Freshmen

by Tom Ellen

  But maybe Stella’s party will be different. Everyone’s finished their exams now, so it’s going to be massive. Ninety people have accepted the invite on Facebook. And now that Freddie is back early from France, maybe it is a sign. Maybe now is the right time. It’s not love, but I just need to get sex over with so I can get on with living my life.

  Tilly and Grace stomped back up the stairs and flopped onto my bed, clutching two packets of Ritz crackers and a jar of peanut butter.

  “I hope you never take Zac down,” Tilly said, staring up at my ceiling. “He’s been there as long as I’ve known you.”

  She was looking at the sticker of Zac Efron I’d put there when I was twelve so he would be the first thing I saw every morning.

  “It’s never coming down,” I said. “Zac is my first love. I may have moved on—”

  “To Freddie,” Grace interrupted.

  “—but he will always have a place in my heart.”

  “And your wardrobe,” Tilly said. “Do you still have that T-shirt with his face on? That was crazy.”

  “Says you in the Aztec-print harem pants.”

  Tilly swung her legs in the air to show them off. “I have nothing else to wear. My mum isn’t doing any laundry because she’s on strike. She wants me to learn how to do stuff before college.”

  “Well, you’d better learn quickly,” I said. “You’re never going to meet a boy and get out of no-man’s-land dressed like Aladdin.”

  Tilly is in hymen limbo. She’s the walking undead. A sex zombie. Max Lawrence did go inside her, but not all the way and only for a few seconds. She said it hurt too much, so he stopped. And then he got off with Amber Mason at a party, so Tilly dumped him. She couldn’t have known at the time that it was her last-chance saloon. She might have given it a better go if she had known. But Tilly’s a wimp when it comes to that kind of thing—she almost fainted when she got her HPV shot.

  How can we live in a world where they can identify serial killers from their DNA but we can’t figure out if Tilly’s a virgin or not? We’ve Googled it a hundred times, but the more you try to research it, the more philosophical the whole thing gets.

  Like, what is losing your virginity, anyway? When your hymen breaks? But that can happen horseback riding or doing gymnastics, or even swimming, apparently. I could have lost my virginity to Acton Municipal Pool, for all I know. If it’s just the hymen thing, then what about gay people? It must be the act of someone else being inside you; after all, boys lose their virginity even though nothing breaks. So maybe it’s a mystical, intangible thing? Like the Holy Spirit.

  Out of all of us, Grace is the only one who has lost her virginity. She fell in love with Ollie last year and they’ve been inseparable ever since. I don’t know how they’re going to cope when they go to college. Grace hasn’t told us what having sex actually feels like, though. It’s like once you’ve done it you become unable to speak about it. Can anything be that amazing? Maybe nothing feels epic when you’re actually living it.

  We sprawled out across the bed and started rambling on about other things: what we’d wear to the party and what color we would dye our hair if we had to pick one color for the rest of our lives (me: chestnut; Tilly: platinum; Grace: stay the same). And then conversation inevitably turned to the missing member of the group.

  “Do you really think she’s at his house?”

  Tilly was sitting on my bed with her legs crossed, eating the peanut butter straight out of the jar with a spoon. She had added my Duke of Edinburgh hoodie to her Aztec look, and her long red hair was wound into a topknot.

  “Well, she’s not here, so…” Grace shrugged, as if Stella could only be with us or with Charlie. Maybe that was actually true. It did feel weird that Tilly and Grace were here and she wasn’t.

  “Of course she’s with him,” I said. “He got back from college last night. I’ve been with her every day since exams, but I haven’t heard from her today.”

  “Well, I think it’s a toxic relationship,” Grace said.

  I laughed. “A ‘toxic relationship’? What do you think this is, Dr. Phil?”

  “You know what I mean,” Grace tsked. “He’s really bad for her. Stella, of all people, could do way better.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “Shit, I’d better tell her about Freddie.” I wrote Stella a text:

  Where are you? Freddie is back from France and I think tonight is the night!

  SAM

  It all felt wrong. Totally, utterly, terribly wrong. What the hell were we doing? I decided to ask Robin.

  “This feels wrong, man,” I said. “What are we doing?”

  He was kneeling on the wet grass beside the big steel bucket, pressing one final textbook into the mangled mass of textbooks already squashed inside.

  “What are you on about?” he muttered, holding the books in place with one hand while he used the other to retrieve a cigarette lighter from his pocket. “I think it’s pretty obvious what we’re doing.”

  He sparked the lighter twice to check if it was working. It was.

  “Yeah, what I mean is, it feels wrong to be doing this after what happened this morning,” I said.

  “We’re celebrating, you idiot.”

  “That’s my point!” I yelled as Robin stood up, swatting bits of damp soil off the front of his trousers. “There’s nothing to celebrate. I already told you how badly I fucked up French. So if we’re celebrating, then we’re celebrating defeat. Who celebrates defeat? It’s illogical.”

  Robin snorted. “We’re not celebrating defeat or victory. We’re celebrating the fact that it’s all over. It doesn’t matter how we did—it’s the fact that we never have to think about those exams ever again.”

