Rachel turned up more than three-quarters of a bloody hour later, and because I was waiting for her I felt much more self-conscious than I would have being alone on purpose. I’d already spent quite a while in the café with Bruno, and I worried the waiters were sick of the sight of me. Towards the end of the wait, I worried Rachel wasn’t going to come at all, and my weird tearful-out-of-nowhere feeling just seemed to get worse; so by the time she did arrive I wanted to sulk. But I was just too happy to see her.
‘Yayyy!’ I said, immediately feeling a bit stupid.
‘OK, so what’s the news, and then I have to tell you mine!’ she said before she’d even sat down.
I didn’t want to rush. I wanted to feel normal with her again first and get back to where we’d been. Somehow, she was almost like a stranger, or anyway a different version of herself. She seemed louder and everything about her was fast and impatient.
‘No, you first’ I said. ‘It sounds serious.’ Even though it had been me repeatedly texting and calling her and getting no reply. But I could sense how much she wanted to talk about something.
‘Uuuuuuh, I . . . talk to me first.’
‘OK, well, yesterday, Lucas took me to a château on his moped – I ride his bike now, like that’s normal, ha ha! – and we ended up snogging for quite a while.’ I paused and looked straight at her.
‘I had sex with Fabrice,’ Rachel said.
‘WHAT? You HAVE had?’
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘Two days ago. The night we were all here in town. The night you met him.’
‘But you don’t even know him!’
‘Wow, you’re really making me feel great,’ Rachel said. Her eyes looked teary. My stomach lurched with guilt; I felt horrible.
‘I’m sorry, Rach. I’m just shocked. How do you feel?’
‘Fine. I’m not sure.’
‘Well, it was what you wanted, wasn’t it?’
‘Yeah, of course.’
I moved my chair round to her side of the table and we leaned against each other, shoulder to shoulder, not talking for a bit.
‘So what happened?’ I said at last.
‘I went home with him, his parents were away, we drank some calvados – that’s this insanely strong apple liqueur they make here, apparently – and we ended up, you know.’
‘How drunk were you?’
‘I shouldn’t have got drunk,’ Rachel said. ‘But I knew what I was doing.’
‘What about Madame Lacasse? Didn’t she ask why you didn’t come back?’
‘I told her I was staying with you,’ Rachel said.
‘Oh. Oh wow,’ I said.
‘Well, you’re not going to deny it!’ she said.
‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘I was just thinking, you know, what if your Frenchwoman gets together and talks to my Frenchwoman. Well, I guess there’s no reason they would, I’m being crazy. Oh listen, you have to come round to dinner at ours soon, Madame Faye told me to ask you.’
‘Yeah, of course I will,’ Rachel said absently.
‘So . . . do you want to talk about it?’
‘Well, you know how it works,’ Rachel said.
‘Well, you know I don’t!’ I said. I leaned back in my chair, moving it away from her. I felt exhausted. I was cross with her for not talking about this to me sooner, although I wasn’t sure when she could have. BEFORE, maybe? She was my best friend! At the same time I was scared of her and scared for her. I thought she’d done a really stupid thing. She didn’t know Fabrice well enough. They lived in different countries. ‘And how do you feel about him?’ I said.
She picked up the annoyance in my voice and turned back to me looking angrier. ‘What if I’m in love with him?’ she asked me loudly. ‘Is that good enough for you? Or do you have a problem with how easily I did it?’
‘I didn’t say anything like that!’
‘You’re thinking it.’
‘I am NOT THINKING IT!’
‘Oh.’
‘I’m just worried about you.’
‘You know, Sam,’ Rachel said, and I could sense her sort of toughening up against me, ‘it’s not that big a deal. It’s just the next step. And this holiday was supposed to be about having fun and falling in love and getting out and living. And when I look back on my life, I will be able to say that I lost my virginity one summer in France to an absolutely gorgeous French boy who I was totally crazy about, and it was romantic and exciting and . . .’
‘And that’s fantastic!’ I said. ‘I just didn’t want you to —’
‘ . . . and terrifying and painful and maybe a mistake,’ she finished, more quietly.
I felt guilty again. ‘It’s not a mistake,’ I said, trying to remember that I should be supportive before anything else. ‘Like you say, it’s not that big a deal. Half the girls we know have.’
‘Maybe not half.’
‘Maybe half!’
‘Maybe not girls like me.’ Rachel sighed. I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know what she wanted to hear from me. She was right, girls like her didn’t do this. She’d had one boyfriend the whole time I’d known her, and yet, she was the one who’d lost her virginity, in a flash. To a holiday romance.
