Girl, 16: Five-Star Fiasco

  For Alex Meyers

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Get to Know Sue Limb!

  A Few More Facts about Sue!

  By Sue Limb (in reading order):

  Hi, guys!

  Jess Jordan’s Top Tips for How to Deal with Your Mum’s Online Dating

  Chapter 1

  Jess ran practically all the way to school. There was Fred, looking very tall and gangling in his parka, talking to Mackenzie by the gate.

  ‘Fred!’ called Jess. ‘Here they are!’

  The guys looked towards her, Fred’s mysterious grey eyes peering out from his hood as if he was some kind of shy rainforest animal. Jess grinned. Fred was her favourite kind of rainforest animal – after gorillas, of course.

  Jess tore open the envelope and pulled them out.

  ‘Ta-ra!’ she yelled in a triumphant fanfare. ‘Tickets for Chaos, the Dinner Dance of the Century! I can’t believe we’ve organised this! They look really professional, don’t they?’

  Fred picked one up and peered at it.

  ‘Hmmm,’ he pondered. ‘They’re certainly the best since the tickets to the coliseum in Rome, you know: Lions, Lemonade and as much Linguine as you can eat …’

  ‘Brilliant!’ cried Mackenzie, who was short and curly-haired and bristling with energy. ‘Can I have mine? I ordered four.’ He ripped some out of Jess’s hand.

  ‘Wait, you animal!’ yelled Jess. ‘You’ve paid, right?’

  ‘Last week!’ Mackenzie assured her, counting out four tickets and pocketing them.

  ‘Wait, wait!’ wailed Jess. ‘I have to cross you off the list!’ She scrabbled around in her school bag. There was a cosmetics purse, half an apple core, a spare pair of socks, a copy of a trashy magazine, a few random school books, three pens (two broken), the remains of a cheese sandwich dating back to prehistory, two scrunched-up pieces of paper containing used chewing gum, and half a bottle of cola, which had already leaked a tiny pool of dark-brown gunge into the bottom of the bag – but no list.

  ‘Fred!’ said Jess urgently. ‘I think you had the list – look in your bag!’

  Fred continued to admire the ticket. ‘We chose the right font,’ he murmured. ‘I told you Dotum would be better than MS Gothic.’

  ‘Where’s the list, Fred?’ hissed Jess.

  ‘I haven’t got it.’ Fred shrugged, handing the ticket back to her. ‘You must have left it at home.’

  ‘Urghhh, wait.’ Jess remembered something. ‘I think there were two lists – or maybe three. There was the list we were working on early last week, because we sold loads of tickets on Tuesday, and then you left that list at home, so on Thursday we made a new list. And I think there was an extra list with a few names on it on Friday.’

  ‘Way to go!’ Mackenzie grinned. ‘You could be the Queen of Lists!’

  Jess smiled faintly, but inside she was panicking. She’d been so sure that Fred had all the lists. But now she wasn’t so certain. She’d been concentrating on keeping the cheques safe, and thought she’d handed the lists to Fred.

  The bell rang. As they walked into school, Jess grabbed Fred’s elbow.

  ‘Listen!’ she whispered. ‘We can’t go dishing out tickets unless we’re sure people have paid! And unless we have the lists we can’t be sure they’ve paid or not!’

  ‘We could always make another list,’ said Fred. ‘I’m in the mood for it. I can feel another list coming on. I’m going to make a list of the people I know who look like characters from history. Starting with that guy in the corner shop who looks like Bugs Bunny.’

  ‘Fred, concentrate!’ groaned Jess. Fred’s kidding around wasn’t always appropriate. ‘We have to get this right! Otherwise people could gatecrash! We’ll have to pretend the tickets aren’t available until we’ve found the list of people who’ve paid.’

  But, of course, they had already let Mackenzie have his.

  By break, a crowd had gathered. ‘Tickets, tickets!’ they were chanting. Pushy Jodie was at the head of the queue – although it wasn’t really a queue, more a kind of rugby scrum. Jodie snatched a fistful of tickets from Fred’s rather limp, long fingers.

