by Alice Oseman
“You’re lying!”
“Wha— What …”
He walked closer to me and I actually stepped backwards. He might have been drinking, but I’d drunk a lot so I couldn’t tell.
“You just— You just wanted to use me to get popular on the Internet, didn’t you!”
I couldn’t speak.
“Just stop pretending you care about me!” He was full-on shouting at me now. People were starting to look at us. “All you care about is Universe City! You’re just another fangirl trying to expose me and take away the one thing I actually care about! I don’t even know what your real personality is, you behave so differently around other people. You’ve literally plotted this entire thing from the start, pretending you just like hanging out with me and you don’t care about Internet fame and all this shit …”
“What— N-no—” My mind was going blank. “That’s not true!”
“Then what is it!? Why are you so obsessed with me?”
“Sorry,” I said, but I wasn’t sure whether I was making any actual sound.
“Stop saying that!” Aled’s face was scrunched up and his eyes were watery. “Stop lying! You’re just caught up in some stupid delusion again, just the same as you were with Carys.”
I suddenly felt like I was going to vomit.
“I’m just the replacement. You’re obsessed with me, just the same as Carys, and you’ve managed to fuck up the only thing I had, the only good thing I fucking have, just like you managed to fuck up Carys’s. D’you fancy me as well?”
“I don’t— That’s— I don’t fancy you …”
“Then why would you be round my house every day?” The way he said it was like someone else was speaking through him. He stepped closer again, he was so angry. “Just admit it!”
My voice was more like a shriek by this point. “I don’t fancy you!”
Do you believe me? I thought. Does anyone believe me? I thought I might be the only person who believed me.
“So what the fuck is it!? Why did you do this to me?”
Tears had started to spill down my cheeks. “I— It was an accident …”
Aled stepped back. “You told me yourself that you’re the reason Carys is gone.”
He said the last word so loudly that I stepped back again and now I was crying properly and God I hated myself, I hated myself so much. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry …
Before I knew what was happening, Daniel was in front of me, almost shoving me backwards, saying, “Go away, Frances, leave him alone,” and then Raine was in front of me facing him, saying, “Lay off, mate! What did you say to her?” and then they started shouting at each other, but I wasn’t really listening until Raine was like, “He doesn’t fucking belong to you,” and then they were both gone and I was walking out of the club and sitting down on the kerb, trying to stop the tears coming out of my eyes, but they wouldn’t stop …
“Frances, oh, God.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry …”
“You didn’t do anything, Frances!”
“I have, I’ve ruined everything again …”
“It wasn’t you.”
“It was me, everything was my fault.”
“It’s not important, he’ll get over it, I promise.”
“No— Not just that, Carys as well, Carys … it was my fault, it’s my fault she’s gone … and nobody knows where she is and Aled’s all alone with his mum and it’s all my fault …”
Suddenly I was sitting on a bench with my head on Raine’s shoulder and in her hand was her phone and she was playing some music and it was like the music was coming right out of her hand, but the phone speakers were shit and the music sounded less like music and more like the dull 2am buzz of a car radio on the motorway, and the guy sang, “I can lay inside’’, and the music played like the darkness of the sky and it played with me, I felt drunk and blurry and I couldn’t remember what I was going to say.
3. AUTUMN TERM (b)
BULLET
• The next day I texted Aled. Then I Facebook-messaged him. Then I called him. I heard nothing, and at quarter to seven in the evening I stepped out of my house with the intention of knocking on his door, but his mum’s car was gone, and so was he.
• At the weekend I sent him a lengthy apology over Facebook, which felt pathetic while I was writing it, and was still pathetic when I read it back. While I was writing it, I realised there really wasn’t anything I could do to make it better, and I had possibly just lost the only real friend I had ever made in my entire life.
• My behaviour throughout the rest of October was more pathetic than I even believed was possible of myself. I cried daily and couldn’t sleep properly, and got very angry at myself because of both of these things. I put on some weight, but I didn’t really care about that very much. Wasn’t like I was skinny in the first place.
• October was full-on for schoolwork as well. I was spending most of my evenings doing homework. I had copious amounts of art coursework to do, and we were being made to write English essays every week. I was trying to read some books for my Cambridge interviews, but I couldn’t make myself concentrate. I forced myself to read them though. The Canterbury Tales and Sons and Lovers and For Whom The Bell Tolls. If I didn’t get into Cambridge, everything I had tried to be throughout my school life would be a total waste.
• One evening I saw Aled walking down the road from the station lugging a suitcase – home for the weekend, I guessed. I almost ran outside to see him, but he would have replied to my messages if he’d wanted to be friends again. I wanted to know how he was finding university – he was tagged in a few Freshers’ Week photos on Facebook with other freshers, smiling and drinking and sometimes in a fancy-dress costume. I didn’t know whether to feel happy or sad, but looking at them made me feel horrible.
• Obviously I stopped voicing Toulouse in Universe City and I stopped doing the art. Aled changed the story so Toulouse was suddenly banished from the city. I felt very sad about that, as if it was me who’d been banished.
