Freshmen Read online

  “So you thought you’d just call me and we’d get back together and everything would suddenly go back to how it was.” She sounded tearful. “It’s not that easy, Luke.”

  “No, I know. It’s just…Maybe I’m not over you.” The words seeped out of me before I could think about whether I really meant them.

  “I’m not over you, either,” I heard her say.

  “Well,” I said. “OK, then.”

  And then the ceiling stopped spinning, and I fell asleep.

  I was irrationally nervous.

  In the worst-case scenario, I wouldn’t get a job at a café. It wasn’t college entrance exams, losing your virginity or skydiving, just another situation I had to walk into, not knowing what the hell I was doing, and hope for the best. I had tied my hair back into a tight ballet-dancer bun and it was making my ears ache, so I kept trying to wiggle them free.

  I gently pushed at the door but it was locked. Josh was behind the counter, neatly laying out a row of giant scones. It was weird seeing him doing something so precise and un-boyish. The last time I had seen him he had been right in the middle of the dance floor of a club, really going for it. He was wearing a white button-down, and it made him look younger than he normally did, like he was in a school uniform. I knocked gently and he looked up, beamed and came over to let me in. Josh hugs you properly. Not a formality hug, but one like he has been waiting for you at the airport for hours. You don’t really get that kind of hug at college: a huge, tight, confidence-giving squeeze.

  “Nice granny bun, Bennet. You OK?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine, apart from the fact I’m exhausted ’cause Frankie has slept in my bed with me for three nights and she’s a massive wriggler.”

  “That girl is an absolute nut. Last night she got behind the counter at the kebab shop and begged the guy to let her serve the fries.” He shook his head. “Negin had to trick her to leave by saying there was a tall man giving out prosciutto in the street.”

  “I went home at midnight because I’m taking this trial shift seriously.” I was—I needed the money, and working at Bettys Tea Rooms seemed slightly more romantic than Pizza Hut.

  “Bettys are serious about people taking it seriously.” He walked back over to the counter and handed me a box of scones and some gloves. I started to lay them out in a row next to his.

  I wanted to say something about Will. I didn’t want him to be this awkward thing in my friendship with Josh. I have enough awkward things with people at York Met to last me the next three years, and it’s only been three weeks.

  Even though I had now taken a solemn vow of chastity, including text message chastity, in front of Frankie, Becky and Negin, I was already notorious in the D Dorm love-life stakes. Since Guinea Pig–gate, Will just acted like he didn’t know me when we were out. I’d seen him get with people in clubs, and I didn’t really care. Well, I did care. I mean, I cared that I’d had this weird thing with him that included that first week of orientation and the bizarre night at his place and the guinea pig text. But apart from that I just wanted to be able to go out and not have to worry about seeing him. Especially when I was already on high alert for Luke Taylor sightings. Twice, I’ve had to hide in the ladies’ room waiting for the all clear.

  “Are you wiggling your ears, Bennet?” Josh laid out his last scone.

  “Yeah, I went a bit militant with the bun. It’s giving me a headache.”

  “You look different with a bun. I can’t believe all that hair can go so small.” He leaned toward me. “Right, so Sandra will come up in a minute. When she does, just be super smiley. Like you’re in a cult. Around here it’s like, you’ve got to smile all the time. That’s the main thing. You can be a murderer as long as you are smiling hard.” He looked down. “Excellent cake-arranging.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.” A stern-looking woman, actually wearing what looked like a Downton Abbey servant’s uniform, came around the corner.

  Sandra took me downstairs to the staff room and handed me a neat pile of clothes in a clear plastic bag and promptly left. I went into the staff restroom and pulled the shirt over my head and fixed the little brooch that came with it in the middle, where a bow tie would go.

  “You OK?” Josh shouted from outside.

  I opened the door.

  “Yeah, I look ridiculous. And I don’t know what this is.” I held it to my waist. “Do you have to be really skinny to work here?”

  “It’s the hat thing,” Josh said.

  I looked in the mirror and put it on my forehead. “I don’t get it. How does it go on?”

  “I don’t know. Guys don’t have to wear them.”

  “That’s the patriarchy for you.”

  “Hold on, turn around.” He gently took a couple of pins out of my bun and my hair fell down. Then he gathered it into a ponytail and rewound the bun slowly, pinning it again, but more loosely. He held up each end of ribbon below the bun and tied them together with the hat thing on my head.

  “I feel like you’re getting me ready for school,” I said.

  “Four sisters. I can do fishtail braids, Dutch braids, French braids, those weird bun things on the side of your head, glitter partings.” He patted my bun and we went back upstairs. There were lots more people there, and we had a team meeting where Sandra spoke a lot about specials and clearing tables and keeping the customers happy. I was still a bit nervous. She kept saying words I had never heard before and everyone was nodding knowingly.

  “You’ll be fine,” Josh whispered.

  I was on the counter for the morning and it wasn’t that bad. I didn’t have to work the register, just get the scones and cakes and biscuits and put them in boxes and hand them to a lady called Julie, who seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of every single thing Bettys had ever sold: “Do you have the Lady Betty peppermint creams?” “Only at Christmas, my love. Give it a few weeks.”

