Freshmen Read online

  “Ten to four.” She nodded.

  “Cool. Well, see you both later, then.”

  “See you at three, right?” I said to Will. He nodded without making eye contact, and they both walked off.

  “You’ve got a game this afternoon, then?” Phoebe asked as we headed back toward Jutland.

  “Yeah. Leeds. Apparently, they’re pretty good.”

  “Right…”

  I wondered if we were ever actually going to talk about Will directly. But then, maybe there was nothing to talk about. Maybe there was no awkwardness. Maybe I was just being paranoid.

  Coming off the field later, after Leeds had effortlessly battered us 6–1, I tried to catch up to Will, but he marched straight off into the changing rooms.

  Trev fell into step alongside me. “He’s not exactly a good loser, is he?”

  “Guess not.”

  “Their third goal was his fault, to be fair.”

  That was definitely true, but I wasn’t convinced that was what was bothering him.

  “Dunno why we even turned up today, to be honest,” Trev sighed, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. “It was pretty demoralizing.”

  “I dunno. I still enjoy it, actually, even when we get beaten.”

  “You’re weird, Taylor.”

  “Thanks, mate. Your goal was good, at least.”

  He ruffled his sweaty hair. “Yeah, thanks. When you’re five foot six you get an added buzz off scoring a header. You coming tonight, then?”

  “Probably, yeah,” I said, shrugging.

  He grinned at me. “Try not to sound too excited, mate.”

  Wednesday night was Sports Night, which basically meant the whole team went into town together, got shit-faced and ended up in some kebab place, where Dempers would invariably get us chucked out by performing a lewd act with the condiments.

  I’d usually arrive at every game with some bulletproof excuse about why I wouldn’t be able to come out afterward, but when it came down to it, I never had the guts to bail out. I always secretly suspected that Trev knew how I felt. Because I secretly suspected he felt it, too.

  Back in the changing room, Will was already stuffing his jersey into his backpack while Dempers banged on about some photo on the group chat.

  “Wicks should be banned for life for that one,” he yelled, hurling his water bottle across the room.

  “It’s true, she was a fucking dog, Wicks,” said Geordie Al. “I’m surprised your camera didn’t break.”

  Wicks—a tall, blond, extremely self-satisfied sophomore—held his hands up and said, “Her face was ropey, but trust me, boys, the tits were amazing.”

  “Well, next time, let’s have a shot of her tits, then,” said Dempers.

  Will zipped his bag up and his eyes fell on me. “Have you checked the Wall today, Taylor?”

  “No, haven’t seen it,” I said.

  Geordie Al leaned across and showed me the photo on his phone. Another girl lying asleep in a messy bedroom. Not knowing she was having her picture taken. Not knowing she was being passed around a changing room.

  I nodded and said, “Huh,” which I’m pretty sure wasn’t the desired reaction but was the only thing I could think of.

  Geordie Al cocked an eyebrow at me. “Swifty obviously doesn’t think she’s that bad.”

  “He’s a freshman,” bellowed Dempers. “He’ll fuck anything that moves!”

  Everyone laughed again, but Will was still looking at me with a weird, cold smile on his face. When the laughter died down, he said: “No, seriously, though, Taylor. Now that you and Phoebe Bennet are a thing, you’ve got to get a photo up on the Wall. Bit unacceptable to still be on zero pictures six weeks into first semester.”

  I felt my face heating up as everyone turned to look at me.

  “Told you that girlfriend-from-home thing wouldn’t last, didn’t I?” Will smirked.

  “No, no, it’s not like that,” I said. “Honestly, me and Phoebe are just…friends.”

  “Oh, really,” Will scoffed. “ ’Cause obviously, I go to the sex clinic with all my friends.”

  “Nice one, man,” Dempers cackled at me. “Pregnant or herpes? Or both?”

  Will ignored this and turned back to me. “Seriously, though, Luke, mate. When’s the Phoebe photo going up?”

  Trev caught my eye and then looked away. Me and him were pretty much the only ones who didn’t comment on the photos.

  “Honestly, man, it isn’t like that,” I stuttered. “I’m still with Abbey. From home.”

  “Stick up a photo of Abbey from Home, then,” said Geordie Al, and everyone cracked up. I laughed along with them, hating them, but hating myself slightly more.

  Will shrugged, like he was bored by the whole conversation now. He pulled his backpack over his shoulder. “Oh well, whatever. I’m sure Phoebe Bennet will find her way onto the Wall somehow.”

  And before I could process that properly, he yelled, “Hurry up, then, you fucking girls. Taxis into town!”

  “How are you dancing? I can’t even walk.” I squeezed the mop in the bucket.

  “You are shit at mopping,” Josh laughed. “You do weird show-mopping. Did you just mop the shape of a star?”

  “It’s a snowflake.”

  “Have you just chucked all the water on the floor? Do you ever wanna leave here? It’s like you want to spend the night in Bettys’s kitchen.”

  “Well, at least I wouldn’t have to walk anywhere.”

  Josh picked up the mop and started systematically working it around the floor. “Phoebe Bennet: too posh to mop. Too tired to dance. Too full to eat another vanilla slice.”

