by Alice Oseman
It was just because I was nervous. I felt weird because I was nervous. That’s all it was.
My original plan, way back months ago, had been to listen to a Universe City episode to calm me down before I went inside the college. I didn’t want to do that any more.
I got shown into the college by a student. He had a very wide smile, a very posh voice and was wearing a blazer voluntarily.
As I’d expected, half an hour before my interview I was given a small piece of paper with a poem on one side and a short extract from a novel on the other. I read them sitting on a sofa in the college library. They made very little sense, but I tried to look for the metaphors. The book extract was about a cave. I can’t even remember what the poem was about.
And then my half an hour was up and my palms were sweating and my heart was beating. My life had built up to this; my future would be built by this. I just needed to sound intelligent, enthusiastic, original, open-minded. The ideal Cambridge student – wait, what was that again? I’d watched all of the example interviews on the Cambridge website. Did I need to shake the interviewers’ hands? I couldn’t remember. The girl who’d gone in before me was wearing a suit. Was everyone wearing a suit? Did I look unintelligent? Was my phone on silent? What if I messed this up? Would that be the end? What if I messed up now, after all the late nights, after reading all these books and poems for an entire year? What if I’d wasted all that time? What if all this had been for nothing?
OLD WHITE MEN
The two interviewers were both old white men. I’m sure that not all of the interviewers at the University of Cambridge are old white men, and in my second interview later that day one of them was a woman, but in my first interview, mine were old white men, and I was not surprised.
They didn’t offer to shake my hand, so I didn’t offer either.
My interview went a little bit like this.
OLD WHITE MAN (O.W.M.) #1: So, Frances, I see that you picked art A level alongside English, history and politics. And you did maths at AS-Level. Why such a diverse group of subjects?
FRANCES: Oh … well, you know, I’ve always been interested in a wide range of subjects. I just thought, at A level, you know, it’d be good to, sort of, keep that going, you know, using both sides of the brain, having a wider … broader … learning experience. I enjoy lots of different subjects, so, yeah.
O.W.M. #1: [blinks and nods]
O.W.M. #2: And you say in your personal statement that the book that really started your interest in the study of English literature was [glances at paper] The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger?
FRANCES: Yes!
O.W.M. #2: What was it, precisely, about the book that so inspired you?
FRANCES: [completely unprepared for a question like this] Ah … yeah. Well, I think it was the themes, really, I really related to the themes of, you know, disillusionment and alienation, [laughs] you know, the typical teenage thing you go through! Erm, but yeah, there were lots of things in the book that really interested me from, like, an academic point of view, like, erm … One of the things I liked was the way Salinger sort of got the lingo of nineteen-forties and -fifties teenagers? It was the first time I’d read an old book – well, like, a classic book anyway – that, erm, you know, really felt like it had a real voice? I really felt connected to the main character, I guess … and it made me want to understand why.
O.W.M. #2: [nods and smiles, but doesn’t really seem to have heard anything I’ve just said]
O.W.M. #1: So, Frances, I suppose the big question is: why do you want to study English literature?
FRANCES: [horrific pause] Well … [another horrific pause – why couldn’t I think of anything to say?] Well, I-I’ve always loved English literature. [A third horrific pause. Come on. There are more reasons than that. It’s fine. Take your time.] English literature has always been my favourite subject. [That’s not true, is it?] I’ve been passionate about studying it at university since I was little. [What absolute bullshit. You’re going to have to sound less like a robot if you want them to believe you.] I love analysing texts and learning about their— their contexts. [I don’t understand, why are you being like this? You sound like you’re lying.] I think doing an English literature degree would encourage me to read a lot more than I do. [Wait, so you’re saying you don’t read lots already? Why are you applying to study English literature in the first place?] I think … [Why are you applying to study English literature at university?] I think I’ve always … [Always what? Always been lying to yourself about this? Always believed that you were passionate about something you weren’t?]
O.W.M. #2: Okay, well, let’s move on.
THE ONLY SPECIAL THING
Immediately after this, I had to take an exam where I had to compare two pieces of prose. I can’t remember what they were about, and I can’t remember what I wrote. I was in a room with around twenty other people and we all had to sit around the same large table. I was very fidgety and by the end everyone else seemed to have written a lot more than me.
I then had my second interview, which went essentially the same as the first.
When I got back to Starbucks, Raine was reading a newspaper. She looked up as I sat down and folded the newspaper.
It struck me what a brilliant friend she was.
She’d had no reason to drive us here. She’d probably been sitting here for three hours.
“Mate, how’d it all go?”
“Er …”
It had been awful. I’d realised that I didn’t want to study the subject I was applying for midway through an interview at the university I’d been aiming to go to for at least ten years. I’d lost my words and forgotten how to bullshit and I’d ruined all of my chances of getting in.
“I don’t know. I think I did my best.”
Raine looked at me for a moment. “Well … that’s good? That’s all you can do.”
