It Sounded Better in My Head

by Nina Kenwood

  It’s a single minute, for godsake. No one is going to force me to do anything. In fact, I bet no one is going to do anything at all.

  I can see everyone sizing up everyone else, deciding who they want, who they could deal with and who they definitely don’t want. The flip side of not wanting to do anything is, of course, the fear that no one will want to do anything with me even if I did want to.

  A girl I don’t know spins the bottle first. It lands on Owen. Everyone cheers. I watch him walk off with her, and an iPhone stopwatch countdown begins. We sit in silence, and after about twenty seconds, it’s surprisingly boring. Seven minutes in heaven must really drag on. Everyone counts down the last ten seconds and they cheer again when the two of them emerge, grinning.

  They rejoin the circle—Owen is looking pleased with himself in a hugely unappealing way—and the bottle is spun again. I’m so nervous I take a swill of the beer in my hand, even though beer is the foulest tasting thing in the world and I can barely swallow it without gagging, and now I’m paranoid about having beer breath.

  The game goes through several more rounds. On reflection, it seems a stupid, discriminatory game, made mostly for the enjoyment of heterosexual guys. I have no idea who is straight, gay, bi or asexual here. One guy spins the bottle and it lands on another guy, and he gets to spin again, which is okay, I guess, because he’s straight, but still. If you’re queer, and not out, then you either have to out yourself or endure possibly kissing someone of the opposite sex.

  I’m still thinking about how terrible the game is and working myself into a state of hating the world and feeling ashamed I even mentioned it, when the bottle one of the girls has just spun lands on Alex. They walk off together, laughing. Alex looks completely relaxed and my stomach lurches. I don’t want him to kiss her. The thought is in my head before I can stop it.

  We count down the final ten seconds, everyone looking bored now, and they walk back, all smiles.

  ‘All right, I’m over this,’ Raj says as Alex picks up the bottle and spins it. It turns lazily, round and round, and we all watch it slow down and stop between me and Owen.

  ‘That’s a liner. Go again,’ says Lana/Petra.

  ‘Nah, it’s on her.’ A guy points to me.

  There’s a pause, and everyone looks at me, and I open my mouth to say we shouldn’t play anymore, but then I swallow without saying anything, and I stand up and follow Alex, who is already walking back towards the side of the house.

  I’m shaking, and my legs are jelly.

  There’s about a metre of space between the house and a wooden fence. It’s shadowy. There are spider webs further down and what looks like a broken rake, an old broom and a pile of bricks. The whole thing is decidedly unromantic. Alex leans against the fence and I stand in front of him, leaning back against the house. His feet almost touch mine. I’m worried about spiders and bugs getting in my hair.

  ‘I didn’t kiss Sarah.’

  ‘Who’s Sarah?’

  ‘The girl I just came back here with before.’

  ‘Oh, cool. I mean, I don’t care. We don’t need to kiss either. Obviously.’ My face feels hot.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘This is an awful game.’

  ‘It was your idea.’

  ‘I mentioned it. I didn’t suggest we play it.’

  Thirty seconds have passed. Forty. We’re not going to kiss. Of course we’re not. They start the ten-second countdown. He shifts his weight and moves his foot slightly and his shoe touches mine. I can’t tell if it’s accidental or on purpose.

  ‘Three—two—one!’

  We both hesitate. Then I push off the side of the house at the same time he pushes off the fence, and we’re face to face, our bodies close to touching.

  It seems like he’s going to say something, so I move slightly closer. He smells unbelievably good.

  Alex doesn’t say anything. Instead, he leans over and gently kisses my cheek. His lips are soft, and his stubble is scratchy.

  My heart is hammering in my chest.

  ‘Hey, you two! Minute’s up!’

  Alex turns and walks around the corner, and I follow him back out to the party.

  Vanessa is staring at us both as I sit back down in the camping chair. I’m trembling a little but trying my very hardest to look normal.

