Amelia O’Donohue Is So Not a Virgin

by Helen FitzGerald

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  I was like, “Nothing, that place spooks me.”

  “I missed you,” he said, kissing me. I’m not sure if I kissed him back. But I liked it. I liked him. He tasted even more delicious than the food he made. He felt even more cozy than my favorite red duvet cover. Nothing like John, who tasted like Irn-Bru and whose tongue felt like sandpaper. It scared me to death, how nice it felt.

  “I have to go back to the dorms,” I said. “I’ll get in trouble.”

  “Can I see you tomorrow?”

  “Maybe…” I raced off as fast as my body would take me, then lay in my bed and thought about the kiss. The warm, perfect kiss.

  Oh dear, this wasn’t supposed to happen. This thing with Sammy had gone too far. This would unravel me, unravel everything.

  I wouldn’t let it. I would put Sammy away somewhere safe and un-gettable.

  So I didn’t meet Sammy the following afternoon. I avoided the curry shop from then on.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  I can’t remember exactly when the girls got fed up with tormenting me. Not long after christmas, I think, they began to realize that my lack of response gave them no pleasure. Also, Louisa started to realize that I was the only person she could be outwardly clever with. She came to my room a few times on the sly to talk over math problems. To add to that, Mandy and Taahnya et al., had discovered that Jan, the International girl, cried when they called her a chinky. Before long, she was the one whose bed was filled with Coco Pops. Poor Jan.

  Something had changed in me around christmas time, anyway. I felt energetic, invigorated, and focused. I no longer cared about whether Mandy and Louisa liked me. I’d stopped taking the buses into town on Fridays. Girls giggling with stupid boys. Girls buying makeup and tops. Girls shoplifting and telling everyone. Fridays in town were not for me. It did my nut in. I had no interest in anything but work. And work I did. I read all the books on the English reading list three times, then found all the literary criticism I could in the library, then wrote two practice essays for each. I liked my one on T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” the best. But my take on John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany was pretty original, if I do say so myself. I managed to get all the exam papers for the past three years in biology, math, physics, and chemistry, and had them down pat after four or five attempts. In between, I handed in all my assignments and essays with pride and confidence. I was pretty good at this academic malarkey.

  I don’t know how Louisa managed to stay in with the Populars and work so hard, but she did. Maybe it was just the smoking. An inordinate amount of cool bonding seemed to take place on the fire escapes. Louisa studied almost as much as I did, and always got As. She and I were constantly looking at each other as papers were handed back, wondering who’d done better. It was always very close.

  • • •

  Through January, February, and March, the only incident that varied my study routine happened on the night of the second school dance. I stayed behind this time, with girls who felt too ugly or too hip or too devoted to boyfriends from elsewhere to go. Surprisingly, Amelia O’Donohue was one of them. “The boys are idiots and the girls are worse,” I overheard her saying to Taahnya. “I’d rather watch the telly.” Which is what she did. Nonstop.

  I was writing an English essay at my desk when my door opened and closed and Sammy stood before me, just like that.

  “How did you get in here?”

  “Just walked in the front entrance. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “We have the most perfect moment then you disappear for months.”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not interested in getting involved.”

  “I’ve never met anyone like you, Rachel Ross. You’re infuriating. You’re the cleverest person I’ve ever met and you’re funny and incredibly easy to be around, but it’s like you’ve tuned everything out. How can you do that?”

  “I’m just motivated.”

  “No. I don’t think it’s that. You’re scared.”

  “I am not.”

  “Then kiss me. And I don’t mean let me kiss you. I mean kiss me.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You may not understand this, but I have one goal. I don’t want anything to screw it up.”

  Before I had time to stop him, Sammy grabbed me old-movie style and kissed me violently. I didn’t succumb or soften, I pushed him away and yelled, “Get out of here! How dare you? I never want to see you again for as long as I live.”

  He sighed, shook his head, and walked out of my room.