  He was way off, there. I’d thought more about that French exam since finishing it that morning than I had in the last six months. Which, to be fair, was probably why I screwed it up so badly. Fucking pluperfect tense. Who needs to go that far back into the past anyway?

  Robin clicked the lighter again. “Right. Let’s do this then, shall we?”

  This had always been the plan. We’d agreed that the day we finished our College Board exams we’d celebrate by incinerating all our textbooks. It was supposed to be a cleansing thing; a glorious cathartic bonfire that marked the end of childhood and the start of…well, not adulthood, exactly, but definitely a step in its general direction.

  But, in reality, it was just the two of us standing over a mop bucket in Robin’s backyard. If this was the road to adulthood, I was considering turning back.

  Robin knelt back down and plunged his hand deep into the bucket to pull out my French textbook. He placed it carefully on top of the pile and held the lighter up to me.

  “Here, come on, man. Show those French pricks what you’re really made of.”

  I shook my head. “No. I don’t feel like it.”

  He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  He sparked the lighter and held the flame against the corner of the book’s cover.

  “Why isn’t it burning?” he demanded. “Nothing’s happening.”

  “It’s laminated, you dick.”

  The flame was just about managing to turn the plastic-coated corner a faint browny-black color. If we were going to use this method on every book, we’d be here all day.

  “Why the fuck do they laminate them?” snapped Robin, letting go of the lighter.

  “Probably to stop people like us burning them in buckets.”

  “Those bastards,” he murmured. “They’re always one step ahead. Maybe we could just burn the inside pages. They’re not laminated.”

  “Then we’ll be left with a bucket full of empty book covers. What are we going to do with all those?”

  Robin chewed his bottom lip as he considered this. “We coul
d cut them up into little pieces and bury them? Or put them in a box and throw them in the sea?”

  “The sea? We live in London. The sea is at least an hour away.”

  “So? I could get my mum to drive us to Brighton when she gets back from work.”

  “This is beginning to sound like more hassle than it’s worth, to be honest.”

  Robin groaned and stood up. “You need to perk the fuck up, Sam. If you’re still like this tonight, then I’m ditching you as soon as we get through the door. End-of-exams parties are the best parties ever; that’s common knowledge. I’m not having you ruining this one for me by whining all night. This might come as a surprise to you, given your lack of experience in the area, but girls don’t exactly get turned on by constantly complaining about French exams, you know.”

  Maybe he was right. Maybe I could look at the French Fuck-up as a positive thing. The beginning of an entirely new and unplanned chapter in my life. No university, no job, no real conventional future: I could totally reinvent myself, starting this evening.

  Robin only heard about the party tonight through his friend Ben, who knew about it via a friend of a friend. So there was a good chance we wouldn’t know anyone there. I could become someone else. I could start introducing myself as “Samuel.” That might make me sound deeper and more intelligent. I could be Samuel the mysterious drifter; Samuel, who wears long coats and hand-rolls his own cigarettes and gazes off into the middle distance enigmatically during conversations. Rather than plain old Sam, who fails French exams and tries to burn plastic books.

  The problem is, you have to have done something with your life before you can start going around calling yourself Samuel. You have to have achieved something. Samuel Beckett; Samuel L. Jackson; Dad’s friend Samuel, who drives a Porsche and used to go out with Nigella Lawson: they’ve all earned the right to those extra letters. What have I ever done? Won an essay contest when I was fourteen and fingered Gemma Bailey in a gazebo. I’m hardly in line for a knighthood.

  I’d always thought that getting into Cambridge would be my big achievement. But now that I’d screwed up French—and I definitely had—I was going to have to find something else instead. I just had no idea what.

  You won’t find many virgins called Samuel, that’s for sure. You remain a Sam until you get past fingering, I reckon. Or at least past gazebos.

  Robin picked up the bucket and stomped off toward the house.

  “Right, let’s just give the fuckers to Goodwill and be done with it,” he muttered.

  HANNAH

  Stella and I were sitting at the bus stop where we had sat hundreds of times before. Except this time I was in extreme pain.

  “I’ve been mutilated. I think I’m in medical shock,” I said. “Have you got any sugar?”

  Stella handed me a bag of mixed gummies. “It’s just hair,” she said. “You don’t say you’ve been mutilated when you go to the hairdresser, do you?”

  “Yeah, but what happened to me in there was not like what happens at the hairdresser.”

  Stella had booked me in to have my bikini line waxed as soon as she had found out Freddie was not only back but coming to her party.

  “Hannah, honestly, it’s just because it’s your first time. Shit, all your first times are happening at once,” she announced slightly too loudly.

  The lady next to us shot a disapproving glance in our direction, and I winced.

  Across from the bus stop is a gigantic H&M poster of a model in a neon-pink-and-white string bikini. She looks amazing, all impossibly long and brown and perfect. The poster has been there forever. Looking at it used to make me feel quietly excited. Because that was going to be me. I was going to go running and do my mum’s Davina DVD and wake up having morphed into an H&M campaign version of myself. But obviously, none of that had happened, and I looked just the same as always.

