The Bright Side Read Online Free Page A

exactly the pretty-boy type. Plus, he was kind of chunky. Caroline shrieked, bouncing on her bed. Who was it? Who ? I bit my lip for a while, considering my options. Then I rolled my eyes and muttered the name: Gerry O’Connell. I honestly thought she’d laugh at me. I thought she’d laugh at me, then I would defend my crush, then we’d change the subject. We’d part on bad terms, with her thinking she had great gossip for the girls and me thinking I had much more sophisticated taste than they did. None of that happened. Instead, Caroline collapsed back on her duvet, pulled a pillow over her face and moaned like she’d just been stabbed. It was all very confusing for a moment. And then the penny dropped: she was agreeing with me. I couldn’t believe it. When she finally recovered the power of speech, she provided a long and detailed assessment of Gerry’s many qualities. He wasn’t pretty-boy good-looking, no, but he was – she thought for a moment – rugged . I’d never heard that word applied to a man’s looks before, but I knew immediately that it was the right one. And Gerry wasn’t chunky, she went on, he was big ; like a real man should be . Even his clothes were great. All he ever seemed to wear was jeans and a T-shirt but they always fit just right . And his hair! It was all choppy and peaky, like he cut it himself with a Stanley knife, but it was so incredibly cool you could die on the spot . The best thing about him, though, she said in a husky whisper, was the way he looked at you. If you caught his eye walking down the street, you didn’t know whether he was going to laugh in your face or screw you senseless on the bonnet of the nearest car. Everything about this conversation had been shocking to me, but this last bit left me slack-jawed. None of my friends ever talked about getting screwed, senseless or otherwise. We talked about so- and-so being “a ride”, sure, and Andrew Healey’s arse, of course, got a regular airing. But by and large, when we talked about boys, we talked about the possibility or otherwise of kissing them. It wasn’t all we thought about, no doubt – but it was all we talked about. I left Caroline’s in a funny mood. It was nice, I supposed, in a giggly, gossipy, girly sort of way to hear that she had noticed Gerry (to say the least). But it also felt as if something that was mine and mine alone now had to be shared. I was dead right on that score. Caroline had apparently taken great comfort from our little chat and from that day forth, she started dropping Gerry’s name into random conversations. Every time she did it, some other girl would mutter that, actually, to tell the truth, don’t laugh, she thought he had “a certain something”. It was so strange. They always thought they were the only one .
    My return to Cleo’s, which came just after my exams, was not exactly triumphant. I’d been back in the game, as such, for about a month before I got so much as a dance, and that was from a sort of anti-Gerry. He was tall (way too tall for a half-pint like me) and incredibly skinny. It was like putting your arms around a ladder. Worse still, he had the wispy beginnings of an ill-advised moustache and the tiniest eyes I’ve ever seen on a human being. None of that would have mattered – at least, it wouldn’t have mattered as much – if he’d been fun to talk to. But he spent the entire three or four minutes of our relationship telling me about the time a few weeks previously when he got stung by a wasp. Apparently – and this was a point he was keen to emphasise – it had really hurt. There was a happy ending to the story, though – he’d squished the little bastard with a rolled-up RTÉ Guide . As he mumbled on and on, I realised that I had never been less attracted to anyone in my entire life. Several weeks later, when I saw Gerry standing by the bar, the first thought that popped into my head was this: that one wouldn’t tell you if he’d done battle