  The bottle has been kicked away by this point and everyone has moved on to something else. Alex doesn’t look at me for the next thirty minutes—I know because I sneak a look at him roughly every minute. Vanessa looks at me though. I catch her quickly turning away a few times.

  At ten-thirty, I decide to go home. I’ve hardly spoken to anyone since spin the bottle, so I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell anyone I’m leaving.

  I hover near Owen for a moment, but he’s deep in conversation. He looks up and I wave, and he waves back. I can’t be certain, but I’m pretty sure that’s the last time Owen Sinclair and I will ever communicate. I feel a surge of excitement at the fact that I don’t care. I don’t care what this hot guy thinks of me. It feels like maybe the most emotionally stable moment of my life so far.

  I book a car and it tells me the driver is two minutes away. I walk through the lounge room and Alex is there, talking to a group of people, including Vanessa. He looks up at me.

  ‘Hey,’ he says, smiling.

  ‘Bye,’ I say.

  ‘You’re going?’

  Does he sound disappointed? Surprised? Relieved? I wish Lucy was here so she could help me figure it out.

  ‘Yup,’ I say.

  He gets off the couch and walks over to me. ‘How are you getting home?’

  ‘Uber.’ I don’t know why I am giving him one-word answers to every question.

  ‘Is that safe?’ He frowns a little.

  ‘You’ve never got an Uber before?’

  ‘Well, yeah, but I mean…’

  ‘Safe for girls on their own?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s a sexist question.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes.’ I actually have no idea. I am a feminist, but I don’t really know the rules yet. I like the idea that he’s worried about me, but I hate the idea he thinks I’m a little kid who can’t get herself home.

  ‘Take my number and text me to let me know you got home,’ Alex says.

  ‘What? No.’ I don’t know why I say this, because the thought of swapping numbers with him makes my heart speed up and my cheeks get warm, and also this is a system Lucy and I have had in place for years. But something about it feels brotherly. I don’t want Alex to treat me like a female version of Zach. I want him to think of me like he thinks of Vanessa, minus the baggage.

  ‘Come on. If Mum found out I let you get an Uber alone without checking you got home safe, she’ll be so mad at me.’ This is true. Mariella regularly talks to her sons about how to be good men in the world, and one of her favourite topics is teaching them to think and care about the safety of women.

  ‘Fine.’

  I hand Alex my phone and he adds himself as a contact. He passes it back, and we say goodbye. Is there something lingering in his eyes as we do? They seem…soft. Warm. Or maybe I am overthinking things, or maybe I am seeing the reflected glow of his interaction with Vanessa, or the lamp in the corner.

  I would dismiss everything between us as a figment of my imagination, but that kiss on the cheek happened.

  Outside I wait for my Uber, and check behind me, in case Alex is going to come running after me (in the movie version of my life, someone would always come dramatically running after me), but he doesn’t, and then my car arrives, and I get in.

  I text Mum to say I’m on my way home.

  Then Dad texts me: ‘Are you still at the party?’ Dad is still living in the same house as Mum. Why wouldn’t they be talking to each other about this? This is a preview, I understand suddenly. Life with divorced, overly invested parents means having to tell them both where you are at all times. It means having to come up with lies that will
work on them both if I need to lie about stuff. It means making sure they are treated equally in everything, down to a damn text message.

  I get out of the car at my house and before I walk inside, I text Alex Home safe. I was going to be cute with gif or an emoji, but I decide not to be, because I can’t think of anything that hits the right tone of I’m funny and adorable but also I don’t care at all, and many men and women are in love with me and I’m probably messaging them right at this very minute too. He writes back Good. See you soon. I don’t write anything back to that, but later that night, I lie in bed and look at the messages, and run over a million scenarios of things I might have written, and what he might have written back, and what might have happened then.

  I can’t stop thinking about the Kiss. On. The. Cheek. (Aka The Greatest Thing To Romantically Happen To Me, If In Fact It Is Romantic.)

