THAT WAS IT . I T WAS all over.
And that’s when I heard it – the wind whistling off what’s left of the polar ice cap right through the empty place where my heart used to be.
I know what you’re thinking – that sounds like a really bad line from a really bad country and western song. And you’d be right. Because that’s what I turned into. Some heartbroken heroine from the He-Done-Me-Wrong Hall of Fame. A walking, wailing cliché. Except, of course, I kept my wailing to myself. I knew Meko didn’t want to hear it and besides I was too humiliated, too embarrassed and ashamed to admit to her that I cared as much as I did.
I looked after everything at home and I went to school, same as normal, but I was totally numb. I wasn’t even angry – not yet. I walked through the days as though I was walking through glue – everything seemed to have slowed down and lost its colour and taste. There was nothing in my head except a really annoying sound loop on endless repeat: ‘Jet Lucas dumped you. Jet Lucas dumped you.’
Wednesday afternoon, a week after my life had ended, Dad had taken Nina to a ballet rehearsal and I was sitting out back in the studio playing my guitar and trying not to think about dirtbag Jet. I was playing your song – ‘My Life Before You’ – strumming the chords and singing softly to myself. Then I saw Danny in the open studio doorway.
He was looking at me strangely, almost angrily. I quickly put the guitar down and turned back to the console, wondering how long he’d been standing there. Danny stepped into the room.
‘You know your dad thinks you don’t play anymore?’
‘I don’t really. I was just messing around.’
‘What was that song you were playing? Did you write that?’
‘Like I said, I was just messing around.’
‘So why don’t you ever jam with your dad and me?’
‘You two look like you’re getting along just fine without me.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Nothing. I just don’t want to get in the way.’
‘Get in the way of what? You’re not in the way. What are you talking about?’
I took a deep breath, trying not to scream in frustration.
‘What are you doing here, Danny? It’s not Friday.’
‘Meko told me about you and Jet. I’m sorry.’
‘Meko’s got a big mouth.’
‘She’s worried about you, that’s—’
‘Well, as you can see, I’m fine.’
I picked up my guitar and stood up to go. As I walked past Danny, he tried to grab my hand. I pulled it away and kept walking.
‘Luisa,’ he called after me. ‘You know we’re not all like Jet Lucas, don’t you?’
I don’t know what it was about what Danny said to me that afternoon but it changed everything. I know what he meant to say, and what he wanted me to hear, but somehow my brain decided to process it differently. What my brain heard was, ‘We’re not all like Jet Lucas. Jet Lucas is unique, one of a kind, one in a million. Don’t be such a wimp. If you really love him, go after him – because Jet Lucas is worth fighting for.’ And that’s what I decided to do. I didn’t know how I was going to do it – but that seemed like a minor detail.
The one thing I did figure out is that if I was going to win back Jet, it was going to have to happen at the fete. Ever since the night Meko and I turned up at his house, he’d been totally avoiding me – if he so much as spotted me on the other side of the quadrangle, he would turn around and walk the other way. The one situation, I reasoned, in which he couldn’t run away from me was when he was actually up on stage performing in front of an audience.
I know, I know, I sound like a total lunatic – but as I said, at the time it made perfect sense.
Now that I had a new-found purpose in life, I went into overdrive making sure that everything else I’d promised to organise for the fete was under control. I checked off my list:
1. Old records and CDs in Home Ec storage cupboard ? Check.
2. Year Ten Common Room starting to look Oz-like? Check. (Okay, Edith wasn’t as artistic as she claimed, and the yellow brick road looked more like a toxic industrial spill than a magic highway. But Tiahna had come up with twenty-five mocktail recipes – all featuring green cordial – so it probably wasn’t going to be a total disaster.)
3. Five fashion tribes booked in for the Urban Tribes show? Check. (We would have had more but the Death-Rockers threatened to beat up the Emos, who wisely decided to stay at home and listen to Jimmy Eat World CDs instead.)
4. The KGB hadn’t gone The Sopranos on Nina? Check. (I’d only had one further, comparatively non-life-threatening, encounter with them, so I was comparatively happy. Melissa and Shania claimed to have seen me in the library flirting with Jet Lucas, which was a total lie, because I doubt either Melissa or Shania know where the library is. Which means that, as I’d predicted, one of their spies must have seen Danny and me having our meeting with Jet and informed on us – see what I mean about Stalinist Russia? But once I had calmly explained that I was just handing over the reins to Danny Baldassarro, and Melissa and Shania had made a few non-specific threats and given me a Chinese burn for good measure, we parted company pretty amicably – or as amicably as you can when you hate each other’s guts.)
5. Kanisha had discovered her inner fashion-head and had suddenly taken to wearing lots of eyeliner and had her nose and eyebrow pierced? Check.
6. Meko had no idea what I was really up to? Check.
It seemed to my slightly warped brain that everything was falling perfectly into place. The planets were aligning in a cosmic sign that my mission to win Jet back was not only just and fair, but also bound to be successful.
And then I found out that Danny had secretly been visiting Dad at Sound Advice.