When We Were Young

by Richard Roper

  “Kind of,” I said. “But familiar at the same time. And it’s funny: I’ve started to remember loads of stuff I’d not thought about for years, without us even talking about it.”

  “Oh yeah? Like what?”

  I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about the memory I’d just been lost to. But I told her about the day Joel came in wearing his solidarity eyepatch.

  “Wow, I’d forgotten about that, too,” Alice laughed. “And that was, what, two weeks after you’d met?”

  “Barely that.”

  Alice yawned, which made me yawn too.

  “God, it’s so weird how things work out, isn’t it?” Alice said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, just think: in an alternate universe, there’s another you who never had a friend at school, who carried on being a lonely weirdo dressed like a P. G. Wodehouse character. And there’s another me there, too, and I can still walk.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Joel

  I woke with a start, disoriented. My eyes eventually focused on the TV opposite, where someone was running away from a car that had just exploded. I looked around, but there was no sign of Theo. I didn’t remember moving my bag of chips over to the dresser. Had that been him?

  I reached for my phone and read a text from Mum: How are you getting on? And have you had any more thoughts about “Plan B”? Before I could collect my thoughts, there was another ridiculous explosion on the TV and I scrambled for the remote, flicking through the channels to find something less hectic. I wished I hadn’t, because the next thing I knew I was looking at Amber. It was a repeat of an ITV drama, one of her earliest roles, playing a college student blackmailing a tutor. Seeing her on-screen now, pacing up a corridor, pulled me back to the first time I ever saw her.

  * * *

  It was the annual non-uniform day for charity, not long after I’d turned sixteen. For 50p, we were allowed to ditch our school uniforms for the day and wear whatever we liked—within reason, as Theo found out to his cost when he was forced to change his Bill Hicks T-shirt with the slogan “If you’re in marketing or advertising . . . kill yourself.”

  “Where did you even buy that?” I asked.

  “Saw it on a website,” Theo said.

  “So you saw it . . . advertised?”

  “Yeah? What’s your point?”

  “Well, isn’t . . . Never mind.”

  Unlike the rest of the school, I hadn’t bothered to think of anything edgy or interesting to wear; I was just in my usual dark jeans and hoodie. Theo, endearingly, seemed so excited by the occasion that he was bouncing along beside me like a self-propelled Slinky. My thoughts drifted as he yammered on about a new sitcom he’d discovered.

  We’d just turned into the long corridor that stretched the length of the school building when I was distracted by a flash of yellow at the other end. A girl was walking in our direction wearing a yellow plaid skirt and matching blazer. At the time, I had no idea that this was an homage to Clueless. I would imagine there is still significant damage to the floor at the spot where my jaw hit it.

  The girl and I made eye contact, and from that point on as we walked, our eyes were locked together, a missile seeking its target. The journey down that corridor would be the longest twenty seconds of my life. As she smiled at me—a smile that seemed to suggest mischief, nonchalance and shyness all at once—walking became impossible. What was it again: left foot, then right? I tried to work out if I’d seen her before. Surely I’d have remembered her.

  “Hey,” she said as we passed.

  “Helley,” I said back—halfway between “Hello” and “Hey.” I screwed my eyes shut. How was it possible I’d managed to fuck up “Hello”? I’d caught a faint hint of her perfume. It was citrusy, orange . . . blossom, or something? Was that a thing? I had no idea. But then again, I also had no idea that for the rest of my life there would be moments I’d catch that scent in the air—in a rush-hour tube carriage, or in a restaurant—and it would catapult me back to this moment.

  I made myself count three full seconds after she passed, then I turned. The swish of the girl’s hair told me I’d been a second too late to see her looking back. I wanted more than anything to rewind and try that again, but Theo nudged me in the ribs, asking if I was listening to him or what? And the moment slipped away.

  A few days later, I was supposed to be meeting Theo at lunchtime as usual, but I’d barely slept the night before, a result of Mike falling asleep drunk, mid-cigarette, in his chair and nearly setting it alight, and all I wanted to do was find somewhere to hide and close my eyes for a few minutes. I told Theo I was feeling ill and heading home, and then I made for the place I’d scouted out earlier—a trampoline in the corner of the gym hall, a secluded spot where I thought I wouldn’t get disturbed. I put on some comedy CD that Theo had given me, then leaned back and closed my eyes, idly picking at the scabs on my cracked knuckles. But moments later I heard footsteps approaching.

  “Hey, that’s my spot.”

  I jumped, smacking my elbow on the wall behind me. It was her.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I can move if you want.”

  The girl looked at me for a moment.

  “No, don’t worry. But mind if I join you?”

  “Sure,” I said, doing my level best to hide how ecstatic I was to get a chance to make up for the “Helley” incident.

  She crawled under the trampoline and sat opposite me, arranging her legs so that they were stretched out straight in a mirror image of mine.

  “I’m Amber, by the way,” she said, taking a book from her bag. “I’m new here.”

  “I’m Joel,” I said. “I’m not new. Well, I sort of am.”

  “Delighted to meet you, Joel.”

  There was something alluringly grown-up about the way she said this.

  “What are you listening to?” she asked.

