Vikram was surprised to see us. He stared for a moment, and then shrugged and took the bottle I was holding out as if it were an entry ticket.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Come on in. Come in. I did say everyone was invited. I’m honoured. Libby – they say you were good in the play. I didn’t watch it. I don’t do Shakespeare. The immortal bard. Immortal bastard more like. Come on then.’ He giggled. ‘You look like my mum.’
Max and I looked at each other. Vikram was very drunk.
I hadn’t met Vik’s mum, but I knew what he meant. I looked like any middle-class mum, like someone who had gone to a Christmas book group to drink Prosecco.
I did not look like a teenager at a house party, and everyone else did.
We followed him, only because it would have been even weirder to turn round and walk away at this point, and I had to get my photographic evidence.
The house was full of people. There were people on the stairs, people in all the rooms, people in the back garden. Every one of them laughed as I walked past.
Coming here had been a massive mistake; I could feel, from the static in the air around him, that Max knew that too. The music was so loud the neighbours would definitely call the police, and everyone seemed drunk, drugged, different.
The worst thing was that people really were laughing as I walked past. I knew it was happening. I wasn’t imagining it: I cringed with every step I took. This was exactly the same feeling I had in the terrible dreams in which I found myself on a stage accidentally naked. I tried everything I could to wake up, but I couldn’t because this was real.
‘Nice dress,’ said someone who was sitting on the stairs. I looked round but all I saw were smirking people. I looked ahead again and there was a small explosion of laughter.
‘Fuck,’ I whispered. Even Max couldn’t say anything to that. He reached out and squeezed my hand, which was an unprecedented thing for us and that made it worse.
We stepped over a little group of people sitting on the ground and as we passed they all laughed. Actually burst out laughing, at us. They were cool in their jeans with their drinks and their cloud of smoke, and they laughed in our faces. Ninety-one per cent of me was so mortified that I wanted to die immediately, and the other nine per cent was furious.
Natasha would have turned to them and had it out. I just put my head down and shuffled on.
I was dressed for a cocktail party and Max wasn’t much better: he was wearing black trousers that were suspiciously like his old school uniform, and a smart shirt. I curled up into myself as I walked and tried to become as small as I could.
We followed Vik into the kitchen, and he turned round, looked surprised to still see us there, put our bottle down and gestured to it and the other bottles of booze on the side, then went into the garden.
I looked at Max. He made a face, and I forced a smile even though I wanted to cry. There were no glasses, so he opened cupboards until he found mugs, and poured our wine, and we clinked cups. His mug said WORLD’S BEST MUM on it. Mine said PARIS, JE T’AIME.
‘Cheers for this, you evil witch,’ he said. ‘What could be more fun, and less awkward?’
‘You’re welcome.’ I tried to laugh. It didn’t work, so I tried smiling, which also didn’t work. ‘Can we take a selfie? I have to prove I was here.’
‘Who to? The Gods?’
We did it. I got my photo and I was free to leave. We stood in the kitchen and drank quickly. I could feel the bassline of the music pounding through me. After a while a boy came past and stopped to chat to Max. I didn’t know him, but all of a sudden they were talking about computer games. Max changed. He relaxed and looked happy. He refilled my mug without really looking at me. I edged away from their conversation and he didn’t notice.
‘It has an excellent tie-in to the first story,’ the other boy said.
‘But the tutorial!’ Max was animated now. ‘So long! I mean, please …’
I decided to leave. I was supposed to stay here for another twenty minutes or so, but I didn’t care. I had my photo. She’d never know.
I held the cup between my hands as if it were a cup of tea. My head was spinning because I didn’t usually drink alcohol, let alone red wine, which I actively disliked. It made my tongue feel strange. As I edged back through the party towards the door I wondered how different it would be if I were walking through an enchanted wood in a story. I felt there were dangers on all sides. I thought wild animals were snapping at me, creatures dropping out of branches, thorn bushes reaching out to grab me. I did not feel safe. I knew where the door was, and I crept past the hyenas towards it, and home, and safety.
I took a few photos of the scene around me as I went, just to show Natasha.
Then I opened the front door and walked back out through it, still cradling my cup of wine. I smiled as I found myself outside, breathing the air that was still fresh. There was a low wall at the front of the house so I sat on it and sent the photos to Natasha with the words ‘Did it!’ attached, and sipped my drink. I was still wearing my denim jacket, but I was shivering. It didn’t matter.
I heard the clip-clopping of heels, and a woman walked down the street. She was about Mum’s age and she looked completely together; she was talking through headphones, laughing. I wondered whether I would ever be at ease in the world like that.
The music was pounding out of the house. It must have been horrible for all the neighbours. This was a nice street. Curtains were twitching. I saw someone on the other side of the road in a front garden and wondered whether it was a neighbour who was coming over to complain, but whoever it was must have gone back inside.
I looked up at the stars and thought how insignificant human life on Earth had been. I looked down at some chewing gum on the pavement. I took deep breaths of the precious atmosphere and smelled all the night-time spring smells: things were growing and budding and unfurling, and it smelled of life.
I yawned. It was close enough to being time to go home now. I had been at the party for a total of half an hour, and so my contractual obligation to Natasha was fulfilled. I needed to take one more photo for the time stamp, and that would do it.
‘See how she leans her cheek upon her hand,’ said a voice. ‘O that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek!’
Only one person had ever said those words to me. Only one, and she had said them exactly like that.
‘Ay me!’ I said, partly because that was the next line in the play, but also because it felt like the right thing for this moment. Perhaps the wine had made me brave.
