Primperfect Read Free Page B

kind of hard to process. I understand now why Dad left them till I was sixteen. They’re lovely in a way, but I’m reading through the time she was with Fintan at the moment, and it’s difficult. Because she is so young and even though she is older than I am now, it’s not by much and I want to protect her from her future. How strong she will have to be, how brave! I don’t know if I could be as brave and strong as Mum was but, at the same time, I kind of hope I would be. If a crisis happened, I would love to be able to deal with it gracefully. It is REALLY weird to be reading about the times that led to my conception. I mean, I know that they were together, but it kind of blows my mind that there was a time when my mum actually fancied my dad. Like, seriously fancied. The way I feel about Kevin sometimes when I am in a charitable mood or daydreaming out the window during class.
    I think I am going to write another apology letter to Karen. I will read it out to Joel’s voicemail and see if it is good enough to make him be friends with me again.
    LETTER TO KAREN draft 47 (UNSENT)

    I miss him terribly. I don’t have a lot of family and I don’t want to lose the bits of it I have left. Especially Joel because he is a member of the family you build for yourself – the friends and allies you can call at three o’clock in the morning if you really need them. I rarely call people, though, when I’m in that sort of headspace. Because I don’t like throwing my problems all over them and I know you can’t rely on friends to, like, provide you with happiness. That has to come from yourself. Or something. Not that I’m an authority on happiness or anything, although I have my moments. Usually when I’m happy.
    Joel is always such a huge part of my summer, to the point that we actually resent each other’s holidays with family. Not that Fintan ever takes me anywhere – his holidays tend to be work-related. He should step up and fork out because I really want to go to Paris and walk around it in ballet pumps and a stripy jumper, pretending that I am an artist or some sort of muse to an artist or in an indie band with a cult following. Fintan isn’t sure about Paris, because he associates it with his lost love, Hedda, who is now married to a human rights lawyer named Gallen, whom I have never seen and always picture as an elf.
    I wish that Fintan had been nicer to my mum and not flirted with her housemate, Gillian, whom I have never met but will probably automatically hate if I ever do meet her because she was a disloyal and scheming friend. I wonder if that is how Joel feels about me.

Why is Fintan even with me? He doesn’t think I’m half as interesting as the stock market or the other women he insists on flirting with even when I’m in the room. It’s like he wants me to never be too sure of him. In fairness to him, it is working a charm.
    Quote from Prim’s mum’s diary
    ad is kind of with me yet against me on the whole Karen thing. He is with me because he understands that she is the devil, yet he thinks that I went ‘far too far’, what with announcing her sexual orientation over the intercom. He thinks that the teachers realise that Karen is evil incarnate, but came down hard on me because they were worried that me ‘breaking in’ (how is it breaking if the door isn’t even locked?) to the principal’s office and ‘commandeering’ (how is it com mandeering if no-one else was even using it?) the intercom for purposes that were ‘not school-related’ (I could argue this one, but – honestly – fair enough) would set a worrying precedent. It totally did, too. While I was suspended (but before Ms Cleary put the padlock on the office door) a second-year invited the whole school to her ‘free gaff’ over the intercom in the hopes of popularity.
    My outing of Karen, while hardly a public