PHOEBE
‘I can’t believe how long your hair is,’ Liberty said. Every time she clamped the straighteners near my head I jumped a bit, internally.
‘Yeah, but does it look good?’ I asked.
‘I have never in my life seen anything like it.’ She said it totally sincerely.
‘Liberty, that is not a reassuring answer. “I have never in my life seen anything like it.” That’s what people say about nuclear explosions or those people who have plastic surgery to make themselves look like cats.’
‘No, it’s just, you look so differe—’
Frankie crashed in and did a sort of over-exaggerated double take. ‘What the what? Mate, what is happening?’
She bent over next to me so her face was right in front of mine. ‘Mate, I literally didn’t recognize you. As in, this is freaking me the fuck out.’ She was shaking her head. She leant back out into the corridor and shouted: ‘Negin! Negin!’
I jumped up and looked in the mirror. Straightened, my hair reached all the way to my bum. I actually did look like a completely different person. Frankie held her phone up and took a picture. Then she banged on my wall. Liberty had dissolved into laughter. ‘Connor! Connor!’ Where is everyone?’ Frankie stood in the middle of the room and just started shouting. ‘Becky! Nathan!’ She walked over to my bed and opened the window. ‘Anyone, please? I can’t experience this alone.’
I cut her off. ‘OK, let’s focus. I have to see Luke in an hour.’
Frankie made a face. ‘You’ve seen him, like, every day this week.’
‘I know, but today is the actual presentation.’ I looked at Liberty. ‘Should I wash it out?’
Frankie picked out a piece of my hair and peered at it. ‘No way, I mean firstly, it could create a whole new beginning for you and Luke. As in, you could literally pretend to be another human being. Like, “Phoebe had to leave but I am – Horatia, the new person in your presentation group. I will never send a photo of you to you because I am Ho—”’
I ignored her and turned back to Liberty. ‘Seriously, I know this represents an hour and a half of our lives, but should I wash it out?’
Liberty shook her head. ‘No way. It’s like red lipstick, you just have to get used to it.’
‘What should I wear?’
Frankie opened my wardrobe. ‘What would Horatia wear? That is the question.’
Liberty jumped up and down. ‘I’ll lend you some of my clothes.’
‘Liberty, me and you have very different styles.’ Liberty’s style was unashamedly sexy. More ‘Ibiza VIP lounge’ than ‘romantic poetry seminar’. ‘I think the hair and then me turning up looking so glamorous might make people think I was—’
‘Horatia,’ Frankie shouted. ‘She’s like Sasha Fierce. Like, Horatia wouldn’t pretend the Luke Taylor text never happened. She’d just be all like, “Yeah, that is how I test my men. Do you wanna stroke my long straight hair or not?”’
‘Can we stop talking about the text?’ I pleaded.
‘I will never stop talking about the text,’ Frankie said, crossing her arms. ‘It’s literally the most hilarious thing that’s ever happened to me. And it didn’t even happen to me.’
I laughed. ‘Yeah, well, I can only cope with seeing Luke if I do this weird mental exercise where I convince myself I never sent him that photo.’
It was true. Me, Luke and Bowl-Cut Mary had met up in the library every day for the past three days, and I’d only managed to get through it by burying the text somewhere deep inside me. Just literally pretending it had never happened. But the truth was, the more we hung out, the less weird and awkward it was starting to feel.
‘I reckon Luke probably keeps that message as his screen saver,’ Liberty said. ‘Has he honestly never mentioned it?’
I shook my head.
‘So weird,’ she sighed. Then she turned to Frankie. ‘Can I have a Sasha Fierce name, too?’
Frankie shrugged. ‘You don’t need one, mate, but yeah, OK. What about Hercules?’
‘Ooh, Hercules, I like tha—’
She was cut off by Connor’s boom from the kitchen. ‘Waffles!’ I knew he was beating his chest as he said it. ‘Waaaaaaaaffles.’
The kitchen door opened and Connor poked his head through. ‘We have made waaaaaaaffles.’
We walked into the kitchen, where he and Nathan were standing over a machine.
‘You bought a waffle maker?’ I said.
‘Woah, you look totally different.’ Nathan seemed genuinely shocked.
Frankie held up her phone. There was a picture of me spliced next to Cousin It. Underneath she had written ‘Freaky Friday’.
‘We’ve melted Smarties, Chomp bars and Honey Nut Loops together,’ Connor said proudly. ‘Although the Honey Nut Loops aren’t really melting.’
‘Connor, do you think I look ridiculous?’ I said.
‘She means do you think Luke Taylor will think she looks ridiculous?’ Frankie corrected.
