by Holly Bourne
I wanted Guy to ask me out though.
He would, wouldn’t he? I mean, he’d been about to kiss me. Me. That’s how it worked, right? You like them, they like you, they want to kiss you, you start going out. Right?
Rose dozed off and I soon joined her, the film playing as backing vocals for our nap. I was just on the brink of utter unconsciousness, when my phone rang.
I sat up blearily. “Huh?” I answered, instead of hello.
There was no answer, only sobbing.
“Hello?” I asked. More sobbing. I looked at my screen. It was Lottie.
“Lottie? Is that you?”
It prompted a massive howl, a heartbreaking one, one that rips through your soul.
“Evie?” I could just make her out through the snot. “Evie? Can you come over?”
“Sure. Are you okay?”
“He…he… Can you just come round? Bring Amber.”
“I’ll be right there.”
Nineteen
Lottie’s mum answered the door, her big owl glasses poking around the gap. She looked – and dressed – exactly the same as she did when I was eleven.
“Evie? Is that you, darling? I haven’t seen you since you were yay high.”
She opened the door and Amber and I pushed past the beaded curtain, setting off five wind chimes as we did so.
“How are you, Ms Thomas?” I asked as she pulled me in for a hug. She smelled of hemp – I think. I’d never really smelled hemp before. I was proud of myself for remembering the “Ms”. Lottie’s mum always refused to be called “Mrs”, despite being married.
“I’m good.” She released me then waved her hand around my body – cleansing my aura. Yep, just like when I was eleven. I remembered then why I used to be scared of going round.
“And this must be Amber.” She pulled her in for the hug treatment and Amber’s hair practically obliterated Ms Thomas’s face.
“Nice to meet you,” Amber muttered into her shoulder.
“I’m glad you’re here, girls,” she said, releasing Amber. “Lottie’s in a state; she won’t leave her room. I can hear her crying but, of course, she won’t tell her mother what’s happened.”
I headed up the stairs to Lottie’s room. “We’ll look after her,” I reassured Lottie’s mother. It’d been so long since I was here, but everything was the same. The weird seventies style wallpaper, the big painting of the words “THIS IS IT” hanging over the stairs that a monk had painted for them on an educational family holiday somewhere. I knocked softly on Lottie’s door, already able to hear her cries through the thin plywood.
“Who is it?” she croaked.
“It’s Evie and Amber. With freshly cleaned auras.”
The door opened and a puffy-faced Lottie appeared, her eyes almost gone from crying.
“Oh God, sorry about her.” Lottie’s back was already to us as she stumbled over to her unkempt bed. She slumped down on her belly and buried her face in the pillow.
Amber and I sat gingerly to the side of her.
“Lottie,” I said gently, putting my hand on her back. “What’s wrong? Where did you go last night?”
“He…he…” she stammered into the pillow, her voice muffled. “He broke up with me.”
Both of us leaped into action. I rubbed her back more, while Amber provided the indignant outrage. “What? Why? How? What a bastard.”
Lottie slowly raised her head, leaving at least half of her hair sticking to her face.
“That’s not even the worst of it,” she said. “He was confused…he didn’t even think we were going out in the first place!”
And we sat there as she sobbed and cried and sobbed some more.
Twenty
“I’m such an idiot,” Lottie announced to the pillow. “I’m such a goddamn idiot.”
I rubbed her back. “I think he’s the one we should be calling an idiot.”
“No, it’s me. I’m so stupid. Thinking we were falling in love…when it was just me.”
“There’s nothing idiotic about having feelings,” Amber said, who was on hair-stroking duty.
“Yes there is. Feelings are for losers.”
Eventually Lottie turned over. She looked so different with all her heavy eye make-up cried off, her face much softer.
“Sorry, guys,” she hiccupped. “I feel so stupid, crying like this over a stupid smelly boy.”
“What happened?”
“Ergh, it’s so clichéd.”
“Tell us.”