‘Well,’ I began carefully, and then couldn’t think of anything comforting. ‘Was it really painful?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And how did you leave things? I mean, do you want to keep seeing him?’
‘Yeah, of course!’
‘So, what’s going to happen?’
‘Oh, just leave it, Sam! This is not the conversation I want to be having!’
I was confused and angry. ‘I don’t know what conversation you want to be having. Maybe you should just have it and I’ll sit and listen and nod.’
We sat in silence for ages.
‘So you snogged Lucas?’ Rachel said, half-smiling, as if this was a peace offering. ‘And . . . what’s going to happen?’
I laughed. ‘Well, you kind of stole my thunder.’
‘He’s lovely,’ Rachel said.
‘I don’t know about that,’ I said. I started talking about Lucas because it seemed easier after that edgy stand-off to talk about myself, but when I went into more detail about the romantic things that had happened when we went to the castle, Rachel kept interrupting with stories of how romantic Fabrice had been. Sometimes, weirdly, it felt like a competition. It had never felt like that between us before.
‘Listen, when are you going to come round to dinner with the Fayes?’ I said. ‘Madame Faye seemed very keen. As I said, it makes sense to have met her if you’re going to use her as an excuse.’
‘Yeah. But you’ve made it sound so terrible,’ Rachel said. ‘I can’t eat five courses of minging food.’ I noticed for the first time that Rachel had lost some weight.
‘Are you dieting?’ I asked.
‘I’m always dieting,’ Rachel said. ‘Do you mean, is it working?’
‘You just seem different,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen you for a few days and now . . . everything’s different.’
‘Sometimes different is good,’ Rachel said.
The conversation got a bit awkward and when Rachel went to the loo, I sat and got more stressed. She was overtaking me, and I was worried I was handling it badly. What I’d said about half the girls we knew was true – and maybe I was running out of time before I’d start to look like some kind of freak among our friends. I knew I wasn’t ready to take that step, but I also didn’t want to be the last one who did. Rachel had always been my safety net. She was my nice friend who didn’t get involved in that sort of thing. She was careful, she’d never even wasted her time snogging some boy she didn’t really go for, the way I sometimes had, just so I could say I’d pulled someone at every party, like some kind of badge of pride.
But unlike Rachel, I’d had steady boyfriends too, and the issue had obviously come up a lot more for me. But what was I holding back for? Why was this a problem for me? I’d always made it clear to boys I went out with that it wasn’t on the cards, and hadn’t even allowed any discussion on the subject. Really, I knew the answer: I’d never been in love. I liked going out with boys, but I hadn’t fallen hard for any of them, and there was no way I was going to have sex with someone I didn’t love. I’d always believed Rachel felt the same and, maybe stupidly, always assumed I would be the first out of the two of us to make that move. It was possible that Rachel did love Fabrice, but it still seemed too quick. I thought briefly about the slightly spooky advice Bruno had given to me earlier that morning, to make sure I ‘knew’ about Lucas. The thing about the boys back home was that we really did know them, we’d been going to school with them all our lives. How could she trust Fabrice?
When Rachel came back, she said she had to go home to get ready, because she was meeting Fabrice later. I cycled home, my head messed up with the shock of all the news. When my phone rang, I guessed it was Rachel, wanting to smooth over our weird chat, but it was Lucas – I’d given him my number. He asked if I wanted to catch a train to Paris the next day to hang out with him. Two days before, I’d have leaped at the chance. Now, everything about these French boys seemed to be moving too quickly for me, and it felt like there were no brakes – you had the choice of staying on or jumping off, nothing else. I was regretting kissing Lucas. I didn’t know if I’d even really liked him, or if I was just enjoying that buzz you get when you make a boy start liking you.
‘Yesterday at the château was really great,’ I began. ‘But I feel like maybe we jumped into things a bit too soon . . .’
Lucas laughed, and I felt mortified. ‘I’m not proposing marriage,’ he said. ‘I thought we were friends, and it would be fun. Another time, little girl.’
I was furious . . . ‘little girl’! But also I was dying of embarrassment. What had I been thinking, trying to give him a serious break up speech like that? All we’d done was kiss. I’d lost all sense of perspective and was acting like a lunatic. I needed to get a grip. Not everyone is having sex, Sam, I told myself, and then I went and hid under my bedclothes. I’d had enough of everything for one day.