-1Sorry it’s been a while. I’ve just not been very funny recently (am I ever?) so this has been kind of difficult to write. I wanted to like this chapter, but I guess because it’s taken so long to do, I kind of hate it. Ah well, let me know what you think.

I love pathology. It’s always a good source of random biology puns. Unfortunately, this was based on a night out I had the other week. Most of the stuff said (in fact, probably all of it) was said by me that night. I need to be slapped. I tried to tone down the uber-nerdness (although Grace was never really that nerdy to begin with, I guess) has it made any difference?

C: Major Histocompatibility Complexities Involving Cyndi Lauper and Intracellular Protozoan Parasites

Grace

Guilt is like Toxoplasma gondii on acid--once you’re infected with it, you’re riskier, doing things you would never, never do usually, not in a million years. Just like a mouse in a maze, I no longer fear the metaphorical cat piss. I am stupid. I am going to get eaten alive with chips, peas and bradyzoites.

“Well, are we going, or what?”

Ed looks me up and down, taking in my massive Lion King jumper and tracksuit bottoms without the proper respect and love they truly deserve. This is the good thing about only growing outwards since the age of thirteen; things like this still fit me, just about.

“Do you bind cyclic AMP and play a role in the regulation of the expression of the lac operon?” he asks.

“No,” I say slowly, wondering where the Hell this is going. “Why?”

“Because you look like crap!”

CRP, cAMP receptor protein. Funny; thanks to yesterday’s lectures, I know I’ve just been hit by the nerdiest insult of all time. I am oddly flattered.

“You’re not even trying,” he adds blandly.

“I wonder why!”

“I won’t help you,” Ed says, narrowing his eyes slightly, “unless you put some effort in. This is a date, Grace. A date. And it was your idea; you can at least try to look pretty.”

Charming, but I am not naïve enough to take this personally; by pretty, of course, he means slutty, and I will probably have to listen to him. Guilt is a terrible, terrible thing.

“I don’t have anything!”

“You forget that I’ve seen your wardrobe, Grace,” Ed says, smiling as he brushes his hair.

Forget? How could I ever forget that? Scientific proof that Monsters Inc was not wrong when it said scary things come out of closets. I’d choose Sully any day. Sure, he’s big and blue and animated, but any day.

Sully’s hair would be fun, though. You could plait it, or curl it, or crimp it. Wow, a whole world of opportunity has just been opened up for me. Now I’ve just got to wait for an amazing invention that turns Disney characters into real people. Once that happens, I’ll be in there.

“Go screw yourself, Vreeland.”

Ed flicks a hand in my direction. “Go!”

Oh yes, Sully any day. I shudder as I walk away.

Craptacular.

So the question I keep asking myself is why oh why on God’s green Earth did I let Kal get that stupid tattoo? Okay, it was hi-bloody-larious to watch, but other than that, why? I know perfectly well about my own guilt complex; I’ve lived with it for eighteen years after all. I guess I must just get stupider when drunk. I would vow to never drink again, but now, thanks to everything, I’m going on a date with super-geek, and I will do just about anythingto my poor liver to get me through this alive and without any homicide convictions.

Sorry, liver, but it’s you and me against the world tonight.

Killer heels are the best invention ever, but they’re also the cruellest. When I walk, I feel fabulous, but the people who look at me just see a big wobbly mess on stilts, like a marshmallow melting on a cocktail stick.

And it doesn’t really help that I can’t breathe in my dress, either. I can only hope that I faint and have to be taken home by some big strong man who is definitely not Edward Vreeland. Oh yes. He shall hold me close in his muscly arms, cradle me like a baby, and tuck me up in bed with a warm cup of hot chocolate.

Damn, I’m so boring. Hot chocolate? Am I seven or something? And God help the man carrying me home; he’d have to be bloody strong. He’d have to be the Arnie of the anonymous fantasy stranger world, arms knitted out of pure muscle. My body is pure ice cream and chocolate, and it was so worth it.

“This better, Ed?”

He doesn’t say anything, but he’s dressed in the ugliest T shirt I’ve ever seen and--worst of all--he’s wearing white socks with black trousers. I dare him to judge me.

“Don’t stare at me,” I growl after a while. “Don’t look at me, don’t touch me, don’t think about me. Just make some nice, angry conversation, be civil, and we’ll both have a happy little night together, won’t we?”

“Okay,” he says slowly with a goofy smile. “I think I love you.”

I narrow my eyes. “Let’s just get this over with, okay?”

