Boy Meets Hamster Page 3

  Jayden-Lee dipped his chin in a way that might either have been agreement or repulsion.

  Then he said, ‘Yeah, whatever. OK.’

  And he stepped forward to pat me on both shoulders. That was it. A pat. Less affection than you’d show a cat. Maybe he just didn’t like being ordered into PDA by overgrown house pets. Either way, my heart skipped at least two beats. I was just debating how best to act cool during a heart attack, and whether giant hamsters would be trained in first aid, when Jayden-Lee whispered something in my ear.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, yeah? Can’t be easy when your brother’s a retard.’

  He gave my shoulder a final pat and let go. I was silent for a minute, shocked and trying to figure out a reply.

  I meant to tell him that that’s not an OK thing to call anybody, least of all my little brother, especially when his little brother thinks chewing gum makes great hair gel. I wanted to tell him that disabilities don’t make people stupid, and that using someone’s disability to mean stupid was mean and stupid itself. I nearly told him that he’d better watch what he said, because if my mum ever heard about it he’d be wishing the giant hamster had finished him off when it had the chance. I kind of wanted to punch him in the mouth.

  But I just sort of shrugged and gave a guilty laugh.

  And then he walked off before I could say anything at all, and I was left standing there feeling angry and not knowing whether it was at him or myself.

  Then Nibbles waved his paws at me again, pushing Troy my way.

  Troy yelled, ‘HAMSTER HUG!’ wrapped his arms round me, and threw up all over my jeans.

  SIX

  By the time I’d reached the bathroom, taken off my brand-new trainers and grabbed a handful of toilet roll to try and scrub the pink chunks off my jeans, I’d figured out who I should really be mad at.

  That evil hamster.

  How dense could you get? How could anyone throw kids’ parties for a job and not know the number one thing you don’t do to a cake-filled child. You don’t squeeze them.

  Pushed into a hug by those little pink paws, the contents of Troy’s stomach had been squished out all over me, like someone trying to get the last bit out of a tube of toothpaste. Except instead of being minty fresh, I smelt of Haribo and unhappiness. And it was all Nibbles’ fault.

  I wondered what sort of sentence I’d get for having a hamster assassinated. Maybe I could bribe a local vet to come in and do it on the sly. In the mirror I could see that my face had turned from its usual dark olive tan to a shade as bright as the cupcake slime on my clothes, embarrassment and fury burning together under my skin. Stupid kids. Stupid hamster. Stupid, sexy, Jayden-Lee.

  That gross comment about Jude should have killed my crush on him. I knew it should. Obviously it was a crappy thing to say, and if Mum had heard it she’d be wearing Jayden-Lee’s teeth as a necklace by now. But my brain was already trying to make excuses for him. The thing was, people said ridiculous stuff about Jude all the time. Even the really well-meaning ones were always talking over him to whoever was behind his chair, as if sitting down somehow made him incapable of speech.

  So it wasn’t like Jayden-Lee was the only person who’d ever acted like that around him. Just, probably the best-looking one.

  I dumped my trainers in the sink, kicked off my jeans and turned on the water to blast away some of the sick spatter, while I tried to figure out why that made a difference.

  It’s not like I’d let someone off for insulting my brother just because they had a five-star rating on the Fitness Scale. I’m not the type of person who loses his head about boys on a regular basis. In fact, I’ve had a total of three serious, world-altering crushes in my life so far.

  1. Freddie Alton – Sports Prefect at school. So good-looking I physically can’t form words when he’s around. Like, when I’m talking to someone else and he walks past, all my vowels disappear and I end up saying something like hnnnnngghh aaa-rrrgh. He probably thinks I’m foreign exchange.

  2. Sam Shepherd – my next-door neighbour until last year. We spent so much time together that Dad cut a gate in the fence between our houses. I tried a few times to tell him I liked him in a more-than-friendly way, but he never really got it. Then Sam’s mum got a job in Berlin. They moved, and now we just talk on the computer sometimes, and he sent me a postcard on my birthday featuring six different kinds of German sausage.

