You, Me and Him Read Online Free PDF Page A

a virgin!’ he shouted down the bus.
    ‘Shut up, Kevin,’ Tatiana shouted back. ‘Crawl back into your dirty hole.’ I turned to her with amazement, almost envy.
    ‘What did you say,
Prickman
?’
    ‘She said, shut up and push off,’ I told him with renewed confidence.
    ‘SIT DOWN!’ yelled Terry, one eye on us, the other on the road. The coach swerved, tyres screeching against the tarmac. I heard more footsteps. Kevin grabbed one of the straps on my head and gave it a sharp yank.
    ‘Kevin, leave Josie alone.’ I turned round and there he was. Justin. My hero. Through the wires, I smiled at him and he smiled back. I was glowing inside. It was true love. But there was something equally pressing on my mind. ‘What’s a virgin?’ I whispered to Tatiana when the boys sat back down.
    ‘Someone who hasn’t had sex, stupid. You know, kissing a boy and all that stuff. Justin wants to kiss you,’ she’d added with a sharp dig in my stomach from her bony elbow.
    ‘No, he doesn’t!’ But I had felt an excited kick inside me, a punch of pure happiness.
    ‘I can tell you all about sex,’ she’d informed me before pulling a horrified face. ‘I saw my parents doing it.’
    I gained another lifelong friend that day in Tatiana Prickman. She told me she’d always been quiet and self-contained because other people thought she was weird. ‘Do you have an invisible friend?’ she once asked me. I said yes, his name was Casper and he wore a green velvet cap. ‘He’s your guardian angel,’ she’d confirmed. ‘What’s your star sign?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘I’m a Capricorn, a mountain goat. And, by the way, call me Tiana.’
    Tiana taught me a game that would help me calculate just how much Justin Clarke loved Josie Mason. It worked out at 12 per cent. ‘It’s a stupid game,’ she’d assured me afterwards. ‘He definitely likes you.’
    But she’d been wrong. We never went out together. Instead he went out with Rosie, a quiet mousy girl. I was consumed with jealousy when they shared a desk together, passed secret notes or exchanged coy glances.
    ‘Why don’t you fancy me?’ I’d asked him once.
    ‘You’re like my sister … ugh!’ So I went out with Kevin instead. It turned out his attention had been for a reason.
    *
    I had a rich uncle in Cambridge who had given Clarky and me his home to ‘housesit’ during our gap year. He had bought a three-month round-the-world air ticket. We watered the purple pansies in his window boxes, forwarded his mail, made sure the house didn’t get dusty and smell like a nursing home, and in return stayed there rent-free. He lived on a long residential road that ran into the city.
    We needed to earn some money before we bought tickets ourselves to travel across Europe. I wanted to go to Barcelona, Madrid and Paris; Clarky wanted to go to Venice. He was working in the shop at the Fitzwilliam Museum, taken on for the run up to Christmas. His main job was stacking cards on the shelves and working the till.
    I found work in a baking hot Italian restaurant called Momo’s. It was on a street running off King’s Parade, opposite King’s College. Momo’s was small and rundown, I was sure there were mice, and the walls were more like cave stone with small crystals visible inside them. It was romantic at night, lit by white candles stuck into dark green bottles with great wedges of wax spilling over the sides. The food was simple, flavoured with lots of garlic and chilli. There was constant noise from the students huddled around the tables. Momo looked like a giant bear with his dark hair and bushy eyebrows.
    ‘Josie!’ he roared across the room one day.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘What’s wrong with this table?’
    He was standing in front of a wooden table laid for four. Knives and forks were in the correct places. Olive oil bottle refilled. The menu was wedged into a loaf of crusty bread on the middle of the table.
    ‘I can’t see anything wrong.’
    ‘Look again,’ came