by Tom Ellen
I waited for him to say something more but he didn’t. ‘Well, you can always join quidditch with me, Frankie and Negin. There’s a social next week.’
He smiled at me. ‘You never know, Bennet, might take you up on that, actually.’
I peered through the kitchen shop window. ‘Look, they have a whole wall of cookie cutters. I can spend all my wages stocking up for fairy-bread egg sandwiches.’
He nodded. ‘Yeah, we need to keep adding to our collection.’
There were loads of them, in the shape of literally every object you could think of. I turned to Josh. ‘OK, which do you reckon’s my fave?’
He narrowed his eyes. Then after a second, he said: ‘I’m going for the train one.’
‘Yes! That actually is my favourite.’
‘I know you so well, Bennet.’ He pointed. ‘Is that a phone-shaped one?’
I started walking again. ‘We are not buying that one. Phones are the root of every single problem in my life. Do you actually, really want to know what happened with Will?’
‘Well, how graphic is it? I mean, will I see you in another light, Bennet?’
‘I sent him a picture of a guinea pig doing the Macarena. And I never heard from him again.’
Josh stopped still and then burst into laughter so loud that a woman crossed the street.
‘Stop.’ I pulled my hat over my eyes. ‘Please. It’s still raw.’
He linked arms with me. ‘Don’t worry. Trust me, guinea pig Macarena is amateur stuff. On Valentine’s, when I was sixteen, I wrote my girlfriend a cheesy love poem. And then accidentally texted it to my mum.’
I pulled out my phone. ‘OK. That’s bad, but this blows everything out of the water. If I show you this, we have to be friends for life.’ I found the message and handed it to him.
He squinted. ‘“Luke Taylor is—”’
I whacked him on the arm. ‘Don’t read it out loud. It’s horrific enough as it is.’
‘And you sent this to . . .?’
I shut my eyes and nodded.
‘Wow.’ Josh stopped and ran a hand over his shaved head. ‘I mean, yeah, there’s no beating that. That’s the Usain Bolt of embarrassing texts. That’s made me feel a lot better, actually.’
‘Oh good. Great. Glad my shit-show of a life could be of service.’
He sighed. ‘I feel like life is always manageable until you get girls involved.’
‘Or boys.’
‘People. Basically, you shouldn’t get people involved.’
‘Or technology,’ I said. ‘Especially phones. Phones have caused all my uni dramas to date. You wouldn’t catch Elizabeth Bennet sending a comedy guinea pig picture to Darcy. She’d have to paint it and then send it by horseman.’
Josh shrugged. ‘Maybe she did do that, it just didn’t make the final cut. It’s probably in the bloopers.’
‘You know it’s a book, too, right?’
‘You know I do English, too, right?’ he shot back.
I sighed. ‘Maybe we should just throw our phones away and live like people from the olden days.’
‘Agreed, you stay away from phones and I’ll keep living like a monk.’
I scrunched my face up. ‘You don’t live like a monk. What are you talking about?’
‘An emotional monk. I have vowed to be an emotional monk. I’m not gonna fall in love with anyone again.’
‘Who were you in love with? Are they here?’
He shook his head. ‘Nah, she’s at home. We broke up last year. She broke up. Broke up with me. Broke me.’ He sounded really serious.
I wanted to ask him more but his face sort of told me not to. I feel like everyone has had some great love except me. Like, maybe it will never happen to me. Maybe I’m immune or something.
‘I think we’ll both be all right.’ He smiled at me. ‘And you’re a Bennet, Bennet, so it is inevitable that one day, someone will tell you how ardently they admire and love you.’
LUKE
Will was muttering like a maniac and jabbing randomly at the quiz machine’s buttons.
‘Krypton . . . 1968 . . . The Diet of Worms . . .’
But he was getting every answer right. It was genuinely quite impressive.
‘How the hell do you know all thi—’
‘Shut up,’ he hissed. ‘We’re one off the money.’
He squinted at the screen. ‘Who wrote the 1925 novel The Trial?’ He spun round to face me. ‘Come on, English. This is all you.’