“Yeah, exactly.” But I hadn’t done my best, had I? I’d done my absolute worst. How had I not seen this coming? How had I let myself get this far into things?
“It must be useful to be smart,” she said and then laughed weakly. She glanced down and suddenly looked very sad. “I’m like, constantly scared I’m going to be homeless or something. I wish our whole lives didn’t have to depend on our grades.”
‘Useful’, I thought, was a pretty good word for it.
Raine and I wandered round Cambridge for a bit while Daniel was at his second interview. Raine had already explored quite a bit of it so she took me to all the bits she thought were worth seeing, which included an old bridge going over the river and a café that sold milkshakes.
By half past six we were back at Starbucks and Daniel’s interview was over, and I told Raine I was going to go and try to find him so he didn’t have to walk back alone in the dark. Raine argued that this would involve me walking to his college in the dark. I suggested she come with me, but she just made a whining noise and said she didn’t want to move because we’d managed to bagsy the sofas in the corner of the room.
So I went to meet Daniel by myself, still with half a cup of eggnog latte in my hand. I didn’t really want to sit in Starbucks any more anyway.
King’s College, the college where Daniel had applied, looked like a palace, even from where I was staring at it in the dark. It was giant, white and gothic, and nothing like the cottage-like college I’d applied to. It really was exactly where Daniel belonged.
Daniel was sitting alone on a low brick wall outside, his face illuminated by his phone and his body wrapped up in a thick Puffa jacket. You could still see his suit and tie underneath and he honestly looked like he belonged here. I really could imagine him at age twenty-one walking to a cathedral for his graduation in a fancy gown, or laughing with a lanky guy named Tim as they walked to the debating society where Stephen Fry was giving a speech on NHS privatisation.
He looked up as I approached. I gave him an awkward closed-mouth smile, which is a classic Frances thing to do.
&nbs
p; “Hey,” I said, sitting down next to him. He tried to smile at me, but wasn’t quite successful. “You okay?”
I couldn’t tell entirely whether he’d been crying.
I felt like it was a strong possibility.
“Yeah,” he said, breathing out, but he wasn’t.
He leaned forward suddenly, his elbows on his legs and his head in his hands.
Anyone could see he wasn’t okay.
“I just … really need to get in,” he said. “It’s the only thing … I just …”
He sat up again, not quite looking at me.
“When I was thirteen, I got this award at school … I got the highest CAT test scores out of anyone who’d ever taken them at our school …” One of his legs was bobbing up and down. He shook his head and laughed. “And I was so … I thought I was so smart. I thought I was the smartest person in the whole world.”
He shook his head.
“But now … I’m just … when you get to this age, you realise that you’re not anyone special after all.”
He was right. I wasn’t special.
“It’s … all I’ve got,” he said. “This is the only special thing about me.”
He cared about his subject, I knew that much. I didn’t care about mine.
He glanced at me. He looked tired, and his hair was messy, and his knee was bobbing up and down. “Why are you here?”
“Thought you might need some moral support,” I said, then felt like that was a dickish thing to say, so I followed up with, “Also, it’s dangerous for a young man to be walking around in the dark by himself.”
Daniel snorted.
We sat in silence for a moment, staring at the dark street and the empty shops opposite us.
“Do you want some eggnog latte?” I held out my cup to him. “It tastes a bit like dirt.”
He looked at it as if suspicious, but then took it and sipped. “Thanks.”
“No problem.”
“What shall we do now?”
“Go home, I guess. I’m literally freezing.”
“Sounds good.”
There was another silence.
“Was your interview really that bad?” I asked.
Daniel chuckled. I hadn’t seen him do that sober before. “Do we have to talk about it?”
“Oh. No. Sorry.”
He took in a breath. “It wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t perfect.” He shook his head. “It should have been perfect.”
“I think you’re being too hard on yourself.”
“No, I’m being realistic.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Cambridge are only gonna take the best. So I have to be the best.”
“Did Aled tell you good luck at least?”
He laughed. “Aled … wow. You just say whatever you want, don’t you.”
“Only to you.” I shook my head. “Sorry, that sounded creepy.”
“Ha. Well, no, he didn’t. I told you we weren’t talking, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You two still not talking either?”
“No.”
“Oh. I thought you might have made up by now.”
He sounded almost bitter.
“I think he’d make up with you before me—” I began, but he laughed, interrupting me.
“Do you really?” he said, shaking his head. “Wow. You are stupider than I thought.”
I fidgeted nervously. “What d’you mean?”
He turned to me and stared in disbelief. “You’re better than me in every possible way, Frances. You really think he cares more about me than he does about you?”
“What—” I stammered. “You— You’re his boyfriend. And best friend.”
“No, I’m not,” he said. “I’m just someone he kisses sometimes.”
CHILDISH KISSES
It started to spit rain, and the streets looked much less posh in the dark. Daniel was holding the half-empty Starbucks cup and tapping it against his knee.
He laughed and glanced at me again like he couldn’t be bothered to be mean to me any more. “Am I going to do the ‘reveal my entire life story’ thing now?”
