‘Come here,’ he says now, a whole foot taller than me so his chin rests on my head when he brings me to his chest and tells me he has concerns. And it all feels kind of weird when he says he’s worried about boys, you know, because I’ve obviously been drinking, and then there’s that up-for-it dress, and I need to be more careful because ‘You’re so special’, and it’s not just his hand on my back, but his finger. And yeah, that’s attached to his hand, but one finger has a different kind of touch.
Mum appears at the top of the stairs and his hand flattens into a palm.
‘You OK, Isabel?’ Her voice tries to be a glass half full.
‘She’s good,’ Daniel says before I can say anything, using the bulk of him to shift me out of her sight.
And I guess from how her footsteps take her back into the bedroom, like Grace, Mum must also be choosing to believe that I’m fine.
TWO
It’s not the first time someone’s slipped me a pair of inflated tits under the table. And even though Miss Green’s on to him, I’m pretty sure it won’t be the last time Jacob pulls up some hardcore on his phone and passes it round the class like a tin of Quality Street at Christmas.
And if it weren’t for his juiced-up excitement, I could hand it straight back, but there’s this film of sweat from Jacob’s palms, and what with that and the shock of that mesh of bodies going at it like hairless animals in a screen-sized cage in a zoo, the phone falls to the floor in an all-eyes-on-me kind of clatter, and Jacob rolls his eyes, like, seriously, Izzy, as if I’m the idiot here.
It’s stupid really, how I can look at the phone as I pick it up but not at Jacob as I put it down on the desk, how his hard stare makes me feel as naked as those women in the film.
‘Honestly, you lot –’ Miss Green doesn’t clock Callum Gun’s hands miming just what he’d like to do to her bum as she walks from the whiteboard towards me – ‘how many times have you been told? No phones in class.’
‘Sorry, miss.’ Though Jacob’s voice is a sorry-not-sorry kind of smirk as Miss Green picks it up, turns it over and sees the mass of skin, the wet mouths and the perfectly timed shot of the man getting just what he came for. ‘I’ll delete it, miss,’ he says, but we all know that if he does, there are a thousand more where that came from – those films he called ‘life lessons’ when I saw him watching one on the bus a few months back and he did that V shape with his fingers, tongue between them, the other boys sniggering and, yeah, some of the girls too. ‘Come on, miss,’ he says now, ‘it’s a laugh, innit.’
But Miss Green, the inside of her bottom lip pulled back between her teeth, doesn’t look like she thinks that’s true.
‘Don’t be a prude, miss. It’s just bodies.’ He winks. ‘Natural, innit.’
I catch Grace’s eye, like, say something.
‘Ask Izzy, miss,’ Jacob mutters.
I swear my face melts into my body, melts into the floor.
Only it doesn’t, not really. There’s too much of me, too many inches of thick shame to disappear, and though Grace’s hand on my thigh is an anchor, it’s not enough to steady the shake, which starts in my fingers but spreads like gossip through the college corridors to the rest of me, cos though the click of Miss Green’s heels on the floor might have prevented her from hearing Jacob’s jibe about me, the rest of the class received it loud and clear.
Not that it’s anything new. Because, no kidding, it’s five weeks since that party, and Jacob’s still getting off on how easily I shrivel when he’s around.
‘Watch yourself, Mansfield.’
If Jacob’s voice was a sorry, not sorry, Grace’s is a you will be. But his shoulders are, like, whatever, as he stands, all that six foot two of him, following Miss Green to the front of the classroom, where he leans over her desk and in that voice, deep as hell since three or so years ago when he and his mates hulked from boy body to man body, he apologises, just sincere enough this time.
Miss Green tells him, ‘Any more of that and, honestly, Jacob, I’ll have no choice.’
‘Thanks, miss,’ he says, head down as he turns away from her, slipping the phone into his pocket, where he makes a pantomime grab of his dick. He mouths in my direction, ‘You love it.’
Max Dale shakes his head, like, you nob, Mansfield.
But he’s smiling.
Everyone’s smiling, right, cos it’s natural, innit? Anything else, and you’re just a prude.
THREE
‘All I’m saying is: I’m so totally glad boys aren’t my thing, that’s all.’ Grace’s voice is, like, totally am-dram. Ever since Mrs James, our Year Three teacher, told her how wonderfully she used emphasis after her turn reading Fantastic Mr Fox aloud in class, she’s been sure to verbally underline at least one word per sentence. ‘Jacob Mansfield is such a creep.’
She reckoned the breeze along the seafront would shift the humiliation that’s smeared like cheap sun cream across my skin, but the June heat’s making me stickier, which fits with the indignity, I guess; at least there’s no doubting that I now look as crap as I feel.
As usual, Grace glides through, talking at a hundred miles an hour, unaffected by humidity or shame. ‘If I was straight and had to choose from that bunch of pervs, I swear I’d die. Literally,’ she says, and, not for the first time, I wish I was gay too, because my best mate has a point – they don’t make it easy, those boys, and if I were gay, maybe Grace wouldn’t need Nell.
‘Nell would never be like that,’ she says.
And in my head, I’m thinking, Yeah, yeah, we all know Nell would never be like that, cos Nell is never anything but perfect, right?
‘OMG, Izzy, it’s bliss!’ Grace had swooned when, six weeks into their relationship, they’d ‘taken the plunge’ and spent a night in a Margate B & B, looking the following morning like two flushed explorers who’ve discovered a new moon.
‘Taken the plunge?’ I said, as we drank hot chocolate after, partly to dissect and partly so she wouldn’t be entirely lying when she told her mum she’d been hanging with me in the Old Town. ‘It sounds so wet.’
And she smiled, like, yeah, that’s the point, and though she was holding my hand at the time, like she always does when we’re revealing secrets, I felt this thin line being drawn between us, and I’ve had no hope of finding my way back to her side since.
‘Max isn’t so bad.’ I look away from Grace to the wind farm as I say it, or whisper it really, because I know what Grace will say. She’ll say, in a voice that sounds like one of those feminist books she’s always taking from the library, that I deserve better and nothing is better than something if the something thinks jacking off to that misogynistic smut is OK.
‘Yeah, not so bad if you like to spend time with someone whose idea of romance is sending out a group Snapchat asking three fingers or four.’
I know she’s proving some political point, but you’d think that, over a month on, Grace would stop using the most mortifying moment of my life to do it.
‘That was Jacob,’ I say, like it matters, cos right from the beginning, when we first started college and Jacob made some comment about us being scissor sisters, Grace lumped all that lot together in a box labelled ‘scum’. ‘Max is actually quite sweet.’ And I think of how he made sure I got home safely from that party and how, last Friday, when Grace was off with Nell – when isn’t she off with Nell? – and Max was at McDonald’s, he called out my name as I took my chocolate thick shake and asked if I wanted to walk home.