Читать книгу Ugly Shy Girl - Laura Dockrill - Страница 7

Abigail walked up to her college entrance to find Matt sitting on the wall waiting for her.

‘Hey buddy, you’re five minutes early … fresh start to the New Year, eh?’ he laughed. Colleges have these people, support assistants, agony aunts, whatever you like to dress it up as and they are assigned to a case, like a detective, to shadow. To make sure that their days run smoothly. At this college they are known as ‘buddies’ and Matt is Abigail’s buddy. Some people would say that Abigail was lucky that her buddy wasn’t a tight-fisted old hag with a melting face but Matt was just as difficult to get along with for different reasons. Matt was 32 years old. When his head wasn’t consumed by a tight beanie, he had his hair all spiked up like he had used a whole tub of Brylcreem … (excuse me … I mean … Wella) to get that out of bed look. He played around with it all the time, constantly referring to it as his flea pit but the warm smells of coconut shampoo and limey gel haunted him on his day to day whereabouts; it was very clear that his hair was washed more than the hands of the man with OCD. Matt wore baggy jeans that cut an inch or two too high around the leg; sort of swung around his ankles, showing off his Family Guy socks, making him look very awkward and slightly try-hard. Then there was that skater chain that hung so blatantly from his side pocket, reflecting Abigail’s dismal grimace and every other spare reflection in its twinkling presence, screaming, ‘I’M MASSIVLY OVERPRICED, WAS I EVEN BOUGHT FROM A COOL SHOP? WHAT THE HELL AM I USED FOR?’ Matt had the vocabulary of a fourteen year old; he used words like ‘sick’, ‘wicked’ and his good old favourite, ‘random’.

‘It’s raining, random.’

‘Hey, the guys have got a football, we should totally play, could be random?’

Which frustrated Abigail because she found that when something was actually ‘random’ she couldn’t bring herself to use the word itself, she was tired of having to find alternatives … ‘Yes, the lottery balls are chosen at … melon? Transformer? Broomstick?’ You see, it just doesn’t work.

This wasn’t the only thing that annoyed Abigail, it was the relentless refusal to give-up on her. He loved it. Abigail spent almost everyday giving off all the signals that she didn’t need him around. When he spoke – she stared at the floor, folding her arms aggressively, scuffing her boots along the walls. When he sat near her at lunch – she would get up and move away but he would still come after her, like the stinky boy in class with the bad breath and the dried smudges of sleep sculpted around his eyes. He would still want to be next to her to make more pointless comments about the weather or The Simpsons or what he had eaten for breakfast. ‘Toast. Random.’ The ‘buddy’ system was even more painful as it quite frankly made matters worse. Bullies just made jokes about Abigail going out with a teacher, the girls would crack up laughing for no reason at all whenever the two of them walked past and the boys would make ludicrous sex noises:

‘FUCK ME, MATT.’

‘ONLY WITH A BLINDFOLD YOU UGLY SHY BITCH.’

Matt was so polite and so protective of Abigail he would just play along with the comments, laughing hysterically, creasing his newly wrinkled face and sometimes overacting by putting a hand on his stomach. ‘You guys!’ he’d hoot breathlessly, dramatically slapping his thigh. Matt wasn’t fooling anybody; he was as transparent as a looking-glass. Abigail knew that she had no friends; she knew that she was the pinnacle of everybody’s fun and she knew that it was her that everybody was laughing at. She just knew.

So when Matt greeted her at the entrance to college at the start of the new term, she already had a pretty decent idea of what the next few months were going to work out like. (Which is why she pretended not to notice him.)