Freshmen Read online

  “So…that was him, then?” she said, cupping her fingers around my ear so I could hear her over the music. I bit my lip and nodded.

  She shrugged. “He’s not all that.”

  “It was a big school,” I said. “So not everyone knew each other.” I felt ridiculous. Like some psychotic weirdo. We had only directly spoken, like, five times in seven years, but I thought he knew my name, at least. I felt like someone had taken all the air out of me. I made a conscious effort to pull myself together but I knew I had turned bright red. I looked at her and groaned. “Negin, I’m so embarrassed.” I shook my head. “Honestly, what a fail.” I tried to laugh. “I want to die.”

  She smiled really warmly and nodded. “Well, you might, actually. Apparently, there are about fifty freshmen deaths every year, on average, so, you know…” She shrugged.

  “Mine could be the first one. And the first one to have been caused solely by dance floor humiliation.”

  Liberty beckoned us back into the throng, and I took a breath and decided not to let Luke Taylor’s stupid blank ruin everything.

  Josh, our second-year contact person, and his friends brought us all shots. Josh was tall and kind of stacked and had a shaved head, like he was in the marines. He had been so nice earlier: spent twenty minutes showing my mum where the outlet shopping center was on the map, and labeled each of our doors with stickers that had our name and a cute little picture.

  “These are my roommates, Will and Pete,” he shouted, and they waved. Liberty gave me a look to say things are looking up.

  Will was classically good-looking. Tall, with boarding-school floppy hair and the kind of smile that only comes from knowing you’re attractive. He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek to say hello. Pete was smaller and less chatty, and had somehow ended up wearing so many clothes he was almost drowning in them.

  Some hip-hop song came on that they all liked and we started dancing. Me and Will started doing that thing where you look at each other and then look away. With every song that played, we moved a bit nearer. He was smiling at me, almost shyly, and I could sense Pete and Josh tactfully shift away as they realized me and Will were dancing closer and closer. I glanced around for Negin and the others but I couldn’t see them anywhere. Will and me exchanged a smile one more time and then we were making out with each other. He was a good kisser, but I couldn’t really get into it because I kept wondering if everyone was watching. Or if Luke Taylor was watching. Not that anyone, least of all him, would exactly care. The whole night had already descended into a bit of a meat market anyway. And even kissing a good kisser gets awkward when you don’t really know the first thing about them and you’re wearing a bathrobe.

  “I’m just gonna go to the bathroom.” I smiled and walked away, unsuccessfully scanning the room for people I recognized.

  The whole night felt out of control. Like I needed to sort myself out and concentrate on making friends—not being rejected by Luke Taylor and kissing randoms. I couldn’t see Negin anywhere, so I walked out the main doors and into a hall with vending machines. There was a darkened room labeled COMPUTER LAB that looked empty, but I could hear a weird noise coming from inside.

  I creaked open the door. Gradually, my eyes got accustomed to the dark, and I matched the low, gentle sound with the shape in the corner. Facing the window and shuddering every so often. Someone crying.

  Luke Taylor crying.

  I hadn’t meant to say it. It just sort of…came out.

  It was like she was pushing me, almost. Daring me to say it. “If you don’t want to speak to me,” Abbey’d hissed, “if you don’t want to work at this, then maybe we should break up, Luke. Maybe we should just fucking break up.”

  And I’d said, “Yeah. OK. Maybe we should.”

  And then there was only the gentle hum of her crying in my ear, and this terrifying, exhilarating feeling, like I’d jumped off a cliff with no clue if there was water or concrete at the bottom.

  I just sat there, listening to her cry, feeling the panic and the toothpaste-y vodka fighting for space in my chest, surging up into my throat and pressing against the backs of my eyeballs.

  Then the phone went dead. And I thought: Is that it? Are we actually broken up? Can three years of your life really come to an end, just like that, in a dark computer room in the middle of the night? I covered my face but the tears wriggled out between my fingers. What the fuck was wrong with me? Half a day away from home and I was already falling apart.

