Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,76
how I’d been utterly miserable there in the rain until she invited me under her umbrella and everything had changed. I wrote about how wonderful it had been to discover that she was Tracey’s sister, how stunning she’d looked out there on her sun bed in her garden, how much I admired her pretty little house and her parents’ photographs, and how if she ever dressed up in a glittery ballroom dress like one of her mother’s she’d look far more glamorous than any film star I’d ever seen. I wrote about how grateful I was that she’d stopped Tracey and those boys from teasing me, how she’d changed my life by saving me from a terrible fate.
As I continued, I felt my embarrassment at my words fall away. It started to feel good, cleansing almost, to get it all out there on the page. Though I knew it was terribly wrong to want to kiss another girl, when I wrote about wanting to take Stan Heaphy’s place, to wrap my arms around Amanda, it made me feel calm, less troubled, as if putting my desires in writing took the shamefulness out of them, transformed them into sentences made up of nothing more than words.
When I finished my letter, signing it “All my love, Jesse,” it was several pages long and the time was after ten o’clock. I tore the pages carefully out of the notebook, folded them, and looked around the room. For a moment, I considered hiding them under my mattress, but I decided that might not be such a good place. Despite my mother’s current apathy, there was always a chance she’d find some new frenzied energy and take it upon herself to clean the bedrooms from top to bottom, single-handedly turning the mattresses on all the beds. After giving it a few minutes’ consideration, I took one of the books down from my bookshelf, pressed the letter inside its pages, and put it back on the shelf. Though in a sudden fit of housework my mother might dust off my books, she was very unlikely to look inside. Then, my confession made and hidden away, I changed into my pajamas, climbed into bed, and promptly fell asleep.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I USUALLY GOT A CHANCE TO TALK TO AMANDA IN THE MORNING AT the bus stop, but she never took the bus home with us after school. She would stand outside the school gates with Stan and ride back to Midham on his motorbike. They argued frequently, but just as frequently they engaged in long snogging sessions, eyes closed, mouths squished together and moving as if they were chewing on each other. During the first couple of weeks of school, Tracey and I watched them from the school car park until our bus arrived, Tracey huffing and mumbling under her breath about how Stan was far too good for Amanda, how she hoped it wouldn’t be too long before he moved on to some other, better girl. I said nothing, guiltily imagining myself there instead of Stan, Amanda in my arms.
Within a short time, however, Tracey got over her fixation on Stan Heaphy when she developed a crush on Gregory Loomis, one of the boys who regularly hung out with Stan by the school gates. Greg was a lanky fifth-year who tottered around school on platform shoes sporting a feathered haircut, wispy sideburns, and flares so wide he could have held a disco inside his trousers. He had a precociously hairy chest, which he attempted to reveal at any opportunity by walking around school with his tie loosened and his shirt undone even when the rest of the Liston Comprehensive student body had donned pullovers to keep off the deepening October chill. “Don’t you think he’s bloody gorgeous?” Tracey oozed each time we passed him in the corridor (an event that happened with great frequency after she obtained a copy of his timetable and began dragging me and the Debbies on circuitous detours to our lessons so that our movements would coincide with his). I thought he had decent enough looks, but I wasn’t convinced that he had much in the way of personality, since the only thing he seemed capable of talking about was his favorite football team, Liverpool; he became positively fanatic when the subject of their star player, Kevin Keegan, came up. It wasn’t long, however, before Tracey became an avid Liverpool fan herself, replacing the pictures of David Cassidy she’d pasted on the front of