Adorkable

by Sarra Manning

Genres: Young Adult; YA Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Jeane Smith is seventeen and has turned her self-styled dorkiness into an art form. But in spite having hundreds of Internet friends and a cool boyfriend, she feels inexplicably lonely. Things get worse when Michael Lee, the most popular boy at school, suspects that Jeane's boyfriend is secretly seeing his girlfriend. Michael and Jeane have NOTHING in common. So why can't she stop talking to him?

Release date: May 24, 2012

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 336

Sample

‘We need to talk,’ Michael Lee told me firmly when I stepped out of the makeshift changing room at the St Jude’s jumble sale, which was actually four curtained rails arranged in a square, to have a good preen in front of a clouded mirror.

I didn’t say anything. I just stared back at his reflection, because he was Michael Lee. MICHAEL LEE!

Oh, Michael Lee. Where to begin? Boys wanted to be him. Girls wanted him. He was star of school, stage and playing field. Enough brains to fit in with the geeks, captain of the football team so all the sporty types bowed down before him, and his faux-hawk and carefully scuffed Converses also pulled in the indie crowd. If that wasn’t enough, his dad was Chinese so he had an exotic Eurasian thing going on; there was even an ode to his cheekbones on the wall of the second-floor girls’ loos at school.

He might have been all that and a bag of Hula Hoops but, as far as I was concerned, if you were one of those popular types who got on with absolutely everyone then you couldn’t have much of an edge. To be all things to all people, Michael Lee had to be the least interesting person in our school. That took some doing because our school was bursting at the seams with mediocrity.

So I couldn’t imagine why Michael Lee was standing there in front of me insisting that we needed to have a chat, chin tilted so I had a great view of his poetry-inspiring cheekbones. I could also see right up his nostrils because he was freakishly tall.

‘Go away,’ I said in a bored voice, wafting my hand languidly in the direction of the other side of the church hall. ‘Because I can guarantee that you have nothing to say that I’d want to hear.’

It would have sent most people scuttling back from whence they came but Michael Lee just gave me this look as if I was all hot air and bluster, then he dared to put his hand on my shoulder so he could turn my stiff, cringing body round. ‘Look,’ he said, his breath hitting my face, which made me flinch even more. ‘What’s wrong with that picture?’

I couldn’t concentrate on anything other than Michael Lee having his football-playing, prize-essay-writing hot fingers on my clavicle. It was just wrong. Beyond wrong. It was a whole other world of wrong. I screwed my eyes tightly shut in protest and when I opened them again, I was looking at Barney, who I’d left in charge of my stall, against my better judgement, talking to a girl.

Not just any girl but Scarlett Thomas, who happened to be Michael Lee’s girlfriend. Not that I held that against her. What I held against her was that she was vapid and had a really annoying voice, which was breathy and babyish and had exactly the same effect on me as someone crunching ice cubes. Scarlett also had long blonde hair, which she spent hours combing, spritzing, primping and tossing so if you stood behind her in the lunch queue there was a good chance you’d get a mouthful of hair.

She was tossing her hair back now as she spoke to Barney and, yes, she was grinning a vacant grin and Barney was smiling and ducking his head, the way he did when he was embarrassed. It wasn’t a picture that made my heart sing, but then again …

‘There’s nothing wrong with that picture,’ I told Michael Lee crisply. ‘It’s just your girlfriend talking to my boyfriend—’

‘But it’s not the talking—’

‘About quadratic equations or one of the many other things Scarlett doesn’t understand, which made her fail her Maths GCSE and have to retake it.’ I gave Michael a flinty-eyed look. ‘That’s why Ms Clements asked Barney to tutor Scarlett. Didn’t she mention it?’

‘She did mention it and it’s not them talking to each other that’s wrong, it’s how they’re not really talking at all. They’re just standing there and gazing at each other,’ he pointed out.

‘You’re being ridiculous,’ I said, even as I surreptitiously glanced back to where Barney and Scarlett were indeed gazing at each other. It was obvious they were staring at each other because they’d run out of things to say and it was awkward, nervous gazing, because they had absolutely nothing in common. ‘There is nada, nowt, not one thing going on. Well, apart from the fact that you and Scarlett are slumming it at a jumble sale,’ I added, turning my attention back to Michael Lee. ‘Right, now that we’ve cleared that up, feel free to go about your business.’