“Okay.”
What happened between Lottie and Tim
She’d agreed to meet him at the house party. She was looking forward to us meeting him properly, since they’d been seeing each other for a few weeks.
But he was weird from the moment he got there.
“Well, you saw him,” she said. “He barely said hello to either of you, and wasn’t interested in the party at all. He kept trying to whisk me upstairs.”
I could hardly remember meeting him, but then I had killed about twenty million brain cells in the last twenty-four hours. I remembered him trying to shake mine and Amber’s hands, and we didn’t really know what to do with something that posh. Amber and I had disappeared into the kitchen to start our drunken oblivion mission, leaving them alone to make small talk with people.
“It was awful,” she said, curling her knees up, tucking them neatly under her delicate chin. “He seemed to get posher and posher, and all judgemental of our friends. Like, I know Joel and that are a bit odd to look at…especially with Joel’s new nose ring thingy, but he’d been to their gig, he knew what they were like. It was like the louder the music got, the more upper-class he got. I bet he was probably wishing we were all chinking champagne glasses, wearing blazers and yelling ‘tally ho’ to each other or something.” I giggled and Lottie smiled weakly. “I got so wound up. I just wanted things to be better. And he kept whispering into my ear, saying we should go upstairs. And I thought maybe that would help, I dunno, get him out of his weird mood.”
Amber and I each raised an eyebrow at each other over her head.
“So we went upstairs. And then he…we…” Amber bristled and my hand went tight on Lottie’s back. “We had sex. Right there in the toilet. Argh… God.” She picked up the pillow and buried her face in it again. “It was awful. He was all rough, not like usual. Like he was just doing a job. And then…then…afterwards…” She started to cry again, a really hollow cry, from the very pit of her stomach.
“What?” I asked.
“It felt so weird and unromantic, so I panicked, and said something like ‘Hey, my parents really want to meet you’ and, I’m not kidding, guys, his entire face dropped. Like I’d announced I was the secret love child of Hitler or something. He…he…just pulled up his fly and said, all posh and blustery, ‘I think you’ve got the wrong idea here, Lottie.’”
Amber’s mouth gaped open. “What? Just like that?”
Lottie nodded, more tears spilling. “He looked so shocked, and then he started apologizing. Which made it even worse I think. ‘Oh, Lottie, sorry, you’re a great girl but…well…I thought it was just a bit of fun. I thought you agreed. Oh, I’m so sorry.’ I felt like a charity case! I’m so stupid. I was really falling for him, you know? Argh, Christ, I’m such a bloody girl. I’d even practised telling people how we met – ‘Oh, he spilled drink down me’…it all seemed so romantic.”
“So what happened then?” I asked, returning to rubbing her back.
She sighed. “Well then, of course, I went stark raving mental. I started yelling at him, all drunk and totally unladylike, screaming, ‘What? Are you serious? What? You arsehole, you led me on.’ I swear the whole party heard. And he just apologized even harder, coming up with all this stupid crap, about how we never said it was anything official, and that he liked spending time with me but… And I was like, ‘But what? BUT WHAT?’ I was chasing him out onto the street by then, like a rabid dog, screaming. I just remember yelling, ‘BUT WHAT?’ I didn’
t get it. I still don’t get it.”
“Did he answer you?”
Lottie sat up suddenly, and wiped her curranty eyes. Her face morphed from grief into anger, like someone had pointed a remote at her. “He said he didn’t understand why I was so upset. That we were just seeing each other. And why would he want to be tied down at sixteen anyway?”
Amber and I went to the local corner shop. Chocolate was purchased.
“I’m such a cliché,” Lottie told us on our return, half a Dairy Milk hanging out of her mouth. “I’m eating chocolate and moaning about men.”
“Sometimes clichés are helpful,” I offered.
“I hate how he’s made me do this. I hate how much chocolate is genuinely helping.”