  Thinking of the cheek kiss is like pressing on a bruise, but instead of pain, I feel a burst of happiness. Right now is the best time—before I can be disappointed, before I find out Alex isn’t interested in me at all, before I can ruin things. Tonight, everything is still possible.

  6

  A House Full of Gryffindors

  ‘What happened?’ Zach says.

  ‘Every detail,’ Lucy says.

  The three of us are lying on the deck at Zach’s house the next day. Lucy has her head on Zach’s chest, hair fanned out in all directions. It still hurts my selfish heart, seeing her lying on him so casually. I love them both so much, so it doesn’t make sense that I am still ever so slightly unhappy that they’re so happy. But I guess it does, because they don’t need my love like I need theirs anymore, and that hurts.

  Today, I am on edge anyway because I am nervous about running into Alex. I don’t want to talk to him, but I need to see him in the light of day to formally assess my feelings. Everyone knows you can’t really trust any feeling you have at night—and the later the hour, the less trustworthy it is. Anything you feel after 10pm is suspect, anything after midnight should be discounted altogether.

  I washed my hair this morning and I’m wearing my best jeans and a top that Lucy and I call the Boob Top, for pretty self-explanatory reasons: it makes my cleavage look great. Normally little thought would go into my outfit, and I wouldn’t call it an outfit, it would be just clothes I picked from the cupboard (or maybe the floor), and my unwashed hair would be in a messy bun, and I would avoid looking in the mirror because sometimes I can get stuck in a cycle of self-loathing if I make no effort in my appearance and then see myself making no effort, and start hating what I look like when I make no effort, then hating myself for making no effort, and on it goes in a really boring, looping way where I expend a lot of energy in making no effort. But this morning, I made an effort, and I wore something that makes me feel good.

  Lucy said, ‘Why are you wearing the Boob Top?’ when I arrived, and I shrugged and said, ‘It was the only clean thing I had,’ all innocent, and I could see from her face that she didn’t believe me.

  The thing is, I quite like my breasts. When I stand naked in front of a mirror, I like the way they look. Full, reasonably perky and only slightly uneven in size, which is normal according to the billion times I’ve checked on the internet. If I were ever to become famous and be the subject of a series of tasteful black-and-white nude photographs taken by a renowned photographer, my breasts would be without a doubt the artistic highlight. Or, in an only marginally more likely scenario, if I ever have the inclination to send someone a sext, my breasts will be the pornographic highlight.

  I’m pretty sure my boobs are responsible for the only time in my life I properly kissed someone. It was at the year-eleven school social, which Lucy had bullied me into going to—when I say bullied, what I actually mean is lots of positive reinforcement, emotional cheerleading and general enthusiasm—and she pretty much babysat me all night to stop me from sneaking off and leaving. It got to the very end of the night, the time when everyone who is panicking about having kissed no one starts desperately looking around and grabbing each other, and I’m sure my cleavage was one of the major things attracting the boy to me in the three seconds he spent looking at me before he mashed his face against mine. I was a very willing participant in the mashing, as the fact I hadn’t kissed anyone in my life was weighing on me—forget being a virgin, being unkissable is a worse fate, especially for anyone who has had bad skin.

  ‘Well?’ Lucy picks up a bag of chips, looks at it, and puts it down again. She’s had no appetite for a few weeks now, which is worrying me. Lucy doesn’t eat much when she’s anxious about something. (I tend to operate at the other end of the spectrum.) Zach and I used to bring her food in the lead up to final exams, because we knew she’d just nibble at an apple otherwise. But, the thing is, exams are over. She got the marks she wanted. She’ll likely get into the course she wants, and yet I can tell she’s still lugging all that stress around like an overstuffed backpack she can’t take off.

  ‘Well, what?’ I answer.

  ‘What happened at the party, obviously?’

