Freshmen Page 10

  Another person came in and sat down. I’d been half wondering if Luke Taylor would be in my class, but clearly not. More awkward small talk about whether we had all read the books.

  And then a guy walked in and sat down toward the front. He was wearing jeans that were covered in white paint and a faded red T-shirt that said THE VELVET UNDERGROUND. He had thick black hair that stuck up all over the place and was also splattered with globs of paint. He looked foreign, with that kind of tan that’s hardened every summer and never goes away. Like the front man of a band that sings about being heartbroken in black-and-white.

  “OK.” He nodded and smiled at all of us. “The literature of memory. That is a kind of crazy thing, right?” He was French, maybe Spanish. Some incredibly hot kind of accented nationality. He was the…what is it even called? It’s definitely not the “teacher.” The class leader? The professor? He definitely couldn’t be a professor. He was, like, twenty-five, max.

  Bowl-Cut looked me dead in the eye and mouthed “Hot TA.” Teaching assistant, that was it.

  I smiled in agreement. It is a wonder that I have only slept with two people, because I fall for so many people at a time. If I was Bowl-Cut and wore artfully draped boob curtains, I would probably have slept with a hundred people already.

  He took the cap off his dry-erase marker. “Just say anything, guys. When I say memory, what do you think about?”

  “The past.” Bowl-Cut didn’t even put her hand up. Were you supposed to put your hand up?

  Hot TA nodded and wrote it on the board. “What’s your name?”

  “Mary,” she said.

  I could not believe it. Mary. And I could not wait to tell the others. How is anyone even named Mary anymore? Mary, the most boring Bennet sister. Mary, the mother of God. Mary, the woman who used to babysit me after school when my mum went to Weight Watchers.

  Hot TA tapped the board with his marker. “So what else do you think about when I say ‘memory’?”

  “Nostalgia,” said a girl with French braids.

  And then Luke Taylor walked into the room. Just like that. On cue.

  “Sorry. I got lost.” There was no chair for him to sit on. I had a wild thought about offering him mine, then realized just how insane that would be. Hot TA went and got him one from a stack at the side, and everyone shuffled up to make room for him. Bowl-Cut Mary smiled at me again as if to say, “Wow, all this hotness in one room,” which made me instantly feel both terrified and certain that she was going to get with Luke Taylor, and also made me want to message Frankie and confirm that crushing on Luke Taylor was a universal thing, not just confined to me.

  “What’s your name?” Hot TA asked.

  “Luke.” He looked slightly flustered. Had I ever seen Luke Taylor flustered? Luke Taylor looked attractive flustered.

  “What do you think of when I say the word ‘memory,’ Luke?”

  Luke seemed slightly alarmed. “Erm, I don’t know. Maybe extremes? Like things that are good enough or bad enough to stay in your head?”

  Hot TA wrote it on the board and I copied it down, word for word, slowly. We wrote down our earliest memories and the colors we associated with them and then a memory of school and a memory of a vacation. We talked about whether you can manufacture memories and why so many of us remembered the same things.

  Bowl-Cut Mary retied her hair and I saw that her tattoo said I love, I have loved, I will love. Bowl-Cut Mary had fucking loved. How had she had time to have loved? And how could she be so confident about the will love bit, too? I needed to get on with things.

  I started to wonder whether Luke would talk to me at the end and whether he would mention the quidditch. And then Hot TA said we could take a five-minute bathroom break. Some people got up and left. I got my phone out. Luke was sitting across from me studiously copying things down from the board. I thought about speaking to him, saying some jaunty ice-breaking thing, but I couldn’t think of anything. He had typical, scrawly boy handwriting.

  I opened my camera and slowly shifted my phone up, trying to look natural. And then I pressed the button and quickly put the phone down. I copied out the same sentence I had already copied out and then picked up my phone again.

  “Up-close indisputable proof. Luke Taylor is the HOTTEST BOY ON EARTH.” I made the O’s with a pair of eyes for effect and sent the picture to Frankie.

