Peer Pressure Read online

  Copyrights

  eBook First Published in 2013 by Autharium Publishing, London

  Copyright © Chris Watt 2013

  The moral right of Chris Watt to be asserted as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All Rights reserved, No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  British Library Cataloguing-in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN: 9781780255101

  Peer Pressure

  ONE

  Last day of term...

  In years to come, Jodie McPhee would look back on the event and put the sad outcome down to three things.

  One: Hormones

  Two: A void in the chemistry that should have been,

  And

  Three: A serious lack of click.

  Jodie McPhee had taken a liking to Mark Credence about two weeks earlier, but it was only now, during the last period of the final day of term, that she had decided to do anything about it.

  She had given the usual subtle signals. Looks. Smiles. Accidentally bumping in to him as she walked past and, finally, a note asking him to meet her in the stationary cupboard before class started.

  Mark Credence wasn’t obvious boyfriend material. He was short at five foot four, with untidy hair and, due to a particularly nasty hockey injury earlier in the term, a spine like a buggered bottle. It caused him to veer slightly left when walking and that, matched with a tendency to speak without thinking, had acquired him the nickname amongst his classmates of ‘Credence Queerwater’.

  In spite of all this, Jodie had taken a shine to him. She thought he was kind. A little shy maybe, but cute in that ‘I could work on him’ sort of way that girls often looked for in potential boyfriends. There wasn’t a hint of edge to him. This was something that many of her friends looked for and the reason why many of them dated older boys. But Jodie never made choices based on what her friends did. It was one of her many charms. She was smart enough to know that older boys, in particular, were slaves to their lack of concentration, not to mention their raging, confused libidos. She knew she was safer with someone like Mark.

  Mark had noticed Jodie too. Like most of the boys at Brushwood Academy, he’d found it hard not to. She was tall, with long, dark brown hair and wide blue eyes. Aunts and Uncles would tell her she was the spit of her mother, something she naturally denied. She had a tendency to show off her long legs in short (but never too short) skirts, meaning that she was never without one or two admirers during any given week. And yet, even though she was fully aware of these facts, Jodie didn’t just ‘go’ with anyone. She was kinder than most, her good nature meaning that she was never considered a bitch by other girls — a bit of a prude at times, maybe, but never a bitch. And it was just this fact that had peaked Mark’s interest on this particular day.

  In fact, if he was honest with himself, he had fancied her for most of the term, but in typical seventeen year old fashion, had abandoned hope after his first attempt at approaching her had gone so wrong. He had planned it out to a fault (even stole some of his father’s aftershave for that little something extra), but this began to fall apart the moment he ‘made his move’. He walked up to her in the school cafeteria and offered to buy her lunch. However, he failed to portray the cool, calm, collective manner he had practised at home, and instead sounded like a business partner offering to pay for their power lunch at the local sushi bar. Despite this she accepted, finding something charming in his innocent manner, but really, she felt a slight hint of pity too. They walked up to the lunch line and joined the queue. As they went along they chose what they wanted, not really knowing what to say to each other and exchanging shy smiles. All the while, Mark’s confidence grew and, as they approached the end of the line, he felt that he had made up for his rather odd invitation simply by virtue of the fact that he hadn’t turned and run away at the first sign that she was enjoying his company. They got to the till and the total came to six pounds eighty.

  This was when Mark realised that he didn’t have any money on him and that he had, in fact, left his wallet lying on his bed at home. Awkward glances had followed between them ever since.

  But today was different. It was the last day of term. A long summer lay ahead and Jodie was more aware now, as she had just turned seventeen, that she was without a boyfriend for the next two months. This was unacceptable.

  There would be parties to attend, get-togethers to make appearances at, movies to sit in the back row of and, most importantly, gossip sessions to take part in. She surely wasn’t expected to sit with her girlfriends, bemoaning the immaturity of guys, when she had no frame of reference herself. It just wasn’t how it was done.

  Hence her summer project — Mark Credence.

  TWO

  Jodie was already in the stationary cupboard when Mark opened the door. They had a good ten minutes before Mr Pritchard would enter and the next class would start and Jodie intended on making the most of that time.

  She had messed her hair up a little to give the air of a carefree spirit, someone who was up for a good time. She felt it made her look older, more mature. But frankly, Mark was a seventeen year old boy who would have made out with a crisp packet if it had shown interest and hadn’t really noticed. They stared at each other for a few moments, Jodie with a smile on her face, Mark looking nervous and confused.

  If a first move was going to be made, Jodie was going to have to make it - so much for being swept off her feet.

  She grabbed him by the arm, pulling his body closer to hers and closing the cupboard door.

  Mark froze, unable to focus in the darkness, when suddenly Jodie’s lips were on his. It wasn’t a direct hit, the kiss landing somewhere between his top lip and the bottom of his nose, but, hell, neither of them could see anything, so Jodie felt her aim wasn’t bad. At least their teeth hadn’t clashed. That would have been a real mood killer.

  Jodie had heard a story once about a girl that had chipped her tooth while engaged in some darkroom make out time. She had choked on the tooth and dropped dead, right there amongst the developing fluids.

