What Not to Do If You Turn Invisible

This is how it happened.

Jarrow Knight – who else? – shouted, ‘Pizza delivery!’ when I walked in the class, and pretty much everyone laughed. Not a LOL sort of laugh – more a spluttering cackle. Most people in my class are not actually cruel.

I didn’t get it at first. I had no idea it had anything to do with me. In fact, I thought it was some joke that I had walked in on halfway through, and so I smiled and laughed a bit as well, like you do when you don’t want to feel left out.

That must have looked odd, in hindsight.

Then a couple of days later, Jarrow, her brother, and some others were walking past me when I was talking to the girls outside the chemistry labs, and Jarrow said in a loud-ish voice, ‘Did you order the American Hot, Jez?’, and they high-fived, while Kirsten and Katie looked at their feet.

Do you get it? It still hurts to remember. (There’s going to be quite a lot of hurting and remembering, so we may as well get used to it.)

‘Pizza delivery’ is a reference to my face.

‘Pizza face’ = acne. That is, spots and zits and boils and the whole pimply shebang. You get it, yeah? The reference, not acne.

My face supposedly resembles the surface of a pizza. Hilarious. It doesn’t, anyway. It’s not as bad as that.

Acne on a twelve-year-old? I know, it’s kind of early. Even Dr Kemp said I was ‘at the earlier end of the spectrum’, but it’s not freakish. No, ‘freakish’ we’ll reserve for the acne itself, which is ‘towards the more severe end of the spectrum’. That’s nice family-doctor-speak for ‘Jeez, you’ve got it bad’.

I’ll spare you the details. You might be eating while you’re reading this and the details are not very nice.

So that was about three months ago. I realised a couple of things with those words, ‘Pizza Face’:

1 My policy of keeping a low profile at school had met with only limited success. Everyone knows Acne Girl. Up till that point, most of the mean stuff had been directed at Elliot Boyd, which was fine by me. Except, now I was a target too.

2 I honestly think some people reckon that you can catch acne. I mean, I’m not some saddo who spends the entire day alone, surrounded by people taunting her. It’s just that the whole ‘best friends’ thing is taking longer than I expected and I wonder if the acne is the cause? Gram says, ‘Just be yourself’, which sounds like good advice. I guess it is good advice if you have a reasonable idea of who you are – and I do. Or at least I did, until everything started to go wrong. Gram also says, ‘If you want a good friend, then be a good friend.’ She’s full of stuff like this. I sometimes think she collects it. Problem with that one is that there is a distinct lack of people around to be a friend to.

3 Jarrow Knight is a total nightmare. That’s not exactly a revelation but along with her twin brother the pair of them are pure poison.

4 I have got got got to do something about my skin.

My acne started about a year ago with a single, tiny pimple on my forehead. That pimple, I like to think, was sent as an advance scout by the Acne Army. It reported back to Pimple HQ, and within weeks a full regiment of spots and blackheads had encamped on my face and nothing I did could beat them back.

And then the Acne Army started colonising other parts of me. My neck hosted a small platoon of boils, which are actually large, shiny and painful. My chest had a company of tiny blackheads, which occasionally grew into whiteheads with pus in them, and within two months there was an expeditionary force annexing my legs.

Worst of all, though, Gram doesn’t really take me seriously and that is driving me nuts.

‘Spots, darling? You poor thing. I had spots too, and so did your mum. It’s just a phase. You’ll grow out of it.’

Even before the pizza incident, school had become much less fun than primary. It was just a coincidence, but at the same time as all this was happening, Flora McStay – who was probably my best friend – moved to Singapore, and Kirsten Olen was moved to a different class and started hanging out with the Knight twins.

Of whom more later.

The point is, I needed a plan to get rid of the acne, and that’s how the sunbed and the Chinese medicine entered my life.

And no, becoming invisible wasn’t part of the plan. That would definitely be ‘at the extreme end of the spectrum’.

Nor – in case it needs to be said – was getting any closer than strictly necessary to Elliot Boyd.

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So, we’re still on backstory and you’re still around, which is good.

Elliot Boyd, eh? ‘Smelliot’ Boyd as he’s known, because someone once made the joke and it kind of hangs around him like his smell is supposed to.

The kid that no one likes.

Is it his height? His weight? His hair? His accent?

Or, in fact, his smell?

It could be any of them, and all of them. He’s a big bear of a boy, as tall as a couple of the teachers, with a large stomach, and a chin with a fuzz of blond hair on it that I imagine he thinks disguises the fact that there’s another chin beneath it.

As for his smell, to be honest, he doesn’t seem to smell that bad, though I go to some lengths not to test the widely held belief that he is a stranger to soap and deodorant by simply avoiding him.

I think it’s his manner that grates on people. Overconfident, pushy, cocky, loud, and – my favourite, this one – ‘bumptious’. That was Mr Parker’s word, and he’s very good with words.

You know what, though? I think it’s just because he’s from London. Honestly. People took against him from day one because he started slagging off Newcastle United (he’s an Arsenal fan, or so he claims). Round here, unless you’ve got a very good excuse, you follow Newcastle. Possibly Sunderland or Middlesbrough. But definitely not a London football team – not even, it turns out, if you’re actually from London.

Boyd came into our class on the first day of Year Eight. No one knew him, so you’d think he would have kept his head down a bit, but no. I think he thought it was funny, what he did on his first day – you know, bold and a bit cheeky, but it didn’t come across like that.

As well as taking us for Physics, Mr Parker’s our form teacher who does the register and stuff. He clapped his hands and cleared his throat.

‘Welcome back, you lucky people, to the north-east’s finest edifice of erudition. I trust you all had a restful break? Splendid.’

He talks like that a lot, does Mr Parker. He used to be an actor and wears a cravat, which – incredibly – looks quite cool on him.

‘We have a new addition to our class! All the way from sunny London … Thank you, Mr Knight, booing is for boors …Please give it up for Mr Elliot Boyd!’

Now, at this point, the class – who had done this routine a couple of times before with new kids – would usually applaud on Mr Parker’s cue, and the new kid would look all shy and smile a bit and go red and that would be that.

Elliot Boyd, though, immediately stood up and raised both hands in the air in a triumphal gesture and said loudly, ‘Ar-sen-al! Ar-sen-al!’, which killed the applause dead. To make matters worse, he added, in his best London accent, ‘Wot? You lot ain’t never ’eard of a propah footbaw team?’

Wow, I thought at the time, way to become instantly unpopular, Elliot Boyd!

From that moment, at least half the class decided that they hated him.

Yet it didn’t seem to put him off, or make him any less pushy. Elliot Boyd was like one of those large, shaggy dogs that lollop up to other, smaller dogs in the park and freak them out.

Worse, he then started to hang around my locker after school, as if – just because we shared part of the route home – we should automatically be friends.

Fat. Chance.

I would have carried on ignoring him, except he was about to become part of what happened, and how I ended up turning invisible.

THINGS I HAVE TRIED FOR ACNE

1 Good Old Soap And Water. This was Gram’s first suggestion. ‘It worked for me,’ she said. And I had to stop myself from saying, ‘Yeah, but that was back in the Dark Ages of the twentieth century.’ Besides, the Good Old Soap And Water treatment comes from the idea that people get spots because they don’t clean their faces, and that’s not true.