  Hot TA walked back in. Luke checked his phone and then put it away before copying one last thing off the board.

  “You and someone else might both experience the same event,” said Hot TA. “But the memories you form might be entirely different. Your memories are not about what actually happened, but about you. Who you are and how you experience the world.”

  I thought about Flora and the night with the bikes and whether she remembered it, too. I suddenly wanted to ask her. The conversation was getting quite deep, and people started talking about their earliest memories.

  “Me and my sister had this teddy named Norvin,” Bowl-Cut Mary said. “And it’s weird because she swears he was orange but I know he was purple. And we are both one hundred percent sure.”

  Hot TA smiled. “What does that memory say about each of you?”

  Bowl-Cut Mary shrugged. “That one of us is wrong?”

  He nodded. “Let me tell you something. The night Ted Hughes met Sylvia Plath at a party at Cambridge, they both went straight back to their rooms and wrote about this amazing, intense, explosive connection. It was so important to both of them that they immediately documented it. The beginning of a love affair. Hughes writes about the blue velvet ribbon Plath was wearing in her hair, and she writes about the red velvet ribbon she was wearing.”

  “She must have known what color her ribbon was,” Bowl-Cut said. “It was hers.”

  Hot TA nodded. “Maybe. You would think. You know, in all Plath’s poetry she associates herself with the color red. And in all Hughes’s poetry he associates her with the color blue.”

  “What does it mean?” another boy said.

  “I don’t know.” Hot TA shrugged. “That he always saw her one way, but that she saw herself another. What do you think, Luke?”

  Luke still looked a bit flustered. “I don’t know. That sounds scary. Like no one is really seeing anyone else.”

  Hot TA nodded, and we read a Ted Hughes poem called “Red,” and because I get emotional about everything I almost started to cry. When Hot TA turned to write something on the board, I sneaked a look at my phone.

  And then I had the most intense physical reaction I have ever experienced. My whole body seized up and saliva flooded into my mouth. For a second I thought I might faint or be sick.

  “Memory and writing cannot exist without each other,” Hot TA was saying, but I could barely get a grip on what was happening.

  I stared down at my notebook and curled my hands into fists to stop them from trembling. I looked at my phone again to make sure, and it was like a knife twisting in my chest.

  The worst moment of my life had happened. And I was still living in it.

  I had sent the message to Luke.

  I had sent the picture of Luke…to Luke.

  It was like everything suddenly tripped into slow motion. I almost felt like I’d floated up out of body, but then I realized my left leg was literally shaking under the table, and that brought me back down to Earth.

  It took everything I had not to look at Luke. To see whether he was checking his phone. Maybe he’d already checked it. I felt simultaneously boiling hot and freezing cold. I needed to get out. Not just of the room, but out of York entirely.

  I looked up at the clock. There were still thirty-seven minutes of class left.

  I could hear a weird buzzing in my head, and my cheeks felt like they were on fire. If I said I was ill it would draw more attention to
me. I tried to breathe evenly and keep copying stuff off the board, but my brain wasn’t communicating properly with my hand.

  And then I realized Hot TA was staring at me. Everyone was staring at me. Luke was staring at me.

  “Phoebe?” Hot TA said, smiling. “What do you think makes a moment stay in your head forever?”

  Phoebe was up and out of the room faster than I had ever seen a human being move.

  As soon as the TA said “See you all next week,” she just snatched her bag off the table and bolted out the door. I’d barely even noticed him saying it. But then, I’d barely noticed anything he’d said once I’d looked at my phone and seen that message staring up at me. My first-ever college class and I learned practically nothing because I was obsessing over a twelve-word text.

  As far as I could see, there were two possibilities. One: it was a joke. Quite a weird, inexplicably harsh joke but, still, a joke. She was winding me up. She wanted to embarrass me. Or maybe she thought I’d find it funny. Whatever, Possibility One meant that she was clearly crazy.