  ‘Honestly, there’s nothing to say. I went. I hung out. I came home.’ I shrug, as though I am the kind of person who goes to parties all the time and then shrugs about it. No big deal.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. There’s so much to say. Let’s start with the big stuff and work backwards: did you kiss Owen?’ Lucy asks.

  ‘No. God. I would have mentioned that.’

  ‘Did you come close?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you touch at any point?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was there eye contact?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Did you talk to each other?’

  Lucy is good at grilling people because this is how her mother operates—a million rapid-fire questions about your day, your homework, your train ride home, the walk from the train station to your house, the last thought you had before you opened the front door. I think they see it as some weird way to practise for when Lucy becomes a lawyer.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Interact in any way?’

  ‘Sort of. He said hi and asked if I was having fun. I said yes. Oh, and he peed in front of me.’

  ‘He peed on you?’ Zach says, his voice almost a yelp.

  ‘Not on me. Near me. In front of me. For barely a second. He peed into the toilet and I was momentarily standing near him.’

  ‘Why were you in the bathroom with Owen?’ Lucy asks. Her tone is gentle now, like the voice our school counsellor Ms Bennett used when she wanted you to confess to being the person who hung a used tampon off the balcony railing. (The tampon incident, as it came to be known, remain unsolved but everyone was pretty sure it was a girl called Marley who loved gross and shocking things and always had at least three disgusting videos primed and ready to show you on her phone.)

  ‘I was leaving as he was coming in…oh, forget I even mentioned it.’

  ‘I can never forget,’ Lucy says.

  ‘Did you want to kiss him?’ Zach asks.

  ‘In the bathroom?’

  ‘At any time.’

  ‘No.’

  I suspect they don’t believe me.

  ‘You are the worst storyteller today,’ Lucy says, and she sighs dramatically.

  The thing is, her interest in my life is genuine. From the moment we met, Lucy has cared about what happens to me, and I usually put a little bit of effort into making it worthwhile for her. I always tell a story. My life has had so few things happen in it that when I go to a party on my freaking own, you better believe I will draw it out into a week-long discussion, dissecting every interaction and moment. No doubt they’re still annoyed I wasn’t live-texting and sending them videos of every moment. My lacklustre answers today are bordering on unforgivable.

  So I go back to the beginning and give them a proper run through, emphasising the hiding in the bathroom part, which they enjoy, and explaining the Owen peeing moment, which Lucy makes me retell more tha
n once (‘What did you see exactly?’), but I skip over the spin-the-bottle ending, because I know Lucy will become laser focused on that part and Zach will act weird about the fact Alex and I got each other, but mostly because I’m not ready to say it out loud, because to speak the words of what happened might reduce it to the very small thing it really is.

  If it’s not already clear, Lucy and Zach are my everything. I met them both at a writing camp when I was fifteen. Several schools in my area were asked to choose two students each from year ten to attend a special writing retreat set over three days in the wilderness. There would be workshops, sessions on creativity, book discussions and time to write. Everything about it sounded amazing to me, even the wilderness part, even though I would undoubtedly perish within thirty minutes if I ever got lost in the bush on my own.

  I was one of the students chosen from my school, and I made myself sick about it. I had never wanted and not wanted something so much in my life. I had started my serious acne medication four months prior to going, and it was working, which was so miraculous I was still getting used to the idea, but it made my lips so cracked and dry they would sometimes bleed just from opening my mouth to eat something, I had to put on lip balm every ten minutes (that’s not an exaggeration, I truly had to apply lip balm up to ten times an hour in order to function) and I had rough, scaly hands and elbows and a weird, shiny red patch had appeared on my left cheek—all side effects that I was very self-conscious about.

  Also, because of my self-imposed post-puberty social isolation, I wasn’t very good at meeting new people, or staying at a house other than my own, or sleeping in a bed that’s not my own, or making small talk with new people. I wasn’t good at existing outside a set of very narrow confines (the walls of my house, basically). I had spent three years turning myself into a socially incapable shut-in, and I didn’t know how to undo that.