LUKE
I hadn’t meant to say it. It just sort of . . . came out.
It was like she was pushing me, almost. Daring me to say it. ‘If you don’t want to speak to me,’ she’d hissed, ‘if you don’t want to work at this, then maybe we should break up, Luke. Maybe we should just fucking break up.’
And I’d said, ‘Yeah. OK. Maybe we should.’
And then there was only the gentle hum of her crying in my ear, and this terrifying, exhilarating feeling, like I’d jumped off a cliff with no clue if there was water or concrete at the bottom.
I just sat there, listening to her cry, feeling the panic and the toothpaste-y vodka fighting for space in my chest, surging up into my throat and pressing against the backs of my eyeballs.
Then the phone went dead. And I thought: Is that it? Are we actually broken up? Can three years of your life really come to an end, just like that, in a dark computer room in the middle of the night? I covered my face but the tears wriggled out between my fingers. What the fuck was wrong with me? Half a day away from home and I was already falling apart.
I caught a glimpse of my reflection in one of the screens. This sweaty, moony, tear-stained face with a pair of green Yoda ears on top of it. It was so ridiculous I actually started laughing. Which, if anything, made me look more insane. I took the ears off and dropped them on the table in front of me.
Suddenly, I heard a noise from outside. I looked up but there was no one there. I wiped my face and checked the corridor, which was empty except for that Phoebe girl from school, who was getting some chocolate out of one of the vending machines.
A little shiver of anxiety ran through me as I realized she might have seen what I was doing. Even if she hadn’t seen it, she was probably still wondering what sort of maniac sits alone in a computer room at midnight.
‘Hey,’ I said, trying to sound casual. She smiled and said ‘Hey’ back. Her cheeks were flushed from the heat of the bar and she had purply glitter smudged all across her forehead.
‘You having a good night?’ I asked, and she nodded.
I suddenly panicked that my eyes might be red and watery, so I blurted, ‘I just took my contact lenses out.’ She nodded politely, and I realized that, if my eyes weren’t red and watery, this might have seemed like quite a random statement.
She then said something I missed completely, because the bar doors burst open behind us and a blast of music and shouting filled the hall. A girl wearing bright-orange dungarees and Pikachu earmuffs stepped out. She wobbled on the spot for a second, and then sort of slumped down on to the steps in slow motion.
‘Are you OK?’ Phoebe asked her.
The girl blinked a few times and squinted at us, as if she was having trouble focusing. She smelt strongly of tequila and sick. We helped her up.
‘Where are your friends?’ I said.
‘I don’t know . . .’ she slurred. Then her face fell. ‘I mean, I’ve only just met them . . . Do you think they are my friends? Do you think they like me?’
‘Definitely,’ Phoebe said.
‘Do you like me?’ she asked, and I nodded. ‘Yeah, of course. We’re both huge fans of your work.’
Phoebe laughed, and the girl seemed satisfied by this, because she draped an arm around each of our shoulders. ‘OK, well at least we made friends. We can be each other’s friends, can’t we? First-night Freshers Friends.’
‘First-night Freshers Friends,’ Phoebe and I repeated, grinning at each other.
The girl took a deep breath and examined us more closely. It seemed like every change of facial expression required massive effort. ‘What’re your names?’ she whispered.
‘Luke and Phoebe,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘Hi, Lucan Phoebe. I’m Stephanie Stevens.’
‘Nice to meet you, Stephanie Stevens. Are you going to be OK getting back to your corridor?’
Stephanie Stevens sighed and shook her head violently, like a grumpy six-year-old. ‘Noooooooo.’
‘Where do you live?’
She screwed her eyes up tight in concentration. ‘Seventeen Belmont Road, Sunderland, SR1 7AQ.’
‘No, I mean here, in Jutland, where do you live? B Block? C Block?’
‘Oh. I’m not in Jutland,’ she said. ‘I’m in Wulfstan.’
Phoebe looked at the campus map that was pinned up next to the bar doors. Wulfstan was the next college along from Jutland. ‘OK . . . Wulfstan College . . . This way.’
We all linked arms, with Stephanie Stevens in the middle, and started trooping slowly down the covered walkway. A few ducks waddled up out of the darkness of the lake, and started quacking along behind us.
