The Dates.

A knock disrupts my miserable thoughts. I clamber around under my duvet, trying to bury myself further away from everyone else. Why don't they just leave me alone?

"Honey? Andy?" coos my mother through the door. She sounds tentative, not that I blame her. I've been a wreck since I got back from Gemma's house Friday so it's useless trying to communicate with me anyway. I feel like I could rip the head off of Godzilla.

"Andrew. It's time that this stopped. You've been wallowing in there all weekend!" she orders. Even though I can't see her, I know that she's pressing her hands to her hips. I'm glad that I'm safely out of the way of one of her scolding stares, the type that mum's fix on you when you've done something wrong. The sort that makes me feel ashamed of myself. God, I hate it when she does that.

I groan into my pillow and throw my arm over the back of my head. "Just go away, mum! Just let me drown in my teenage angst!"

"Not until you've heard me out." she sighs. "I have Jake here, he wants to talk to you."

Jake is my best friend. He earned that status by eating a worm in nursery when I dared him to. It wasn't even one of those puny ones. I'm talking crazy long. Since then, we've pretty much been inseparable. In fact, he's probably more welcome in my house than I am. If I walk through the front door without Jake nearby, my mum starts to panic that we've fallen out, or that he's been caught up in a freak accident, or a meteor has dropped out of the sky and has only managed to wipe out Jake.

I don't want him to see me like this though. At least, not again. The first time was enough. I swear his brain was going to combust from all the stress it gave him.

"Dude, let me in, yeah? I bought you a doughnut from Gregg's." Jake yells through the door, thumping his fist against it loudly. Sure enough, I can hear the rustle of a bag. "Just let me shower you with sugary goodness!"

Jake has bought me a doughnut. He must think I'm severely depressed to willingly hand over food. He sees more of my lunch than I do, it's incredible that I haven't wasted away yet. Outside my door, he's started to chant.

"Let me in. Let me in. Let me in."

"Ugh, shut up!" I growl, cramming the pillow over my head. It's not use, he only gets louder.

"LET ME IN. LET ME IN."

"FINE!"

Wobbling to my feet, I shuffle to my door and unlock it, hitting against the wood with my foot to let him know he can come in. I groggily pull a jumper over my head and smooth out the creases from the long shorts I'm wearing. I start to mentally ready myself.

When Jake bursts into the room (he always bursts into rooms, he has way too much energy for a teenager) he catches sight of my appearance and shields his eyes from me, doubling over like he's in pain. The doughnut bag swings merrily from his wrist. All I can see past his arm is his purposely scruffed up blonde hair. He claims that it's just naturally that way but I know better. I reckon he spends at least half an hour swooshing it up until it looks appropriately windswept.

"Whoa, Andy. You look rough...and I'm talking about crawled from the grave rough. Seriously, you've got some wicked bags under your eyes, mate."

I glare at him the best I can but my heart isn't in it, falling back onto my mattress with dismay, the springs creaking pathetically. The bag hits me in the face but I make no attempt to bother moving it, breathing in the sweet pastry smells.

"Wow. You're really miserable, aren't you, Bagface?" he says, the mattress beside me dipping from his weight.

"Of course I am. Why do all my girlfriends cheat on me, Jake?" I grumble into the bag, grateful that he can't see my expression. He'd probably recoil in horror.

Again, I feel him squirm next to me, probably to lean back on his elbows and take up all of my space. He might as well just move right in, he already has half his junk in my room. I've found comic books of his from three years ago stashed beneath my bed, at least six hats that he's discarded or forgotten and one time, a science project lurking under my computer desk. He was investigating the process of mould. It took me weeks to get the smell out of my stuff.

"Because you're choosing them all wrong?" he suggests, slightly chuckling.

I drag the doughnut bag off my face and stare across at him glumly. Sure enough, he's making himself comfortable, already lifting an icing covered doughnut to his mouth now that he realises I'm not going to have one. Crumbs sprinkle my duvet. Great.

"Really? I'm on the brink of depression and that was the best you could come up with?"

"What? Just sayin', dude." he shrugs, polishing off the doughnut and smacking his lips together happily. His eyes widen, like he's figured something out. "Hey! You don't need a girlfriend anyway. You have me."

I raise an eyebrow at him and rake a hand through my knotty hair. "Yeah, at least I'll know you'll never cheat on me."

Jake throws his head back and laughs. "You never know, I've got my eye on Reece -"

"You mean Richard?" I say, seeing as we don't even know a Reece.