  Then there was Possibility Two: that it was a genuine message, genuinely meant for someone else, genuinely saying that Phoebe Bennet thought I was “the hottest boy on Earth.”

  I much preferred Possibility Two.

  I reread it over and over again as I walked back down the covered walkway to B Dorm. I dodged the ducks and nodded at randoms I recognized from Orientation Week, and slowly let the whole concept of Phoebe shift and transform in my mind.

  It was weird. It was like the message had suddenly lit her differently in my brain. I wondered why I hadn’t seen it before. She was definitely hot. She was really funny. That hour we’d spent together on the first night was one of the only times I’d felt relaxed and easy here. She had this openness and positivity about her that sort of drew you in, made you feel more open and positive, too. Even the occasional rush of Abbey-guilt couldn’t stop me from smiling as I thought about her. By the time I was back at B Dorm, punching in the entry code and clambering up the echo-y staircase, I officially had a crush on Phoebe Bennet.

  The hall was totally empty. The chemists were all in labs from nine to five and a knock on Arthur’s door revealed he was out, too. I braved the socks-and-sewage brie stink and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. There were three sheets of printer paper propped up on the table, addressed to Arthur, with the heading: UNACCEPTABLE CHEESE SMELL. I started reading and had just gotten to the final paragraph about “missing Fritos” when Rita walked in. She immediately heaved and covered her nose.

  “My god, that cheese is not messing around, is it?”

  I waved Barney’s essay at her. “He’s already had a formal written complaint about it. Do you want a tea?”

  “Yeah, that would be nice, thanks. Just sat through an incredibly boring class, so I need one. Is Arthur in?”

  “Don’t think so. I just knocked.”

  “Oh.” She frowned and looked around the kitchen, which was spattered with cold, sticky pasta sauce, still holding her nose. “Well, we can’t have a nice cup of tea in here, can we?” She unpinned the laminated fire safety sheet from the notice board, walked across the hall and inserted it carefully into the crack of Arthur’s door.

  “Erm…Rita. What are you doing?”

  “It’s fine,” she said, biting her lip in concentration. “I used to do it all the time last year when Arthur wasn’t in.”

  “Is that definitely legal?”

  “I’m a law student, Luke,” she said, as if that somehow answered my question. She gently jiggled the laminated sheet and tried the door handle at the same time. Suddenly, there was a soft click, and the door swung open. “Ta-da,” she said, flopping onto Arthur’s bed. I followed her in, and as we sat sipping our tea, I decided I had to tell someone about the text.

  “Bloody hell,” she murmured, reading it with raised eyebrows. “She’s not very subtle, this girl, is she?”

  “So do you think it’s for real, then? Like, she actually means it?”

  “Well, she clearly didn’t mean to take a photo of you and then send it to you, but yeah. I think it’s safe to assume that she wants your body.”

  I laughed and felt a little flickering glow inside me, like someone had switched on the central heating in my stomach. “Do you think I should text her back?”

  Rita rolled her eyes. “No, obviously don’t text her back, Luke, you idiot. The poor girl’s probably mortified. She’s probably buried under three blankets, crying her eyes out as we speak. And what would you say, anyway?”

  I thought about it. “Dunno. ‘Thanks for the text’ or something.”

  Her eyes rolled back the other way. “ ‘Thanks for the message.’ Brilliant. You might as well punch her in the face and be done with it.” She took a sip of tea. “How do you know this girl in the first place?”

  “Well, we went to school together, actually. But we didn’t really know each other then. We met for real last week. I sort of said I’d go to that quidditch thing with her at Orientation Fair.”

  “Oh yeah. Why didn’t you go, again?”

  “I just…forgot.”

  She made a face. “Right, well…you should probably apologize. And make up a better excuse.”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Do you actually even like her?”

  “I mean…I hadn’t really thought about it before. But now…yeah. I sort of think I do.”

