Freshmen Read online

  Also by Tom Ellen and Lucy Ivison

  A Totally Awkward Love Story

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Tom Ellen and Lucy Ivison

  Cover art copyright © 2018 by Ray Shappell

  Hand lettering by Erin Fitzsimmons

  Excerpt from A Totally Awkward Love Story copyright © 2014 by Tom Ellen and Lucy Ivison

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in different form as Freshers by Chicken House, London, in 2018.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  First line of “You’re” by Sylvia Plath from Collected Poems (Faber, 1981) copyright © 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath, used by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ellen, Tom, author. | Ivison, Lucy, author.

  Title: Freshmen / Tom Ellen and Lucy Ivison.

  Other titles: Freshers

  Description: First American edition. | New York : Delacorte Press, [2018] | “Originally published as Freshers by Chicken House, London, in 2018.” |

  Summary: Relates, in two voices, the experiences of Luke and Phoebe, who attended the same high school and are now experiencing the joys and angst of life as college freshmen in York, England.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017021751 | ISBN 978-1-5247-0178-9 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5247-0179-6 (el)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Universities and colleges—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Dating—Fiction. | Conduct of life—Fiction. | York (England)—Fiction. | England—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.E44 Fre 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9781524701796

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Tom Ellen and Lucy Ivison

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Two

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Three

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Four

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part Five

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Excerpt from A Totally Awkward Love Story

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  For Carolina —T.E.

  For Cassie Cooper, Louise Geoghegan, Nell Booker and Vicky Clarfelt—I’ll keep your secrets if you keep mine —L.I.

  I was doing my best to focus on what Arthur was saying, but the buzzing in my pocket kept distracting me.

  If I’d counted right—and I was pretty sure I had—this was the eleventh buzz since we’d arrived at the Jutland school’s bar for the clothes swap party. The eleventh. A sudden rush of anger cut through me. Did she really expect me to spend the first night of freshman orientation standing outside talking to her? Wasn’t the whole point of this week to talk to new people?

  The buzzing stopped as Arthur pushed a luminous blue shot and a pint of lager along the bar to me. He was wearing a bright-red bathrobe over a sleeveless denim jacket, his sweaty black hair messily tucked into a yellow swimming cap. I had on my mum’s 2007 Bon Jovi tour T-shirt under a massive multicolored Mexican poncho. We both looked absolutely ridiculous. But then, so did everybody else. Even the bartender was wearing a kimono.

  The DJ yelled, “Jutland, make some noise!” and I realized Arthur’s mouth was moving again, so I leaned in and tried to concentrate.

  “I was supposed to live off-campus this year,” he was shouting over the music. “Me and some friends had a house and everything. Even put the deposit down.”

  “So what happened?” I yelled back.

  “It got fucking condemned. Like, literally, two weeks ago. Asbestos. So that’s why I’ve ended up back in B Dorm next door to you.” He did his shot and winced. “Still, could be worse. Most second years don’t get to do Frosh Week twice, do they?”

  I nodded and drank my shot. It tasted like vodka-flavored toothpaste. “What is asbestos?” I shouted.

  Arthur downed half his pint in one go. “It’s this sort of invisible presence that lives inside your house.”

  “Like Wi-Fi?”

  “A bit, actually, yeah.” He nodded. “But Wi-Fi that silently kills you in your sleep.”

  “Right. Shit.”

  The Klaxon horn went off, and he shrugged out of his bathrobe while I gave him my poncho. The bartender started lining up more blue shots on a tray as Beth came over with Barney. Or maybe it wasn’t Barney. Was it Tom? Tom also had red hair. It might have been Tom.

  “Beth! Barney!” Arthur yelled.

  “Just seeing if you guys needed a hand,” said Barney-Not-Tom cheerfully. He was short and skinny with a soft country accent and tons of orangey freckles. Beth was almost a foot taller and had a sort of strict “valedictorian” vibe about her that was nicely accentuated by the Harry Potter robe she was wearing.

  “One, two, three, four…” Arthur clamped the shots one by one between Barney’s fingers.

  “I’d rather have a gin and tonic than another of those shots, to be honest,” Beth said sharply. “They’re like drinking Listerine.”

  “No worries,” said Arthur. “One G and T coming up. We’ll bring it over with the rest of them.”

  “Thanks.”

  Arthur leaned in to me as they walked back to the table. “You wanna watch that Barney, by the way.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s a labeler. I saw him putting a Post-it note on his Nutella. We had a labeler in our hall last year. Total nutjob. Got kicked out in the second semester for shooting a squirrel with a BB gun. He was a chemistry major, too.”

