right. Even when Jinx occasionally dared to take her life in her hands and voice the opinion that things were going in the wrong direction, Liberty totally ignored her, so that the right-side pile was quickly growing considerably larger than the left.

  Jinx was messing around with a large pot of Mac gold glitter, blending it into the back of her hand, when Liberty spun round. “I’ve got it!” she squealed. “I knew there was something I’d forgotten.”

  “What?” Jinx asked, barely bothering to conceal her yawn of absolute, total boredom. She loved clothes, but really, this was ridiculous. How long had they been shut up in here? Christ, she needed to make the bloody phone call yet. And she still had to copy Liv’s English essay and make appropriate adjustments before first lesson tomorrow morning. This evening was fast becoming a bloody farce. But since Liberty would be well upset if Jinx said anything, she resolved to try her best to stick it out and at least pretend to be interested.

  “Look at THIS,” said Liberty, ripping a photograph off the wall by her bed and pressing it into Jinx’s hand. “I LOVE you in this dress!”

  Jinx studied the photo, taken last summer half-term by Caroline before the whole family went off to a television awards ceremony in London, where Martin had picked up a gold gong for his work as creative director of a top London advertising agency. She smiled as she realized that yes, even if she did say so herself, she looked pretty damn hot in her multicoloured silk Simultane shift. Her face fell as she realized she’d also drunkenly shoved it to the back of her crowded wardrobe when they got home late that night and had promptly forgotten its existence. Until now, anyway.

  “But it’s not here, Lib,” Jinx wailed. She was now absolutely set on wearing this or nothing—and she didn’t think nothing would make her first date with the divine Jamie East go down quite the way she hoped. “It’s at home!”

  “Don’t worry about it,” replied Liberty. “Why don’t we go back to yours on Friday and pick it up? Your mum phoned a couple of days ago and asked if she was ever going to see us again—we could kill two birds with one stone. I’d love to see them all anyway.”

  “Okay,” Jinx said, sitting up and looking enthused for the first time since Liberty had announced her position as head stylist for Saturday’s event and decided to act on it immediately. “That sounds great. Let’s do it! We’ll get on a train straight after Art and be home by dinner. Mum will be thrilled, I can pick up my dress, and George can drive us back here on Saturday afternoon just in time for bright lights, date city!”

  “Excellent!” Liberty shoved all the clothes littering the bed onto the floor and flung herself onto the bed next to Jinx. “We can take all our washing back, too.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Jinx, “and have a massive dinner and see the dogs. In fact, the more I think about it the more I can’t wait—I feel like I haven’t been home in a freaking age.”

  Sitting cross-legged and alone on her bed a few minutes later, having been propelled at high speed out of the next door room by its owner occupant, one Liberty Latiffe, Jinx opened a can of Diet Coke and took a few reflexive sips as she gazed at her mobile phone lying on top of the pile of largely unopened text books on her bedside table. This was fucking ridiculous. Wasn’t she supposed to be, like, a way cool dudette? Well, she sure as hell wasn’t behaving like one. No, she was acting like the biggest wuss in the whole freaking world. Jinx mentally punched herself in the face and reached for her phone. She was making this bloody call, and she was making it now.

  “Hello?” Jamie’s voice answered after the third ring and Jinx felt her heart leap with excitement at the sound of it.

  “Hi Jamie,” she said, thinking that—thank God—she sounded remarkably cool, calm and collected even in spite of what was currently happening to the inside of her stomach. “It’s Jinx.”

  “Ah, naughty Jinx Slater finally gets off her butt and calls me back,” Jamie said in a very low and sexy voice that seemed positively brimming with innuendo to a totally love-struck Jinx. “Hel-lo. I hoped it would be you. Don’t move!”

  Jinx sat unsurely on her bed. After an uncomfortably long pause during which a reddening and slightly sweaty Jinx mostly wished she’d taken her jumper off earlier, she heard heavy, rushing footsteps thudding across the line until a heavy-breathing Jamie picked it up with a clatter and said, “So, where were we, Slater?”

  “Um,” Jinx replied uncertainly, just a touch unnerved by the whole business, “you were…”

  “Yes, that’s it. I was about to ask you out,” Jamie said firmly, immediately bringing Jinx’s spinning mind right back to the matter at hand.

  “So?” he asked, a huge smile lending his voice a very warm, teasing tone, “can I tempt you? Saturday?”