I pressed the ‘Franz Kafka’ button, and a few pound coins clattered out of the machine. ‘Fucking yes, mate!’ Will beamed, reaching down to collect the money. ‘Dream team.’
He squeezed past the pool table and I followed him up to the bar. ‘Played that machine so many times last year that I still remember pretty much all the answers. I might be fucking my degree up, but I could definitely get a first in pub trivia.’ He waved the barman over. ‘What d’you want?’
‘Nothing. I’ve got a seminar. Got to go back to the block and get my stuff.’ Will shrugged and ordered a pint, and I wondered if I should maybe try and talk to him about Abbey. About what ‘I’m not over you’ might actually mean.
Did it mean we were back together? It definitely didn’t feel like we were. Mainly because I hadn’t actually heard from her since the night we’d said it. It had been more than a week, and nothing. Not one single message. I’d been so pissed at the time, I was starting to doubt whether the conversation had even happened.
Will sipped his pint, and asked: ‘Your corridor still boring as fuck, then?’
‘I don’t see them, really.’ I shrugged. ‘They’re all doing Chemistry so they’re usually in labs all day.’
He nodded. ‘Cool. It’s just . . . I dunno what you’ve got sorted for houses next year, but we might have a spare room at my place.’
‘Oh, right. Really?’
It sort of knocked me sideways. The chemists were already talking about getting a house together next year, and in my head I’d been working up to asking Arthur and Rita what their plans were. But, then, they had their own mates and their own lives. They never actually messaged me, or arranged to meet up with me, like Will did. Arthur had only ended up next door to me because of asbestos and random chance. It wasn’t like we’d somehow bonded and found each other. The truth was, Will was probably the closest thing I had here to a proper mate.
‘Yeah, I’d be up for that,’ I told him. ‘Sounds good.’
He started counting the quiz machine winnings out on the bar. ‘I mean, nothing’s definite yet, mate. I need to see what Josh is doing.’
‘Of course, yeah.’
I said goodbye and went back to B Block to get my bag, where I found Beth and Barney in the kitchen furiously spraying air freshener to cover the stink of Arthur’s cheese.
I headed up the walkway to my seminar, pulling my jacket collar tight against the bitter wind and thinking for the zillionth time about that Abbey conversation.
The hardest thing was that I had literally no one to talk to about stuff like this. Last night, I’d got so sick of all these doubts and fears nagging at me that I’d even called Reece. But all we’d ended up talking about was how shit Arsenal were this season. I couldn’t get beyond the banter and pointless small talk. I couldn’t ever find the space to say what I really wanted to say: that I was starting to freak out. About everything; friends and football and not fitting in. But mostly about the idea that I’d broken something in Abbey, something that couldn’t ever be fixed.
It was like I was on edge all the time. Like I was slowly sinking, surrounded by people, and I couldn’t shout for help.
My phone buzzed, and my heart did its usual mini drum roll, but it wasn’t Abbey. It was someone on the football group; a fresher called Murf. I opened the message, which was another photo of a random sleeping girl – about the fourth this week.
You had to keep checking the group in case it was about training or a match, or something, but that meant you basic
ally couldn’t avoid these photos. Dempers called it ‘The Wall of Shame’: whenever anyone in the team slept with a girl, they put a picture up. But the thing was, the pictures weren’t even the worst of it. It was the comments underneath that really gnawed at me. People rating the girls out of ten, saying horrible shit about the way they looked.
I looked at my phone again. Dempers and Geordie Al had already commented: ‘3/10 . . . Rough as fuck m8’ and ‘Any hole’s a goal . . .’ I put it back in my pocket and kept walking.
When I got to the seminar, everyone was already sat down. Phoebe was on the other side of the room, getting her books out of her rucksack. She looked particularly pretty today; her masses of curly hair were all pulled up neatly into a bun at the back, so you could see the whole of her face.
I tried, and failed, to make eye contact with her as I walked in. We didn’t even nod hello these days. As weirdly great as it had been to receive that text, I was starting to wish it had never happened. What was the point of fancying someone if they were too embarrassed to ever speak to you?
