Freshmen

by Tom Ellen

  “Oh, right, I get you: the mouse.” I nodded. “The mouse. The generic mouse of literature. Which mouse?”

  She rolled her eyes. “The Gruffalo mouse. Look.” She pointed at the girl next to her, who appeared to be dressed as the devil. “Flora is the Gruffalo. Do you remember Flora?”

  I did remember Flora, but I didn’t know she was called Flora. “Yeah, I remember her,” I said. “Gruffalo and Gruffalo Mouse. That’s a bit…niche isn’t it?”

  She shrugged and handed me the Ted and Sylvia book. “The niche stuff is the best stuff. Are you even in this picture or were you too cool for Book Day?”

  “Of course I’m in it.” I pointed at tiny, spiky-haired, fourteen-year-old me, squashed between Reece and Harry in the back row. “I’m the greatest literary character of all time. Boy in an Arsenal jersey.”

  Phoebe made a face. “You wore a soccer jersey to Book Day?”

  “Yeah, someone, somewhere, in the vast expanse of world literature has definitely worn an Arsenal jersey. The guy out of that Nick Hornby novel, for a start.”

  “The guy out of Fever Pitch?” Phoebe scoffed. “Classic.”

  “It is a classic, thank you very much.”

  “Whatever. You’re just crap at dressing up. Admit it. What did you wear to the emoji party? A smiley face or something, wasn’t it?”

  “Thumbs-up, actually.”

  “Well, you could’ve made more of an effort,” she said, laughing. And even though I knew she didn’t mean anything by it, it still made me think of the quidditch bail. And Abbey. And all the other fuck-ups I was leaving in a long trail behind me.

  Could’ve made more of an effort. That would probably be written on my fucking gravestone.

  I sighed and slumped from kneeling to sitting on the bed. “Yeah, it’s true. The thing is, Phoebe, I guess I’m just, y’know…a bit of a prick, really.”

  I smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back. She just stared at me hard. Which was quite disconcerting, as we’d only really been making nervous, fluttering, two-second eye contact since we got into the room.

  “You’re not a prick, Luke,” she said slowly. Then she scooched away from me slightly and started looking at the other photos. “Do you remember Zoe Kenney’s seventeenth?” she asked. “In her dad’s massive house?”

  “Erm…yeah,” I said, although I had no recollection of Phoebe being at that party at all.

  “Well, you remember when Chris Isaacs and Alex Paine and those guys showed up? They were really drunk and they started giving Justin all that shit? Going on about how his long hair made him look like a girl?”

  The memory started to defrost in my head. It was a horrible moment. They’d pushed Justin Hader on the floor and Chris had grabbed a pair of scissors, telling him they were going to give him a proper haircut. A boy’s haircut.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I remember.”

  “You were the one that stopped that,” Phoebe said quietly. “You pulled Chris off him. You got them to leave him alone.”

  “Chris Isaacs and Alex Paine were the biggest assholes in the whole school.”

  “Yeah, but they listened to you.”

  “Only ’cause I was on the soccer team with them.”

  “Yeah, well, either way…” She looked at me again, right in the eyes. “That awful thing didn’t happen because of you. And I remember thinking, at that moment…” She trailed off and then shook her head gently, like she was embarrassed or something. She smoothed out another fistful of her long, curly hair. “Well, I remember thinking Luke Taylor’s not a prick, anyway.”

  I tried to laugh, but it got stuck in my throat. It was like she’d shaken me awake suddenly; reminded me there was more to me than what had happened with Abbey. I sat there in silence on the bed next to her, pretending to look at the photos, and for the first time in forever, I actually felt OK.

  “I can’t believe how long your hair is,” Liberty said. Every time she clamped the straighteners near my head I jumped a bit, internally.

  “Yeah, but does it look good?” I asked.

  “I have never in my life seen anything like it.” She said it totally sincerely.

  “Liberty, that is not a reassuring answer. ‘I have never in my life seen anything like it.’ That’s what people say about nuclear explosions or those people who have plastic surgery to make themselves look like cats.”

