by Non Pratt
“Don’t be,” I say.
It’s too awful that something like this is what’s brought us back together, but I’m also relieved that when she needs help, Seren knows that she can turn to me and I will be there to give it.
Later, long after I’ve pleaded (non-specific/completely misleading) extenuating circumstances to my mother as a reason for a short-notice sleepover, when I’m in the PJs I always used to leave at Seren’s house that don’t quite fit any more, we lie in her bed, curled up facing each other, knees touching beneath the duvet.
I feel Seren reach for my hand.
“Thank you for coming when I called,” she says quietly.
“As if I wouldn’t.”
She gives my hand a couple of quick squeezes, as if signalling a change in conversation, before she breaks out into a wide smile, eyes sparkling under her bedside light.
“So. Sef Malik. Sexy sixth-former and your own private taxi driver…?”
Sitting here, my best friend back in my life, I find that, in fact, I don’t want to keep the truth about Sef to myself at all.
“My own private boyfriend? I think?” I scrunch my face up, not quite believing that I really get to say this out loud to her.
“Tell me. All of it. Everything. The whole of your relationship start to finish.” Her lip wobbles slightly as she says, “I can’t believe I missed it all.”
I know that we aren’t fixed and there’s a conversation to be had about me finally understanding why she was upset with me.
Seren’s sexuality isn’t an optional add-on – it’s part of who she is. But I treated it like it was something she was supposed to work around when it was me and Rich who should have put the effort in. I will have to tell her this, offer a hand to help her climb down from the high ground she stranded herself on over the Gemma issue.
But tonight it is enough that when I tell her about Sef, I know she wants to listen.
I know I can tell her the truth. All of it.
CHAPTER 24
Rich’s phone has been blinging a ton of messages all the way to school that he’s been ignoring, so when he looks up to see Seren standing by the school gate, he’s already in such a foul mood that I worry this is all going to go horribly wrong.
“What’s she doing there?” Rich mutters.
“Waiting for me.”
He grinds to a halt. “What?”
“We made up.”
I wait, wondering whether his loyalty to me or the memory of Seren is strong enough to grant the second chance we all deserve.
“So where does that leave me?” Rich looks so lost, so uncertain that I hook my arm through his in a way I’ve been wary of doing since he started seeing Gemma.
“It leaves you wherever you want to be.”
Five long strides along the pavement and up to the gate, Seren watching us, caught between hope and caution.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey,” Rich replies.
Rather than go inside, we sit on the wall, ignoring first bell as Seren tells Rich what happened on Saturday, my hands clenched into fists so tight my knuckles turn white. I’m almost as angry now as I was then.
Seren falters when she gets to the bit about James lunging in for a kiss.
“After that he…” She frowns, huffs out an angry little breath and then, “Put his hand where it had no business going. That’s when I left. Called Claire – who came.”
Rich is staring at her, face hard with rage, his mouth pressed into a lipless line. Until something shifts, eyes glazing over slightly, the blood draining from his face as fast as it rose up.
“What did James try to do?” Rich’s voice is tight, his words forced.
Seren’s as confused as I am.
“He… You know. Don’t make me spell it out.”
“Seren…” Rich looks ill as he runs his hand up through his hair. “Shit.”
A quizzical little frown wrinkles across Seren’s forehead. “I know it’s pretty sleazy, but he didn’t succeed.”
“That depends on what he was trying to do.”
The way he takes his phone out is ominous, his thumb pausing over the screen for a second before he taps it savagely and hands the phone to Seren.
The last time I was in the head teacher’s office was in Year 9 when my mum was upset at the way the options for Year 10 had been timetabled.
“Denver, Seren and … ah…?”
“Claire Casey.” You can’t really blame Mr Chung for not recognizing someone he last saw over a year and a half ago.
“Sorry, yes, of course. I remember our discussion about Media Studies – you enjoying it…? Excellent. Please take a seat, the three of you.”
Mr Chung folds himself back into his leather throne. His desk is packed with books, trays over-populated with papers, and the keys on his computer are so worn that half the letters have rubbed off.
“Not that I’m not pleased to see three of my less troublesome students, but what is it that brings you to my office when you should be in first period?”
Rich and Seren exchange a glance.
“We’re here to report James Blaithe,” she says.
A muscle tenses in Mr Chung’s jaw and his next blink lasts a little longer than the one before. “Go on.”
“Last Saturday, at the cinema, he – well, he made an unwelcome advance.”
“At the cinema?” Although what everyone in the room hears is: “Not at the school?”
“Yes. I didn’t realize it at the time, but he took a picture up my dress.” Her voice is strong and clear, but Seren’s fingers are pinching and smoothing and pinching again at the pleats in her skirt.
“Sir,” Rich takes over. “James sent a photo to the football team group chat this morning.” He holds up his phone with a steady hand. When Rich gets angry, he goes disturbingly calm. “Seren agrees that it’s of her. I’ve screengrabbed the comments beneath the picture so you can see who’s involved.”
Both of us turn to give him a wide-eyed stare of surprise at this and he swallows as he hands Mr Chung the phone. The plan was to report James, but Rich has effectively turned in half of West Bridge’s football team.
