Phil said loudly, “Hurrah, it’s the Tree Sisters. Are you having a thespian outing?”
The people on the bus started tutting. I went bright red, I think. I could feel my head on fire. Phil and Charlie sat down in the seats in front of Jo and me. And the other three went near Honey and Flossie and Vaisey. As the bus lurched off, Phil leant over the back of his seat.
He said, “I still dream about our day in the woods.”
I said, “It wasn’t your day in the woods, it was our day in the woods. And anyway, it wasn’t our day in the woods, we were getting ideas.”
Charlie popped his head up then and looked really closely at us.
“Was your idea to go and get off with trees?”
Jo hit him over the head with her Topshop bag.
Phil said, “I like a fight on the way home.”
It was all getting a bit, I don’t know, sort of tense, but I don’t know why. The other boys were talking to Honey and Vaisey. And Flossie was talking to a bloke and his sheepdog. The bus stopped in the middle of nowhere. Not at a stop or anything, and a big old man got on and came up the bus towards us. He was carrying a chicken. It wasn’t dead.
He looked at the boys leaning over the back of the seats and said, “Ay, you young larrikins. Sit down properly, tha’s not at home now.”
Then he gave the chicken to a woman at the back and said, “Now then, that’s for thee, bring us up any spare cow tit you’ve got and we’ll call it evens.”
She said, “Awreet, thanks, love.”
Then the chicken man walked slowly down the bus and got off.
Somebody shouted out from the back, “Can’t tha go a bit slower, at this rate I’ll still be alive by the time we get to Heckmondwhite. Bloody hell.”
When we shuddered off again, Phil popped his head up.
He looked at Jo.
She looked at him.
He kept looking.
She said, “What do you want?”
And he said, “Do you want to come to the pictures with me?”
I have never seen someone look so much like a human goldfish as Jo.
Eventually because he went on looking at her she said, “What?”
Phil went on, “Cinema, you and me, jogging boy and tree girl. Go on. Be a devil. Go on.”
Jo was saying, “But I…don’t…”
Then Charlie popped his head up.
“Go on, lady. Don’t upset him. He’s shy.”
All the way home Jo has been driving us mad. How many times can you go through a conversation? A lot is the answer.
We had to hang around at the bus stop for ages while she went on and on.
Jo said, “What does he mean, do you want to come to the pictures with me?”
Honey said, “He meanth, well that meanth, he wanth to take you to the thinema.”
We all nodded.
I said, “That sums it up. Night, night.”
Jo said, “OK, what if I do go with him and then that’s it. He doesn’t want to see me again. Because I am too small. Or can beat him at arm wrestling or whatever. What then? I will have been dumped just because I said I would go. Whereas, if I hadn’t gone in the first place I would have been alright.”
I don’t like myself for this, but I felt a bit jealous of Jo. At least she had been asked to go to the cinema by a real boy.
Jo said, “Anyway, I don’t think I fancy him. He’s too short.”
After the girls trudged off up the lane to Dother Hall, Vaisey said, “I’d be excited if I’d been asked out by a boy. I liked that other boy on the bus. He’s called Jack, but he didn’t say anything to me. He sort of looked like he was going to and then he didn’t.”
I put my arm around her. “I’m sure you will get a boyfriend, hair-hat friend.”
Vaisey said, “Have you met anyone you like yet? Do you like Charlie?”
I laughed in a casual way and said, “Charlie?”
She said, “Oh, I just wondered. I thought he might have asked you to go to the cinema as well.”
To tell the truth, that is what I had thought in a little far away place in my mind. He seemed friendly and sort of happy to see me, but he hadn’t said anything. Why should he? He was quite a good-looking boy. Probably had a few girlfriends before.
I said to Vaisey, “Maybe he doesn’t go for the Irish broomstick type?”
Vaisey said, “You’re silly. Anyway, Honey said we had to show our glorwee.”
I said, “I am showing my glorwee, look at me showing my glorwee.” And I bent down and kissed my kneecaps as we walked along.
We had breakfast in the pub the next day. It was quite good fun being in a real pub when it was all secret and closed up. Especially as Ruby’s dad had gone to the beer fest up in the dales. For a laugh, I was offering one of the stuffed deer a little sausage when a male voice said, “Hello, Tallulah.”
I whirled round, hiding the sausage. It was Alex. Matilda went mad leaping up and down at his shins.
I said, “Hello, Alex.” In a low voice, like the woman in James Bond. I don’t know why.
Vaisey said, “Hi, Alex. I’m going to go in and work on my song. Laters.”
Ruby went after her saying, “Vaisey, I want to show you Matilda’s new collar, it lights up. Come and see, Lullah.”
And she scampered off after Vaisey.
I was about to follow them when Alex said, “Come and sit in the sun with me. I haven’t really heard about how you are getting on at college or anything.”
I looked at him.
He was being quite nice, wasn’t he?
Was he?
We went and sat on the wall that ran around the graveyard. You could see miles from there and the moors looked green and not glowering like they often did. I could see big birds swooping and diving above the crags, like in Wuthering Heights on a good day. I felt warm in the sun and it was really nice sitting there with him. I was still nervous, because he was just so gorgeous. Like a film star, really. I don’t think I had ever spoken to a grown-up boy before. About myself.
He said, “What do you like best about college, Tallulah?”
“Oh, I don’t know really, I feel like I’m being me. Not that that is probably the best choice but…”
And he laughed. “What would be wrong with you?”
And that’s when I did it.
“Oh you know, the knee thingy. And the—” And just in time I stopped myself from saying the corkers word. I had very nearly said, to the best-looking boy in the universe, “Alex, I haven’t got any corkers, do you think they will ever grow?” And possibly followed that up by saying, “I have been trying various methods of corker-rubbing, what do you think?”
He was still reeling from the knee thingy.
“The knee thingy?”
I said, “Oh, I…well…they…”
He was looking at my jeans, where the knees would be (in any ordinary