The Worst Girlfriend in the World

by Sarra Manning

Genres: YA Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

A darkly funny new story from the queen of UK YA.
Alice Jenkins is the worst girlfriend in the world according to the many, many boys who've shimmied up lampposts and shoplifted from New Look to impress her, only to be dumped when she gets bored of them. Alice has a very low boredom threshold.
But she never gets bored with Franny, her best friend since they met at nursery school. Friends are for ever. Ain't nothing going to come between them. Girls rule, boys drool is their motto. Well, it's Alice's motto, Franny doesn't have much time for boys; they're all totes immature and only interested in one thing.
But then there's Louis Allen, lead singer of Thee Desperadoes, the best band in Merrycliffe-on-sea (though that could be because they're the only band in Merrycliffe-on-sea). He's a tousle-haired, skinny-jeaned, sultry-eyed manchild, the closest thing that Franny's ever seen to the hipsters that she's read about on the internet and she's been crushing on him HARD for the last three years.
She's never worked up the courage to actually speak to him but she's sure on some deeper level that goes beyond mere words, Louis absolutely knows that she's his soulmate. He just doesn't know that he knows it yet. It's why he cops off with so many other girls.
So, when Alice, bored with callow youths, sets her sights on Louis it threatens to tear the girls' friendship apart, even though they're better than fighting over a boy.
They strike a devil's deal - may the best girl win. Best friends become bitter rivals and everything comes to an explosive conclusion on their first trip to London.
Can true friendship conquer all?
“Manning writes well, delivering some witty one-liners.” (Daily Mail)

Release date: May 1, 2014

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 352

Sample

‘Right, so after you’ve nicked a traffic cone, you need to climb on top of the bus shelter and leave it there, along with one personal item. First one to complete the mission gets an amazing prize.’

Alice stood there, her hands on her hips, blonde hair rippling in the breeze – though it seemed to ripple even when there wasn’t a breeze, it was that kind of hair. It was obvious that she was the amazing prize.

It was a Saturday night and we were hanging out on the High Street, though Merrycliffe-on-Sea doesn’t really have much of a High Street, just a forlorn parade of shops. It doesn’t have much merry either, so we have to make our own fun. As we were both too broke to go to The Wow, watching Alice ensnare two lame boys and make them do her bidding was as good as it was going to get.

‘I wonder how long they’ll be,’ I said to Alice, after the boys had trooped off on their quest to prove they were worthy of her. ‘Want a chip?’

Alice sat down next to me on the low wall in front of the betting shop and shoved her hand in the grease-soaked bag of chips that one of the boys had bought for me because Alice had told him to.

Soon all that was left were the crispy bits floating in an acidic slick of vinegar. Alice looked up at the big, navy sky studded with pinpricks of starry light and ominous wisps of cloud. ‘I think it’s going to rain,’ she said. ‘If they’re not back in five minutes, we might as well go home.’

‘Next week, we have to go to The Wow.’ This week, I’d lent my mum thirty quid because she hadn’t got to the bank. It always took her ages to repay me too, not until I’d dropped brick-sized hints for at least a week about illegally benefiting off child labour.

‘How long does it take to nick a traffic cone anyway?’ Alice asked me. ‘I hope they haven’t got into trouble. Like the time Marc got caught trying to steal a wire basket from outside the pound shop, remember?’

‘Don’t be mean,’ I said as Alice hooted, but I started laughing too because Marc from Year 12 trying to bomb it down the seafront with a wire basket and two security guards in hot pursuit had been one of the highlights of the summer before last.

In the end, to get rid of the evidence, he’d thrown the basket on top of the mini-golf ticket office where it remained to this day. ‘Do you remember the security guards trying to find a ladder to get their stupid basket back? Then they decided that they couldn’t climb it because of Health and Safety regulations.’