  3. Dr Wei Liu from Woking Community Hospital. Smart, insanely good-looking, and not necessarily too old for me either. At least, when Grandma came to visit me after I had my appendix out, she kept telling him he couldn’t be more than twelve. On the other hand, he has looked at X-rays of my bowels, which probably didn’t trigger love at first sight.

  Three crushes. And it might be obvious that none of them exactly worked out. Everyone else I know has kissed someone. Half my class have been on dates or started relationships or even – in Kayla’s case – had a series of highly dramatic break-ups involving compensation claims for unpaid cinema tickets, and a custody case over a goldfish.

  So maybe I did have dreams of holiday romance, but really all I wanted was the chance to have what other people did. I didn’t want just another crush; I wanted someone who liked me back. And it seemed more likely to happen here, where no one knew me and I didn’t have to worry about a) embarrassing myself in front of the whole school b) messing up a friendship or c) getting someone struck off the medical register.

  Maybe Jayden-Lee could finally be the one.

  He might have a few issues, but true love was supposed to take work, wasn’t it? Fairy tales didn’t start at the happily-ever-after. Sometimes you had to wait until the prince stopped being a beast.

  That was it. That was what this was. It was my chance to educate Jayden-Lee. To help him become a better person. I’d be building my own perfect man, only without the need for lightning strikes, surgical skills and a hunchbacked assistant.

  I’d just have to get him alone and explain why ‘retard’ is a rubbish word to use about anybody, and how much it didn’t apply to my little brother. He’d get it, if I explained. He had to. I could picture the apology already: a faint, guilty hunch to his rugged shoulders as he understood that he’d been wrong. A pleading look in his green eyes while he asked me how he could possibly make things better.

  Maybe some light crying when he told me he’d do anything, anything, to make up for it. Nothing embarrassingly sniffly, but you couldn’t go wrong with a single, manly tear.

  Then I’d invite him back to our caravan to meet Jude properly, and we’d sit on the sofa and bond over Jude’s DVDs of Twinkle the Talking Train. Our eyes would meet and we’d be startled by the electricity that ran between us as our fingers tangled together in the tin of iced gems.

  It was the perfect plan. And as soon as I’d soaked the sick out of my clothes, I’d start working out how to make it happen. My trainers would probably be all right, I’d managed to soak them before any regurgitated cupcake got crusted in. The legs of my jeans still looked a funny colour, but I guessed they’d be OK once I’d dried them off.

  Folding the jeans over one arm and holding them out so they didn’t drip down my bare legs, I took them over to the hand drier on the wall to figure out how to do that.

  It was one of those fancy new types: the kind that have a deep slot where you can put your hands in and wait while something that sounds like a jet engine tries to vibrate all the skin off them.

  If I held my jeans up high enough, I could slide both legs down into the slot and blast them dry up to the knee. Except, wet denim didn’t seem to set off the sensors as easily as human skin. Somehow I needed to get my hands and the jeans into the slot at the same time.

  So I did what anyone would have done, if they were smart enough. I pulled my jeans on over my head and leaned forward to dangle the legs into the slot, giving myself both arms free to get the drier working.

  It was quite peaceful, really. I’d never worn jeans on my head before, but it was warm
and mostly dark, except for a small triangle of light coming in through the zip. As I let the jet noise rumble up my trouser legs and rattle through my ears, I relaxed for what felt like the first time all day. Everything was sorted. I was just going to have to engineer a complex, multi-layered plan to let true love take me by surprise, exactly the way it was supposed to.

  ‘Hey, are you all right?’ a voice said, right by my ear.

  It turns out that the dangerous thing about the inner peace of a pair of pants is that, when you’re wearing them over your ears, you can’t hear if someone’s opened the door behind you.

  You can’t hear them, in fact, until they’re close enough to tap you on the shoulder and scare you into stumbling face-first into a roaring hand drier.

  SEVEN

  ‘Bad luck back there,’ the voice behind me continued, as though it wasn’t talking to someone with the bum part of their jeans where the back of their head should be. To someone with a freakish headbum, who’d just slammed their nose into the side of a hand drier and was trying not to hop about and yell with the pain.