• I got a ton of messages on Tumblr asking me why this had happened. I just said that’s the story – Toulouse’s segment was over.
• I got a ton of messages on Tumblr asking me why my art had stopped appearing on the Universe City videos and why I hadn’t been posting any drawings lately. I said I was struggling with school stress and needed to take some time away.
• I got a ton of messages.
• I almost bit the bullet and deleted my Tumblr entirely, but I couldn’t do it, so I tried to stay away from Tumblr as much as I could.
• On the first of November, I turned eighteen. I expected to feel different but, of course, I didn’t. I don’t think age has much to do with adulthood.
SCHOOL FRANCES
“Frances, you look so grumpy,” said Maya with a laugh. “What’s wrong?”
Every day I spent eating lunch with my school ‘friends’ felt like I was walking one step closer to packing my bags, leaving town and hitchhiking to Wales.
My school friends weren’t bad people. They were just friends with School Frances – quiet, studious Frances – instead of Real Frances – meme-lover, patterned-leggings fanatic, and very close to a breakdown. Because School Frances was very dull, they didn’t really like talking to her, or care very much about how she was. School Frances, I started to realise, hardly even had a personality at all, so I didn’t really blame everyone for laughing at her.
It was early November and I was finding it increasingly difficult to be School Frances any more.
I smiled at Maya. “Haha, I’m fine. Just stressed.”
‘Just stressed’ was starting to take on the same meaning as ‘I’m fine.’
“Oh my God, same,” she said, and then started talking to someone else.
Raine turned to me. Raine always sat next to me at lunch and I was extremely grateful for this because she was pretty much the only person who I actual
ly had conversations with.
“You sure you’re okay?” she said in a much less patronising tone than Maya. “You look a bit ill, actually.”
I laughed. “Thanks.”
She grinned. “No! I mean – ugh, I just mean you haven’t really been acting like yourself.”
“Haha. I don’t really know who that is.”
“Are you still upset about Aled?”
She said it so bluntly I almost laughed again. “Partly, I guess … He just hasn’t replied to any of my messages ….”
Raine looked at me for a moment.
“He’s an absolute cunt,” she said, which made me splutter a mildly traumatised laugh.
“What? Why?”
“If he can’t even think rationally enough to see that you’ve been his friend for all this time, what’s the point in trying? He clearly doesn’t care about you enough to value your relationship. You shouldn’t have to care either.” She shook her head. “You don’t need friends like that.”
I knew everything was way more complicated than that, and I knew that everything was my fault and I didn’t deserve any pity whatsoever, but it still felt nice to hear Raine say those things.
“I guess so,” I said.
She hugged me then, and I realised it was the first time she had done so. I hugged her back as well as I could from my seat.
“You deserve better friends,” she said. “You’re a sunshine angel.”
I didn’t know what to say or what to think. I just hugged her.
WINTER OLYMPIAN
“Frances, when’re your Cambridge interviews?”
I was walking past the school hall’s backstage door when Daniel spoke to me for the first time since September. He was standing next to the stage curtain with a Winter Olympian who had come to give a speech in front of Years 7, 8 and 9.
Daniel obviously had good reason to be angry with me, and since I wasn’t head girl any more I had no reason to even be around him. So I hadn’t been surprised when he started refusing to make eye contact with me in the school corridors.
I didn’t have anywhere urgent to be, so I walked into the backstage area. He hadn’t even asked his question in a particularly rude manner.
“December the tenth,” I said. It was mid-November so I had a few weeks left. I hadn’t read everything I’d said I’d read on my personal statement yet. I just hadn’t had time to prepare for the interviews and keep up with my coursework at the same time.
“Ah,” he said. “Same.”
He looked slightly different from the last time I’d spoken to him. I thought he’d maybe let his hair grow a little longer, but I couldn’t really tell, since he kept it swept back into a quiff every day.
“How’s it going?” I asked. “You ready? Know your stuff about … like … bacteria and … skeletons and stuff?”
“Bacteria and skeletons …”
“What? I don’t know what you do in biology.”
“You did it at GCSE though.”
I folded my arms. “The nucleus is the powerhouse of the cell. The cell membrane – what does the cell membrane do? I hope you know what the cell membrane does. They might ask you.”
“They’re probably not going to ask me what the cell membrane does.”
“What are they going to ask you?”
He gave me a long look. “Nothing that you would understand.”
“Good thing I’m not applying to do biology then, isn’t it.”
“Yup.”
I suddenly noticed that Raine was backstage with us. She was currently interrogating the Winter Olympian, and I felt a bit sorry for him – he could only have been a couple of years older than us and he seemed kind of nerdy and awkward for an athlete, super tall with massive glasses and jeans that were slightly too short for him. He looked a little panicked at the fact that he had to talk for twenty minutes to Years 7 to 9, and Raine was doing nothing to help. Apparently he used to go to the grammar school across town, Aled’s school, and now he was here to talk about his success and achievement and stuff.