‘And Marc didn’t get arrested…’

‘And he turned out to be quite a good snog so it was all OK.’ Alice gave me one of her sideways smiles, her little snub nose twitching, eyebrow arched. It was the look that had all the boys bringing their milkshakes, fries and extra ketchup to Alice’s yard.

Talking of which, limping down the road with only one of his trainers on was Chris, or was it Joey? He was holding a traffic cone aloft like it was an Olympic gold medal.

‘I don’t think this one is going to be a keeper,’ Alice murmured, like that was anything new. ‘But he’ll do for the next ten minutes.’

She stood up, still tiny even in her five-inch heels. Alice was small and curvy. In ye olde days they’d have called her a pocket Venus. Boys wanted to protect her as much as they wanted to get with her. She had the previously mentioned ripply blonde hair and huge blue eyes that twinkled whenever she said something suggestive, which was all the time. It was like Alice came with an inbuilt nudge and wink as standard features.

Like she said, ‘If we weren’t best friends until the day we die, then you’d probably hate my guts, Franny.’

But I couldn’t remember a time when Alice and I weren’t best friends. We’d met at a Mother and Baby group; there’s photographic evidence of us in nappies and a gummy, smiley embrace and barely a thing had happened to me, from losing my first tooth right through to almost getting my first kiss (let’s not even go there), that Alice hadn’t been witness to.

Right now, Alice was all Joey had eyes for, as he presented her with the traffic cone. ‘Trainer on top of the bus shelter by the roundabout,’ he announced. Losing a trainer lacked imagination and meant a tricky walk home but Joey was fit in a dull Merrycliffe way, which was about ten years behind the way really fit boys on style blogs looked, so Alice was eyeing him speculatively.

‘OK then,’ she said without much enthusiasm. ‘To the victor, the spoils.’ Off she went with Joey, swinging her hips in that artful sway she’d worked hard on ever since she got hips three years ago.

It was another five minutes before Chris came into sight minus a traffic cone but carrying one of those little lights that hang on the side of skips so people don’t go crashing into them in the dark.

‘Where’s Alice?’ he asked in dismay. ‘I just left my second-best hoodie on top of the bus shelter.’

‘Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but Joey beat you to it.’

Chris looked at his little skip light and sighed. Then he came and sat next to me on the wall. My buttocks were pretty much all ache at this point.

‘You got any chips left then, Franny?’

‘’Fraid not.’ I was the poster girl for bad news. ‘Got some chewy though.’

I gave him a stick of Wrigleys and he settled back with a sigh, arms folded. ‘I mean, technically, she’s not even that pretty. Vicky is prettier and Shayla’s got bigger tits and you, well, your legs are insane, Franny.’

‘Thanks for the validation.’ I was only being a little sarcastic. The rest of me was quite glad that my love of an opaque black tight and a very short skirt wasn’t just me trying to work a sixties mod silhouette when my legs weren’t up to it. I knew I wasn’t sexy. I wasn’t that pretty. My hair was more mouse than blonde, my eyes were blue but not deep blue like Alice’s. Just blue, and I usually had a couple of spots and I worried that maybe my lips were too thin but I had long, skinny legs and because I did work a sixties mod silhouette I had a rep for being cool. In Merrycliffe it didn’t take a lot to get a rep for being cool. Anyway, that all added up to me being attractive on a good day. But not so attractive that boys wanted to get with me on a regular basis, or, like, ever.

‘Alice is such a bitch,’ Chris huffed. ‘I don’t know why I bothered.’

‘But you did bother and you agreed to her rules so don’t start hating on her just ’cause you lost. No one likes a hater.’

‘I’m not being a hater.’ He was, but I couldn’t be arsed to argue about it. ‘I’m just saying no wonder there’s that graffiti in the bogs…’

‘This isn’t some new graffiti?’ I asked sharply.

‘No, it’s the same old graffiti.’

I slumped in relief, because I was worried that some boy Alice had cruelly rejected might have got nasty and written something rude, possibly involving blow jobs, but it was just the old graffiti: Alice Jenkins is the worst girlfriend in the world.