  “No, it’s just, you look so differe—”

  Frankie crashed in and did a sort of exaggerated double take. “What the what? Mate, what is happening?”

  She bent over next to me so her face was right in front of mine. “Mate, I literally didn’t recognize you. As in, this is freaking me the fuck out.” She was shaking her head. She leaned back out into the hall and shouted: “Negin! Negin!”

  I jumped up and looked in the mirror. Straightened, my hair reached all the way to my butt. I actually did look like a completely different person. Frankie held her phone up and took a picture. Then she banged on my wall. Liberty had dissolved into laughter. “Connor! Connor! Where is everyone?” Frankie stood in the middle of the room and just started shouting. “Becky! Nathan!” She walked over to my bed and opened the window. “Anyone, please? I can’t experience this alone—”

  I cut her off. “OK, let’s focus. I have to see Luke in an hour.”

  Frankie made a face. “You’ve seen him, like, every day this week.”

  “I know, but today is the actual presentation.” I looked at Liberty. “Should I wash it out?”

  Frankie picked out a piece of my hair and peered at it. “No way; I mean, firstly, it could create a whole new beginning for you and Luke. As in, you could literally pretend to be another human being. Like, ‘Phoebe had to leave, but I am—Horatia, the new person in your presentation group. I will never send a photo of you to you because I am Ho—’ ”

  I ignored her and turned back to Liberty. “Seriously, I know this represents an hour and a half of our lives, but should I wash it out?”

  Liberty shook her head. “No way. It’s like red lipstick, you just have to get used to it.”

  “What should I wear?”

  Frankie opened my wardrobe. “What would Horatia wear? That is the question.”

  Liberty jumped up and down. “I’ll lend you some of my clothes.”

  “Liberty, me and you have very different styles.” Liberty’s style was unashamedly sexy. More “Ibiza VIP lounge” than “romantic poetry seminar.” “I think the hair and then me turning up looking so glamorous might make people think I was—”

  “Horatia!” Frankie shouted. “She’s, like, Sasha Fierce. Like, Horatia wouldn’t pretend the Luke Taylor text never happened. She’d just be all, like, ‘Yeah, that is how I test my men. Do you wanna stroke my long, straight hair or not?’ ”

  “Can we stop talking about the text?” I pleaded.

  “I will never stop talking about the text,” Frankie said, crossing her arms. “It’s literally the most hilarious thing that’s ever happened to me. And it didn’t even happen to me.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, well, I can only cope with seeing Luke if I do this weird mental exercise where I convince myself I never sent him that photo.”

  It was true. Me, Luke and Mary had met up in the library every day for the past three days, and I’d only managed to get through it by burying the text somewhere deep inside me. Just literally pretending it had never happened. But the truth was, the more we hung out, the less weird and awkward it was starting to feel.

  “I bet Luke probably keeps that message as his screen saver,” Liberty said. “Has he honestly never mentioned it?”

  I shook my head.

  “So weird,” she sighed. Then she turned to Frankie. “Can I have a Sasha Fierce name, too?”

  Frankie shr
ugged. “You don’t need one, girl, but yeah, OK. What about Hercules?”

  “Ooh, Hercules, I like tha—”

  She was cut off by Connor’s boom from the kitchen. “Waffles!” I knew he was beating his chest as he said it. “Waaaaaaaaffles.”

  The kitchen door opened and Connor poked his head through. “We have made waaaaaaaffles.”

  We walked into the kitchen, where he and Nathan were standing over a machine.

  “You bought a waffle maker?” I said.

  “Whoa, you look totally different.” Nathan seemed genuinely shocked.

  Frankie held up her phone. There was a picture of me spliced next to Cousin Itt. Underneath she had written “Freaky Friday.”

  “We’ve melted M&M’s, Twix and Honey Nut Cheerios together,” Connor said proudly. “Although the Honey Nut Cheerios aren’t really melting.”

  “Connor, do you think I look ridiculous?” I said.

