Freshmen

by Tom Ellen

  “Oh, no thanks,” she said. “I don’t smoke.” She smiled down at Arthur, who was staring blankly at the TV. “I just come here for the sparkling conversation.”

  I took another drag.

  “So how was Orientation Fair, then?” she asked, folding her page over and putting the book down. “Did you sign up for anything?”

  “Yeah, soccer and…” It hit me. “Oh fuck!”

  “What?” said Arthur. “Tell me you didn’t sign up for the fucking Caribbean Club!”

  Rita laughed. “Poor old Jeremy. He’s always trying to get me to join that. I keep telling him: my mum’s from Trinidad, I’m from Luton.”

  “No…,” I moaned. “It wasn’t that. It was quidditch.”

  Arthur frowned at me. “What, the Harry Potter thing? Do people really play that?” He looked at Rita. “People can’t actually fly, can they?”

  “We don’t cover flying till junior year, either,” she said.

  “I was supposed to go to this quidditch thing this afternoon,” I muttered. “I completely forgot.” Phoebe and the balloon and the handshake all suddenly swirled into my head.

  “You dickhead,” Arthur scoffed. “I told you not to sign up for anything you weren’t genuinely interested in!”

  “I am genuinely interested. Like, I was going to go, honestly. It’s just…something came up.”

  Everywhere I turned I was fucking things up. I’d only just met Phoebe properly and already she probably thought I was a total prick. I suddenly felt I had to go and see her. To say sorry for not being there. Her dorm was only a minute’s walk away. She’d be pregaming there right now. I stood up.

  “I’m just going out for a bit.”

  Arthur paused the game. “Oh great; well, get some more booze while you’re out, yeah?”

  He dug into his pocket for a wrinkled £20 note. “There you go. Just get as much beer as that will buy. And maybe some chips. Lay’s.”

  I headed out toward Phoebe’s building, feeling the weed start to take effect in the form of a fuzzy warmth behind my forehead. I walked across the grass to D Dorm and looked up to see her through the first-floor kitchen window. She was talking to a tall blond girl and a guy with a shaved head. They were all drinking and laughing, throwing robot dance moves to some hip-hop track I could hear thumping through the glass.

  I had a weird sort of moment of clarity. Why the hell did I think she cared whether I was at the quidditch thing or not? Who was I to her? No one. Someone she used to walk past in the hall at school.

  I sat down on a bench and rubbed my eyes. Every window of every dorm was full of noise and people, and I suddenly felt tiny and invisible and completely alone.

  I stood up to go, feeling the scrunched-up £20 note in my pocket and wondering how much cheap booze it would buy. I needed to try to get my head straight. To think a bit more clearly. And the best way to do that, I decided, would be to get really, really drunk.

  “None left,” Frankie shouted from the other side of the costume shop. She groaned before disappearing. Me and Negin found her splayed out on the floor, wailing melodramatically. Her height meant she covered almost an entire aisle.

  “Shame,” the woman at the front of the shop said halfheartedly. “We’ve just been so busy this week.”

  Above the empty section where Frankie was lying was a label that said GHOST COSTUMES.

  “This is so hard,” Frankie whined, and closed her eyes as if she was going to fall asleep on the store floor. “I swear the last five nights have broken me.”

  I kicked her gently. “Come on. Last night of Frosh Week.”

  “All right, Connor, calm down.” Negin shook her head and then peered at Frankie. “And what’s happened to you? This morning you were so emoji-party obsessed you wanted to make a papier-mâché melon with a yoga ball.”

  “No, but such a good idea.” Frankie opened her eyes. “If someone walks in papier-mâchéd-up as the melon, I’m gonna be livid. Same with the chick coming out of a cardboard-box egg.”

  Negin picked up a random scythe. “The ghost is so obvious.”

  “What about the moon?” I said. “We could all go as the moon at different stages of its development.”

  Frankie snorted from the floor. “You’re supposed to pick an emoji and sex it up. It’s the rule; everyone knows it. Like, sexy crocodile, sexy backpack, sexy loaf of bread.” She flung her leg in the air and pouted. “Sexy the moon in different stages of development.” She howled with laughter.