The idea suddenly occurred to me that I could even things out right then and there by sending her a text telling her how hot she looked. But I dismissed that pretty quickly as one of worst ideas anyone’s ever had.
Our tutor, Yorgos, came in, and dumped his bag on the desk.
‘Right,’ he announced. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you all today. Presentations.’
Someone groaned and Yorgos laughed. ‘I know, I know. Literature is supposed to be about sitting and writing, not standing and talking. But your essays will only make up seventy-five per cent of your mark this term. The other twenty-five per cent will come from this presentation.’
There was a louder groan this time, and Yorgos smiled again. He looked a bit like a younger, skinnier, less terrifying Javier Bardem. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘You won’t have to go through this humiliating ordeal alone. You’ll do it in groups of three.’
He scanned the room. ‘And don’t just grab hold of your two friends next to you. Let’s mix things up a bit.’
He flicked his fingers like an orchestra conductor, picking out groups of three at random. On the last flick, he took in me, Hot Mary with the ridiculous hair, and Phoebe. ‘You three.’
Hot Mary grinned at me, and I grinned at Phoebe, but Phoebe just stared down intensely at her notepad.
As soon as the seminar was over, Phoebe bolted for the door, but Hot Mary blocked her off.
‘I was thinking we could grab a coffee, or something?’ she said to both of us. ‘Chat about the presentation?’
A few minutes later, the three of us were sat in Wulfstan Bar, drinking grainy lukewarm cappuccinos, and Phoebe had still not made eye contact with me. In fact, neither of us had actually said more than about five words. Hot But Ridiculous Mary seemed quite happy to do all the talking.
‘Like, I was thinking we should do the whole thing about memory, right?’ she was gabbling. ‘We could put Ted and Sylvia at the heart of it, obviously, but we can also bring in shitloads of other memory stuff: Joyce, Nabokov, Proust . . .’ She banged the table suddenly, causing half my coffee to bail out into the saucer. ‘Oh my god, we could make it a Proust-themed performance piece! Like, we could all sit at the front of the class, dunking bits of cake into cups of tea, talking about our earliest memories!’
She stopped speaking and stared at us, and I realized that she was finally expecting one of us to say something. She was wearing a green top with a sort of lightning-shaped split up one side. I could see a gothic-lettering tattoo snaking down into her jeans, but I couldn’t work out what it said.
I was focusing so intently on this that I momentarily forgot about the silence. Luckily, Phoebe didn’t. ‘Well . . . I like the memory thing,’ she said. ‘We should definitely do that. I’m just not sure about the performance piece bit.’ She smiled softly. ‘I’m not that much of a performer.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about that.’ Mary flapped her hands, dramatically. ‘You can leave the performance stuff to me. I could maybe even read out some of my poems. I’ve got one called ‘Winchester Casts No Shadows’ that deals heavily with the theme of memory . . .’
She reached down to get something out of her bag, and I saw that the tattoo said I love, I have loved, I will love. Out of nowhere, a memory hit me – a memory I didn’t even know I had – and it was like stepping on a landmine.
I looked at Phoebe. ‘You are a performer,’ I said. ‘You were whatshername in Grease. Frenchie.’
Mary stared at me. So did Phoebe. Mary was smiling a confused sort of smile, but Phoebe’s face was literally impossible to read.
‘I don’t know why I just remembered that,’ I carried on, feeling a weird rush from looking into Phoebe’s blue-green eyes for the first time since Freshers’ Fair. ‘It was Year Ten, wasn’t it? In the dining hall. You were great. I remember Annabel kicked her shoe off into the crowd and you ad-libbed a joke about it.’
Phoebe smiled, then looked down at her coffee. ‘Yeah, Year Ten, you’re right.’
I’d only gone to see it because Abbey had been Sandy. She’d looked ridiculously hot in the end scene with the leather trousers and blonde wig. I’d actually thought about auditioning for one of the bloke parts, but Reece had laughed so hard when I told him that I’d chickened out.
‘What the absolute fuck are you two on about?’ Mary demanded.