Liver takes his first battering at nineteen hundred hours when Ed leads me into a very large building with a bar and a stage. A stage is a very bad sign. And the fact that Ed chose to come here? Not good. And the way that the whole place is already teeming with drunken preps and girls on hen nights dressed up as various slutty members of the animal kingdom, very very bad. All the people I hate, crammed into one place and one horrible date.

This is the problem with hating everyone.

The sign above the stage reads ‘Karaoke night’. It is the devil’s sign. I’d give my inflatable hammer to leave right now, and that‘s saying something; I stole that hammer off some demonic small child who cried for like three whole hours afterwards. Good times.

As I sit on one of the tall, pink bar stools and stare into space, Ed’s eyes burn holes into my shoulder. I wonder fleetingly how hard I’d have to bang my head against the bar to be allowed to go home. Maybe I’ll even kill enough brain cells to get chucked out of Uni and have a brilliant excuse to never see Vreeland ever again.

Ha! Whatever, darling brain, I don’t need to kill you to get chucked out of Uni; I can do that all on my own, thank you very much. As long as there is Worms Armageddon on my Nintendo DS, there will always be a quick and easy way to fail all of my exams most gloriously. I wish that Holy Hand Grenades and Supersheep really existed, although living in Wales would be kind of a health hazard. My mum is Welsh so she takes us there all the time, but I doubt she’d be so keen if all the sheep started wearing capes and exploding. A Holy Hand Grenade would be good, though. I could aim it right there in that smooth patch between Vreeland’s eyes. Hallelujah. But I digress.

“It’s cocktails,” Ed announces. “What do you want?”

I chuckle as I look at him, thinking about his willy. I’ve seen way to much of this boy. I’m thinking years and years of therapy. I’m thinking Jerry Springer and nightmares and cold sweats. I’m thinking I’ll never be able to look Ed in the face again without laughing.

“Long Island Iced Tea.”

Yeah, sometimes, I like to pretend I’m Cecile Caldwell and hope that Ryan Phillippe will pop up randomly and start trying to take photos of me naked. I am a very sad person. No, definitely not the coolest Callipo in the ice box. I also went to see The Chuckle Brothers live on stage once. I was seventeen.

“Super,” he says lightly, before giving the barman what he clearly believes to be a piercing look that will allow him to get served instantly.

Ten minutes later and no drink. I’ve had breaths more thirst-quenching than this. Ed is going cross-eyed. This can’t be good.

I lean forward on the bar. I’m always told that boobulas help in the whole ‘getting a drink’ debacle, although I’ve never experienced this myself. I always thought it was just a myth made up by desperate sluts to have an excuse to show off their cleavages, but then, I am incredibly mean and prejudiced, and I am probably a desperate slut too. We shall see.

I test the theory.

I get served before Ed, but this proves nothing; Ed is so cross-eyed now that he looks contagiously weird. I order my drink and get him the most disgusting-looking thing on the menu, because I am nice like that.

I pass him the drink, and he looks at it down his nose as if I’ve just drugged it. He wishes.

“What’s this?” he asks.

“Brain haemorrhage,” I remark. I‘ve given him a brain haemorrhage already; maybe this night won‘t be so bad after all. As an afterthought, and actually more to myself than anyone else, I add, “Congrats.”

I can’t believe I just used the word ‘congrats’ out loud. I must be distressed. “Congratulations.” That’s better; downbeat is always better.

“Thanks,” he says slowly. Then he eyes the stage, a wicked grin growing on his horrible face. “So, shall we? Nobody’s up yet. We could be the first.”

“Oh goody,” I cry, clasping my hands to my chest. “We could actually be the very first? That sounds almost as much fun as my epilator!”

He is still grinning. Kill me now. Fill my brain with liquid nitrogen and pump arsenic through my veins. I dare you.

Ed

What’s an epilator? Do I want one?

I get out my diary and jot a bit down about it on my ‘look up on wikipedia’ page. With a diary as cool as mine, I am the best person ever. I look up at Grace with a wise-yet-humble kind of smile--I have a wikipedia page in my diary so will obviously take over the world one day, but I am still down to earth. She’s impressed. She might be pretending to look completely disgusted, but I reckon her face will explode some time soon from all the effort she’s putting into not smiling.

“Don’t let your face explode,” I suggest helpfully.

“What?”

It made perfect sense to me.

For a long time, I say nothing. Then, I grab her arm and walk her towards the stage. She actually comes with me, and, although resistance makes things more interesting, I fall in love with this deal we have all over again.

“I think you’d make a great Cyndi Lauper.”

Grace scoffs. “Fuck Cyndi Lauper. Girls just want to have fun? More like girls just want to make their own way in a disgustingly misogynistic world without getting unwanted attention from lecherous arseholes like you.”