Michael opened his mouth like he had something more to say about the utter non-event of Barney and Scarlett gurning at each other. Then shut it again. I waited for him to leave so I could go about my business, but he suddenly moved closer to me.

‘There is something going on between them,’ he said, bending his head. His breath ghosted against my cheek again. I wanted to bat it away with an irritated gesture. He straightened up. ‘And nice dress, by the way.’

I could tell he didn’t mean it from the almost-smirk on his face, which made me wonder if Michael Lee might actually have some hidden depths buried way below the surface of his bland exterior.

I sniffed loudly and contemptuously, which made the quirk of his lips blossom into a full-blown smirk before he strode away.

‘Jeane, my love, don’t take this the wrong way, but he was being sarcastic. That dress doesn’t look at all nice,’ said a pained voice to my left and I looked over at Marion and Betty, two volunteers from the St Jude’s social committee who manned the cake stall and policed the changing room. One of their stern looks would scare off even the most determined perv. I didn’t doubt that they’d pelt peeping toms with rock buns if the stern looks failed.

‘I know he was being sarcastic but he was also being very mistaken because this dress is made from all kinds of awesome,’ I said, stepping back so I could get my preen on, though my heart wasn’t really in it now.

The dress was black and I didn’t normally do black because why would anyone want to wear black when there were so many fabulous colours in the world? People with no imagination and Goths who hadn’t got the memo that the nineties were over, that’s who. But it wasn’t just black; it had these horizontal patterns all over it – yellow, green, orange, blue, red, purple and pink squiggly lines that made my eyeballs itch – and it fitted so well that it could have been made just for me, which didn’t happen often because I have a very odd body. I’m small, like five feet nothing, and compact so I can fit into children’s sizes, but I’m sturdy with it. My grandfather used to say that I reminded him of a pit pony – when he wasn’t telling me little girls should be seen and not heard.

Anyway, yes. I’m sturdy, stocky even. Like, my legs are really muscly because I cycle a lot and I’m kind of solid everywhere else. If it wasn’t for the iron-grey hair (it was meant to be white but my friend Ben had only been training as a hairdresser for two weeks and something went badly wrong) and the bright red lipstick I always wore, I could have passed for a chubby twelve-year-old boy. But this dress had enough nips and tucks and darts and horizontal lines that at least it looked as if I had some kind of shape because me and puberty hadn’t got on very well. Instead of womanly curves, it had left me with a general lumpiness.

‘You’d look so pretty if you wore a nice dress instead of all this nasty jumble sale stuff. You don’t know where it’s been,’ Betty lamented. ‘My granddaughter’s got lots of clothes she doesn’t wear any more. I could sort you out some things.’

‘No, thanks,’ I said firmly. ‘I love the nasty jumble sale stuff.’

‘But some of my granddaughter’s old clothes are from Topshop.’

It was very hard to restrain myself, but I didn’t immediately launch into a rant about the evils of buying clothes from high street chains, which peddled the same five looks each season so everyone had to dress just like everyone else in clothes that were sewn together by children in Third World sweatshops who were paid in cups of maize.

‘Really, Betty, I like dressing in clothes that other people don’t want any more. It’s not the clothes’ fault that they’ve gone out of fashion,’ I insisted. ‘Anyway, it’s better to reuse than recycle.’

Five minutes later, the dress was mine, and I was back in my own lilac-tweed, old-lady skirt and mustard-coloured jumper and heading to my stall where Barney was leafing through a stack of yellowing comics. Thankfully, Scarlett and Michael Lee were nowhere to be seen.

‘I got you cake,’ I announced. At the sound of my voice, Barney’s head shot up and his milk-white complexion took on a rosy hue. I’d never known a boy who blushed as much as Barney did. In fact, I hadn’t even been certain that boys could blush, until I met Barney.

