Kizzy was my twin. Which meant she knew all my secrets before I even had them. I’d think, I quite fancy Cece Noble, and she’d already have written it in her notebook, underlined twice, and drawn a diagram with arrows pointing to “probable failure.”
She ran Easter ’78 like a military campaign. She had the Form Photo pinned up on her wall, strings and darts sticking out of it like she was solving the Zodiac murders. Except instead of suspects it was girls in cardigans.
Her rules were strict. “You must attempt one girl per day. No repeats until at least a week has passed. Minimum of one kiss per seven days.” Honestly, it was less romance, more like a cross-country run with forfeits.
Kizzy had a nickname for everyone. Cece was The Gazelle. Donna was Pub Vicar. Sharon was Snogzilla. Even the dog down the road got christened The Hairy Prophecy.
Whenever I came back from a failed mission, she’d interrogate me like I was a spy returning from Moscow. “Did she touch your arm?” “How many seconds did the eye contact last?” “Describe the scent: Yardley or Brut?” Then she’d write it all down in her Five-Year Diary, which was meant to be private, but really she read it out loud to Momo like it was the Shipping Forecast.
Her best invention was the Dart Game. She set it up like we were Knights of the Round Table, except instead of swords it was darts, and instead of a grail it was Cece Noble’s elusive cheek. She threw first, missed entirely, and hit the skirting board. Declared it a victory anyway.
Kizzy never once fancied any of the boys. She just enjoyed watching me flail. “You’re like a goose on roller skates,” she said once, as I tried to explain my ‘romance strategy’. She wasn’t wrong.
But the thing is, she wasn’t cruel. She kept me afloat. Without Kizzy’s charts, schedules, and dartboard commandments, I’d have drowned in the sea of Yardley perfume and Brut aftershave.
Kizzy was the clipboard general. And I was her very willing, very hopeless infantry.
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