  I caught a glimpse of my reflection in one of the screens. This sweaty, moony, tearstained face with a pair of green Yoda ears on top of it. It was so ridiculous I actually started laughing. Which, if anything, made me look more insane. I took the ears off and dropped them on the table in front of me.

  Suddenly, I heard a noise from outside, but when I looked up there was no one there. I wiped my face and checked the hall. Just that Phoebe girl from school, who was getting some chocolate out of one of the vending machines.

  A little shiver of anxiety ran through me as I realized she might have seen what I was doing. Even if she hadn’t seen it, she was probably still wondering what sort of maniac sits alone in a computer room at midnight.

  “Hey,” I said, trying to sound casual. She smiled and said “Hey” back. Her cheeks were flushed from the heat of the bar, and she had purply glitter smudged all across her forehead.

  “You having a good night?” I asked, and she shrugged and smiled.

  I suddenly panicked that my eyes might be red and watery, so I blurted, “I just took my contact lenses out.” She nodded politely, and I realized that, if my eyes weren’t red and watery, this might have seemed like quite a random statement.

  She then said something I missed completely, because the bar doors burst open behind us and a blast of music and shouting filled the hall. A girl wearing bright-orange jeans and Pikachu earmuffs stepped out. She wobbled on the spot for a second and then sort of slumped down onto the steps in slow motion.

  “Are you OK?” Phoebe asked her.

  The girl blinked a few times and squinted at us, as if she was having trouble focusing. She smelled strongly of tequila and puke. We helped her up.

  “Where are your friends?” I said.

  “I don’t know…,” she slurred. Then her face fell. “I mean, I’ve only just met them….Do you think they are my friends? Do you think they like me?”

  “Definitely,” Phoebe said.

  “Do you like me?” she asked, and I nodded. “Yeah, of course. We’re both huge fans of your work.”

  Phoebe laughed, and the girl seemed satisfied by this, because she draped an arm around each of our shoulders. “OK, well, at least we made friends. We can be each other’s friends, can’t we? First Night First Year Friends.”

  “First Night Friends,” Phoebe and I repeated, grinning at each other.

  The girl took a deep breath and examined us more closely. It seemed like every change of facial expression required massive effort. “What’re your names?” she whispered.

  “Luke and Phoebe,” I said.

  She nodded. “Hi, Lucan Phoebe. I’m Stephanie Stevens.”

  “Nice to meet you, Stephanie Stevens. Are you going to be OK getting back to your dorm?”

  Stephanie Stevens sighed and shook her head violently, like a grumpy six-year-old. “Noooooooo.”

  “Where do you live?”

  She screwed her eyes up tight in concentration. “Seventeen Belmont Road, Sunderland, SR1 7AQ.”

  “No, I mean here, at the university—where in Jutland do you live? B Dorm? C Dorm?”

  “Oh. I’m not in that school,” she said. “I’m in Wulfstan.”

  Phoebe looked at the York Met University campus map that was pinned up next to the bar doors. Wulfstan was the next school down from Jutland on campus
. “OK…Wulfstan College…This way.”

  We all linked arms, with Stephanie Stevens in the middle, and started trooping slowly down the covered walkway. A few ducks waddled up out of the darkness of the lake and started quacking along behind us.

  It was crazy to think me and Abbey had done this exact same walk less than a year ago, on the campus tour. Trailing our guide from school to school around the huge, murky lake, we’d talked about whether people swam here in the summer and had taken photos on the grassy banks. We’d even had a winter picnic by the main bridge, with all the most random foods we could find in the “international” aisle of the supermarket. We’d sat there, chewing on South African biltong and weird German Haribos, and talking about all the things we were going to do here next year. The memory of it now seemed so detached from reality it was like it wasn’t even mine. I shook it out of my head and turned to Phoebe.

  “So how are your roommates?” I asked.