He was blushing now for no good reason, unless … No, I wasn’t going to waste my precious time on Michael Lee’s crackpot theories, except …

‘So, Michael Lee and Scarlett Thomas, what were they doing here?’ I asked casually. ‘Hardly their scene. I bet they’ve gone away to disinfect themselves from the stench of second-hand goods.’

Barney was now so red that it looked as if someone had plunged his head into a pan of boiling water, but he hunched over so a curtain of silky hair covered his burning face and grunted something unintelligible.

‘You and Scarlett?’ I prompted.

‘Er, what about me and Scarlett?’ he asked in a strangulated voice.

I shrugged. ‘Just saw her checking out the stall when I was trying on dresses. I hope you gave her the hard sell and offloaded that chipped “Rugby players do it with odd-shaped balls” mug that I can’t shift.’

‘Well, no, I didn’t have a chance,’ Barney admitted, as if he was confessing to something shameful. ‘And that mug is really chipped.’

‘True. Very true. Not surprised you didn’t get round to it,’ I said, cocking my head in what I hoped was an understanding manner. ‘You two looked pretty tight. What were you talking about?’

Barney flailed his hands. ‘Nothing!’ he yelped, then realised immediately that ‘Nothing’ was not a suitable reply. ‘We talked about Maths and stuff,’ he added.

I’d been sure that there wasn’t anything going on with Barney and Scarlett apart from some compound fractions, but Barney’s apparent guilt was forcing me to rethink that theory.

I knew I could winkle the truth from Barney in nanoseconds, and that the truth was that Barney had a crush on Scarlett – being easy on the eye and untaxing on the brain, she was considered quite a catch. There was no point in getting upset about it, even though I’d raised him to be better than that, and it really wasn’t worth talking about any longer. It was far too boring.

‘I got you cake,’ I reminded Barney and watched his eyes skitter from side to side as if he wasn’t sure whether my abrupt change of subject meant that the topic of Scarlett was over and done with or if it was a sneaky tactic to catch him out.

For once, it wasn’t. I handed over a huge slab of cake, which was obscured by a napkin. Barney took it warily.

‘Well, thanks,’ he muttered, as he uncovered his prize and I watched his face go from deep pink to bedsheet-white. Barney was so white that he was only a couple of shades down from albino. He hated his skin almost as much as he hated his orange hair. At school, the lower years call Barney ‘the ginger minger’, but Barney’s hair isn’t ginger. It’s actually the colour of marmalade, except when the sun is shining and it becomes a living flame, which is why I’ve forbidden him from dyeing it. He’s not a minger either. When his face isn’t obscured by a thick fringe, his features are delicate, almost girlish, and his eyes, which were fixed on me imploringly, are pond-green. Barney is the only boy I’ve ever met whose signature colours are white, orange and green. Most other boys are blue or brown, I thought, and made a mental note to explore this colour theory on my blog later in the week. Then I turned my attention back to Barney, who had puckered up his face and was thrusting the napkin and its contents back at me.

‘This is carrot cake!’

I nodded. ‘Carrot cake with cream-cheese frosting. Yum.’

‘Not yum. This is, like, the anti-yum. I ask you to get me a cake. A CAKE! And you come back with something made out of carrots and cheese. That is not cake,’ Barney snapped. ‘It’s non-cake-food disguised as cake.’

I could only stand and stare. I’d seen Barney petulant before – I was usually responsible for it – but I’d never known him quite so snippy.

‘But you eat carrots,’ I ventured timidly under the weight of

Barney’s ferocious scowl. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen you eat carrots.’

‘I eat them under duress – I have to have meat or potatoes with them.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said and I tried to sound like I meant it. Barney was in a very unpredictable mood and I didn’t want to trigger another explosion. ‘I’m sorry I sucked at the cake selection. I obviously need to work on that.’

‘Well, I suppose it’s not your fault,’ Barney decided magnanimously. He looked at me from under his fringe, a mere glimmer of a smile just hovering on his lips. ‘You do really suck at choosing cakes, but it’s good to know you suck at something. I was beginning to wonder.’

