Diary of a Crush: French Kiss Read Free

I started stammering and blushing even more than I already had. It was hideous. And I glanced up and he was just giving me this look accompanied by a little half-smile that just about removed the top layer of my skin.
15th October
    I can’t concentrate on anything but the fact that Dylan is coming over on Sunday. By some miracle, the ’rents are going to a wedding on Saturday and staying over so they won’t be home until Sunday night late and my mother won’t be barging in, proffering Ribena and oatcakes.
    Mia told me that Dylan has a terrible rep and that he’s left a ‘trail of broken hearts in every girls’ school from here to Cheshire’. And that he and Shona have this strange contest to see who can get off with the most people but it’s really because they have this love/hate relationship and they’re trying to score points off each other.
    ‘Mia, have you
seen
Dylan?’ I asked her incredulously as we sat on the wall by the Nursery Block and split a bag of chips between classes. ‘He’s gorgeous. If he wanted Shona, he could have her. He doesn’t need to play games.’
    But Mia just gave me a funny look and then changed the subject.
    I can’t seem to settle. I wish Sunday was here and then I wish that it was never, ever going to happen. When I’m alone inside my head, I have these amazing conversations with Dylan and I’m funny and intelligent and just a little bit quirky. But in reality I know that I’m too chicken to even speak to him.
17th October
    In twenty-four hours Dylan will be in my house. It’s just too awful to contemplate. And if I wasn’t stressed enough, Mia’s invited herself to stay over tonight. I like her and all, but I just wanted to be alone tonight so I could work myself up into a hysterical state.
18th October
    Mia’s as good as dead. She came around, spiked my Diet Pepsi with vodka and then persuaded me that it’d be a really good idea to cut a fringe in. ‘You’ve got really cool eyebrows, but no-one can see ’em,’ she kept saying. And I felt so woozy that in the end she just kind of lunged at me with the scissors and butchered my hair.
Then
she threw up on my mum’s Art Deco rug.
    Dylan’s coming round in half an hour. The lounge stinks of Dettol, I’ve got a killer headache and worst of all, my so-called fringe is crooked and curling up at the ends. I wish I was dead. No I don’t – I wish everyone else was dead.
18th October (later)
    By the time Dylan actually turned up I was practically hyper-ventilating. Every time I looked in the mirror my fringe had become even more lame. It was flicking out at the edges and just wouldn’t lie flat. Did I mention that it was completely uneven too?
    I was just in the middle of changing, so I was wearing my new dark denim skirt
and
the Lisa Simpson T-shirt I’d slept in, when the doorbell rang. I swear to God, my limbs went into spasms. I managed to open the door and Dylan was slouched nonchalantly (my word for the week) against the door jamb, dressed all in black. He slowly uncoiled himself, smiled at me in a not very reassuring way and handed me a carrier bag. ‘I thought we could have these with our tea,’ he said, with another smile that was a millimetre away from being a smirk.
    I just stared at my feet, but eventually I took the bag and looked inside.
    He’d brought biscuits. When I glanced at him, he was staring at me really intently. It was my
bloody
fringe, wasn’t it?
    ‘You look different,’ he said after I’d just stood there and gazed at him for five minutes. Then, he reached out his hand and lifted my chin. My stomach dipped all the way down to the silver nail varnish on my toes. I pulled away ’cause I just couldn’t bear it any longer.
    ‘It’s my fringe. I had a run-in with a pair of scissors,’ I muttered and he was like, ‘Wow, you actually talk!’
    And then we were sitting on the stairs and I told him about Mia and he said in this strange, strained voice, ‘Oh, that sounds like Mia.’
    I