We didn’t know who’d written it, because Alice tended to snog most boys for no longer than a week. We’d narrowed it down to Rajesh, because they’d gone out for about three whole weeks, or George, who said he’d gone out with Alice when he hadn’t. Though he had gone through a phase of leaving Alice bars of chocolate on her doorstep every morning until she’d told him to stop or she’d report him to the RSPCA because Pucci, her chihuahua, had eaten one and had explosive diarrhoea for three days.

Anyway, it wasn’t like Alice had been offended. She’d persuaded someone to take a picture of the graffiti to use as the cover photo for her Facebook and Twitter profile and she was particularly fond of quoting it like she was doing the voiceover for a big Hollywood movie.

‘Alice Jenkins is,’ she’d say in a deep gravelly voice, ‘the worst girlfriend in the world.’

No, Alice could never be accused of false advertising so there was no reason for Chris to look so mopey. There was also no reason for him to suddenly shift closer to me so that his leg was pressing against mine.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ I told him sternly. ‘I’m not the loving kind. I’m wedded to my career.’

‘You’re sixteen,’ Chris pointed out, like that had anything to do with it.

‘Also I’m a person in my own right. I’m not some consolation prize when you fail one of Alice’s tasks.’ It was my turn to fold my arms.

‘Sorry,’ he said. Then we sat there in silence and it wasn’t Chris’s fault that he’d fallen for Alice’s charms. It also wasn’t his fault that he was rubbish at nicking road safety items.

‘Let’s head back to the bus shelter to get your hoodie and hang out there until Alice and Joey are done, all right?’

It was another fifteen minutes before Alice texted me. I was sitting in the bus shelter with Chris and watching old breakdance videos on YouTube on his phone. It was another fifteen minutes before she came to get me, by which time Chris had pinched the rest of my chewing gum and a blackcurrant Strepsil I’d found at the bottom of my bag. She was really pushing the limits of my good nature tonight.

Alice, inevitably, looked remarkably unsnogged. She’d reapplied her lippy, didn’t have a hair out of place and was still managing to walk in her five-inch heels. Joey, following behind her, looked like he’d just seen God.

‘Let’s go, Franny B,’ she demanded. ‘We’ve things to do, places to be.’

Which meant she needed to change into her trainers but not when there were boys present.

‘So, I’ll see you. We’ll make plans to hook up,’ Joey said, then swallowed hard, amazed by his own daring.

‘Yeah, great, BBM me or whatever.’ At least two of us knew that she would never return any of Joey’s messages, texts or invitations to chat, but at least Alice was letting him down gently.

‘So, Franny, thanks for the chewy,’ Chris said. ‘See you Monday then, right?’

‘Well, see…’

‘Wrong,’ Alice interrupted in a flat voice. ‘You’re not going to see Franny on Monday. None of us are going to see Franny on Monday, because Franny doesn’t go to our school any more.’

‘I’m going to college to do a fashion BTEC. You know, after the school got all pissy about my GCSE results.’ I shrugged. ‘Like, whatever.’

‘It doesn’t matter about your GCSEs, Franny,’ Alice said, like she’d been saying ever since my results had arrived. ‘You’re going to be a famous fashion designer so why do you need Maths anyway? Franny got on to the fashion course on the strength of her portfolio. Like, she actually has a portfolio,’ she added proudly, not that Joey and Chris seemed to care.

As we walked away from the boys and I waited in the doorway of one of Merrycliffe’s eleven charity shops for Alice to change into her trainers, I wondered if I’d ever get my BTEC, then get the hell out of Merrycliffe and go to London to find fashion fame and fortune. Or would my Saturday nights always be like this?

‘Oh, cheer up, Franny!’ Alice exclaimed, tucking her arm in mine. ‘I wish I was going to college and not stuck at school. School is so immature.’

