The Armchair Bride Read Online Free

such a miserable day outside and I already feel so incredibly fed up, it won’t hurt.
    I had a hard time of it at school and didn’t make friends easily. Patronising school reports informed my parents that “ Lisa worries too much about what others may think ”. Despite this, they laboured under the impression that I’d be the one to go on to bigger and better things. There wasn’t much competition. My elder sister Sue’s waters broke mid way through her English exam. Amy, two years my junior, had a first class degree in male anatomy before she was fifteen. Compared to them, I wasa saint. Mam and Dad took me on day trips to Oxford and stood in awe before the dreaming spires. For birthdays I got book tokens.
    Under pressure to perform, I studied hard. Ignoring invites to classmates’ houses and after-school discos and left school laden with qualifications but light on friends. I went to university more out of obligation. Not Oxford or Cambridge - they wouldn’t have me - instead I escaped to Manchester and Mam pretended to be proud. Even if I was studying drama. Which even she knew was a bit rubbish.
    I first logged into PlaceTheirFace about two years back and only out of curiosity. Sharon at work used to rave about it.
    ‘It’s a real giggle,’ she said. ‘Half the girls in my class are on their second ASBO.’
    Maybe I’m the big success story, I told myself. The one who got away. My heart sank as I scrolled through page after page of happily married classmates. Some posted photos of their wedding days, their kids and wisteria-fronted cottages.
    It left me feeling like a big fat failure. Every sensible cell screamed log off . But I, of course, knew better and kept going back, and what started small grew until it threatened to take over my life. I drew up a list of those who made no mention of any significant other.
    It was depressingly short.
    Other names came to mind - girls who had yet to discover the on-line hall of shame. Driven by the need to be sure I wasn’t alone in having a less-than- perfect life and with way too much time on my hands, I typed names into search engines and scoured local newspaper website archives of wedding photos and announcements.
    And all this research threw up one awful result. I’m one of two social misfits. Two girls left firmly on life’s shelf. Me and Helen McVeigh. Little Helen McVeigh with the lazy eye and a stutter. My best friend at school.
    I didn’t want any Tom, Dick or Harriet to know I was still single, so cobbled together an on-line profile that made me sound happy, grounded and successful. I may have added a serious boyfriend and a picture of an engagement ring from some foreign website.
    Girls I’d not heard from in years sent cute messages, congratulations and invites to stay in touch. I finally became popular.
    ‘Have you never thought this is all a bit weird,’ my friend Sharon asked over chai latte in a fancy Manchester cafe.
    ‘Nobody tells the truth about themselves on line,’ I said as I upgraded my college degree to first class with honours.
    ‘Fact of life.’
    ‘Why do you even care?’ she said and I looked at her cradling her new baby daughter and knew she’d never get it. Her life was one long whirl of clothes that don’t show sick, mother and baby groups and people that tell her how wonderful she is to balance a return to work with her family life.
    ‘I’ve got issues,’ I said. ‘It’s this or a room with bouncy walls.’
    ‘You need to get out more. Somewhere normal people go.’
    ‘Are you suggesting I’m not normal?’
    She didn’t answer and her look said it all.
    At school, Helen and I were the quiet ones, in awe of the pretty girls, or The Swans , as we called them. These were the girls who wore make-up, smoked cigarettes and French-kissed boys tin the bushes at the back of the playing fields. The Swans took their orders from Ginny Walters. Her father was a butcher and once, she poured pigs’ blood into my schoolbag. It