Girls Out Late Read online

  Then we spend hours and hours and hours at the nail varnish stands. Nadine ends up buying a nail lengthening kit, one of those fun sets where you can paint on false nails all different patterns and add little sequins and beads and stuff. Magda buys one too but I know I’d forget and nibble mine off. I’m going to stop biting my nails one day, but at the moment my teeth have a beaver-like will of their own and gnaw my fingers ferociously.

  ‘Come on, you guys, the shops will be shutting soon,’ I moan – and eventually they let me drag them up to this art shop on the top floor. They get fed up after the first few seconds and hang around outside while I finger the fat white sketchpads and lust after the huge shiny tins of rainbow felt-tips. I’m only in there a minute but Magda and Nadine keep putting their heads round the door and yelling at me. I try out the pens, writing ‘I am Ellie and I like to draw’. I do so, squiggling a little elephant with a wavy trunk with an 07 point and a weeny 03 point and a mean green and a flamboyant pink and after more moans from outside I end up buying the 05 black pen I always choose and a little square black sketchbook that I simply can’t resist. I haven’t got too much money left. I’m going to have to beg a few chips off Magda and Nadine or go hungry – but I’m happy.

  The three of us link arms and wander round the rest of the shops, trying on high heels in Office and staggering around like drunks, and then we spend ages in the HMV store listening to the latest Claudie Coleman album. Magda, Nadine and I have entirely different musical tastes but we are all united in our admiration for Claudie. Magda likes her because she sings songs with very powerful, positive lyrics. Nadine likes her because her music is very cool and hip. I like her because she’s got long, wild curly hair a bit like mine but much lovelier and she’s not a bit fat but she is much curvier than your average rock chick. So she’s kind of my role model.

  The HMV store is crowded. Magda automatically stands wherever there’s a clump of likely looking boys. They all stare at her appreciatively and three of them start chatting her up. Nadine and I sigh and slope off. This is a familiar situation and it sucks.

  ‘Three boys, three girls, and all three want to be the one who gets Magda,’ says Nadine. She is too nice to point out that she is always second choice. It’s easy enough to work out where I come – last!

  ‘Hey, wait for me!’ says Magda, scurrying after us. The boys call after her but she doesn’t take any notice.

  ‘You stay with them if you want,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah, we’re going down to McDonald’s but you can catch up with us later,’ says Nadine.

  ‘I’m catching up with you now,’ says Magda. ‘This is our girl-time, right? Hey, look at the time! It’s getting late. Come on, let’s eat.’

  Magda is sweet enough to insist on buying me a burger and fries. I draw her portrait on the first page of my sketchbook, picturing her doing a little twirl in her pink top and designer trousers with lots of adoring weeny guys milling around her ankles. Then I draw Nadine. First of all I tease her and kit her out in Rhinestone Cowboy gear, but after she’s clobbered me I appease her by drawing her as a glamorous witch with nails like jewelled claws and in one elaborately manicured hand she’s holding a little doll, the image of Natasha, stuck all over with pins.

  I’m really into drawing now so I peer round for someone to sketch. And then I see the strangest thing. There’s a boy the other side of McDonald’s. He’s not strange. He’s quite good-looking with dark eyes and long, floppy hair. He’s wearing Halmer High School uniform. A lot of the boys who go there are either Hooray Henrys or the twitchy nerdy type. But this boy’s different. Guess what he’s doing! He’s got a pen and a little notebook similar to mine and he’s sketching . . . me?

  It can’t be me. No, of course, it’s Magda. She’s the one all the boys stare at all the time. But when he looks up he’s staring straight at me – and when Magda goes to get another straw for her milkshake he doesn’t turn his head. Then it’ll be Nadine. Yes, he’s drawing Nadine with her amazing long hair and big dark eyes. Though Nadine is lolling back in her chair and I’m not sure he could see her properly now.

  It’s me he’s looking at. Looking up at my face and down at his book, up and down, up and down, his pen moving rapidly across the page. He must see I’m staring at him but it doesn’t put him off.

  ‘Why have you gone pink, Ellie?’ said Nadine.

  ‘Oh God, I haven’t, have I?’

  ‘Shocking pink. What is it?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Who are you looking at?’ says Magda, coming back with the straw. She peers round and susses things out straight away. ‘Are you flirting with that Halmer High guy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Which boy?’ says Nadine, peering.

  ‘Don’t! He’s staring at us.’

  ‘So we’ll stare at him,’ says Magda. ‘What’s he doing, writing?’

  ‘I think he’s sketching,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Me!’

  Magda and Nadine look at me. They both look a little surprised.

  ‘What’s he drawing you for?’ says Nadine.

  ‘I don’t know. It feels . . . weird,’ I say, as his eyes flicker up and down again.

  ‘So you draw him,’ says Magda. ‘Go on, Ellie.’

  ‘It’ll look silly.’

  ‘No it won’t. Go on. He’s drawing you, so you draw him. Even Stevens,’ says Magda.

  ‘All right.’ I start sketching the sketcher. I try a jokey portrait, making his eyes extra beady, his hair a little too long, his stance ultra alert. I draw the sketch-book in his hand with a small picture of me. In this picture I am crouched over my own sketchbook drawing a minute portrait of him.

  ‘It’s good!’ says Magda.

  ‘So you’re drawing him drawing you drawing him . . . it’s making my brain buzz thinking about it,’ says Nadine.

  ‘Hey, he’s coming over!’ says Magda.

  ‘What?’ I say, looking up. She’s right, he’s walking this way, still staring at me.

  I shut my sketchbook up quickly, and slide it onto my lap.

  ‘Hey, that’s not fair. I want to see what you’ve drawn,’ he says, standing at our table. He smiles at me. ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.’

  Magda and Nadine burst out laughing.

  ‘That’s an invitation you can’t resist, Ellie,’ says Magda.

  ‘Ellie! Hey, you’re not Ellie the Elephant, are you?’ he says.

  I stare at him. Ellie . . . the Elephant? Why is he calling me my old nickname? Does he think I’m that fat?

  All my old anorexic loopiness overwhelms me. I feel like I’m being blown up like a balloon. Roll up, roll up to peer at the fat lady in McDonald’s.

  ‘Ellie the Elephant?’ I whisper in a mouse’s squeak out of my gargantuan head.

  ‘Yes, I was in the art shop upstairs just now, you know?’

  ‘Does she know?’ says Magda. ‘She only spends half her life there.’

  ‘Half our lives,’ says Nadine.

  ‘Me too, me too,’ he says. ‘Anyway, I was buying this new pen and I went to try it out and someone else had been writing all across the pad, and there was this name, Ellie, and a cute little elephant with a wavy trunk.’

  ‘Oh! Yes, I see. That was me,’ I say, shrinking back into my ordinary-size self.

  ‘So have you been drawing lots of little elephants, eh?’

  ‘I hope not,’ said Magda. ‘Seeing as she’s supposed to have been drawing me.’

  ‘And me,’ says Nadine. ‘And also you!’

  ‘Me?’ he says eagerly.

  ‘Shut up, Nadine,’ I say.

  ‘Oh come on, let me see. Look.’ He opens his own sketchbook. ‘Here’s you.’

  I peer at it, my heart thudding. I’ve never seen my portrait drawn by anyone else. Well, I suppose Eggs has included me in his shaky crayonings of MY FAMILY, but as he represents me as two big blobs, four stick lines and a wild scribble of hair, his portraits are not very flattering.