by Juno Dawson
‘Was Nico your first … well, whatever he was?’
Polly twirled a lock of newly purple hair around her finger. ‘Nope.’
‘So who was?’
‘With a boy or girl?’
I almost fell off the pirate ship but managed to maintain something that could pass for composure. ‘You’re bisexual?’
She scowled in distaste. ‘Bitch, please. Labels are for **** you buy in shops.’
I was aghast and embarrassed. How CRAP of me to assume she was straight. It became horribly clear that I assumed everyone was default straight, and I should have known better. Still, Polly had never mentioned girls. But I also realised that, aside from Nico, she didn’t really mention boys … except for her unrequited crush on Etienne.
‘Sorry.’ I tried to keep the shock off my unworldly little face. ‘So which came first?’
‘Girl. Tanya. She ****** me when I was fourteen on Year 9 camp.’
My eyes widened. ‘Can two girls …?’
‘****? Duh, of course.’ She made another crude hand gesture and I more than got the picture.
‘I wasn’t so nervous that time, it mostly felt like we were playing. For some reason peens are really scary, like a flesh spear flying towards your nether-regions!’
‘I know, right!’ I threw my hands up. ‘And Nico’s doesn’t strike me as a little one!’
‘Limited experience, but I suspect you’re right.’ Polly offered me a cigarette which I obviously declined. ‘Look. It’s going to be scary, but go with it. All the best things are scary.’
I sighed. ‘I guess once I get the first time over and done with it’ll be OK.’
Polly smiled a secret smile. ‘Nope. Every time is scary if it’s someone you really like. But good scary – like an adrenaline rush.’
‘I thought you said nothing meant anything?’
‘Tors, you should have figured it out by now. I talk a lot of ****.’ She smiled and lay flat on the cool planks to look up at the sky. I lay alongside her. Black clouds looked like Rorschach-test inkblots in the indigo sky. ‘I spend way too much time in my head,’ Polly went on. ‘You know sometimes I totally ******* annoy myself.’
‘Oh god, me too.’
‘Like, sometimes I spend all this time thinking about myself and I think I must be the most self-involved **** ever, and I get so cross at myself and that’s just even more time in my head. I go around and around in these little circles. You know what I mean?’
I did and I didn’t, but I agreed with her. Far, far up above, landing lights flickered on the wings of an aeroplane. ‘When I was little,’ I finally said, ‘I used to think that planes were UFOs and that the aliens were coming to take my mum and dad away from me.’
Polly swivelled round to face me. ‘No way! I used to think that too – my sister used to watch this show called –’
‘The X Files? Yeah, that’s where I got it too. My babysitter used to let me watch it on Sky. It terrified me.’
‘Me too.’ Polly grinned at me. After a moment she said, ‘You know what my mum said to me today?’
‘No. Because I’m not Jean Grey. Yet.’
‘She said, “Where do you think you’ll be in ten years?” I mean what the **** are you meant to say to that?’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘That I didn’t have a ******* clue. What would you have said?’
I thought about it. Twenty-seven, yikes. I pictured myself in a tailored skirt suit, marching somewhere in heels with a venti latte. It looked all wrong. ‘I have no idea. It’s scary. Scarier than Nico’s willy in fact.’ Her silence told me she felt the same way. ‘I hope we’re still friends though.’
She faced me and looked at me as if I was speaking Punjabi. ‘Of course we will be. This is forever.’
In the absence of a shooting star, the aeroplane would have to do. I made my wish: I never wanted this – this night, this feeling – to end.
I wrote this about Polly. I didn’t tell her.
Grrrl
Crack den sherbet dip
Safety pin tights rip
Hotel / motel
Don’t care, won’t tell
White lip bruise eye
Razor blade cherry pie
Knuckleduster scapegoat
Sheep in wolf’s coat
Vodka chunks daisy chain
Chewing gum on my brain
Shoplift, rosebud
That one’s no good
Red mouth lioness
Chainmail undressed
Fast forward on repeat
Aphrodite on her knees.