‘I suck at loads of things,’ I assured Barney, as I decided that it was probably safe to stand behind the stall with him. ‘Can’t turn cartwheels. Never got the hang of German and I don’t have strong enough facial muscles to arch an eyebrow.’

‘It’s genetic,’ Barney said. ‘But I think you can teach yourself to do it.’

I pushed up my right eyebrow with my fingertip. ‘Maybe I should tape my eyebrow up every night and hope that my muscle memory kicks in.’

‘I bet there’s an instruction guide on the internet,’ Barney said eagerly. It was just the kind of obscure, random thing that he liked to research. ‘I’ll put my Google-fu on it, shall I?’

We were friends again. I mean, boyfriend and girlfriend again. I got Barney a slice of chocolate cake, then spent the rest of the afternoon adding to the list of things I absolutely sucked at, which made him laugh.

It was good. We were cool. Though I wondered why I had to run myself down in order to make Barney feel better about our relationship when I was a card-carrying feminist. Like, seriously. I had the word ‘feminist’ on my business cards. But for once I took the easy option because I couldn’t bear the thought of three hours of Barney moping about. I didn’t even yell at him when he spilt Dr Pepper on the ‘Adorkable’ hot water bottle cover it had taken me ages to knit.

I hate Jeane Smith.

I hate her stupid grey hair and her disgusting polyester clothes. I hate how she goes out of her way to make herself look as unattractive as possible but still wants everyone to notice her. She should just wear a T-shirt with ‘Everyone! Pay attention to me! Right now!’ printed on it.

I hate how everything she says is sarcastic and mean and sounds even more sarcastic and mean because of the flat, toneless way she speaks. As if showing emotion or excitement is way too uncool.

I hate the way she shoved her fugly face into mine and jabbed a finger in my chest to make her point. Though, now I think about it, I’m not sure she did do that, but it’s the kind of thing she would probably do.

But mostly I hate her for being so obnoxious and such an out of control bitch that even her boyfriend can’t stand to be around her and has to start looking for an out. Especially when that out is my girlfriend.

I knew that Barney fancied Scarlett. It was a given. She was really fit. Really, really fit. Whenever we went into town and got within fifty yards of Topshop she was mobbed on all sides by model agency scouts.

But Scarlett never went to see the agencies because she said she was three inches too short to be a model and she was far too shy. Before we started dating, I thought Scarlett’s shyness was sweet. But, after a while, shyness isn’t endearing and doesn’t make you want to protect someone, it makes you secretly grind your teeth in frustration.

The thing about shyness is that it seems a lot like not trying, the same way that Scarlett wasn’t even trying to make our relationship work. I was putting the effort in, calling her every night, thinking of cool things to do on our dates. I bought her presents and helped her set up her BlackBerry and in all ways I was an excellent boyfriend. Whether it’s football or A-level Physics or dating, what’s the point of doing anything if you’re going to do it in a half-arsed way? And I don’t want to sound bigheaded but I could go out with pretty much any girl at our school – in fact, any girl at any school in our borough. The fact that I chose Scarlett should have given her a huge shot of confidence and she could have shown a little gratitude too.

So when I saw Scarlett and Barney together, it made me furious. All I ever got from Scarlett was a lot of hair-tossing and a few wan smiles but Barney got longing looks and giggling. I couldn’t actually hear the giggles but I imagined them as tiny, silver daggers aimed right at my heart and, when I turned my head away, I saw a short, squat, grey-haired girl preening in the mirror.

Jeane Smith is the only person at our school that I’ve never spoken to. Seriously. I hate labels and cliques and all that bullshit about blanking people ’cause they’re not into the same music as you or they’re crap at sports. I like that I can get on with everyone and always find some common ground to talk about, even if they’re not that cool.

Jeane Smith doesn’t talk to anyone, apart from that Barney kid. Everyone talks about her, or about her revolting clothes and the arguments she picks with the teachers in every single one of her classes, but no one talks to her because if you try to, you find yourself on the business end of some serious snark and a superior stare.

