Freshmen Read online

  “Right, thanks for coming, gang,” he said. “I’m seeing some new faces here this afternoon, which is super exciting, isn’t it, Mist?”

  Misty was looking at us like she wanted to kill us, but she still agreed that it was super exciting.

  Brandon carried on: “Competitive matches start next week, so today will just be a bit of fun. We’ll play a few friendlies among ourselves. Right, grab some brooms, people,” he shouted. “Let’s do this!”

  I realized I was going to have to actually do physical exercise in front of Luke Taylor. I tried to sneak a look at him in a non-bait way. And when I did, he was looking right back at me.

  The Brandon guy was the most excitable person I’d ever seen. He was like someone had trapped a rabbit in a human body, then wrapped it in a Gryffindor robe.

  “OK, so for the friendlies, we usually divide up into houses,” he yelled. “So let’s just see if we have anything even resembling equal numbers….” He looked around the circle, and his gaze rested on Arthur. “How about you, mate? Didn’t see you at our first meeting. What’s your name?”

  “Arthur.”

  “Great. And what house are you in?”

  Arthur shrugged. “No idea. I don’t really care about Harry Potter, to be honest.”

  Brandon smiled, completely unoffended. “OK, cool; well, let’s put you in Hufflepuff, then.”

  Arthur snorted. “Fuck off. No way am I Hufflepuff.”

  Frankie let out a yelp of laughter so loud it echoed around the hall.

  Misty stepped forward and clapped Arthur on the shoulder proudly. “Yeah, you’re right. Hotheaded, fiery, passionate…You’re Gryffindor through and through, aren’t you?”

  Arthur sniffed and tried to regain some of his composure. “Yeah, I guess. Maybe. Whatever. I mean, it’s not like I care either way.”

  “Oh, well, in that case,” said Brandon, “if you don’t mind being Hufflepuff…”

  “No, we’ve said I’m Gryffindor now, haven’t we,” Arthur snapped. “So I might as well definitely be Gryffindor. Definitely.”

  We split up into two groups. I got put in Ravenclaw with Ed and Negin. We were playing Hufflepuff, who had Phoebe and Frankie on their team.

  “I’ve been given a fucking mop!” I heard Arthur yell from across the hall, where Gryffindor was getting ready to take on Slytherin. “I’m supposed to be a wizard, not a caretaker!”

  Somebody blew a whistle, and even though half of us had no clue what to do, we started playing.

  One of the freshmen chucked the ball at me immediately, and I saw Phoebe sprinting toward me. For half a second I had the ridiculous idea to just keep hold of it, and see if she would crash right into me.

  But I didn’t. I chucked it to Ed, and Phoebe pulled up an inch from my chest.

  She hitched an eyebrow and smiled. “So close.” Then she sprinted off again, and I suddenly wondered whether I was the first person in history to feel horny on a quidditch field.

  Ed was legging it down the wing, the ball clamped under his arm. He stopped short in front of the goal hoop things. Frankie went galloping madly toward him, but he chucked the ball right past her into the top hoop.

  Our team all went crazy, and even Frankie started clapping, until one of the Hufflepuffs shouted: “You’re not on their team!”

  The Hufflepuff keeper immediately started scanning for a decent pass. I drifted over to Phoebe and stood right behind her.

  “Right, I’m marking you, Bennet,” I said. “There’s no way you’re getting past me.”

  She stepped backward into me gently, scraping the inside of my leg with her broomstick. “This isn’t soccer, Luke Taylor.” She turned to look at me, her cheeks flushed. “This is a real sport, yeah? You’re out of your depth.”

  I was finding it pretty hard to concentrate on anything except Phoebe, but I tried to get my head back in the game as the Hufflepuffs were jogging out of their area.

  Someone shouted, “Mark up!” and I yelled, “Got Phoebe!”

  “No one’s marking me,” Frankie bellowed, looking directly at Ed. “I mean, someone should be marking me, shouldn’t they?” Ed was totally oblivious to this; he was just watching the ball.