  “Barney’s studying geography, though, isn’t he?” I’d only managed to remember that because me, him and Arthur were the only ones not doing chemistry in our hall.

  Arthur finished his pint and slapped the plastic cup back down on the bar. “Yeah, well, it’s all the same Big Bang Theory ballpark, isn’t it? Except that geography is basically just coloring in. What are you doing, again?”

  “Engl
ish. You’re philosophy, right?”

  “Yeah.” He ran a hand across his patchy black stubble. “I’m wrestling with the big-boy questions: What is the nature of truth? How can we find meaning in a Godless universe? How hot is that girl chatting with the DJ?” I looked at the girl in question, who was indeed hot. He picked up the tray, which was now dangerously overloaded with drinks. “Shall we get back?”

  My pocket started buzzing again. Number twelve. I pulled my phone out. “I’ll be there in one sec. Sorry, man, just need to quickly get this.”

  I slipped out the main door and the cold hit me hard. I pressed the phone to my ear. “Hey.”

  “Hey.” Her voice sounded wrinkled and far away. The way it’d sounded pretty much all summer.

  “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t pick up, it’s just—”

  “I know,” she said. “I know you’re busy.”

  “I’m not busy, it’s just…It’s the first night. Obviously, everyone’s out.”

  “I know.”

  Silence.

  “So maybe I’d better go back in.”

  “OK. Have you met anyone nice?”

  “The people in my suite in my dorm are all right. They’ve pretty much only talked about chemistry so far, because that’s what they all want to major in, but they seem nice. And this one guy Arthur seems cool. He’s a sophomore, though.”

  “That sounds good. Cool. I…I just wanted to check everything was OK. It felt like we didn’t really sort stuff out properly this morning before you left. I didn’t want you to leave when it was weird between us.”

  I sighed. “It’s been weird between us all summer.”

  More silence. That was the first time either of us had actually admitted that out loud. For some reason it felt easier to say knowing she was two hundred miles away.

  She still wasn’t speaking, so I kept going; the booze and the pocket buzzing and the two hundred miles making me spill stuff that had been locked up firmly in my head until now. “And, I mean, the thing is, it’s not gonna get any less weird now that I’m here, is it?”

  “What do you mean?” she said quietly.

  “I mean, I’m here and you’re there. We won’t see each other that much.”

  “Yeah, but you said, at Reece’s party, remember, you said we could make it work?”

  “I know, but…if this is us making it work, then maybe it won’t work.”

  I heard her inhale sharply, but I carried on. “Like, I’m supposed to be working at other stuff, too, y’know? Meeting people. Making friends. But instead I’m standing out here talking to you. Do you really want me to spend the whole three years on the phone with you?”

  “You’re being a dick, Luke,” she muttered.

  I was, a little. But I was also right.

  “Look, I’m sorry. It’s stupid to talk now,” I sighed. “I’m a little drunk. I’m wearing a bathrobe. I’ll call you tomorrow.” I wasn’t quite sure why I’d added the bathrobe information.

  “I don’t want to talk about this tomorrow,” she said, her voice getting lumpy with tears. “I want to talk about it now.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “If you’ve got something to say, then just say it. Have you met someone else?”

  This actually made me laugh out loud. “Of course I haven’t fucking met someone else, Abbey! I’m out here talking to you! How can I meet someone else?”

  “Do you want to meet someone else, though?”

  “I want to go back inside.”

  I hung up before she could respond. But my pocket was buzzing again as soon as I stepped back in.

  Luke Taylor was right there and I did not feel prepared.

  I kept dancing, but the sight of him had kind of electrified my insides. The boy he was with passed him a pint of something green; Luke took a sip and grimaced. The horn went off and everyone started shrieking.

  I needed to stop looking at him. I needed to call Flora. I turned in the opposite direction and came face to face with Negin, the girl in the room across from me. She was wearing a T-shirt with Princess Diana on it that said QUEEN OF HEARTS. I randomly decided to share the hysteria that was going on inside me. “A really weird thing just happened to me,” I yelled. But she shook her head. “I just saw someone—”

  She kept shaking her head. In a weird moment of madness, I grabbed her hand, which was a bit bonkers considering we’d only met five hours ago, and charged us to the edge of the dance floor. She looked a bit taken aback, and I saw her eyes wander, as if looking for an escape. But it was too late to turn back. I took a breath. I didn’t know how to explain the last seven years of nothingness accurately. “This boy I have wanted for, like, my entire existence, is here.” I realized I was still holding her hand. “Sorry.” I let it go.