  Rita groaned loudly. “So when she’s just a random girl from school you don’t give her a second look, but as soon as she accidentally informs you that she wants to jump your bones, you’re suddenly in love with her. Men are such predictable jerks, honestly.”

  I didn’t bother arguing with that, because, to be fair, she had a point.

  She finished her tea and plonked the mug down on Arthur’s bedside table. “Well, this has all worked out perfectly for you, hasn’t it? You like her, she thinks you’re the hottest boy on earth….I mean, it’s all good, by the sound of it. You don’t have a girlfriend or anything, do you?”

  I thought about Abbey, who I hadn’t heard from in more than a week now; the longest silence between us for almost three years. “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  Rita shrugged. “There you go, then. Say sorry for being a dick about the quidditch, and then, I dunno…ask her out or something.”

  Suddenly, we heard the tinkle of keys outside, and the door was kicked open. Arthur stood in the doorway, holding a massive cheese sandwich and frowning hard at us.

  “You know I could report you to the police,” he said, chucking his keys on the desk. “You have broken into my property. You are literally criminals.”

  “Oh, come on, Watling,” said Rita. “Your room’s like the living room. It’s a communal space.”

  “It is not a fucking communal space!” Arthur yelled, jabbing his stinking sandwich at us. “This is my actual, private, personal room! What if I was in here doing something actually private and personal?”

  “What, like peeing in the sink?” Rita said, smirking.

  “No. Like seducing a girl or something.”

  Rita clicked her tongue against her teeth. “You won’t be seducing anyone now that you constantly stink of Brie.”

  “Wrong, actually, Maurita. I’ll be making out with sophisticated French women who appreciate once-in-a-lifetime supermarket deals.”

  They grinned at each other, and not for the first time I wondered why they weren’t a couple. They seemed pretty much perfect together. But then, me and Abbey had seemed pretty much perfect, too. How the hell are you ever supposed to know if you’re right for someone?

  I stood up. “I’ll leave you two to it.”

  “Are you going to soccer initiations?” Arthur asked eagerly. He’d become weirdly obsessed with them. He
thought they’d be some kind of insane combination of Freemason ceremony and satanic ritual. Maybe he was right.

  “No, they’re next week. I’m going back to my room. Need to do some reading.”

  “Are they all right, then, the soccer kids?” Rita asked.

  “Yeah, they seem cool,” I said. “Why?”

  “No, nothing. Just, we had that Will Barnes on the floor below us last year. Do you remember, Arth? He seemed like a bit of a…”

  She trailed off and just let the sentence hang there, unfinished, in the air.

  “He seems all right to me.” I shrugged.

  She smiled. “No, yeah. I’m sure he is. I don’t know him, to be fair.” Arthur flopped down in his swivel chair and she said, “By the way, Arth, you’re not gonna believe what Luke just got.”

  Arthur turned to look at me but I headed for the door. “You can fill him in, Rita. I’d better do this reading.” I clapped Arthur on the shoulder as I left. “You got a note about the cheese, by the way. First of many, I bet.”

  “That cheese is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” he said stiffly.

  I went back to my room and tried to read Ted Hughes’s Collected Poems, but I couldn’t stop my brain from flicking back to Phoebe. Rita was probably right: I probably was a predictable jerk. But knowing that Phoebe liked me had made me feel totally different about her. Maybe I’d even liked her all along, but I hadn’t realized it. Maybe I’d forgotten what liking someone new actually felt like.

  To be honest, it felt pretty good.

  “Honestly, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  I genuinely couldn’t think of anything more awful. I couldn’t think of anything else period. I was trapped in it, like a hamster, running away as fast as I could but not realizing I was stuck in the plastic wheel.

  Negin reached out and touched my arm gently. “Phoebs, do you know you’re rocking?”

  “It’s probably PTSD setting in,” Frankie said from the kitchen floor. She had crumpled into the fetal position when I’d showed her the message, and oscillated between sympathetic nods and helpless laughter ever since.