Connor shook his head. ‘I would like to say he won’t notice the hair, but you do look like a child from a Japanese horror film, so he probably will.’ The waffle maker started smoking and he flapped at it with a tea towel. ‘But, then, y’know, that’s the beauty of fancying girls, isn’t it? Never knowing what mad shit they are gonna do next. Like, wearing those wedge shoes, or having nails like Wolverine or making you take the same picture millions of times. I, personally, love it.’
Frankie was still cuddling me so I shuffled over and we added Connor to the huddle. ‘Strangely, you’ve actually made me feel better.’
I went and got changed into the most boring outfit I could think of; jeans and a white T-shirt. The hair was enough of a statement without Liberty’s over-the-knee boots.
I tucked my hair into my duffle coat and packed my bag. Even aside from all the Luke stuff, I was actually a bit nervous about the presentation. It was the first thing that properly counted. As I walked to the seminar, I tried to retract tortoise-like into my hood to take attention away from my hair.
I thought Luke was late at first, but then I saw him on the grass outside the English block, on his hands and knees.
‘What are you doing?’ I stood on the path looking at him.
He smiled up at me. ‘I forgot the leaves.’
‘Mary will kill you,’ I laughed. ‘The leaves are like . . . the whole thing.’
‘Yeah, but the thing is, now that I actually need some leaves, there are none. The whole place has been covered in them and now the wind has blown them all away or something.’ He looked genuinely quite stressed.
‘It’s because you are looking at a patch of grass where there are no trees. Why would there be leaves when there aren’t any trees?’
He stood up. ‘Oh yeah, right. That makes sense.’ I swear he went a tiny bit red.
I pointed at the trees on the other side of the lake. ‘Hurry up, we’ve got time.’
We rushed across the bridge, and I realized it was the same bridge we’d sat on back on the first night. When I looked at Luke, he was staring right up at Stephanie Stevens’ block, but neither of us said anything.
We paced about picking up random leaves. ‘They’re a bit damp,’ he said.
‘OK, well, you find them and I’ll dry them with my coat.’
He handed me a leaf and I started wiping it dry.
‘I mean, this whole thing is ridiculous,’ he moaned. ‘Why did we let Mary lead us down this damp-leaf-ridden path of madness?’
‘Cos neither of us had any ideas whatsoever.’
He handed me the last leaf and I smoothed it out. ‘They look a bit budget, but they’ll have to do.’
We met Mary outside the seminar room. She was wearing tons of mascara and had a silver star stencilled just underneath her eye. Plus her usual baggy trousers and crop top. Was she so hot she was actually immune to the cold?
She hugged us both. ‘Luke, have you got the leaves?’
He nodded. ‘Yeah, of course. Got them yesterday.’ I shook my head and mouthed ‘twat’ at him. Then Mary did a kind of overly dramatic double take as she properly took in my hair.
‘Shit, Phoebs. So much hair. Such good hair. Phoebe with the good hair.’
Luke nodded. ‘Yeah, I meant to say, earlier. It looks really different. Like, good different. I mean, it looks nice curly, too. But, like this, it also looks really . . .’ He sort of puttered to a stop as he saw Mary biting her lip. ‘Nice,’ he finished.
Mary whistled. ‘Smooooooth. Save that silver tongue for the presentation, Taylor.’
LUKE
I should’ve said something about the hair earlier.
Obviously, I’d noticed it straight away. With Phoebe, the hair is always the first thing you notice. And it did look really good. But I never know what to say in those kinds of situations. Like, if you mention it, it’s like you’re making a big thing of it. But if you don’t mention it, you’re a twat. You literally can’t win.
We all sat down in the seminar room. Yorgos arrived and started telling us how excited he was for our presentations. He picked Martha and Scouse Paul and Katie first. They got up and opened their PowerPoint. They had a PowerPoint; we had a bag of damp leaves. I was starting to get very nervous.
Mary looked like she literally didn’t have a care in the world. She even looked slightly bored. I nudged my notebook towards Phoebe and wrote ‘Are we fucked?’ on it. She wrote ‘POSSIBLY YES’ underneath in block capitals.
Scouse Paul finished his monologue about Chaucer and everyone clapped. Then Yorgos started talking about how vital good research is. I had the sudden feeling that I was about to fail my first proper piece of university work.
‘OK,’ Yorgos said. ‘Mary, Phoebe and Luke. Let’s see what you’ve got.’
Mary was straight out of her chair, handing out the leaves with a kind of smug look on her face. ‘Our piece is experiential,’ she announced, and I saw Phoebe wince slightly.
She handed Yorgos a leaf and then walked over to the door and turned off the lights. ‘Everyone close your eyes,’ she said in this slightly GCSE drama-type voice.
Me and Phoebe stood either side of her at the front of the room. ‘We want to take you on a hypnotic journey . . . through memory,’ she continued. ‘Through your own memory but also into the collective memory of everyone who has come before you.’
