Freshmen

by Tom Ellen

  Negin reached over to my phone. “Don’t touch it,” I screamed, and snatched it off the table.

  Frankie dissolved again. Her whole body was convulsing in hysterics. “You know Negin touching your phone isn’t gonna make it worse, don’t you? I mean, let’s be honest, nothing could make—”

  I let out a loud groan-wail hybrid. “It is the second week of college. How can I have done this? Oh god.”

  “You are pretty epic.” Frankie threw her legs in the air above her. “Your love life is, like, fucking…dynamite.”

  “Will hasn’t texted me back! Luke thinks I’m a freak! I don’t have a love life!” I shouted.

  “You do. Luke Taylor bailed on you. And then Guinea Pig–gate with Will and now…” Negin kicked her quite hard and she trailed off. “Sorry. I mean, better to have loved and lost than to have loved and then…accidentally confessed your love via text message.”

  Negin tried to fake-cough her way out of a laugh and kicked Frankie again.

  “This is your fault anyway,” I yelled at Frankie. “You were the one who said Luke Taylor wasn’t hot.”

  Frankie sat up straight and screamed back at me: “Yes, but at no point did I make you send a photo of him…to him!”

  I took a deep breath. “I still feel sick. My whole body is boiling and my face is really itchy.”

  Negin leaned in and squinted. “Yeah, I didn’t want to mention it but you have got a kind of…rash.”

  “What?” I jumped over Frankie and looked at myself in the toaster. My face was covered in massive red blotches, and they were spreading down my neck.

  “Accidental Text Rash!” Frankie bellowed through her fingers.

  “You need to calm down,” Negin said. “It’s just stress.”

  “My face is burning!” I screamed, and started jumping up and down.

  “OK, OK.” Frankie sprang up, ran over to the sink and started chucking the dirty pans out onto the floor one by one. The crashing reverberated around the kitchen. She turned the tap on.

  “What should I do?” I turned to Negin.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you a doctor or not?” I screeched.

  “As I have said a thousand times, I won’t be a doctor for seven years.”

  Frankie was beckoning me to the sink. “OK, the plug is fucked, so just do it quickly.”

  “I feel like I’m on fire.” I stared at the water.

  “Just do it!” Frankie shrieked.

  I put my face close to the sink, took a deep breath and closed my eyes. “I can’t,” I shouted, just before Frankie plunged my whole head into the freezing-cold water. The shock of it hit me hard, but it felt kind of calming. I couldn’t really hear anything except my heartbeat and the water in my ears.

  I gasped from the shock as I pulled my head out.

  Frankie threw her arms around me. “I feel like I fucking baptized you.”

  “Erm…what are you guys doing?” Connor was standing at the door, looking very confused.

  Negin handed me a dish towel with old bits of pasta stuck to it.

  “We’re just…daring each other to…dunk our heads in water,” she coughed.

  “Awesome.” Connor ran over to the sink and plunged his face into it. Then he stood up and shook himself out like a dog. “Yes!” he roared.

  “This is one of the strangest days of my life,” Negin said, and put the kettle on. Becky walked in. If she thought it was odd that there were two people drenched in water she was too polite to say.

  “Tea?” Negin said to her, and she smiled.

  “Do you want to get dunked in water, Becks?” Connor asked amicably.

  Becky shook her head. “I’ve got loads of work to do, and I’m going out later.”

  “Fair play.” Connor nodded.

  “Can I tell them?” Frankie said. “D Dorm circle of trust.”

  “You’re not even in D Dorm!” I screamed. I was starting to shiver uncontrollably from the cold, but I didn’t feel like my face was burning quite as much.

  “Phoebs took a picture of a guy and wrote underneath it that he is, and I quote”—Frankie made quotation marks with her fingers—“ ‘the hottest boy on Earth.’ Then she sent the picture to him by mistake.”

  Connor held his hand up to high-five me. “Phoebs. You are a comedy legend. I think that is fucking brilliant. If he doesn’t like ya, who cares, move on, and if he does, he’ll make a move now for sure.”