  “They’re pretty…nuts,” she said. “We’ve got this one guy, Connor, who worked in Ibiza over the summer, so he’s basically taken it upon himself to force us to have as crazy a time as possible.”

  I nodded. “There’s nothing better than enforced fun.”

  “Yeah. Although I drew the line when it came to drinking tequila out of a bucket.”

  “Please don’t mention tequila,” muttered Stephanie Stevens darkly.

  “What about your suite?” Phoebe asked me.

  “Pretty much the exact opposite of yours, by the sound of it,” I said. “No, they seem nice. Quiet, but nice. They’re pretty much all majoring in chemistry, though, so they basically spent the whole evening before the party talking about polymers and matter. What are you studying?”

  “English.”

  “Ah, nice. Me too. Maybe we’ll be in some of the same classes together.”

  There was a pause, and Stephanie Stevens stopped and said, “I’m doing French and hotel management.” Then she staggered away from us and threw up in a bush.

  By the time we got to Wulfstan, the ducks had abandoned us. By some miracle, Stephanie Stevens managed to remember the code to get into her building, so we all staggered up the stairs, still arm in arm. In the hall, she fumbled for her key, opened the door, murmured “OK, then…night-night, First Night Friends” and collapsed face-first onto her bed. Her room looked exactly like mine: Same tobacco-yellow walls, same scratchy Brillo-pad carpet, same weird little brown cupboard that opened to reveal a sink and mirror inside it. She even had the same brand-new Ikea desk lamp.

  “Do you think she’s OK?” Phoebe whispered.

  “Well, she’s snoring,” I replied. “That’s got to be a good sign.”

  Phoebe winced. “Not if you’re the person next door. Listen to her. She sounds like a didgeridoo. And these walls are really thin.”

  I laughed. “We should probably put her in the recovery position, right? Just in case.”

  We gently rearranged her on the bed while she mumbled “I love my First Night Friends” over and over again.

  “I’m a bit worried about leaving her like this,” Phoebe whispered.

  “Yeah. Let’s have a cup of tea and then come back and check on her in a bit?”

  “Um…yeah,” she said. “Yeah, that sounds good.”

  We went into the suite’s common kitchen, and Phoebe boiled the kettle and I found some of Stephanie Stevens’ roommates’ mugs and milk, then we walked downstairs, taking our teas with us. There was a little red bridge stretched across the lake, and we stood together in the middle, leaning against the edge, watching the steam rise from our cups.

  It was freezing, and I could feel the cold and the tea starting to rub away at my drunkenness. I thought about Abbey and the phone call and all the utter, utter shittiness of the past few months. I’d spent the whole summer thinking that college would magically solve everything. I’d go to York Met, she’d go to Cardiff and we sort of wouldn’t even need to have the maybe-we-should-break-up conversation. Ten hours into college and I was already learning important life lessons: don’t be so fucking naive.

  “Oh my god, yes.” Phoebe fished into the pocket of the bathrobe I’d given her back at the bar and pulled out a Twix. “Totally forgot I’d bought this.” She opened it. “One finger each?”

  “Nice.” I took the chocolate off her. In spite of everything, I couldn’t help wondering why I’d never noticed how pretty she was. Masses and masses of brown curly hair and an amazing smile.

  I must have walked past her a million times at school. She couldn’t have changed that much in ten weeks. Maybe I was just too hung up on Abbey to notice any other girls. But no, that wasn’t it. I’d definitely noticed Isha Matthews. And Lauren Green. And Katie Reader.

  But I’d never noticed Phoebe.

  The whole thing was beginning to feel like an out-of-body experience.

  This was exactly the kind of shit fourteen-year-old me was always daydreaming about. Well, maybe not Stephanie Stevens vomming everywhere and feeling like the pregame “Frosh punch” was kind of creeping ominously up my esophagus, but the Luke Taylor part. The part where I was now alone and kind of friendly with him. Like a weird Doctor Who–type thing where I had jumped back into my own eighth grade fantasies. I focused on looking unfazed and generally breezy and not babbling. Flora says when I’m drunk I over-touch people, so every time I got within ten inches of him I took a step back.