"Yeah, Richard, I mean. He can be my new BFF! He'll probably be a lot more chipper than you."

"Next thing you know, I'm gonna catch you two together, playing football behind my back." I tease, my mood lifting slightly with all the joking.

"Anything for a bromance, mate. I need all the friends I can get." Jake agrees, shoving my arm playfully.

My mouth twists up into a half smile and I push myself into a sitting position. In all honesty, I'm still feeling pretty crappy about Gemma but what was the point in moping around? I'm wasting my time on her. Apparently, two years of my time.

"Now that's the Andrew I know!" Jake cries, helping himself to another doughnut. "Still a miserable git, but not nearly gloomy enough to bring the rest of us down!"

"You know, I'm still feeling thoroughly -"

Jake stops me with his hand, the doughnut hanging from his mouth while he dives from my bed and to the computer chair. He grabs the back of it and tows it right up to where I'm sat, swiftly dropping into it and scooping up a notebook from my desk behind him. He throws his feet onto my bed, dirt from his trainers rubbing into the sheets.

"Okay, I'm ready." he tells me, balancing the notebook on his knee. He looks up expectantly.

"Ready for what?" I ask, confused.

Jake searches my desk again, looking for something as he speaks. "I'm gonna be a therapist. 'Course, I don't have no qualifications or anything but it seems easy enough, right?"

I roll my eyes when he gleefully turns back to me with a pen in his hand. He poises himself, hunched slightly over the notebook and giving it his total concentration. What an idiot.

"Jake, we're not doing this." I grumble, scooting away from him to get off my bed. He hooks his fingers around my ankle and hauls me back, waving the pen erratically in my face.

"If we don't find the problem - the source of all this misery, you may be in danger of falling completely and totally into...into, um..."

"Into a state of manic depression?" I offer, shaking my leg to loosen his death grip on me. Clearly, I'm not getting out of this easily.

Jake makes a buzzer noise, like the ones from a game show when the contestants get it wrong. He scribbles something down into the notebook.

"Wrong, Andrew." he says, putting on a professional sounding, uppercrust accent. "You do not have mood swings, am I right?"

"No, but -" I start, trying to point out that he's not an expert on mental illness but he holds up his hand again to stop me.

"Andrew. I'm here to help you, please don't contradict me."

I've had enough. I violently yank the notebook away from him, getting a quick glimpse of what he'd written on the page. Child-like hand writing was scribbled across the page, a line taking up the whole sheet. Wasting my paper. "Nut-job. He's totally lost it. Could snap at any moment..."

"Okay, cut it out now." I demand, tossing the book across the room, watching it land in a pile of dirty washing.

"Hey..." Jake mutters, staring at his lap. "Sorry, man. Didn't think you'd get annoyed."

"It's alright." I say, waving away his apology. "It's just hard to deal with right now."

Jake nods sympathetically but after a minute, his eyes light up again. A grin creeps up on his face and he starts to make wild hand gestures in the air. And I'm the crazy one?

"What?" I ask worriedly, feeling as if I have something on my face or in my hair. My hand flies upwards.

"I have an idea. A brilliant, superb, magnificent idea."

I let my hand drop.

"Oh. I'm listening."

Jake stands up and kicks away the computer chair, holding his arms up and his palms facing me like he's pitching a business idea. He actually twitches from excitement, or insanity...or both.

"Why don't you -" he begins, a toothy smile breaking out across his face. "- ask girls to interviews so you know what they're like?"

A moment of silence follows. Jake is still smiling crazily at me and I wait to see if there's a punchline. An explanation wouldn't hurt, either. Nothing though. He just keeps on grinning at me, looking for all the world like he's about to pull an axe from behind his back.

“You’re saying I should interview girls?” I repeat quizzically.

"Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. Find out what they're like so you know whether they'll cheat on you or not."

He's being serious. What an arsehole. It's probably the stupidest idea I'd ever heard from him yet and he's had some zingers.

But then I think about Gemma, how much it hurt when I walked in on her, the way I felt when I heard her laughing and the realisation that I just wasn't 'it' for her anymore. I think to the past two days, the way I've been skulking in my room like Bella in 'New Moon' when Edward left her, except without the stupid montage of time passing. Had my life really become to resemble a teenage chick-flick?

"You know what?" I say, trying not to regret what I'm about to say. "I like it."

Jake punches the air, relaxing from the tense stance he'd been standing in as he waited for my opinion.

"Dude, it's gonna be epic!" he gasps, holding up a hand for me to high five. "You are most definitely the man, my friend!"