  This may have been true, although Jodie wasn’t sure if her school even had a darkroom.

  It may also have been an urban myth her mother had told her, to keep her away from the kind of boys that like to ‘do things in the dark’, as she put it.

  Whatever the truth it was too late now. Jodie had made the first move and low and behold, Mark started to react with something other than fear and innocence.

  Suddenly it was all coming back to him. The previous year he had been in a relationship with a girl named Susan, for more than five months, which in school time was as good as marriage, kind of like dog years for teenagers. It had ended in tears of course, but Mark had lost his virginity, which was why it only took him a few moments to get back into the swing of things.

  Arms started to move about. Jodie could feel her heart beating faster against her chest, and brought her hands up to touch Mark’s face. She ran her fingers through his hair, an action which actually made him pause for a moment, and exhale into her mouth as their tongues began to touch. And indeed, things may have continued in much the same manner, were it not for the loose change in Mark’s trouser poc
ket, which due to his over excited libido, was beginning to chafe against his slowly growing member. This is when he panicked.

  “Wait!”

  Jodie felt a sudden pang of nerves. What had happened? Had she done something wrong?

  Had she touched him inappropriately?

  “What is it?” she asked in a whisper, trying to keep the seduction in the air, but Mark’s panic was growing as he sensed that he needed to come up with an excuse or some plausible reason for stopping the cupboard courtship ritual. He knew that ‘the cupboard’ was something of a rite of passage in the school, and that to screw this up would mean a permanent black mark on his record with the opposite sex.

  “Hang on”, was the best he could muster as he began to rummage in his pockets, as if the excuse he so desperately needed was somewhere between his loose change and his balls.

  In the end, all he could find was his iPod.

  “Um, I think you nudged my iPod.”

  Jodie took a step back, less than impressed. Leaning against a shelf stacked with paper clips, she replied,

  “Sorry? Your iPod?”

  Mark cringed. Pulling the iPod from his pocket, the screen turned on, illuminating their faces briefly.

  “It’s new”, he stated, as if this was some sort of acceptable excuse. But as the screen went blank, Mark could swear he saw Jodie’s eyes roll as they were plunged back into darkness. Mark took this as his opportunity, and plunged his right hand into his pocket to re-arrange the contents of his boxer shorts.

  Jodie moved back in for a kiss and, after a moment or two of fumbling, she found Mark’s lips meeting hers again, this time with a renewed confidence. Their mouths pressed harder against each other, the tongues moved freely and eagerly and, most surprisingly of all, Jodie thought she could feel Mark’s hands at the top of her shirt. She was right. With an eagerness she had not anticipated, he had started to undo a few buttons. Mark had decided to go for broke, heading straight for the main artery of a girl’s last defense against hapless teenage boys: her bra.

  Taking this as an open invitation, she decided to rub her leg against his crotch. And then things began to go really wrong.

  This time he yelled out “Jesus!”

  The embrace broke off once again. Mark lost his balance and fell to the floor with a thud, even taking a couple of boxes of staples with him. Not that he could tell what they were, because neither of them could see anything.

  Jodie let out a sigh, while the best Mark could offer was a “Sorry.”

  “Yes, you are aren’t you?”

  “I’m just...well, a little out of practice”

  Jodie reached down and took his hand, helping him back to his feet.

  “Just relax”, she said, “and take your time, I don’t mind”.

  But Mark flinched, feeling something brush against his leg.

  “Did you feel that?”

  Jodie froze, not sure if she had heard him right, before allowing herself to answer.

  “Feel what?”

  “I mean, was that you?”

  Jodie had found her breaking point and decided then and there that this wasn’t going to work. Mark Credence, it would seem, had been a bad choice. Standing before her was not the man of her dreams.

  “Who the hell else do you think it was?” “Do you think there’s someone else in here with us? A dwarf perhaps? One of the bloody Time Bandits?! I mean, Mark, if you’re not into me, then...”

  “I am into you, but this was your idea and...”

  “My idea? I seem to recall you making eye gestures at me during third period French.”

  This was, in actuality, a lie. The gestures were in fact instigated by Jodie, and at the time Mark had had something in his eye. It wasn’t until lunch break that Mark had become aware that Jodie had spent the better part of the day trying to get his attention, when he received Jodie’s note of intent.

  Not that any of this mattered now, as the argument that raged within the stationary cupboard on that fateful afternoon in June was immediately rendered mute by the beam of light and utter silence that signified the opening of the cupboard door.

  Jodie and Mark squinted, trying to adjust to the light, finally finding focus enough to gaze upon the classroom beyond their hiding place and the twenty students sitting in their seats, staring at them.

  Worse still, this view was then blocked by the shadow, followed quickly by the physical form, of Mr. Pritchard, the scariest fifty-nine year old Geography teacher you’d never want to be caught fooling around in a stationary cupboard by.