Daniel saw me looking at her, and he rolled his eyes. “She wanted to meet him.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway, here’s the thing,” Daniel continued, looking me in the eye. “I need a lift to Cambridge.”
“You need a lift …?”
“Yeah. My parents are working and I don’t have the money to get to Cambridge by myself.”
“Can’t your parents give you money for the train?”
He sort of ground his teeth like he really didn’t want to say what he was about to say.
“My parents don’t give me money for things,” he said. “And I had to quit my job because of schoolwork.”
“They won’t even give you money for Cambridge?”
“They don’t really see it as a very big deal.” He shook his head slightly. “They don’t even think I need to go to university. My dad— My dad just wants me to come work for him … he runs this, like, electronics shop …” His voice faded away.
I stared at him. And I suddenly felt really bloody sorry for him.
“I was gonna get the train there,” I said. “My mum’s working.”
Daniel nodded and looked down. “Ah, okay. Yeah. That’s all right.”
Raine leaned over from the chair she was straddling. The Olympian guy looked sort of relieved.
“I’ll drive you guys,” she said. “If you want.”
“What?” I said.
“What?” Daniel said.
“I’ll drive you.” Raine grinned broadly and rested her chin in her hand. “To Cambridge.”
“You’ll have school,” said Daniel, very quickly.
“So?”
“So … you’re just gonna skip?”
She shrugged. “I’ll fake an absence note. Works every time.”
Daniel looked extremely conflicted. It was still very weird to me that Daniel had drunkenly poured out his heart to a girl he has absolutely nothing in common with. Then again, maybe that was why he did it.
“Okay,” he said, trying and failing to mask the irritated tone of his voice. “Yeah. That’ll be great.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “That’s really kind.”
There was an awkward pause for a couple of seconds, and then a teacher gestured from the other side of the stage for Daniel to come on and introduce the Olympian guy, which he did, and then the Winter Olympian walked on to the stage and Daniel walked off.
Daniel and I didn’t say anything to each other while the guy was talking. To be honest, he wasn’t a very good public speaker – he kept losing the point of his talk. I think he was supposed to be inspiring people to work hard in school and explain about sports-related careers and he seemed to be fairly confident in what he was saying, but he kept throwing things in like “I didn’t really get along well with academia,” and “I felt a bit alienated with school,” and “I just think we don’t all have to have our lives laid out by the grades that we get in our exams.”
After the guy finished, Daniel and I smiled and thanked him for coming and all that stuff, and he asked if it was okay and we obviously said it was. He was then whisked off by a teacher, and Daniel and I started making our way back to the common room.
As we were walking through the hallways, I asked him, “Have you been seeing Aled much?”
And he looked at me and said, “You know about us, don’t you?”
And I said, “Yeah.”
And he said, “Well, he doesn’t talk to me any more.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. He just stopped texting me one day.”
“For no reason?”
He paused and almost seemed to sway as he walked, as if the weight of this whole thing was about to crush him into the ground. “We had an argument on his birthday.”
“About what?”
I don’t know why I was surprised. People move on quicker than I can comprehend. People forget you within days, they take new pictures to put on Facebook and
they don’t read your messages. They keep on moving forward and shove you to the side because you make more mistakes than you should. Maybe that was fair. Who was I to judge, really?
He said, “It doesn’t matter.”
I said, “He doesn’t talk to me either.”
And neither of us said anything after that.
SPACE
“It’s getting a bit late, isn’t it, France?” said Mum, wandering into the lounge with a cup of tea in one hand.
I blinked up at her from my laptop. Moving gave me an immediate headache. “What’s the time?”
“Half twelve.” She sat down on the sofa. “You’re not still doing work, are you? You’ve done work every night this week.”
“I’ve just got to finish this paragraph.”
“You’ve got to be up in six hours.”
“Yeah, I’ll be done in a minute.”
She sipped her tea. “You keep doing this. It’s no wonder you’re getting stress pains.”
I’d started getting weird pains in the side of my ribcage every time I sat in a particular position. It did at times feel a bit like I was having a very slow heart attack, so I was trying not to think too much about it.
“I think you should go to bed,” she said.
“I can’t!” I snapped, louder than I’d meant to. “I literally can’t. You don’t understand. This is due tomorrow, Period One, so I have to do it now.”
Mum stayed silent for a moment.
“How about we go to the cinema this weekend?” she said. “Just a little break from all this Cambridge stuff. That space film came out a few weeks ago.”
“I don’t have time. Maybe after my interviews.”
She nodded. “Okay.” She stood up. “Okay.” She left the room.
I finished the essay at 1am and went to bed. I thought about listening to the most recent Universe City episode because I hadn’t got around to it yet, but in the end I was too tired, and I didn’t feel like it, so I just lay in bed and waited to fall asleep.
HATE
I’d been avoiding checking Tumblr for a few weeks. All I was ever faced with was a ton of messages asking me why I hadn’t updated for a while and the reminder that I hadn’t drawn anything for over a month.