  “She means do you think Luke Taylor will think she looks ridiculous?” Frankie corrected.

  Connor shook his head. “I would like to say he won’t notice the hair, but you do look like a child from a Japanese horror film, so he probably will.” The waffle maker started smoking and he flapped at it with a dish towel. “But then, y’know, that’s the beauty of liking girls, isn’t it? Never knowing what crazy shit they’re gonna do next. Like, wearing those wedge shoes, or having nails like Wolverine or making you take the same picture millions of times. I, personally, love it.”

  Frankie had her arm around me, so we shuffled over and added Connor to the huddle. “Strangely, you’ve actually made me feel better.”

  I went and got changed into the most boring outfit I could think of: jeans and a white T-shirt. The hair was enough of a statement without Liberty’s over-the-knee boots.

  I tucked my hair into my duffle coat and packed my bag. Even aside from all the Luke stuff, I was actually a bit nervous about the presentation. It was the first thing that really counted. As I walked to class, I tried to retract tortoise-like into my hood to take attention away from my hair.

  I thought Luke was late at first, but then I saw him on the grass outside the English building on his hands and knees.

  “What are you doing?” I stood on the path looking at him.

  He smiled up at me. “I forgot the leaves.”

  “Mary will kill you.” I laughed. “The leaves are, like…the whole thing.”

  “Yeah, but the thing is, now that I actually need some leaves, there are none. The whole place has been covered in them, and now the wind has blown them all away or something.” He looked genuinely quite stressed.

  “It’s because you are looking at a patch of grass where there are no trees. Why would there be leaves when there aren’t any trees?”

  He stood up. “Oh yeah, right. That makes sense.” I swear he went a tiny bit red.

  I pointed at the trees on the other side of the lake. “Hurry up, we’ve got time.”

  We rushed across the bridge, and I realized it was the same bridge we’d sat on back on the first night. When I looked at Luke, he was staring right up at Stephanie Stevens’s dorm, but neither of us said anything.

  We paced about, picking up random leaves. “They’re a bit damp,” he said.

  “OK, well, you find them and I’ll dry them with my coat.”

  He handed me a leaf and I started wiping it dry.

  “I mean, this whole thing is ridiculous,” he moaned. “Why did we let Mary lead us down this damp-leaf-ridden path of madness?”

  “ ’Cause neither of us had any ideas whatsoever.”

  He handed me the last leaf and I smoothed it out. “They look a little raggedy, but they’ll have to do.”

  We met Mary outside the seminar room. She was wearing tons of mascara and had a silver star stenciled just underneath one of her eyes. Plus, her usual baggy track pants and crop top. Was she so hot she was actually immune to the cold?

  She hugged us both. “Luke, did you remember the leaves?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, of course. Got them yesterday.” I shook my head and mouthed “idiot” at him. Then Mary did a kind of overly dramatic double take as she properly took in my hair.

  “Shit, Phoebs. So much hair. Such good hair. Phoebe with the good hair.”

  Luke nodded. “Yeah, I meant to say, earlier. It looks really different. Like, good different. I mean, it looks nice curly, too. But, like, this—it also looks really…” He sort of puttered to a stop as he saw Mary biting her lip. “Nice,” he finished.

  Mary whistled. “Smooooooth. Save that silver tongue for the presentation, Taylor.”

  I should’ve said something about the hair earlier.

  Obviously, I’d noticed it right away. With Phoebe, the hair is always the first thing you notice. And it did look really good. But I never know what to say in those kinds of situations. Like, if you mention it, it’s like you’re making a big thing of it. But if you don’t mention it, you’re a jerk. You literally can’t win.

  We all sat down in the classroom. Yorgos arrived and started telling us how excited he was for our presentations. He picked Martha and Liverpool Paul and Katie first. They got up and opened their PowerPoint. They had a PowerPoint; we had a bag of damp leaves. I was starting to get very nervous.

