Best of Friends. Cathy Kelly

They couldn’t lose this house. They’d be so happy there, she knew it. All Tom needed to do was get over his strop about who earned the most money.

      She sighed now as she swung the Jeep into the drive, admiring, as she always did, the magnolia tree to one side of the gate, now gorgeously in bloom. She did love this place but things hadn’t been easy since they’d moved here. Her relationship with Tom had deteriorated, while she and Jess seemed to be living on different planets. Just when life should be perfect for the Bartons, it seemed curiously off balance.

       CHAPTER TWO

      Earlier that afternoon, Jess Barton had glanced quickly at the classroom clock. Ten to three. Another forty minutes of science. Boring. Being a teenager was crammed with boredom, Jess felt, what with train-track braces, horrible exams and people constantly bossing you around, but double science was surely the most boring thing of all. Noticing Miss Nevin’s gaze roaming over the class, Jess stared down dutifully at her science textbook, trying to appear as if her mind was firmly fixed on the knotty issue of what sort of chemical formula you came up with if you mixed sulphur, oxygen and hydrogen. Nobody acted dutiful interest better than Jess Barton. She was award-winning material, Oscar-nomination stuff.

      ‘It’s the angle of the head,’ she often explained to her best friend and partner in crime, Steph Anderson, who was always the first person to be hauled out of her seat and left in disgrace outside the classroom door for not paying attention. ‘And the pencil sucking. There’s something about pencil sucking – it just makes you look riveted. You’ve got to lean over the book and look like you care, Steph.’

      In Jess’s opinion, all that any teacher required was a room full of students bent at forty-five-degree angles to their desks and sucking pencils thoughtfully. She knew this from her dad. He said that not everyone paid attention all the time but the kids he liked were the ones who actually behaved in class.

      Jess behaved. She reasoned that your mind could be a million miles away, or even four miles away at St Michael’s School for Hot Guys down the road, but as long as you kept your head down, you gave the impression of being a good student. So far, this system had worked. Jess Barton had never been made to stand outside the door, a punishment that also merited ten black marks.

      Naturally, chemical formulae were the things furthest from her mind. Ian Green was the focus of her concentration. Gorgeous Ian, with those piercing blue eyes and a hint of dark stubble on his perfect face. Steph said that stubble was so yesterday and the best guys were fuzz-free, but Jess had a secret yearning for the sensation of kissing a guy and feeling manly, grown-up stubble against her cheek, like in a passionate scene from a movie. Jess had enjoyed many happy hours daydreaming about herself and Ian, replaying such a scene. Ian was tall too. Tall enough to have to really lean down to kiss her, which was nice, because Jess was tall herself. There was only one problem. Well, two actually. The first was that he went to St Michael’s School for Hot Guys instead of Bradley College, where Jess went. The guys in Bradley were mostly beyond boring. And the second: he had a girlfriend, Saffron Walsh, who was nearly sixteen, in the same class as Jess, and who was Ms Most Likely to Succeed.

      ‘Most likely to succeed in becoming an airhead TV weather girl, more like,’ Steph snorted resentfully. Some people might have thought that Steph was a rival of Saffron’s, as they were both of the blonde hair, perfect figure variety. But Jess, who had been Steph’s absolute best friend since kindergarten, knew that Steph’s dislike came from the fact that Saffron was clearly not good enough for Ian. If Ian realised what a bimbo Saffron was, he might dump her and miraculously take up with Jess. Miraculous, thought Jess, being the operative word.

      Jess was not blonde with a perfect figure. She was, she felt, more a ‘reliable girl picked for netball’ sort of person. Lanky like her dad, she had no curves, no need of a bra and she could never get jeans long enough for her skinny legs. Her eyes were nice – a thick-lashed, smoky bluey green like her mum’s – but they were hidden behind boring glasses because she’d inherited bad eyesight from her dad. Her hair was boringly straight and the dull colour of wet sand, while the rest of her face was ordinary with a big O: ordinary nose, ordinary mouth, ordinary, slightly pointy chin. It all added up to the sort of person nobody noticed. Having a celebrity mum didn’t help. People expected the daughter of the glamorous Abby Barton to be just as glamorous. ‘And then they meet me,’ Jess would say, grumpiness hiding the hurt.

      Steph insisted that this wasn’t true, and was always going on about how she envied Jess for being tall and slim, and for having great cheekbones and beautiful eyes that lit up when she was passionate about something.

      ‘Now I have slitty eyes,’ Steph would say, piling on another layer of Mac shadow to counteract this perceived failing. ‘But yours are huge and your lashes are so long. Wait till you get contacts and get your train tracks off. Then the guys will be all over you like a rash.’

      But Steph was only being nice, Jess felt. She knew that guys liked girls who looked like girls, meaning ones with actual boobs. Tall and lanky and not able to fill an A cup made her a non-runner, no matter how nice her cheekbones were.

      Which led on to a third problem, actually. She’d never spoken to Ian. He went around with people from her school, of course, because he was going out with Saffron, but these weren’t the sort of people who were interested in the likes of Jess. They were the glittering people who wore the right jeans, the right trainers and had money to go into the city centre at the weekends and hang round having fun, going for coffee and buying CDs. Jess didn’t know how to hang around in that languid, I’m-so-cool manner that girls like Saffron had down to an art form.

      Even worse, now that the Bartons had moved to Dullsville, a.k.a. Dunmore, there was even less of a chance of her bumping into Ian.

      ‘Ian & Jess,’ she wrote on her notepad. Shading the writing with her hand, she drew a tiny heart around the words. Then she scribbled over the writing in case Gary, who sat beside her, saw it. Gary was good at science but bad at life, and was quite likely to announce Jess’s doodle to all and sundry. Jess would just die if anyone but Steph knew how she felt about Ian.

      ‘Homework,’ announced Miss Nevin happily from the front of the class. ‘I’ve prepared a list of thirty questions for the next lesson. They’re not too hard – just to test you on what we’ve been learning this week. Hand these sheets round, would you?’

      As the questions were passed down the lines of desks, there were a lot of sighs, mainly from the people who’d just suffered history and been given a huge essay on eighteenth-century wars to write for Monday. Honestly, all those eighteenth-century people did was have wars. What were they like? Had they never heard of the UN?

      Jess opened her homework notebook and stared dismally at today, Friday. The class were doing exams in June, their first public exams, and the teachers were piling on the work like anything. Along with the history essay was an English assignment on Paradise Lost (from Mr Redmond, who obviously thought that fifteen-year-olds had nothing better to do at the weekend than analyse every single word Milton had ever written) and a note of the four chapters of geography to be revised for a test on Monday afternoon from Mr Metcalfe, more proof that he was criminally insane because they were the four biggest chapters in the book. There was also a huge tranche of maths homework, not to mention a page of French comprehension (not too bad) and some art history to read over (easy peasy).

      Jess wrote down ‘Science – 30 questions for Tuesday’, and sighed at Steph as the bell rang.

      ‘What are we? Baby Einsteins?’ grumbled Steph as the two friends shoved their science books into their rucksacks. ‘Why did we do science?’ Steph asked this question at least once a week. ‘We could have done home economics and be making our name as fashion designers right now.’

      ‘You don’t get to make things in home ec,’ Jess pointed out. ‘You learn about the eight billion vitamins and minerals that keep you healthy, which is just biology, which is science, which…’

      ‘…is why we did science,’