  “I’ve had two. I’m sorry. My back aches.”

  “I thought it was your feet, you shirker. Go and start taking inventory in the freezer.”

  I was about to tell him how the freezer reminded me of The Shining, and every time I went in there I freaked out, but I thought that might be a step too far. I pulled the incredibly heavy door open and walked in. It was completely silent. I took my shoes off and put my feet onto the freezing floor and padded about, letting the cold soothe them.

  I took the clipboard off its hook. I was completely alone. I tried to remember the last time I had actually been by myself and I couldn’t. Apart from being in the bathroom, every second of my day was spent with other people. Even at night, I shared a single bed with either Frankie or Luke. I sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall at the back of the freezer. The cold crept through my bun and right to my head. The buzzing ache in my feet spread through my body.

  I took my phone out of my pocket. My mum had messaged me a picture of Fat Cat asleep on my Turtles pillowcase. Seeing it made me feel lost and kind of disconnected. I tried to call Mum but there was no reception. I hadn’t been home at all since coming to York. Becky went home every weekend. Maybe I should go back for my birthday, just do a family thing. For no reason at all I started crying.

  It was ridiculous. Nothing had happened. I shut my eyes and let it wash over me for a second.

  “Bennet?” Josh was standing at the door. “Are you OK?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I am, just…” I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t really know what was going on. “Just leave me for a minute, honestly. I’m embarrassed. I’m a shambles of a person.” Trying to speak was making me more tearful. I sniffed in a disgusting attempt to try to pull myself together and wiped my eyes. “Honestly, just give me a second.”

  He nodded and walked out. But as soon as he did I wished he hadn’t. I scanned the clipboard and told myself I would get up and start counting in exactly three minutes. I felt like I could fall asleep. It was like the tears had drained me, left me totally exhausted.

  The door creaked again, and Josh was peek
ing back into the empty kitchen. “OK, coast is clear.” He pulled the door shut. He was holding two steaming cups in one hand.

  He crouched down next to me. “Do you want the tea or the hot chocolate?”

  I reached out and took the tea.

  “Scoot over.” He sat down.

  “Imagine if we got trapped in here. This is how they killed people in the Cold War.” I leaned my head against his shoulder.

  “Bennet, you do know that’s not why it’s called the Cold War?”

  “It’s in a Bond film. They kill the man in a freezer. Or it might be a sauna, actually.”

  I closed my eyes and neither of us said anything. The silence just rolled over us.

  “Are you OK?” he said softly after a while. “I’ve never seen you upset. It’s horrible. You’re such a smiley person usually.”

  I nodded against his shoulder. He smelled like chocolate and fabric softener. “Yeah. I really do think I’m just tired. I miss my mum today. It’s the first time I have, like, for real. I’m nineteen soon. It’ll be the first birthday I won’t be with my family.”

  “Well, you could go home for it.”

  I shook my head. “Nah, I don’t want to, and the girls are organizing something, I think.”

  “What do you want to do in your twentieth year, then, Bennet? If me and you are sitting on the floor in this freezer one year from today, what one thing do you want to have done?”

  The steam off the tea was dissolving the ice on the shelf and making it drip. “I dunno.”

  “Come on, it can be anything. So you can say ‘The year I was nineteen, I…’ ” He scooped his finger around the edge of his mug to get all the foam.

  “I feel really boring. Can I get back to you?”

  He tilted his head on top of mine. “Yup. This freezer is actually warmer than my house.”

  “Has Will still not fixed the boiler? Are you definitely moving out next year?”

  “I think so. It’ll just be…easier.”

  He took two Bettys cookies out of his pocket and gave one to me. “So how’s your ever-eventful love life, then?”

  I elbowed him. “I told you I don’t have chlamydia.”

  He laughed softly. “You get in some scrapes, Bennet, I swear.”

  “All right. We don’t need to list them.” If he knew about the condom, he’d probably die laughing right here in the freezer.

  “But you and Luke are solid, right?” he asked. “It’s not him making you sad?”

  “No. He is one of the really, really good things. Well, I think he is. I just wish I knew what was actually going on between us. As in, I am in it, living it and I don’t really know. Like, we see each other every day. We spend most nights together. We text each other. We cook together. Don’t those things, added up, mean that we are a couple?”

  “Well, it sounds pretty couple-y.”

  “But I don’t exactly know what happened with his ex and he never talks about it. And he was a bit off about Frankie taking a picture of me and him together at the nine-nine-nine thing. I dunno…I hate this stuff. Like, how you never know what the status is. What the status of your own life is. I mean, is there an amount of time that passes, and then you just kind of are a couple, whether you’ve said it out loud or not?”

  Josh shrugged. “If you’re worried about it, just ask him. What are you scared of?”

  For a moment, I thought she was Abbey.

  It was just a few seconds, in that weird, fuzzy state between sleep and waking, but still, I could have sworn it was Abbey’s head resting softly on my chest. Then my phone buzzed on the bedside table, and reality came sliding back into focus.

  It was the morning after yet another night before; another night where we’d both gone out separately, gotten drunk, then ended up back in bed together.