“And, Miss Casey, how is it that you’re involved? Not on the football team, are you?” Mr Chung is smiling kindly, expecting me to say that I’m here for moral support given the way that I’m now holding hands with Seren.
But it’s her giving me strength, not the other way around.
“I should have reported it sooner,” I say and Mr Chung’s smile turns from kind to weary. “But I believe James was responsible for a video posted online of my … er … well, my bikini slipped.”
I’m grateful when Mr Chung chooses that moment to break eye contact and straighten a piece of paper on his desk.
“And he’s assaulted me on school premises,” I whisper, wishing I’d done something sooner and squeezing Seren’s hand so tight I can feel her knuckles grind together. “By grabbing me round the chest.”
Seren comes round to my house after school like old times. We sit in the kitchen snacking on dry cereal, half doing homework and half chatting about anything and everything except what might have happened after half the football team had been ordered from their lessons to Mr Chung’s office.
Particularly what might have happened to the goalie who never came back…
There’s supposed to be practice tonight, but Rich rejected our offer to wait for him, telling us we were over-reacting. With James excluded, it wasn’t as if anything was going to happen.
Still when the doorbell goes, followed by the sound of Rich tramping in, we both let out a sigh of relief.
It’s premature.
“No one’s allowed to say ‘I told you so’…” Rich’s voice is weirdly hoarse and when he rounds the corner from the hall, we find out why.
Rich is habitually slow getting changed and with everyone – even his girlfriend’s brother – sore at him for crippling the team ahead of their grudge match with East Bank, all Jam
es had to do was wait for the captain to be the last to leave. It seems James hasn’t quite taken on board the idea that being excluded means not being on school premises.
If the groundsman hadn’t stayed late to put the pitch back to rights, Rich might have more than a black eye and a tender throat to show for his encounter.
Between googling what you’re supposed to do with a black eye if you don’t have any steaks in the fridge and thrusting tissues at Seren, who’s burst into uncharacteristic tears, while also trying to stop an argument about whose fault it is, I get very stressed.
When I accidentally drop my phone in the freezer drawer looking for some frozen peas, I yell at them to stop.
“Listen to yourselves, trying to convince the other you’re the one to blame. You’re not, neither of you. It’s no one’s fault but James Blaithe’s.” I shove the peas at Rich. This is exactly what I’ve been trying to tell myself since Saturday. “James is the one who mauled you and revenge-posted that picture, James is the one who punched you in the face. And James is the one who grabbed my boobs.”
Maybe I should have reported him for it at the time, but it should never have been down to me to police how James behaves. It should be down to James.
I can feel them both watching me as I set about preparing three deluxe hot chocolates.
“Aren’t I supposed to be the bossy one?” Seren says.
“She’s been getting uppity for a while now,” Rich scrapes out.
Perhaps the stern glare I give them would carry more weight if I wasn’t holding a bag of mini marshmallows.
“She didn’t use to be like this,” Rich murmurs.
“I blame her new boyfriend.”
There’s a second of silence before I feel a cold, wet slap on my back. Rich just threw the frozen peas at me, didn’t he?
“I knew it!” he says, before breaking out into a painful-looking coughing fit, through which he barely manages to add, “Tell me. Immediately.”
CHAPTER 25
Sef picks me up from school on Friday and we drive to the caravan. Tomorrow we’ll be Dare Boy and Truth Girl, but tonight we’re Sef and Claire and we snuggle up against the pillows on the bed, a film on my laptop and a bowl of popcorn between us like a proper couple.
Sef tuts when yet another message buzzes through on his phone. He’s been bombarded by them.
“Do you mind if I give my mum a call? She seems to think I said I’d be home for dinner tonight.”
“Sure…” I wave him away into the other room and pick up my own phone, tapping through to check for any new comments on the video we posted on Wednesday. I’m hoping to have something easier to film than “Go into a bookshop and turn all the books round so you can’t see the spines”.
Only, the comments I find aren’t challenging. They’re just horrid.
Anyone think TG needs to lose a few?
Porker
Don’t think his type eat pork
lmao
Do they eat ugly girls???
These aren’t people who’ve commented before and I’m vaguely heartened by one of our regulars telling them to stop being disgusting, but still … porker, ugly … and his type…
“What’s up?” Sef throws himself onto the bed next to me so that my phone bounces out of my hand and onto the floor and before I can stop him, he reaches down for it. “More comments?”
But his smile fades as he reads them.
“Some of our new viewers are delightful, aren’t they?” He hands me back my phone and kisses my cheek. “My type likes your type and the rest of them can fuck off.”
Sef leans forward and unpauses the film, snuggling into me to watch the screen. His head is resting on my breasts, arm across my stomach, like I’m a giant fleshy pillow.
It’s not like these are the first comments I’ve ever seen about my body, obviously, but there’s a part of me that hoped I’d left those behind with Milk Tits, that no one cared what Truth Girl looked like…
Sef’s hand moves from where it’s resting across me to slide gently up under my top, fingers splayed as if trying to cover as much of my skin as he can.