‘Your mum still won’t budge then?’ Alice’s dad owned five hair and beauty salons and Alice would much rather go into the family business than study for five A levels in subjects she didn’t care about, but her mum wasn’t having any of it. She let Alice work in the Merrycliffe salon on Thursdays after school and all day Saturdays, but she was convinced that Alice was going to be the next Alan Sugar – a younger, prettier, femaler Alan Sugar. She was also convinced that Alice was going to go to Oxford or Cambridge to study Economics. It was kind of amazing how little she knew her only daughter.

‘No, but Dad’s on my side.’ Alice’s dad was always on her side. ‘I just need to come up with a cunning plan.’

‘You’ll think of something,’ I said, as we turned on to the seafront. ‘You always do.’

‘Oh God, I don’t want to think about school. It can wait until Monday. Come on! Let’s run!’

Alice and I grabbed on to each other’s hand and ran, screaming into the wind, not caring that we might wake up the residents of the many old people’s care homes that populated the seafront.

That was the way we rolled. We lived for kicks, even if the kicks were hard to come by.

It wasn’t long before we got to my house. It was a huge Victorian beast of a house that had been a hotel back in the days before aeroplanes, when people had to holiday in Britain. I couldn’t believe that anyone would come to Merrycliffe of their own free will. Like, on holiday, but that was the olden times for you. Now Merrycliffe was known only for being Europe’s eleventh largest container port and our house was just a house, its sky-blue paint job corroded by the salt in the air, which had also rusted its metal balconies.

It wasn’t much but I called it home. ‘Let’s do something tomorrow,’ I said to Alice as I unlatched the gate. ‘To celebrate our last day of freedom.’

‘Something exciting,’ Alice agreed.

We stood there for a while, a minute at least, trying to think of something exciting we could do.

‘Oh, look, come round mine and I’ll do your nails and then we can order some food and watch repeats of Jersey Shore and try really hard not to die of boredom,’ Alice said finally. ‘Sound like a plan?’

‘Let’s skip Jersey Shore for Made in Chelsea and that sounds like one wild Sunday afternoon right there,’ I said. Then we air-kissed three times, ’cause I’d read that up in London, if you’re in the media or generally fabulous, three kisses are industry standard. ‘See you tomorrow if I don’t get a better offer in the meantime.’

Alice snorted. ‘Like, that’s going to happen. Here!’

The house was in darkness and felt cold and stale as if it had been shut up for a long, long time, the rooms unaired, furniture swathed in dust sheets.

Except it hadn’t, but my mother refused to open a window because she thought that the fresh air was full of toxic germs. Don’t even get me started on the badness of putting on lights – apparently it had been proven that even energy-saving bulbs could give you cancer but whatever, I put them on anyway. Blazing a path from hall to kitchen, where I shoved two pieces of bread in the toaster, stuck the kettle on, put on even more lights as I climbed the stairs and knocked on my mum’s door.

There was no reply. I pushed the door open and peered into the darkness.

‘No…’ came the piteous whine from the lump of flesh huddled under the duvet as I turned on the light. ‘Turn it off.’

‘Making toast. What do you want on it? Marmite? Jam? Is it too late for cheese?’

‘No…’

‘Peanut butter? Tell you what, I’ll let you have some of my Nutella.’ I sat down on the edge of the bed and poked at what I thought might be her arm. ‘As it’s you.’

‘Please, Franny.’ Her voice was muffled until she pulled back the covers enough that I could see her face, all squinched up in case she might accidentally breathe in some fetid, airborne virus. ‘I can’t eat.’

‘Well, tough, you’re eating ’cause I’m not going to bed until you do. I’ll just stay in here talking and talking and talking until you can’t take it any more and go down to the kitchen of your own free will and end up eating the whole box of those weird Polish cocktail sausages with the use-by date of January 2019 just to get me to shut up. Your call.’

There was no response. It didn’t surprise me.

When I came back fifteen minutes later with a laden tray, the bedside lamp had been switched on but she’d disappeared under the duvet again. I put the tray down on the bedside table. Right next to her pills, which I was sure she hadn’t taken.