  “I’m going to buy that bikini for Kavos,” Stella said.

  We were going away to Greece together in a week, and I wasn’t prepared at all.

  “She’s definitely had her bikini line waxed,” I said, nodding at the poster, “and it definitely wasn’t her first time.”

  Stella shrugged and got out her phone, probably to text Charlie. She wasn’t intimidated by the model in the bikini because she is effortlessly cool. She’s petite, olive-skinned, naturally sexy and mysterious, and boys always love her. She loves video games and movies like Pulp Fiction and Scarface. Her dark brown hair is dyed with random bits of lilac, and last summer she got a snowflake tattooed on her wrist. You can’t see it in winter, but it appears when she tans. Out of all of us, she is the closest to the H&M girl.

  Me, Tilly and Grace don’t even come anywhere near. Tilly is tall and willowy with freckles. Her hair is her best feature. It’s straight out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, auburn and flowing with curls at the end. Grace used to be plain until her sixteenth birthday, but like my mum says, she has “really blossomed,” especially since she stopped wearing huge shapeless sweaters as her everyday look.

  I think it’s really hard to see yourself how other people do. I have naturally blond hair, pale blue eyes to match my pale skin and a totally average body. On a good day people might call me pretty. On a really good day.

  The bus came and Stella strode to the back while I waddled slowly behind her, trying to keep the burning pain around my lady parts to a minimum.

  “You’re walking like an old person,” Stella said as we sat down.

  “Well, it hurts.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  I wanted to ask her about Charlie Allen, about her virginity and what was going on between them. She is a virgin by choice, which is a distinct category from just being a virgin. She has done everything but with Charlie. He is her fuck buddy without the actual fucking part. Or the blow job part because that totally grosses Stella out. He’s hot, but behind her back we all say he’s a prick who’s using her. We know he deals drugs but we don’t talk about it. She says she’s happy with the way things are between them, but I don’t think that’s really true.

  I can’t ask her, though, because the whole her-and-Charlie thing is a no-go area. She’ll never admit there’s a problem, so we all have to pretend there isn’t one. She can ask any of us anything, but we are not allowed to do the same back. Stella is just different like that; she’s a closed book.

  She is also the kind of person who just has house parties and is relaxed about it. Her parents have gone to France for the whole summer. You would think she would want to go with them, but she never does. This is the second summer they have let her stay home alone. They get her Marks & Spencer food delivered every week and send her allowance by Venmo.

  “Are you still getting a bob?” Stella asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m brave enough.”

  “You are way too uptight about hair.”

  “Yeah, well, I need to do a lot of things before college.”

  Stella got out her phone again. “Shall we consult the list?”

  Last month, deep in study hell, we had made an action plan of all the things we had to do before college.

  “ ‘Hannah,’ ” Stella read out. “ ‘Fall in love and lose virginity.’ Well…one of those is getting ticked off pretty soon….OK, next we’ve got, ‘Get an amazing body. Get good at fake tanning. Get a new look. Get a bob. Practice having slow mannerisms to appear more enigmatic. Be less giggly and more intellectual.’ ”

  I groaned. “Oh god, there’s so much to do. Can you add ‘Cope with failing history’ to the list?”

  “OK, you might need to prioritize. What about just getting a bob and sleeping with Freddie?”

  I sighed and fished a gummy fried egg out of the bag. I don’t know when everything got so complicated. Eighteen is supposed to be the age when you become an adult.
When you are complete. How can anyone feel finished by now? I don’t even feel started. I haven’t done anything, I haven’t been anywhere. Everyone around me seems to have figured it all out. It feels like suddenly it’s the norm to be in a long-term relationship. To be having sex like it’s no big deal, and have had your bikini line waxed to do it. It’s like so much has changed since I was fourteen, but then at the same time nothing has. Sometimes I wish I could be that age again and just not worry about all this stuff. About what people think of me, and how I come across in social situations. When every weekend we used to sleep over at Stella’s house and eat ice cream and drink cups of tea. I hate it that now people are constantly expecting me to have become something. And like I’m a failure because I just haven’t. Everything seems like it was easier in Pride and Prejudice. My nan was married at eighteen. Married. I can’t even operate an iron.

  When we finally got to Stella’s house, I went straight up to the bathroom to fully assess the horror beneath my underwear. As if it wasn’t enough having pale red legs with veins showing through and weird albino blond hair and generally looking like a hobbit wife, I was now also deformed.

  I didn’t tell Mum where I was going because that would have been weird. I know for a fact there are some things she would never do. Like blow jobs and polyester clothing and KFC. I would bet a lot of money she has never had her bikini line waxed.

  I can see why people become feminists now. All those years in health class learning about crabs and condoms and consent. Why didn’t Miss Smart just get up and say, “As well as voting and learning to drive and being a good citizen and not getting pregnant out of wedlock, one day you will have to go into a room and put on a pair of underwear made of tissue paper and let a woman you have never met before pour hot wax on your cha-cha.”

  It looked like a raw, bloodied chicken with a Mohawk. And I was supposed to be losing my virginity tonight.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS