It’s barely past seven but the party’s already messy: sticky carpet, cigarette smoke spiralling in the air, tinny music bleating out of a speaker that no-one seems to care sounds rubbish. Everyone’s leaning against torn op-shop couches, leaning against the walls, leaning against each other. Everyone except two girls doing cartwheels outside on the grass — and me. I hesitate in the doorway, wondering if it’s too late to do a runner, and see a pile of puke decorating the steps at the entrance to the uni residences’ rec centre. Not surprising really: homemade punch’s been flowing for hours.
Through the stench and drooping streamers, from a couch on the other side of the room, Sal spots me and waves me over. She’s cross-legged, barefoot and laughing with three guys slurping from plastic cups. They’re in uniform: deep V-necks, thongs, lashings of sunburn across the nose. If we were in Durnan, Sal would’ve avoided them, shrugged them off as douchebag poster boys. But we’re not in Durnan, not even close. A red bra peeks out from beneath her singlet. I haven’t seen it before, or maybe I haven’t paid enough attention.
I give her a wave — on my way — and squeeze past a table stocked with undercooked sausage rolls, tripping over a spray-painted sign that’s fallen from the ceiling: Happy Valentine’s Day, loser! I smirk. Tell me about it.
By the time I reach Sal, I’m drenched in someone else’s punch. She leaps to her feet, passes me a cup and introduces me to the group, but I forget their names immediately, except the tallest guy — a gum-chewing second-year law student called Woody who can burp the first verse of Bohemian Rhapsody and has already kissed two girls tonight, according to one of the first-years who’s migrated to our corner.
When everyone slides back into their own conversations, Sal steps in closer to clink our cups together. ‘You’re here.’
‘Yeah, sorry, hot water dropped out, and Mum rang to check I got in alright, then I sorta got lost finding this joint and …’ I cut myself off. ‘Yeah, I’m here. Hey.’
‘How great is this?’ Sal says. ‘We can pretend you live here — that we’re freshers together. We’re not cheesy Valentine’s Day people anyway, are we?’
I shrug. ‘Nah, all good.’
I don’t remind her that only four hours earlier, I’d organised a date for us for tonight, before her ‘slight change of plans’. The kind of date she’s always pestering me to organise — without party pies soaked in punch.
Laughter erupts from the rest of the group. A massive grin has spread across Woody’s face.
‘What? What did I miss?’ Sal asks, grabbing a nearby girl’s arm.
‘Just my famous Chewbacca impression, dear Sal,’ Woody says. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll do it again just for you.’
Sal laughs as she readjusts her cut-offs. I wait for her to tell him she’s never seen a Star Wars film, not even after two years of me begging, but she doesn’t. Instead, she tosses her ponytail, like girls do in the movies when they’re pretending to be blasé but really just want to show off their hair. Sal’s is strawberry-blonde, flowing, shiny — the kind that gets in the way when you’re fooling around.
Woody repeats the impression, throwing an extra growl in her direction, and the group cheers.
A girl with lipstick as bright as a traffic cone pushes through our group to top up Sal’s cup before wandering off to splash punch over someone else.
‘That’s Jamie,’ Sal tells me. ‘Apparently she fell down two flights of stairs after the last punch party. She’s a scream. Oh, and her and Woody used to date, like a hundred years ago.’
‘Ah, right. Cool.’
I take a swig, realising it’s the first time we’ve met new people who don’t already know us as a couple. In Durnan, we’ve been a package deal since we were sixteen. I was her first kiss, she was my first kiss that meant something, and we were voted ‘most likely to get married’ at our Year 12 formal three months ago. While everyone else was hooking up and breaking up, we were ‘Milo and Sal’. We just were.
A hand claps on my shoulder. Woody’s back.
‘So, Miles, we’re all wondering, how’d you pull this top chick?’ he asks, snaking an arm around me. ‘She’s a legend, our Sal, a fine specimen.’
Miles. Chick. Our Sal. Specimen. I force a laugh. ‘Er, well —’
‘Woody, it’s Milo,’ Sal cuts in.
He slurps his drink. ‘What did I say?’
‘Miles.’ Sal elbows him. ‘It’s Milo, with an “o”. I told you that last night.’
Last night?
‘Okay, so what’s the story, Milo with an “o”?’ Woody asks. ‘The boys around campus’ve been nursing broken hearts since finding out this little fresher is off-limits.’
‘Ignore him,’ Sal says. ‘There are no broken hearts. Although maybe there’ll be some broken bones if certain people don’t watch themselves.’ She elbows Woody again, this time throwing him a smirk too.
A second fake laugh is out before I can stop it. Woody doesn’t notice — he’s already charged off to a beer-skolling contest on the lawn.