Those comments make me feel like I should stop him – tug the material down so he can’t see what’s underneath – but then his weight shifts and Sef’s propped up on his elbows, gently lifting my top and dotting a delicate line of kisses across the skin he finds.
It feels beautiful.
“Come here…” I tell him and Sef brings his mouth to mine and we kiss, the film still playing in the background. When our kisses shift gear from welcoming to wanting, my hands run up under his top too.
Sef pulls away to take off his glasses and put them on the table next to the bed then, after a slight hesitation, he pulls his top off and tentatively, he reaches for mine, eyebrows raised in question.
My type likes your type.
It isn’t long before we’ve wriggled out of most of our clothes and under the covers, bodies as tangled together as our breathing and our kisses and the words whispered in each other’s ears.
“You’re gorgeous…” Sef tells me.
“You’re OK,” I tease and then, “Ow!” because he bit my shoulder in retaliation.
“So are we doing this?” Sef squints at me.
“Maybe?” I say. “If you want?”
Sef swallows and laughs. “Oh I want…” He runs a finger up under the line of my bra strap and pulls me gently towards him until I’m close enough to kiss.
Then he pings the strap in a decidedly unsexy manner and pulls away.
“It’s not something I’ve done a lot of.”
“Really?” I say, tracing the line of his collarbone with my finger, not quite sure what to say to this. Sef’s older than me. And a boy. Who’s had at least one girlfriend.
He twangs my bra strap a few times and I lift a hand up to stop him because it’s starting to hurt.
“I don’t like letting people in, you know?” he says eventually.
His face is too gorgeous when he looks at me like that. Open and vulnerable and nothing like the slightly caddish boy he spends most of his time being.
“I’ve noticed,” I say. “But that’s OK.”
I wind my hands around his body, luxuriating in the heat of having him this close to me, kissing my way to his ear to whisper, “However much I know of you, whether it’s the tip of the iceberg or the whole of your soul, I like it a lot.”
“Well, then, it’s very convenient that I like you back,” he says.
When we next kiss, it’s with the sort of feeling that wipes away any doubts about how much he likes me, or how sexy my body is, or whatever doubts Sef might have about letting me in. I press my lips, my nose into his skin and breathe him in, thrilled by the soft hum of a suppressed groan. He’s tugging at my knickers and I follow his lead so that the pair of us strip naked under the covers, clashing teeth, bumping elbows and shins and giggling and kissing.
We are clumsy. His hands are cold. There is a lot of apologizing and the occasional gasp that comes from discomfort not desire, as he touches me in places I’ve only ever touched myself.
None of it is how I imagined.
It’s not desperately romantic, or even that sexy at certain points. But it is also exciting and comforting, and when my stomach makes a strange noise, Sef doesn’t push me away and look repulsed, he just laughs and kisses my belly button. We’re both nervous, both happy, both excessively, awkwardly polite at times, hazy on whether we’re doing everything the way we’re supposed to.
But whether we are or we aren’t, it feels right.
Afterwards, when I pull on my T-shirt to run to the loo, I sit there on the toilet and think of the conversations I’ve heard at school – girls who’ve been disappointed with whoever they’ve done it with; or Chloe, who Gemma told me cried when she slept with her boyfriend because she was afraid of what he’d say about her…
But I don’t feel like that at all.
I’ve had sex with someone that I like as much af
ter as I did before. More importantly, I like myself as much.
CHAPTER 26
It’s D-Day and the messages ahead of meeting up have been flying so fast between the three of us, that the only sleep I get is on the journey there, napping in Mrs B’s passenger seat on the way to the biggest shopping centre in the UK.
Moz is waiting for us in a low-key coffee shop, hair hidden by a striped beanie pulled down to his eyebrows.
“Hey hey,” he says, attention lingering on Sef a little longer than it does on me.
His morning has been spent meeting and greeting all the winners of the competition. He arranged for them to come in groups of ten to a nearby cafe laid out with brunch. This is something he does whenever he makes public appearances. It’s one of the reasons he’s got such a devoted following – and why reddit is rife with stories of the subsequent hook-ups.
This time, though, it’s all business. He’s been handing out T-shirts and masks and very strict instructions about where to sit and what to do (no throwing crockery/glass/cutlery, no hot food, try and aim for each other). And he’s made them sign an agreement that if they get caught, they’re on their own – all emails and chats were deleted in front of Moz before he’d let them leave.
“Man, it’s like we’re planning some kind of terrorist attack.” Then he glances at Sef. “No offence.”
There’s an excruciating second in which Sef looks at Moz – other people’s ignorance and fear distilled into one diamond-hard stare.
“If all the most famous serial killers are white, does that mean I should worry about you, Moz?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“No one ever does.” Sef sighs and says he’s going to the toilet.
“Where’s he from, anyway?” Moz nods as Sef leaves.
“Britain,” I say, the same way I heard Sef say it to someone on the bus once.
“Touchy much?”
“Rude much?” I reply.
You can tell Moz is thinking about pushing it further, but then he bursts out laughing and shakes his head.
“Sorry. I don’t mean to be such a dick.”
“But you are, Moz.” I pat his hand as if I’m joking. “You are...”