The New Girl

by Harriet Walker

  The new girl, meanwhile, acted like she had been there for years. She walked through the halls and classrooms as though she owned the place, a confidence I was constantly reminded of when I came up against Helen’s kind at Cambridge and then from behind my desk in the gallery. Rich, self-assured people who had been educated to believe they counted, rather than schooled to take up as little space as possible.

  What someone like Helen was doing at St. Dominic’s was a mystery, I realized much later. I’ve spent years projecting imagined scandal onto her solicitor father—bankruptcy, fraud, witness protection. But at the time, the new girl was far more at ease in a school she had attended for three months than Margot ever had been, even though she’d started there alongside me wearing a blazer that was far too large and a rucksack almost as big as she was. She had never quite grown into either of them.

  Margot had always looked up to me, but who did I ever have to look up to? In Helen, I found someone more worldly than me, whose opinion really counted for something. Who would help me find the woman I wanted so desperately to become.

  5

  A couple of weeks later, Helen and I went out again. When I left my house to stay at hers, a rucksack full of outfits and makeup on one shoulder, I told my mum that we’d put on a film and eat pizza, play Ping-Pong in Helen’s games room. We were only just on the cusp of that not being believable anymore: half children, half women. Femmes fatales who still watched cartoons.

  I was excited to meet that new girl again—not Helen, but the one within me who had stared out from the mirror at me, burnished with silver at her temples, kissed with cherry on her lips. The girl who had danced on a stage, who had climbed the security barrier at its edge and hung from it over the crowd as the notes swelled around her.

  It was as exhilarating as it had been the first time round, everything from the rituals of getting ready—Helen pilfered a bottle of cheap and fizzy sugary wine from a cupboard downstairs—to shivering in the queue outside the club as we each muttered the fake birth dates we’d need to recite if the bouncer asked us for them.

  Where I had sometimes felt self-conscious in front of Margot—as though we were children trying out adulthood—I never did with Helen, because her maturity wasn’t an act. It lent my own shaky version a feeling of authenticity. Back then I didn’t realize that she was every bit as uncertain of the steps as I was. All I wanted was for life to open my eyes as wide as they had been the last time, when Helen and I had claimed our first night as almost-women.

  There was a noisy cluster of other teenagers a few groups behind us in the queue, and, peering around, I recognized some of them from school. Initially irritated that our haunt had been discovered by others—specifically, others I had built my entire personality in antithesis to—I reasoned it wouldn’t do my reputation any harm if I was seen by them to be already au fait with the nighttime economy.

  At first, I barely noticed her, but as my eyes traveled over the heads of the girls behind us, the ash blonde on their periphery caught my attention. Margot was in my direct eyeline and stared back through the queue at me expressionlessly. My body remembered enough of our friendship to be delighted to see her on a reflexive, muscular level; a smile rose on my lips and my throat almost called out a greeting.

  “What. Is she. Doing. Here.” Helen’s voice was scathing.

  “Looks like she’s got some new mates.” I shrugged and turned back to face the front, but that magical feeling of liberation, of newness, of being on the cusp of…something, had fizzled and was no longer there.

  It didn’t take me long to realize that was because she was. Margot knew me inside out and I hated her for looking at me as though she didn’t recognize me. How could I be that new girl with my old life looking on?

  It was no surprise, really, that she didn’t get in: Margot was practically faint with terror at the prospect of lying to the doorman, her face as transparently readable as a toddler’s. We gleefully saw her being turned away as we waited in line for the cloakroom, and as the cordon came down in front of her, Margot caught my eye. I felt like I was closing a door on a crying child.

  The old Winnie would have dropped back from the cashier’s till and gone home with her, seething but honorable. The new Winnie hesitated for just a moment longer than was necessary, and then—

  “She can make her own way, Win!” Helen shouted in my ear over the music. “Come on!”

  I don’t know how long we had been in there when I saw her again. Time went out of the window in that place, because there weren’t any—nor was there a sense of the minutes passing while the music blared. We’d danced to maybe ten or eleven songs when I noticed Margot standing on the other side of the bar as I went to get another drink.

  She had gone to a shop, bought a bottle of vodka, and drunk it as she queued again. She’d rolled her T-shirt up and tucked it under her bra to change her outfit. Her stomach was the pale board I remembered unsuccessfully trying to rub a crappy tattoo transfer of a rose onto a couple of years before, before we’d given up and thrown a tennis ball back and forth for a couple of hours.

  She had borrowed somebody’s lipstick so she would look different to the doorman. I doubt he would have noticed either way: another girl, another face, another body. We’re all the same in the dark.

  I found that I was impressed. Shocked, but impressed. I’d even say relieved. I thought, for a moment, that we’d have fun together that night, that she’d come round to Helen, that maybe everything would work out among the three of us.

  How stupid I was.

  Margot swayed slightly on her feet, and I realized she was drunk.

  “You left me,” she slurred, and hiccuped a bit of vomit.

  I was mortified at the prospect of her puking there and then, of the acidic puddle and accompanying waft that would mark us out as the young amateurs we were, so I hustled her over to a banquette along the edge of the dark dance floor and pushed her down onto it. Her eyes were closing even as she hit the pleather with a soft bounce.