Chapter Nine
Sex
I got an A on my French writing assignment. YAAAASSSSSS! Thanks to the combined efforts of Daisy and Polly I was actually doing well again. That was the thing with my new friends – they still felt new, and I still felt like a newcomer – it was us against the rest of the school. We were all getting out of Brompton-on-Sea, and, as Polly had promised, no one was getting left behind. Polly was taking Psychology with Beasley, and she was coaching him as well. There was no concept of who was doing best, all that mattered was getting our tickets out of town. I don’t know if I’d ever seen such determination. Perhaps the key to educational achievement lies in sending young people to dreary dead-end seaside towns.
The nights grew longer and colder but we still went to the golf course, only in more clothes. Jamie clearly HATED us – he just wanted to shut the kiosk and go home. No such luck.
Initially I was fascinated with Polly being … not bi, but bi … or queer? LOOK, sometimes labels are quite handy for describing stuff, OK? I gave Beasley a super-hard time for not saying anything – it felt like yet another loop I’d been left out of. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!’ I spanked his bum with a golf club at Hole 3.
‘Ow! I thought you knew. We don’t talk about it at school for obvious reasons but she always has liked both. She dated Zoë for about five minutes.’
‘Wow, she’s really working her way through that band.’
‘Ha! Yeah!’
I pulled my bobble hat further down my head. ‘God, is everyone in Brompton gay or what?’
Beasley’s eyes widened as he checked no one was listening in. ‘I know, right? We joke that the year we were born doctors were carrying out genetic experiments on the maternity ward. The theory actually stands up pretty well. There’s me,’ he said under his breath, ‘Pol, Zoë, Etienne’s not fussed either way, and clearly Marcus Brady in Year 13.’
‘Oh, “Marcus Gaydy”? Yeah, I heard about him.’
‘Yeah, he, like, totally tried to hit on me once.’ Well, that had to be a lie. Marcus Brady looked like a Burberry model. Beasley … less so. ‘And I wouldn’t be surprised if Alex was keeping something secret. I don’t think straight guys like dressing up as much as he does. Can I have a turn with the gloves?’ It was so cold but Beasley had forgotten his so we were taking it in turns to wear mine. Polly, Daisy and the others were hanging out at the kiosk. ‘Thanks. What about you, Tor? Ever kissed a girl and liked it?’
‘No,’ I said too quickly. ‘I mean … no.’
‘You never kissed a girl or you never liked it?’
‘Either! Oh, well, except Polly when we played spin-the-bottle.’
Beasley smirked. ‘Polly had the biggest crush on you when you got here. Don’t tell her I said that; she would rip my balls off and shove them in my eye sockets.’
My mouth fell open. ‘What?’ I dearly hoped this was Beasley being economical with the truth again.
‘Oh god, you must have noticed! She’s hardly subtle, is she?’
‘I really didn’t.’ My heart lolloped around my chest. I recalled the night I’d slept in her bed, our bodies pressed together. Had she been aroused? Worse, had I led her on? Awk. I replayed the evening in my mind, looking for lesbian faux pas. I didn’t know whether to be bothered or not. She probably should have told me, I thought. Would it have made a difference? Would I have still slept alongside
her if I’d known she had a crush? I couldn’t decide if there was a tiny bit of homophobia lurking somewhere inside me like a parasite, or if I was simply annoyed at not being told.
As winter got even more wintery, and the walk to school became a veritable ice rink, I resented Beasley for ever saying anything at all. It changed how I was with Polly. I scrutinised every sentence and glance, looking for signs that she still might be internally shipping us. I couldn’t see any immediate differences but when you dwelled on it for as long as I did, things became more ambiguous. She was always grabbing my hand and dragging me places, always playing with my hair. What did it all mean?
I thought she was my best friend. Was she only hanging out with me because she fancied me? That was an awful thought. In the end I confided in Daisy who I knew would tell me straight. ‘Whatever Beasley said, she wasn’t hopelessly in love or anything,’ she said in perfect French during French class. She was working on the latest instalment of the Geoff Squirrel saga. In this episode, Geoff had been locked up in an asylum because no one else would believe his fake baby was evil.
Poor Geoff.
I frantically flicked through my French dictionary trying to catch up. ‘Is she over it?’ I asked, pretty sure in French that literally meant, ‘Has she climbed over it?’