  ‘Bar, bands, buffet!’ yelled Jodie. ‘Excellent! What bands are we having?’

  ‘We haven’t quite … finalised it yet,’ said Jess.

  ‘But there’s going to be jazz, right?’ asked Ben Jones, his divine face peering over Jodie’s shoulder.

  ‘Oh, defo, yes, don’t worry!’ Jess assured him.

  ‘I ordered six tickets,’ said Ben, holding out his hand. ‘My mum and dad and my sister and her boyfriend –’

  ‘Who are you taking, then, Ben?’ demanded Jodie, turning and staring brazenly into his face.

  ‘Just … a friend,’ said Ben shyly.

  Jess wondered who the lucky girl would be. She had a feeling Ben might bring somebody who didn’t go to their school. So many girls at Ashcroft School drooled over him, it was almost a GCSE option. Jess had passed that exam with flying colours – she’d adored him for at least six months, until she’d realised that Fred, though often irritating, was somehow more her sort of guy.

  ‘Fred!’ she snapped. ‘Don’t just stand there! Make another list!’

  ‘OK,’ said Fred, getting out his notebook. ‘Uhhh, right: tea, milk, pasta, kitchen roll, talcum powder …’

  ‘Fred!!???’ yelled Jess. ‘What kind of list is that?’

  ‘Oh, just my favourite foods,’ quipped Fred. ‘Talcum powder is great sprinkled on porridge.’ He put on his brilliant-but-vacant professor’s face, and everybody laughed.

  ‘Fred,’ insisted Jess, trying to stay calm, ‘make a list of the people who are collecting tickets!’

  Fred clicked open his pen. ‘What’s your name, sir?’ he asked Ben.

  ‘He’s Santa Claus, and I’m Rudolf!’ yelled Mackenzie.

  ‘And I’m Madonna!’ added Jodie. ‘Hey, stop pushing!’

  It was all getting a bit frantic, but Jess could see that, whatever Fred was saying, he was writing down people’s real names – more or less. Although his handwriting was so spidery it was going to take them a week to decipher it.

  ‘This is such a great idea, babe,’ Jess’s best friend, Flora, said into her left ear. Flo squeezed Jess’s arm. ‘It’s going to be such a blast! I’m proud to even know you. Gimme my eight tickets! Mum, Dad, Felicity and Rob, Freya and her horrible Danny, and me and Jack – I must win the prize for buying the most tickets ever!’

  ‘I remember your dad’s cheque,’ said Jess with a smile. ‘It was the biggest cheque I’ve ever seen!’ For a fleeting second, Jess hoped that Flora’s dad’s cheque was safe with the others in the plastic box at the bottom of her wardrobe (or was it in a big envelope under her bed?). She and Fred must get around to opening a proper bank account for the dinner dance – at £75 for a double ticket, these wer
e big bucks (by Jess’s standards, anyway).

  ‘It’s going to be awesome!’ Flora went on, staring dreamily at her tickets. ‘Such a brilliant idea to make it a family thing! So the parents don’t mind shelling out and everything. If it was just for teenagers I don’t think my dad would even let me come.’

  ‘And think of all the money you’ll raise for Oxfam!’ added Ben.

  Jess felt a horrid little lurch of panic: any profit was going to Oxfam, so that made it even more vital to sort out the money side. She suddenly remembered she’d put some cash in her chest of drawers as well – stuffed in a sock or something.

  ‘Are you going to host it, Fred?’ asked Jodie, grinning. ‘I hope you’ve got some brilliant gags lined up!’

  ‘We’re going to co-host it,’ Jess informed Jodie coldly.

  ‘Yeah, the famous Jess ’n’ Fred double act!’ Flora backed her up. ‘That’s why the tickets are going like hot cakes!’

  ‘No,’ said Mackenzie with a strange, almost mischievous grin. ‘It’s because they’re dirt cheap! My dad said he didn’t see how you could do a decent dinner dance for the price!’

  Jess felt a flare of annoyance. Mackenzie’s dad said that, did he? Right! She would single him out for a bit of sarcastic banter during the co-hosting stand-up routine …

  Walking home after school, Fred and Jess discussed their triumph. At least, it nearly felt like a triumph.