I broke off another square of the Whole Nut and passed it down to Amber, who leaned against Lottie’s bed, her long legs sprawled out on the carpet.
“I just can’t believe he said that,” she said, taking the chocolate and popping it into her mouth. “I don’t want to be tied down. I hate that. That they think girls are just obsessed with having relationships. What do they want us to do? Shag them but not expect anything in return?”
“Er, yeah, basically,” Lottie answered.
“No, that’s not right either,” I said. “They call those girls sluts.”
They nodded in agreement.
“So we’re damned if we do, damned if we don’t, basically?” Amber looked utterly depressed.
Lottie stood up on the bed, slipping a bit in her fluffy socks. “No, there’s another way. We can pretend to be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.”
“A whatta whatta what now?” I asked.
“You know? A fraud. A boy’s dream. Especially the indie boys that we hang out with.”
“What’s a Manic Pixie Dream Girl? Why do you know all these words all the time?”
She sat back down, and scrolled on her phone, pulling up a few movie stills on Google. Zooey Deschanel came up. And Kirsten Dunst. And this indie film I really liked called Ruby Sparks that came out a few years ago. “Voilà,” she said. “Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Or MPDG if you wanna sound, like, so four years ago.”
“Huh?”
Lottie jabbed at the screen. “She’s like this invention in men’s imaginations, but girls pretend they’re real. It’s all basically a recycle of the Madonna-Whore complex, but with vintage dresses.”
“The Madonna whatnow? Seriously, you know all the words,” I said, my head spinning.
Lottie ignored me and just explained. “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is pretty but she doesn’t really know it. She’s kooky and makes you feel alive, but she knows when to shut up and just let you watch the football. She drinks whisky or beer and doesn’t ask anything of your relationship because she’s too busy doing whacky leisure activities or at band practice. She likes casual sex, but just with you, not with anyone else.”
Amber twisted around and grabbed the phone. “Oh, I SO know what you mean.” She turned to me and helped explain. “I did a whole topic about Madonnas for my art GCSE, it’s basically paintings of the Virgin Mary. The Madonna-Whore complex is this idea Freud came up with that men get all sexually confused because they want us to be virginal Madonna types they can bring home to meet their parents…but they also want us to shag them like we’re insatiable whores. They can’t make up their mind which one they want. Ideally both, because, you know…” She shrugged. “Because boys. I made up my own phrase for the ideal combo of both,” she said proudly. “For modern times. I call it The Girl-Next-Door Slut.”
Lottie cackled. “LOVE it! The juxtaposition of two feminine ideals, i.e. a complete lose-lose stereotype.”
I pulled a face. “And you think guys want this?”
“Sure,” Lottie took back her phone. “I swear the only way you get a boyfriend these days is to pretend you’re a Girl-Next-Door Slut.”
“Pretend how?”
“Oh, you know. Say stuff like ‘Do you mind if we keep this casual, I kinda get freaked out by the whole commitment thing?’ It drives me mad. Boys always think I’m like that because I’m quite sexual, I guess…” Lottie didn’t look sexual right then. She had melted chocolate all round her mouth. “But then they realize I sort of want them to only put their organ into my body, and nobody else’s, and maybe even have a chat about our feelings and stuff in-between and – bam – they get all jumpy and moody, like I’ve let them down.”
I pulled a face. “Aren’t you being a bit sexist? Boys aren’t all like that.”
“Yes they are,” Amber said.
I thought of Guy, and how he always picked me up on it when I got double-standardy. Thinking about him felt good… “You can’t just lump all boys into the same turd lump.”
“Why not?” they both asked.
“Well…look at Jane and Joel. He’s not cheated on her, has he? He seems to really love her.”
“He loves a lie!” Lottie stood up again. “Jane is totally playing the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Didn’t you say she’s changed loads since they got together? That you feel she’s made herself a product? A girlfriend product?”
“I guess…”
“I swear to God, if she pulled out her clarinet and started saying ‘I’d rather you not blow me off for band practice at the last minute’, Joel would up and leave.”