  “He has a girlfriend,” I said.

  “We don’t know that,” Negin pointed out.

  “Anyway, whatever, I know he doesn’t like me.”

  “How?” said Connor. “You’re hot, Phoebs, and you’re fun to talk to. Trust. I don’t shit where I eat, but if I did, I’d definitely be up for it.” He winked at me. Weirdly, it made me feel a bit better.

  “When did you send the message?” Becky sounded genuinely concerned.

  “Like, two hours ago,” I said. “Honestly, this is the end for me and boys. And technology. No men, no technology. Period.”

  Becky took a sip of tea. “Well, he might text you back.”

  “Seriously,” I wailed. “What am I actually going to do?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” said Frankie. “Just avoid Luke Taylor at all costs.”

  Campus was so weird. It was like a really annoying alternate dimension. You were constantly bumping into all the people you didn’t want to see, but the people you did want to see were never around.

  I’d spent all week trying to “accidentally” run into Phoebe. We’d had two classes together, and both times she was sitting on the opposite side of the room.

  I’d even tried skulking around the entrance to D Dorm, pretending to browse the vending machines for longer than was strictly necessary, on the off chance she happened to walk out. But no luck.

  On the other hand, as I shuffled down the walkway that led off campus, I realized that this was the fourth time in as many days that I’d seen Caribbean Jeremy. He was sitting on the grass next to the lake, a big bag of Doritos at his feet, knocking out a fairly appalling rendition of “No Woman, No Cry” on an acoustic guitar. Because he had his eyes shut, he hadn’t noticed there were two ducks with their heads in the bag, cheerfully stealing his chips.

  I left campus and walked up the outer road, past the massive oak trees and the weird little bungalows where the PhD students lived. It had been a week of nothing-y limbo—just Netflix, microwaved lasagna and the occasional spliff with Arthur—but I felt like tonight would be the real start of college. This was when the next three years would actually begin. Soccer initiations.

  They were happening in a slightly grubby-looking, flat-roofed pub just off campus, and when I arrived, there were about five other freshmen bumbling about nervously in the parking lot.

  “They told us to wait outside,” said one guy named Trev, who I’d spoken to a bit at tryouts.

  He grinned sheepishly from under his floppy dreads. “You nervous?” He was quite short, with a sharp northern accent—Manchester, maybe.

  “Not really,” I lied. “You?”

  “Probably the most I’ve ever been in my life, mate, yeah.” He nodded. “I mean, second most, actually, now that I think about it. My brother was on Jeopardy! last year, and that was the most nervous I’ve ever been in my life. It sounds bad, but I wasn’t even nervous for him, really. I was more nervous for me, like, that he’d say something stupid, and then people would make fun of him in school the next day. ‘Oh, saw your brother on Jeopardy! last night—he made a total dick of himself.’ That sort of thing. But in the end, he did quite well. He didn’t win or anything, but he got a Double Jeopardy. It was on flightless birds.” He stopped talking and breathed out. “Sorry, man. When I get nervous, I ramble. It’s
a medical condition.”

  I laughed, and felt some of the tension in my stomach dissolve. “Yeah, well, I’m shitting myself, too, actually. When I get nervous, I lie and pretend I’m not.”

  A few other people arrived, including one guy who was easily a head taller than the rest of us. He had a stubbly beard and a huge, dirty-blond cloud of hair, and could definitely have passed for a Game of Thrones character if it wasn’t for his bright-green raincoat.

  Drunk Toby from tryouts arrived just behind him, clutching a half-empty bottle of schnapps. He started offering it around.

  “Mate, you do know they’re gonna be, like, drowning us with booze for the next five hours,” Trev said.

  Toby shrugged and took a swig. “Settles the nerves.”

  Trev gave me a look as a junior finally opened the doors to let us in. He led us into the back room of the pub, where there was one long, banquet-style table laid out in the center.

  “Maybe they’re just gonna cook us a really nice meal,” Trev suggested.

