Freshmen Read online

  I went to bed earlier than everyone else and imagined them talking about me in the kitchen: saying that maybe things could have been different with Becky if I hadn’t been some lovesick moron. I felt like some vital part of me had suddenly become unsteady. My foundations had cracked. I hadn’t seen Luke as he really was. I had been having sex with—falling in love with, even—a person who wasn’t really there and I couldn’t even figure out if it was my fault or not.

  And like a clichéd, pathetic dick, I missed him. He had kind of seeped in and distorted everything on the inside of me, and everything on the outside of me, too.

  I slipped off to the library alone to do my reading. It crossed my mind that I might see Luke. I had a random fantasy where he explained how it was all a terrible mistake and we kissed in front of everyone, and another concurrent one where I punched him in the face.

  I had crossed my arms on the desk, and was almost asleep on them, when Frankie and Negin found me.

  “Phoebs,” Frankie whispered, her face right next to mine. She laid something wrapped in a piece of printer paper in front me. The paper unfurled to reveal a quite-squashed cloud-shaped fairy sandwich.

  “Josh popped in to see you,” Frankie said. “And you weren’t there, so we made these and kept you one.”

  “Don’t know how the fried egg will taste cold,” Negin added. “But it’s the thought that counts.”

  They sat down opposite me and I bit into the cold congealed egg and icing. It still tasted quite good.

  “Do you wanna get a coffee?” Negin asked. I nodded, and started to collect up my things.

  “I need to photocopy stuff first.” We wandered down the stairs and into the weird little room filled with whirring photocopiers. We waited in the line and watched a boy copy page after page of a book called Why Do Buses Come in Threes?

  I noticed a group of girls swing through the security gates and walk past us. And then one of them turned on her heel and started back toward the photocopy room. Two of her friends broke away and followed her. I realized the first girl was Sequined Skirt from the Fit Sister gig. And Bowl-Cut Mary and Wedding Veil were behind her.

  “So.” Sequined Skirt girl chucked her bag on the floor and looked right at me. “Your boyfriend is a fucking lying arsehole.” She shouted it into the silence of the library and the quiet whirring of the photocopying. The boy stared straight ahead like he hadn’t heard, but he tensed. My whole body shook with adrenaline. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Are you still with him? ’Cause fucking hell—”

  “Jen, you’re acting like a psycho.” Mary put a hand on the girl’s shoulder and shot me an apologetic look. “Phoebe is my mate, and it’s not her fault she shagged a guy who turned out to be a jerk.” She shrugged. “I mean, we’ve all done it.”

  Jen’s face softened slightly and she half glanced at me. “OK, sorry. This whole thing’s just utterly rancid. You’re not still with him, are you?”

  I shook my head and looked at the floor like I was being scolded.

  “This is so not Phoebe’s fault,” Frankie snapped. “Like, come on, how can it be? Luke lied to her, too.”

  “And Becky, the girl who left, is our friend,” Negin said gently.

  Mary’s eyes widened. “Is she OK?”

  “We don’t know,” I said. “She won’t reply to any of our texts or calls. She’s just disappeared.”

  The boy at the photocopier collected up his pages quickly and snuck out. Jen stood in front of the door. “OK, so what the fuck are we gonna do about this? The pictures are literally all over campus. This is the time to annihilate those bastards.”

  A middle-aged man carrying a pile of books tried to walk into the room but Jen held her hand out. “We’re having a meeting in here, sorry.”

  “We need to do something to humiliate them,” Mary said. “To make them get how cruel and disgusting they are. To make them understand that it’s not a joke.”

  “That Becky is a real person,” Negin said, and Jen nodded. “Exactly.”

  Becky had become sort of famous. The girl who left school because she was so ashamed. It was awful. We had talked about it nonstop: when she might have slept with that soccer bloke, whether her boyfriend knew, why she hadn’t told us at the time. Why she hadn’t told us she was leaving. Even Connor felt bad about it. He said if he saw the boy who posted the picture he would knock him out.