It was mad to think me and Abbey had done this exact same walk less than a year ago, on the campus tour. Trailing our guide from college to college around the huge, murky lake, we’d talked about whether people swam here in the summer, and taken photos on the grassy banks. We’d even had a winter picnic by the main bridge, with all the most random foods we could find in the ‘international’ aisle of the supermarket. We’d sat there, chewing on biltong and weird German Haribos, and talking about all the things we were going to do here next year. The memory of it now seemed so detached from reality it was like it wasn’t even mine. I shook it out of my head, and turned
‘So, how’s your corridor?’ I asked.
‘They’re pretty . . . mental,’ she said. ‘We’ve got this one guy, Connor, who was a rep in Ibiza over the summer, so he’s basically taken it upon himself to force us to have as crazy a time as possible.’
I nodded. ‘There’s nothing better than enforced fun.’
‘Yeah. Although I drew the line when it came to drinking tequila out of a washing-up bowl.’
‘Please don’t mention tequila,’ muttered Stephanie Stevens, darkly.
‘What about your corridor?’ Phoebe asked me.
‘Pretty much the exact opposite of yours, by the sounds of it,’ I said. ‘No, they seem nice. Quite quiet, but nice. They’re pretty much all doing Chemistry, though, so they basically spent the whole of pre-drinks talking about polymers and matter. What are you studying?’
‘English.’
‘Ah, nice one. Same as me. Maybe we’ll be in the same tutor group.’
There was a pause, and Stephanie Stevens stopped and said, ‘I’m doing French and Hotel Management.’ Then she threw up in a bush.
By the time we got to Wulfstan, the ducks had abandoned us. By some miracle, Stephanie Stevens managed to remember the code to her block, so we all staggered up the stairs, still arm-in-arm. In the corridor she fumbled for her key, opened the door, murmured ‘OK, then . . . night night, First-night Freshers Friends’ and collapsed face-first on to her bed. Her room looked exactly like mine; same tobacco-yellow walls, same scratchy, Brillo Pad carpet, same weird little brown cupboard that opened to reveal a sink and mirror inside it. She even had the same brand-new Ikea desk lamp.
‘Do you think she’s OK?’ Phoebe whispered.
‘Well, she’s snoring,’ I replied. ‘That’s got to be a good sign.’
Phoebe winced. ‘Not if you’re the person next door. Listen to her. She sounds like a didgeridoo. And these walls are really thin.’
I laughed. ‘We should probably put her in the recovery position, right? Just in case.’
We gently rearranged her on the bed while she mumbled, ‘I love my First-night Freshers Friends,’ over and over again.
‘I’m a bit worried about leaving her like this,’ Phoebe whispered.
‘Yeah. Let’s have a cup of tea, and then come back and check on her in a bit?’
‘Um . . . yeah,’ she said. ‘Yeah, that sounds good.’
We went into the kitchen. She boiled the kettle and I found mugs and milk, then we walked downstairs, taking our teas with us. There was a little red bridge stretched across the lake, and we stood together in the middle, leaning against the edge, watching the steam rise from our cups.
It was freezing, and I could feel the cold and the tea starting to rub away at my drunkenness. I thought about Abbey and the phone call and all the utter, utter shitness of the past few months. I’d spent the whole summer thinking that uni would magically solve everything. I’d go to York Met, she’d go to Cardiff, and we sort of wouldn’t even need to have the maybe-we-should-break-up conversation. Ten hours into university and I was already learning important life lessons: don’t be so fucking naive.
‘Oh my god, yes.’ Phoebe fished into the pocket of the bathrobe I’d given her back at the bar and pulled out a Twix. ‘Totally forgot I’d bought this.’ She opened it. ‘One finger each?’
‘Nice one.’ I took the chocolate off her. In spite of everything, I couldn’t help wondering why I’d never noticed how pretty she was. Masses of brown, curly hair and an amazing smile.
I must have walked past her a million times at school. She couldn’t have changed that much in ten weeks. Maybe I was just too hung up on Abbey to notice any other girls. But, no, that wasn’t it. I’d definitely noticed Isha Matthews. And Lauren Green. And Katie Reader.
But I’d never noticed Phoebe.
PHOEBE
The whole thing was beginning to feel like an out of body experience.
