I somehow knew the event was going to involve some of us taking off our clothes. I also knew she fancied him. I’d noticed a few times the way she looked at him – as if he were some strange, exotic creature she longed to stroke, but kept her distance from because the park ranger had told her he might bite. Foolish though it was, I never really believed he would cheat on me. Never believed he’d be tempted by someone as plain and ordinary as her. I wasn’t exactly vain about my appearance, but I was aware of the effect I had on men. Aware they were drawn to me. Aware, when I came to England, how my American accent apparently only added to my natural attractiveness. Holly, meanwhile, seemed like a nobody. On the few occasions I’d tried to talk with her – at Rupert’s party, or even as I’d arrived in Ally’s room before we started playing that ridiculous spin the bottle game – she’d come across as dull. There’s no other way to really say it. She was boring.
Having watched the effects of alcohol slowly break apart my parents’ relationship, I’d often steered clear of drinking excessively. However, that night, I was keen to get drunk. Not to the point of sickness – though that did come, eventually – but just to anaesthetise my feelings after a horrible, horrible day. It had started with James in the morning when he’d snubbed my attempts to have sex. We’d woken up to the sound of rain, a sound I love to hear in the morning when I don’t have to get up and do anything. He was lying on top of me, giving me a dead arm, so I gently eased him off and started touching him under the covers. He let me carry on for a moment or two before stopping my hand and getting out of bed. I watched his naked form as he walked across the room, put out that he’d left the warm comfort of the bed. He said he was going for a game of squash with Ernest. ‘Cancel,’ I said, simply, and let the duvet drop down to reveal my bare chest, hoping it would tempt him back. But no. He pulled on his gym clothes and said he’d be back in a couple of hours.
Later in the day, when he’d come back and showered, he sat on the bed and smiled. He said he was sorry he’d been in a mood earlier and asked if I wanted to get brunch. I was starving, not having bothered to get up to eat, instead choosing to tend my hurt feelings by reading the first chapters of the new Stephen King novel I’d bought earlier in the week. I agreed and he kissed me and I fell back among the covers, the hardback cover of Four Minutes to Midnight digging into my thighs. I slipped my hand under his boxer shorts, pulled them down and started to use my mouth on him. He stopped me after less than a minute. ‘We need to eat,’ he said, and got up, his erection pushing against his underwear as he pulled it back on. I felt puzzled and hurt, unsure why he was avoiding sex with me.
The row occurred when we were paying the bill at the café. I made a joke that he shouldn’t keep buying me things – meals, clothes, perfume. He asked why not and I said it made me feel like a whore. I probably should have expressed the sentiment more elegantly, but he got very funny about it and asked what I meant. I told him it didn’t matter, but he persisted and I told him to drop it, since my comment made little sense regardless, as I wasn’t even able to give sex in return these days. He became angry at that, saying just because he didn’t want his cock sucked every minute of the day didn’t mean we weren’t having sex. I was mortified. I saw the couple next to us look over, eyes widened in shock. Some teenagers nearby laughed. This wasn’t my James. His tone was more like the belligerent confidence of Ernest than his normally calm, mild-mannered self.
We made up eventually later that afternoon, but not everything was resolved; at least not by me. I was trying to think back over the previous week and couldn’t remember an occasion when he’d instigated sex or completely followed through if I had tried. I was starting to get anxious. Maybe he wasn’t into me any more. Maybe he felt we’d run our course and was now keen to look elsewhere. But if I’d had to pick a girl I thought he would cheat with, it wouldn’t have been Ally’s mousy, unremarkable friend. Perhaps he found her attraction to him too hard to resist. Or maybe he was just horny and she was awake and eager and I was passed out down the hall. Regardless, that evening became so horrible, so tainted by his actions, that I would do my best to forget it for the rest of my life.