Her eyes are so beautiful when they’re narrowed and filled with hate; I could eat them up, straight out of her head holes. And she’s not even much of a feminist, so I think that she’s just saying this to piss me off. I’m so wonderfully flattered.

I need to impress her now.

“Can I show you something?” I ask her, whilst subtly directing her towards the stage.

“What?” she shoots back at me.

I grin and reach into my pocket and pull out my wallet. A small bunch of keys is attached to it and I jingle them about with pride, waiting for my own joy to penetrate Grace’s curly head.

“They’re keys,” I announce, after precisely six seconds of silence.

“Yeah. They are.”

“Do you remember that my key didn’t work? When you walked in on me?”

“I’d completely forgotten,” she says coolly.

I don’t take her literally. I know a liar when I see one. “They don’t work because these are not my keys,” I hiss, and jangle the them again. The sound is rather amazing. Like stainless steel-flavoured victory.

“They’re not?” Grace takes a huge gulp of her drink and frowns at me. She will make a super little alcoholic one day.

I shake my head. “Me and my wily ways switched keys with Olivia yesterday morning. I have her keys, she has mine. Now I have all the access to her that I need to set her up with that nerd-boy. Isn’t that good of me?”

Grace gives me a crooked smile. “I don’t want to know about your wily ways. And that was before I asked you for help, Ed.”

Oh yeah. I improvise, tapping the side of my skull and saying nothing. She can fill in the gaps.

Grace leans close. “You’re such a freak,” she whispers. “You deserve to be sectioned. I wouldn’t even wish you on Olivia.”

And yet she has. She’s more evil than she’d like to think. I look at her with interest over the top of my glass and remember fondly the pages of her diary and how they’d been written in so neat and carefully and how they’d smelt slightly of ginger biscuits. The corners of some pages were smeared lightly with grease spots and I’d put my own thumb up against them, as if comparing handprints with a Hollywood movie star. I like a girl who can eat, but what was written on Grace’s foody pages had disturbed me.

But I don’t know Grace’s secret. I can’t let her see. Reading people’s diaries is not the best way to win friends. It is too weird.

I push her up onto the steps that lead to the stage very gently. I am practically directing her. I’m not forcing her into anything at all--deep down, she wants to be Cyndi Lauper. I mean, I wasn’t even a fan of karaoke my whole life. For a good five years, I believed Japan’s most amazing export to be pocky. But the best of us are wrong sometimes, if only to stop everyone else from being intimidated. For a long time I also believed that camels stored water in their humps, but I was wrong; camels are actually fat bastards. See, I was wrong. It happens.

I was first introduced to karaoke at my mum’s third wedding. This time it was to Harry, a loud, raucous guy with a loud, raucous family who loved getting pissed and singing karaoke. I hated everything to do with them, but I was dragged onto the stage at the wedding reception and, as the music started to blare out, I sung the YMCA reluctantly. Still, when you’re a proper super muso like me, songs whisk you away. By the end, I was singing with gusto. Everyone was dancing. A cute girl in the front row smiled at me.

I was in love for a whole ten minutes.

“Hi,” I said afterwards. My face was red from all the effort I’d been putting in but maybe she thought I was embarrassed.

“Hey.”

“Do you wanna get a drink?” I was twelve and amazingly smooth and had been eyeing up the lemonade at the bar for half an hour already. They had good straws at the bar--blue and curly and very exciting; Harry’s sister had arranged the reception, and she was an unemployed teenager with way too much time on her hands.

“Not really.”

This is my first love story. I’d watched the kid for the rest of the night, wishing bad things on her. If I screwed my face up hard enough, I could feel psychic rays coming out of my skull to attack her.

Anyway, point is I fell in love twice that night. Once with the ice queen bitch twelve year old who was actually a cousin of mine, now that I think of it, and once with ‘the song’. Oh yeah.

“You’ll fall in love with the music too,” I tell Grace encouragingly. “Just open your heart.”

“I’m not opening anything tonight,” she says darkly.

I blink at her. What could she be implying? “I own you tonight,” I say calmly. “If I tell you to do it, do it.”

Grace raises her eyebrows, looking momentarily shocked. Then, her lips tighten and her eyes are filled with that lovely hatred all over again, just for me. She walks stiffly into the middle of the stage and glares at me.

Maybe I’m not a very nice person, but this was her idea.

Grace looks at the machine as if it’s some sort of poisonous viper. She presses a few buttons, selecting her song, and then she taps the microphone twice. A dazzling smile is flashed out to me and the crowd, but it’s brandished like a weapon.

