by Tom Ellen
‘They don’t really give you much time to sort out what you’re going to wear and . . . stuff.’ I sounded like a mum.
Will nodded. ‘Yeah, but no one really cares when you get there. Loads of people will just wear a hat or paint their face or something. Honestly, it’s nothing to stress about.’
Oh god, it was so cringe. We had kissed for so long last night and it was just there, splodged between us, this giant mountain of unsaid physical contact. Even accidentally brushing against his sleeve would feel like an invasion of personal space now. I kept not looking directly at him. Like he was the sun or something. This tiny moment of silence passed and in it we both looked at each other. And it was like making eye contact kind of acknowledged the kissing all week on various dance floors. And then we both smiled at the same time and then it turned into a laugh. And we were both just laughing together, both knowing why but not saying anything.
Then he looked at his phone. ‘I’ve got to take football trials in like an hour, so we better go.’
The mention of football made Luke Taylor pop into my head. I hadn’t forgotten about the whole first night. Although now I couldn’t really remember what actually had or had not happened between him being The One on the bridge and The One who stood me up at quidditch. Frankie had taken to calling him ‘Luke Taylor, Quidditch Bailer’, which, to be fair, was quite catchy.
I had seen him a few times over the week but we had basically just blanked each other. Which in any other situation would have been the major drama of my existence, but in this Freshers’ haze, with Will chucked in, it had just become a weird thing I blocked out of my mind. I think Luke Taylor is destined to be one of the enigmatic mysteries of my life. It’s like we belong on different sides of a Venn diagram and the first night of Freshers’ was a strange crossover that should never have happened.
‘Ready?’ Josh said, and Will nodded. ‘See you later,’ he smiled at me. ‘Hope you find something. I’m sure, you know . . . you’ll look nice whatever.’
And then they left.
Frankie cackled so loudly the woman in the shop jumped. And then she was laughing so hard she could hardly breathe. She was doubled over. ‘”You’ll look nice.”’
‘Stop.’ I put my head in my hands. ‘Stop.’
‘You’ll. Look. Nice.’
Negin was laughing in a more genteel way. ‘I think it’s sweet. Cringe. Cringe-sweet.’
‘You’ll look nice,’ they chanted, while we bought mouse ears and cat ears and a plastic turtle and the corn. And after every time they said it they burst into even more hysterics until it just started to feed on itself and none of us could really breathe.
‘Why is everyone always having sex except me?’ Frankie wiped away tears.
‘I’m not having sex,’ Negin said.
‘Yeah, and I haven’t even slept with Will,’ I added.
‘Yet.’ Frankie handed me the box of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. ‘I think you need to carb load. You know . . . for later.’
LUKE
I was in the kitchen, nursing a hangover so horrendous I could literally feel it in my bones.
The past five days had basically snowballed into one long, hazy night out. It had been a weird drunken cycle of going out to whatever party was happening down at the bar, then coming back up to Arthur’s room, getting stoned, waking up on his floor, having breakfast, getting stoned again, playing Xbox, going out again, coming back, getting stoned . . . And so it went, on and on and on.
I had been making a concerted effort to block out all thoughts of Abbey, and the best way to do that seemed to be to just keep going: keep drinking and smoking and partying, so that my brain didn’t have a chance to settle on her for longer than a few minutes. Occasionally, though, lying wasted on Arthur’s floor at five in the morning, she’d float into my head, and a hot wave of guilt would sweep right through me.
I speed-ate a Nutella sandwich over the sink, keeping one eye on Beth’s door, as I could hear her and Barney whispering and giggling inside. Then I went into Arthur’s. He and Rita were playing what looked like a fairly intense game of Scrabble; she was sat cross-legged on the duvet, hunched over the board, while he was kneeling on the floor, his elbows propped up on the edge of the bed.
‘Yes, Luke,’ he croaked, not taking his eyes off the board. ‘Man, I’m fucking feeling it this morning. We should not have done those last Jägerbombs.’
‘Gherkin,’ said Rita cheerfully, laying down some tiles. ‘Fourteen, plus a double letter score on the K, so that’s . . . nineteen. Quite pleased with that. Hey, Luke.’