  “It’s their last game of the semester next week,” Jen said.

  “Yeah, that is the moment.” Mary nodded.

  “Laxatives?” Wedding Veil suggested. “In their water bottles?”

  “I think we should graffiti the field,” Frankie said.

  “Yeah, but how would we actually do that without someone seeing before and getting rid of it?” Jen shook her head.

  “I’ve got an idea,” I said. They all looked at me, and I felt scared and excited at the same time.

  The only sound was the echoey clack-clack-clack of Will’s studs on the tiles.

  It was ten minutes before kickoff, but no one seemed particularly pumped. They were all either checking their phones or lacing their shoes or just staring down at the changing-room floor.

  One of the freshmen, Murf, suddenly piped up. “The girls in my dorm have literally stopped speaking to me,” he said. “Like, I’ll go in the kitchen and they just literally pretend I’m not there.” He laughed. “It’s like…fuck’s sake. Chill out.”

  “People are so fucking touchy, honestly,” Geordie Al said. “It’s not even that bad.”

  Will stopped pacing and looked at him. “It was obviously Louise who took those screenshots,” he told him. “She must’ve known you were fucking around on her. She was probably trying to get you back.”

  Geordie Al scratched at his stubble. “Maybe…”

  “It could have been a lot of people, to be fair,” Wicks said.

  “Whoever did it, did it anonymously,” snapped Dempers. “So we aren’t gonna find out, are we?”

  “Yeah, well…” Will started pacing again.

  Over the past few days, all anyone had talked about was who might have leaked the screenshots. To be quite honest, I didn’t give a shit. It was literally the last thing on my mind.

  Phoebe had basically cut me out of her life. She wasn’t returning my calls or texts. Rita and Arthur had barely spoken to me, too. Worst of all, though, a girl had left York. Her whole life had been ripped down the middle, and it was all our fault. My fault. I could have stopped it. First Abbey, now Becky. It was like everything I touched turned to shit.

  I glanced over at Trev, who was just staring down blankly at his unlaced boots. I wondered if he was thinking what I’d been thinking all week: that it wasn’t worth it. That being friendless and houseless and alone for the next three years was still much, much better than being part of all this.

  There was this Sylvia Plath poem we’d done that I couldn’t get out of my head lately. It was about her keeping this box of bees in her house, and being half terrified, half fascinated by it. By the chaos that would come if she opened it. The last few nights, lying awake, I kept thinking: That’s me. It’s me and the Wall of Shame. Until last week, it had been something I’d just done my best to try to ignore. But now it was like the bees had busted out and they were swarming through the house, stinging people, and I couldn’t just sit there, pretending they didn’t exist anymore. I had to actually do something.

  “What’s gonna happen, you think?” asked Wicks nervously. “Like, do you think we’ll all get in trouble for this?”

  Will exhaled, bored. “How can we get in trouble for it? It was just fucking around. The girls weren’t naked or anything, were they?”

  “That Becky girl did drop out, though,” said another second year quietly. “I mean, that’s pretty…serious, isn�
��t it?”

  Dempers finished lacing his shoes and glared at Geordie Al. “If you hadn’t nailed that Becky in the first place…”

  “I don’t even know why you did,” Will muttered. “She’s rank.”

  “Yeah, well, why d’you think it’s called the Wall of Shame?” said Geordie Al, trying to lighten the mood and failing quite spectacularly.

  Will looked up at the clock. “Anyway, come on,” he murmured.

  We all trooped out onto the field. The Manchester team was already out there, and it slightly freaked me out to see that we had the biggest crowd we’d had all semester. Not that they looked particularly supportive. There was no cheering or applause as we came out; just odd little pockets of nervous chatter. I had the sudden feeling people had turned up to see more than just a game of soccer.

  The whistle blew and we kicked off. I tried to focus on the game, but I kept noticing commotion in the crowd—ripples of movement that stopped as soon as I turned to look at them.

  I’d just fed Will the ball, and he was tearing off down the field, when the commotion suddenly exploded into something else.