“This is for my friend Vreeland,” Grace says, waving a hand in my direction. “He’s a very special person.”

Bless.

And then she starts to sing. It’s strange, because she sings the YMCA too. We have so much in common. I check my memory quickly to check that we don’t have too much in common; I have a lot of cousins I don’t know well and I don’t want to make the same mistake twice. Thank God, though--the only female cousins I have between the ages of fifteen and twenty five are living abroad or in prison. Grace is totally perfect for me. And she has great big tits. When she was getting a drink earlier, leaning over the bar and that, she almost poked my eye out. It was the best thing ever.

Grace

If I didn’t need Edward Vreeland, I’d give him thirty minutes before he gets himself slapped or castrated or stabbed or killed. Hell, I’d give him thirty seconds. Him and his creeping eyes and his ‘I own you’ all round twattiness put him first in line for a round of violence with a dash of tabasco sauce and ‘I’m going to kick your nerdy arse’-ness from me. I’m going to flush his head down the toilet. I’m going to kick him in the nuts. I’m going to burn his stuffed bacterium.

I’m going to remain calm. I’m going to smile very nicely and ignore the way that he touches my arse as he leads me away from the stage. I will save this anger and lock it away. When all of this guilt crap is over, I will let my little anger monster run free so that it can build a little cave, find a little husband for itself, have a few kids, then grab its husband and kids and reap havoc when Ed least expects it.

I have another drink. I have three more. Ed tells me to think of my hepatocytes. I have two more drinks.

“Fatty change,” Ed mutters darkly, shaking his head. “Just think of the fatty change.”

“Ed,” I say slowly. “See, I don’t even have any idea what the Hell you’re talking about.” And I laugh, because it’s funny. “I’m not really a nerd. All I know about is parasites, and that’s because my Dad is a parasitologist. Ask me about intracellular protozoan parasites and I shall smile, ask me about chemicals and I shall smile too, but I wont smile on the inside.”

Ed frowns. “What?”

I snigger. “I’m not clever. I just got here by…” I lower my voice, as if I’m spilling out a dirty secret. “Working my arse off.” The shame. I have an IQ of less than 140. Maybe I should be culled.

“Oh.” Ed is speechless for a bit. “Well, I work too.”

“You see,” I say, waving my hands around a little and ignoring him completely. “I really hate people who pretend to be someone they’re not, but…I’m not a nerd at all.” I stare at him. “I’m really quite stupid.”

I’m not stupid; I’m drunk.

He edges up to me. “You’re not stupid,” he says.

I look at him closely. He’s a perv, but he wouldn’t actually try anything, I don’t think. I sigh and don’t run away. “I know. I’m a hypocrite, though.” I poke the fat on my belly and laugh lamely. “A hippo hypocrite.”

“You’re not a hippo either.”

I glare at him; I like my belly and hippos are very cool animals. I’m not one of those girls who’s unhappy with her weight. I don’t watch what I eat because I like eating crappy things too much and I don’t exercise because I hate it. And I binge drink. I’m fat for a reason, and I wouldn’t change that. I am happy.

“You’re beautiful,” Ed says slowly. Then he smiles. Jeez, he almost looks genuine. I turn away and frown. I’m too drunk for this. I might even have the sexilicious drunk red face thing going on, and there’s no way I want him to think I’m blushing.

“I’m not going to sleep with you tonight, Vreeland,” I say simply, bursting his bubble with relish.

Ed doesn’t say anything for a while. I feel his eyes on my neck and glance back at him. They’re stuck on fast and narrowed slightly.

“Is there something you should tell me?” he asks slowly.

“You what?”

“Is there….” he pauses and taps his fingers on the tacky pink surface of the table. “Anything up?”

What the Hell is he talking about?

“Again. What?”

Ed sighs impatiently. “Let’s share secrets. Here’s mine; my mum is currently married to a guy three years older than me. She’s had six husbands so far and none of them was my dad. My mother is a slut. Do you have a secret involving love, Grace?”

“Oh,” I smile. I laugh and snort at the same time but I don’t care because this is Ed and I don’t want to impress him anyway. So the little creep’s been reading my diary. I‘d like so say this surprises me. I’d like to say that I actually care, but I’m already very angry with Ed and my anger seems to follow a Michaelis Menten distribution, plateauing at a maximum. Oh wow; I think I’m becoming a nerd. “You mean Laurie?”

His eyes move up to the ceiling. “Err…yeah?”

“He’s coming to visit next week,” I say cryptically, stroking my chin and beaming because Laurie is an excellent excuse to keep my distance from Vreeland. “You can ask him yourself.”