‘Hey, Rita.’ I sat down on Arthur’s wheelie chair. ‘Gherkin. Good work.’
‘Cheers. Your go, Arth.’
Arthur exhaled slowly and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Er . . . What words are there? I feel like I’ve forgotten all the words.’ He turned to me. ‘What are some words, Luke?’
Rita smiled at him like a nurse might smile at a patient. ‘You’ve got an “s” there, Watling. Just do “gherkins”.’
Arthur nodded, and laid the ‘s’ down. ‘Gherkins. Genius. This game is really fucking difficult when you’re hungover.’
‘I’m quite enjoying it,’ Rita said. ‘It’s like I’m playing against myself.’
‘You got your outfit for tonight, then?’ Arthur asked me, shaking out a new tile from the bag.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Well, I just printed out a thumbs-up in the computer room. Gonna glue it to a white T-shirt.’
‘Classic,’ Arthur smirked. ‘You’ve really pulled out all the stops there.’
‘What you going as, then?’
‘Oh, you’ll see, my friend. I’ve got this emoji thing locked down, trust me.’
‘What time are we doing pre-drinks, then?’ I yawned.
Arthur snorted. ‘We can have our own pre’s in here. The chemists are being boring as fuck, as usual. And I haven’t seen Beth or Barney all day.’
‘I think Beth and Barney are shagging each other, actually,’ I said. ‘I forgot to tell you, I saw him coming out of her room on the first night.’
Arthur spun round to look at me. ‘Fuck, you’re kidding? I’m surprised he hasn’t stuck a Post-It on her.’
Rita threw a tile at his face. ‘Oi. You misogynist knobhead.’
Arthur took his cap off and ran a hand through his scraggly hair. ‘I definitely need a Twix after that bombshell. Who’s going to the machine? Nominate Luke.’
‘You can’t nominate me.’ I stood up, stretching my arms out, painfully. ‘I’ve got to go to football trials.’
‘What, seriously?’ Arthur looked appalled. ‘Can’t they postpone that? It’s Freshers’ Week. You can’t make people do exercise when they’re hungover. It’s a human rights violation.’
‘Yeah, well. It’ll probably make me feel better in the long run.’
‘I highly doubt that,’ Arthur muttered.
Rita laid some tiles on the board, and he squinted down at them. ‘”Can’t”? You can’t have “can’t”, Reets! Even I know that. Where’s your apostrophe? There’s no apostrophe!’
‘It’s “cant”,’ Rita laughed. ‘It means, like, “hypocritical bullshit”.’
‘This is hypocritical bullshit,’ he huffed. ‘You can’t just make words up.’
Rita climbed off the bed, and patted him on the shoulder. ‘All right, Watling. You google “cant” and I’ll go and get us both a Twix, shall I?’
Arthur jumped up and hugged her tightly. ‘Maurita, I love you, man. You are literally the greatest person that’s ever lived. Have I ever told you that?’
‘Yes,’ Rita said. ‘Yes, you have. Now give me some change for the machine.’
Me and Rita stepped out of B Block into the mid-afternoon breeze. ‘How you finding Freshers’ Week then, Luke?’ she asked, as we trooped along the covered walkway towards the munchie machines.
‘Yeah . . . It’s good. I mean, it’s pretty . . . mad. But good. I dunno. How was your Freshers’?’
&nbs
p; ‘Not great, to be honest,’ she said. ‘It’s like, there’s so much pressure to have fun that you can’t really . . . have fun. You know?’ I nodded. ‘Plus, I was splitting up with my boyfriend,’ she added. ‘That was pretty grim.’
Something I had learnt about Rita over the past few days was that she didn’t really do small talk. She came out with big, meaningful, surprisingly honest statements in the same way most people came out with comments about the weather. It made me really like her.
‘Was he at York Met, too?’ I asked. ‘Your boyfriend?’
‘No, Jack’s at Edinburgh. We both went off to uni, thinking it would be OK long-distance, and then three days into Freshers’ Week he just called me and said it wasn’t going to work.’
‘Shit, really?’
