by Alice Oseman
I attempted to say a sentence without bursting into hysterical laughter.
“I am fine,” I said, but I was grinning and probably looked like I was about to murder someone. “Why are you here? Daniel Support?”
According to rumour, Aled and Daniel had been inseparable their whole lives, despite the fact that Daniel was an uppity, opinionated dickhead and Aled spoke maybe fifty words per day.
“Er, no,” he said, his voice almost too quiet to hear, as usual. He looked terrified. “Dr Afolayan wanted me to give a speech. About university.”
I stared at him. “But you don’t even go to our school.”
“Er, no.”
“So what’s up with that?”
“It was Mr Shannon’s idea.” Mr Shannon was the head teacher of Aled’s school. “Something about camaraderie between our schools. One of my friends was supposed to be doing this actually … he was head boy last year … but he’s busy so … he asked if I’d do it … yeah.”
Aled’s voice got gradually quieter as he was speaking, almost like he didn’t think I was listening to him, despite the fact that I was looking right at him.
“And you said yes?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Aled just laughed.
He was visibly quaking.
“Because he’s a turnip,” said Daniel, folding his arms.
“Yes,” Aled murmured, but he was smiling.
“You don’t have to do it,” I said. “I could just tell them you’re sick and everything will be fine.”
“I sort of have to do it,” he said.
“You don’t really have to do anything you don’t want to,” I said, but I knew that wasn’t true, and so did Aled, because he just laughed at me and shook his head.
We didn’t say anything else.
Afolayan was on stage again. “And now I’d like to welcome Aled Last, one of the boys’ school’s wonderful Year 13s, who will be setting off to one of the UK’s most prestigious universities in September. Well, if his A levels go to plan, anyway!”
All the parents laughed at this. Daniel and Aled and I did not.
Afolayan and the parents started to clap as Aled walked on to the stage. He approached the microphone. I’d done it a thousand times and I always got that little stomach flip beforehand, but watching Aled do it then was somehow three billion times worse.
I hadn’t really spoken to Aled properly before. He caught the same train to school as me, but he sat in a different carriage. I knew next to nothing about him.
“Er, hi, yeah,” he said. His voice sounded like he’d just stopped crying.
“I didn’t realise he was this shy,” I whispered at Daniel, but Daniel didn’t say anything.
“So, last year I, er, had an interview …”
Daniel and I watched him struggle through his speech. Daniel, a practised public speaker like myself, occasionally shook his head. At one point he said, “He should have said no, for fuck’s sake.” I didn’t really like watching so I sat back in the chair for the second half of it and read the Twitter message fifty times over. I tried to switch my mind off and focus on Universe City and the messages. Radio had liked my art. Stupid little sketches of the characters, weird line drawings, 3am doodles in my 99p sketchbook instead of finishing my history essay. Nothing like this had happened to me, ever.
When Aled walked off stage and joined us again I said, “Well done, that was really good!” even though we both knew I was lying again.
He met my eyes. His had dark blue circles under them. Maybe he was a night owl like me.
“Thanks,” he said, and then he walked away, and I thought that’d probably be the last time I ever saw him.
DO WHAT YOU WANT
Mum barely had time to say “nice speech” once I met her at our car, before I was telling her all about Universe City. I once tried to get Mum into Universe City by forcing her to listen to the first five episodes on our way to a Cornwall holiday, but Mum’s conclusion was, “I don’t really get it. Is it supposed to be funny or scary? Wait, is Radio Silence a girl or a boy or neither? Why do they never go to their university lectures?” I thought that was fair enough. At least she still watched Glee with me.
“Are you sure this isn’t some sort of giant scam?” said Mum with a frown as we drove away from the Academy. I lifted my feet up on to the seat. “It sounds a bit like they’re trying to steal your art if they’re not even going to pay you.”
“It was their official Twitter. They’re verified,” I said, but this didn’t quite have the same effect on Mum as it did on me. “They liked my art so much that they’re actually asking me to join their team!”
Mum said nothing. She raised her eyebrows.
“Please be happy for me,” I said, rolling my head towards her.
“It’s really good! It’s brilliant! I just don’t want people to steal your sketches. You love that stuff.”
“I don’t think it’s stealing! They’d give me all the credit.”
“Have you signed a contract?”
“Mum!” I groaned exasperatedly. There wasn’t much point trying to explain this to her. “It doesn’t matter, I’m gonna have to say no anyway.”
“Wait, what? What d’you mean?”
I shrugged. “I’m just not gonna have time. I’ll be in Year 13 in a few months, like, I’ve got so much work all the time, and Cambridge interview prep on top of that … there’s no way I’d have time to draw something for every single weekly episode.”
Mum frowned. “I don’t understand. I thought you were really excited about this.”
“I am, like, it’s so amazing that they messaged me and thought my art was good, but … I have to be realistic—”
“You know, opportunities like this don’t come around very often,” Mum said. “And you clearly want to do it.”
“Well, yeah, but … I get so much homework every day, and coursework and revision will only get more intense—”
“I think you should do it.” Mum stared straight ahead and spun the steering wheel. “I think you work yourself too hard for school anyway and you should take an opportunity for once and do what you want.”
