by Lucy Ivison
Everything that was unsaid was tainting the memories of the last seven years. Our rooms plastered with millions of photographs, every weekend spent together since we were eleven, but in the end it just amounted to some sort of Mean Girls-style survival of the fittest.
We went back to the room and had a nap, and when I woke up Stella was in the bathroom. I could hear Tilly and Grace in the next room, playing Hairspray and singing along. They sounded happy. Less strained than earlier, anyway.
Me and Stella have always been friends who wee in front of each other so I swung my legs out of bed, strode across the room and opened the bathroom door. And there she was. Stood in front of the mirror, more brown than H&M girl and Pax put together.
And wearing the dress. Her dress. My dress.
I was so shocked I couldn’t speak. She didn’t turn around, just kept rummaging in her sponge bag before looking up at me in the mirror and giving me a really broad, fake smile. Neither of us spoke. I made myself walk across to the toilet and sit down. I couldn’t even wee at first. I just looked at her. Neither of us acknowledged each other. There was silence.
The feathers on the bottom of the dress brushed against her thighs and her gold shoes looked perfect with it. She had piled her hair messily on top of her head. A few strands were left out, just resting gently on the gold sequins. I got up and stood next to her while I washed my hands. Everything felt like it was going in slow motion because of the silence between us. She looked even more perfect than usual. She hummed as she applied her eyeliner. If she felt nervous, it didn’t show.
I shut the bathroom door behind me and got into bed. I rolled over and looked at the wall. My hands were shaking, I had no idea how the next few minutes would play out. I felt like doing something dramatic. Something that would change everything. I thought about ringing my nan and asking her to pay for me to come home. But she would just say I was being silly. I didn’t know who was more in the wrong: me for buying the dress or Stella for taking it. I thought about saying I was ill so I didn’t have to go out. But that would just mean staying in alone. I heard Stella putting her things in her handbag and zipping it up. She came back into the room and I felt her sit down on the edge of the bed.
‘Hey, are you OK with me borrowing your dress?’ Her voice was all breezy, sugar-coated with mock concern. ‘We always share clothes so I thought it would be cool.’
I carried on looking at the wall.
‘Yeah … course.’ I tried to make my voice sound even but it came out quiet and false.
‘Cos if you want to wear it tonight, I can totally change?’
She was making sure that at no point this could be re-told to make her look like a bitch.
‘No, it really suits you.’
‘Cool, I’ll see you at the bar in a bit.’
She left. And I just lay there. I drew my knees up and held them really tight. I could feel tears but I bit my lip as hard as I could and put the pillow over my head. She had looked so beautiful. It had suited her.
Eventually I got up and made myself get dressed. I had brought loads of dresses but I picked up the same one I’d worn the night before and shoved it on. Then I went downstairs and made myself smile through the photo shoot.
We met the boys on the strip, and as we were walking to the club I could see that Tilly was going to get with Harry. I walked the same stretch of road as I had with Pax, but this time I was watching Pax and Stella, Grace and James, and Tilly and Harry. Jordan and Casper were nowhere to be seen. I felt invisible. Tilly obviously noticed because she hung back and made Harry walk with me as well, which was even more humiliating. As we walked past the public toilets Stella yelled over her shoulder at me.
‘Hannah, you better get in there! Toilet Boy might be waiting for you.’
‘Fuck off, Stella.’
I shouted it without even thinking.
It cut the air and for a split second everyone was on the edge of it. Stella laughed. No one else did and for a moment there was just silence.
‘Chill, it was only a joke,’ she said.
Pax turned around and looked me in the eye. I had no idea what he was thinking. I wanted to know what he thought about what had happened between us, but he acted like he couldn’t even remember it. We all carried on walking. When we got to the club and everyone dispersed to get drinks and go to the toilet, I turned around and walked back towards the hotel.
