Primperfect Read Free

feels that Grandma Lily’s instructions should be honoured and because her life’s ambition is to be a milliner of some description with her own little hat-elier (see what I did there?) and everything. She is really talented and I wish I had more call to wear hats because the ones she makes are nothing short of lovely.
    â€˜Three more years,’ she said grimly.
    I nodded.
    â€˜Three more years’ is kind of our motto at the moment. We share it. Ciara uses it whenever her mum is being all snippy. (Her dad can also be pretty snippy, but he feels more conflicted about completely ignoring Grandma Lily’s wishes, seeing as how she gave birth to him back before epidurals were readily available and so on.) I use ‘three more years’ whenever Fintan is being impossible. Ciara is using it more than me these days, but that might just change now that I am in possession of Mum’s diaries.
    â€˜Don’t judge me based on what you read in there, Prim,’ Dad said as he handed the diaries to me. ‘What happened between your mother and me was regrettable and I should have acted differently.’
    â€˜Like not gotten her pregnant, maybe?’
    â€˜Yes. Wait, that’s a trick question, isn’t it? No. No. NO!’
    And then he got stuttery about how he should have done certain things differently but he didn’t regret having me and so on until I put him out of his misery by admitting that I was trying to

    him.
    I love that word, ‘flummox’. Ella’s mum uses it all the time. This will be my first year of not being taken care of by Mary after school. Instead I will be going to two hours of after-school study. Because it is my post-Junior Cert year and I am now mature enough to spend an extra two hours in the marvellous establishment which I frequent so delightedly every single day of my adolescent life. Except for weekends. And holidays. But that is still a hell of a lot of days. I hope Joel isn’t going. Or Karen. They’re total besties now, all laughing at each other’s stupid jokes and being gay together.
    Karen is a lesbian or bisexual or something – I can’t really keep track. The above statement comes across a bit bigoty. Unless you know how evil Karen is. Which is kind of why Joel and I are fighting. I did something very wrong and it wasn’t nice of me. But I think it is more OK to do something wrong to Karen than it is to do something wrong to other people. Because

    She really is and now she and Joel act like I am the devil and I amn’t, I really truly amn’t. I’m just a girl trying to survive in this crazy mixed-up world.
    I miss Joel so much, but he won’t be my friend any more, until I apologise to Karen again and I already had to apologise to her once and I will not apologise to her any more times until she apologises to me for being a horror. In exactly those words: ‘I am sorry I am such a horror, Prim. It was hurtful and wrong of me. I will try not to be in the future.’ And then she has to follow it up with being nice to everyone for six months and maybe then we can talk about me maybe drafting something in the line of an apology.
    Last year I went through a big phase of wanting to be a cruciverbalist (the people who draft and assemble the crosswords that go in the papers). It still sounds cool, but I’m so sick of hinting what I want and analysing other people’s hints at what they want. It is exhausting. I just want to know what Joel wants me to do so this will all be fixed and we will be best friends since Montessori again.
    It started because he fancied Kevin, I think. The rift. He really fancied Kevin and I wanted a boyfriend and Kevin seemed like he wanted to be my boyfriend and I fancied him even though he was a LARPer and so forth. Looking back, I can see that I totally backed the wrong horse. Kevin turned out to be a bad idea – not that he was cruel to me or anything, just really,