That was what I got when I tried to explain my suspicions about Barney and Scarlett. About halfway through my first sentence, I realised my mistake, but it was too late. I was committed to having a conversation with her. And I don’t know how anyone could manage a dead-eyed stare that also promised unimaginable pain but somehow Jeane had mastered the art. It was as if her retinas had been replaced with laser pointers.

Then she was sticking out her chin and being a bitch, and suddenly whatever whacked-out thing that was going on with Barney and Scarlett didn’t matter as much as having the last word.

‘Nice dress, by the way,’ I said, cocking my head at the horrible multi-coloured mess of a dress that she was wearing, and it was a low blow and completely beneath me, but at least it got Jeane Smith to shut up. But then she smirked and she was one of those people who could make a smirk say a thousand words and none of them good ones.

By the time I’d finished that unpleasant little exchange, Scarlett and Barney had finished their silent flirting. She hurried over to me, her face more animated than I’d ever seen it.

‘Can we go now?’ she asked, as if it had been my idea to go to a jumble sale full of tatty old junk and stinky clothes that wouldn’t have been accepted as donations at the crappiest charity shop in the world. But Scarlett had wanted to come and as she never suggested interesting or fun things to do on dates, I’d seen it as a real sign of progress in our relationship.

Now I suspected that Scarlett had only wanted to come because Barney was going to be there. Normally I’d have come straight to the point and asked Scarlett what was going on, but something made me hesitate. If I couldn’t make it work with Scarlett, what did it say about me? It said she preferred a mumbling ginger kid over me, which just … no. That couldn’t be possible.

So I just said, ‘Cool. This place smells like someone died in here.’

Scarlett murmured in agreement but, just as we reached the door, she turned her head and looked back at the corner where Barney sat. He wasn’t looking longingly at Scarlett but at Jeane, who, from the way she was standing with her hands on her hips and a belligerent look on her face, was giving him a hard time.

‘God, I hate that girl,’ Scarlett said, her voice murderous and low. I stared at her in amazement. It was the first time I’d ever heard Scarlett express an opinion. ‘She’s so mean. She made me cry in English once because she, like, actually stuck her hand up in the middle of me reading from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to complain about my delivery. At least I don’t sound like a stoned robot.’

‘Well, she is kind of annoying …’

‘She isn’t kind of anything. She is annoying,’ Scarlett informed me icily. She was full of surprises this afternoon. She even glared at me as I held the door open for her as if I was a Jeane Smith proxy.

‘Why are you getting so worked up about her?’ I asked, as we walked up the steps that led to the street. I already knew the answer – Scarlett was hating on Jeane, because Jeane was dating on Barney. I was sure of it.

‘“I am Jeane Smith,”’ Scarlett intoned in a mechanical voice, which made me smile reluctantly, because this worked up, ranty Scarlett was approximately one thousand times more fun than the Scarlett I’d been dating. ‘“I have a million followers on Twitter and I am a blogging genius and my disgusting clothes and old lady hair are actually the last word in cool and if you don’t agree it’s because you are not cool. In fact, you’re so uncool that I can’t even bring myself to look at you, in case you infect me with your nasty, uncool suburban germs.” Ugh! She’s so up herself.’

‘She has a blog? Big deal. Everyone has a blog.’

‘You haven’t seen her blog,’ Scarlett muttered darkly. ‘The stuff she goes on about – it’s unbelievable.’

‘How come you’re cyber-stalking her anyway?’ I asked, my voice getting so squeaky that I choked on the final syllable.

‘I’m not.’ Scarlett’s voice, on the other hand, was fading into its usual whisper. ‘I have to read her blog, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to join in when people are talking about her at school.’

‘Don’t you Year 12s have anything else to talk about that isn’t Jeane Smith?’

Scarlett didn’t reply, but looked up and down the road then gave a sigh of relief. ‘There’s my mum’s car. I’ve got to go.’

‘I thought we were going to get a coffee.’

‘Well, yeah, my mum texted me and said that she was, um, like, in the area.’ Scarlett squirmed unhappily. ‘While you were looking round the jumble sale. I mean, that’s when she texted me.’