‘Oui!’ Daisy assured me. ‘It’s not a big deal.’
Semi-satisfied, I agreed to something so shocking, you may need to sit down while reading the next sentence.
I agreed to participate in the Christmas carol concert.
I KNOW. No one was more surprised than me. It turned out that the gang were VERY into Christmas. Perhaps ‘Being Really Excited About Christmas’ was the new ‘Being Over Christmas’, as I had been for, like, the last three years. It was all a blur of advent calendars (there was a bet as to who could find the most joyless, overtly religious one), swapping Christmas cards and posting letters to Santa at the local supermarket. Apparently you got a reply.
I found myself swept along with the excitement. We even went, en masse, to the grand switching on of the town lights. We swaddled ourselves in scarfs and hats and stood in the drizzle as the weather girl from the local news and a former X Factor contestant switched the lights on. ‘Ooooh,’ we said, followed by ‘Aaaaah’, although they weren’t very impressive. Some of the flickering candle illuminations looked like willies.
Polly would be allowed to have a few friends around for a shindig once we broke up so we did Secret Santa in preparation for our Christmas-Before-Christmas. I got Beasley and started to think of something horror-y to get him. I’d get Nico something too, and maybe Polly and Daisy. Secret Santa, it transpired, was oppressive to my newfound seasonal joy. I wanted to get everyone something!
Rehearsals were every Tuesday and Friday and quickly became my new favourite thing. Night-time now oozed in a little before four, but it felt safe and warm inside the main school hall. Icy windows fogged up and the room smelled clean and pine-tinged from the Christmas tree that filled a whole corner from floor to ceiling. It was a weird marriage of the music folk to the rest of us. Beasley, Alice and Alex were all in the concert band so that left Polly, Daisy and I in the choir with a few of the Pot-Pourri girls and a new social subgroup – the Theatre Studies gang. All of them were mini Lea Micheles and all of them were going to MAKE IT.
Polly invented a fantastic game for us to play during rehearsals: The Fake Lyrics game. The idea was to subtly sing along with made-up lyrics – just loud enough for us to hear. The winner was anyone who could get the rest of us to crack up. First up was ‘Away in a Manger’: ‘Away in a manger, I never give head,’ sang Polly. ‘I might get mouth herpes and wind up all dead.’
My turn. ‘The little Lord Jesus sells drugs to the kids.’ Polly had to stifle a laugh.
‘The stars in the bright sky turned everyone gay,’ finished Daisy and we all cracked up.
‘Girls!’ snapped Mrs Randall, the choirmaster. ‘Is there a problem?’
‘No, miss,’ we all said in unison.
Some sessions we played a different game where we took it in turns to sing one word each. It certainly made rehearsals more fun.
‘Silent.’ Polly.
‘Night.’ Me.
‘Holy.’ Daisy.
‘Night.’ Polly again …
‘All.’
‘Is.’ Daisy.
‘Calm.’
‘All.’
‘Is … why do I keep getting “is”? That’s a rubbish word.’
‘Bright.’
It’s harder than it looks.
More significant than carols and gingerbread lattes, I decided in the run-up to Polly’s party that this was going to be it. I was going to lose my penis virginity to Nico. I felt there was only so much kissing and rubbing his crotch I could get away with. I know planning it doesn’t sound particularly romantic, but as much as I’d have liked it to be wild and spontaneous, that wasn’t happening, so I was taking matters into my own hands. Literally. Once we’d got the first time out of the way, I hoped things would happen more organically.
‘Polly …’ We were chatting in the sixth-form study room the week before the party. This close to Christmas, everyone was winding down – even the miserly librarian had strung some threadbare tinsel along the front of the counter. ‘I think I’m ready to have sex with Nico. At your party.’
She paused. I wanted an honest reaction. If Polly was into me, I wanted to know. This method was a little backhanded, but I figured her reaction would tell me everything I needed to know. ‘Oh. OK.’ Her response was neutral.
I didn’t get it. If she’d had such a big crush on me, why had she given me her blessing to date Nico in the first place? Still, I thought it polite to ask. ‘Is that OK?’
