I Think I Love You by Allison Pearson Read Free Book Online Page A

yours and yours alone, but you can, you really can.
    The hard thing was, I loved talking about David, and everything connected to him, even in a silly way. Wednesday nights, I would take the long way round to orchestra practice just so I could walk past David’s, the ironmongers, behind the bus station. Seeing his name written in big letters over the shop felt like a sign. I mean, it
was
a sign, you know, but a different kind of sign. Like the world knew that I loved him and put his name up there special. Just saying his name out loud was a thrill after hearing it a million times inside my own head. Talking about him to friends made him more real, but at the same time it meant I was sharing him, which hurt. I preferred it when we were alone together in my bedroom.
    “David is sexy but what?” demanded Gillian, twitching her delicate, Beatrix Potter–bunny nose.
    She was in her usual perch on top of the radiator, slender legs dangling down, sheer navy socks pulled up to her thighs, leaving only a fewinches of pale flesh exposed. I tried not to look at the flash of white panties, which made me think of her new boyfriend and of what he might be doing to her. How I longed for those long socks of Gillian’s. My socks came to just below the knee and my mother insisted I wear garters to hold them up. The elastic burrowed into the skin, leaving an angry red bracelet round my calves. It took ages to fade. Sometimes, when I lay in the bath and looked at the marks on my legs, I liked to pretend I was a tortured saint. One who had courageously kept the faith and endured the red-hot irons of sadistic torturers with pointy beards, giving absolutely nothing away.
Stigmata
rhymed with
garter
.
    “What’s so funny then about David singing ‘but’? I don’t get it,” Gillian demanded.
    God had made Gillian perfect, but in His infinite wisdom He had left out a sense of humor. Maybe if you’re that pretty, He reckons you don’t need one. God probably thinks it’s worth giving a sense of humor only to those of us who have to laugh at all the rubbish bits that are wrong with us.
    “It’s not funny,” I said, trying to silence Sharon with a pleading look.
    She was supposed to be on my side, not Carol’s. When we were at her house doing our David scrapbooks, I felt we were getting really close, but at school I never quite knew whose friend she was. Sharon’s shifting loyalty stung more than Carol’s crude taunts.
    “I was only saying ‘Could It Be Forever’ is David’s best song, like you said, Gillian,” I went on, hoping that saying Gillian’s name would make them stop. They were all scared of upsetting her, even Carol.
    Gillian took a pot of Vaseline out of her bag and dabbed a blob on her bottom lip. She had this way of moving the jelly, flexing and rolling both lips to push it along and get even coverage without needing to use her finger. Like all of Gillian’s actions, it was seductive and mesmerizing. We all tried to copy her, but ended up with jelly on our teeth.
    Gillian was looking at me as though I were something in a shopwindow she might seriously consider buying. For one brilliant moment I thought she was going to smile. Maybe even invite me round to her house to listen to records. Then she slid off the radiator, yanked down her skirt and said: “That’s the aggravating thing about you, Petra. You’re always agreeing, aren’t you?”
    • • •
    Our form room was out in one of the temporary classrooms next to the netball court. Better known as the Cowsheds. Freezing in winter, baking hot in summer. Walls so thin you could hear a chair being scraped back in the class next door. They called it the temporary block, but it had been there since the war.
    On the way back to afternoon registration, Angela told us she had some news. I could tell from the little secret twitching smile on her face that she’d been saving it up like the last sweet in a packet. Her cousin, a girl called Joanna Crampton who lived in