I should just end this, I thought. Because this, us, we were going nowhere and yes, Scarlett would give me her sad face that looked like a baby seal just before it got clubbed to death but I’d seen Scarlett’s sad face so often in the last few weeks that I was immune to it.

‘Look, Scar, I’ve been thinking …’ I began, but Scarlett was already backing away.

‘Got to go,’ she yelped, as her mother tooted the horn. ‘See you tomorrow or something.’

‘Yeah, see you,’ I said, but Scarlett had already started running to where her mother’s Range Rover was blocking the traffic and there was no way she could have heard me.

All too soon it was five o’clock and the jumbling hordes started thinning out.

I’d had a good afternoon and sold most of the heavy items, including a mouldy collection of pulp fiction novels, a hideous framed painting of a clown that had given me the shudders every time I looked at it, and an art deco statuette of a black cat, which had a light fitting shoved on top of its head and an electrical lead and plug where its tail should be.

It meant packing up the stall and loading my plastic crates into Barney’s mum’s massive petrol-guzzling four-wheel-drive didn’t take too long and we didn’t have to pile things up on the back seat like usual. Barney had only passed his test a couple of months before and it sent him into a sweating, shaking tizzy when he couldn’t see out of the rear window.

Even though his field of vision was completely clear, Barney still needed absolute silence while he was driving, but as we got nearer to where I lived it got harder to keep quiet.

I waited until we stopped at a traffic light. ‘So, do you want to hang at mine for a while?’ I asked. ‘Or we could go and see a film. There’s that one with Ellen Page that we talked about. Or how do you feel—?’

Barney hissed in annoyance because I was still talking as the lights changed from red to amber. ‘Sorry,’ I muttered, sinking back on the seat as he tensed every muscle in anticipation of the lights turning green and having to drive off again without the car stalling.

I tried to keep still and quiet, and not even breathe too heavily, until Barney had pulled slowly and carefully into the kerb outside the redbrick mansion block where I lived.

‘So, do you want to do something now?’ I asked. ‘For a couple of hours.’

‘I can’t. You know my mum likes me to spend Sunday evening at home so she can check that I’ve done my coursework and that I’ve washed behind my ears and sharpened my pencils and I have enough clean T-shirts to last the week.’ Barney wrinkled his nose in disgust. ‘I bet even when I’m at university she’ll drive down on a Sunday afternoon to check up on me.’

‘I’m sure she wouldn’t do that,’ I said, although I thought Barney’s mum would do precisely that if Barney didn’t have a younger brother who needed just as much, if not more, supervision than Barney. There wasn’t much love between Barney’s mum and me – she thought I was a bad influence on her son and had much preferred the days when he stayed at home and didn’t have a social life. But I was careful never to raise this topic with Barney because I didn’t want to be the sort of girl who came between a boy and his overbearing mother.

‘Yeah, she would.’ Barney unclipped his seatbelt. ‘I’ll help you get everything inside, but then I have to go home.’

Once we’d ferried all the crates and boxes and bags into the foyer, then into the rickety lift up to the sixth floor and then dumped them in my hall, Barney took a deep breath and waited for me to hang up my jacket.

I could see his anxious face reflected in the hall mirror and it was a perfect match for my own. I hated this part. The goodbye kiss part.

I took two steps forward as Barney craned his neck a few centimetres towards me to show willing. When we were practically nose to nose, he screwed his eyes shut and pursed his lips tightly until they resembled a cat’s bumhole. Apart from the lack of visual stimulation, when I pressed my lips against Barney’s they didn’t feel very kiss-shaped. His mouth wasn’t relaxed, his lips weren’t soft and pliable, so we ended up kissing the way we always ended up kissing, mashing our mouths against each other furiously as if the effort made up for the lack of passion.

There were no hands cupping or fondling. Barney kept his arms at his sides and I placed one hand very decorously on his shoulder and there was absolutely no tongue. The first time I’d tried to introduce it, Barney had freaked out so much that I’d never dared repeat it. I counted, ‘One elephant, two elephant, three elephant’ in my head and when I got to ‘fifty elephant’ I gently disengaged our lips.

‘We’re getting better at that,’ Barney remarked, even though he had this pained look on his face as i. . .