Zoe came and sat next to me, so close that our thighs were touching, and every part of me melted and fell apart. I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay here forever.
‘I miss it, Libs,’ she said. ‘Don’t you? I know it’s been ages, but everything feels a bit … nothingy.’ She took a deep breath in, and then exhaled slowly. I did too.
‘I miss it so much.’ I could smell Zoe’s perfume, her shampoo, and the essence of Zoe that had been everything to me during the play. ‘Every day,’ I said, somehow hurdling my usual barrier. ‘I hate being my normal self again. At least you have friends.’
I felt her looking at me, and I couldn’t look back. I knew my cheeks were burning, but luckily it was dark. My self-pity hung in the air between us for a while, and then she put a hand on my back and I leaned towards her.
Her hair had grown out a bit since the play. It was springy on my cheek.
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘I know you’re quiet. But you always seem so cool. Like you’re not talking to us because you’re too busy with more important things. The meaning of life, you know?’
I laughed a bit, or at least made a snorting sort of sound.
‘I’m really not. I’d love to join in, you know. I just … I suppose I’m really bad at it. I’m trying to get better.’
‘So, look at you here. What I’m seeing is someone who aced the lead in a Shakespeare play, and who is right now at a party on a school night, wearing a blingy dress that puts her friend Romeo here to shame.’
I thought of the one last photo. ‘Can we take a selfie?’
‘Sure,’ she said, and we leaned our heads together and did it. Zoe didn’t make a stupid pouty face like most people did. Neither did I, because I would have looked ridiculous.
‘Send it to me,’ she said.
I did, and then I put my phone away and looked at her. That selfie would be the most precious thing I owned. Zoe looked back at me. I leaned my head on her shoulder. It felt a bit weird but I left it there because it was my head. On Zoe’s shoulder.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I am just so …’ My words dried up for a moment but I forced myself to carry on. A motorbike went past, fast. ‘Awkward,’ I said eventually.
‘Oh, Libby,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know you felt like that. I think everyone’s struggling right now. It’s too awful to think about, isn’t it?’
‘I was reading somewhere,’ I said, thanking Natasha, ‘that part of being human is that we can’t think about our own deaths. It’s like the poles of magnets. You try to imagine yourself dying, and your mind just swerves away from it.’
‘That’s so true.’ She shifted closer to me. ‘I’m in total denial about the reality. Complete.’
‘Same.’
Zoe’s girlfriend Elisha was cheerful and sunny all the time. I longed for Zoe with every atom in my body and I wondered whether she knew that. She had no idea that I wrote to her most days. I had never had a girlfriend, never had a relationship, never even kissed anyone. I had far too many hang-ups to be able to do a thing like that.
But I wanted to. I longed to. It would be a girl – I’d always known that – and that girl would be Zoe. The woman who was beside me right now.
I wanted the moment to last forever.
I couldn’t help myself. I turned my face towards her. I wanted to kiss her and, in spite of everything, this felt like the moment. I had wanted to do this so many times while we were doing the play, and now we were sitting next to each other on a wall in the starlight while somewhere, in the permafrost, a chemical reaction was already underway. The world was heating and the air was changing and we had both just said we were in denial.
She pulled away a bit, and then she noticed what I was doing, and she didn’t look as if she hated me. She opened her mouth and I didn’t know if she was going to speak or to kiss me.
‘Woo! Romeo and Juliet!’
It was Elisha.
It was the person I wanted to see less than anyone in the world. The two of them had been together since Year Ten, and the worst of it was that Elisha was lovely. She was always friendly to me. Even now, finding me sitting on a wall looking into her girlfriend’s eyes and about to try to kiss her, she clearly didn’t consider me to be the tiniest bit of a threat. She came and sat on Zoe’s other side.
‘Hey there, Libby!’ Elisha had bouncy curly hair and she always seemed happy. If there wasn’t a conversation going on, she would have one by herself. She was the very opposite of me. ‘How are you? Haven’t seen you for ages. I like your dress. It’s all shimmery.’
Shimmery. Natasha had told me to wear something shimmery. Job done, I supposed. Task officially complete. It no longer felt like such a triumph.
‘Thanks,’ I said, and I looked away from both of them, and anyway Zoe was turning towards her girlfriend and our moment was over. Elisha had said she hadn’t seen me for ages, but I was in three of her classes. She saw me all the time; she just didn’t notice me.
They also didn’t notice when I shifted myself apart from them, put my empty mug on the wall and sidled away. Perhaps Zoe sensed me leaving, but she didn’t do anything to stop me, or say goodbye, or do anything other than completely ignore me because she was with her girlfriend.
I walked home. I kept hearing footsteps behind me, but every time I turned round no one was there. In the end I half ran, tripping in my tango shoes, feeling like the most ungainly, friendless person there had ever been. Whoever was following me (if they existed) melted away long before I got home.
I left a note for Mum and Sean.
YES PLEASE. I WANT TO SPEND THE WHOLE SUMMER IN SPAIN.
How soon can we go?
Let’s go now.
I woke at three in the morning to a text from Max.
Thanks fr prty lib. BEST. U still hr? bit pssed
Then, at six o’clock, Natasha replied to my photos. I had sent her my proof, but hadn’t told her about Elisha appearing at the crucial moment.
YOU DID IT! Also, Zoe is hot.
Here’s your next task. Get a big night’s sleep and have a huge breakfast tomorrow, then send her a text saying: ‘Lovely to see you last night x’.