JITTER LOVE

Back then it was the Jitters versus Plebs and nothing in between.

Alex didn't feel like picking a side at first as he had friends in both camps but when he discovered the girl he fancied was a Jitter that pretty much settled it for him.

The two most pressing questions in his mind currently were how did one even become a Jitter and could he win the heart of a girl who didn't even seem to know he even existed.

His friends' sisters (all Jitters) in the older years loved to give him advice walking home from school on how to win the heart of the girl he had become besotted with but he wasn't so sure about the advice they dispensed so freely. No. He was pretty sure they were taking the piss out of him.

"You should just go up and ask her out. Be brave!"

"Buy her some food at break with your lunch money!"

Alex queried this suggestion.

"Surely that's bribery, though? What about a love letter?"

Grimacing in unison, his band of hippy valkyrie advisors clearly thought this was a terrible idea.

After splintering off in the town centre to their respective homes, Alex thought how funny it was he could be so comfortable with older girls (by only just a few years) but was tongue tied when it came to a girl of his own age.

Emma. Her name was Emma.

It was a Wednesday and unusually Alex found himself walking alone after school. Truth be told, he was so preoccupied with his romantic feelings lately that he was more than happy to wallow in solitude in this indulgent dream state. He even noticed while meanderering slowly back through the park into town that his feelings of love appeared to be reflected in the magical atmosphere of his surroundings. Alex was absolutely convinced the lilting trees and soft pastel skies above him seemed to be just as in love as he was, which he found strangely amusing.

Autumn was definitely on its way, though, with the smell of smoky bonfires and cold looking sunsets that seemed to be drawing the days to a close quicker and quicker. These late September afternoons seem imbued with the last dreams of summer before the inevitable handover of October brought about the changing of the season. If love was in the air it would have to hurry up before the autumn equinox blew out these last flickers of summer.

Alex had also noticed something strange had happened with his general perception of time whilst being in love. Everything seemed speeded up when the possibility of bumping into Emma was close by. It was only after he knew for certain she had taken her last bus home each day that suddenly time slowed down again and hours seemed like weeks as he waited impatiently for the next school day to arrive.

His attendance had also greatly improved since he first caught sight of her in the dinner queue that one unforgettable lunch time. School was now a neccessity for Alex whereas before it had seemed a chore. Unfortunately, his love sickness hadn't enabled any better focus in lessons where all he could do was gaze out of the window and see Emma's face in clouds.

"Oi, Alex!"

He turned round to find Robbie "No" Hopes panting breathlessly after sprinting to catch up with him.

"You alright?" Alex said, feeling as if he'd been rudely awoken from a beautiful dream.

"Yep. I was gonna go to the courts. You wanna come?"

"You got any balls?"

"Yeah. I got two."

Alex rolled his eyes at Robbie's cheesy riposte.

"Me too!"

"That makes four between us then."

Wheezing like an old man with a strange raspy sort of laughter, Alex watched as Robbie shook his blue asthma inhaler and took a slow drag on the end of it like he was a native indian sucking on the end of a peace pipe.

He wasn't really in the mood for Robbie who was a crude little oink at the best of times, but if it meant delaying his return home then he thought he might as well use his offer as a way of extending his after school idling.

Who knows, he thought. Maybe I'll see Emma.

The two lads had been playing a strange game of tennis using their hands to hit the ball instead of rackets and occasionally kicking the ball with the ends of their shoes.

As Robbie launched a lazy second serve, throwing the ball cack handedly across the net, Alex toe-punted it as high as he could into orbit. He watched it for what seemed an eternity before it returned to earth and landed outside the courts, close to where the ornate looking park bandstand was in the distance.

"I'll get it!"

Heading off to retrieve the ball, Alex suddenly found what he was really looking for.

Emma.

"Oh, man."

Suddenly his heart started beating like a bass drum and he wondered why his adam's apple appeared to be moving further up his neck into the very back of his throat.

Watching her sitting inside the bandstand with her friends, laughing and singing, made him fall even more in love with her than before. What was it about her exactly that he liked so much? He did a quick mental check list. Maybe it was just the way her hair fell into a mass of corkscrew curls and her eyes seemed to smile with the upturn of her lips each time she broke into a chorus of the Fairground Attraction song he recognised her singing.

Somewhere out there, there must be a boy for this girl
Could be anywhere, could be next door, or the other side of the world!

Call up the radio, give 'em my number
Tell them to put it out on the air
There must be someone, there must be someone like me
Sitting lonely as a boat out there

He couldn't make an honest assessment of her singing voice due to being completely in love with her but as far as he was concerned in this moment she had the voice of an angel.

"Oi Alex! What you doing?"

Looking back at "No" Hopes, Alex was brought back to reality, remembering the ball he had gone to look for.

"I can't find it, mate!"

Actually he had found it, but wanted desperately to extricate himself from the crude and scruffy Robbie who would surely do him zero favours in winning the affection of Emma. Sad to say Robbie was a Pleb and as a wannabe Jitter Alex knew a line now had to been drawn between them.