For a moment, being alone and walking in the opposite direction felt freeing. As if being brave enough to walk away was taking some kind of stand. I knew I was running away from everything, but at least I wouldn’t be in some shit club, posing for pictures to make out we were having the best time ever. I texted Tilly and said I felt ill and was going to lie down. Her text back was predictably concerned and sweet.
Back in our room, I lay in bed and listened to the sound of Kavos. Girls shrieking and boys being lairy. Bass from all the different clubs thumping, and random snippets of people’s drunken conversations. I pulled the thin sheet up and read Mansfield Park. At least my name wasn’t Fanny.
I don’t know when I fell asleep but I woke up to Stella’s laughter coming up the stairs. As she fumbled with the key I could hear Pax laughing too, and then they were right there. They sort of fell into the room and he was kissing her really hard, and pulling her dress, my dress, up around her waist.
I should have said something then but I thought they would realize I was there. But they didn’t. They were sort of walking and kissing. She pulled him on to her bed and then out of the corner of his eye, he saw me. He looked up and at me, and then she did too.
She mock screamed and then burst out laughing as if it was the most hilarious thing that had ever happened to her.
‘Awkward,’ was all she said.
‘How are you feeling?’ Pax said. He was obviously flustered. Well, as flustered as Pax seemed to get. He took a step back from the bed and folded his arms as if trying to make out we were having a normal conversation over a cup of tea.
‘Yeah, I’m fine now. I’m going to go back out and find the others. I’ll sleep in Grace and Tilly’s room tonight.’
He looked like he wanted to say something, but he didn’t.
I put my flip-flops on and left the room. As soon as I shut the door I realized I was wearing my pyjamas – the ones with hedgehogs eating American breakfast foods – and that I hadn’t even brought a cardigan. I wandered out into the cold. I had no idea where to look for the others. I went to get my phone and realized I had left that too.
Sam
Robin blasted another alien to gooey smithereens and shook his head for the hundredth time that afternoon.
‘You didn’t meet a single girl?’ he sighed. ‘Not even one? Honestly, Sam, I despair of you sometimes. I really do.’
It was Sunday night – about four hours after my family and I had returned from Sark across an English Channel violently swollen by stormy winds – and Robin and I were sat in my bedroom. I was supposed to be ploughing through the Cambridge reading list, but what I was actually doing was watching Robin massacre an army of extraterrestrial insurgents on my Xbox. I was quite pleased he was getting some use out of it. I hadn’t played on it since I was fifteen.
I was actually tempted to tell Robin about the whole Erin thing. Well, at least everything up until the very last bit. I could even have pretended I got a handjob. Which, technically, I suppose I did. An incredibly humiliating handjob, yes, but a handjob nonetheless. When you’re still a virgin, they all count.
But I didn’t say a word. The whole thing was starting to piss me off, to be honest. If I had actually shagged Erin, I couldn’t have told anyone because nobody would have believed me. And I couldn’t tell anyone that I had nearly shagged her because they’d just laugh at me for screwing up my opportunity in such an embarrassing way. It was a lose-lose situation. I guess that’s why they call it losing your virginity, instead of winning your masculinity or something.
Since I had nothing to report (or, r
ather, nothing that I was prepared to report) from my Sark trip, Robin gabbled on to me about his week in Florida – failing miserably to conceal his excitement at visiting the Harry Potter theme park (‘They had an actual Zonko’s Joke Shop!’) – while he murdered Martians on the Xbox.
In place of any exciting or uplifting girl-related news, I thought about telling him what had happened with Hannah. About how I was the Toilet Boy Cinderella who Stella had gone on about on the double date. But what was the point? Maybe she did feel that same weird connection I felt in Stella’s bathroom, but she had a boyfriend. She’d told me so. It was almost certainly Freddie the Waistcoated Twat. When someone tells you they have a boyfriend, what else can you do but try to forget about them and move on?
I had to accept that Hannah was just a daydream; a weird, brilliant ten minutes at a party, but not something real or palpable. Certainly not something I could tell Robin about. Telling him would have just made the disappointment worse.