And what I wanted to do was this:
Direct Messages > with Radio
Hey!! Wow … thank you so much, I can’t believe you liked my art! I’d be absolutely honoured to get involved!
My email is [email protected] if it’s easier to talk there. Can’t wait to hear more about what you’re thinking in terms of design!
Honestly, Universe City is my favourite series of all time. I can’t thank you enough for thinking of me!!
Hope I don’t sound too much like a crazy fan haha! xx
I ALWAYS WISHED I HAD A HOBBY
I had work to do when I got home. I almost always had work to do when I got home. I almost always did work when I got home because whenever I wasn’t doing schoolwork I felt like I was wasting my time. I know this is kind of sad, and I always wished I had a hobby like football or playing the piano or ice-skating, but the fact of the matter was that the only thing I was good at was passing exams. Which was fine. I wasn’t ungrateful. It’d be worse if it were the other way around.
That day, the day I got a Twitter message from the creator of Universe City, I didn’t do any work when I got home.
I collapsed on to my bed and turned my laptop on and went straight on to my Tumblr, where I posted all of my art. I scrolled down the page. What exactly had the Creator seen in these? They were all crap. Doodles I did to turn my brain off, so I could fall asleep and forget about history essays and art coursework and head girl speeches for five minutes.
I switched over to Twitter to see if the Creator had replied, but they hadn’t. I checked my email to see if they’d emailed me, but they hadn’t.
I loved Universe City.
Maybe that was my hobby. Drawing Universe City.
It didn’t feel like a hobby. It felt like a dirty secret.
And my d
rawings were all pointless anyway. It wasn’t like I could sell them. It wasn’t like I could share them with my friends. It wasn’t like they’d get me into Cambridge.
I continued scrolling down the page, back months and months and into last year and the year before, scrolling through time. I’d drawn everything. I’d drawn the characters – the narrator Radio Silence, and Radio’s various sidekicks. I’d drawn the setting – the dark and dusty sci-fi university, Universe City. I’d drawn the villains and the weapons and the monsters, Radio’s lunar bike and Radio’s suits, I’d drawn the Dark Blue Building and the Lonely Road and even February Friday. I’d drawn everything, really.
Why did I do this?
Why am I like this?
It was the only thing I enjoyed, really. The only thing I had apart from my grades.
No – wait. That would be really sad. And weird.
It just helped me sleep.
Maybe.
I don’t know.
I shut my laptop and went downstairs to get some food and tried to stop thinking about it.
A NORMAL TEENAGE GIRL
“Right then,” I said, as the car drew up outside Wetherspoon’s at 9pm several days later. “I’m off to drink the alcohols, do lots of the drugs and have lots of the sex.”
“Oh,” Mum said, with her half-smile. “Well, then. My daughter’s gone wild.”
“Actually this is my one hundred per cent real personality.” I opened the car door and skipped out on to the pavement with a cry of, “Don’t worry about me dying!”
“Don’t miss the last train!”
It was the last day of school before study leave and I was supposed to be going to this club in town, Johnny Richard’s, with my friends. It was the first time I’d ever been to a club and I was essentially terrified, but I was on the verge of being so uninvolved with our friendship group that if I hadn’t gone, I thought they might stop considering me a ‘main friend’, and things would get too awkward for me to deal with on a daily basis. I couldn’t imagine what awaited me besides drunk guys in pastel-coloured shirts, and Maya and Raine trying to make me awkwardly dance to Skrillex.
Mum drove away.
I crossed the street and peered through the door into Spoons. I could see my friends sitting in the far corner, drinking and laughing. They were all lovely people, but they made me nervous. They weren’t mean to me or anything, they just saw me in a very particular way – School Frances, head girl, boring, nerdy, study machine. It’s not like they were completely wrong, I guess.
I went to the bar and asked for a double vodka and lemonade. The bartender didn’t ask for ID, even though I had a fake one just in case, which was surprising because most of the time I look approximately thirteen years old.
Then I walked towards my friends, barging through the packs of lads and pre-drinkers – more things that make me nervous.
Honestly, I need to stop being scared of being a normal teenage girl.
“What? Blowjobs?” Lorraine Sengupta, known to all as Raine, was sitting next to me. “Not even worth it, mate. Boys are weak. They don’t even want to kiss you afterwards.”
Maya, the loudest person of the group and therefore the leader, had her elbows on the table and three empty glasses in front of her. “Oh, come on, they’re not all gonna be like that.”
“But a lot of them are, so I literally can’t be arsed. Not even worth the effort, tbh.”
Raine literally said the letters ‘tbh’. She didn’t seem to do it ironically and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.
This conversation was so irrelevant to my life that I had been pretending to text for the past ten minutes.
Radio hadn’t yet replied to my Twitter message or emailed me. It had been four days.
“Nah, I don’t believe in couples falling asleep in each other’s arms,” said Raine. They were talking about something else now. “I think it’s a mass-media lie.”