  Mary looked like she didn’t have a care in the world. She even looked slightly bored. I nudged my notebook toward Phoebe and wrote “Are we fucked?” on it. She wrote “POSSIBLY YES” underneath in block capitals.

  Liverpool Paul finished his monologue about Chaucer and everyone clapped. Then Yorgos started talking about how vital good research is. I had the sudden feeling that I was about to fail my first real piece of university work.

  “OK,” Yorgos said. “Mary, Phoebe and Luke. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Mary was straight out of her chair, handing out the leaves with a kind of smug look on her face. “Our piece is experiential,” she announced, and I saw Phoebe wince slightly.

  She handed Yorgos a leaf and then walked over to the door and turned off the lights. “Everyone close your eyes,” she said in this heavy, Acting 101 voice.

  Me and Phoebe stood on either side of her at the front of the room. “We want to take you on a hypnotic journey…through memory,” she continued. “Through your own memory, but also into the connective memory of everyone who has come before you.”

  The corner of Phoebe’s mouth twitched. Even though it was our presentation, and I was standing at the front, it was like I couldn’t concentrate on it. I just looked across the not-that-dark room at everyone with their eyes closed, holding a moldy old leaf.

  “Feel the veins,” Mary was whispering. She had a way of whispering that was actually louder than her normal speaking voice. “Think of how they reach out to one another. Think of your mother’s hand reaching out for yours on your first day of school. And think of the hand reaching out behind her, and the one behind that. And all the hands that came before you, reaching out into the darkness. Reaching back and back and back.”

  People were actually feeling their leaves. “Think about the love you have felt,” Mary said. “Think about single moments of time that have changed your—or someone else’s—life forever.”

  I tried very hard not to think about Abbey.

  “Think about the secrets you keep inside you,” Mary continued. “Feel the veins connect and think about the secrets other people hold in their veins, too.” She was holding her hands out like Gandalf and speaking in a slow, kind of dreamlike voice. Me and Phoebe both looked down at our sheets.

  “ ‘You were blue,’ ” I recited.

  “ ‘Clown-like, happiest on your hands,’ ” Phoebe said.

  “Think of your ancestor, walking in the snow to find food,” Mary whispered.

 
“ ‘When you can no more hold me by the hand,’ ” Phoebe read.

  “ ‘Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.’ ” I tried to match Mary’s somber tone, but didn’t quite get it.

  Mary shuffled to the back. She shouted, “Speak, memory!” then switched on the light.

  No one said anything for a few seconds. They just sat there, blinking and holding their leaves. There was just this long, awkward silence. Then Phoebe cleared her throat and launched into her short, non-leaf-based analysis of “Ariel” by Sylvia Plath, which was scarily impressive and eloquent, and I bumbled through my bit about Ted Hughes’s “Last Letter,” most of which I’d nicked from the book Phoebe had lent me.

  And then Mary beamed around the whole class and said: “Yeah, so…that’s it, basically. Keep the leaves. Remember us every time you look at them.”

  Everyone clapped, and Yorgos shot us a big smile and got the next three up. And I had absolutely no idea whether it had gone well or not.

  Mary definitely seemed to think it had. She literally danced out of the room when it was all over.

  “I totally respect everyone else’s approach, but ours was obviously the best. I mean, the fact that Yorgos actually took his leaf with him when he left…Like, I actually think it made him see stuff differently. I hope so.”

  She linked arms with us both and we wandered down the hall.

  “I feel like I might sleep with Yorgos at some point, y’know,” Mary said, as if she was mulling over what to have for dinner. “Like, I know it’s a cliché to sleep with your TA, but when they’re that hot…”

  “Yeah, seconded,” Phoebe said. “I think his hotness makes him impervious to clichés.”

  “Thirded,” I said, and they both laughed.

  Mary stopped. “You guys are coming to Fit Sister later, right?” She said it like it wasn’t actually a question, more a statement. And in the third person, like she wasn’t even in Fit Sister.

  “Definitely, yeah,” I said.

  “Cool. I’ll see you there. Just need to go pick up the smoke machine….”