  Luke took a sip of his tea, then sat down and let his legs dangle over the edge of the bridge. I followed suit, forgetting how my mug was much fuller than Luke’s, and also that when it comes to smooth physical movement, I am a dud. For a split second I thought I just might tumble underneath the iron railing and into the lake. I made a kind of squawking sound and then landed on my bottom with a thump, like some sort of geriatric penguin.

  I looked up and saw that Luke was shaking his hair out over the lake and tea was dripping out of it.

  “Oh my god, are you OK? I’m so sorry.” I almost reached out and touched him but managed to stop myself in time. “I prioritized the tea. I’m sorry.”

  “I prioritized the tea.” He started full-on laughing, which made me laugh, too. “Good to know you value me less than some tea.”

  A part of me wanted to get out my phone and actually text that as a direct quote to Flora.

  “Clumsiness is one of my defining features,” I said. “My parents made me do Irish step dancing for three years to try to, like, train it out of me. But all it did was give me even more of a complex. There’s a picture in my house where I’m wearing one of those ridiculous curly wigs. I mean, that is only going to give your kid more problems, not less.” I pinched my thumb to try to physically stop myself babbling. At least I hadn’t snorted. Snorting is probably the least sexy of all mannerisms.

  Luke smiled. “My mum made me do flamenco dancing for a semester because my sister did it and she didn’t want to pay for a babysitter.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Old enough to know I was the only boy,” he said. “They had to get me a special frilly shirt with red and black dots. I did an exam in it and everything.”

  “How did you do?”

  He shrugged in mock modesty. “Oh, I can’t remember. Passed with distinction. No big deal. Just a distinction.”

  I laughed. “I cannot imagine you flamenco dancing.”

  “I was all right at it, actually. Do you want some of my tea?”

  “No, like I said, I prioritized the tea. I still have some left.” I showed him my mug. “I feel a bit bad. These mugs have never been used. Look, they still have the label—£2:99, Home Goods.”

  “I’m sure whoever they belong to won’t mind,” Luke said. “And more to the point, they won’t even know. Plus, we can always blame Stephanie Stevens.”

  “Yeah, we coul
d leave them a note that says ‘Stephanie Stevens did it.’ ”

  We sat for a bit, just drinking our tea and staring at the lake. It made me realize how exhausted I was.

  Luke sighed. “I really feel like today has been one of the longest days of my life. Waking up this morning feels like weeks ago.”

  I wondered if it felt longer for him because of what had happened to make him cry—whatever that was. Did it have something to do with Abbey Baker? Surely not. They were our year’s golden couple. Out of nowhere, an image of them at the senior prom popped into my head. They looked like they belonged on the Oscars red carpet, not in the lobby of the Holiday Inn.

  “Yeah, but we made it.” I held my mug up. “Cheers. To making it through the first day.”

  He clinked his mug against mine and nodded. “Yup. Me, you and if Stephanie Stevens isn’t dead, then her, too. We made it through the first day of college. And we both made a friend. Two friends, actually, if we count Stephanie Stevens. If she’s dead we can definitely count her, ’cause she won’t be able to argue with us.”

  I shook my head. “Seriously, why are people so obsessed with dying at college?”

  “I don’t know. Do you know Reece Morris?” Of course I knew Reece Morris. He was Luke’s best friend.

  “Maybe?”

  “Anyway, he told me this story about this boy who fell in a dumpster on the first night of Frosh Week, got knocked out, and then got tipped into a landfill.”

  “What? That’s crazy. See? It’s not just dying. It’s dying in weird ways. My friend from my hall, Negin, is obsessed with it, too.”

  “Oh, you’ve already got a friend, have you?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “That’s awkward. I thought me and Stephanie Stevens were your First Night Crew. Anyway, if this Negin’s your friend, then where is she?”