  “Erm . . . a band . . . They’re called Slipknot,” I said, hoping Amber couldn’t see the CD case by my foot, which had Fawlty Towers written on it.

  She wrinkled her nose and opened her book.

  “What’re you reading?” I asked.

  She showed me the cover. The book was called An Actor Prepares.

  “Cool,” I said.

  “Do you know Stanislavski?”

  “I . . . Yeah, course. Wasn’t he on Graham Norton recently?”

  “I don’t think so,” Amber said, “given that he’s been dead for eighty years.”

  “Right, yeah. Must’ve been thinking of someone else.”

  Amber narrowed her eyes, apparently trying to work out if I was joking or not.

  “So you want to be an actor, then?” I said, possibly overdoing it on the sincerity front to make up for how I’d just come across.

  “I’m going to be an actor,” Amber replied, smiling. There was nothing haughty or arrogant about the way she said this, just understated confidence.

  We started talking about our favorite TV shows. I did my best to think of the most obscure, edgy ones I could, no matter if I’d actually watched them, and Amber scribbled a few down in the back of An Actor Prepares—which, I saw, was full of other doodles and notes. So she wrote in books. A defacer of literature, no less. I noticed her school tie was arranged with the thin part hanging down in front of the thick part. I decided I should probably start doing that, too, in future.

  “Shit, that looks sore,” Amber said. It took me a moment to realize she meant my knuckles.

  “Oh yeah. They’re fine, really,” I said. But I didn’t hide them. It felt too obvious a move to do that now, and I didn’t want to invite questions.

  “Are you sure? Wait, hang on, I’ve actually got some stuff that might help.” She reached into her bag and brought out a little tube of something. “Here,” she said, “give me your hand.”

  “W-what?”


  “Give me your hand. Come on.” Amber raised her eyebrows expectantly at me.

  As Amber reached out toward me, I was more worried about my palm being sweaty than how my knuckles looked. She took my arm gently in one hand and with the other she squeezed a little of the cream onto my knuckles. She began to rub it in with delicate little circles. It was instantly cool and soothing. After a moment I looked up. Amber was watching me intently. She looked away, cheeks flushing slightly, and pushed her hair behind her ear.

  “All done,” she said, putting the cream back in her bag.

  “Thanks,” I said. “That, um, feels better already.”

  “Good.” She assumed the voice of a concerned but friendly doctor. “Now, is there anything else I can help you with today?”

  I shook my head.

  “Are you on MSN by the way?” Amber asked.

  Jesus, who was this girl? Was MSN the same as ecstasy?

  “Huh? No,” I said. “But I smoke weed quite a bit.”

  Amber laughed at this, and I laughed back, even though I had no idea what the joke was. She started scribbling something down in her book, then she tore a scrap of the page out and handed it to me.

  “Here’s my username. Add me tonight?”

  “Definitely,” I said. It seemed crucial I agree. I could find out what she was talking about later.

  “See ya then.” Amber crawled out from under the trampoline.

  As the lunch bell went, I looked at the scrap of paper on which Amber had written: Xx_LittlePixie_xX. I put the precious cargo in my pocket and wandered in a daze back to the form room, finding Theo in our usual spot.

  “All right?” I said.

  “All right. Hang on, I thought you were going home sick.”

  “Yeah, I was,” I said, adjusting my voice to a croak. “But, you know, couldn’t be bothered going all the way back.”

  “Fair enough. So where’ve you been?”

  I put my hand in my pocket, feeling for the scrap of paper, flexing my soothed knuckles. “I was . . . nowhere.”

  * * *

  A month passed. Ever since adding Xx_LittlePixie_xX on (what turned out to be) MSN messenger, it had felt like I was living a double life, one that Theo knew nothing about. I would wait for Mum and Mike to go upstairs and then get on the computer in the living room. Amber and I would message for hours at a time, to the point where I’d crawl into bed bleary-eyed only a few hours before I had to get up for school.

  With the distance that talking online allowed, I found it easier to open up—it meant I could organize the thoughts rattling around my head into something cogent. But still, when her question appeared one night—“What actually happened to your hands?”—I couldn’t think of how to respond. I must have typed a dozen different answers, brushing it off as an accident, or that I’d got into a fight, or, most ludicrous of all, pretending that I’d come down with a rare tropical skin disease. In the end, after rejecting all of these, the only option I had left was to tell her the truth.

  “It’s something I do to make me feel better,” I wrote.

  I watched the screen, blinking the soreness away, waiting for Amber’s response.

  “I thought it was something like that,” she wrote. “It’s cool if you don’t want to tell me anything about it, but you can if you want . . .”

  And so I did, tentatively at first, but before I knew it, my fingers were traveling across the keyboard so rapidly it was like they had a mind of their own, and the more I shared, the more I unburdened myself of all the guilt and shame, the more it felt like I was swimming up through a fetid lake, pushing myself to the surface, where I could finally breathe again.

  It helped that Amber had her own pain to share. When you’re messed up, I realized, it’s easier to talk to people if they’re messed up, too. She’d been in counseling since she was twelve, ever since she’d found out she was adopted and had run straight to the station, getting on a train to London before quickly running out of money and having to call home. She’d only been introduced to her biological mum just a few weeks ago.

