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 than 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.