I knew something wasn’t right the moment I woke up and tasted vomit. Nobody had come to get me. I could feel I’d been there for hours by how stiff my legs were, and my back clicked when I pulled myself up, hanging on to the toilet seat as I slowly got into a sitting position. I’d been sick over the toilet, managing to get only a portion inside the bowl, with the rest speckling the bathroom floor. Though I was more than a little put out nobody had bothered to come and find out where I was, I was grateful they hadn’t seen me like this. It wasn’t my style. I rather pathetically tried to dab at the small splashes of vomit with a bit of tissue before abandoning my attempts and stumbling out of the stall, feeling bad for the cleaners who’d have to scrub up what I’d left behind me. As I walked the short distance back down the corridor to Ally’s bedroom I thought I heard someone laugh. Or maybe it was a cry. I couldn’t be sure. I reckoned they were all still in the swing of the game. Maybe Ernest was doing something outrageous or Ally had cracked one of her inappropriate jokes. But when I got to the room, I found it empty, apart from Ally, fast asleep, leaning against her chest of drawers, some saliva escaping from the corner of her mouth, her thick waves of blonde hair covering half her face. Then I heard the creaking. The sound of the bed in the room next door, rhythmically groaning under the weight of someone. More than just someone.
There are times in life when your brain plays tricks on you. When you’re told one thing but you see another and you have to wrestle with yourself over which one’s real and which is an illusion. Like the feeling you get if you unwrap a present that so obviously isn’t for you, or step on a stationary escalator, expecting it to be moving, or mishear someone and think they’ve said something rude or embarrassing. It disconcerts you. And then you fill in the blanks. You suppose. You reason. You choose the likely version of the truth that fits best in that moment. When James opened that door to me – the door of Holly’s room – there was something that didn’t feel right. I knew it, but couldn’t put my finger on it. Something about the way she lay there, entirely still as he spoke to me. As he pleaded with me. As he said how sorry he was and that he had just lost himself in the moment. How she had begged him to have sex with her; said she was a virgin and wanted him to be the one to do it while the others were asleep. How she’d got a bit upset because it hurt and she’d started to bleed a little. All this information came crashing down on me in a rush as he tried to confess his crime. Confess he’d had sex with another girl and how he would never, ever do it again. He didn’t want to let me into the room, but I pushed past him and went over to her, stepping over the sleeping figures of Ernest and Peter on the floor.
Losing my virginity was a pretty horrendous experience. It was with a boy named Mark Cohen in the backseat of a car in Jacksonville, Florida, in the parking lot of a Home Depot store. I was on holiday with my parents, had met a boy at the hotel and ended up getting laid. Though I tried to convince myself at the time that I was into it, I knew as soon as he started kissing me that it was probably a mistake. I wanted him to do it, to be free of my V card, but as soon as he started entering me I couldn’t help crying out in pain. It hurt, and continued to hurt, even when I told him it was fine and he could carry on. I just gritted my teeth and tried not to cry. He kept stopping and asking if I was okay, but I told him to just get it over with. And then the regret. The mounting sense of regret I felt when I walked gingerly back to my hotel, crying quietly, hoping my parents would be too drunk or busy arguing to notice what a state I was in. And so when I walked into that bedroom and saw Holly’s tears rolling silently down her face, I did the only thing that came naturally to me in that moment. I held her hand. I told her it was all going to be okay. I wanted to hit her. I wanted to scream in her face and tell her she was a fucking bitch. But more than that, I wanted to give her the comfort and support I’d never received two years previously when I had to come to terms with my own mistake.
She drifted off to sleep soon after, but I stayed with her for over an hour, not really seeing her, lost in my thoughts. I barely noticed when Ernest and Peter came to and exited the room without saying anything to me. When I finally left her around dawn and walked back to James’s dorm room to find him crying on his bed, I had already formulated what I was going to say. I told him that under no circumstances were we going to talk about this incident ever again. We would never allude to it or mention it. That was the only way I felt I could carry on with him and not have it all implode around me. A complete redaction of it from our history. I would sponge it away, write it off as a catastrophic error of judgement on his part. We’d had a row that day, he was stressed about exam work and the pressure he was being put under by his father, and I had probably been unfair with him. We were both to blame. He had been angry and probably hadn’t read the situation as well as he could have. Things like this happened. Mistakes happened. We all floated into grey areas from time to time where the boundaries were blurred. That’s what I told myself. And he accepted it. He promised me he would love me for ever and devote every second of every day to making sure he never put me in this position again.
I discovered about a week later from Ally that her friend Holly had decided to drop out of university altogether. ‘Just wasn’t for her, I don’t think,’ she said, as she bit into a large burger in the pub where we were eating. I nodded and agreed that the experience wasn’t for everyone. She didn’t pursue the subject and I was pleased to move on and talk about something else – the weather, the impending exams, the book I was reading, how I was going to stay with James and his parents over the spring holiday. All of it seemed so much more important than the subject of Holly Rowe. She was a nobody. She always would be.