  “Um.” Clearly, Negin had no idea how to respond to my declaration. “Did you not know he was coming to York?”

  “No, I totally did. I knew that—a lot.” I nodded to try and communicate my back catalog of daydreams about me and Luke Taylor in York. “I’ve sort of been waiting for this moment…kind of.” I was coming across mental.

  “Right…”

  “And now I don’t know what to do.” She looked at me for a beat and I rushed to babble over it. “I feel like if you saw him you would understand.”

  She glanced around the room. “Where is he?”

  I physically jumped. “Don’t look at him.”

  “I don’t know who he is.” Negin twitched, a hint of a smile on her face. She had a black bob with not a hair out of place, almost like a Lego person. Apart from the faded Princess Di T-shirt, she looked neat. Black jeans, Converse, no makeup. Like if a newscaster fronted an indie band. “Don’t worry, it’s fine. There aren’t that many people in this room.” She scanned it. “Three hundred, maybe. You’ll bump into him naturally at some point.”

  Me and Flora usually went in for intensely rehearsed accidental bumpings, but Negin sounded confident, so I went with it. And anyway, when I looked back to where he had been, there was just a boy in a cow costume unrolling toilet paper and hurling it everywhere. We bought another drink and made our way back into the throng. There was a girl with rainbow-dyed hipster-bowl-cut hair up onstage, chatting with the DJ. I’d watched her from my dorm room earlier, moving in with the sea of other first years. Tonight, she was still wearing the same tracksuit pants and crop top from this morning, but now she also had a gold crown that was sort of hanging jauntily to one side, like she was in some kind of fashion shoot.

  “How is that girl a first year?” I said. “Seems like she knows everyone.”

  “I saw her earlier and she was writing in marker on this boy’s stomach.” Negin didn’t seem to have an opinion about this, just delivered the information matter-of-factly.

  “What, like her phone number?”

  “No, I think it was a line from a song or something.” Negin rolled her eyes. “Deep.”

  “I saw her ‘move in’ this afternoon. But she didn’t have any stuff at all. Nothing. She just walked into her dorm carrying a colander. She didn’t even change clothes for tonight. Like, she’s so cool, all she needs for the next three years is multicolored hair and a colander.”

  We kept staring at Bowl-Cut as the DJ gave her his headphones and she started waving her hands to the crowd.

  We found the rest of our suite and all started dancing together. You could tell we were all from the same hall because of the luminous glitter this one girl from Liverpool, Liberty, had enthusiastically doused on us before we came out. Negin was dancing in her reserved way, and the really shy girl, Becky, was hardly dancing at all. Every time the Klaxon sounded she looked panicked. Liberty oscillated around the group, hugging us all and breaking out into random and unexpected stripper moves every so often.

  The
Klaxon sounded again, and Connor, the boy in the room next to me, jumped into the middle of the circle, and his mighty “First night of college” war cry reverberated around the room. None of us was in danger of forgetting his name, since he had KISS ME I’M CONNOR written right across his forehead. He took off his T-shirt and started swinging it around his head like a lasso, whacking my Yoda ears onto the floor. I bent down to get them, and when I stood up, I came face to face with Luke Taylor. He had appeared out of nowhere, just as I had forgotten about him for one second.

  “Hey.” I tried to smile demurely.

  “Hey,” he shouted over the music. The Klaxon went off and he handed me his bathrobe. “It’s…”

  There was this moment where I didn’t know what he meant. And then I did, and it was like a stone had appeared in my stomach.

  “Phoebe,” I said.

  “Yeah, of course.” He smiled. “Phoebe. I’m Luke.”

  I could feel my face getting red and tight. “Hey.”

  Negin was trying not to seem obvious and was sort of half dancing next to me, her back slightly turned the other way. Her being there made it worse. I wanted to replay the night from the beginning and not have blabbed on about him like some desperate idiot.

  I handed him the Yoda ears and he put them on.

  “So random we’re both here,” I shouted brightly.

  “Yeah, I kind of…” He felt in his pocket for his phone and then glanced down at it. “Sorry, I…” He didn’t finish the sentence, just looked across the room and started to shuffle away. He didn’t even say goodbye. I stared after him, sort of shocked. If I’d seen someone from school, even if I didn’t really know them, I would have made an effort. We were two hundred miles away from home. We had known each other since we were eleven. It was like he actively didn’t want to be associated with me. Like he didn’t want anyone here to even know that we were connected. I took a deep breath and turned to Negin.