Free Adorkable by Sarra Manning Page B

out of her mouth. She was so wet that I wanted to wring her out.
    ‘So, does that mean you accept my apology?’ I persevered and Scarlett shrugged and pursed her lips and generally acted like she was in ungodly amounts of agony.
    This was going to take for
ever.
And I didn’t have for ever. I was too busy for for ever. And what Scarlett was too stupid to realise was that she had all the power, so I was going to have to point that out for her and also run to keep up with her as she suddenly dashed across the road.
    ‘Listen, Scarlett … will you just listen to me?’ I grabbed hold of her arm and she stopped instantly as if my touch had paralysing properties, which would actually have been very cool.
    ‘OK, I’m listening,’ she mumbled.
    ‘Scarlett! You might think that I’m just an uppity, shouty, badly dressed girl who’s made you cry on two separate occasions and if I’d just disappear then your life would automatically be one hundred per cent better, but guess what?’
    ‘What?’ I definitely had her attention now.
    ‘My future happiness is in your hands,’ I told her, grabbing the limp, lily-white hands in question and giving them a little shake so she’d appreciate the urgency of the situation. ‘I like Barney and you like him too.’
    ‘Well, look, about that …’ She tried to pull her hands free but I hung on for dear life. ‘It’s not what you—’
    ‘Youprobably like him a lot more than I do and he likes you way more than he likes me, especially right now ’cause he’s mad at me, but we were a disaster as a couple, so the two of you have my blessing.’
    ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, right. Well, I wasn’t expecting that.’
    ‘I’d much rather have Barney as my friend than my boyfriend but that’s only going to happen if that’s all right with you,’ I told her, and it was hard to admit that someone as blah as Scarlett had a say in my destiny. It stuck in my throat like a piece of dry chicken, but she was the kind of person that needed to have everything spelt out for her. In fact, I should have prepared some flash cards just to make this whole exercise a little more humiliating than it already was. ‘If you two do get together then Barney isn’t going to want to hang with me unless you say it’s OK.’ I paused. ‘Which is kinda wrong because people aren’t personal property, they should be able to do what they want and be mates with who they want regardless of what their special friend thinks, but not everyone is as enlightened as me.’
    Scarlett certainly wasn’t. Maybe that’s why she was frowning. She was a very hard person to read when she wasn’t cowering in fear. ‘But we’re not together, Barney and me,’ she said. ‘Not right now anyway.’
    ‘You prefer Michael Lee to Barney?’ I asked incredulously, because anyone who’d spent more than ten minutes in Barney’s company would infinitely prefer him to Michael Lee if they possessed more than two working brain cells. ‘Then what the actual
hell
have you been playing at?’
    ‘No, no! You don’t understand.’ We were blocking a path for two tutting mothers who were brandishing their Bugaboos at us.Scarlett sighed as I took a step to the right just as the mums veered right so I was almost tangled up in the pram wheels. She yanked me to safety and the weirdest thing happened: Scarlett Thomas and I were suddenly sitting on a garden wall and talking about boys. Or she was talking about two boys in particular and I had no choice but to listen. Barney was going to owe me big-time for this.
    ‘ … and I really like Barney, like, really
really
like Barney, ’cause he gets me, which is weird because you wouldn’t think he would and now that we’ve been hanging out a lot, I think he’s actually quite cute, but I’m with Michael and I don’t know how to not be with Michael, you know?’
    ‘It’s simple. You just, well, dump him. Say, “You’re dumped,” but maybe you want to find a slightly nicer way of