  Just when I felt like it was all going well, Sandra appeared behind the counter.

  “That Laurel is ill again, so I’m afraid I’m going to have to put you on the floor, Phoebe.”

  My stomach churned. I had never waitressed before, and waitressing at Bettys seemed to be the Olympics of waitressing. Silver cake forks and tea strainers and lots of very white tablecloths. I thought about the words “silver service waitressing” on my résumé, which referred to pouring champagne at my gran’s seventieth.

  I just kept getting hotter. People kept asking me questions I didn’t know the answers to and everyone looked too busy to help. The quicker I took people’s orders, the quicker more people seemed to sit down. I couldn’t remember the table numbers and I couldn’t remember all the teas and I couldn’t seem to input the orders without taking so long that people started trying to wave at me to come over and see them.

  I knocked over a tiny vase with a red tulip in it that was on one of the tables, and Sylvia Plath popped into my head. And that made Luke pop into my head, and I got a horror wave that I was getting my accidental text rash back, and then I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to be doing. I had needed to pee for so long that the pain just began to feel normal. How can people get paid so little to do something so complicated? The panic was making my mind go completely blank. I couldn’t remember what had happened three seconds ago.

  Four women at one of my tables kept looking at me. I took a tray of sandwiches over to a group of Americans, and they shook their heads like I had done something wrong. I could feel sweat dripping down my back. I looked through the millions of little pieces of paper I had stuffed into my apron pocket. I found theirs. I had definitely taken their order.

  “Sorry, honey,” one of them said. “We’ve been here for a half hour and we haven’t even been given our tea.”

  “I’m so sorry. Let me just go to the kitchen and check on your order.”


  “Just the pot of tea would be good,” another said, and gave her friend a look as if to say I was a complete idiot.

  Panic was rising inside me. I went downstairs and into the staff bathroom and looked over the slips again. I hadn’t put their order through. And if I did it now it would go to the end of the orders and it would be another half hour until they got anything.

  I couldn’t think properly. I needed to just own up to it, find Sandra and tell her what had happened. I took a deep breath and walked out. Josh winked at me from across the room. I shook my head trying to indicate what had happened.

  He smiled and said something that made the whole table laugh, and then he walked over to me.

  “I think I’ve totally fucked it up,” I whispered. “I forgot to put an order in.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I can fix it.”

  But then Sandra appeared. “Are you all right, love?” she asked. “You’re supposed to be upstairs.” Her voice had an edge to it.

  “Sandra.” Josh wrinkled his nose. “I said to Phoebe I would put an order through for her, but I totally forgot. Don’t blame her. I said I would do it, ’cause she had that many tables and we were quieter down here.”

  She shook her head. “Right, go and handle it.” And then she walked away. I wanted to throw my arms around him, I was so relieved.

  “Your hat’s coming off,” he said with a grin.

  “Thank you so much.” I was acting like he had pulled me out of the water after the Titanic sank. I needed to get some perspective on this trial waitressing shift.

  “Well, I want you to get the job.” He smiled. “So I have a mate here. I mean, I do like having twenty-odd mothers about but, you know…it would be a riot with you.”

  We got the tea and cakes for the table and served them together. Josh definitely had a way of talking to people that just made them like him, even before he had really said anything.

  The lunch rush had passed and things were quieter. Josh and me re-laid all the tables and played Shoot/Snog/Marry in whispers between serving customers.

  Four o’clock came around really quickly, and I got changed and tried to fold up the uniform into the same neat pile in which it had been handed to me.

  “You keep it.” Sandra smiled. “Welcome to Bettys.”

  Me and Josh walked out together, and when we got to the corner he gave me another one of his massive hugs. He hugged me so tight he lifted me up without even realizing.

  “Thanks for getting me the job.”

  “I didn’t,” he said. “You got it for yourself.”

  It was getting dark. People were finishing their shopping and going back to their cars. We wandered along the cobbled street toward campus.

  “Do you want to come to mine for a cuppa? It’s on the way back.”

  I made a face. “Um…dunno.”

  “You mean ’cause of Will?” He sounded almost concerned. “Are you OK? About all that?”

  I didn’t really know what to say. I wondered what he knew about that night. What exactly Will had said about it, and what Josh thought.

  We both looked in a toy shop window. “What would you go for?” Josh pointed. “I reckon you would go for the Calico Critters rabbit family.”

  “I already have that one, obviously. It’s a classic. I would go for the light-up Hula-Hoop. I mean, when did they invent those?” I peered through the window. “I reckon you are a Nerf gun kind of boy.”

  He crinkled his nose. “What? That’s a massive insult. I would go for the teddy bear. I love a good teddy bear.”

  We kept walking in silence. “I am OK about it,” I said. “The Will stuff, I mean. I just feel like…I just don’t want it to be weird.”

  Josh nodded. “Yeah. Well, Will’s…He’s a bit…” He trailed off. “He’s great in loads of ways, but…I dunno.”