  “She okay?” came a male voice through the dingy haze.

  “Just needs a disco break,” I said, and went back to Helen, who was gyrating to a familiar guitar riff a few meters away.

  I meant to keep an eye on her. Not in a clucking mother-hen sort of way, but just to flick a glance every now and then to check she hadn’t tipped over into a pool of vomit. But the next time I looked over, Margot was gone. My groan of frustration was so loud it must have sounded as though I was singing along to the blaring music. How had she become my responsibility yet again?

  I gestured to Helen that I was going to the loo, and she waved me off confidently, deep in a jocular back-and-forth that she was shouting directly into the ear of a man with long hair and no shirt on.

  The nightclub was dank and steamy, the air so thick with dry ice and cigarette smoke that I felt I was combing it for Margot not only with my eyes but with my hands too. Fuming at having had to leave the dance floor, where Helen and I had been having fun, I could feel righteous anger building up—it wasn’t my problem Margot had got so drunk she could barely stand up, but here I was doing the right thing. In my head, I composed what I’d say when I found her, my silly, callow friend—a sharp reproof for wasting my time. But then I realized she’d probably be in no fit state to hear it.

  Pushing through throngs of people clustered around bottles and badly hidden baggies of powders that I didn’t yet quite recognize, I felt like the prince hacking back briars to reach the princess at the heart of the forest.

  The deeper I went, the more coldhearted I began to feel. Margot never had been any good at looking after herself; it had always fallen to me. No wonder I was out of patience with her.

  I tried the toilets, recalling from our last visit a closed cubicle door with one comatose foot sticking out from underneath it, and hoped, more for my sake than for hers, that Margot had made it there
before the inevitable torrent had shot forth. There was no response to my calls. And no sign of that blond head among the gaggle of women, all older than me, who were doing their makeup and narrating their domestic situations to whoever might listen.

  Next, the bar, by this hour ringed with the desperate who needed no more but were intent on buying it, and the chemically enhanced—astonishingly active dancers who were drinking water as though they’d been deprived of it for weeks.

  I checked under a pile of coats wadded up against a wall and, to my surprise and disgust, found another woman asleep, her eyes half closed and her mouth open, a string of drool attached to her glittery top. I wondered what the Middle Ages had looked like, substituting sequins for sackcloth in my head, and came up with a scene not dissimilar. I was relieved to see it wasn’t my friend under there but noted with annoyance that the time was ticking down until the night—my night—would be over.

  Eventually I came to a standstill near the corridor that led back out onto the street and stood, chewing my lip. Had Margot gone home? That was the most sensible option, but she hadn’t seemed in a state to decide when I’d last seen her. As I pondered, I became aware of laughter coming from behind me, seeping through the door to the club’s office: the hearty but heartless humor of men confronted with vulnerability. My stomach turned over at it.

  I opened the door, just a crack at first, and put my eye to the gap, through which the brightness of strip lights made dusty shapes in the filthy dark air. Through the slit, I saw two broad, dark backs standing on sturdy feet encased in Doc Martens. Ducking for a better view, and peering between their legs, I saw another set of heavy-duty boots, tangled between a pair of white Converse, now streaked black with beer mud. Margot had bought them only a few weeks ago.

  “Proper jailbait, that,” I heard one of the two backs growl, and rasp a husky laugh that they all three joined in with.

  Had I stopped to think about the safest way to proceed, I doubt I would have done what was absolutely necessary in that instant, which was to remove Margot from the situation. Instead, I barged through the door, blinking in the bright light and shouting: “Margot, time to go now, your dad’s outside!”

  “What the f—” The backs leaped aside as I barreled in, and I saw for the first time the sport they had been spectating on.

  Slumped on a chair, Margot’s head hung heavy on her chest, her face in as deep a shadow as the rest of her was almost unbearably well lit. Her T-shirt had been ripped from neckline to navel, her small, girlish breasts tipped out of the soft cotton bra she was wearing underneath. Her denim skirt was shoved up to her waist, her pale pink knickers accusingly childish for both the context and those men’s intentions.

  The very grounds on which Helen and I had frozen her out had come to this room to thaw: Here, under fluorescent lights that mercilessly highlighted the greasy pores and ingrown hairs on the doughy faces leering down at her, Margot looked every inch the bewildered little girl she had every right to be at the age of sixteen.

  The third man had been in the act of leaning over her and unzipping his fly but had stopped where he was, bending over Margot, with one hand rummaging inside his trousers.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” a voice behind me said, low and snarling. “You’re not supposed to be in here.”

  The sweat I had worked up dancing suddenly seemed very cold on my skin. Margot raised her head at the sound, and for the first time, I saw a trickle of blood running from one nostril, as shiny and as vital as the terror in her eyes when they met mine.

  Shame and regret rushed at me for having despised Margot for being naïve, for being nervous, and for not trying to hide it under the blanket of worldly-wise cynicism that Helen and I had endeavored to cultivate. For playing the tiresome ingénue to our jaded alter egos.