  “Sexy bread,” Negin repeated slowly. “Sexy. Bread.”

  Frankie held a finger up. “Girl, trust me, there will be at least one sexy loaf of bread there. Probably two or three.”

  “If you wanted to be sexy you would go as the bunny girls or the flamenco dancer or the…I dunno…” I got my phone out.

  “Sexy bread,” Frankie shouted.

  The woman behind the counter glanced over at us. “I’ve got no Playboy bunnies left,” she said. “And no sexy señoritas, either.”

  “See?” I said to Frankie. I looked at the woman. “How many bread costumes have you got left?”

  “None. We’ve got a Heinz beans….”

  “I don’t think there’s a Heinz beans emoji.” I looked down at Frankie. “We just need to find any old thing now. It’s three o’clock. We just need to buy whatever.”

  “It’s the last night of Frosh Week,” Frankie said. “We’ll remember it forever.”

  Would we, though? It was impossible to know. There’s always a chance that tonight is going to be the night you remember forever, but usually it never is. For some weird reason, I’ve never forgotten me and Flora sneaking out of our houses in the middle of the night in eighth grade and biking around the empty town square. Not the whole night, just this snippet, this moment of it, really. I don’t know why my brain chooses to remember that, of all the nights that ever happened. Maybe tonight would be burned into my brain forever, too. Maybe tonight is one of those nights. Maybe.

  Over the past five days, me, Negin and Frankie had started to feel like a little team. We messaged each other when we woke up and went shopping together and checked we were all not dead before we went to bed. It was a relief to have found people who were nice and who seemed to like me. They weren’t Flora, but then how could they be? That’s what’s weird about the whole thing; how you’re expected to be so insanely close to people you’ve only just met. I was still careful with Negin and Frankie; I tried to pick up on what kind of people they were and mirror it, to not do anything that would rock the boat of our five-day friendship. Maybe we were all doing that, though? Maybe we’d all talk about it one day.

  I picked up some mouse ears. Maybe the mouse was a good middle ground between sexy and fun.

  “Is there a nun emoji?” Frankie asked, clambering to her feet. She and Negin were still buried in their phones. “I swear there is.”

  “Who would need a nun emoji?” I picked up a plastic corncob and held it up to Negin.

  “The pope?” said Negin. “The pope’s on Instagram.”

  “Yeah, well, if there is a nun emoji, I’m going as that. I am literally the nun of the freshman class. I need to turn things around tonight.”

  “Nothing says get with me like corn on the cob.” I held it in front of my mouth and smiled.

  “There are no tall men,” Frankie wailed. “I thought there’d be Dutch exchange students. I hate my height.”

  “Can you hate your height later?” asked Negin. “We’ve got, like, two hours. We need to focus.” She went back to scrolling through her phone, and me and Frankie dutifully followed suit.

  “Shut. Up.” Frankie poked me in the arm and nodded toward the window.

  It was Josh and Will, crossing the road. My whole face flooded with heat. They knew all about m
y first night make out session with Will now, and all about every one since.

  “I can’t see Will,” I hissed. “Not now. Should I hide? I’ve never even seen him in daylight.”

  “Like a vampire!” Frankie yelled.

  I had never seen him when we were not in a bar and either about to hook up or actually making out. I stared at the floor. We’d made out together for ages last night in the club. Only a few hours ago, really. But in the daytime, everything was different. I picked up a skirt labeled ROCK AND ROLL SWEETHEART and pretended to be examining it intensely. Frankie and Negin began “browsing with intent,” too.

  “I don’t think this is subtle,” Negin whispered as the door swung open and they walked in.

  “Hey,” I said, and waved. Hard. Almost to the level of flagging someone down in the street. I tried to tone it down by tucking my hair behind my ears and sort of shrugging. Which obviously looked ridiculous. Will smiled at me lazily. It was ludicrous how he still managed to look hot on three hours of sleep. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “There are no ghost costumes.” Thank god Negin was there.