  • • •

  By the time April came, I had taken to rearranging things in my cubicle, repeatedly cleaning out my cupboards, taking an unusual amount of pleasure from the comfort of my cocoon. Sammy left me alone, just as I’d asked. But just before the easter holidays, I bumped into him in front of the chemist.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “That all you’re going to say?”

  “Aye.”

  “You know what? You’re screwed up. There’s something wrong with you. I give up,” he said.

  “Good.” I headed along the road and up the driveway.

  But he didn’t give up. He ran after me. “You make me angry,” he said. “I don’t usually do angry.”

  “Sammy, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m just not interested in getting into anything. I want to be a doctor. I want to go to Oxford.”

  “Well, I’m not going to stop you. A kiss won’t stop you.”

  “Can you just leave me alone?”

  “Right, fine,” he said. “I’ll leave you alone. Like everyone else leaves you alone. So you can study alone. Work alone. Die alone…”

  “Shut up,” I said, upping my pace and leaving him dangling at the end of the driveway.

  • • •

  I didn’t go home for easter. I read, revised, took notes, went over practice exams, worked, worked, worked. I hardly spoke to a soul. I told my mother and my father that all communication was on hold until after my exams. Reluctantly, they agreed.

  Word had spread that the probable dux of the school would be asked to do a motivational speech before the higher exams began. I knew, and everyone knew, that it was between me and Louisa MacDonald. When the principal, a business-like man called Mr. Gillies, called me to the office, I guessed what it was about.

  “You are an inspiration,” he said, as I sat opposite his desk. Mr. Gillies always wore blue suits and brown shoes. He said short sharp hellos to everyone as he strode purposefully through the school (hello.hello.hello). I’d never heard him say anything else before now. “Every teacher has nothing but praise for you,” he said. “Your practice exam results were the best this school has ever achieved. Would you do a speech at assembly before the first exam? To motivate the girls?”

  “Of course,” I said, feeling ambivalent about it. All the girls hated me. I was a hermit, a Keener, a Brain. An ambitious, dour-faced, boring, friendless, loveless Brain. How could I motivate them?

  As I walked out of his office, Louisa spotted me from the driveway. Her eyes narrowed. She didn’t like me being favored by the principal. She cared about these things more than I did.

  But I have to admit, the request invigorated me. I had the most promise. I was an inspiration! Anticipation, nerves, excitement, and angry determination welled and swelled inside me as I wrote the speech ten minutes later. I was about to succeed.

  I was about to escape.

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  I ignored the wheezing for two days running, mostly because my exams were about to begin and it couldn’t be! It couldn’t be that my crap lungs would screw me over when I needed them most. But after two days of breathlessness, of being unable to sleep at night, I knew it wasn’t going to go away and that I needed some medical help.

  Nurse Craig came to school each morning and afternoon, to see a long line of gi
rls with ailments either serious enough or not serious enough to be allowed to stay off school for the day. Her room was on the first floor (Left). I walked down the stairs in my pajamas at 7:30 a.m. The girl who’d confessed to having lupus in first semester smiled at me in the queue, as did the girl with the hairy toothy parasitic armpit twin.

  “Blow into this,” Nurse Craig said when it was finally my turn. I blew into the cardboard tube. “Again,” she said, and I blew again, as hard as I could, which was pathetically not-hard.

  “Any other symptoms?” she said.

  I told her my usual symptoms had arrived—flu-like fever, sore everything. She put me on the nebulizer, gave me some aspirin, told me to rest all day, and to come back in the afternoon to see how I was getting on.

  Mortified, I returned to my room. I needed to read over my English notes. I needed to make sure my grades were even higher than they’d been for my practice exams. I had no time for rest.

  I’d never spent a weekday in the dorms. It was freaky. Quiet. But with noises I didn’t recognize. Washing machines buzzing. Doors creaking in the distance. No voices, just erratic sounds that kept me from reading over my notes and kept me from sleeping. I lay in bed, the steroids from the nebulizer working my lungs, the aspirin working the pain in my head and everywhere else, and tried to get to sleep. Before I knew it I was having the obligatory exam dream.