‘Yeah.’ We got to the munchie machine, and she started feeding a thick block of 20p pieces into the slot. ‘I mean, it’s fine. And it’s definitely for the best that it happened. He was actually a bit of a knob, to be honest. He used to wear a flat cap. And you can’t really get away with that unless you’re a farmer or a 1920s gangster.’
‘And he wasn’t either, I’m guessing?’
‘Unfortunately not, no. So, yeah . . . I guess my memories of Freshers’ Week aren’t that great on the whole. I mean, it’s good that you’re having fun and everything, but it does get better than this, trust me. Contrary to popular belief, this is not the best bit of university.’
She smiled at me as the Twixes spiralled off the shelf and clattered noisily into the machine’s belly. For a split second, I considered telling her about Abbey. Just spilling everything that had happened from results day to right now, and asking her what she thought. I wanted to talk to someone about it so badly.
But if I couldn’t get it straight in my own head, how was I supposed to explain it to anyone else? The truth was, I didn’t know how to describe it without it sounding like I was the bad guy. Like I’d ruined Abbey’s life. Which seemed to pretty much confirm that I was the bad guy. That I had ruined her life.
We said goodbye and I headed over to trials. The pitches were all the way across campus, so I followed the covered walkway right around the edge of the lake, exchanging nods with people I vaguely recognized from drunken nights out. The grass was still shimmering with dew and the ducks were out in full force, quacking their heads off. It was bitterly cold, but the sun was glaring down in the blueish-white sky, making my hangover scratch angrily at my temples.
All the football lads greeted me enthusiastically, even when I told them I might genuinely throw up at any minute. ‘Don’t worry, mate, we’re all suffering,’ said one bloke called Toby. ‘I haven’t slept in four days.’
The captain – a posh, floppy-haired guy called Will – gathered everyone together in the middle of the pitch. ‘All right, boys. Thanks for coming. I know it’s not easy in Freshers’ Week. But we’re just going to do a few drills, and play a quick match – just take it easy and have a laugh, basically.’
I’d seen Will before – most nights this week, actually – in various clubs, usually getting off with Phoebe on the dance floor. I’d tried to go and chat to her a couple of times – mainly to apologize for bailing on quidditch – but she’d either been surrounded by people or attached at the lips to Will. It seemed weird to me that we hadn’t even spoken since Freshers’ Fair.
Will carried on: ‘Anyway, if you make the cut, we’ll have initiations in the next couple of weeks, so be afraid . . .’
A third year called Dempers, who was short, stocky and red-faced, added, ‘Be very, very fucking afraid.’
An uneasy laugh rumbled around the first years, but Will just waved it away: ‘He’s fucking with you, don’t worry. We’re not that bad.’
In the end, the trials were actually quite fun. My team lost the match – due largely to having Toby in goal – but I still scored twice, and I could tell I’d done OK by the way Will and a few of the others thumped me on the back as we left the pitch. For the first time all week, I actually felt happy and vaguely in control. Football’s always had this weird effect of blocking everything else out; giving me something real and physical to focus on that means I literally can’t focus on all the other shit swirling about in my head. At the end of a match, I feel battered and sore and tired, but I also feel better. Like I’ve been rebooted, or something.
As we were all stumbling back to the changing rooms, I got caught behind Will and Dempers and a couple of the other lads, who were huddled around Will’s phone.
‘Mate, have you seen the wall today?’ Dempers was whispering, excitedly.
‘Classic Wicks,’ laughed Will.
‘She was seriously fucking hot, actually,’ said another bloke.
They suddenly realized I was behind them, and Will dipped the phone back into his pocket and grinned at me. ‘Good game, Luke, mate. See you tonight, yeah?’
PHOEBE
‘You look amazing.’ She really did; I couldn’t stop staring at her. Liberty had really gone for it in the sexy cherub department. She was wearing kawaii-type frilly white knicker shorts, white over-the-knee socks, a white vest and giant white feathery wings. Unbelievably, she still seemed to have copious amounts of glitter left, and had lathered herself in it head to toe, giving her a slightly oily, celestial sheen. She had brought her GHDs into my room and was curling her white-blonde hair. Negin was meticulously drawing whiskers on to Frankie’s face and Becky was wrapping giant pieces of brown fur around her ankles.