  “Gosh—a date!” Jinx snapped right back, all unease totally brushed under t
he nasty navy blue carpet of her single room. “I’d love to, thanks very much.”

  “Sweetheart, that’s great. I hoped you’d say yes.” Jamie paused enough to allow a throaty chuckle to drift down the airwaves and hit a beaming Jinx’s delighted ear before continuing.

  “So here’s the deal. I’m having a party at my place on Saturday.”

  Jinx nodded as she thought that this wasn’t quite the tête-à -tête she had envisioned, but smiled at the realization that it sounded like a hell of a lot of fun and much less scary than having to deal with him à deux. Shit though, what about the solemn promise the lower sixth had made to each other to go out and have a total blast on Saturday night?

  “Um, the thing is,” Jinx said after a quick-fire think, ripping tiny slivers of paper off the sides of the note Jo had given to her in the library earlier, “I’ve kind of got--”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Jamie’s voice cut Jinx’s off in the middle of her sentence. “You can bring whoever you like. In fact, I’d say the more the merrier.”

  “Okay,” said Jinx, not really noticing the presumption in his tone. “I’ll tell Liberty and Chastity and everyone. They’ll definitely be up for it.”

  “Great, come round at about seven and bring a few bottles. And Jinx…” The lingering pause seemed positively pregnant with promise to Jinx, until Jamie added decisively, “I’m really looking forward to seeing you.”

  “Me too,” she replied, blushing a deep red and distractedly screwing the note into a tiny ball with her free hand.

  She was going to crack a gag about trying to keep hold of her shoes this time and hadn’t even managed to ask if George would be there on Saturday night when she realized that the silence from the other end of the line meant he’d put the phone down.

  Well, she thought to herself, exhaling deeply and banging on the wall that she shared with Liberty, that went better than expected.

  Jinx might have known there’d be no need for her to attract Liberty’s attention. She’d barely banged once before her door was flung open and Liberty and Chastity burst in and leapt on top of her on her bed. They’d obviously been sitting in the corridor outside, ears firmly attached to the door, just waiting for the conversation going on inside to end so they could go over every aspect of it in endless detail.

  The three of them were so overexcited they didn’t notice Liv running down the corridor towards a very bedraggled Charlie, an expression of extreme concern on her face. The pair went into a huddle in the alcove by the common room. Not long after this, Liv started laughing uncontrollably at whatever it was Charlie was telling her. Their tortuous ascent up the adjacent stairs to the first floor bedrooms a few minutes later—the pain in her leg obviously intense, Charlie was leaning heavily on Liv’s arm—also went completely unnoticed by their friends. Jinx et al. were now making so much noise in her room they’d already woken up Brian Morris from where he was trying to have a snooze in his office two corridors along and three floors up.

  16 Relax, Don’t Do It

  Jinx and Liberty spent two solid hours giggling and shrieking at everyone’s horoscopes in all the trash magazines they’d bought at Brighton station for the train home to Hampshire. And now Jinx sat happily on her bed at home and sorted through the pile of mail Caroline had left on her bed.

  She hardly had to strain her ears over and above The La’s “There She Goes” that was playing on her digital radio to hear Liberty having an extremely animated conversation with her parents downstairs. God, she thought as she breathed in great lungfuls of crisp countryside air breezing in through the open window at the head of her bed and looked around at her pink-and white-striped bedroom, which had remained resolutely unchanged since she was twelve, it was good to be home. It was also great—she grinned massively at the thought of this—to have Liberty back where she belonged, clutched close to the collective bosom of the adoring Slater family. Caroline and Martin, both sporting suspiciously bright eyes, had leapt on her as if she were their own daughter when the taxi the girls had hailed at the station dropped them off at the front door.

  Lying back against her perfectly squashy pillows, Jinx fondled her dog Flash’s ears with contentment and a very real sense that all was right with the world. Although Caroline often waxed long and lyrical about how unhygienic—never mind the bloody hairs!—it was to allow the dogs onto their beds, the rest of the Slaters paid her scant attention and Jinx was especially enjoying the long and emotional homecoming love that she and Flash were sharing right now.