  “And no bread. There was never actually any bread.” And Frankie.

  “If Connor was here, you know what he’d say.” Josh smiled.

  “Last night of Frosh Week!” we all chimed in a Connor-esque cheer.

  “Exactly.” Josh nodded. “How are you feeling?”

  “We’re all going to have a group nap to prepare,” Frankie said. “And I’ve bought Crunchy Nut Cornflakes and two bags of giant chocolate buttons.”

  She offered them the open box of cereal we had been eating on our way around town and they both took a handful.

  I was desperate to say something so the situation wasn’t weird. “We don’t know what to go as,” I blurted out, slightly manically.

  Will smiled at me. “Neither do we. You haven’t got any huge cartoon eyes, have you?” The woman at the front of the shop shook her head. Will grimaced. “Stuff like this is not easy on a hangover.” The fact he had even half referenced last night made me blush even more. We were facing each other and I felt like he was nervous, too. Negin and Frankie and Josh were talking to the woman. I shuffled my feet.

  “They don’t really give you much time to sort out what you’re going to wear and…stuff.” I sounded like a mum.

  Will nodded. “Yeah, but no one really cares when you get there. Loads of people will just wear a hat or paint their face or something. Honestly, it’s nothing to stress about.”

  Oh god, it was so awkward. We had made out for so long last night and it was just there, splotched between us, this giant mountain of unacknowledged physical contact. But weirdly, right now in the daylight, even accidentally brushing against his sleeve would feel like an invasion of personal space. I couldn’t even look directly at him. Like he was the sun or something. This tiny moment of silence passed, and in it we both looked at each other. And it was like making eye contact kind of acknowledged the kissing all week on various dance floors. And then we both smiled at the same time and then it turned into a laugh. And we were both just laughing together, both knowing why but not saying anything.

  Then he looked at his phone. “I’ve got to go to soccer tryouts in, like, an hour, so we better go.”

  The mention of soccer made Luke Taylor pop into my head. I hadn’t forgotten about the whole first night. Although now I couldn’t really remember what actually had or had not happened between him being The One on the bridge and The One who stood me up at quidditch. Frankie had taken to calling him “Luke Taylor, Quidditch Bailer,” which, to be fair, was quite catchy.

  I had seen him a few times over the week, but we basically just ignored each other. Which in any other situation would have been the major drama of my existence, but in this freshmen haze, with Will chucked in, it had just become a weird thing I blocked out of my mind. I think Luke Taylor is destined to be one of the enigmatic mysteries of my life. It’s like we belong on different sides of a Venn diagram, and the first night of orientation week was a strange crossover that should never have happened.

  “Ready?” Josh said, and Will nodded. “See you later,” he said, smiling at me. “Hope you find something. I’m sure, you know…you’ll look nice in whatever.”

  And then they left.

  Frankie cackled so loudly the woman in the shop jumped. And then she was laughing so hard she could hardly breathe. She was doubled over. “ ‘You’ll look nice.’ ”

  “Stop.” I put my head in my hands. “Stop.”

  “You’ll. Look. Nice.”

  Negin was laughing in a more genteel way. “I think it’s sweet. And awkward. Awkwardly sweet.”

  “You’ll look nice,” they chanted while we bought mouse ears and cat ears and a plastic turtle and the corn. And after every time they said it, they burst into even more hysterics until it just started to feed on itself and none of us could really breathe.

  “Why is everyone always having sex except me?” Frankie wiped away tears.

  “I’m not having sex,” Negin said.

  “Yeah, and I haven’t even slept with Will,” I added.

  “Yet.” Frankie handed me the box of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. “I think you need to carb load. You know…for later.”

  I was in the kitchen, nursing a hangover so horrendous I could literally feel it in my bones.

  The past five days had basically snowballed into one long, hazy night out. It had been a weird drunken cycle of going out to whatever party was happening down at the bar, then coming back up to Arthur’s room, getting stoned, waking up on his floor, having breakfast, getting stoned again, playing Xbox, going out again, coming back, getting stoned…And so it went, on and on and on.