  One of the Hufflepuffs tried a long pass, but Ed plucked it out of the air with his tree-trunk arm. He chucked it to Negin, who stared at it blankly for a second and then burst off down the wing.

  It stopped everyone dead. “Negin,” hissed Frankie. “Are you joking?”

  Negin was unbelievably quick. The Hufflepuff beaters launched three “bludgers” (flat volleyballs) at her, but she dodged them all. Without slowing down, she sent the ball straight through the top hoop, and our team went crazy again.

  Misty stood up and shouted from the sidelines at Ed and Negin: “You and you—what are your names?”

  They told her, and she started scribbling furiously on her notepad.

  It was weird: that same edge that comes out in me on the soccer field suddenly came out here, too. I really wanted to win.

  Hufflepuff got a goal back, but me and Ed passed the ball around neatly, then I sent Negin off on another blazing run. Again, she slammed the ball through the hoop, and the three of us high-fived.

  Brandon jostled about among the chaos, slapping people on the back and randomly shouting encouragement. He’d grin at you if you did something right, and he’d grin more brightly if you did something wrong. When Frankie nearly decapitated him by swinging her broom at the ball, he just fell about laughing and started calling her Belinda Broomswing.

  Eventually, when we were 14–10 up, another whistle blew, and the Ravenclaws all cheered and collapsed to the floor. I felt sweaty and tired and the happiest I had been in ages.

  Misty asked me and Phoebe if we’d mind putting the goal hoops away, and I could feel Frankie’s and Negin’s eyes on us as we wheeled them out into the hall. We found the storeroom and propped the hoops up against an old Ping-Pong table. And then we just stood there, still red-faced and a bit out of breath, looking at each other. Realizing that we were completely alone in a dusty back room. Just smiling and breathing and not saying anything. We both knew it was gonna happen, and it was sort of exciting and excruciating at the same time.

  Phoebe mumbled, “OK, then…” and we both laughed awkwardly. I felt my heartbeat up its pace, and just as thoughts of Abbey were starting to tumble into my head, she leaned forward, and then I leaned forward, and then she closed her eyes.

  And then it was like I stopped thinking altogether.

  I put my arms around her, and we were suddenly right up against each other, sticky with sweat, and kissing harder and harder.

  Frankie took her full-to-the-brim bowl of Wheaties and hot milk out of the microwave and tiptoed to the table so it wouldn’t spill. Negin and me were eating honey on toast.

  “I’m gonna leave it to dry for a bit,” Frankie said. “I only like it when it’s turned into a kind of paste.” She picked up a bag of sugar and started shaking it out over the top of the gloopy brown mixture. Negin wrinkled her nose slightly.

  “So would you say Luke Taylor is your official boyfriend now?” Frankie took an un-offered bite of Negin’s toast.

  I shook my head. “As if. Would you say random-freshman-kiss is your boyfriend? We’ve kissed. Once.”

  Negin shook her head. “Come on, it’s different. You’ve had this really long buildup.”

  Since it had happened I’d been permanently giddy. I had never had this feeling, about anything, ever. The closest was when I was so bored in study hall that I entered an online competition and won a luxury trip to Disney World for my whole family. It was the same kind of initial quake and then tremors of fuzzy, giggly aftershock that made me feel like some kind of epic hero.

  “Did you tell Flora?” Negin aske
d.

  “Yup. She literally started hyperventilating. She acted as if we had achieved it together. Like a joint Oscar win.” She had just kept saying, “You’ve fucking kissed Luke Taylor. You did it,” over and over again. Which was pretty much what was going through my head, even in real time as it was actually happening. Like my subconscious was yelling, What the hell? This is cracked out. Is this even real?

  Frankie started to eat the congealed sugar crust on her Wheaties. “He obviously likes you. I mean, he texted you ‘good night.’ ‘Good night’ is the most meaningful message you can send someone. It’s more than ‘I love you.’ ‘Good night’ actually incorporates ‘I love you.’ Because you only text people you love ‘good night.’ No one has ever texted me ‘good night.’ Literally, no one.”

  “I just really want to know what happened with him and Abbey,” I said. “But it’s impossible to find out.”