His question thumps in my head, probably ’cos I never ‘pulled’ Sal. We got together when our pushiest mates interfered during recess in Year 11. I was playing basketball when two of her friends — both gossips, both perpetually single — dragged me off the court. ‘Sally likes you, do you like her?’ they asked me, giggling, as my mates pissed themselves. I remember shrugging. I didn’t like her, not like that, but I didn’t not like her, which seemed good enough at the time. I didn’t know anything about her other than that she sat in front of me in chemistry, plaited and unplaited her hair whenever she was supposed to be taking notes, and ate meatballs and pasta for lunch when most of our year was throwing away half-eaten sandwiches. But she was a girl — a girl who had the hots for me apparently — so I worked out how to like her. Fast. One week of awkward conversations, one week of sweaty hand-holding, one week of kissing each other so hard I had to sneak some of Mum’s lip balm later, one week of grinding our school–uniform–covered bodies against each other whenever her parents were home late from work, and that was that — I’d fallen into my first relationship. Our friends did all the work and I let them. It was all mapped out for me. Not exactly the stuff of fairy tales.
Sal drags me over to sit on the couch. ‘Hey,’ she says, ‘loving life?’
I give a thumbs-up ’cos it feels like less of a lie that way.
‘Oi, bitches! Coming in.’ Jamie wedges between us, tugging on my shirt. ‘Alright, Milo, real-talk time. Tell me everything I need to know. Who are you, what are you doing, and why aren’t you coming here to play with us? And … go!’
I rattle through the boring stuff — eighteen, live in Durnan, Sal’s boyfriend of two years, doing the long-distance thing while she’s studying in Canberra — to disguise the fact I don’t have answers for most of her other questions. She may as well have asked me to multiply 47,201 by 13,546, subtract 391 and divide by 31 without a calculator. The answer? Who the hell knows.
‘Yeah, but why are you still in dumb-ass Durnan?’ Jamie interrupts. ‘Three hours away with nothing going on? You may as well be on Mars. Sal says it’s a hole packed with halfwits. Right, Sal?’
Sal shakes her head. ‘That’s not exactly what I said.’
I shrug. ‘Just taking some time.’
There it is. I’ve said that line so much since last year, I almost believe it.
‘Whaddya mean?’ Jamie asks, leaning in. Her breath reeks of cigarettes so I pull back a little. ‘To do what?’
Sal answers before I can admit I have no freakin’ idea. ‘He’s working for his parents and then he might join us next year. Or even next semester. Either way, he’ll get here. Right, Milo?’
Sal seems to have a whole publicity campaign down, spinning the truth so I don’t seem like such a dud of a boyfriend. She’s so confident, so happy, so unlike the Sal who reversed out of my driveway two weeks ago. That Sal whispered, ‘Tell me I’m going to make friends and learn how to fold a fitted sheet and ace my subjects and find a café that makes the perfect poached egg. Tell me I’m going to be fine.’ When I told her, ‘You’re going to kill it,’ she was so overwhelmed with nerves that she burst into tears. Now, it’s like she’s someone who’s never been anxious in her life.
‘You’re saving money, Milo? Oh damn, you’re rich, aren’t you? Hey, Milo’s rich, everyone!’ Jamie claps her hands together. ‘Do you live in a McMansion with a pool and a tennis court and a pantry big enough to hook up in?’ Her body slants towards me like the Leaning Tower of Pisa and she pokes me in the chest. ‘’Cos you should. You should, Milo.’
Burp. Her eyes bulge. Her hand rushes to her mouth.
‘You okay?’ Sal asks. ‘J?’
Jamie nods, her chin now smudged with lipstick, before hurling red chunks all over my jeans.
* * *
Woody is a human skyscraper so it’s no surprise his shorts bunch up on me, giving me the appeal of a mouldy cucumber. I wriggle around on the tiles to try to disguise my knobbly knees, but can’t get comfortable — especially with about thirty of us jammed into the kitchen on Sal’s residence’s floor, which now stinks of burnt cheese.
‘You look fine, stop worrying,’ Sal says as she butters up a round of toasted sandwiches. ‘Besides, everyone here on ressies wants to get into Woody’s pants, and look at you — nailed it first time.’
‘They do?’ Everyone. She’s said it herself.
She pecks me on the lips. ‘Obviously not everyone.’
‘I know.’
I don’t know shit.
Now the punch party’s fizzled out, the night has somehow morphed into a blow-by-blow of Woody’s shenanigans. How many girls he’s kissed tonight (six), how many girls he’s turned down tonight (two), and how many girls he’s kissed since Orientation Week (thirteen). Jamie, perked up with a second wind, inputs all the data onto a piece of butcher’s paper that stretches across the kitchen floor. The others all cheer as she tapes it to the wall, crooked, while I gnaw on my toastie and digest the fact I don’t even know that many girls.
‘Bed?’ Sal whispers.
‘Nah, I’m not that tired,’ I reply, before noticing her raised eyebrow. ‘Oh. Bed. Yeah, definitely bed.’