  ‘Amazing!’ marvelled Fred. ‘All those tickets gone!’

  ‘Except eight,’ Jess reminded him.

  ‘Yeah, except eight,’ admitted Fred. ‘Hey! Why don’t we print another hundred?’

  For an instant Jess’s heart leapt in excitement. Another hundred! More money for Oxfam! And more muns for them to organise all the details, which they must get around to …

  ‘Wait, no!’ she gasped, suddenly realising something. ‘If we print another hundred, there wouldn’t be room for everybody in the hall!’

  ‘We could stick a few extra tables out on the pavement,’ suggested Fred airily.

  ‘Fred! It’s going to be February! Valentine’s, remember?’

  ‘We could provide duvets.’

  ‘No, no, don’t be stupid. It’s made me wonder, though – can we fit in the people who have already bought tickets?’ A cold wave of anxiety shot up Jess’s neck.

  ‘Of course we can!’ Fred grinned breezily. ‘A hundred is nothing!’

  ‘Maybe we should go to the church hall and have another look at it. A hundred! That’s ten tables of ten people each. How big are the tables?’

  ‘Never mind that.’ Fred brushed her aside. ‘The really important question is: how are we going to host it? In fancy dress?’

  Jess was instantly distracted by the idea.

  ‘We could go as animals,’ Fred pondered. ‘I could be a meerkat. I’ve always wanted to be a meerkat.’

  ‘You are a meerkat,’ Jess assured him. ‘You have their strange, lost eyes … But what would I be?’

  ‘Miss Piggy, of course!’ Fred grinned.

  Jess hit him with her school bag and, as she did so, there was a horrid little crack from inside and some drops of brownish liquid spilled out.

  ‘Oh, that cola!’ Jess shuddered. ‘I bet it’s all over my history book!’ She opened her bag and picked out the school books, which were lightly dripping. ‘A hankie! A tissue! Give me something to mop them up with!’ she pleaded.

  ‘You must know by now that I never carry a hankie,’ said Fred. ‘That’s girls’ stuff. I always wipe my nose on the pavement.’

  ‘Oh, Fred!’ sighed Jess. ‘You’re useless.’

  Chapter 2

  It had been a mistake to barge into Mum’s bedroom without knocking. She was sitting on the bed, with her laptop on her knees, and as Jess entered, Mum snapped the lid of the laptop shut with a panicky look, as if she’d been caught out.

  ‘Hey, Mum! Why the guilty face? What are you up to?’ Jess bounced on to the bed and tried to prise the laptop open. Mum slapped her hand playfully, but hard.

  ‘Stop! It’s – a secret!’ Mum’s face went pink. Hey! Maybe she’d been ordering some kind of surprise treat for Jess! Clothes? DVDs? A day at a spa? A world cruise?

  ‘What kind of secret?’ asked Jess, peering into her face. Mum couldn’t usually stand up against a really ferocious grilling. ‘Is it a nice secret?’

  Mum looked doubtful. She stuck out her lower lip, sighed and shook her head. ‘It could go either way,’ she said.

  A sudden horrible thought came scorching into Jess’s mind.

  ‘You’re not looking up illnesses on the internet again, are you?’ she demanded. She remembered that terrible time when Mum thought she had Polymyalgia rheumatica! (‘Polly’ for short – it always helps to have a nickname for a nasty illness.)

  ‘No, no,’ said Mum hastily. ‘I’ve managed to kick that awful habit.’

  ‘What is it then, Mum? Come on, give me a clue. Maybe I can help.’

  ‘Oh, you certainly can’t help.’ Mum gave her a very sceptical look. ‘Although you could ruin it.’

  ‘Ruin it?’ Eagerly Jess pounced on this hint. She could ruin it! What could she ruin? Well, almost anything. The world cruise would be top of her list of things to ruin, of course. What had she most recently ruined? Well, the non-stick frying pan – by scraping at it with a metal spoon!

  ‘Are you ordering a replacement non-stick frying pan?’ enquired Jess anxiously, because at the height of the ruined frying pan row she had recklessly offered to pay for a new one.