So I kept my thoughts about Hannah firmly to myself while Robin jabbed at his controller and banged on and on about how a girl in Orlando had taught him how to mix the perfect mojito.
Suddenly, as if reading my mind, he broke off from his story and threw me glance while a new level of the game loaded.
‘You haven’t heard from that Stella girl, have you?’ he said.
I shook my head.
Robin clicked his tongue against his teeth in disapproval. ‘It was pretty shit of her just disappearing like that at Westfield.’
‘She didn’t disappear. She was ill. And anyway, you disappeared even before she did!’
‘Yeah, but only because I was clearly getting nowhere with her mate. What was her name again?’
I watched the TV screen turn green as it filled with alien blood. ‘Hannah,’ I said quietly.
‘Yeah, that’s it. Literally didn’t say a word to me. She’s probably an “introspective intellectual” like you. You should have asked her out for a drink when Stella fucked off.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said, even more quietly.
Robin was hardly listening. ‘Yeah, well, we should have known the Stella thing was never going to happen. How many X’s did she put in that first text to you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Exactly what I said. How many X’s, how many kisses, did she put in that text she sent you when she was organizing the date?’
I pulled my phone out and checked.
‘One.’
Robin’s eyes widened. He paused the video game and looked round at me. ‘One X? Jesus. Sam, that is pathetic. I get more X’s from girls I’ve rejected.’
I stuffed my phone back into my pocket and folded my arms.
‘Piss off. Maybe Stella’s just not a loads-of-X’s-on-texts sort of girl.’
Robin laughed and then stood up, dropping the controller on to the carpet. ‘Sam. Listen. I know you’re young—’
‘You’re four days older than me,’ I said. He continued as if he hadn’t heard.
‘—but you must understand that the number of X’s a girl puts in a text to you is an indication of how much she fancies you. I once got a text from a girl that was just X’s. Nothing else. Just a screen full of X’s.’
‘She sounds like an eloquent young lady.’
‘If by “eloquent” you mean she gave me a blowjob at Matt Farley’s eighteenth then, yes, she was.’
‘I didn’t mean that, obviously.’
Robin was in full flow now and pacing the room.
‘You remember Alex Spokes? How into me she was in Year 10?’
I nodded wearily.
‘She put six X’s at the end of her first text to me. Six.’
‘Are you counting the one at the end of her name?’
Robin blinked. ‘Yeah, all right, five X’s. But, still. She was fucking nuts about me, and those five X’s proved it. Six if you count the one in her name.’
‘Which you clearly shouldn’t.’
‘One X in a text from a girl may well be unprecedented, Sam. You may have uncovered a whole new level of female apathy. If you keep this up, by the time you hit twenty you might even get a text from a girl with no X’s in it at all!’
I was just about to chuck a pillow at Robin’s face when my mum shouted up from the bottom of the stairs.
‘Sammy! What are you boys doing up there?’
Robin rolled his eyes, sat down and unpaused the video game.
‘I’m looking at Cambridge accommodation, Mum,’ I yelled back.
‘I can hear that computer game machine,’ she responded, her voice wrinkled with concern.
I kicked Robin and he muted the TV.
‘Robin’s playing on that,’ I shouted. ‘I’m looking at accommodation.’
I didn’t hear her sigh, but I knew she had. ‘Perhaps you should be doing something to improve yourself a bit? Why don’t you and Robin have a look through some of the books on your reading list?’
Robin made it clear how he felt about this suggestion by pretending to fix and tighten a noose around his neck.
‘All right, Mum! I’m literally reading The Waste Land right now!’
I heard the sigh loud and clear this time, as she padded back to the living room.
‘Your mum’s always banging on about Cambridge,’ muttered Robin as he switched the TV back off mute. ‘If she loves it so much why doesn’t she go there?’