  “I thought you two were really good mates,” I said.

  He dug his hands into his jacket pockets. “I mean, yeah. We were in the same hall last year and we both played soccer and it seemed really obvious from the start that we were gonna live together. And then his dad literally bought a house in York, so…”

  We stopped outside a kitchenware store. “The living together thing freaks me out a bit,” I said. “People are talking about it already. Like, getting houses together. Being roommates for all the years we’re here.”

  “Honestly, Bennet, do not give in to the pressure. You don’t have to decide straight away. I kind of…wish I hadn’t.”

  “Do you still play soccer?” I wondered if he’d met Luke.

  “No, I stopped at the end of last year. I played at school and everything, but up here, those guys are all quite…dunno. Can’t describe it, really.” He shook his head. “Like I said, I’ve got four sisters, so I guess I’m a bit more sensitive to all that locker room joking around.”

  I waited for him to say something more but he didn’t. “Well, you can always join quidditch with me, Frankie and Negin. There’s a social next week.”

  He smiled at me. “You never know, Bennet, might take you up on that, actually.”

  I peered through the store window. “Look, they have a whole wall of cookie cutters. I can spend all my wages stocking up for egg-fairy-bread sandwiches.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, we need to keep adding to our collection.”

  There were loads of them, in the shape of literally every object you could think of. I turned to Josh. “OK, which do you think’s my fave?”

  He narrowed his eyes. Then after a second, he said: “I’m going with the train one.”

  “Yes! That actually is my favorite.”

  “I know you so well, Bennet.” He pointed. “Is that a phone-shaped one?”

  I started walking again. “We are not buying that one. Phones are the root of every single problem in my life. Do you actually, really want to know what happened with Will?”

  “Well, how graphic is it? I mean, will I see you in another light, Bennet?”

  “I sent him a picture of a guinea pig doing the Macarena. And I never heard from him again.”

  Josh stopped still and then burst into laughter so loud that a woman crossed the street.

  “Stop.” I pulled my hat over my eyes. “Please. It’s still raw.”

  He linked arms with me. “Don’t worry. Trust me, guinea pig Macarena is amateur stuff. On Valentine’s, when I was sixteen, I wrote my girlfriend a cheesy love poem. And then accidentally texted it to my mum.”

  I pulled out my phone. “OK. That’s bad, but this blows everything out of the water. If I show you this, we have to be friends for life.” I found the message and handed it to him.

  He squinted. “Luke Taylor is—”

  I whacked him on the arm. “Don’t read it out loud. It’s horrific enough as it is.”

  “And you sent this to…?”

  I shut my eyes and nodded.

  “Wow.” Josh stopped and ran a hand over his shaved head. “I mean, yeah, there’s no beating that. That’s the Usain Bolt of embarrassing texts. That’s made me feel a lot better, actually.”

  “Oh good. Great. Glad my shit-show of a life could be of service.”

  He sighed. “I feel like life is always manageable until you get girls involved.”

  “Or boys.”

  “People. Basically, you shouldn’t get people involved.”

  “Or technology,” I said. “Especially phones. You wouldn’t catch Elizabeth Bennet sending a comedy guinea pig picture to Darcy. She’d have to paint it and then send it by horseman.”

  Josh shrugged. “Maybe she did do that—it just didn’t make the final cut. It’s probably in the bloopers.”

  “You know it’s a book, too, right?”

  “You know I’m studying
English, too, right?” he shot back.

  I sighed. “Maybe we should just throw our phones away and live like people from the olden days.”

  “Agreed; you stay away from phones and I’ll keep living like a monk.”

  I scrunched my face up. “You don’t live like a monk. What are you talking about?”

  “An emotional monk. I have vowed to be an emotional monk. I’m not gonna fall in love with anyone again.”

  “Who were you in love with? Are they here?”

  He shook his head. “Nah, she’s at home. We broke up last year. She broke up. Broke up with me. Broke me.” He sounded really serious.

  I wanted to ask him more, but his face sort of told me not to. I feel like everyone has had some great love except me. Like, maybe it will never happen to me. Maybe I’m immune or something.

  “I think we’ll both be all right.” He smiled at me. “And you’re a Bennet, Bennet, so it is inevitable that one day, someone will tell you how ardently they admire and love you.”

  Will was muttering like a maniac and jabbing randomly at the quiz machine’s buttons.

  “Krypton…1968…The Diet of Worms…”

  But he was getting every answer right. It was genuinely quite impressive.

  “How the hell do you know all thi—”

  “Shut up,” he hissed. “We’re one away from winning.”

  He squinted at the screen. “Who wrote the 1925 novel The Trial?” He spun around to face me. “Come on, English. This is all you.”

  I pressed the FRANZ KAFKA button, and a few pound coins clattered out of the machine. “Fucking yes, mate!” Will beamed, reaching down to collect the money. “Dream team.”

  He squeezed past the pool table and I followed him up to the bar. “Played that machine so many times last year that I still remember pretty much all the answers. I might be fucking my degree up, but I could definitely get first in pub trivia.” He waved the bartender over. “What d’you want?”