  I’m walking across the walkway, past the dining hall, up two flights of stairs, into the English classroom. Exam papers rest on desks before tired-looking pupils. I walk towards my desk and look at my blank answer sheet. To my horror, I realize everyone has finished. Their papers are all completed. I’m late. I’ve missed English.

  I walk towards the window, open it, look out over the driveway, lean forward as if trying to grab something, then fall.

  As I fall, I think to myself, You’re not supposed to land in a dream. You’re supposed to wake up mid-fall. You’re supposed to sit upright in your bed, sweating, thanking god that it was just a dream.

  I don’t. I fall fast, all the way to the garden bed at the bottom. Bang. I land. Face down, stomach down, and it hurts, like hell.

  I don’t even wake up at that point. I lie face down in the garden, in agony.

  Still dreaming, I roll onto my back and I look up at the school and the windows are filled with heads, all looking down at me, perplexed. The pupils are dressed in their Aberfeldy Halls uniforms, holding their completed exam papers. And look—John’s there, with an enormous love-bite on his neck. Sammy’s there too, looking worried. Bronte and her baby are there. My mother and my father are there, looking down at me—not dressed in school uniforms, not holding exam papers, but holding their bibles in their hands.

  • • •

  It was then that I woke up. Sat up. Sweating, as you should after a dream like that.

  Feeling confused and disorientated, I eventually found my way, slowly, painfully, to the bathroom, and stood under the shower, dizzy and breathless. I scraped air into my lungs the way I always did at home, then fainted.

  When I woke, the shower had gone cold and a crop of goose bumps had come to graze on my body. I stood, turned the shower off, wrapped a towel around me, walked back to my cubicle, changed my sheets, took a second dose of ventolin, seretide, and aspirin, and got back into bed. It was only 12:15 p.m. I would see the nurse at 4:00.

  I picked up my revision notes for English. Macbeth and Keats and T. S. Eliot whizzed around the page. Nonsensical. A blur.

  I needed to sleep.

  But I couldn’t. The day noises of the dorms had multiplied into a whir of buzzing washing machines, creaking doors, ticking clocks, and screeching cats. I put scrunched up tissues in my ears to stop the noises and dozed off for a while. When I woke, it was only fifteen minutes later, and the tissue had fallen from my right ear and the washing machine buzz and door creak had stopped but the ticking had gotten louder and so had the cat. An ugly meow. Make it stop!

  My breathing was a little better. If I concentrated and tried to relax, I could take shallow breaths and feel the oxygen calm me. On the desk beside my bed, my revision notes sat neatly, ready for one last blast before my first exam, which, unsurprisingly, was English—straight after assembly tomorrow.

  I lay down again and put more scrunched up tissue in my ears. I closed my eyes. All noises but one had disappeared into a light muffled hum, the background for a cat that was so loud it must surely be in the building.

  Had to be Jennifer Buckley’s, I thought to myself. I don’t know how she’d managed to keep the poor red mite quiet since September, but I’d never heard him meow, and no one had ever mentioned her stowaway secret.

  What floor was Jennifer on? I wondered, sitting up, unable to sleep, desperate to placate the cat in order to get some rest and recover in time for my first exam. I wasn’t sure, so I put my dressing gown on and followed the noise down the corridor. It was the loudest cat I’d ever heard. The loudest and the creepiest. Its meow sent prickles of anxiety up my legs and through my body. It stopped my breathing. It stopped my whole body, smack bang in the middle of my floor, the third floor, the bathroom door in front of me, the vast linen cupboards beside. I blocked my ears to stop the noise that was piercing into me, then opened the linen cupboard door.