He said something hurriedly about needing to wait for a lift from his parents and that he would see Robbie at school the following day but he knew it was all bullshit.

Watching Robbie walk off the courts, he was disturbed suddenly to see his 'friend of sorts' head directly toward the girls sitting inside the bandstand.

What the hell was the crazy bastard doing? Alex thought to himself. It was like watching a kamikaze pilot crash his planes into an enemy target which Alex had been taught about recently in history class.

From a distance he then saw Robbie wrestling the guitar from Emma and he felt an atavistic burning anger surging through through him like molten ore.

This was it. His moment of glory.

Running like an olympic sprinter toward the bandstand, he threw himself at Robbie like a predator launching to catch its prey and dragged him back onto the grass surrounding the semicircular structure.

Finding Robbie wheezing and spluttering beneath him unnerved him as a few accidental gobs of spit landed on the end of his nose. As Alex prepared to throw a fist at Robbie, Emma intervened herself and pulled him off.

"Leave him alone. That's my brother!"

Quickly loosening his tightened fist and falling onto his back, Alex found himself staring up at Emma with all her many curls filtering the late afternoon sunlight onto his face.

"But he's a Pleb!"

"He's a Pleb and I'm a Jitter but that doesn't mean we're not still brother and sister."

"I thought he was attacking you."

"No. He just wanted his guitar back."

Robbie, looking utterly confused by his friend's attack, and seemed surprisngly placid about the whole thing.

"Why didn't you tell me you had a sister?"

"You never asked."

Embarassed and distraught, Alex had no idea in that moment how to recover his reputation from his unwarranted assault on Robbie.

"I'm sorry, guys."

An awkward silence ensued as everyone left the bandstand en masse.

All alone suddenly, Alex stared up at the now menacing looking sky and cursed his bad luck. He closed his eyes, feeling like an irredeemable fool.

He could feel time slowing down all around him now and it depressed him.

Rumour had circulated through the school that a Jitter had assaulted a Pleb and that the tribal playground conflict was expected to escalate.

The irony was Alex had never been entirely sure what a Jitter was anyway, except that they seemed to be somewhat pretentious, foppish and generally ill prepared for battle.

A few Plebs had congratulated him but he insisted to them that he didn't do anything. In the aftermath of the bandstand disaster he felt there was little he could do to redeem himself in the eyes of Emma, her brother and the rest of the Jitters.

To make matters worse, a meeting was called by the headmistress of the school between both Alex and his parents as well as Robbie and his parents. Never in his wildest imagination could Alex have forseen such utter cataclysmic ruination as this from those few seconds of impulsive madness.

"I'd like to have this entire situation cleared up between all parties here today," Mrs Clarke said. "Alex, perhaps you could explain why you assaulted Robbie in the park without any seeming provocation."

"I, uh, thought he was attacking a girl. It looked like it from a distance. Maybe I need an eye test."

"The girl in question was his sister."

"I know that now."

"Emma. Her name is Emma."

Each time she said it Alex felt like she was stabbing him in the heart with her name.

"My concern is, this event has accelerated tensions in the school and so I believe we need to make sure that we find a suitable punishment."

Rather than suffer a suspension from school, Alex was set the task of clearing and cleaning all the lunch time dinner plates for the entire month of October.

Scraping off congealed baked bean juice and starchy potato wedges into the white plastic bins, Alex wondered why the universe had conspired against him in such a cruel and undignified way.

The most humiliating part of his punishment was having to go round and collect the plates from his fellow students off the tables in the canteen.

"Bin boy" and "Scraps" were just two of the new nicknames he had acquired lately and he feared they might stick even more than the gloopy custard on the plates he scraped.

And then, to top it all off, he suddenly found himself face to face with Emma and her mates as they smirked at the white chef hat sitting awkwardly on top of his head.

"Can I take that for you?"

Emma nodded as he cleared the table. He could sense her staring at him and instantly went as red as a glass of Ribena until he eventually walked away with the remains of her and her friends' lunches.

If there was a God, he was clearly loving the misery being piled on Alex right now.

"What's the opposite of a miracle?" he asked one of the dinner ladies who shrugged her shoulders, confused by his question before handing him some fresh kitchen gloves.

It wasn't until he began to scrape the food off Emma's plate that he noticed a small piece of graph paper with what appeared to be her telephone number written on it.

He couldn't quite believe it but pocketed it immediately without hesitation.

"Tragedy is the opposite of a miracle," the dinner lady finally remembered.

"Huh?"

Alex was too dumbfounded by his own miracle to remember the question he'd asked of her.

That night, he'd begun to feel a little better about things.

The question was, did Emma mean to leave her number on her dinner tray, or was it a mistake?

Playing his well worn cassette of Fairground Attraction on the stereo in his bedroom, he lit a sandalwood jostick (a custom of Jitter life he'd been informed) and watched as the smoke from the end of its red, glowing tip drifted up toward the ceiling.

If this was just the first stage of winning Emma's heart he didn't even dare imagine what the next trial would be.

One thing was for sure though.

He was definitely a Jitter now.