Drama Queen Read Free

girls in our class went out with were really immature. Personally, I preferred to remain single until I found complete
perfection
.
    â€˜So how on earth did
she
get
him?
’ Clare nudged me and nodded in the direction of a curiously mismatched couple. A really fit guy was sitting beside a plain girl with lank hair.
    â€˜Maybe she’s his sister.’
    â€˜They’re holding hands.’
    â€˜Are they?’ At that point the girl nuzzled up to the guy. ‘I give up. I dunno. It happens,’ I said.
    â€˜It’s
so
unfair.’
    â€˜It’s love. There’s no logic to it.’
    At that point we reached the stop for Westgate, our school. The bus disgorged its load of kids on to the pavement. Clare strode on ahead of me but I lagged behind, thinking about what I’d just said.
    It’s love – there’s no logic to it
. But there should be. Surely love is the most important thing in life? Who you ended up with couldn’t simply be down to chance.
    I considered the way the people up ahead of me were paired off. There was Marion, who’d been glued to Mark since nursery school – they were even planning to apply to the same colleges. And there was that boy in Year 9 with the big nose, whose name I never could remember, who’d teamed up with the girl with the dodgy legs. Then there were the drippyFrinton twins who each had their totally uncool boyfriends. In fact, if you imagined a great cosmic game of Pelmanism, you could probably sort most of the people at school into matched pairs.
    The school bell was already ringing as I reached the gates, so the last of us stragglers made a headlong dash for the doors, to avoid getting on the late list.
    It was three hours later in a biology period while the teacher was droning on about ‘natural selection’ that the phrase came back to me again.
It’s love – there’s no logic to it
.
    What was this curious process that attracted one person to another? Was it the survival of the ‘fittest’? The bullfrog with the deepest croak gets the most frog wives. The strongest stag who can fight off all the other males gets the biggest harem. Were human beings just the same? All of us girls were after the ‘fittest’ male, after all. And all of the males were after the ‘hottest’ girl. Some people of course, sickeningly enough, attracted the opposite sex like filings to a magnet. But what about the rest of us? Did we just have to settle for what was left over? Maybe we were simply after the best we could get. We’d aim for the fittest but we’d then have to scale down our standardsuntil we met someone who
we
thought were the best
they
could get.
    It wasn’t until double maths (not my best subject) that the answer to the whole thing came to me. I was studying this problem and the words literally leaped off the neatly squared page. ‘Solve the inequality’, it said.
    Solve the inequality
. That was it. Love is like a vast cosmic equation. The moment you meet someone of the opposite sex, your brain does this massive piece of mental algebra: i.e. his blue eyes and perfect teeth = my glossy hair and long legs.
    be + pt = gh + ll
Good Match!
    Then on a second glance you start to see negatives: i.e. his dodgy trainers and sticky-out ears.
    be + pt – dt + soe < gh + ll
Mismatch
    Errm. Maybe there should be some brackets in there somewhere. (Algebra was not my strongest subject.)
    (be + pt) – (dt + soe) < (gh + ll)
Better?
    But then you may have negatives yourself, i.e. my bitten nails and snagged tights.
    (be + pt) – (dt + soe) = (gh + ll) – (bn + st)
Match!
    Then, of course, the more you get to know someone, the more enters into the equation. Like ambition, for instance. He might want to be a brain surgeon, whereas I might just settle for being, say, a parking warden. So the equation would become unbalanced.
    bs + (be + pt) – (dt + soe) > (gh + ll) –