  We all took our seats, and I spotted Will milling about, as well as a few other sophomores and juniors I recognized. Dempers pulled a chair out at the head of the table and stood on it.

  “Right, freshmen, shut up and listen,” he barked in his fancy private-school accent. I could easily see him as a red-faced, sweaty politician in twenty years’ time, shouting across the House of Commons. “If you do exactly as we say,” he continued, “you will escape from this pub unscathed. However, if you disobey, you will be punished….” He left what he probably assumed to be a dramatic pause, and then slammed his fist into his palm. “Severely punished!”

  Trev leaned into me. “This dude,” he whispered, “is a fucking tool.”

  Dempers reached down into a cardboard box and pulled out a bunch of metal handcuffs. There was a genuine gasp of either surprise or horror or both from the freshmen. All the older guys cracked up.

  “Don’t worry, this isn’t some sick Fifty Shades shit,” Dempers said, laughing. “You will all be handcuffed to one of your superiors”—he gestured at the sophomores and juniors—“and you will have to drink double whatever they drink. So, for example…”

  He plonked himself down and clicked the handcuffs onto Game of Thrones and then himself.

  “This is probably not a good time to tell you,” Thrones said. “But I don’t actually drink.”

  “Fuck off,” Dempers snorted. Someone passed him a pint of Guinness, and he downed it, spilling most of it on his T-shirt. “Right,” he gasped. “Now you. Two pints.”

  Thrones shook his massive curly head, sadly. “Like I said, pal. I don’t drink.” He had a deep, booming Yorkshire accent.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Dempers spat. “Then you can fuck off, pussy.”

  I felt myself flinch inwardly, but Thrones didn’t bat an eye. He shrugged, nodded, then stood up suddenly and walked off, yanking Dempers to the ground behind him. Dempers hit the floor with a loud smack, and a few people laughed.

  “You fucking dick!” he bellowed.

  Thrones took no notice; just carried on walking across the room, dragging the wriggling Dempers behind him.

  “Oi! Fucking stop!” Dempers was screaming.

  Thrones finally turned and looked down at him blankly, like he was a stone stuck in his shoe. “You might want to undo these handcuffs, pal, because I’m not dragging you all the way home.”

  Everyone was laughing now, even the older guys, and Dempers was almost purple with anger as he fumbled to undo the handcuffs. “Good fucking riddance,” he shouted as Thrones walked out.

  Will didn’t look quite so convinced. Clearly, having someone Thrones’s size on the team could only have been a good thing. He cleared his throat and waved his hands for quiet. “OK, OK, chill. You always get one walkout. Wouldn’t be a real initiation without it.”

  Dempers chucked the handcuffs out, and everyone partnered up and started drinking. I was cuffed to Geordie Al, who for some reason insisted on calling me “Swift.”

  “That’s four tequila shots you owe me now, Swift.”

  Between the third and fourth I asked: “Why Swift?”

  “ ’Cause you drink like a fucking girl, man. Luke Taylor…Taylor Swift.”

  “Oh I see. That’s a little bit tenuous.”

  He downed a gin and tonic. “That’s two G and T’s, Swift. Go.”

  After a while, Drunk Toby had puked so many times he was literally coughing up air, and Trev had just given up altogether. He sat groaning with his head in his hands while Dempers cackled and took photos of him. I was trying to stop the room from spinning, but my head and stomach were both pulsing mercilessly.

  “Some of you are drinking slower than others,” Dempers bellowed. “We need extra nominations.”

  I felt a hand clap me on the shoulder and looked round to see Will standing over me, smirking.

  “I think Taylor could do with a more experimental drink order.”

  “Yeah,” I slurred. “If you like.”

  Will reeled ingredients off the top of his head: “Whisky, instant noodles, mayonnaise, absinthe, mustard, Guinness.”

  Trev winced next to me. “Fuck’s sake, man.” Will grabbed a glass to prepare this lethal cocktail, but Dempers stopped him.

  “No. He has to drink it…out of his shoe.”