There was still no response as I sat back down on the bed, but I made sure that I was pretty much sitting on her leg so she had to shift over. With a deep sigh she sat up. I shoved a mug of tea at her so she had no choice but to take it, otherwise there would have been hot tea all over the duvet and spills drove her to the very edge of her nerves.

A huge number of things drove my mum to the very edge of her nerves.

‘Been out then?’ she asked, her voice rusty because she hadn’t used it all day. She took three sips of tea and I let myself relax ever so slightly.

‘Yeah, with Alice.’

Because she’d started to nibble at the toast now, she had the energy to pull a vinegary face. She didn’t like Alice. Thought she was a bad influence, though she should have known, being my own mother and all, that I wasn’t the type of girl who was easily influenced.

But tonight, I went along with it. I told her about Alice’s re-enacting The Hunger Games with two dumb boys and it was the distraction she needed to drink the mug of tea and eat her two pieces of toast. She even looked at the tube of hand cream on her dressing table like she was thinking about putting some on.

‘Alice… she’s one of those girls who’ll get pregnant before she’s even finished school. She’s probably pregnant already,’ she said disapprovingly.

‘She’s not. She won’t. She doesn’t do that with them, she just likes to make them suffer,’ I explained. ‘There’s not much else to do round here on a Saturday night, if we don’t go to The Wow.’

‘I suppose.’ Mum smiled so fleetingly I almost missed it. But I didn’t and for that microsecond she was who she used to be, then she was gone.

I stood up. ‘I’m going to run you a bath. I put a wash on before I went out. Should be dry by now. I’ll get you a clean nightie to change into.’

‘I don’t really feel up to it.’ She was already trying to retreat back under the covers.

‘Oh, you’ll feel much better once you’ve had a bath. And tell you what? I’ll change the sheets while you’re soaking.’ I pulled back the covers and didn’t quite haul her out of bed, but I came pretty close to it.

She didn’t shout at me. Or swear. No threats or tears, just a little bit of grumbling as she swung her pasty white legs over the side of the bed and took hold of the hand I was offering to pull her up. This was a good day.

Once she was in the bath, which I’d generously doused with lavender bubble bath ’cause I’d read somewhere that it was meant to be all soothing and stuff, she let me wash her hair. ‘You can do the rest,’ I told her, as I handed her a sponge and the bar of lily-scented soap I’d bought her last birthday.

I went back into her room, opened the window to let in five minutes of fresh air and checked the pill bottle by her bed. There were twenty-three tablets in it. There’d been twenty-three tablets in it all week. There should have been only seven left and I should have been nagging her about going to the chemist to pick up her repeat prescription. I was too tired to think about that. Instead, I stripped her bed.

I could hear a faint splashing as I came back up the stairs with clean linen and fifteen minutes later she was back in bed. Her hair was damp and she wouldn’t let me use the hairdryer because she said it would just blow dust around the room, but she was sitting up, she’d taken her pills with the glass of water I’d got her and was looking like she was present, rather than, like, absent.

‘Tomorrow, I might do a supermarket shop,’ she said. ‘We’ll make a list at breakfast. Maybe I’ll drive, so we can go to the big Morrisons in Lytham. What do you think?’

‘It sounds great,’ I said with a lot more enthusiasm than I felt. I didn’t want to spend my last precious Sunday free from the yoke of further education traipsing round the big Morrisons in Lytham. Besides, there were ten hours between now and breakfast tomorrow. A lot could happen in ten hours.

I bent down to kiss her cheek, wished her goodnight and said I’d see her in the morning.

 

When I got to my room, I had the sick, panicky feeling I always got when I thought about what she might be like in the morning. The only way to stop it was to stop thinking about her. To shove her far back into the furthest reaches of my head, as far back as I could, then the sick, panicky feeling would go.

