“Do you?” I said. “Well I did not know that.”
“There’s loads of stuff you don’t know about me.”
“Is there?” I said. “Well, it must be nice to have something to be passionate about.”
“Yeah, well I’m passionate about loads of things.”
“Like what?”
“Like you, my love,” he said in an over-the-top voice. He took my hand and spun me round and before I knew it, he had bent me over in some elaborate dance move and I was relying on him to keep me held up because my knees had somehow got lost beneath me.
“Stubbs! Get off me,” I said, giving him a whack on the arm. He pulled me up and I looked around to see if anyone had seen what a massive idiot he was being.
“What’s wrong with you,” he said, laughing hard.
“Everyone’s looking,” I said.
“Oh here we go again. Don’t want anyone looking at you, but always moaning that nobody notices you.”
“Nobody does notice me,” I said, feeling a little bit hurt and embarrassed that Stubbs seemed to think it was funny.
“Yeah, right,” he said.
“Anyway, I thought you wanted to ask April out. Isn’t she the one you’re passionate about?”
He scratched his head and looked off into the distance and kind of mumbled a bit.
“Maybe,” he said.
“Well, why don’t you then?”
“I dunno. I don’t know what she’ll say.”
“She’ll say yes. Or she’ll say no.”
“Nah, was a silly idea really. She wouldn’t go out with someone like me.”
“What do you mean, someone like you?”
“You know what April is like, she’s all bad boy bikers or corporate bankers. She goes for anyone with a bit of drama attached. I reckon I’m just too ordinary for her and just not popular enough. She is fit though.” I reckoned he added that bit about her being fit because he was worried he had almost revealed his innermost secrets and fears and had to change it at the last minute to blokeify his statement.
“Yeah, she is. Fit.” I thought, unlike me who wanted to keel over after a forty-second run. I didn’t think that being an athlete was my thing at all.
“I’m bored of this now,” I said. “Can we go for a cup of tea instead?” I motioned with my head to the tea rooms.
Stubbs reluctantly agreed and we sat near the window with a pot of tea and piles of toast.
“So the athletic life isn’t for you, then? What’s next on your plan?”
“Brain,” I offered. “Or criminal?”
“Do you want to leave without paying then?”
“No way,” I said, looking round to see if the staff or one of the customers on the nearby table had heard us.
“Brain it is then.” Stubbs reached out behind him and picked up one of the newspapers from the rack. He flicked through to the crossword page and said, “Nine down…”
“Stop,” I said. “I can’t do crosswords.” Brain was probably the least likely fit for me, I reckoned.
“How do you know you can’t? When did you last do one? Here try this one. Nine down: ‘month for fools’.”
I tutted and decided I wasn’t going to go along with it but then he said, “It’s easy.”
“April,” I said. Stubbs grinned and raised his eyebrows.
Bloody April again. Popping up everywhere to remind me how cool and popular she was. I’d always assumed things were easy for April at school. She must have had a blast, everyone liked her and she was at the centre of everything. I thought back to watching The Breakfast Club and wondered if being popular had been a curse for April, like it was for Molly Ringwald. Maybe this life as a princess wasn’t that comfortable for April after all. I wondered if she was like me and was finding it hard to shake the past or if she was satisfied to live the life she had been assigned at school. It was like April hadn’t moved on at all, trying to cling on to her popularity. It made me even more determined to move on from being the invisible girl.
“How old are you, Liv? Nineteen? Twenty?” I’d barely given chance for her to take her coat off. I don’t suppose it was very fair of me to bombard her with questions this early on a Monday morning. I was sat at the desk, updating my CV. I was determined to have something in place before April’s reunion, to be doing something I was proud of.
“I’m twenty-five,” she said.
“Oh,” I said.
“I’ve worked with you for years,” said Liv, pleading with me to understand. I knew that she had, but sometimes I struggled to comprehend how the years had gone so fast. How had so much time passed and nothing really happened?
I wondered how things had been at school for Liv. She didn’t seem to fit into any particular type.
“Oh yeah, course,” I said to Liv, studying her for a while, wondering if she had been popular at school, wondering whether Daniel would have asked her out. She certainly fit the part: glamorous, fashionable but with her own quirky colourful style. I looked down at my own clothes: a long black tunic over a pair of trousers and another pair of block-heeled shoes. When I started working here in the summer before sixth form, it was the first time I’d been able to buy my own clothes and it felt so good to choose things for myself, but I hadn’t really changed my look since. Fashion struck me as particularly exhausting and yet here was Liv who made it look effortless. She must have been popular at school.
“So were you one of the popular girls at school?” I nodded, waiting for her to tell me like Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club how it was such a challenge being so popular and having to fit in with her friends.
“No. Goth.”
“Goth!? Like full goth? Black hair, eyeliner, the lot?”
“Yeah.” Liv nodded and laughed. “I had a long leather coat with Sisters of Mercy painted on the back and I wore German army boots and hardly anyone talked to me, but I didn’t talk to them either.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. How could Liv, this religious follower of YouTube beauty bloggers, ever have worn black lipstick?
“So,” I said taking a sidelong glance at Ally Sheedy, “were you, would you say, a basket case?”
Liv laughed. Being the athlete clearly wasn’t for me, and I wondered whether you were allowed to suddenly turn into a goth in your thirties.
“Probably yeah. Come here,” said Liv, “I’ll show you the pics.”
Liv scrolled through Facebook on her phone, and showed me a photo of her in full goth make-up at what looked like a family meal in something like a Toby Carvery. She was sat on the end of the table, everyone else smiling and raising their glasses in a toast, while Liv looked like the undead. I burst out laughing.
“So what happened, Liv? How did you escape from the goth cult?”
“Spots,” she said.
“Eh?”
“The main reason I started wearing loads of white make-up was because I had acne at school. It was the only thing that covered it up and stopped people noticing, and then one thing led to another and soon I was full