‘I don’t know what she’s going to be like if I don’t get in,’ I said. I was genuinely starting to feel like my parents would be more upset than me if I didn’t get the grades.
‘You’ll get in easily, man. They love bookworm knobheads like you at places like that.’
‘Thanks, mate.’
‘Plus, you’re going to do that work experience thing. What is it again?’
‘Dunno really. Just working in an office, I think.’
I had a week’s work experience lined up in my mum’s friend’s office. Mum had arranged it for just a few days before I got my results, as if she thought it would help convince Cambridge to still accept me even if I didn’t get the grades. I hadn’t given it much thought. I wasn’t even entirely sure what the office did.
‘The kind of dickhead who willingly goes and works in an office during his holidays is exactly the kind of dickhead Cambridge are after,’ Robin announced.
‘That’s probably true,’ I said. Although I wasn’t entirely convinced.
‘Course it’s true,’ he sniffed.
‘How can you be so calm about results, anyway?’ I asked. ‘Do you seriously not care about getting into Loughborough?’
Robin chewed his thumbnail. ‘I do, but I’m more worried about what I’m going to do on my year off. Like, these two blokes I met in Miami were going on about how they’d spent last year teaching at one of those American summer camps. Sounded pretty amazing. Apparently all the teachers at these places are ridiculously hot American girls.’
‘Apart from the two blokes who told you this, obviously,’ I said.
‘Yes, obviously, apart from them,’ Robin snapped. ‘It can’t be one hundred per cent hot women or they’d get done by the equal opportunities groups.’
I nodded patiently.
‘So, yeah, I might just do that,’ Robin continued. ‘Spend six months living in a tent in the wilderness, shagging hundreds of hot American girls by telling them I’m related to Prince Harry.’
‘What about your beatboxing?’
‘There’ll still be time to do that in an American summer camp, Sam,’ he said, pointedly. ‘That’s the great thing about beatboxing – it’s non-location specific. You can do it anywhere.’
I laughed and lay down on my bed.
‘Anyway, look,’ said Robin, returning his attention fully to the Xbox. ‘You won’t have time to worry about Cambridge or Stella or your lack of X-based texts next week. Because we will be in a field in Devon, at Woodland Festival, absolutely off our tits, without a care in the world.’ He cut another alien in h
alf with his virtual shotgun. ‘What do you think about that, you big space prick!’
9
Hannah
I only became aware of how ridiculous I looked when I turned on to the main street. No one else was walking by themselves, let alone in their nightclothes. I pulled my massive scrunchie out and tried to cover my face with my hair.
Boys checking you out and waiters whistling at you when you’re in a big group feels exciting and fun, but on your own in the dark, the neon lights and the leery men just seem frightening. The girls weren’t in the bar they said they were going to be in, or the one from the night before. They weren’t on the beach I had seen Pax and Stella heading to, or in the restaurant. They weren’t anywhere. Every time I scanned a new bar or stared through a window my chest felt a little bit tighter. I seemed to get more alone and freakish. I was shrinking into a lost child, biting the inside of my cheek to stop myself crying.
I couldn’t go back to Stella. I wouldn’t. Grace was probably having sex with James; Tilly was probably having sex with Harry.
I reached the end of the strip where the resort finished. There was just a dark road stretching out into countryside. Probably the idyllic type of postcard places I had pictured us frolicking in before I got on the plane. Standing there felt like standing on the edge of the world. I had never felt as desperate. I tried to think what my mum would do. Thinking about her and home made me start to cry.
I turned around and started walking back. And then I saw Casper standing outside a bar, holding a bottle of beer. My stomach relaxed. There was something about Casper. His independence or his ability to be OK outside of things that made him strong somehow. But weirdly, although it felt like everything was going to be all right because I had seen someone I knew, it just seemed to make me cry even more. I just stood in the middle of the road, with the music and the clumps of drunk girls and puddles of couples getting off with each other, and sobbed. He saw me and came over.