‘I don’t think I look like a monkey.’ Becky jabbed a giant safety pin through some fur. ‘I look like a shire horse, if anything.’
‘No, but do the shy face,’ Frankie shouted. Becky put her brown furry hands over her monkey-painted eyes. Frankie burst out laughing. ‘Let me take another picture, honestly, it’s immense.’
Negin had threaded her corn through some string and was wearing it around her neck. ‘I look like someone from the Depression.’
‘They would have eaten their corn, not fashioned it into a necklace,’ I said.
‘I played Lennie in Of Mice and Men,’ Frankie screamed, putting her hand up like she was in a lesson. ‘Just saying.’ And she started shouting the word ‘alfalfa’ again and again in a strange American accent.
‘What is alfalfa?’ Negin asked.
‘No one knows, it’s one of the great mysteries of the book,’ Frankie replied, still in character.
I looked at myself in the mirror. Negin had done a good job of my whiskers – I just had to remember not to rub my face and smear them everywhere.
I was wearing jeans and a white vest top and I had threaded a Babybel on some of Negin’s string and hung it round my neck. I adjusted my ears. I wasn’t gonna stop traffic with a runway entrance, like Liberty, but I felt good.
‘My ears keep getting lost in my hair,’ I said.
‘I like it. You look like a Pre-Raphaelite mouse.’ Frankie started making the plastic turtle walk along the floor.
‘I was going to cut all my hair off before uni,’ I told her. ‘But the hairdresser said cutting it would make it lighter and it would spring out sideways.’
‘I think that would look cool,’ Negin said. ‘I cut mine the week before I came.’ She got out her phone and showed us a picture of her with poker-straight, waist-length black hair.
‘You look so different,’ we all chimed. She did.
‘Do you think Bowl-Cut Girl did all the colours right before she came here?’ I asked.
‘I think she was born like that.’ Frankie shrugged. ‘I think she came out of her mum with a multi-coloured bowl cut. I must find out her name.’
‘I heard it was Persephone.’ Liberty had still only curled one tiny bit of hair.
‘You said it was Ariel,’ Negin said to Frankie.
‘Yeah, but I think that’s just because she reminds me of a mermaid, and I got confused.’ Frankie was throwing the turtle in the air and catching it.
‘Persephone is a cool name. It probably is that.’ I gave up
trying to flatten my hair around the ears.
Becky’s phone flashed, and she smiled at us apologetically. ‘Sorry, it’s Aaron. Won’t be a second.’
She picked up her monkey tail and walked out.
‘Becky and Aaron are one hundred per cent goals,’ Frankie sighed. ‘You know he sent her flowers on the first day. They were literally at reception when she arrived.’
‘Ah, that’s lovely,’ Liberty cooed. ‘The most romantic thing my ex ever did was piss my name in the snow.’
Frankie shrieked with laughter, then added: ‘That’s actually quite impressive, to be fair. You have got a long name.’
We trooped out into the kitchen, where the boys were all already assembled, drinking. All of them had painted their faces with thick yellow paint and Negin had drawn various emoji expressions on each of them with black eyeliner.
Connor was wearing a sombrero and a fake moustache and seemed even more excited than usual. When Liberty started rinsing the washing-up bowl to make the punch, he stopped her.
‘Got a better idea!’ he shouted. ‘To the bathroom!’ He picked up a bag of bottles and a tub of Nesquik and charged off.
We all squeezed in to see him perched with one foot on either side of the bath, simultaneously pouring out a bottle of wine and a bottle of tequila. ‘We can turn this into a giant punch bowl!’ he said.
I saw Negin wrinkle her nose slightly. The bath was absolutely disgusting. There was a dark-grey tidemark around the top and some long black hairs coming out of one of the taps. Even after Connor had poured in everyone else’s contributions, plus two litres of Coke, a bottle of Ribena and the Nesquik, the liquid inside barely covered the bottom of the tub. It looked like grainy, purple handwash with a weird shiny film across the top.
Connor scooped a glass into it and handed it to Negin.
‘I don’t drink,’ she reminded him, politely.
‘Oh, yeah, course,’ said Connor. ‘So is that, like, a religious thing, then?’