I’ve been awake all night in an attempt to maintain some kind of hold on what has happened, on what I have done. My eyes are red and prickling with tiredness, but I daren’t go to sleep. If I sleep, when I wake up I’ll have one blissful, terrible second when I’m unaware – and then it will all come crashing in on me, its power multiplied indefinitely by that one un-knowing second.
I think of the last time I saw the dawn in, lying in Sophie’s bed. This time it’s a more tempestuous and bleaker affair. A ceaseless summer rain has been falling all night, and the branch of a nearby tree is thwacking intermittently against my windowpane. It’s not just the chemicals keeping me awake, although I can still feel them coursing, unwanted, around my veins. I’ve been sitting here on the floor for four hours, as my bedroom turns gradually from darkness to a dull grey half-light. I’m surrounded by the debris of my elaborate preparations for the evening that, twelve hours ago, stretched out invitingly, bright with the promise of acceptance and approval. There are three dresses strewn on the bed, with the accompanying pair of shoes for each lying discarded in front of the full-length mirror. My eyes rest dully on the stain on the carpet where Sophie dropped my new bronzing powder and I made a clumsy attempt to wipe it up with a bit of tissue dipped in a glass of stale water.
The dress I wore lies in a crumpled heap next to me – I’ve pulled on an old sweatshirt and leggings. There are dark smudges under my eyes and my lips are dry, the remains of my lipstick clinging to the cracks and bleeding into the skin around my mouth.
I’ve been sitting here on the floor for so long only because I can’t move. I would have expected my heart to be racing, but in fact an iron fist grips it so tightly that I am surprised it is beating at all. Everything has slowed to a funereal pace. If I move my hand to brush my hair behind my ears or pick something up off the floor, however quickly I do it, it’s as though I am moving in slow motion. My brain struggles to make sense of it all, my thoughts moving sluggishly through the past couple of months, trying to figure out how it has come to this.
I suppose it all began a couple of months ago, the day the new girl started. I’d spent break listening to Sophie talking to Claire Barnes and Joanne Kirby, not saying much myself. We were all sitting on that bench at the far edge of the playground, the three of them with their skirts rolled over at the waist so many times there was hardly any point in wearing them. Matt Lewis was watching Sophie from the other side of the playground and I could tell what he was thinking. It was that day, the first one of the year where you could smell spring in the air. I sat on the end of the bench, enjoying the feeling of the sun on my face, hoping they wouldn’t expect me to contribute anything. The sky was the most amazing blue, and Sophie and the other two were sort of shining, their impossibly glossy hair reflecting the sunlight, their smooth golden skin glistening. Of course they knew the effect they were having, they weren’t that stupid.
Sophie was redoing her mascara and talking about a boy she’d got off with the weekend before at Claire Barnes’s sixteenth birthday party. Obviously I wasn’t invited. Claire and Joanne only tolerate me tagging along because I’m friends with Sophie, and sometimes I feel like I’m hanging on to even that friendship by the tips of my fingers.
‘Basically, we were kissing and all that, and then – well, you know the most embarrassing thing that can happen to a boy? That happened.’
Claire and Joanne shrieked.
‘Oh my God!’ Claire said. ‘That is so embarrassing! You know I got off with Mark that time, at Johnny’s party? We went down the fields and I was down there, you know, giving him head, and nothing much was happening and I looked up and guess what? He was asleep!’
Sophie and Joanne fell about laughing and I smiled, to show that I understood the joke. At least I know what giving head is, even if I am hazy on the details. I’ve tried to imagine doing it to someone, even someone I really like, but I can’t. I have no idea how it works, for a start; what you would do with your mouth, your tongue. I shuddered.
Claire leaned in to the other two as if about to impart some great piece of wisdom.
‘It’s all right for you two, it’s still all quite new to you, but I’m actually getting a bit bored with sex, you know. It’s all Dan wants to do. You know sometimes I’d like to go into town or go to the cinema or something?’
Sophie and Joanne fell over themselves to agree. It’s funny, Sophie’s always so cool, so together, but sometimes when she’s with Claire I can see her soft underbelly, the cracks in her facade. They’d recently started letting me go into town with them after school. We would all walk down in a group, but when you get to the path by the river it’s too narrow to walk anything but two-by-two, and I could always feel Sophie and Joanne silently jostling to be the one that got to walk with Claire rather than with me.
Until tonight, I’d never even kissed a boy, and I remember praying that day that the others wouldn’t find out. Sophie knows, but I don’t think she’d tell. At least they never try to involve me in those conversations. I’m always so frightened of saying something stupid, something that will betray my lack of experience. Most of what I know about sex I’ve learned from the pages of Just Seventeen magazine, although God knows it could be more helpful. The problem-page woman seems to assume you have a basic knowledge, so there are always phrases and words I’m not sure about. You’d think maybe sex education at school would have covered this, but no, so far it’s been an ancient 1970s video of a woman giving birth, and some embarrassed talk about penises going into vaginas. Well, even I knew that. The only lesson that had promised to be interesting was the one where Mrs Cook was going to teach us how to put a condom on a banana but guess what: Mrs Cook was ill that day so we had to make do with hearing from one of the other classes in our year who’d done it the week before.
