But then he came back from Ibiza. I had planned everything for when he walked into my room. I was wearing this really cute little dungaree playsuit I’d found in this vintage store – it was so retro but really hot, not actual denim, but dyed really deep blue, and just straps going up over my tits. Once Mum and Dad were out at the pub, I took my top off underneath it and wore it like that. It just about covered my nipples. I heard him let himself in and when he appeared holding some Marc Jacobs he’d bought me, I knew instantly he’d slept with someone else. I don’t know how, I just did. I’m very gifted with awareness. He was smiling, and his body language was all the same as usual, but there was nothing in his eyes. I went up to him straight away and kissed him, put his arms around my waist, and he hesitated.
‘It’s good to see you!’ I’d smiled. ‘I missed you!’
‘I missed you too.’
‘Still love me?’ I teased.
‘What can I say?’ he said, playing our usual game and, inside, I screamed, for the millionth time.
‘You can say “I love you”,’ I replied.
‘You know I do.’
But that’s not actually saying it. School was DOA after that. He was just vacant. Everyone noticed and was asking me what was wrong with him – it was quite a lot of pressure actually, because I had no idea what to say. I didn’t know anything more than they did, which hurt. It actually makes me sick now to think that the Thursday when we went to his house and SHE was there having some kind of scene with his parents it was Jonny that she was sleeping with, and not his dad, like Jonny tried to make out. When she pushed past me, I was just surprised. Now I wish I’d shoved the slag back.
I think his crisis moment came when he got smacked in the face with a football, at lunchtime, the next day, in front of everyone. He went batshit. It was beyond embarrassing. He was so mad. I’d never seen him like that before. He gets moody, of course, and sometimes when his sugars are low you could kill him, he’s that much of an asshole, but this was a whole new level of crazy. It was obvious by then that something was really, seriously wrong. Now I know that he’d been over to see her at the surgery, to beg her to leave him alone, and that’s why he was so stressed, but as it was, I just let him slam out of school. I’m not going to lie, I was starting to re-consider our narrative, but then he called me and asked me to come over. His dad let me in when I arrived – he was really subdued too, not himself at all. He’s usually over the top and just that little bit too hugsy for your boyfriend’s father, but he just said Jonny was up in his room, and when I got to the top of the stairs he called out: ‘Cherry?’
I looked back down, almost frightened by what he was going to say.
‘Try and understand, OK?’
I nodded, although I had no idea what he was talking about unless Jonny had actually told his dad he was going to finish with me, which was going to be really fucking shit if it was true.
Jonny was sat on his bed when I went in and he asked me to come and sit next to him. He told me the doctor who had shoved me in his kitchen hadn’t been there to confront his dad, he had slept with her – in Ibiza.
‘Her?’ I just stared at him. ‘But she’s so old.’
It got worse, a hundred times worse. He told me everything. All the stuff that everyone knows now that was in the papers. I cried. I didn’t know what to do with what I felt about her. I still don’t.
* * *
I squeezed his hand again. He was just staring into space, and we were both getting colder and colder sitting there in the car with the door half open.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let me just drive you home and you can dump me after that.’ I tried to make a joke of it, but he didn’t laugh, just sighed again, pulled back his hand, turned round to face the right way and swung his legs back in.
‘Thanks.’
As we drove back, the new Sam Smith song came on, ‘Too Good at Goodbyes’. I tensed and tried so hard to keep it together, but as I listened to the words, I wasn’t imagining that I was saying them to Jonny, I heard him in my head saying them to her. Was he even mine any more? Had she damaged him so much it had broken us?
I swallowed but I couldn’t help the tears streaming down my face.
He looked back across at me, tutted impatiently, and muttered ‘for fuck’s sake, Cherry’, then leant forward and changed the station, flipping around until he found Taylor Swift’s ‘Look What You Made Me Do’.
‘There you go. Perfect. You can #squad power-emote to this instead,’ he said and returned to staring back out of the window.
It was legitimately the rudest thing he’d maybe ever said to me. We pulled up at some lights and I turned and stared at him in disbelief. Power-emote? ‘Just who do you think you are?’
‘Cha-ching!’ He sighed, like I was that predictable.
‘I’m serious, Jonny. I’ve done nothing but try to help you and support you for the last two and a half weeks.’
‘You must be exhausted,’ he said, looking out of the window. ‘It’s so tough to be you.’
‘Hey!’ I said. ‘You say you feel it’s following you, but you’re letting yourself become more and more obsessed by it all – you keep vlogging and posting about it. It’s like it’s eating you up from the inside out. You can’t give her this much power. And I HAVE been there for you, for the record.’
He turned very slowly and looked at me. ‘Yeah, it must have been a real pain in the arse to have to come on national TV and watch your own social media numbers soar.’
‘That was NOT why I was doing it. I did it to support you.’
The car behind us honked. The lights had changed, and as I pulled away I sniffed.
‘Oh God, stop crying about it.’ Jonny glanced across and rolled his eyes. ‘You don’t even understand any of this, Cherry. It’s not your fault. But you really don’t. Trust me. I’m sorry for what I just said about why you were with me when I did that TV thing, I know that’s not true. All I want is to try and get something good to come of this; use it to help other people, because what’s happened has been so wrong. So messed up.’
‘I know it has,’ I said.
He shook his head, exhaustedly. ‘No, you don’t. That’s exactly what I mean. You don’t know what I’m talking about at all.’
We drove out towards his house, but as we were about to turn left, he suddenly said, ‘can you go down towards Sainsbury’s before we go back?’
I did as I was told. Anything to delay the actual moment of leaving him for the last time at his house. We reached the roundabout.
‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I’ve changed my mind. Can we go out to the forest and just drive a bit? I want to clear my head. Take the second exit… that means you need to be in the other lane. Cherry! Watch out! There’s a woman about to step out!’ he raised his voice in alarm.
‘Don’t shout at me!’ I shrieked as I swerved round this stupid bitch in the middle of the road – frozen and staring at me, all wide-eyed. ‘She shouldn’t be looking down at her phone while she’s crossing the road!’
‘No, it’s this dumb electric car, you can’t hear it coming. It’s fucking dangerous,’ retorted Jonny. ‘Especially with you driving it.’
‘Can I actually do anything right any more?’ I demanded but carried on out towards Eridge.
‘OK, OK – I’m sorry. Calm down. It is dangerous though.’
‘I had the noise sensor on, OK? You have to switch it off if you want it to be totally silent, and I didn’t. It was her fault for being a dick and wandering out into the road without looking.’ We reached the bunny run and I indicated to go left, but he shook his head.
‘No – turn right here.’
I had to break at the last minute and some asshole in a lorry behind us leant on his horn, properly freaking me out as he, like, thundered past us. I’d almost totally had enough. I was a shaky mess and breathing fast as we drove into the forest, but Jonny didn’t say a thing, just stared out of the window. I glanced at him. He honestly just wanted a pretty drive? Seriously?
‘Slow down a bit,’ he said after a moment of my grumpily wondering if I was allowed to speak while he ‘cleared his head’.
We approached a bend – but as we went round it wasn’t even tight. I opened my mouth to say I really wasn’t that bad a driver, but he was concentrating on a house to our left.
‘Slower – please,’ he added as an afterthought.
I was almost crawling past. It was just an ordinary house. A car outside, gate shut. Then I saw a figure moving around upstairs at the window. A woman.
It was her.