  I woke up the same way I always seemed to wake up these days—with a throbbing head and a tongue that felt like the top of a pool table. I tried to swallow, but my mouth didn’t have enough moisture, so I ended up making a weird sort of clicking noise at the back of my throat, like a radiator coming on.

  Through the door, I could hear the chemists having an unnecessarily loud conversation while smashing saucepans about. Eventually, they headed off to their labs and I lay there, listening to the soft flutter of Phoebe’s breathing and thinking about Abbey. I thought about how I’d feel if she slept with someone else. Like, I really thought about it. Hard. I tried to imagine her telling me, and exactly how I would react. I decided that, honestly, I’d be happy. I just wanted her to be OK. I wanted us both to get on with our lives.

  But then, was I really getting on with my life? I still wasn’t totally sure if I was ready to start something new. Something official. I liked Phoebe—a lot—but the idea of getting into something serious seemed so much riskier now. What if things ended with her the same way they had with Abbey? What if I was destined to go through life just screwing stuff up and hurting people? What if I was never brave enough to start another relationship because I was so sure it’d all turn to shit?

  Truth was, I’d spent all this time worrying that I’d fucked Abbey up, but I never really considered that maybe she’d fucked me up a bit, too.

  My phone buzzed three times in quick succession, and Phoebe snuffled and shifted under the comforter. I couldn’t reach the phone without lifting her head off my arm. She scratched her nose, blinked a couple of times, then grabbed my phone and passed it to me.

  “Was that your alarm?” she mumbled.

  Four new messages from the soccer group flickered open. A photo of a girl I vaguely recognized from somewhere, with Will’s and Dempers’s and Wicks’s increasingly grim comments underneath.

  I switched the phone to silent and locked it. “It’s just the soccer team.”

  Phoebe rolled over, still half asleep. “Mm. What’re they saying?”

  “Just about practice later.”

  I pushed the comforter back and then suddenly remembered I was completely naked. Being naked with Phoebe when we were drunk in the middle of the night felt like the most natural thing in the world, but I still wasn’t quite ready for it in daylight.

  I wriggled my foot out of the bed and used it to blindly sweep the floor for my boxers. I connected with something and reached down to grab it, only to find that it was just my T-shirt. My boxers were, for some reason I couldn’t quite remember, all the way across the room.

  “I just need to grab my, erm…” Instead of finishing the sentence, I put my shirt on and stood up, tugging it as far down my arse as it would go and waddling to the door like a penguin in a cocktail dress.

  I put my boxers on, and when I came back from the bathroom, Phoebe was sitting up in bed, putting her bra on.

  “Do you want some breakfast?” I asked.

  She frowned. “Well, yeah. But your kitchen smells so, so bad.”

  “It’s all right, I’ve got a system now. I just open all the windows.”

  “But it’s November. It’s freezing.”

  “Yeah, so then I turn the oven on full and leave the door open.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Still not sure.”

  “All right. One sec.”

  I went and knocked at Arthur’s and a muffled zombie-moan told me he was still in bed.

  “I’m putting your cheese in the bath,” I shouted through the door. “Just for half an hour.”

  There was another moan, which I took to mean, “Please, go right ahead.”

  When I’d moved the cheese and aired the kitchen, Phoebe ventured in, wearing my pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, and we sat munching toast.

  “Hey, who’s that girl Ed’s always with?” she asked, putting two more slices in the toaster.

  “Which one?”

  “You know.
The blond girl who looks like she’s in a Wes Anderson film.”

  “Oh right. Sarah, or Sophie, or something. From his floor.”

  “Are they together?”

  I shrugged. “Dunno. Don’t think so.” I got the jam out of the fridge. “I have tried to pump him for information, honestly. But Ed doesn’t exactly talk much about his feelings.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Well, can you try harder? Frankie’s eternal happiness basically depends on you.”

  Arthur’s door swung open and he emerged, scruffy-haired, wearing his comforter like a huge coat.

  “Here they are.” He yawned. “The lovebirds.”

  We both forced a laugh.

  “What we saying, then?” He peered at my plate and scratched his chin. “Toast?”

  “Yes, Arthur. That’s what this is.”

  He picked up one of my pieces, which I’d just coated with jam, and walked back to his room.

  “Right, I’m back to bed for a spliff and some Schopenhauer. If you need me, you know where I am.”

  He slammed his door. Phoebe smiled at me. “I remember you saying on that first night how the people in your hall weren’t that great. But Arthur is really nice.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, he is. I do feel a bit better here now. It’s just that I’m not that similar to most of them, and I guess that freaked me out at first.”

  She took a sip of tea. “Are you still gonna live with Will next year?”

  “Erm…maybe.” The atmosphere tightened slightly. I’d barely even spoken to Will in the past few days. He hadn’t texted me all week. “I need to talk to him about it.”

  We finished breakfast and she headed off back to her dorm. Even saying goodbye was weird nowadays. Full on lip-kissing always felt way too couple-y in the mornings, so I just went for a kind of half-arsed cheek kiss that morphed uncomfortably into a semi-hug.

  “See you later,” she said.