Instead I looked at all my college stuff laid out, though college was still two sleeps away. I had new stationery: a really expensive set of fibre-tip pens for drawing, an A3 sketch pad and a lime-green notebook my sister Siobhan had bought me which had DESIGNERS I MET AND LIKED embossed on it in gold letters. I had my sewing kit in a little vintage attaché case: three different pairs of scissors, pinking shears and my chalks. Measuring tape, pins, thimble, reels of cotton and finishings. Really, it was a thing of beauty.

Draped over the back of a chair was the dress I planned to wear on Monday. It was a candy-pink and white sweater dress I’d found in a chazza. I’d put a corded trim on the unravelling hem, and fake-leather patches on the elbows like you get on old men’s cardigans. I was going to wear it with black tights and a pair of amazing cork-wedged sandals because I love an open toe with a matt tight.

(It’s very fashion to refer to things like jeans and tights in the singular. ‘I was rocking a skinny jean with a five-inch heel,’ you might say, though Alice said you’d only say that if you were a gigantic wanker.)

Apart from the pile of college stuff, my room is actually very minimalist in a space age, pop art way – probably because my sewing stuff is in the room next door, though I like to think of it more as my design studio. I’m on the third floor, just below what would have been the staffrooms in the attic. Mum never ventures up this far and Dad’s always away so I can pretty much do what I want in here.

What I wanted to do was to paper my walls in silver foil. Yeah, Christmas turkey tin foil. It was very fiddly, but I was inspired by a place in New York called the Factory, where the artist Andy Warhol had lived and worked in the sixties. He was famous for making art that riffed off of all sorts of weird random stuff like Campbell’s soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, even Brillo soap-pad boxes. He also directed black and white films full of sixties hipsters and he had a house band called the Velvet Underground sometimes fronted by a really cool German model called Nico and then Edie Sedgwick would dance on stage with them. Edie was this doomed, mad, utterly beautiful heiress, who’s my absolute style icon and glamour hero and numero uno inspiration. I discovered Edie when I saw a picture of her on a style blog. She was wearing just a T-shirt and black tights and was posed in an arabesque while perched on a stuffed rhinoceros. No wonder I was intrigued. Once I started obsessing on Edie, it didn’t take long to find out about Andy Warhol and his whole scene. I would have loved to be part of a scene like that, except for all the drugs and nudity, that is.

As well as clearing the Spar of all its tin foil so I could have shiny, silver walls, I also have a huge blown-up photograph of Edie, Andy Warhol and another guy called Gerard Malanga on the wall right opposite my bed. It was taken in New York, obvs, because New York is totes the centre of the universe, and they’re on the street. Literally on the street, rising up out of a manhole, Edie leaning back against Gerard, her long, black-clad legs stretching up to infinity, Andy staring straight ahead at the camera with his own camera poised.

Whenever I was feeling unsure and down-hearted, like I was tonight, I would climb into bed and stare at Edie, Andy and Gerard and it always made me feel better.

That photo represents everything I want to be. The problem is that I’m just not sure how to get there.

On Monday morning, walking through the college grounds, after the trudge up the long hill from Merrycliffe town centre, felt like walking the green mile.

Obviously I wasn’t the only new person starting college that day. But I felt like the only person hanging solo and I was getting some smirky looks because of my candy-striped dress, tights and open-toed sandals. Merrycliffe College wasn’t ready for a tight and an open toe.

I styled it out by putting on my big dark glasses – they’re a lot like the ones that Audrey Hepburn wears in Breakfast at Tiffany’s – and assumed my best ‘bitch, please’ expression.

It got me through three hours of filling in forms and my first catch-up GCSE Maths class, then skulking around the canteen for the rest of the morning. It was weird not having a form room to hang out in but at least I could go home for lunch without fear of being accused of bunking off. At college you were treated as an adult, or else they didn’t really care what you did – it was too soon to tell.

Mum was actually up when I got home. Not dressed, but she’d managed to make it down to the kitchen and was watching a re. . .