This was exactly the kind of shit fourteen-year-old me was always daydreaming about. Well, maybe not Stephanie Stevens vomming everywhere and feeling like the pre-drinks ‘Freshers’ punch’ was kind of creeping ominously up my oesophagus, but the Luke Taylor part. The part where I was now alone and kind of matey with him. Like a weird Doctor Who-type thing where I had jumped back into my own Year Nine fantasies. I focused on looking unfazed and generally breezy and not babbling. Flora says when I’m drunk I over-touch people, so every time I got within thirty centimetres of him I took a step back.
Luke took a sip of his tea, then sat down and let his legs dangle over the edge of the bridge. I followed suit. Sort of. I followed suit forgetting how my mug was much fuller than his and also that when it comes to smooth physical movement, I am a dud. For a split second I thought I might just tumble underneath the iron railing and into the lake. I made a kind of squawking sound and then just fell on to my bottom with a thump, like some sort of geriatric penguin.
I looked up and saw that Luke was shaking his hair out over the lake and tea was dripping out of it.
‘Oh my god, are you OK? I’m so sorry.’ I almost reached out and touched him, but managed to stop myself in time. ‘I prioritized the tea. I’m sorry.’
‘“I prioritized the tea.”’ He started full on laughing, which made me laugh, too. ‘Good to know you value me less than some tea.’
A part of me wanted to get out my phone and actually text that as a direct quote to Flora.
‘Clumsiness is one of my defining features,’ I said. ‘My parents made me do disco dancing for three years to try and like, train it out of me. But all it did was give me even more of a complex. There is a picture in my house where I am wearing a turquoise unitard. I mean, that is only going to give your kid more problems, not less—’ I pinched my thumb to try and physically stop myself babbling. At least I hadn’t snorted. Snorting is probably the least sexy of all mannerisms.
Luke smiled. ‘My mum made me do flamenco dancing for a term because my sister did it and she didn’t want to pay for a babysitter.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Old enough to know I was the only boy,’ he said. ‘They had to get me a special frilly shirt with red and black dots. I did an exam in it and everything.’
‘How did you do?’
He shrugged in mock modesty. ‘Oh, I can’t remember. Distinction. No big deal. Just a distinction.’
I laughed. ‘I cannot imagine you flamenco dancing.’
‘I was all right at it, actually. Do you want some of my tea?’
‘No, like I said, I prioritized the tea. I still have some left.’ I showed him my mug. ‘I feel a bit bad. These mugs have never been used. Look, they still have the label – £2.99, Robert Dyas.’
‘I’m sure they won’t mind,’ Luke said. ‘And more to the point, they won’t even know. Plus, we can always blame Stephanie Stevens.’
‘Yeah, we could leave them a note that says “Stephanie Stevens did it”.’
We sat for a bit, just drinking our tea and staring at the lake. It made me realize how exhausted I was.
Luke sighed. ‘I really feel like today has been one of the longest days of my life. Waking up this morning feels like weeks ago.’
I wondered if it felt longer for him because of what had happened to make him cry – whatever that was. Did it have something to do with Abbey Baker? Surely not. They were our year’s golden couple. Out of nowhere, an image of them at the leavers’ prom popped into my head. They looked like they belonged on the Oscars red carpet, not in the reception of the Kingston Holiday Inn.
‘Yeah, but we made it.’ I held my mug up. ‘Cheers. To making it through the first day.’
He clinked his mug against mine and nodded. ‘Yup. Me, you and, if Stephanie Stevens isn’t dead, then her too. We made it through the first day of uni. And we both made a friend. Two friends actually, if we count Stephanie Stevens. If she’s dead we can definitely count her, cos she won’t be able to contest it.’
I shook my head. ‘Seriously, why are people so obsessed with dying at uni?’
‘I don’t know. Do you know Reece Morris?’ Of course I knew Reece Morris. He was Luke’s best mate.
‘Maybe . . .’
‘Anyway, he told me this story about this boy who fell in a skip on the first night of Freshers’, knocked himself unconscious and then got tipped into a landfill site.’
‘What? Random. And it’s not just dying. It’s dying in weird ways. My friend from my corridor, Negin, is obsessed with it too.’
