Free Doing It by Melvin Burgess Page B

neck in between people to try and spot him. Jonathon was being hunted. By good fortune he turned up as the slight girl was opening the fridge door, just in time to duck behind it out of Deborah’s sight. The thought, ‘Never hide from a fat girl in the fridge’, crossed his mind, but there was nowhere else to go. He lowered his head as if to peer inside.
    ‘Yum,’ he said to the girl standing next to him. She waved a wedge of cream cake at him.
    ‘No’ bad,’ said the girl thickly. The little pink dress was so short she showed her knickers every time she bent over or lifted her arms; a pussy pelmet, as his dad would have called it. It occurred to Jonathon that it would be a good thing if Deborah saw him in close-up with a pretty girl like this. She might get the message.
    ‘I’m Jonathon,’ he told her, moving in, something he’d never have dared to do unless he had another reason other than to get close.
    ‘Zoë,’ she said thickly. She waved her cake into the fridge, generously inviting Jonathon to help himself. Jonathon reached in and took out one of the cold cooked sausages lying on a plate inside. He held it between his fingers, and on a sudden impulse – ‘May I?’ – reached across and dipped the tip of the sausage into the cream of the girl’s cake, wiping it along so it had a big dollop on the end. As he did it he had a nasty feeling he might regret it. He held the sausage up in his fingers and waited.
    ‘You disgusting thing,’ said Zoë, but even as she spoke she burst into laughter, snorting around her cake. Jonathon bobbed the sausage up and down like a little finger puppet.
    ‘Mr Porky is wearing a white hat today,’ he began. He was about to launch into a puppet show, but the girl laughed in surprise right through her mouthful of cream cake and sprayed all over the inside of the fridge. Everything was covered.
    ‘Jesus, sick in the fridge,’ said Jonathon. The girl was delighted with him, it was great. But at that inopportune moment, Fasil turned up.
    ‘What is this? What are you doing?’ he asked them. He looked in amazement at the sausage and then angrily at the girl’s handful of cake. Then he saw what looked like sick sprayed all over the inside of the fridge. Despite being caught snogging Dino’s girlfriend, Fasil was a man of principles.
    ‘That’s his fridge! That’s his food. You can’t do that!’
    ‘Who’s this?’ asked the girl. ‘Someone’s dad?’
    ‘What are you doing?’ Fasil asked Jonathon.
    Jonathon smiled weakly. ‘It’s just a sausage …’
    ‘Look at that, she’s got half his cream cake there,’ complained Fasil. ‘She’s spat it all over the fridge and you’re encouraging her.’
    ‘Is this how you
party
?’ the girl asked. ‘Is this how you have
fun
?’ Fasil was pulling the fridge door shut on them. Revealed to the kitchen, Jonathon looked round. Sure enough, Deborah was there, right there. Two steps and she was on him.
    ‘Oooh,’ she said. ‘Sausage and cream. My favourite.’ She reached forward, took the sausage off Jon and licked the cream off the end of it.
    ‘I see,’ said Jonathon.
    Taking advantage of the distraction, the girl in the pink dress dodged out of sight, past Fasil, who was staring at Deborah and her sausage as if he’d just seen a cat lay an egg, and out into the hall, where she leaned against a wall and finished off the cream cake greedily.
    Zoë had started out the night before in a bar called Kas the Wanderer, drinking Red Bull and vodka with a group of friends. She’d done a load of e at another party, stayed up all day watching TV at a friend’s house before going to Dino’s. One of her friends was going out with one of Jackie’s, which was how they’d found out about it. The others had had enough fairly early on and gone home, but Zoë had nowhere better to go. She hung around in the hope of doing a bit of looting. She’d had nothing to eat all day and she was starving hungry and exhausted.
    That guy