  Mum threw back her head and laughed. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ she said, beginning to make a move. ‘Come on! Let’s go and help Granny with supper.’

  ‘No!’ roared Jess, capturing her with a well-aimed rugby tackle. ‘Unless you tell me what it is, I shall go down the leisure centre and get into a fight! I’ll run away from home and live in a cardboard box with street people! I’ll marry a fish!’

  ‘Well, you’ll obviously do most of those things anyway,’ said Mum, giving up the struggle to escape and going limp. ‘Oh, all right. If I tell you – and it’s a big if …’

  ‘Yes? Yes? What?’

  ‘You must promise not to breathe a word to anybody.’

  ‘I promise!’ said Jess. ‘I really mean it! My lips are zipped!’

  Mum gave her a serious, stern look. ‘Seriously, Jess. It’s … a delicate subject.’

  Surgery! She was going to have a facelift!

  ‘Sure!’ agreed Jess, breathless with excitement. Maybe if Mum had a facelift she would look more favourably on Jess’s plans for a boob job.

  ‘OK, then.’ Mum gave her a doubtful look and flipped open her laptop. ‘I’m thinking of … well, there’s this online dating thing.’

  Jess’s heart gave a crazy somersault. The facelift went hurtling off into cyberspace. The boob job drooped out of sight. The world cruise sailed away off the map.

  ‘Dating?’ Jess gasped. Her mum gestured towards the screen. A gallery of men stared out at them. Somehow they all looked shabby and desperate, as if they’d been floating on a life raft in the Pacific and had to eat their own feet to survive.

  ‘This is what’s available within twenty miles of here,’ said Mum with a sigh, ‘between the ages of thirty and fifty.’

  ‘That’s quite a big age range,’ Jess pondered. ‘I mean, thirty is, like, a toy boy, Mum.’ When it came to toy boys, Jess’s mum had a bit of history. There had been her Japanese pupil with the glossy shoes, Mr Nishizawa. Jess shuddered at the ghastly memories of this affair, particularly the time when Mr N had come out into the back garden just at the moment when Jess had been driven, by a terrible bathroom crisis, to pee behind a bush.

  ‘Thirty is fine,’ Mum insisted firmly. ‘I’m not old enough biologically to be the mother of a thirty-year-old.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ Jess agreed hastily. ‘But, Mum! Fifty is way too old.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so …’ faltered Mum. ‘Fifty is nothing, these days.’
/>
  Jess stared at the photos on the screen. Several of these guys had horrible thick beards, not stylish goatees. There was one called Adrian who had a beard so big you could have built a tree house in it and thrown a party.

  ‘Er, Mum,’ said Jess, ‘these guys all look like losers.’

  ‘You should never judge people by their looks,’ Mum argued, although she sounded a little half-hearted about it.

  Jess sighed and stared at the candidates, all smiling awkwardly in the manner of serial killers. OK, they looked unpromising. But if one of them turned out to be even vaguely tolerable, it meant that Mum might come to the dinner dance after all. She had so far sternly refused, on the grounds that Jess might be traumatised by the sight of her mother dancing by herself. There’s something really weird about parents dancing. That was why Chaos was going to be a family event – so all the teenagers could see their parents dance, feel the fear, eat their own fists, pee themselves laughing and get over it.

  ‘And the fact is, Jess, I’ve already made arrangements to see one of these chaps.’

  ‘Which? Which?’ demanded Jess eagerly.

  ‘You’ll see,’ said Mum, shutting her laptop with a mysterious smile. ‘Now let’s help Granny with the supper – and don’t breathe a word to her about this, OK?’

  Granny had made burgers and, to placate the gods of dieting, she’d done oven-baked wedges of butternut squash instead of chips, plus a salad.

  ‘There’s the ketchup,’ said Granny, helpfully placing it beside Jess’s glass (water, not cola: so saintly!).

  Mum was messing about, struggling to open a bottle of wine for herself and Granny. Jess sighed. Why was their corkscrew so primitive? Flora’s dad had a state-of-the-art corkscrew that worked on compressed air or something.