  I was already going to have to go and live in a cave for the rest of my life to deal with the shame. I didn’t need to look more ridiculous.

  ‘These parties can get rough,’ the voice was saying. ‘It’s like entertaining a room full of tiny drunk people – someone’s always about to puke, pick a fight or take an unexpected nap under the buffet table. Will your brother be OK?’

  It wasn’t Jayden-Lee’s voice. Jayden-Lee hadn’t walked in on me standing in my boxers with my jeans on my head. There was a God and he wanted me to get a date sometime in the next decade. It was probably just one of the dads from the party.

  Just a friendly, concerned . . . really young-sounding dad.

  I tried to pull my head free to answer him, and let out a strangled yelp.

  The zip was caught in my hair. My jeans were locked tight to a clump of fringe in the middle of my forehead, trapping me in my own buttock-space. I pulled up again, experimentally, and felt a few hairs ping painfully from my scalp.

  So, these were my choices:

  1. I could rethink the living-in-a-cave plan and spend the rest of my life on the outskirts of civilization, just me and a specially trained assistance dog I’d send out to fetch my shopping (Tesco probably don’t deliver to the depths of the woods). I’d learn which berries to pick and which mushrooms were edible, far away from the harsh stares of normal folk.

  2. I could style it out.

  I didn’t have the patience for dog training. It was going to have to be option two. I swung my head round, jean-legs flapping in front of me like the trunk of some mutant denim elephant, fully prepared to act cool.

  And it wasn’t one of the dads at all. Between the teeth of my zip I could see one concerned-looking dark-brown eye – the kind of shade that’s almost black, but just a fraction too warm. If I tipped my head sideways, my gaze ran along a similarly dark-skinned cheek, and down to a wide mouth with the corners bitten down, like they were trying not to curl into a smile.

  It took me a minute to remember that he’d asked me a question. Would Jude be OK?

  ‘Err. Um. Mhmm?’ I replied.

  Which probably wasn’t the clearest answer, but when I’m nervous I sometimes forget how words work.

  What I was trying to say was that so far Jude had made it through two hamstring surgeries, a case of German measles that all joined together to turn him a frankly impressive shade of neon pink, and being stuck in the head part of an Ewok costume for seven and a half hours one Halloween. So I thought he’d probably survive the whole gum/hair trauma. He was pretty tough, after all.

  Tougher than me, anyway. I’d been stuck in my jeans for less than ten minutes and I was already falling apart.

  The translation process between my brain and my mouth somehow took all the things I meant to say and replaced them with a series of grunts. I added an uncertain shrug, trying not to notice that I was dripping sick-water on to the floor between us.

  He had a staff shirt on. I could see the ARC part of STARCROSS through the viewing window made by my open flies.

  I had no idea how I’d missed him at the party, but obviously he couldn’t have avoided seeing me taking a relaxing dip in the puke fountain. Just great. I might only have seen a few triangle-shaped fragments of his face, but they were the face parts of someone not too much older than me. My chances of using this holiday to emerge from my dire and dateless chrysalis as a brilliant social butterfly were narrowing by the minute.

  I tilted my head to the side and got a new slice of facial real-estate.

  He had an eyebrow bar.

  I had headpants.

  I was totally going to have to go with the cave-dwelling, grocery-shopping dog plan.

  ‘Do you . . . need any help with that?’ he asked. I watched his feet shuffle on the floor. He had the exact trainers that mine were a cheaper copy of.

  I was so busy trying to figure out by exactly how many degrees he outcooled me that for a moment I had no idea what he meant. I stared blankly into the seams of my jeans.

  He coughed, softly. ‘I mean, do you want me to get you out of your jeans?’

  Everything went silent for a minute. Even the drier finished its cycle and paused, as though it wasn’t quite sure what it had just heard either.

  I watched the curve of his mouth narrow out into a thin line, then quirk upwards again. ‘Or, you know, the same question put less weirdly. Only, it seems like you might be getting dressed the wrong way round.’