‘Oh, you’ve already got a friend, have you?’ he said, raising an eyebrow. ‘That’s awkward. I thought me and Stephanie Stevens were your First-night Crew? Anyway, if this Negin’s your friend, then where is she?’
I actually had no idea where Negin was. Would she be angry that we had got separated? I pointed vaguely out across the lake towards Jutland. ‘Over there somewhere.’
‘That’s a duck, Phoebe.’ It started swimming towards us.
‘Look, it wants to be our friend.’ I threw a bit of Twix into the water.
‘OK, fair enough,’ Luke smirked. ‘It’s you, me, Stephanie Stevens, this girl Negin – whoever the hell she is – and that duck. That’s it for first night of Freshers’. Any more friends is overkill.’
‘It’s weird, cos everyone says you don’t speak to the people you make friends with in Freshers’ ever again, but I actually do really like Negin.’
He held his mug up. ‘Cheers. Me and Stephanie and the duck haven’t made the cut. We don’t care. We’ve got each other anyway.’
Luke was actually funnier than I imagined. And less confident. He was quite softly spoken, really. He stared down blankly at the water. ‘I wonder what will have happened between now and like, three years’ time’. He said it like he’d almost forgotten I was there.
‘We’ll be twenty-one,’ I said. ‘That feels so far away. What do you want to have happened?’
He didn’t look up. ‘For everything to feel less complicated, I guess.’
It was the first time he’d said something that wasn’t just banter. It was like his real voice came through. I didn’t know what to do. So I just stayed silent.
He swung his feet underneath the bridge like a kid. ‘Shall we go and check on our First-night Freshers Friend?’
He got up and held out his hand to me. ‘Try not to fall in.’
Even as it happened, I simultaneously imagined describing it to Flora. It was the first time I had ever touched him. I took his hand but didn’t want to put my whole weight on him in case I ungracefully pulled him over and into the lake. We walked back into the block and up the stairs. In the kitchen, we washed our mugs carefully and put them back in the cupboard. Then we looked in on Stephanie Stevens like new parents checking on their baby in its cot. She was snoring so loudly her bookshelf was shaking.
We wandered back over the bridge and along the walkway. Music was still blaring from Jutland Bar, but the lights had come on now.
We were walking side by side and every so often our arms brushed. I could feel my heartbeat upping its rhythm. Even though my Year Nine phase of stalking the hell out of Luke Taylor was just an embarrassing memory now, I still really, really fancied him. More than even Max and Adam, the two people I’d actually slept with. A part of me didn’t even have the guts to look at him, in case he could tell.
We stopped outside Jutland Bar. We were facing each other and not far apart. My tummy flipped over a few times. We were in a classic kiss position.
‘See you tomorrow, then, yeah?’ he said, and reached forward to give me a hug. It was just a quick, see-you-later, cursory one; the kind you would give someone you were going to see right after the next lesson. But it woke my whole body up.
I wandered back to D Block in a bit of a daze. I kept replaying the hug in my head. I messaged Flora, saying, LUKE TAYLOR BREAKING NEWS: EVERYTHING YOU CAN IMAGINE HAS ACTUALLY HAPPENED.
Negin’s door was closed but I could see her light was still on.
I knocked gently. ‘It’s Phoebe,’ I said softly. ‘Just checking you’re not dead.’
‘Not dead,’ I heard her say. Then she opened the door in her pyjamas and smiled. ‘Sorry I lost you. I was waiting up to check you weren’t dead either.’
LUKE
Jutland Bar looked like a bomb site. The lights had come up and people were staggering about, broken and sweaty and blinking at each other like ridiculously dressed moles. Five lads in ripped bedsheet togas were on the dance floor, punching the air to ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’. There was a girl wearing a full-length banana costume crying underneath the table football table, while a girl in a Justin Bieber onesie comforted her. Two pissed blokes were playing an aggressively competitive game above them, apparently unaware the girls were even there.
I felt empty. Not in a stupid, over-the-top, dramatic way. Just sort of . . . numb. And exhausted. I tried to let the phrase ‘We are broken up’ sink in properly, but it was like entering the wrong password. It wouldn’t compute. It felt unreal, somehow. The phone call and the computer room meltdown seemed like days ago. In a weird way, the whole thing with Phoebe and Stephanie Stevens had been the best part of the night. It had taken my mind off everything, at least. There was no way I should have been able to enjoy myself after what had happened, but Phoebe’s sunniness was infectious. She was just so easy to chat to.