  I had been making a concerted effort to block out all thoughts of Abbey, and the best way to do that seemed to be to just keep going: keep drinking and smoking and partying so that my brain didn’t have a chance to settle on her for longer than a few minutes. Occasionally, though, lying wasted on Arthur’s floor at five in the morning, she’d float into my head, and a hot wave of guilt would sweep right through me.

  I speed-ate a Nutella sandwich over the sink, keeping one eye on Beth’s door, as I could hear her and Barney whispering and giggling inside. Then I went into Arthur’s. He and Rita were playing what looked like a fairly intense game of Scrabble; she sat cross-legged on the comforter, hunched over the board, while he was kneeling on the floor, his elbows propped up on the edge of the bed.

  “Yes, Luke,” he croaked, not taking his eyes off the board. “Man, I’m fucking feeling it this morning. We should not have done those last Jägerbombs.”

  “ ‘Gherkin,’ ” said Rita cheerfully, laying down some tiles. “Fourteen, plus a double-letter score on the ‘K,’ so that’s…nineteen. Quite pleased with that. Hey, Luke.”

  “Hey, Rita.” I sat down on Arthur’s wheelie chair. “ ‘Gherkin.’ Good work.”

  “Thanks. Your turn, Arth.”

  Arthur exhaled slowly and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Erm…What words are there? I feel like I’ve forgotten all the words.” He turned to me. “What are some words, Luke?”

  Rita smiled at him like a nurse might smile at a patient. “You’ve got an ‘S’ there, Watling. Just do ‘gherkins.’ ”

  Arthur nodded and laid the “S” down. “ ‘Gherkins.’ Genius. This game is really fucking difficult when you’re hungover.”

  “I’m quite enjoying it,” Rita said. “It’s like I’m playing against myself.”

  “You got your outfit for tonight?” Arthur asked me, shaking out a new tile from the bag.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well, I just printed out a thumbs-up in the computer room. Gonna glue it to a white T-shirt.”

  “Classic.” Arthur smirked. “You’ve really pull
ed out all the stops there.”

  “What are you going as, then?”

  “Oh, you’ll see, my friend. I’ve got this emoji thing locked down, trust me.”

  “What time are we pregaming, then?” I yawned.

  Arthur snorted. “We can have our own pregame in here. The chemists are being boring as fuck, as usual. And I haven’t seen Beth or Barney all day.”

  “I think Beth and Barney are shagging each other, actually,” I said. “I forgot to tell you, I saw him coming out of her room on the first night.”

  Arthur spun around to look at me. “Fuck, you’re kidding. I’m surprised he hasn’t stuck a Post-it on her.”

  Rita threw a tile at his face. “Oi. You misogynist idiot.”

  Arthur took his cap off and ran a hand through his scraggly hair. “I definitely need a Twix after that bombshell. Who’s going to the machine? I nominate Luke.”

  “You can’t nominate me.” I stood up, stretching my arms out painfully. “I’ve got to go to soccer tryouts.”

  “What, seriously?” Arthur looked appalled. “Can’t they postpone that? It’s Frosh Week. You can’t make people exercise when they’re hungover. It’s a human rights violation.”

  “Yeah, well. It’ll probably make me feel better in the long run.”

  “I highly doubt that,” Arthur muttered.

  Rita laid some tiles on the board, and he squinted down at them. “ ‘Can’t’? You can’t have ‘can’t,’ Reets! Even I know that. Where’s your apostrophe? There’s no apostrophe!”

  “It’s ‘cant.’ ” Rita laughed. “It means, like, ‘hypocritical bullshit.’ ”

  “This is hypocritical bullshit,” he huffed. “You can’t just make words up.”

  Rita climbed off the bed and patted him on the shoulder. “All right, Watling. You Google ‘cant’ and I’ll go and get us both a Twix, shall I?”

  Arthur jumped up and hugged her tightly. “Maurita, I love you, man. You are literally the greatest person that’s ever lived. Have I ever told you that?”