  About thirty girls streamed onto the grass around us, shouting and screaming. At first, I thought they were all wearing brightly colored clown suits or something, but after a second I realized it was pajamas. They were all dressed in pajamas.

  Our team and the Manchester lot just stood there, frozen, as the pajama-clad girls stormed the field around us. I spotted Phoebe, Frankie, Negin, Mary and some of the girls from the Fit Sister night.

  The crowd was going even crazier than the girls themselves; they were laughing, clapping, cheering, whooping, shouting. I stayed there, glued to the spot, with absolutely zero clue what was going on.

  Suddenly, as quickly as it had started, it was over. The girls dropped in unison down onto the muddy grass and lay there, totally still, like a load of weirdly dressed dead bodies.

  The Manchester team and the ref looked even more confused than we did. The bloke who’d been marking me leaned in and whispered: “Does this normally happen, mate?”

  Will had been frozen like the rest of us, watching all this with his mouth hanging open, but now he finally managed to get himself together. He strode across to Mary and Frankie, who were both lying on their backs in front of him. The crowd was so loud he had to yell down.

  “OK…,” he shouted. “What the fuck?”

  “What d’you mean?” Frankie shot back. “I thought you liked looking at sleeping girls.”

  Then Mary sat up and glared around at me and the rest of the team. “Yeah, come on! What’s wrong with you? Get your fucking phones out!”

  Will sighed and bent down toward her, his hands on his knees like he was talking to a naughty little kid.

  “Yeah, OK, you’ve made your point. Can you fuck off now, please? We are actually trying to play a game here.”

  My eyes found Phoebe among all the madness. She was lying on the center circle in her blue pajamas with whales, but I couldn’t see her face. Like everyone else, she was watching Mary and Will.

  Will stood up: “You guys are so fucking lame.” Then he chipped the ball over to me. “Taylor.” He nodded. “Let’s just keep playing.”

  I looked at him, then at the crowd. I couldn’t see a single face in there—it was just a sea of phones pointed straight at me. I thought about Becky again, and the idea suddenly occurred to me that if this was a cheesy American film, I’d probably pick the ball up, walk over to Will and punch him in the face.

  But it wasn’t, and I didn’t. Instead, I just kicked the ball gently back to him and started walking off.

  “Where you going, Taylor?” he shouted. “I said keep playing.”

  I turned back around to look at him. “You can keep playing,” I said. “I’m done.”

  For some reason, he smiled at this and then nodded. “Yeah. I fucking knew it was you, wasn’t it, Taylor?” he said.

  Before I could say anything back, Frankie shouted something at him—something I didn’t hear, because of the wind and the noise of the crowd. Will looked down, and his whole face crinkled with scorn.

  And then, suddenly, he booted the ball at her.

  For a split second, the whole crowd went silent. It was like all the air had been sucked out of them. There was just the dull thud of the ball hitting Frankie’s chest, and then her strangled sort of half-gasp-half-scream.

  I didn’t think; I just reacted. I was suddenly sprinting toward Will, with no plan for what I’d do when I got to him. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Trev had had the exact same idea—he was streaking out ahead of me, aiming straight for Will.

  But somehow, Ed got there first.

  He bolted out of the crowd, threw himself at Will and just flattened him. I expected him to start hitting him or something, but he didn’t. He just shifted his weight and sat there calmly on top of him.

  “Frankie,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  Frankie stood up and dusted herself off. “Yeah, I’m fine.” She stared down at Will with her hands on her hips. “What is wrong with you?”

  “Get the fuck off me, you fat fuck!” Will was screaming at Ed.

  “It’s not fat, mate,” I heard Ed say. “It’s muscle, thank you very much.”

  Dempers stomped over, but Ed just smiled up at him and he shrank backward, and suddenly Frankie was dancing about madly in her Adventure Time pajamas, and the crowd was roaring with laughter, and Mary and Negin and the others were cheering and taking photos of Will as he wriggled out from under Ed and stormed back to the changing rooms.

