The Gay Delusion

2: The Gossip Girl Delusion

2: The Gossip Girl Delusion

Griffin blinked. He blinked again. He blinked for a third time, and I wondered if he was so shocked that he had been stunned into mutism.

This was the 21st century - I didn't think this would be that much of a shock.

'You're joking.' Griffin said immediately. '...Aren't you?'

I gave him a look, raising my eyebrows. I wasn't too sure exactly how I had expected him to react, if I was going to be honest.

'Er, don't be a presumptuous prick, please,' I said, uncrossing one of my arms and jabbing him in the arm. I couldn't help myself in touching him somehow. 'Is that really something I would make up?'

Well okay, obviously it was something I had just made up, but he wasn't going to find out that small detail any time soon.

But in all seriousness: holy mother of shit at my quick thinking. I was way more deserving of an Oscar than Anne Hathaway for hacking off her hair. My quick thinking and acting was bloody convincing, even if I did say so myself.

Griffin looked a bit flabbergasted, and I didn't know whether to laugh or not at his bewildered expression, his eyebrows knitting together.

'But your friend with the toilet name clearly had a thing for you.'

'Toilet name?' I asked, eyes widening, before realising that he meant Lewis when Griffin elaborated, 'Yeah, Loo or something.'

I snorted in an unladylike way and looked away from Griffin, resisting the urge to roll my eyes by closing them briefly and letting out a slow, deep exhale. 'Nice, I'll tell Lewis you called him that. It's definitely a new one.'

I ran a slightly clammy hand along my bare arm, switching to fiddling with the lace appliqué on the spaghetti strap of my dress which had twisted up, in order to smooth it straight. The hairs on my arm had stuck up a little bit in reaction to the intense way Griffin was regarding me, grey eyes boring into my face in a way that made me feel a little like I was naked. It was almost as though he could see right through my clothes, somehow as if he could see right through me, straight through my lie.

I held his gaze unwaveringly, refusing to be the one to look away first.

'Are you telling me that nothing has ever happened between the two of you?' Griffin pushed, referring again to Lewis and me.

I couldn't resist rolling my eyes this time, teasingly asking, 'Why? Are you jealous?'

'Basically, yeah,' Griffin said bluntly, and my eyebrows instantaneously shot up.

This boy really was telling the truth when he said he didn't beat around the bush. It was refreshing actually, because most of the time it felt as though I was the only other person like that around.

'Well don't be. Nothing ever happened because - as I said before - I'm gay, a lesbian, as bent as a right angle,' I lied.

I would admit it myself: I had always been a supremely good liar. For some reason I had developed the uncanny knack for always managing to tell when people were lying to me, too, actually. Even the slightest waver in someone's voice or a furtive flicker of the eyes in the wrong direction would give them away to me, and I wasn't afraid to call them out on it.

But maybe it was because I was constantly looking for the lies, unlike everybody else, which made me so aware of them.

'Plus, I've got a girlfriend, you know,' I went on when I saw Griffin's expression, feeling the need to say something which would cement my "coming out" to him in his mind.