Do You Remember the First Time?

That wasn’t how I expected my hands to look. They wouldn’t have chipped black polish on them, for a start. But as I forced myself to read the book, I forced myself to realise the truth, however weird it was.
    This girl was me, all right. Unbearably, unreadably so at some points.
    ‘Fallon is a big WITCH. She thinks she’s so brilliant but I think she’s probably a VERY UNHAPPY PERSON who thinks sending round notes about Somebody else’s feelings is funny, which means she is probably SICK.’
    Yeah. Oh, no, please, what was this?
    ‘I think I’m in love with Ethan. I can hardly say it out loud, it makes me feel so strange. But I really do think I love him. I think this might be it. And he looked at me at least three times yesterday.’
    Oh, fuck a doo, surely not. These bloody lads. In two years’ time they’d be DROOLING over us at university, and at the moment they were too busy playing top trumps to even think of including someone … OK, I was not going to have my feelings hurt by someone I had never set eyes on. Let me see …
    There was an incomprehensible scrawl that seemed to indicate Constanzia and I had drunk two bottles of her father’s wine as an experiment and passed out. I had stopped dotting my i’s with circles only a year before. And the more I flipped back and forth in the book for it, the more I realised the truth. It had been true then, and it was true now.
    I was still a virgin. Of course I was. I’d just turned sixteen. It’s just – at this I got a sudden twinge, I didn’t know why. It was very peculiar. Being a virgin wasn’t something I’d thought of as a state for so long, or at any rate as something to kick against as a prerequisite in women in geopolitical terms.
    As soon as I left home – the increasingly sad, inward-looking place home had become after Dad’s departure – I’d got rid of it as quick as was humanly possible. It was sore, fumbly, damp and embarrassing.
    Things had gradually improved, of course, and it’s rarely a romantic highspot for anyone, but I could feel the hopes and dreams tied up in this book, my blank slate, and hugged it thoughtfully to my tiny chest.
    ‘You don’t even know,’ I whispered to it. ‘Well, don’t accept any invites to any college balls willy-nilly.’
    ‘It was really nice kissing Felix at the s.p. We kissed for four hours and twenty-eight minutes.’
    OK, this was from last year, but still, I was quite impressed by that. When had I last snogged for any time at all? I couldn’t remember. I mean, Olly and I kissed, didn’t we? Well, on the lips when we saw each other, which wasn’t quite snogging, and in bed, I guess, but that wasn’t quite snogging either.
    But it’s a teenage trait, really, isn’t it? That’s why they’re always catching glandular fever.
    ‘I hate working in the Co-op. Mrs Bentall is a complete b***h. It’s so unfair. Stanzi just gets money off her mum and dad and a clothing allowance. It’s not fair. If Dad was ever in I might get a clothing allowance.’
    Oh, gosh, a whiner. I looked down at the grumpy life I was holding in my hands. This girl was on the same trajectory as I was.
    My phone bleeped. I leaped on it. It was a text.
    ‘World fucked up,’ it said. Thank goodness Tashy had never learned text language either. ‘Will pick up tomorrow for escape bid.’

Chapter Six
    Thank God for Tash. I couldn’t sleep. I eventually curled up in a ball in the bed when I heard the Newsnight music downstairs, and had jerked awake all night, clutching the stupid diary. I’d texted Tash at as near first light as I could manage, and met her round the corner, in traditional teenager sneaking-out way. I’d just have to resign from the Co-op; Mum never went there anyway. She thought it was the supermarket of communist Russia.
    Tashy was sitting at the wheel of her little Audi. She raised her eyebrows at me and I realised that perhaps the miniskirt/striped jersey ensemble I’d pulled out the cupboard might be a bit much for a Saturday morning.
    ‘What?’ I said crossly, even though I was so relieved she was there I could have burst.
    ‘Nothing,’ she said as I got in. ‘You’re just so tiny. Let me fiddle with your upper arms a second.’
    ‘LEAVE it.’
    She pushed up the skin under my eyes with a finger.‘There you go, see. That’s what you’re going to look like in sixteen years’ time. Fuck, you have so long.’
    I studied myself in the car window as she reversed from the kerb.