Issey woke up with a mouth that felt like something was decomposing in it, and a dead arm. She lifted it over her banging head and tried to wiggle her fingers, but it felt really weird. Like it wasn’t her arm at all. Like she was wearing a too-tight rubber glove. She grabbed her wrist with her other hand and tried to shake her hand, but it didn’t help. She let it drop back down onto the bed.
‘Oof. Fuck! Iz!’
Issey yelped, jerking backwards and banging her head on the wall. ‘Shitsquirrels. Li?’
Liane rolled over, but Issey could still only see the top of her hair. ‘You punched me.’
‘I didn’t even know you were here. Why are you here?’
‘Weird noise. In m’room.’
‘Weird smell in mine,’ Issey said, shuffling up the bed and leaning back on the pillows. The line through the blinds made stripes on the bed.
‘Tequila makes me fart.’
‘Nice.’ Issey reached for her phone and opened Twitter and Instagram. ‘I’m not even hungover.’
‘You’re prob still drunk.’
‘Last night was good, wasn’t it?’ Issey said, typing Paige’s name into the Instagram search box. ‘Paige is nice.’
‘I told you she was.’
Issey shivered. She shouldn’t have left her window open last night. She pulled at the duvet, trying to tug it back up to her chest, but all she succeeded in doing was revealing an undressed Liane.
‘Soz,’ Liane said without moving. ‘Might be naked.’
‘You are,’ Issey said. ‘You are naked. In my bed. Like some sort of perv. What if I was naked too, hmm? That would not be appropriate.’
‘It’d be fine,’ Liane said. ‘S’not like I was going to hump you in your sleep. Anyway, you sleep in shorts and a vest. Always have.’
Issey rolled her eyes. Liane was right. She wasn’t that keen on being so predictable. Maybe she’d go out later and buy herself a nightdress or something. Sensible pyjamas like Ella’s.
‘Anyway. Look at this.’ She held her phone up to Liane’s face and watched as Liane scrunched her nose up and blinked against the light.
‘Yes!’ Issey said, scrolling. ‘And look!’
‘I know,’ Liane said, shuffling up the bed until she was next to Issey. ‘I follow her. She’s gorgeous.’
The photo showed Paige lying in bed on her front, showing quite a lot of cleavage, her mouth open, staring straight into the camera.
She scrolled past some photos of food and sunsets and clouds and stopped on one of Paige in a bikini, in front of a mirror.
‘She looks sexy as fuck there,’ Liane said.
‘Do you think?’ Issey said. She pulled her legs up so she could rest the phone on her knees. ‘She’s quite big.’
‘Yeah, she is,’ Liane said. ‘But look at her! She’s so hot.’
‘Do you think?’ Issey said again. She took her phone back from Liane. In the next photo, Paige had one hand on her hip, the other pushed into her hair. Again she wasn’t smiling, but was looking directly into the camera. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well,’ Liane said, taking the phone again, ‘I’m half hard.’
‘Oh my GOD, Li!’ Issey said, dropping her phone and shoving Liane halfway across the bed. ‘Not in my bed!’
Liane laughed. ‘God, you’re such a prude.’
‘I’m not!’ Issey said. ‘What the fuck? Why would you even say that?’
Liane picked up the phone and scrolled some more. ‘Well, OK. You’d never post a photo like this, would you?’
The photo she’d landed on showed Paige sitting in a chair, her legs pulled up to her chest. She was holding a fluffy blanket over herself, but you could see she was naked underneath – the curve of her hip, the side of her boob.
‘I might,’ Issey said.
‘Yeah, right.’
‘I might!’
‘You’re making breakfast?’ Paige said, shuffling into the kitchen, wrapped in a huge white fluffy dressing gown, her hair wet and pushed back. No make-up and no glasses. She looked, Lou thought, glancing up briefly from resting her head on her folded arms on the breakfast bar, like an underdeveloped photo of herself. Or like she’d used the wrong Instagram filter.
Ella was standing in front of the cooker, stirring something in a pan.
‘Best thing for a hangover,’ Ella said over her shoulder.
‘I feel like death,’ Lou said, without lifting her head. ‘Are you rough?’
‘I’ve been better.’ Paige sat down and started scrolling through her phone. ‘But I’ve been worse too.’
‘We need to all chip in for better tequila in future,’ Lou said, reaching for the steaming mug of tea in front of her. ‘I can feel my guts rotting.’
Paige laughed.
‘There’s tea in the pot,’ Ella said, bending to pull out the grill. ‘Help yourself.’
Paige slid the teapot towards herself. ‘I can’t believe you made a pot.’
‘Ella’s a domestic goddess,’ Lou said, managing to prop her head on one hand and look over at Paige.
‘Apparently,’ Paige said. She poured herself a mug of tea and added three sugars. When she looked at Lou, Lou was grinning back at her.
‘I like it sweet,’ Paige said.
‘Apparently.’
‘Do you eat meat?’ Ella asked, piling bacon onto a plate next to the cooker.
‘I eat everything,’ Paige said. ‘Obviously.’
‘Hey,’ Liane said, as she and Issey joined the others in the kitchen. ‘Don’t do that.’
‘Do what?’ Paige asked.