The side of Phoebe’s mouth twitched. Even though it was our presentation, and I was stood at the front, it was like I couldn’t concentrate on it. I just looked across the not-that-dark room at everyone with their eyes closed, holding a mouldy old leaf.
‘Feel the veins,’ Mary was whispering. She had a way of whispering that was actually louder than her normal speaking voice. ‘Think of how they reach out to one another. Think of your mother’s hand reaching out for yours on your first day of school. And think of the hand reaching out behind her, and the one behind that. And all the hands that came before you, reaching out into the darkness. Reaching back and back and back.’
People were actually feeling their leaves. ‘Think about the love you have felt,’ Mary said. ‘Think about single moments of time that have changed your – or someone else’s – life for ever.’
I tried very hard not to think about Abbey.
‘Think about the secrets you keep inside you,’ Mary continued. ‘Feel the veins connect and think about the secrets other people hold in their veins too.’ She was holding her hands out like Gandalf and speaking in a slow, kind of dream-like voice. Me and Phoebe both looked down at our sheets.
‘You were blue,’ I recited.
‘Clownlike, happiest on your hands,’ Phoebe said.
‘Think of your ancestor, walking in the snow to find food,’ Mary whispered.
‘When you can no more hold me by the hand,’ Phoebe read.
‘Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.’ I tried to match Mary’s sombre tone, but didn’t quite nail it.
Mary shuffled to the back. She shouted, ‘Speak, memory!’ then switched on the light.
No one said anything for a few seconds. They just sat there, blinking and holding their leaves. There was just this long, awkward silence. Then Phoebe cleared her throat and launched into her short, non leaf-based analysis of ‘Ariel’ by Sylvia Plath, which was scarily impressive and eloquent, and I bumbled through my bit about Ted Hughes’ ‘Last Letter’, most of which I’d nicked from the book Phoebe had lent me.
And then Mary beamed around the whole class, and said: ‘Yeah, so . . . That’s it, basically. Keep the leaves. Remember us every time you look at them.’
Everyone clapped and Yorgos shot us a big smile, and got the next three up. And I had absolutely no idea whether it had gone well or not.
Mary definitely seemed to think it had. She literally danced out of the room when it was all over.
‘I totally respect everyone else’s approach, but ours was obviously the best. I mean, the fact that Yorgos actually took his leaf with him when he left . . . Like, I actually think it made him see stuff differently. I hope so.’
She linked arms with us both and we wandered down the hall.
‘I feel like I might sleep with Yorgos at some point, y’know,’ Mary said, as if she was mulling over what to have for dinner. ‘Like, I know it’s a cliché to sleep with your tutor, but when they’re that hot . . .’
‘Yeah, seconded,’ Phoebe said. ‘I think his hotness makes him impervious to clichés.’
‘Thirded,’ I said, and they both laughed.
Mary stopped. ‘You guys are coming to Fit Sister later, right?’ She said it like it wasn’t actually a question, more a statement. And in the third person, like she wasn’t even in Fit Sister.
‘Definitely, yeah,’ I said.
‘Cool. I’ll see you there. Just need to go pick up the smoke machine . . .’
PHOEBE
I spent two hours pulling every single item of clothing out of my wardrobe, before deciding I didn’t own anything cool enough to wear to a Fit Sister gig. I settled on classic wallflower jeans and a plain T-shirt and vowed to buy an electric-blue vest dress just in case this ever happened again.
I met Luke outside Gildas Bar, and as soon as we walked in I felt self-conscious.
The whole place was full of people who looked like they were one hundred per cent part of the Bowl-Cut tribe. People with bright aqua hair tied in buns on top of their heads. A girl wearing a Run DMC vest top and a sequin skirt, and another one wearing baggy combats but also a wedding veil. She was just randomly wearing a full-length wedding veil. The boys were all good looking in a cool, alternative way.
Me and Luke, sitting with our drinks at the side, looked like a mum and dad who had accidentally walked into the wrong tent at a festival.
‘I do not feel cool enough to be here,’ he whispered.
I wanted to say, ‘You are, but I’m definitely not.’ But I just said: ‘Me neither.’
The lights went down and a few people cheered, and suddenly Mary was up on stage, standing behind a massive keyboard and a microphone. Under the black light you could see she had UV stars painted all over her stomach.
Next to her was a hot bloke with shaggy hair and a moth-eaten jumper. He was also stood behind a keyboard and mic stand. It took a couple of seconds for me to place him, but as soon as I did I whipped out my phone.
‘Such a groupie.’ Luke shook his head as I pressed ‘record’.
I covered the clip in hearts and sent it to Frankie and Negin: ‘Interesting Thought Boy is performing LIVE before my eyes.’
‘We are Fit Sister,’ Mary yelled into the mic. ‘You guys aren’t ready for us yet . . . but your kids are gonna love us.’