Polly merely shrugged. ‘I guess so. What do you want me to say? No one ever really wants to think about their friends getting it on. It’s gross.’
‘I mean about using your place.’
‘Yeah, whatever. Have my bed. I’ll take the sofa bed in the study.’ Her face remained unreadable.
‘Are you sure?’
Polly arched a brow. ‘Sure. Who am I to **** up young love?’
Beasley was wrong about Polly, I knew it. ‘You’re the best. I mean it. Thank you so much … for everything.’ I hoped being my best friend would be an OK consolation.
‘All right, calm down. I only said you could use my bed; we don’t need to have a ******* Hallmark moment.’
‘I meant for everything since I got here. Can you believe it’s nearly Christmas already? I’ve been here a whole term. Like, where has time gone?’
Polly leaned in conspiratorially. ‘Do you want to know a secret?’
‘Do I ever.’
‘Don’t tell anyone, but we’re the best ones.’ She scanned the library. ‘Look at all of these beige people. They all think we’re freaks but none of them are ever going to do anything. They’re going to die here and before that they’ll be estate agents or nail technicians and marry men called Dave and watch reality TV in the bedroom. We’re better than them. I’m glad you’re here, Tor.’
I rolled my eyes. No one was listening so I have no idea why I felt the need to defend. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that …’
‘Do you want to be a nail technician?’
I waggled my chewed, chipped nails in her face.
‘We’re gonna be ******* magnificent. Mag-nif-i-cent.’
There were things to get ready before SEX NIGHT, as it was now called. Nico was in on the plan. I told him when we were kissing next to the Loch Ness monster one night. ‘I’m ready … to … go all the way,’ I said.
He said, ‘Cool.’
And that was that. There were practical considerations:
1. The pill – I was not on the pill. Maybe I should be on the pill. I didn’t want to discuss STIs with Nico because they were not sexy, but I thought it best if we used a condom.
2. Condoms – who would get them? Nico’s college had a drop-in-nurse-centre th
ing, so he could get some from there.
3. My vagina – having only properly seen my one and (ACCIDENTALLY) the exterior of my mum’s, I was only half confident that I had a pretty one. I’m not Amish; I’ve logged on to porn sites so I assumed Nico had too. According to porn, I should shave off everything I’ve got down there, but Polly assured me she had not, so a realistic amount of pubic hair wasn’t going to terrify the boy. I was increasingly paranoid about the aroma of my vagina as well. Some of the less charming boys in Year 12 had spread a particularly vicious rumour about Summer next door and her ‘fishy fanny’. Between that and scented sanitary towels I was beginning to worry that women were being subtly brainwashed into hating their own vaginas. I really hope boys have to worry about shit like this too.
4. Will it hurt? I understood it was going to hurt, but what are we talking on a scale of one to ten where one is ‘ouchie’ and ten is ‘GET IT OUT’?
5. Performance – again, I have watched porn, but I’m not an idiot. Surely no one thinks that is how sex actually goes, but I did want Nico to think of me as a sexy person. I wasn’t going to go and buy flammable underwear and whipped cream or any crazy crap, but I hoped that sex was something you could be inherently good at the first time you tried it. This was especially hard because Nico had done it before. He knew I hadn’t and didn’t seem to care, but I did.
Polly’s party was a much calmer affair than Zoë’s had been. It was just the gang. Dress code: Christmas jumpers. Polly had made a playlist of creepy old Christmas songs that were playing as we arrived. Typically, for a girl who sought to avoid cliché, it was a most un-Polly-like affair – we were each given a glass of mulled wine and we gathered in the lounge like grown-ups where there were nibbles and a cheese board. This felt like the most grown-up gathering I’d ever been to. I liked that.
Polly’s parents had gone to London for their annual Christmas shopping/theatre/hotel extravaganza, so we had the place to ourselves. When we’d all arrived it was time for Secret Santa around the open fire. I’d bought Beasley a book about feminism in slasher films, which he seemed genuinely happy to get. My secret Santa was Alice. My initial disappointment in this reveal was unfounded – she’d got me the one Studio Ghibli film I didn’t already have. Either I’d mentioned it in passing or she’d asked Polly, but I was thrilled.