“I…guess…”
Amber came and joined us on the bed, flopping down and making ripples on the mattress. “Sometimes I don’t care if I am sexist, you know? We have to deal with it all day every day, why not fight fire with fire?”
“Girls should rule the world,” Lottie said.
“Totally.”
I always felt I learned something when I was with them. They had such strong opinions, such high opinions about being a girl and how it’s amazing, it was hard not to get swept up in it. Especially with Einstein Lottie teaching me all these new thoughts and words. I did feel a bit glowy about girlfolk. I mean, we are really cool, aren’t we? And the world is, like, totally against you if you have a fanny, isn’t it?
“Shall I tell you what annoys me?” I asked, wanting to join in. “About Tim?”
“Go on.”
“It’s the language boys use, the language all of us use when we talk about girls. It’s so screwed up. Like, there are all these horrid words for being girls with no male equivalent – like ‘slut’ or ‘psycho girlfriend’. Like Tim saying ‘being tied down’ implies we’re a burden, that we, as a species, tie boys down and take away their freedom. Why do they get freedom and we don’t? Why does everyone assume boys want freedom and girls want to be attached to someone?” I took another square of chocolate and it helped my dulling hangover. “Think about it,” I continued. “When boys get older, if they don’t find someone they get called bachelors. We get called spinsters. There isn’t a word that means male spinster. Just like there isn’t a word for a guy who sleeps around – whereas there are TONS for girls. The English language itself is sexist – it reinforces these overgeneralized, screwed-up notions about how boys and girls are allowed to be…” I trailed off when I noticed them both staring at me.
“What?” I asked self-consciously.
“You’re quite smart, aren’t you, oh quiet one?” Lottie said, grinning. “I forget sometimes.”
“Well…umm…”
Amber re-flopped on the bed, causing another mini-earthquake.
“I hate the word spinster,” she said. “I’m already worried about becoming one and I’m only sixteen. And then I get mad at myself for worrying so much about meeting a guy.”
“Why don’t we reclaim it?” Lottie asked, grinning wider. It was the first time she’d smiled all day and she looked gorgeous – all lit up from inside. I felt proud that Amber and I were able to turn her round so quickly. “We can reinvent the word ‘spinster’, make it the complete opposite of what it means? Like ‘young’ and ‘independent’ and ‘strong’? She yanked out her phone again, tapping away madly, pulling up photos of a protest in London – mostly of women, wa
ving placards and wearing miniskirts. “Look, a couple of years ago some feminists tried to reclaim the word ‘slut’. And they organized these protests called ‘slut walks’ all around the world. It didn’t completely work, mainly because slut is such a horrible word it can just never be empowering. But why don’t we try and reclaim ‘spinster’?”
Amber smiled. “I like it.”
“At the moment, spinster, technically means, what? An older unmarried woman? But it also means more than that. It’s the scary fairytale word girls are told about so we fear being unattractive to men from a young age. It means left on the shelf. It means a life wasted. It means cat lady. It means lonely and sad and bitter just because a man doesn’t want you… What if we reversed it?”
“To what?” Amber asked.
And I answered.
“Being a spinster means you value your female relationships as much as your male ones.” I thought of Jane. “Being a spinster means not altering who you are, what you believe in, and what you want just because it makes a boy’s life easier.”
They both smiled wider and Lottie took over. “Being a spinster means you’re not afraid to look at society and say loudly, ‘I don’t agree with this, this is wrong.’ Being a spinster means not worrying that boys won’t find you cute or sexy for saying those things.”
I smiled as Amber finished up. “Being a spinster means looking after your girlfriends and supporting them through whatever they need.”
I grabbed their hands – one each – and raised them to Lottie’s ceiling. “I formally announce us…SPINSTERS through and through.” And we clapped and cheered and whistled ourselves and, for the first time ever in my life, I felt strong.