The new girl’s name was Maria Weston. She looked OK, sort of normal uniform, not trendy but not square either. Miss Allan made Sophie look after her, but Sophie basically showed her where the toilets were, and the lunch hall, and then ignored her for the rest of the day. Esther Harcourt tried to make friends with Maria, but even a new girl could see that Esther, in her hand-me-downs and thick-rimmed glasses was not the route to social success at our school. Funny to think that I used to hang out with Esther all the time at primary school. I loved going to her house because her mum let us go off into the woods for hours, although they were vegetarian hippies so we got some odd stuff for tea. I sort of miss her in some ways; we did used to have a laugh. Couldn’t be friends with her any more though – nightmare.
Anyway, at lunch Sophie hadn’t even sat with the new girl, and Esther was already staying away by then because Maria had been so cold to her at morning break. As I got closer to the tills, I started on the daily task of scanning the cafeteria trying to work out where I was going to sit. Maria was sitting on her own at one end of a table with a group of real swots at the other end, including Natasha Griffiths (or, as Sophie calls her, ‘Face and Neck’ due to her orange foundation and white neck). Face and Neck was holding forth on the subject of her English homework and how brilliant Mr Jenkins said it was, and how he’d asked her to stay back specially after class at the end (I bet he did; everyone reckons he’s a right old perv). I was about to pass Maria, wondering whether it was going to be OK to sit with Sophie (she was with Claire and Joanne on the far left corner table which for some reason is the cool table – basically unless you are only having a yoghurt for lunch it’s fairly embarrassing to sit there), when I caught Maria’s eye. She was eating her jacket potato and listening to Natasha banging on about her Shakespeare essay, smiling like she could already tell how full of crap Natasha is, and something made me slow my pace.
‘Is anyone sitting here?’
‘No, no one!’ she said, moving her tray to make room for me. ‘Sit down.’
I unloaded the shameful fat-filled lasagne from my tray and sat down, pressing the sharp end of my apple juice straw into the little silver disc until it popped, a bead of amber liquid oozing from the hole.
‘So, how’s your first day going so far?’
‘Oh, you know, good; of course it’s difficult… you know…’
She trailed off.
‘So, crap basically?’ I grinned.
‘Yeah.’ She smiled in relief. ‘Total crap.’
‘Where did you go to school before? Did your mum and dad move?’
Maria concentrated very hard on cutting the skin of her potato. ‘Yes, we lived in London.’
‘Oh right,’ I said. April seemed like a funny time of year to move, so near the end of GCSE year.
She hesitated. ‘I was having a bit of trouble with some of the other girls.’
I sensed she didn’t want me to press her, so I didn’t.
‘Well, everyone’s really nice here,’ I lied. ‘You won’t have any problems like that. In fact there’s a group of us that goes into town most days after school, you should come.’
‘I can’t today, my brother’s picking me up outside school to walk home. But I’d love to another day.’
First lesson after lunch was maths, and Sophie swung into the seat next to me, freshly made up after a bitching session in the toilets and reeking of Christian Dior’s Poison. I told her that I’d been talking to Maria and that I’d invited her to come into town with us. She turned to me.
‘You’ve invited her out with us?’ There was a dangerous edge to her voice.
‘Yes… is that OK?’ I tried to check the tremor in my voice.
‘Does Claire know?’
‘No… I didn’t think anyone would mind.’
‘You could have checked with me first, Louise.’
‘Sorry, I thought… she’s new, and…’ I rearranged the books on my desk needlessly, panic building. What had I done?
‘I know that. But I’ve heard some things about her already, stuff that happened at her old school.’
‘Oh, it’s OK, she told me about that.’ Maybe this would be OK. ‘None of that was true.’
‘She would say that though, wouldn’t she? Did she tell you what it was about?’
‘No,’ I admitted, my cheeks beginning to burn.
‘Right. Well, maybe you should get your facts straight before you go inviting people out with other people.’
We carried on doing our algebra in silence for a few minutes, although I noticed Sophie was still looking over my shoulder to copy my answers.
‘She can’t come tonight as it happens,’ I ventured eventually. ‘She’s got to meet her brother.’
‘I heard he was a bit of a weirdo as well. Anyway, I can’t go into town tonight. I’m doing something with Claire.’
I clearly wasn’t invited to this mystery outing, so I said nothing. I was surprised Sophie couldn’t feel the heat radiating from me, shock and worry oozing through my pores.
When the bell went she scooped up her stuff and went straight off to the next lesson. At the end of the day she didn’t even say goodbye to me, she just went giggling off, clutching Claire Barnes by the arm, without looking back. I was so frightened that I’d ruined everything with her. Shit shit shit. What was I going to do?