She and ITB both started whacking their keyboards, making a kind of music I have literally no idea how to describe. It sounded a bit like a computer game playing underwater, with Mary’s distorted singing over the top. She actually had a really good voice.
People at the front started dancing. Or, not really dancing dancing, but sort of swaying and nodding and jerking about wildly.
‘D’you think that bloke’s all right?’ Luke nodded at a guy in a Sherlock hat who was flailing his arms about by the speaker. ‘He looks like he’s having a seizure.’
‘Everyone here is mental, but in the coolest possible way. Like, treading the line between headlining-at-Glastonbury and being-committed-to-an-insane-asylum.’ I took a sip of my drink. ‘I’m definitely the geekiest person here.’
‘Geek power.’ Luke raised his fist in salute.
‘You are so not a geek. You’re one hundred per cent pure jock.’
Luke actually looked offended. ‘I hate that word. It’s like you’re just a dumb knobhead who’s not interested in anything except football.’
Negin and Frankie had sent a photo back; they were both in their PJs, drinking hot chocolate. Frankie had written, ‘Can’t BELIEVE you wouldn’t let us come. As if we really would have embarrassed you in front of Quidditch Bailer. Tell ITB that Negin is his ONE TRUE LOVE.’ Negin had just written: ‘Do NOT tell ITB that. How’s the date going . . .?’
On stage, ITB was now holding a small bell up to his microphone and ringing it gently in time to the drumbeat. I took another picture.
‘I’m sure you’re interested in other stuff,’ I said to Luke. Then, because it was dark, and I was half-drunk and feeling brave, I added: ‘Just not quidditch, obviously.’
He turned to look at me, and shook his head. ‘Honestly Phoebe . . . I have wanted to talk to you about that for ages. Something just . . . came up, and I felt so, so bad about it and I actually really wanted to go and—’
‘It’s fine. It is actually really fun.’ We both glanced at a couple exaggeratedly waltzing next to us.
The song ended, and Mary jabbed her finger at me and Luke: ‘Yes! Big up my leaf memory seminar bredrins!’
A few people whooped around to us, and we both grinned at them. Then the music started bubbling and squelching again, with Mary wailing all over it, and Luke said: ‘Come on, we’ve got to at least try to dance after she basically dedicated the gig to us . . .’
We made our way down to the front, and started copying the Sherlock guy. It went from awkward to really, really fun in the space of about five seconds. After three songs, we were both laughing and sweating so much we had to go back to the bar.
‘Honestly, can I come to the next thing?’ Luke shouted into my ear as we ordered more drinks. ‘Quidditch, I mean. I really, genuinely want to.’
He stuck his hand out.
‘We’ve shaken before, Luke Taylor,’ I said. ‘You are not a man of your word.’
He pulled a leaf out of his pocket. ‘I swear on the rotten leaf of memory.’
‘OK.’ I shook his hand.
Then the lights came up, and Mary was bouncing down into the crowd, hugging people. She came over to us, with a few other girls in tow – including Sequin Skirt and Wedding Veil, who had now taken her wedding veil off.
‘You guys came,’ Mary howled, hugging us both.
‘Of course.’ Luke smiled.
She thumped the bar. ‘I demand to have some booze.’ The barman appeared and she started ordering.
I pointed at the ‘Feminist Soc’ badge on Wedding Veil girl’s lapel. ‘I feel bad, I still haven’t been to any meetings,’ I said. ‘I signed up at Freshers’ Fair.’
‘You should totally come.’ Wedding Veil smiled at me, and then Luke. ‘You too.’
‘Yeah, I’d definitely be up for it,’ Luke said.
Mary handed him a shot. ‘Luke’s on the football team, so he’s more into oppressing women than emancipating them, aren’t you, Luke?’ She clearly meant it as a joke, but the girl with the sequin skirt bristled a bit, and stared at him hard. ‘Are you really on the football team?’
Luke nodded.
‘So, is all that Wall of Shame stuff true, then?’ she asked, and suddenly everyone was looking at Luke.
‘What’s the Wall of Shame stuff?’ I said.
‘They take photos of girls they sleep with and then rate them out of ten, and shit,’ said Sequin Skirt. ‘It’s fucking Donald Trump-level wankerdom.’
‘Yeah, and it’s only a rumour, Jen,’ frowned Wedding Veil. Then she turned to Luke. ‘Right?’
I felt myself getting hot. What if it was true? Had Will taken a picture of me when I was asleep? He might not have messaged me back, but he wasn’t that much of a bastard, surely? Panic started to rise up in my stomach. I hadn’t even slept with Will. I had just slept with him.
Luke downed his shot and winced. ‘Yeah, it’s not true,’ he said, wiping his lips.
Mary punched him on the shoulder. ‘See? If my man Taylor says it’s bollocks, then that’s good enough for me.’
Luke smiled at me, and I felt relief cooling my whole body as I thought, Me too.