It Had to Be You Read Free Page A

happened.
    She shuffled miserably round the mattress trying to find a cold spot. There had been no word from Justin. They were meant to have been sitting down for their romantic lunch by now and planning their mini break. Instead, Lizzy was newly single, humiliated on a national scale and wearing a pair of polyester breeches that had disappeared right up her bum crack.
    How had this
happened
?
    Part of her was still expecting Justin to rock up with a sheepish smile on his face. He would admit he’d just freaked out and hadn’t really meant it, and that he’d deserved the bloody nose. Or else a camera crew would spring out of the wardrobe and tell Lizzy she’d been the victim of a TV prank. Lizzy would take it all with good grace and coolly remark that she didn’t want to marry Justin anyway. She’d come out of the whole thing really well and it would make Justin realize what he’d lost and decide that maybe he
did
want more than a mini break. Henry VIII would become the nation’s most popular choice for fancy dress and everyone would live happily ever after. (Once Lizzy had made her errant boyfriend suffer for the appropriate amount of time.)
    Justin didn’t come round. There was no camera crew hiding, no matter how many times Poppet searched the flat. By 3 p.m. ‘Girl Who Gets Jilted at 30 th Birthday and Headbutts Boyfriend’ had reached six hundred thousand hits and Lizzy had twenty thousand new Twitter followers. People were retweeting the link as far as Uzbekistan and China. Someone had set up a fake Twitter account @DumpedHeadbuttGirl and was tweeting things like, ‘Butt out you lot, my love life is none of your business,’ and ‘All the single ladies, all the single ladies! *weeps silently and stabs Beyoncé poster in eye with pencil*.’ Someone else had even created a Vine set to the eighties power ballad ‘Love Is A Battlefield’, where the infamous moment was on slow-motion constant repeat.
    ‘That one’s actually quite funny,’ Poppet accidentally said in front of Lizzy, before swiftly pressing ‘hide’.
    At 4.15 p.m. Nic called from the airport. Poppet put her on speakerphone.
    ‘Has she spoken yet?’ Nic asked.
    ‘The odd word,’ Poppet sighed. ‘She’s still refusing to come out from under the duvet.’
    ‘Lizzy, you listen, OK? Justin is a
massive wanker
who didn’t deserve you in the first place.’
    ‘She’s worried he’s going to press charges for GBH,’ Poppet told her.
    ‘He’s lucky you didn’t kick him so hard in the bollocks he’s blowing them out through his nose. He hasn’t got a leg to stand on. Look, they’re calling my flight. I’ll call you when I land.’
    Lizzy continued to lie there in the fetid dark, trying not to breathe in the noxious fumes from her own body.
Welcome to Duvetland! A place where humiliated exes come to fester.
    ‘Oh dear,’ Poppet suddenly said.
    Lizzy stuck her head out. ‘What is it?’
    Her friend smiled nervously. ‘You’re on the
MailOnline
.’
    Lizzy grabbed the laptop. She was at the top of the infamous ‘Sidebar of Shame’. The caption read: ‘Hell hath no fury! PR Lizzy Spellman Unmasked as “Girl Who Gets Jilted at 30 th Birthday and Headbutts Boyfriend” Goes Viral.’
    ‘Don’t get upset!’ Poppet implored her. ‘Remember that YouTube video of that American girl who was walking along texting in a shopping mall and she fell into a fountain! That was
way
more embarrassing.’
    It was official: Lizzy’s life was OVER.

Chapter 3
    Lizzy woke with a start. What a horrible nightmare. The fancy-dress party, the YouTube viral, the gang of paparazzi outside her flat. It had felt so
real
…
    A horn went off right by her ear, nearly giving Lizzy a heart attack. It was her ‘Sherwood Forest’ text alert. It was from Nic.
    How are you feeling? Has Twat Face got in contact to say sorry yet?
    Oh God! It hadn’t been a nightmare! The events of the last twenty-four hours flashed through Lizzy’s mind like the reel from a