Lou filled the kettle and switched it on, then remembered there was beer in the fridge. Beer would be better. She opened the beer, grabbed a bag of crisps from the house cupboard and headed upstairs. She’d been planning to take the tea to her room and maybe do some work, but she didn’t want to sit in there drinking alone, so she kept going up to the living room.
Paige was sitting at the dining table in front of her laptop, her glasses pushed up into her hair, her face pale.
‘You OK?’ Lou asked her, flopping down onto the sofa.
‘Laptop’s dying,’ Paige said. ‘Just need to finish this essay. Please don’t put the TV on.’
Lou had just picked up the remote, but she put it back down again. That was fine. She could go on her phone. It might actually be OK checking Kyle’s messages with Paige here. She didn’t want to tell anyone about them, didn’t want to talk about them at all, but she hated being alone with them too.
Lou had turned off sounds and notifications when the ping of a new message had started to make her feel sick. She’d blocked Kyle’s number after the second text, but it didn’t stop him. After he’d sent five more photos using five different phones, she gave up blocking and started avoiding her messages.
She was going to have to talk to him. It was the only way to get him to stop. Either that or she’d have to go to the police. But she didn’t want to do that unless she absolutely had to.
She was surprised none of the other girls had noticed how little she looked at her phone any more. Especially Ella. Lou had been such a social media addict, but she hadn’t posted on Instagram for a couple of weeks now, hadn’t been on Twitter at all. She only kept up with Facebook because her mum would notice and worry if she didn’t.
She tapped the messages icon and scrolled through Kyle’s latest series of messages. More photos of Lou sleeping. One of her awake that she remembered him taking – she was sitting up in bed, her hair in a knot on the top of her head, no top on, one hand covering one boob, but the other boob bare. She was looking straight into the camera and laughing. She remembered him taking that one: they’d just had really good sex. Kyle had been slow and caring and attentive, which he wasn’t always. He’d made her laugh and they’d been planning to go out after and get some food and maybe go on and meet her friends in whatever bar they’d ended up at. But in the end, they hadn’t. Kyle had decided he didn’t want to ‘waste’ time with Lou’s friends when he could be spending time just with her. And so she’d made herself some toast while he watched an old episode of Top Gear and fell asleep.
Lou pictured the hot guy in the coffee shop, the one Liane was keen on. She bet he didn’t watch Top Gear (not least cos it was often racist). And he was a barista. He’d probably make her coffee and a panini in the morning. She wasn’t sure about the sex though. He seemed too nice. She definitely had to stop thinking that nice blokes wouldn’t be good at sex. That was part of what got her in trouble with Kyle in the first place.
And maybe it would be good to just sleep with someone and tick them off the Fuck It List. She was probably the only one in the house who hadn’t yet. Apart from Ella. Obviously. She should go and check the list, but it was all the way downstairs and she couldn’t be bothered getting up now. She screenshotted Kyle’s messages and put her phone down on the coffee table, groaning as she stretched her arms over her head.
‘Fuck,’ Paige said, as an error message popped up on her laptop screen. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Lou sit up on the sofa, but she couldn’t look away from the screen.
‘FUCK!’ she yelled, tapping CTRL-S compulsively.
‘What’s happened?’ Lou said.
‘FUCK!’ Paige yelled again, standing up and pushing her chair back. ‘No. No no no.’
‘What’s up?’ Liane asked, coming to stand next to her. Paige hadn’t even known she was home.
‘Laptop crashing,’ Paige said, her breathing coming fast. ‘It did a thing earlier, but I thought I’d managed to – Fatal exception. Right. So that’s it. Dead.’
‘Shit,’ Liane said. Lou came over from the sofa and the two of them stood either side of Paige, all three of them staring at themselves reflected in the black screen.
‘Oh, fuck,’ Paige said, sitting back down. ‘I’m fucked.’
‘You can take it to that guy by the canteen,’ Liane said. ‘Don’t panic.’
‘I can’t afford it,’ Paige said. ‘I’ve literally got, like, twenty quid to last me ’til payday.’
‘I can lend it to you,’ Liane said. ‘I mean, depending how much it is. I think he charges thirty-five quid to look at it and do a diagnostic thing.’
‘I’ll go halves,’ Lou said. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘I don’t even know when I’d be able to pay you back though,’ Paige said. ‘Literally all that money is gone already. I mean, not gone. But I know where it’s going.’
‘The next one then,’ Liane said. ‘Don’t worry about it. You need a laptop.’
‘Yeah,’ Paige said. ‘Thanks. You’re great. I just hope they can fix it.’
Liane shrugged. ‘If not, you can use mine. I mean, when I’m not using it. And I bet the other girls’ll say the same.’
‘Seriously?’ Paige said, pushing her chair back away from the table again. ‘You’d do that?’
‘Course,’ Liane said. ‘Obviously I need it, but you usually stay up later than me, so you can have it after I go to bed. I’ll set you up a login thingy. Need a cup of tea first. Want one?’
‘I do,’ Lou said.
‘That’s really lovely of you,’ Paige said. To her embarrassment, she was starting to tear up. ‘Thanks.’
‘S’just tea,’ Liane said, bumping Paige’s with her shoulder.
Paige laughed again. ‘I meant the laptop. But the tea too. Thank you.’
In the kitchen, Liane tried to remember what she’d done with her old laptop. The one she’d had before she’d come to uni. When they’d found out she’d got in, her dad had bought her a MacBook and she suspected she’d stuck her old Toshiba in a drawer and just left it there. If she’d known Paige’s was knackered, she could’ve brought it up for her last time she’d gone home. Maybe she’d ask her mum to send it up, if she could bear to.
She opened the fridge for the milk and, as she closed it, the Fuck It List fell off and skidded across the tile floor. Putting the milk on the counter, Liane picked it up and stuck it back on.
She’d only ticked two off so far, but ‘someone with a tattoo’ had three ticks, ‘waiter’ had one, ‘someone in a band’ had one, and ‘someone in uniform’ had one. She didn’t know who’d ticked them off or if they’d put the tenner in the pot each time. They should probably have a house dinner and talk about it. She’d suggest it next time everyone was home at the same time.
She wondered if Alfie had a tattoo. She thought probably not, but maybe he was really surprising under his clothes. She needed to find out. She needed to stop bottling it and actually ask him out. Although maybe she was putting off talking to him because of what had happened with Zack. Because she’d spent so long thinking she’d liked him and now realised she didn’t know if she ever really had. How did anyone know their own minds well enough to actually take action? Liane had no clue.