Up and down the corridor, groups of Fifth Formers were going door to door, screaming, air kissing, spreading holiday gossip, admiring each other’s interior decoration. Divines put a lot of effort into prettifying new dorms, hanging tie-dye sheets in windows, papering the walls floor to ceiling with posters, the content of which notably changed as we aged. First ponies, then pop bands, and finally hunks torn out from magazines—Brad, River, Leonardo, Johnny. Pseudo porn. Oily naked torsos and thumbs tucked into boxer shorts. Whole evenings were spent examining the two lean muscular lines that started either side of Stephen Dorff’s belly button, the inguinal crease, moneymaker, angled slightly together so that, we speculated, they coalesced somewhere close to his pubic hair.
My door banged open, lights switched on. I winced.
Skipper. My best friend since I was eleven years old. Or my former best friend, I wasn’t sure. For the past few months I had fretted endlessly about the status of our friendship. We had begun to drift, progressively hanging out less and less in each other’s dorms or sharing cigarettes or even sitting together at breakfast. The daughter of a Greek shipping magnate and an English mother (also Divine, a contemporary of my own mother), Skipper had spent her four weeks of holiday in Athens. I had spent Easter in my parents’ new house in Hong Kong. She had neither written back to me nor called during the entire break. This was the longest we had ever gone without speaking.
“Anyone home?” She knocked.
Her chestnut hair, of which she had a Botticellian amount, was piled up on the top of her head and fastened with a velvet scrunchie. The rest of her body was oddly hairless. Unlike the rest of us, Skipper never had to shave, not even her armpits. Her tanned legs had an imperceptible, iridescent layer of light fuzz that you could only see when, as on that first day of term, she stood backlit by the corridor light, dressed in nothing but a long Snoopy T-shirt. She was slightly stockier than I was, but her breasts were large and near perfectly round. At that age I was mortified by how underdeveloped I was; the fact that I had pancake tits, bee stings as Skipper once called them, was a constant source of embarrassment to me. It was like they had forgotten to grow.
I raised a hand and gave Skipper a swift nautical salute from the bed, which had once been our greeting of choice, a private joke we had shared since first year, though suddenly the gesture felt juvenile, made more embarrassing when Skipper either didn’t see the prompt or decided not to return it, and instead stood there in the doorway, balancing on one foot. She twisted a stray curl around her index finger. Her retainer clicked in and out of her mouth like a pair of dentures.
I pulled off my headphones.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“Jet lag.” I pincered open my eyelids with my fingers. “Can’t stay awake.”
“Oh, right. Bad luck.”
Skipper squinted around to see what I had done in the way of decoration. My half of the room was almost finished and a yin-yang sarong hung above my head. The other side of the room allocated to Gerry was still bare. A few remaining posters of mine were scattered around the desk below my bunk bed, some of them blown across the floor. I cast a look behind me at the postcard where the Polaroid was hidden but decided to wait to hear Skipper’s news before I showed her.
Skipper walked across my room, treading on several clothes spewing from my overnight bag.
“Who’s this?”
She was pointing to an effeminate-looking aftershave model I’d torn out of a magazine on the plane. Without waiting for an explanation Skipper climbed up on my desk, stepping over me so she could examine each of the new posters I’d carefully blue-tacked to the wall.
“Wicked,” she said, pretending to stroke Matt Dillon’s chest.
Skipper had a deep, rather masculine voice—I can still hear it now—plus all that thick hair, so both sonically and physically she took up a lot of space, which served her well on the lacrosse field where she was by far our best goalie. The ribbed thigh pads, chest protector, mouth guard, and grilled helmet virtually doubled her size. She was loud and quick witted, an expert skier and sailor, very confident. From the time our mothers pushed us together I was always rather in awe of her. Skipper had been the natural mouth of our duo and I the brains, tags that we capitalized on at first but had started to grow tedious as soon as we were teenagers. Reputations for being butch and brainy weren’t going to get us boyfriends.
Skipper’s legs were spread, her nightshirt hitched; I could see all the way up her thighs to her crotch, the only place, aside from her head, where she had any hair. I tried not to stare at the two tufts escaping from either side of her underwear elastic as well as the dangling string of a tampon. Long before I had started menstruating or grown breasts, Skipper had extremely heavy periods. In days gone by it had been my role to check the back of her skirt during the Sunday church service, avoiding the mortifying act of kneeling for Communion with blood seeping through her tights. In exchange I would exhale in her face so she could test for halitosis, bad breath being my own teenage neurosis.
Skipper moved along the top bunk looking at my posters, most of which were new, clicking her retainer against the roof of her mouth. She and I had probably shared twelve or so dorms in our time, our wall space typically split down an imaginary center line. She favored tennis hunks of the day, Andre Agassi and Pat Cash as I remember. I had a rotating collection of magazine front covers, The Face and SKY, most of which were ripped down and replaced each term except, for some reason, a signed photograph I had bought from a stall at Kensington Market, a pre-Bad-Seeds-era Nick Cave in which a very young, cocky Cave smoked and gazed mysteriously upwards through quizzical eyebrows. I don’t know why his furrowed brow and pale skin appealed to me so much. Perhaps I thought it gave me credibility amongst my peers, or more likely a boy I had a crush on said he was a fan, I don’t remember. On the whole, Divines had terrible taste in music. We couldn’t have cared less about the rave scene or feminist punk or the underground. All of that passed us by. The tapes we blasted on our expensive boom boxes were whatever inane pop songs had made the top 10, novelty acts, and the slushy ballads we slow-danced to at school balls. Culturally immune, we wept over Kurt Cobain when he died, not because we liked Nirvana or understood his lyrics, but because a beautiful boy had shot himself in the head.
Skipper was inching closer and closer to the postcard where the photo of the penis was hidden, the thought of which made me let out a nervous snort, like a horse exhaling. I quickly tried to cover it up with a laugh. Skipper looked down at me for a moment, finger curling her hair, as if she was trying to decide something, then she smiled and bounced down onto her bottom next to me.
“Very cool,” Skipper said, twirling her finger at the walls. “I like what you’ve done. Très bon.”
I experienced a huge surge of relief. Whatever faux pas I had made earlier in the year clearly no longer mattered to her or had been forgotten over the Easter break. Probably it had just been my imagination. Riddled with insecurities, I had a propensity to read too much into a situation—if someone forgot to wait for me before crossing the bridge, for example, or if they hadn’t saved me a space at the supper table, I brooded about it for days. I tortured myself over trivial comments, a flippant remark about my clothes or hair, analyzing the exact wording for hidden criticisms, looping it in my head. Perhaps all teenagers live in this state of permanent paranoia, but I anxiously lived in fear of making a fool of myself in front of my peers, terrified I’d say something that would expose me as an imposter. I had persuaded myself that it was simply because our mothers pushed us together in those early years that Skipper and I became best friends. I was constantly expecting Skipper to realize we were only bound to each other by happenstance, that she’d tire of me, to find someone funnier or sportier or more sophisticated to spend her time with, less of a bookworm, always waiting for the sword to fall. When it came down to it I had brains, not beauty, and I felt her loyalty to me was the only thing that saved me from being labeled a nerd.