‘Me and Phoebe went to school together,’ I explained, and her eyes widened.
‘Oh, shit, this is perfect. So, like, maybe we can weave that in? I could do my poems, and then you two can, like, reminisce about sitting next to each other in double Physics, or whatever.’
This made me and Phoebe catch eyes again and smile.
Mary looked at her phone. ‘Oh fuckbags, I’m late for band practice.’ She stood up, artfully messing her multi-coloured hair with both hands. ‘You guys should totally come to our gig next week, by the way. We’re called Fit Sister. We do Electro Tuesdays in Gildas Bar.’ She slurped the rest of her coffee, and slammed the cup back down. ‘Anyway, chat later. Awesome brainstorm.’
Then she bounded off. And just like that, I was alone with Phoebe.
PHOEBE
The thing about Frenchie had totally freaked me out.
I’d basically been aiming to just keep my head down, not look at or speak to Luke, and then get out of the bar as quickly as humanly possible. But him mentioning Grease had dredged up all this random stuff I’d completely forgotten about.
That play had been right around the same time Luke and Abbey Baker had started going out. Every night, I’d come out of rehearsals to see him kicking a football against the wall, waiting for her. And then I’d go home and daydream pointlessly about what it’d be like if he was waiting for me instead.
Now that Bowl-Cut had disappeared, being alone with Luke definitely felt like too much to handle. It was like the text was flashing in front of me every time I looked at him. It was all just way too humiliating. I grabbed my bag, and was about to make an excuse and leave, when he spoke.
‘So, Mary’s quite . . .’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Isn’t she?’
That made me laugh, in spite of everything. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘She is.’
He mopped up some of his spilt coffee with a napkin. ‘I mean, there’s no way I’m sitting at the front of the class, dunking biscuits in tea and talking about my earliest memories.’
‘Yeah, I’m not really into that either.’ I still had one hand on my bag, ready to jump up and leave whenever the conversation stuttered or broke down. But it didn’t. It kept going.
‘Have you seen her tattoo?’ Luke asked.
I nodded. ‘“I love, I have loved, I will love.” Pret-ty deep.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Although it also sounds a bit like GCSE verb conjugation.’
‘True. Can you imagine what her poems are like?’
He raised his eyebrows again. He looked so fit. I tried not to think about it, as thi
nking about how fit Luke is tends to be what gets me into trouble. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘It might actually be worth sacrificing twenty-five per cent of our first term mark just to hear them.’
We both laughed, and I thought, Is this what being a grownup is? Can proper adults accidentally text someone confessing their undying love, and then just have a friendly coffee with them afterwards? Is that really how the real world works?
‘I don’t want to be mean about Mary,’ I said. ‘I actually quite like her. To be honest, me and my friends are kind of obsessed with her.’
He nodded. ‘I’m kind of obsessed with her too. I sort of fancy her, but she also sort of terrifies me.’
Hearing him say he fancied Mary was definitely too much. I grabbed my bag handle a bit tighter, and Luke must have spotted it because he reached for his bag, too.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’re both agreed that we’re mildly obsessed with Mary, so that’s good. You heading back to Jutland?’
We finished our coffees and started wandering slowly back together. It felt like we were walking on ice. Feeling our way carefully back into normality. Every time it started to feel natural and easy between us, I remembered the text and imagined him reading it, and wanted to dissolve into the ground again. I prayed we didn’t bump into Frankie and Negin, as that really would send the awkwardness levels off the chart.
‘So,’ Luke said, ‘what actually is all this Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath stuff about memory? I sort of missed all that in the first seminar.’
He didn’t add: ‘I missed it because I was laughing my arse off at a message you’d just sent me calling me the hottest boy on Earth.’ But he must have been thinking it. It was the first time either of us had mentioned that seminar, and I felt my neck getting red. The text rash was following me. I pushed my scarf up to hide it.
‘Well, basically,’ I said, ‘what happened was, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath met at this party, and it’s like one of the most epic and intense meetings in literary history. She bit his cheek and it bled.’
‘What? That’s a bit harsh.’