  Mark stood rigid, utterly dumbstruck, while Jodie was more concerned with buttoning her shirt back up. The audience of fifth years, meanwhile, didn’t quite know what to make of this spectacle. Some stifled giggles, some seemed genuinely shocked. Mr. Pritchard, on the other hand, gave no such clues as to what was going through his mind. He merely plunged his arm into the cupboard and took Mark by the shoulder, pulling him out of his hiding place and walking him towards the door of the classroom. No words of warning or council took place. No words at all. It was, Mark imagined, a little like taking your last walk on Death Row, except without the execution at the end. Mr. Pritchard merely opened the door and threw Mark into the hallway beyond, before closing the door on him and slowly turning his attention back towards Jodie.

  The silence seemed to last an eternity. Mr. Pritchard walked slowly back towards the stationary cupboard and stood before Jodie. His hawk-like eyes peered intensely at her from over the rims of his spectacles. Jodie shuffled nervously, before attempting a smile at him, some sort of white flag of apology. She expected a stern talking to, or maybe even an order to go to the Headmaster’s office. Instead, Mr. Pritchard just closed the cupboard door, leaving Jodie in there.

  It would give her time to think. Not that Jodie relished the opportunity. Indeed, in half an hour she would have a whole eight weeks to think, the last thing she had really had planned for her summer. She slid her back down the wall and sat on the cold, un-carpeted concrete of the cupboard floor. She felt something against her hand, and picked it up. As she did it began to glow. It was Mark’s iPod. Jodie sighed. Beyond the closed door she could already hear Mr. Pritchard beginning to explain the stages of liquid magma within dormant volcanoes. What was the point? In thirty minutes time, no one was going to remember any of it. She knew that the only thing going through any of those student’s heads was what had just transpired within this cramped, confined space.

  Jodie knew she would have to work hard this summer to scrape off this painful memory.

  That somewhere between the sharpeners and erasures her seduction had failed. She sat there and pondered. Was it her? Was it him?

  But truth be told, she knew all along it was the iPod that did it.

  THREE

  Term time...

  Jodie rolled her eyes as she poured a bowl of cornflakes. She didn’t do mornings and hadn’t really seen any time prior to ten-thirty in two months, a fact that elicited a deep sigh, followed by a question, posed out loud.

  “Where the hell did the last eight weeks go?”

  Her mother didn’t reply. She merely turned her attention back to the coffee pot and smiled to herself, thinking

  “Try the last seventeen years”.

  Katy McPhee was fifteen when she had Jodie. Now, seventeen years and a whopping three lovers later, she found herself facing another four months in an empty house. Oh, she’d see her daughter in the mornings and supper time, maybe catch a glimpse of her at weekends, but really, that was about it. She had never fully adjusted to the idea that Jodie had more of a social life than she did. She didn’t resent her daughter, far from it, but to her utter shame, she did find herself prone to jealousy.

  You couldn’t blame her. She was thirty-two, slender and attractive. According to a dating website she set up a profile on, yet never actually used, her favorite color was blue (like her daughter’s eyes), she liked running, basketball, movies and un-complicated men.

  In actual
ity, only one of these was true. She hated basketball, hadn’t been to the movies since Jodie outgrew the work of Walt Disney, ran only when being chased and Jodie’s blue eyes only served as a daily reminder of her ex-husband Tom. Tom married Katy a year after Jodie was born and managed to make their formative years together a living hell, before running off with a checkout girl who was the tender age of eighteen.

  She left that part out of her profile, of course. Un-complicated men, however? That was right on the money. It might have even worked too, if she had taken the time to actually meet anyone from the website, but seeing as the idea had come from one of her best friends, Jane, who had five kids and a habit of cheating on her husband, Katy had always thought it had been a joke. Not a very funny one at that.

  What rattled her more than anything was the sense that she had been left behind in some way, that women of her age were still out there clubbing and dating, having casual sex and throwing Ann Summers parties. She had tried meeting people in the past. The three that had seen the inside of her bedroom were more a means to an end, essentially a way to scratch an itch.

  She was still a young woman in her prime and, unlike many women of her age, not a slave to her own biological clock. Indeed, once Jodie had appeared in her life, she had taken the clock and thrown it against the bedroom wall without even considering the snooze button.

  First of all there was Will, whom she had met through her Mum and Dad.

  He was nice. He was tall.

  He was unemployed.

  But on that particular night, nice and tall won her over. He wasn’t even that bad a lover and yet the evening felt sort of sullied by the fact that Katy had to pay for his taxi home in the morning.

  It turned out that the dole only extended as far as two courses at Pizza Express these days.

  Oh and a pack of three condoms, although Katy suspected he had had those on him before they had even made it to the restaurant.

  Then there was Steven. He was more promising. A handsome, mature student, studying law at Aberdeen University, he had been an accountant for a Solicitor’s firm, before deciding to try and advance his career. Now, with only one year of study left and the promise of a position of importance at his firm, he seemed not only like a real gentleman, but a great catch for any single woman. It was just that, well, he had a rather strange habit in the bedroom. He liked to swear, a lot. Not the best of kinks when you have a teenage daughter trying to sleep or, God forbid, listen to what you were up to.