  “Is there any way you could, like…bring it up casually?” Negin suggested.

  “No, because that will instantly make me seem like a crazy person who wants to marry him.”

  “Fair. Both ways. I mean, you do.” Frankie poured another layer of sugar into her bowl. “I was telling my mum about it last night. Do you know the woman from Abba married her stalker?”

  I snorted into my tea. “OK, stop saying stuff like that out loud. Although, you know, I only have about four memories before I saw Luke Taylor. I know because I counted them recently.”

  Negin looked up from her toast. “You specifically counted the number of memories you have before you first saw him? That’s really weird. No offense, but that is a bit stalkerish.”

  “I think it’s romantic,” said Frankie. “But I have a really bad memory, so I don’t have a lot of memories before the first time I met Ed yesterday.”

  “I didn’t specifically count them in relation to him. We’re doing memory in one of my courses. Like how memory is what makes literature. How you can’t have the written word without memory.”

  “I have no clue what we do in archaeology.” Frankie yawned. “They keep talking about science. No one ever told me it had anything to do with science. I’m absolutely crap at science.” She took another mouthful of Wheaties paste. “So what is the deal with this Abbey, then?”

  “I can’t find anything out about her,” I said. “As in she used to be social media obsessed and she has, like…disappeared.”

  “Oh my god, do you think Luke Taylor killed her?” Frankie said.

  “He does play sports.” Negin nodded. “More testosterone.”

  “You play sports,” I said.

  “Negin’s killed mad amounts of people,” Frankie shouted. “With her resting bitch face alone.”

  I got up and put more bread in the toaster. “Seriously, though, Abbey has vanished. Literally vanished. And now I have absolutely no way at all of finding out what happened between her and Luke.”

  “Except asking Luke…” Negin shrugged. “Which would be fairly straightforward.”

  “Obviously, I’m not gonna do that.”

  Becky walked in wrapped in a massive coat, carrying a pile of packages.

  “Beckster!” Frankie shouted, even though she was about a few feet away from her. She held up her hand and Becky put the boxes on the table and very gently high-fived her. “How come you’re back?”

  Becky tucked her hair behind her ears. “Me and Aaron had a fight, so I got an earlier train.” I looked at her more closely. Her eyes were ever so slightly red.

  I jumped up and pulled out a chair for her. “Are you OK?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I just…It’ll be fine. I’m gonna call him in—” She stopped before her voice cracked. Her face tightened and she stared hard at the table. I wanted to say she could go back to her room if she wanted to. That she didn’t have to cry in front of us. It was weird how little we all knew each other in some ways. Did Becky have a Flora to call and cry on the phone to? Frankie and me exchanged a look, and Frankie sat down next to her and put her hand slightly awkwardly on her shoulder. Becky gulped and shook her head, and I could tell she was trying her hardest to stop it but she couldn’t. She cried gently for a bit while we watched hopelessly. After a while her sniffs became more widely spaced, and Negin went and got a roll of toilet paper and handed it to her.

  She wiped her eyes and then scrunched the toilet paper up in her hands and finally just said, “It’s not how I thought it was gonna be.”

  It was almost too big a statement to respond to.

  “The ‘best days of your life’ thing is made up by old people with mortgages and stuff,” Negin said. “It’s obviously weird to just uproot your life.”

  Becky nodded. “I really miss him. We used to see each other every single day. We used to meet up to walk to school together. I told him I would stay exactly the same, and I am exactly the same, I think….”

  “No one can stay exactly the same,” I said. And I thought about Flora and her new friends and how strange it made me feel.

  Frankie leaned her head on Becky’s shoulder. “Sometimes I think about how weird it is that if you look in a mirror from one second to the next, then you look exactly the same. But, like, if you stayed in front of a mirror for five years, would you see yourself change?”

  Negin shot her a look that indicated she would have had something cutting to say if Frankie had made this statement in another situation.

  “I don’t want to change,” Becky said. “I really just wish I could have frozen time this summer. I feel like everything was okay then, and I just want it to be then again.” She nodded. “I really love Aaron.”