“Not if you don’t want to …”
“But you want to know, don’t you? You want to know about us.”
I did.
“Kind of,” I said.
Daniel sipped the latte.
“And I want to understand Aled better,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows. “Why’s that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t really understand any of the things that he does … or the decisions he makes. It’s … it’s sort of interesting.” I crossed my legs. “And I do care about him, still. Even though I wish I didn’t.”
He nods. “That’s understandable. You were friends.”
“When did you become friends?”
“When we were born. Our mums used to work together, and then they were pregnant only a couple of months apart.”
“And you’ve been best friends since then?”
“Yeah. We went to the same primary school, then both went to the boys’ grammar school, obviously until I moved to the Academy for sixth form. We’d hang out every day – I used to live in your village, did you know that? Until I was eleven.”
I shook my head.
“Yeah, we’d hang out every day, play football in the fields or make secret bases or ride our bikes or play video games. Just … best friend stuff. We were best friends.”
He didn’t say anything after that, but he did take a large gulp of latte.
“And … so …” I didn’t quite know how I was going to broach the topic. “When did you start, erm, going out? If you don’t mind me asking …”
Daniel was silent for a moment.
“There wasn’t really a beginning to that,” he said. “It wasn’t— I don’t even know whether we were going out.”
I almost asked him what he meant, but then thought I should just let him explain in his own time. He seemed nervous and was stumbling over his words; his eyes were cast downwards at the pavement.
“He knew I was gay for ages,” he said, his voice soft. “We both did. Since we were, like, ten or eleven, maybe. As soon as we understood what gay was, we knew that’s what I was. We …”
He ran a hand through his hair.
“We used to kiss sometimes, when we were kids. When we were alone. Just little childish kisses, little pecks on the lips because we thought it was fun. We were always … really affectionate with each other. We’d cuddle and … we were kind to each other, rather than nasty like most children. I think we were so caught up in each other that we just … missed all the heteronormative propaganda that’s thrust at you when you’re that age.”
It sounded like the sweetest thing in the world, but Daniel’s voice shook like he was talking about a dead person.
“We didn’t really realise it was weird until— yeah, until we were ten or eleven. But that didn’t really stop us. I guess … I guess I always felt like it was more romantic than Aled did. Aled always just treated it like it was something that friends did rather than boyfriends. Aled … he’s always been weird. He doesn’t care what people think. He doesn’t even, like, register the social norms … he’s just caught up in his own little world.”
A pair of students walked past us, laughing, and Daniel paused until they were gone.
“And I guess … you know … when we were teenagers, it all got a bit— a bit more serious. It wasn’t just pecks on the lips any more, you know?” He chuckled awkwardly. “When we were around fourteen, I think, I was— I made the first proper move. We were just playing a video game in his room and I just … I just asked him if I could kiss him properly. He was a bit surprised, but he was like, ‘Yeah, okay,’ so I did.”
I was holding my breath and Daniel laughed at the look on my face.
“Why am I even telling you all this? Jesus. Yeah, so … we sort of went from there … kissing more, and … doing other stuff as well. I always asked him, you know … he’s not— He’s never b
een very clear about what he wants … he’s so quiet and— and he’s a massive pushover as well … so whatever we did, I always asked him first, I always said he could say no if he didn’t want to do something … But he always said yes.”
Daniel paused then, like he was living it, like he was reliving all of it. This was a life I could barely imagine. I could barely imagine sharing so much of yourself with someone else, for so long.
“It was really … just something for us. We didn’t want to be ‘in a relationship’, or be couple-y around other people we knew. It was all just for us in private, like we had to protect it, because we didn’t want the rest of the world to ruin it. I don’t really know why … I guess it didn’t feel like we were in a relationship at all. Because we were best friends, first and foremost. So we never knew how we’d explain it to people.”
Daniel took a breath.
“We were so important to each other. We’d tell each other everything and anything. We were each other’s first everything. First and only everything. He’s— he’s an angel.”
I didn’t think I’d ever heard anyone speak about someone else like this before.
“But the thing was, Aled— he didn’t want to come out because … he doesn’t think he’s gay, like, he says he doesn’t really feel attracted to anyone except me.”
“There are lots of other things he could be,” I said, quickly.
“Well, whatever he is, he doesn’t know,” said Daniel. “And I didn’t really want to come out at an all-boys’ school. That’s just asking for abuse. I mean, there were people who’d done it … there was this guy in the year above I really admired, one of Aled’s friends … but … I was too scared of what people would say. I thought I’d wait until I got to the Academy for sixth form and come out there, but then … I never really made any close friends, and … the topic never really came up with anyone I spoke to …”
He shook his head and took another long sip of latte.
“But the past year or so, since Carys left … he’s changed. I’ve changed as well. We hang out less … and I feel like when we do, he’s just coming to me to escape from his problems, it’s not like he really wants to see me at all. You know about his mum, yeah?”