  “It was so strange,” she told me. “We look so alike, and she even sits in the same way I do. It felt like I was talking to a version of me who’d come to visit from the future. It was nice, I guess, but I don’t even know if I want a relationship with her. It’s so confusing.”

  I tried my best to make her feel better, but I wasn’t equipped with the right things to say. I just wished there was something I could offer her that was the equivalent of her soothing my cracked hands. The best I could do was think of ways to distract her, which meant sending her a series of (in hindsight god-awful) music playlists and researching books on acting that she could add to her collection. I ordered one online by someone called Uta Hagen, which took weeks to arrive secondhand from America.

  I took it from my bag as casually as I could, as if it were a second thought, handing it over and saying I’d just happened to come across it in a charity shop. We were on the fourth of what became our regular rendezvous under the trampoline. I’d been having to make up excuses to put Theo off the scent. I’d pushed past how guilty this made me by telling myself that, fundamentally, nothing was changing about our friendship. Okay, so I might not have been writing with him as much, but he seemed just as happy cracking on by himself as long as I read everything he showed me afterward. I knew if I just came out and told him I was spending this time with Amber, he’d be weird about it, so this felt like the best for everyone.

  That morning, before I saw Amber for our fourth meeting, I’d barely been able to concentrate on anything. Was it natural to be this nervous? I wondered. And the same went for just how much time I spent thinking about her. Whenever I did, it produced an almost painful weight in my stomach that I carried around with me. I didn’t understand that at the time. There were moments she smiled at me and my brain felt like it was collapsing in on itself like a dying star. Why was something this exciting so painful and confusing at the same time?

  Later that night we talked on MSN.

  Thanks again for the book, Amber wrote. Loving it already.

  I punched the air. My gamble had paid off.

  Another message appeared.

  You going to Chrissy Price’s party on Saturday?

  Yeah, probably, I wrote back. (I had no idea who Chrissy Price was, or that she was having a party, but if Amber was going, then I was, too.)

  Then, somewhat out of the blue, Amber asked me about Theo.

  I see you two together all the time. He’s like your best friend, then, right?

  Yeah, I wrote. Part of me worried why Amber was asking me this, whether she meant anything by the question. Theo sometimes seemed a bit odd, obviously, but only I was allowed to think that. And I couldn’t see a way I could go out with someone who thought badly of him.

  I like him, she wrote. He’s really funny in English.

  Yeah, he’s the best, I replied, flooded with relief.

  Have you told him about Mike and everything?

  No.

  What? But why not? You just said he’s your best friend . . .

  It doesn’t really work like that.

  How come?

  Well . . . Theo’s, like, completely innocent. He has this lovely little life with his kind, normal family. He wouldn’t know what to say. And I don’t want him to think I’m this big screwup.

  Well, that’s cute, Amber wrote. But I still think you should tell him. You can’t keep pretending everything’s fine forever, can you?

  Just then I sensed a movement behind me. Mike had been spying on my conversation. He slammed down the glass of water he must have just fetched from the kitchen, ripped the headphones from my ears and picked me up by the scruff of my neck, slamming me against the wall.

  “Don’t you fucking dare tell people about what goes on in this house.”

  “Get off me,” I said,
glaring back at him. I don’t think I’ve ever hated anyone more than in that moment.

  A door slammed and then Mum appeared, face ghostly white in shock when she saw what was happening.

  “Mike, stop,” Mum said, darting forward with a determined look and grabbing Mike’s arm. But Mike barely seemed to notice. I could see then how angry he was. I tried to signal with my eyes to Mum to leave, that it was okay, but then she dug her nails into Mike’s arm and tried to wrench it away. Instinctively, Mike threw his arm back and his elbow caught Mum in the face. She crumpled to the ground, covering her nose with her hands. Sitting there in her nightie, covering her face, she looked almost childlike. Mike let go and I dropped to my knees, throwing my arms around Mum. After a moment I heard Mike wrench the power cable from the computer.

  “That was an accident,” he said to us. Then he left, taking the cable with him.

  As I held Mum, I was already imagining the soothing rasp of the rough wall against my battered hand. But then I thought of Amber and the urge to hurt myself dwindled. There was a party at the weekend. I would see her then. If I could be strong, and just hold on until then, maybe everything would be fine.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Theo

  Lechlade to Newbridge, 16.4 miles

  (161 miles to Thames Barrier, London)

  You . . . all right?” I asked Joel as we prepared to set off to Newbridge. He looked dreadful this morning. Waxy-skinned. Dark bags under his eyes. He looked like he should still be in bed.

  When I’d got back to the room last night, I thought I could hear him on the phone to someone, but when I opened the door, the room was in darkness, and I realized he was talking to himself in his sleep. “Should’ve told you, should’ve told you,” he was saying, over and over again, getting increasingly agitated. When it was clear he wasn’t going to stop, I turned the light on, and when that didn’t work, I prodded him awake with my finger. He looked around and finally saw me, blinking against the light. He seemed startled and afraid.