  “Your dad’s here, Margot,” I insisted, not wanting to interact with anyone in the room but her. What do you say to the men you’ve been warned about your entire life? How do you reason them out of doing everything you’re most afraid of?

  “It’s time to leave,” I added.

  “Go on then.” The man leaning over had moved back, and jerked his head and a hand at me, at the exit. A gesture that usually accompanies someone holding a door for you, this time waving through a lucky, bloodied girl who had only been half molested.

  Margot moved quickly then. She grabbed her bag from the desk behind him as she passed and bundled straight into me at the precise moment a gob of spit landed in the back of her hair.

  “Fuck off, you little slag,” called one of the men as we stumbled out of the room.

  Outside in the corridor, the night was over. The lights were coming up over the steamy dance floor and the party rubble strewn across it. Under the strip lights, the club that had been so full of wondrous possibilities was revealed as a windowless room filled with tired people and the rubbish they’d generated.

  Margot sank to the ground, sobbing. Her T-shirt flapped baggily open to reveal the immature underwear underneath. Her coat was gone, and so was her trust, I realized—in me, in herself, in the people who milled nearby as they left the venue, their shoes making patterns around us as they wondered whether to pause and help this crying girl.

  “Drunk,” one of them said.

  “Jailbait,” another laughed in return, and I whirled around, certain that those broad backs had followed us, but it was someone else. I had never heard the term before that night but I was beginning to recognize the type of man who used it as currency.

  Margot came with me to Helen’s house. She had to, because the girls she’d come with had left without her. They were bound by curfews set earlier than Helen’s mother’s—I wasn’t sure Helen even had one at all. Back in that fashionably rustic kitchen, at the wide wooden table with mugs of tea, disconcerted by her tears, I asked: “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Margot shook her head. “Not while she’s here,” she said quietly, and Helen rolled her eyes.

  6

  The next morning, Margot washed the blood from her face and shampooed the cigarette smoke out of her hair three times before she went home, scarcely speaking to me and Helen as she collected up her belongings and pushed the ripped T-shirt deep into the bottom of her bag. When the door banged shut behind her, Helen and I exchanged a look and breathed out a breath we hadn’t even realized we’d been holding in.

  I didn’t hear from Margot all weekend, although I called and texted again and again. I couldn’t stop thinking about her head nodding in the chair. I kept seeing the largest of the men leaning over. But what haunted me the most was the sense of her acceptance of what had been about to happen. I was horrified by it—not because I thought she should have fought harder, but because her acceptance struck me as the brutal reality between men and women beneath the veneer of civilization we rely on.

  One summer a few years later, when I was working in a supermarket between university terms, an older colleague shut the doors to the stockroom while I was in there and showed me his dick as though it were part of the fresh produce I was supposed to be checking over. It wasn’t the fact of seeing it that pulled me sharply awake in the middle of the night for months afterward—or that made me blink and shudder with hot shame when I recalled it—it was my terror: that split-second moment when I didn’t know whether I would leave that back room a whole person again. Whether what happened in there would travel with me, uninvited, for the rest of my life.

  We carry these men with us, although we might not realize it. The stray hands and too-close lips, the eyes that look too long and the steps that sound too close. They’re the reason we walk the long way round, why we can’t use our parks after dark, why we clutch our keys like a weapon. Most of them we slough off like winter skin eventually, even though they take us off with their jackets that night. I’m sure that grocery dick guy doesn’t even remember me. He probably has a baby of his
own now, but imagining somebody else’s babies into being is even harder than willing your own back to life.

  I was five years older than Margot had been when that happened. I knew how men were supposed to treat you, to talk to you, to touch you, and how nice it could feel. At sixteen, she had no such comparison to make, didn’t know how to process it. The way the casual violence done to her—brutality dressed up as a bro—found its outlet would echo through the rest of her life and mine.

  On the Sunday night, ahead of school the next day, Margot finally texted me back: “Meet me in the prac rooms at lunch.”

  I fobbed Helen off, as she once had Margot, with a line about having a detention and rushed up the staircase to our old haunt. We greeted each other like a brittle Victorian couple, in love but constrained by politesse: Her characteristic awkwardness was galvanized with anger and sorrow; my guilt at how I had treated her stayed my tongue. After a few brief moments just staring at each other, I hurled myself into Margot’s arms and was so relieved to feel them tighten around me that I started crying.

  “I’m so sorry, ’Go,” I sobbed into her hair. “I’m so, so sorry. I was such a stupid cow, and you—you—”

  She held me and said she had missed me. She thanked me for getting her out of that room. Then, on the sponge-spewing sofa that we’d loafed on and laughed on countless times, Margot told me what had happened.

  She’d woken up in a corridor with a man on top of her, she said, more worried by the heaviness of him than by what was happening to her. Worried that his weight would push all the air out of her and no more would ever get back in again.

  In the end, his friend had dragged him away: He’d found two girls willing to go home with them instead. Smiling, drink-blurred faces with responsive bodies. Luckily for Margot, they were a more exciting offer than an unconscious sixteen-year-old lying on a filthy floor with her top torn and her skirt hiked up.