“Oh, hey, Daniel!”
Maya’s voice drew my attention away from my phone. Daniel Jun and Aled Last were walking past our table. Daniel was wearing a plain grey T-shirt and plain blue jeans. I’d never seen him wear anything patterned in the year I’d known him. Aled looked just as plain, like Daniel had picked out his clothes.
Daniel glanced down and saw us and momentarily caught my eye before replying to Maya, “Hi, you all right?”
They struck up a conversation. Aled was silent, standing behind Daniel, and was hunched over, as if he were trying to make himself less visible. I caught his eye too, but he quickly looked away.
Raine leaned towards me while Daniel and the others were talking. “Who’s that white boy?” she murmured.
“Aled Last? He goes to the boys’ school.”
“Oh, Carys Last’s twin brother?”
“Yeah.”
“Weren’t you friends with her back in the day?”
“Er …”
I tried to figure out what to say.
“Sort of,” I said. “We chatted on the train. Sometimes.”
Raine was probably the person I talked to the most out of the group. She didn’t tease me for being a massive nerd like everyone else did. If I’d acted more like myself, I think we’d have been pretty good friends, since we had a similar sense of humour. But she could pull off being cool and weird because she wasn’t head girl, and she had the right side of her hair shaved so no one was very surprised when she did something unusual.
Raine nodded. “Fair enough.”
I watched as Aled took a sip of the drink he was holding and looked shiftily round the pub. He appeared to be deeply uncomfortable.
“Frances, are you ready for Johnny R’s?” one of my friends was leaning over the table and looking at me with a shark-like grin.
As I said, my friends weren’t horrible to me, but they did treat me like I’d had next to no major life experiences and was generally a massive study nerd.
Which was true, so fair enough.
“Er, yeah, I guess so,” I said.
A pair of guys walked up to Aled and started talking to him. They were both tall and had an air of power about them, and I realised then that it was because the guy on the right – olive-skinned and a checked shirt – had been head boy for most of last year at the boys’ school, and the guy on the left – stocky physique and an undercut – used to be the boys’ school rugby captain. I’d seen them both give presentations when I attended a sixth-form open day at their school.
Aled smiled at them both – I hoped Aled had other friends apart from Daniel. I tried to catch threads of their conversation: Aled said, “Yeah, Dan managed to persuade me this time!” and the head boy said, “Don’t feel like you have to stick around for Johnny’s if you don’t want to. I think we’re going home before then,” and he looked at the rugby captain who nodded in agreement and said, “Yeah, let us know if you need a lift, mate! I’ve got my car,” and to be honest I wished I could do the same, just go home when I wanted to, but I couldn’t, because I’m too scared to do what I want.
“It’s pretty grim,” said another of my friends, dragging my attention away.
“I feel bad!” said another. “Frances is so innocent! I feel like we’re corrupting you by dragging you to clubs and making you drink.”
“She deserves a night off studying though!”
“I want to see drunk Frances.”
“D’you think you’ll be a crier?”
“No, I think she’ll be a funny drunk. I think she’s got some secret personality we don’t know about.”
I didn’t know what to say.
Raine nudged me. “Don’t worry. If any disgusting guys come up to you, I’ll just accidentally spill my drink on them.”
Someone laughed. “She actually will. She’s done it before.”
I laughed too and wished I had the guts to say something funny, but I didn’t because I wasn’t a funny person when I was around them. I was just boring.
I downed what was left of my drink and looked around and wo
ndered where Daniel and Aled had gone.
I felt a bit weird because Raine had brought up Carys and I always felt weird when people brought up Carys because I didn’t like thinking about her.
Carys Last ran away from home when she was in Year 11 and I was in Year 10. Nobody knew why and nobody cared because she didn’t have many friends. She didn’t have any friends, really. Apart from me.
DIFFERENT CARRIAGES
I met Carys Last on the train to school when we were fifteen.
It was 7.14am and I was sitting in her seat.
She glanced down at me like a librarian looking down at someone over a tall desk. Her hair was platinum blonde and she had a full fringe so thick and long that you couldn’t quite see her eyes. The sun silhouetted her like she was a heavenly apparition.
“Oh,” she said. “All right, my little train-compadre? You’re sitting in my seat.”
That might sound like she was trying to be mean, but she genuinely wasn’t.
It was weird. Like, we’d both seen each other loads of times. We both sat at the village station every morning, plus Aled, and were the last people to leave the train every evening. We’d done this since I started secondary school. But we’d never spoken. That’s what people are like, I suppose.
Her voice was different to how I’d imagined. She had one of those posh London Made in Chelsea accents, but it was more charming than irritating, and she spoke slowly and softly as if she were slightly high. It’s also worth noting that I was significantly smaller than her at this point. She looked like a majestic elf and I looked like a gremlin.
And I suddenly realised it was true. I was sitting in her seat. I had no idea why. I normally sat in an entirely different carriage.
“Oh, God, sorry, I’ll move …”
“What? Oh, no, I didn’t mean move, wow, sorry. I must have sounded really rude.” She sat down in the seat opposite me.