‘Not demeaning it at all actually. I quite liked it.’
‘You listened to it?’
‘Yep. Some comedian. He only went and admitted he was a virgin until he was twenty-six! Twenty-six!’ Max repeats, with a quick look over his shoulder to check no one but me is listening. ‘No way I’m waiting that long.’
‘So you’re…’
‘Yeah.’ His voice is a finger to his mouth, like, don’t say anything though.
‘The way you and Jacob and that lot bang on…’
‘Just bants though, innit.’
Yeah, right, isn’t it always? But I don’t say that, obviously, because I’m not Grace, am I? Never will be.
‘Sorry,’ I say, when we’re done with the Happy Meal and back outside in the late-evening sun. Max looks at me, like, what for?
‘About Grace.’
‘Whatever.’ And if Max’s voice were a pair of glasses, they’d be rose-tinted to match his not-totally-given-up-yet grin.
‘Max.’
He turns around when I call him back.
‘You reckon you could have a word with Jacob? See if he’ll ease up on all that finger stuff?’
‘Sure,’ he says, ‘but you do know it’s just ban—’
I put my earphones in as hard as they’ll possibly go so I don’t have to hear any more.
SIX
‘You smell like fast food.’
I should have thought of the stink of it. Of Daniel’s hound-like nose and his face when he spots that I’ve strayed from his plan to save my arse from its meteoric proportions. His words, not mine.
‘Like mother like daughter,’ he says, and he’s all smiles, right, but the shake of his head’s a different story – the one that ends with him pointing at those pictures of models he’s pinned to the fridge as ‘thinspiration’ and me looking at my thighs in the mirror wondering how all those other girls do it. Fall out of hate with their bodies, I mean.
‘You’re beautiful,’ Mum whispers when Daniel leaves the kitchen, but her voice is too much like tissue paper to wrap me up in anything that feels like safety or strength or truth. I wish she’d say it when he was here. So the all-rightness of my fat doesn’t come across as an afterthought or some secret she’s so obviously ashamed of.
‘That your boyfriend?’ Daniel calls from the other room when my phone beeps with a message, and he laughs this laugh that’s totally not funny, but Mum still gives me this look, like, well? Like she actually believes Daniel might be on to something. But even if Max were my boyfriend, which obviously he isn’t, it’s not him cos the number’s a new one, the words ‘photo’ and ‘frigid’ flashing on my screen like the red man, like do not cross, but sometimes something pushes you into the oncoming traffic and you go.
‘Isabel!’ But Daniel’s fuss about my elephant gallop up the stairs is the least of my worries because the mystery sender’s got to be Jacob and his words are a ten-tonne truck.
I have another photo. Shows your not so frigid side. Meet me to work something out.
Jacob?
You recognised me. Nice.
What photo?
For me to know and you to avoid. My house. Tonight. ASAP. Or Fingers XL goes viral.
Shit. Like, proper shit. Like heart-in-the-mouth, I-coulddie-here shit. And maybe Max was right when he said I was gone at that party. Because my body may have been there, but that bit of my brain that should have stored whatever it was that happened with Jacob was too drenched in vodka to make any pictures of its own. To make any memories that might have given me some kind of clue what Jacob has on me. What Jacob did to me. When I was gone.
Think of the desert island, Izzy.
Because sometimes it helps, right? To imagine there is nothing but me and the sand and the sea. To think what happens to me in my world is my own doing, to think I can choose my narrative as easily as I can choose my songs. All fine in theory, but what if I can’t? What if some dickhead from my college takes my narrative and slaps photos over it, the way Grace and I used to cover our notebooks in Years Seven and Eight, when it was still OK to stick photos of Harry Styles on everything, a way of making the workbook more enticing. Only Jacob’s photos are gonna make everything so much worse. What happens then? When I’m trapped in the story of the Finger Slag and someone else is dictating my ending?
‘Mum and Dad’ve gone out.’ Jacob quickly checks the street and I’m not sure if he’s looking for last-minute signs of his parents or for anyone who may have clocked him going in with Izzy Chambers. ‘We have plenty of time,’ he says, and his voice is a know what I mean? and his hands are a guide dog leading me blindly up the staircase and into his room.
‘Sorry ’bout the mess.’
No kidding, cos it’s the kind of shitstorm of clothes and books and crisp packets that’d send Daniel into full-on thunder.
‘’S all right,’ I say, even though none of it is – all right, I mean. Not the mess, not the being here, not the rustle in my head that says run, not the weight in my legs that stops me.
Then Jacob shifts his copy of Men’s Health to make space on the bed and pats the duvet like you’d pat a dog, like all this is sweet really, you know, in spite of what he said just now about this photo he has of me and his fingers and my…well, you get the picture.
‘Your face is in it too,’ he’d said, like that was such a good thing. ‘You were well up for it.’
And I’d have asked for the evidence, but his hands were already on my back, telling me exactly what I’d need to do to keep that picture between the two of us.
‘You don’t mind, do you, Izzy…’ he says now, and there’s this flicker of a moment, as he shifts from the mattress, and I think this was all his idea of a sick trick, and relief floods into me like the Jack Daniel’s rushing from the bottle into Jacob’s glass, ‘if I put something on to get us in the mood, yeah?’
And the laptop screen’s not big but it’s like IMAX the way it fills the room with its full-on tits and arse, and those two girls to the one guy are nothing, nothing, nothing like me, which is the point, I guess.
And I should say something, but Jacob’s kisses are harder now and his tongue – it’s like the underside of satsuma peel, furred by the Jack Daniel’s and Coke he’s knocked back with the two bags of Monster Munch since I got here. The empty packets scrunch between the sheet and the skin of my back when he lies me down. And his fingers, probably still coated in Monster dust, claw at my folds as I suggest that, maybe, I’ll go.
‘You can’t leave,’ Jacob says, winking as he points to the crotch of his jeans stretched tight like he’s part Hulk and he isn’t to blame for what might happen when it bursts through.
And I know what they say, a man thinks with his dick, but I’m not sure that’s true, cos his dick doesn’t look like it’s thinking at all. If anything, it looks like it’s up for a fight.
‘We had a deal,’ he says.
And his hands too are bulging, or the veins of them, gripped tight on my shoulders, knuckles as yellow-white as Monsters, scored with fine lines the colour of rare steak the way Daniel has it so it bleeds on to his peas. You’d think Jacob’s fingers would be easier to look at than that bulldozer dick, but this view’s no kinder, his lockjaw-hold making a concertina of my flesh, his smile detached from the clench he has on me and his eyes twinkling as if he’s Santa Claus about to make all my Christmas dreams come true.