  Sucking in a deep breath, I shook my head, flapping jeans and all. ‘No, it’s OK. Actually, at this point I think I’m fine with no one ever seeing my face again.’

  ‘Well, I get the appeal of being invisible, sometimes. But it seems like a shame to me.’

  He hadn’t stepped back much since tapping me on the shoulder, and I was suddenly really aware of the fact that we were less than a foot apart, which was much closer than I’d want to stand next to a bum-headed lunatic whose face I couldn’t even see.

  If he had been further back, I might have been able to see his whole face all in one go, instead of just a scrap of a really-quite-nice-actually smile.

  ‘Also, dressing like that’s probably going to lead to a few more close encounters of the nose-smashing kind,’ he added.

  He hadn’t somehow blinked and missed me nutting the hand drier, then. I felt my nose twang as a sore reminder.

  ‘Oh that?’ I held up my hands innocently, though I was pretty sure I looked more like the pictures of this Hindu elephant god we learned about in school once. ‘Completely intentional. I’ve got . . . anger-management problems. Bad ones. Sometimes I just, you know: Grrr.’

  I actually growled at him. Like a tiger, or a lion or, you know, a complete weirdo with jeans on his head.

  And the weird part was, he didn’t do the sensible thing and back away muttering soothing phrases, like he probably should have. He just laughed again. I saw the STAR on his chest skip under the breath he took. ‘Well, let me know if you need me to do anything. Even if it’s just talking you out of assaulting inanimate objects. One of my sisters is into this mindfulness and meditation thing right now, so I’ve got really good at talking nonsense in a calming way. Just ask for Leo.’

  ‘Leo,’ I repeated, and I was about to tell him my name when the howl of feedback from Stacie’s microphone screeched through the door. Both of us winced.

  ‘WOULD THE OWNERS OF THE TODDLER IN PINK PLEASE GET HER DOWN FROM THE LIGHT FIXTURES? THANK YOU.’

  Stacie’s voice echoed through from the hall outside. It looked like the Troy incident had just been the party warming up.

  ‘I REPEAT: PLEASE COLLECT YOUR CHILD FROM THE CEILING.’

  Leo bit his lip apologetically. It was the only bit of his face that I could see, but it was weirdly hard to look away from.

  My brain took a moment to register that he smelt nice too. I couldn’t put my finger on what it reminded me of.

&nbs
p; ‘Duty calls,’ he told me, spinning on his heels and making for the door. Finally I had an almost full view of someone tall and long-limbed, with a head full of dreadlocks that were almost to his shoulders, messy and dark. Just the back view, though. He called over his shoulder, ‘Remember, ask for Leo if you need anything!’

  Ask for Leo.

  Yeah, I could just tell him the boy with jeans for a face said hi. Like that was ever going to happen. As soon as I got these things off my head I was going to start looking for a cave.

  EIGHT

  By the time I emerged from the loos, the jeans were back on the part of my body they were designed for. I’d managed to remove a significant amount of my hair along with them, but I couldn’t complain too much about that.

  Not once I’d seen Jude.

  Kayla had bought him a ride on the miniature version of Twinkle the Talking Train that stood outside the main doors to the showhall. It cost a pound for three minutes of Twinkle rocking gently while making choo choo noises. Every backward rock tipped Jude just far enough for me to be able to see the perfectly round, palm-sized bald patch right in the middle of his scalp.

  ‘What did you do?’ I mouthed, hoping that Jude would be too distracted by the ride to see me flapping my arms behind him. There’s something about a crisis that makes me lose all control of my limbs.

  ‘It was welded in!’ Kayla hissed back, ducking around Twinkle and coming over to catch hold of my hands and bring them down to a safe level. ‘I looked up “gum-removal techniques” on my phone, and the options were freezing it out, boiling it, or cutting it off. I thought this was the method he’d be most likely to survive.’

  ‘Did you think about how likely I am to survive once Mum sees it?’ My arms flapped up again. Kayla caught them. It looked like we were doing a two-person version of a Mexican wave.

  Jude’s prematurely balding head swung back towards me, glinting in the sunlight. I groaned. ‘Sweet baby cheeses.’