  “Becky, he obviously loves you. You just had a fight. People fight all the time,” I said. “Just call him in a bit.”

  She nodded. “I might go home on Tuesday.”

  Frankie shook her head. “Tuesday is Halloween. You have to come to the nine-nine-nine thing. Pregame’s here first. I’m making cocktails inspired by everyone’s personalities.” She squeezed Becky’s hand. “I mean, you say vodka and Fanta to me, with a dash of green syrup.” She picked her bowl up and tipped the last of the milk into her mouth.

  “All we have currently is vodka, Fanta and some green syrup,” Negin said. And then Becky did smile a watery smile. I thought she might get up and go to her room, but she didn’t, so she must have wanted to stay with us, jabbering on about shit.

  Frankie picked up one of the parcels and started unwrapping it. “Speaking of the nine-nine-nine party…” She tore open the plastic packaging with force and emptied the contents onto the table.

  A weird white plasticky dress with a red cross on it fell out. We all looked at the cardboard insert with a stripper-type woman on it that said SEXY NURSE COSTUME. Frankie sniffed it. “It smells really weird. Like markers. Shall we try them on?”

  We traipsed back to my room, and she immediately started flinging her clothes off. Becky zipped her up in the costume, and she turned around and threw her arms in the air like she was opening a show in Vegas.

  “It weirdly makes you look even taller,” I said. “I think it’s because the dress is so tiny. Your legs look insanely long. Like they are three-quarters of your body.”

  “Like a daddy longlegs? Bitch.” Frankie scowled and changed to another model pose. “What am I supposed to do? Go to the giant’s costume emporium?”

  “If someone spills their drink on you, at least you can just wipe it off.” Negin squinted at her. “Is it made of pencil-case material?”

  “No, Negin, I just look like an actual pencil.” She tried to pull the thigh-high things up but they only reached a bit over her knees. “I thought the only people who actually wore garters were Victoria’s Secret models, so why are they so short?”

  “I’ll have the opposite problem,” I said. “I bet mine are too long and go right up
to my ass.”

  “And there is this gap for my boobs, but I have no boobs to put in it.” Frankie swung around to Becky, who was sitting on my bed. “Becky, you aren’t a bitch like these two. Be honest, if you were Ed, would you find me in any way sexual in this outfit?”

  Becky looked a bit overwhelmed by the question. “Um…”

  Me and Negin burst out laughing. “Sorry, you are sexual,” I said. “It was just Becky’s face…and the way you said ‘sexual.’ ”

  “Fuck you all,” Frankie said, and one of the stockings fell around her ankles. She plonked down next to Becky. “Do you know my mum is actually a nurse? And they don’t even wear this shit. They wear tunics like women at drug stores. Maybe I should have got the £23:99 one. Did you get the £23:99 one? Come on, I want to see yours.”

  Usually, I would have felt a bit self-conscious showing people my body, but Frankie seemed so at home in hers that it kind of made me want to feel at home in mine. Even if I didn’t.

  I think, in my whole life, Frankie was the only girl apart from Mum I had seen completely naked. In PE at school, everyone was so careful, wriggling around inside their Aertex tops. Even when I had been away with Flora, we had put our bikinis on in the bathroom. But the first night Frankie had stayed in my room, she had just stripped off, and it had kind of mesmerized me. Partly just seeing another person’s naked body and partly because she didn’t think it was weird. Like she had never gotten the memo about squirming around in your T-shirt to take your bra off at a sleepover.

  I opened the plastic packet and started to get changed, trying to affect Frankie’s no-fucks-given vibe.

  “You look way more like an actual nurse than Frankie does,” Negin said. “I think the green color helps.”

  “I feel like one of the fairies from Cinderella. It really poofs out at the waist.”

  I sat on the bed and tried to work out how to put the stockings and garters on. In the end, we had to watch a YouTube video to figure it out. I stood up and looked at myself. “The thigh highs kind of funnel all my fat upward and then it spills over the top of them. Like I’m a cupcake and my fat is buttercream icing.”