Boys Beware - Jean Ure

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brother and a bit of a nerd. Gus sounds like … well! We shall see. He has to emerge at some stage. When he does, we shall be watching!

      We went down to Auntie Jay’s again for dinner. Her friend Jo was still there. She is quite funny and sharp and ever so left-wing. Dad would most probably have had a seizure! But me and Tash like her as she makes us laugh, and also she is not at all patronising. Like Anne and Robert last night kept asking us these really dumb questions about which year we were in, and when did we get to take our GCSEs, and what subjects we were best at, and what did we want to do when we left school, yawn yawn. I know they were only trying to be polite but you could tell they really weren’t in the least bit interested. Jo doesn’t bother with questions, she engages you in conversation and actually listens to what you say. We like that!

      Me and Tash, of course, were desperate to learn more about The Boy (which is how we referred to him before we found out his name). However, we didn’t want to ask Auntie Jay ourselves in case she got it into her head that we were interested and flew into a Mum-like panic, so we got Ali to do it for us. We gave her strict instructions.

      “Don’t just go jumping in. Be discreet.”

      “Like how?” said Ali.

      “Like sort of … building up slowly,” said Tash. “You could ask about his dad, and what he does, and how long he’s lived here, and then you could just, like … slip it in.”

      “I happened to bump into his son on the stairs last night. That sort of thing. ”

      “Then what?” said Ali.

      “Oh, well, then you could sort of very casually ask what his name was, and how old he is, and where he goes to school, and—” Tash waved a hand. “Stuff like that.”

      We should have known better than to trust Ali. She has no idea how to be discreet! First off we had to kick her, quite hard, under the table before we could get her going; and then when she did get going she went at it like a mad creature. There wasn’t any stopping her!

      “What does that man do that lives here? The one that lives underneath us? The one with the son? Has he lived here long?”

      “Andrew?” said Auntie Jay. “He moved in last year, after he broke up with his wife. He’s a writer, he writes educational books. A very interesting man! He—”

      “What about his son?” said Ali.

      Oh, God! I nearly died. I saw that Tash had gone bright red.

      “What about him?” said Auntie Jay.

      “Well, like, what is he called and how old is he, and all that sort of thing.”

      “Ali!” Tash was mouthing at her across the table. I was kicking at her.

      “He’s fourteen,” said Auntie Jay. “His name is Gus. What else would you like to know?”

      Ali shot an inquiring glance at Tash. Tash, deliberately, kept her eyes on her plate.

      Auntie Jay seemed amused. She said, “How about where he goes to school? Whether he’s got a girlfriend?”

      “Yes!” Ali beamed, triumphantly, at me. I squirmed. Tash concentrated very hard on shovelling food into her mouth.

      “He goes to Simon Standish,” said Auntie Jay. “As to whether he’s got a girlfriend –” She was laughing at us! “ – I’m afraid I really couldn’t say. But I’m sure you’ll make it your priority to find out!”

      At least she didn’t fly into a panic and remind us of the No Boys rule. Just to reassure her, however, we have stuck a big sign on the outside of our door:

      Ali wanted to know what it meant. She said, “What peril? What would happen if they came in?”

      “We’d jump on them!” yelled Tash.

      Ali plainly thinks we are mad. But we think she is a total whacko, so that’s OK!

       Monday

      Everyone at school is just so envious of us! Meg Hennessy couldn’t believe that we are truly independent.

      “All on your own?” she kept saying. “Completely on your own?”

      Daisy Markham was the only one that wasn’t envious. She said she thought that she would be a bit scared if she were left on her own, but as Meg pointed out, “There are three of them. It must be such fun!”

      Daisy still seemed doubtful. She really is a complete wimp. She said, “I can’t imagine my parents leaving me to look after myself.”

      Like this was some kind of criticism of Mum and Dad. I resented that! I said, “Mum knows she can trust us.”

      “Yes, and it’s good training,” said Tash.

      “But you could get up to anything,” said Daisy.

      “Like we might have orgies,” I said; and me and Tash went off into a fit of the screaming giggles.

       Tuesday

      Kim Rogers asked us today if we were going to take the opportunity to have a party. Tash said, “You bet!” It is in fact no. 1 on our list of things to do. We’ll have to check it out with Auntie Jay, of course, but I’m sure she’ll say that we can. She might even let us invite boys, if it’s a party! After all, you can’t really have one without them. I have to say that Auntie Jay is pretty relaxed about most things. She has made up one or two rules that we have to follow, but they are mostly just common sense, such as always being sure to tell her if we are going out and where we are going. She has put a book on the hall table – the In-and-Out Book. We sign out, and sign in! We’re cool with this. Just because we are teenagers – almost – does not make us unreasonable. It’s only when grown-ups are unreasonable that we take umbrage. That is such a good word! Umbrage, umbrage. I have just said it to Tash, who says that she has never heard of it.

      “What’s it mean?”

      I said, “It means when you get the hump.”

      Tash said that she had the hump right now, with Ali. “She’s doing baked beans again. She did baked beans last night. We’ll get bean-bound!”

      We are taking it in turns to do the cooking, and this week it’s Ali’s turn. I’m all for cutting down on the workload, but I do think that baked beans two nights in a row is a bit much. I have just said this to Ali. I said, “Can’t you do something different?”

      “Like what?” said Ali.

      I said, “I dunno! Omelettes, or fish fingers, or something.”

      Ali said that that would mean cooking. She said, “I told you before, I don’t cook. I just open tins.”

      I said, “Well, couldn’t you at least have opened some other kind of tin?”

      Honestly! It’s like she never even thought of it. Primly, she said that now she had opened the beans, we would have to eat them.

      “You can’t waste food.”

      I suggested she fed them to Fat Cat, but they are in tomato sauce and tomato sauce, it seems, is bad for cats.

      “This is going to look really great in my Food Diary,”

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