  The upperclassmen all cracked up laughing. I looked at Dempers to see if he was serious, and his pinched, unsmiling face told me he was. The mood seemed darker suddenly, more violent. But being so completely wasted, I couldn’t tell for sure.

  “Get your shoe off, frosh,” Dempers snapped.

  “I’d rather not,” I said.

  He leaned down so his face was almost touching mine. He was so close I could smell his tangy, chicken pot pie breath. “Did you not hear me, frosh?” he spat. “I said…Get. Your. Fucking. Shoe. Off. Now.”

  A flash of anger momentarily sobered me up, and I felt like shoving his face away. The upperclassmen started chanting “Shoe off, shoe off,” and the freshmen were just laughing nervously. I looked at Will, vaguely hoping he might step in and veto the whole thing, but he was chanting along with everyone else.

  I took my shoe off slowly to a massive cheer, and watched as Dempers proceeded to fill it with the lumpy, greenish-black cocktail. He handed it back to me and I thought about the Game of Thrones bloke. How could he be that confident to just walk out? How could he be so sure he’d find other friends?

  “Do it,” Dempers barked. I could see blobs of mustard bobbing up ominously near the laces. I put it to my lips, feeling the noise in the room rise and rise around me, and hoped the drink would just knock me flat out and put an end to the whole evening.

  But it didn’t.

  It just made me throw up, quite violently, on my other shoe.

  The rest of the night happened in stop motion. One minute we were in a taxi into town, streetlights whizzing by in a blur, fresh air billowing through the window. The next, Toby was gabbling apologies and the taxi driver was shouting, “Fucking kids! Who the hell’s going to clean this up?”

  Then we were in some club somewhere, and I was trying to stay upright, as Will yelled in my ear over the music.

  “Don’t mind Dempers earlier,” he was saying. “He gets a bit carried away.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Sure you’ve seen it all before anyway.”

  I nodded, but the truth was, drinking with the soccer team at school had always been much tamer than this. More of a laugh. Probably because me and Reece were in charge, and we weren’t exactly going to force anyone to drink out of their own footwear.

  Will got his phone out. “I’ll add you to the group chat so you’ll know about training times and that. Plus, y’know…some extra stuff.” He handed
me another Jägerbomb. “Some bonus material.”

  I’ve no clue how I got back to the dorm. I staggered into my room, opened the sink cupboard and tried to focus on my face in the mirror. But it kept dividing at the nose and swimming into two separate faces staring back at me.

  I lay down on the bed and looked at my phone. The soccer group was already buzzing with pictures of me and Trev and Toby and everyone else throwing up. Most of them involved me and the shoe.

  I scrolled up a bit and suddenly had to squint harder at the screen to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.

  In among all the puking photos there were three pictures, one after the other, of three different girls. Each was asleep in bed, their eyes closed, their hair messy on the pillow. Underneath the last one, Dempers had written: “Wall of Shame Top 3 from last year. Gauntlet laid, frosh…”

  I felt my skin prickle. It was like putting your eye to a peephole, seeing something totally private that you knew you shouldn’t have access to. I don’t know why, but at that moment, for the first time since I’d got here, I really, really wanted to go home.

  I closed my eyes to try to sleep, but the next thing I knew I was hearing voices.

  “Hello?” someone was whispering. “Luke?” I looked down at my phone.

  “Abbey?” I slurred.

  “Luke…,” she mumbled. “Do you know what time it is?”

  “No…What’s going on? Are you OK?”

  “You called me.”

  “Did I?”

  She sighed. “You sound drunk.” She sounded tired. She sounded like home.

  “I’m not that drunk. How are you? I’ve been wanting to call you. All week.” I watched the ceiling spin faster and faster above me.

  “Why?” she whispered. It felt so good to hear her voice.

  “Because…I don’t know. Because I miss you, I guess. I was…Maybe I shouldn’t have said what I said on the first night. I wasn’t really thinking.”

  “You’re not thinking now.”

  “No, I am…I just…York isn’t how I thought it would be. I don’t know if I’m fitting in here. I don’t know if it’s working out.”