  And I just stood there, on the edge of the field, wishing I could celebrate with them.

  None of us took our pajamas off.

  We did a sort of victory lap of Jutland. For Frankie, it was an actual victory lap. She ran in a circle around each college, clapping her hands at the bemused-looking people in the windows, like she had just won the Olympic 100 meter.

  Bowl-Cut Mary did a backflip. She just casually did it, as if before she came to college she had been a professional gymnast, as well as a singer in an electro band and a tattooed, pastel-haired siren.

  “I love Bowl-Cut,” said Frankie, flopping down on the grass outside the dorm.

  “She’s so hot,” I sighed. “But still, she’s just a person. An unobtainably cool one, obviously, but still, a person.”

  We watched her dancing by the lake with Jen and Wedding Veil and the rest of them. Her oversized nightie said MY MARXIST FEMINIST DIALECTIC BRINGS ALL THE BOYS TO THE YARD on it, and she was wearing leggings with cartoon David Bowies riding unicorns.

  “I kind of just want to admire her from a distance,” Frankie said. “I’m worried if we get too close to her, the illusion will be shattered. It’s like, my mum used to be obsessed with Colin Firth—like, obsessed—and then she saw him in Macy’s buying scales—kitchen ones, not weight ones—and she spoke to him, and he was polite and everything, but he clearly just wanted her to fuck off. And I just feel like if I really get to know Bowl-Cut Mary she might not be everything I hoped and dreamed, you know?”

  The sky cracked and it started to rain—big, heavy droplets—so all of us piled up into the dorm, our pajamas and hair dripping like crazy as we ran up the stairs.

  Connor, Liberty, Nathan and Phillip were pregaming in the kitchen, and Connor marched straight up to me, Frankie and Negin and bundled us into a group hug.

  “Were you at the game?” Negin laughed.

  “ ’Course I was.” He broke out of the hug, grinning broadly. “Never been so proud to be a D Dormer. You guys were fucking amazing.” He held up his vodka and Coke. “For the Beckster.”

  “The Beckster!” Frankie shouted.

  Liberty leaned into me. “God, I hope she’s OK.”

  I n
odded. “Me too. I just wish she’d reply to our texts.”

  “I’ve got an appointment to see her TA this week,” Negin said. “And I’m saving all her lecture notes.”

  Connor put on some incredibly loud hip-hop and started pouring drinks for Bowl-Cut and the rest of the girls. The kitchen was already heaving, and the noise was so loud we were soon attracting people from all over Jutland. It was like a celebration. Within half an hour, it seemed like everyone on campus was stuffed into our hall—every room was packed with people I’d never seen before. There were even randoms sitting in the shower, drinking.

  Connor waved his phone at us. “You know you’re famous? Everyone’s Story is just videos of you guys storming the field.”

  It was raining so hard that you could hear it above the music, but it was so hot inside that the windows had steamed up. Liberty had made a kind of dance floor in the middle of the kitchen and was madly showing off routines she had invented to various Justin Bieber songs. Everyone seemed like they had been wound up and set off.

  I went to the bathroom and saw I had a message from Flora:

  What are your b-day plans BEST ONE?

  I wrote back straight away:

  I haven’t seen you in forever. Can you come up for it next week? It’s the day before our Christmas Ball, but we can still GET ON IT.

  She sent back:

  YES YES YES!

  I came out to see Connor hauling his mattress off his bed and shoving Nathan’s and Phillip’s skateboards underneath it.

  “Right, clear the hall,” he shouted. “D Dorm chariot coming through.”

  Negin grabbed Liberty, Nathan and Frankie, and all of us ran as fast as we could and jumped onto the mattress, whooping like mad as it sped down the hall, faster and faster and faster. People came out of their rooms and showered us with beer as we flew by.

  The mattress crashed into the kitchen door, and we all fell off, screaming with laughter. “Again, again,” Frankie was yelling. Then she looked up and suddenly went pale.