  It was dark inside. The hall light took awhile to make its way inside and when it did I couldn’t find the cat. Only sheets and pillowcases and towels. White fluffy towels. All at the back of the cupboard. Thank god, the noise had stopped. I was about to shut the cupboard door and walk away. But one of the towels moved. The cat must be underneath, I thought, reaching towards the wriggling lump with trembling fingers.

  I lifted the moving towel and held it in my hand, trying to see what had been stirring underneath it. I moved my head closer, my pointless asthmatic breaths the soundtrack for the horror that was about to begin.

  Because inside the cupboard, underneath the towel I’d retrieved, wriggling red in its manchester bed, was a baby. A tiny newborn baby boy, its cord freshly cut, its smooth skin covered in warm womb gunk, its dark eyes shining a single bright light into mine, a laser beam so sharp it shot me backwards and onto the ground.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  If I tell, I’ll go to hell.

  The words echoed in my head as I lay on the hall floor, unable to breathe. What first? The Thing in the cupboard? Had there really been a baby, lying there, gurgling, its cry answered at last, by someone, but not by the right someone? Or had I imagined it the way I sometimes imagined living in a high-rise flat overlooking lights-lights-lights of city-not-island? Had I been devoid of air too long? My lungs squeezing what it could from around it—images, sounds—if not air? And had these messages bottle-necked their way to my brain to make me see The Thing, this red gooey creature that did not really exist?

  I needed to stand up, look again, and be sure. But I couldn’t, not without ventolin. Rasping, I made it onto my knees and crawled at snail speed along the hall, counting the twenty doors as I passed, eager to make it to number nineteen. Finally, sliding my cubicle door open from ground level, I saw the blue beacon of life on my desk. The very image gave me the strength to stand.

  Oh, sweet ventolin, opening my throat a little, enough for me to contemplate what needed to be done next.

  I looked out the windows across to the dining hall. The boarders were queuing for their lunch, talking noisily, unaware. I peeked into the hall I’d crawled along. As before, there was no one there. I counted: in-two-three, out-two-three and then walked towards the bathroom, hoping I’d hallucinated, but when I reached the cupboard, opened it, and shone my flashlight towards the back, a now-sleeping baby winced its closed eyes at my light.

  I had no experience with babies. I had no idea what to do with it, its face scrunched, its tiny bluish fingers gnarled into fists. I touched the top of its head, soft and squidgy like play dough. Who in this huge old building had secretly given birth? Who was so frightened that they had simply hidden the th
ing and gone on as if nothing had happened?

  I thought hard about what to do. Call Miss Rose? Call the police? An ambulance? What would be the repercussions for the mother? What would she want me to do? What would she be feeling?

  When people told me their problems, many of them painful and disgusting and sad, my strategy was to empathize, to try and imagine how I would feel if that secret was mine. When I considered what to do about the baby and its mother, I found myself thinking about this strategy and recalling one incident in particular. Before now, this had been my biggest secret.

  • • •

  I was nine. We lived in Edinburgh. My parents had been having a rocky time for several months. My father had been promoted and was always away. My mother was lonely. She and my father argued over the phone all the time.

  “All I wanted was you and Rach and another baby, and you’ve abandoned me here. And now we’ve left it too late!” my mother had said.

  I recalled she made a new friend at work, which cheered her up a bit. He was shorter than she was, with a tiny nose and unruly ginger hair. He made me feel a bit queasy (“What a big girl you are!” he’d say every single time he saw me). Not that I have anything against gingers.

  I recalled finding her and her new friend in the bathtub when I was supposed to be sleeping in bed. His bum was up in the air. It had lines of wet dark red hair on it.

  “Now Rachel,” my mother said as she’d tucked me in after drying herself. “I want you to promise me something.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I want you to promise you’ll never tell Daddy what you saw tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m asking you.”

  “Are you getting a divorce?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to run away with the little red man?”

  “No.”

  “Do you promise you won’t?”

  “Do you promise not to tell?”

  “Okay,” I said quietly, without conviction.

  “Pinky promise,” she said.