Not a Star and Otherwise Pandemonium Read Online Free PDF

because I could get away with it, you know.’
    ‘So how long do you want to do it for?’
    ‘I dunno. ’Til I’m on my feet, I suppose.’
    ‘Make me a promise.’
    I didn’t know until I said it what I wanted from him, but when I came out with it, it sounded right.
    ‘Stop when something worse happens.’
    ‘What does that mean?’
    ‘You know. When, I don’t know…When your Gran dies. Or when your dad and I get divorced or something. Stop then.’
    ‘Why d’you say that?’
    ‘I don’t know. It just felt right.’
    ‘But shouldn’t it be the other way round? I mean…When something bad happens, you won’t notice this.’
    ‘No. But I’ll know it’s there, that’s the thing. I don’t want to know it’s there when I don’t feel the same as I do now.’
    ‘How do you feel now?’
    ‘I feel OK. That’s the thing.’
    He shrugged. ‘All right, then. I promise. Unless you know for a fact you’re getting divorced in the next week or so.’
    ‘No, we’re all right for the time being.’
    He reached out his hand and we shook. ‘Deal,’ he said, and we left it at that.
     
    That night, the three of us went out to the Crown for a drink before our dinner. We used to do it quite a lot when Mark was in his late teens, and it was a novelty for us all, but then Mark found better things to do, and we stopped. It wasn’t like this huge thing, all deciding that we should spend quality time together in order to get to know each other better; it just happened. Dave said he fancied going out for a drink, and Mark and I were in the same sort of mood. But I was glad that somehow the film had moved us back in time, rather than forward–that we’d somehow ended up doing something we used to do. It needn’t have been that way.
    Anyway, I had this strange moment. Admittedly I’d been drinking lager on an empty stomach, but when Dave was getting the drinks in, and Mark was playing on the fruit machine, it was as if I floated out of myself and saw the three of us, all in our different places, all apparently cheerful, and I thought, I’d have settled for this on just about any day of my life since Nicky died. I wouldn’t have settled for it before I got married, but you don’t know, then, do you? You don’t know how scared you’ll feel, how many compromises you’re prepared to make; you don’t know that just about anything which looks OK on the outside can be made to feel OK on the inside. You don’t know it has to work that way round.

Otherwise Pandemonium
    Mom always sings this crappy old song when I’m in a bad mood. She does it to make me laugh, but I never do laugh, because I’m in a bad mood. (Sometimes I sort of smile later, when I’m in a better mood, and I think about her singing and dancing and making the dorky black-and-white movie face–eyes wide, all her teeth showing–she always makes when she sings the song. But I never tell her she makes me smile. It would only encourage her to sing more often.) This song is called ‘Ac-cent-chu-ate the Positive’, and I have to listen to it whenever she tells me we’re going to Dayton to see Grandma, or when she won’t give me the money for something I need, like CDs or even clothes, for Christ’s sake. Anyway, today I’m going to do what the song says. I’m going to accentuate the positive, and eliminate the negative. Otherwise, according to the song and to my mom, pandemonium is liable to walk upon the scene.
     
    OK. Well, here is the accentuated positive: I got to have sex. That’s the upside of it. I know that’s probably a strange way of looking at things, considering the circumstances, but it’s definitely the major event of the week so far. It won’t be the major event of the year, I know that–Jesus, do I know that–but it’s still a headline news item: I just turned fifteen, and I’m no longer a virgin. How cool is that? The target I’d set for myself was sixteen, which means I’m a whole year ahead of schedule. Nearly two