I must look at him like, huh?
‘To my island, Izzy! It’s hard, man. To narrow it down to eight. Didn’t you say they can take a book too?’
‘Yeah’ is all I can manage. I want to be funny. I want to be cool. Basically, I want to be Grace.
‘Go on then.’ Max nudges me with his knee as he hands me a Freddo with one hand and picks up a pebble with the other. ‘What would yours be?’
And I wonder about that feelings book mum bought me, about taking the happiness Daniel cut out of it and sticking it back in, because maybe with that and the desert-island isolation I’d have a chance of finally putting all my screwed-up feelings straight. But no way I’m admitting that to Max, obviously, so: ‘I dunno. Carol Ann Duffy?’
‘Carol Ann Duffy?’ Max’s voice is all are you sure?, and I’m convinced he’ll do a Jacob and call her a dyke, but: ‘You mean the poet?’
‘Yeah, we read her in English Lit.’
‘I know.’
Of course he does – he was there, wasn’t he? Slouched beside Jacob, who was sly-winking: ‘That Duffy, she’s one of your lot, isn’t she, Grace? Go for her, would you? I mean, you like a white one, don’t you? Saw you at that party and you was well into that bird. Whatsherface? Nell, isn’t it?’ And it was all kinds of spineless, but I couldn’t deny the relief that for once they were talking about that party and hadn’t yet mentioned Jacob’s fingers or me. ‘Don’t your mum and dad mind their little black princess going out with a white girl?’
‘White girl, black girl…so long as it’s not a little nob like you, Jacob, they don’t really care.’
She always has the answer, does Grace.
‘“Anon”, that’s one of Duffy’s poems, right?’
And I don’t know what to say now, because Max Dale talking about poetry is as much of a shock as Max Dale inviting me out, as Max Dale not laughing, like, fooled you, when I met him by Tesco Express, half expecting Jacob to appear from behind the bins to take another photo of just what an idiot I am for actually believing Max Dale might want to spend time with me. But the thing is, he does. Want to spend some time with me, I mean, cos he was all smiles and ‘All right, Izzy’, totally shy even as he suggested we go to the beach.
And now, with his Freddos and his pebbles, he looks at me like, come on then, you’re the one who kicked this game off.
‘Yeah, I like that one, “Anon”. Depressing though.’
Max looks at me like, how come?
‘Women not having a voice and all that.’
‘Different these days though, innit?’ Max says. ‘Look at Grace. No one can say she hasn’t got a voice.’ And his voice? He tries to make it as cool as his Coke but, like the can in the evening sunshine, it can’t quite stay chilled. ‘Speaking of Grace –’ he plonks the whole bag of Freddos in my lap – ‘I know she’s got a girlfriend, Izzy, but do you reckon that it might just be, you know, a phase?’
And thank god for Max’s nerves because all those jitters with his fingers and the pebbles and the looking at me, like, don’t tell her I’ve said this – yeah, it all adds up to him not picking up on my disappointment.
‘You like Grace?’ I ask him, and he nods, shy but not quite defeated.
‘Yeah. Well, sort of.’ He just about dares to look up. ‘And I get she’s gay, but Jacob reckons all girls come round in the end.’
And I might not say anything, but the rolling eyes must convey exactly what I think of Jacob’s theory because Max shakes his head, like, all right, point taken.
‘Did it look like a phase when you saw her at that party with her girlfriend?’
‘S’pose,’ he says. ‘I’m surprised you can even remember.’
Honestly, I’d rather he swooned over Grace than we talk about that.
‘You were gone, Izzy.’
‘No more than you or Jacob or any of your other mates.’
‘Isn’t the same for us though, is it?’
And I wonder how much Max would like Grace if she were here now, laying into him for that.
‘You fancy getting something to eat?’ he says.
‘Haven’t we already?’ I hold up the Freddos in my lap, like, what more could we possibly need?
Max is all fair point, when there are these shouts from up by the huts.
‘Eh, eh, what’s going on here then, Maxy? Getting yourself a bit of Izzy action, are you?’
Jacob’s not looking at his mate though. His eyes are on me.
‘Loosened you up a bit, didn’t I, Fingers?’
Despite our silence, he keeps going.
‘You need to drop her back at KFC, Max. Recycle her bucket.’
My big toe finds a small patch of sand among the pebbles, digs in.
‘You at football in the morning?’ Max asks.
I see what Max is doing, but changing the subject doesn’t stop the burn in my face, that churn in the pit of my belly.
‘Yeah, mate.’
The two of them drift up the path in a rush of banter and brawn, and I wonder how long it’ll last, this easy chat about my vagina. It’s not like either of them is calling it that but, let’s face it, that’s what it comes down to. What I boil down to. For them.
‘Sorry ’bout Jacob,’ Max says when he comes back, snatching the last Freddo from my palm. ‘He’s all right really. He’s only trying to be funny.’
And I’d love to believe him but…‘Is it though?’
‘What?’
‘Is it funny?’
You’d think from his silence that I’d asked Max the square root of 3.8 billion.
‘What Jacob says, I mean. What he does. Is it actually funny?’
And I’m not usually one for confrontation. I mean, there’s no way I’d speak with Jacob like this, but Max isn’t Jacob. It’s not that I know what Max is exactly, but he’s not that.
‘Like the other day, when he was banging on about the fingers thing for, like, the millionth time, you know, when he said he knows how much I liked his sweet stuff.’
‘Oh, yeah, with the Curly Wurly.’ And maybe it is actually funny, because then Max is kind of laughing when he remembers how Jacob unwrapped the long chocolate bar, poking it up inside my T-shirt, prodding my boobs with it, playing to the crowd, asking if anyone fancied fetching the crumbs. ‘It’s not like he actually touched you though, Izzy.’
And yeah, there were no fingers that time, I guess.
‘Shall we then?’
My eyebrows must be, like, what?
‘Get something to eat?’ Max says, smiling as if ‘it’s not like he actually touched you’ will have undone all the shame that comes with Jacob’s ‘jokes’.
‘Sure,’ I tell him. Cos it’s not like it’s his fault Jacob’s a complete bellend. And, more importantly, it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do, what with Grace otherwise engaged and my stepdad on the prowl at home.
So we start walking up to McDonald’s and Max turns to me, totally serious, and tells me, ‘Your old-person programme’s not so bad, you know.’
‘My old-person programme? I hope you’re not demeaning the iconic brilliance that is Desert Island Discs?’