‘Put yourself down.’
‘Oh fuck, Els, you are a goddess!’ Issey said, cuddling Ella from behind.
‘Hot!’ Ella said, gesturing at the pans in front of her.
‘Yeah you are,’ Issey said, kissing Ella’s cheek and joining the others at the table.
‘I wasn’t putting myself down,’ Paige said. ‘I was stating a fact. There’s nothing I don’t eat.’
‘But the “obviously”,’ Liane said, frowning.
Paige shook her head. ‘It’s not like I don’t know I’m fat.’
‘You’re not –’ Liane started to say.
‘I am though,’ Paige said. ‘There’s no point pretending I’m not. But you’re perceiving it as negative. I’m just stating a fact.’
‘Coming through!’ Ella said, hip-checking Issey out of the way and putting a bowl of beans and a plate of fried eggs on the table between them all. ‘There’s bacon and sausage coming too. And toast.’
‘Fucking hell,’ Issey said. ‘This is mad. You’re an angel.’
Ella smiled before turning back to the cooker. ‘I thought it would be nice for us to all have breakfast together.’
‘You’re such a mum,’ Lou said.
‘Shut it.’ Ella brought over the bacon and sausages, piled the toast on a plate, and then joined the others at the table. ‘But we do need to sort some house stuff. How we’re going to pay bills and who’s going to be responsible for different things in the house. That kind of thing.’
‘Not now, eh?’ Issey said, stabbing a sausage with a fork. ‘It’ll give me indigestion.’
‘Tonight then?’ Ella said. ‘I want to get it sorted.’
‘We’re all in tonight, yeah?’ Lou said, pouring herself another tea, her eyes still half closed. ‘So we can do it tonight.’
Lou spent most of the day in bed, waiting for her head to stop hammering. She spent some time staring at her boring beige walls and boring white ceiling and trying to work out how she could transform her room for not much money. By late afternoon, she’d decided to walk down Church Street and do a bit of shopping. She knocked on Ella’s door and pushed it open without waiting for Ella to speak.
‘Hey,’ Ella said. She was sitting in the middle of her bed with notebooks and uni books spread out around her.
‘What are you doing?’ Lou asked, horrified.
‘What does it look like?’ Ella pushed her glasses up her nose and then took them off altogether and dropped them on top of one of the books. ‘What’s up?’
‘But … we haven’t even started yet. What are you studying?’ Lou perched on the end of the bed and then got up again and walked across the room to look out of Ella’s window.
‘I’m just going over some of last year’s stuff,’ Ella said. ‘Like a refresher.’
‘Jesus,’ Lou said. ‘That decides it.’ She turned and leaned back against the window. ‘You’re coming out with me.’
‘I can’t,’ Ella said. ‘I –’
‘No, you are. This is mad. I know you’re dedicated and everything, but this is too much. You need to live a little.’
‘Where are we going?’ Ella asked, tidying her books into a pile.
‘Primark.’
When they got back – Lou with four bags, Ella with one – ‘Can’t Stop the Feeling’ was blasting from Issey’s room and Liane was lying on the sofa in the living room, watching How to Get Away With Murder.
‘What d’you get?’ she asked Lou and Ella, rolling onto her back to look over at them.
‘What season’s this?’ Ella asked, squinting at the TV.
‘Two,’ Liane said.
‘Stuff for my room, mostly,’ Lou said. ‘And a playsuit. And some boots.’
‘And a hat and a onesie,’ Ella added.
‘Cool,’ Liane said, rolling onto her side again.
‘Come and help me put the fairy lights up?’ Lou asked Ella, who followed her downstairs.
They stopped outside Issey’s room, where Issey was standing on her bed and sticking a huge selection of photos to her wall with Blu-Tack.
‘Where’s Paige?’ Lou asked her.
Issey stopped sticking, but stayed on her bed, bouncing gently. ‘Work. But she’s going to be back for dinner. She said she’ll pick up some food from Tesco on the way back and then we can do all the boring shit. My words, not hers. Although I think she said something similar.’
By the time Lou’s bags were empty, her room was transformed. A red heart-shaped rug covered the cheap laminate flooring. Six small mirrors were arranged in an artfully haphazard way on the wall behind her bed (which had four new cushions piled on top of the pillows). Flamingo fairy lights dangled from the curtain rail, and disco-ball fairy lights curled around the mirror on the dressing table.
‘Are you still going to paint it?’ Ella asked.
‘Fuck, yeah,’ Lou said, lying back on her bed. ‘Pink like those flamingoes. Come and have a cuddle. Second year, baby!’
Ella laughed and joined Lou on the bed, snuggling into her friend’s side, as Lou squeezed her and kissed her on the temple.
‘It’s going to be great,’ Lou said.
‘Yeah,’ Ella agreed, half-heartedly.
‘It is, you knob. You’re brilliant. But you need to relax!’
‘I relaxed last night,’ Ella said, tipping her head back where some hair had got caught under Lou’s shoulder.
‘Guess what?’ Lou said. ‘You can relax more than once a millennium.’
‘I’m not that bad,’ Ella said.
‘Let’s go and get a beer,’ Lou said.
Ella rolled her eyes. ‘Fine.’