I couldn’t see Arthur or anyone else from the corridor, so I headed back to B Block. Even though it was nearly 2 a.m., I didn’t feel like sleeping. I didn’t want to give my brain the chance to properly process what had happened. I heard the soft thud of music coming from Arthur’s room next door, so I tried knocking. His voice came through muffled: ‘Hang on . . . Who’s that?’
‘It’s Luke.’
There was a pause. ‘All right . . . Come in, then. It’s open.’
For a second, I thought I must have heard wrong, as there didn’t seem to be anyone inside. Over the music, I could hear a watery tinkling sound, like a burst pipe somewhere in the walls. But then, suddenly:
‘Where’d you get to, then?’
From behind the open door of the sink cupboard, I spotted Arthur’s trainers.
‘Oh, sorry,’ I said. ‘Didn’t see you. You OK?’
‘Yeah, man. Nearly finished.’
Before I could ask him what he was nearly finished doing, I suddenly realized what the watery tinkling was.
‘Sorry, are you . . . y’know? Weeing? In the sink?’
‘Yeah. Obviously. What do you think the sink’s for?’
‘Well . . . not for weeing in, I wouldn’t have thought.’
‘Look, mate, just cos we’re not rich enough to get an en suite, like those posh fucks up in Gildas College, doesn’t mean we can’t improvise, if you know what I mean.’
I saw the trainers bob up and down, and the tinkling stopped. Arthur stepped out from behind the door, grinning. His face was red and shiny, and he was wearing the Superman cape I’d started the night with.
‘All right! How—’ He raised his forefinger, stopping himself mid-sentence. ‘Sorry, forgot to flush.’
He reached back inside the cupboard and turned the taps on. My feelings about this must have been reflected pretty accurately in my facial expression, because he smirked and said, ‘Don’t you worry, my friend, you’ll be weeing in the sink in no time. I mean, the toilets in this block are literally at the end of the corridor.’
He switched on his Xbox and pulled a little bag of weed out of his trouser pocket. ‘Go on, then, I’ll have a cup of tea if you’re making one,’ he said.
I laughed. ‘All right.’
‘See if there’s any food as well,’ he whispered. ‘My mum bought me fuck all this term. Just cos I’m not a first year any more, she apparently thinks I don’t need to eat.’
‘My mum got me ingredients, but no actual food,’ I said. ‘I’ve got, like, flour and salt and olive oil, but nothing I can actually eat.’
Arthur raised an eyebrow mischievously. ‘We could always crack out Barney’s Nutella . . . I’m sure he won’t mind if we have a tiny bit . . .’
Three spliffs and ten slices of chocolatey toast later, we were lying nearly comatose on the floor. Arthur scooped out the last splodge of Nutella and examined the now-empty jar.
‘They shouldn’t make this stuff so fucking delicious,’ he groaned. ‘Having something this delicious is clearly going to cause problems within a communal living space. It’s fucking irresponsible is what it is.’
‘What we gonna do?’ I mumbled stickily.
He yanked open his bedside drawer and pulled out a Sharpie. ‘Fuck, I’ve only got a black one. If I had a brown one, we could just colour the jar in, and he’d never know the difference.’
‘Until he decided to actually eat some,’ I said. ‘Which we’ve got to assume he will do at some point.’
Arthur just shrugged and chucked the jar back at me. ‘Just dispose of the evidence. He can’t prove it was us, can he?’
I went out into the kitchen, but just then Beth’s door opened and Barney stepped out, wearing what was presumably Beth’s T-shirt, since it said ‘LANCASTER GIRLS HOCKEY’ and stretched all the way down to his knees. Beth poked her slightly dishevelled head out behind him, and the three of us just stood there, staring awkwardly at each other.
And then Barney said, ‘Is that my Nutella?’
After I’d apologized and promised to buy him a new jar in the morning, I went back to Arthur’s to find him snoring loudly on the floor. I switched off the Xbox and headed back to my own room.
I lay down on the bed, surrounded by unopened suitcases and untouched Ikea bags, and stared at the dirty yellow ceiling. My phone had run out of battery, and I decided, for once, to leave it that way.
to Phoebe.