  As early as she’d thought polite—which wasn’t very, though no one really noticed, Jinx had left her parents and Liberty in the kitchen and sloped off upstairs mumbling something under her breath about needing to sort her washing out. Instead, she’d hotfooted it straight into George’s empty room and immediately located three gorgeous pictures of Jamie plastered to the whiteboard above his sink. Jinx had painstakingly unstuck them from their blue tack fixings, moved a few other pictures around to conceal the obvious white spaces left behind by their removal and strolled happily along the corridor to her own bedroom at the back of the house.

  She held her ill-gotten gains in front of her, looking at first one and then another as if she were about to play her best hand during a game of poker at a super casino. She grimaced fiercely when she heard Caroline yelling at her about dinner, carefully placed the purloined photos between two empty November pages in the big leather-bound desk diary she kept on top of her chest of drawers and followed Flash and the smell of her favourite garlic- and rosemary-roasted potatoes down the wide main staircase, along the painting-filled hallway, past the dresser that held a riotous bunch of flowers in a blue glass vase, through the red dining room and into the kitchen where the Slaters always ate when there were only a few of them in residence.

  Caroline was pulling a huge and wonderful-smelling leg of roast lamb from the Aga when Jinx slipped into her seat and reached for the open bottle of Pinot Noir in front of her. She gave Liberty—who was listening to Martin tell a story about his latest video campaign and laughing in all the right places—a discreet thumbs up to indicate she’d located the dress, then turned her attention to her mother as Caroline started heaping leeks and carrots swimming in her glorious homemade cheese sauce onto Jinx’s plate.

  During their visits to the Slaters, Liberty had taken to sleeping in the guest room adjacent to Jinx’s, both of them having agreed that a night alone in a deliciously comfortable double bed was a small price to pay when they chatted late into the night at school all the time. Whoever woke up first always went and got into bed with the other one. Liberty, sporting a pair of George’s old boxer shorts incongruously but sexily matched with a pale peach-coloured silk camisole edged with white lace, peered round the slightly open door.

  She said, “Hey, I heard you rustling around and thought we should plan our day. Are we going to get changed here? There’s no point in us going back to school and then out or we’ll have to come up with some lie about what we’re doing and where we’re going.”

  Jinx stretched, yawned, pushed up her “princess sleeping” pink satin eye mask and rolled over to look at her radio alarm clock. It was only half past nine. She snuggled deeper down into the warmth of her goose-down duvet as the radio played her current favourite Amy Winehouse song.

  Jinx nodded eventually. “Yeah. You’re right. We’ll hang out here all day until George gets back and it’s time to sort ourselves out and get ready to leave. Then we’ll get changed and head straight off to Jamie’s.”

  The girls flung on dressing gowns thoughtfully stolen from the Sanctuary day spa in London by Jinx at the end of her and Caroline’s last mother/daughter bonding day, and sauntered off to Gaymian’s room. The small flat roof, easily accessed via the big picture window behind his desk, was not only an absolute suntrap but also hidden from the rest of the house unless someone peered right out of Caroline and Martin’s bathroom window. These two factors had transpired to make it easily the Slater kids’ number
one favourite place to get baked in the morning.

  “You know, Lib,” Jinx said as she leaned against the red brick wall, pulled her dressing gown tighter around her body and turned her face to the dazzlingly bright winter morning sun, “it’s really funny to think that the last time I sat here I was completely miserable, wondering if you were okay and if I was ever going to see you again. And now—well, everything’s fucking great!”

  “I know,” Liberty replied, resting her head momentarily against Jinx’s arm, “everything is fucking great. And I’m so excited for you tonight with Jamie. I’d love it if you two got together. He’s so cool and such a dude. Great clothes too!”

  “And he’s got loads of nice friends,” retorted an extremely overexcited Jinx, punching Liberty on the arm so hard she squealed. “We can go on double dates!”

  Later, it seemed like the most civilized thing in the world for the two of them to take to Jinx’s bedroom after loudly and loftily proclaiming to anyone who would listen that they would be working on their English homework and therefore must not be disturbed for at least the next two hours, and lock the door tight behind them.

  “I feel like I’m in a boutique hotel,” Liberty said, sighing deliriously as she rolled around in ecstasy on the ridiculously comfortable rug. “I can’t tell you how much I’ve missed this. I love coming here.”

  “I know,” Jinx replied, her current satisfaction levels also at an all-time high. “I love school, but I can’t imagine how people must have coped in, like, the seventies, when boarders were only allowed home at half-term.”