Amelia O’Donohue Is So Not a Virgin

by Helen FitzGerald

  “Amelia!”

  Oh no. Someone was looking for Amelia.

  I slammed my window shut, ran out my door, and shielded Amelia’s room with my arms.

  “She’s asleep!” I said.

  The girl was dressed in the same nightie as Amelia but in a different color. She had perfectly flat, highlighted hair. And makeup. At bed time! Glittery gold eye shadow, at least three thick coats of mascara, which made her short lashes clumpy to be honest, and bright pink, clown-like blusher that Mandy had told me was “the thing” these days. She turned up her lip and said, “Who are you?”

  “Rachel Ross. Amelia asked me to make sure no one interrupts her. She’s exhausted.”

  “Since when are you friends with Amelia?” she said, looking at my pajama ensemble.

  “Dunno.”

  She was like, “Whatever, tell her Tanya needs to talk to her urgently.” (Tanya with a poncy aah…Taahnya.) Obviously from the city. She probably ate avocado and pine nuts with multicolored lettuce.

  The lights went out at 10 p.m., and Amelia had still not come back inside. I lay in bed waiting for the fire escape door to clink shut, for hers to slide open, to hear her lying down in her bed, her head only centimeters from mine though the thin wall dividing us.

  Finally, must have been an hour after lights out, the fire escape door clicked. There were footsteps, then a door sliding open. But it wasn’t Amelia’s. It was mine.

  “Anyone come looking?” Amelia said.

  “Just Taahnya. Said she needs to talk to you urgently.”

  “Slap my cheek then pull my nose then say: If I tell, I’ll go to hell.”

  I was like, “What?”

  “Slap my cheek then pull my nose then say: If I tell, I’ll go to hell.”

  “I never tell people’s secrets. I promise. I have a reputation for it back home. Ask Mandy and Louisa, they’ll tell you it’s true.”

  “Who the fudge is Mandy and Louisa?” Crikey, she was so cool she said fudge like all the time and made a point of not remembering nobodies. “Slap my cheek then pull my nose then say it.”

  “But you can’t send me to hell and anyway I don’t believe in it.”

  “I’ll make your life so crap you’ll believe in it. Do it.”

  So I closed my eyes and slapped her right cheek.

  “Ow! Not so hard.”

  I opened my eyes a bit and slapped her other (not red) cheek more softly and then pulled her nose for three seconds…

  “That’s long enough! Jeez…” she said.

  I let go and said, “If I tell, I’ll go to hell.”

  Amelia nodded then left my room.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  I set my alarm clock for ten to twelve and woke up wondering where I was. After a couple of seconds the wonderful truth dawned on me. I wasn’t with my misery-soaked parents in the middle of nowhere, the sea crashing against the rocks across the road, the wind howling through the emptiness of our treeless farm. I was in the wondrous Aberfeldy Halls. I got out of bed and tiptoed along the hall and up the stairs to the fourth floor. I counted the cubicles as I made my way to Mandy’s room for our midnight feast, then knocked three times very quietly on the fourteenth on the right. I could hear two girls giggling. Eventually, the door slid open.

  Mandy, Louisa, and a girl called Aimee were sitting on the bed eating cupcakes.

  “You’ll never guess what we heard,” Mandy said.

  “You can’t tell her,” Aimee said.

  “This is Rachel Ross,” Mandy said, “the most trustworthy girl in the world. No matter how hard you try, she won’t tell you a thing. It’s abnormal, actually. I’ve told Rach absolutely all my juicy secrets and she’s never told anyone.”

  “Really, like what?” Aimee said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  Aimee was like, “So you really keep secrets?”

  “There’s no need to tell me if you’d rather not.”

  “Oh, but you’ll die! Y’know the girl who wears the same clothes as Amelia O’Donohue?”

  “Aye, Taahnya…”

  “That’s the one. Taahnya Scot. Posh bitch from Edinburgh. Anyways, guess what she had…”

  I didn’t guess.

  “An abortion!”

  My lack of response didn’t please them.

  “Can you believe that? Her big sister told my big sister that’s why her parents sent her here.”

  “Can I have a cupcake?” I said.

  The girls told me loads of other gossip. There were lesbians on their floor, apparently. With nose rings. Squelchy noises had been heard at around 10:50 that very night. The culprits were called Vanessa and Jill.

  Suddenly, a door slammed somewhere close by. The three of us shut our mouths and stopped breathing, listening as footsteps pounded past the cubicle, then back again, then back again, then stopped dead, then the door slid open slowly.

  It was Miss Jamieson, the fourth floor matron. Each floor’s matron slept in full height lockable cubicles situated beside the bathrooms.

  “To bed now, girls!” she said, more calmly than I’d have expected considering her grim demeanor. She had a very thin face and cheeks that caved into an unfortunate jaw.

  “I understand your excitement tonight,” she said, “but I catch you again you’ll be on toilet duties for a month.”

  There were toilet duties?

  I hardly slept that night. ALO (Dorm speak for After Lights Out), girls quieted down for a while, before coming to life again, confident that the matrons would be asleep. They tiptoed into each other’s rooms to eat, chat, giggle. They snuck down to the television room to watch scary movies on low volume. They smoked on the fire escape. All of which contributed to a hum of ad hoc noises that made sleep impossible. To make things worse, the clock beside the cupboards made an eerie buzzing sound every hour, and I found myself waiting for the next one, hour by hour, till Real Radio played at 7 a.m. to wake us for breakfast.

  “Morning, Miss Rose,” I said as I walked back from the shower room to my cubicle.

  “Morning, Rachel,” she said, smiling. Poor thing, living in a dorm full of girls. It must get lonely, I thought.

  Ouch. Taahnya had grabbed me by the arm as Miss Rose turned to walk away. She was dragging me down the corridor and into my room.

  “What are you doing?” I asked when she pushed me down onto my bed.

  She was like, “What did Amelia tell you about me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I’m going to count to three and if you haven’t told me, then I’m going to punch you on the arm till you do.”

  “She hasn’t told…”

  “One…”

  “Me anything…”

  “Two…”

  “Really!”

  “Three.”

  “Ow!”

  She’d kept her word and had punched me really hard on the arm.

  “Now tell me or I’ll punch you twice this time.”

  “She hasn’t told…”

  Punch. Punch.

  “jesus!”

  “One more chance, then I’ll just keep punching.”

  “One…Two…Three…”

  As she punched, I tried to tell her that I was being completely honest…Amelia had said nothing…

  “What about the other girls?”

  “No one’s told me anything…” I said, sacrificing honesty for discretion.

  It was killing me. My arm was numb.

  “Well…I suppose you are telling the truth,” she said, shaking her red hand and leaving the room.

  • • •

  I loved my uniform, even though my mother had ordered it secondhand from some scabby shop in Perth. The skirt was long, pleated, and thick: a blue and maroon tartan. White shirt, blue tie, maroon cardigan, maroon blazer, tights, black shoes. I looked official. Posh even. When I got to breakfast, I was surprised at how different the girls could make a standard uniform look. Amelia O’Donohue had fashioned her tie into a loose, short, mas
sive knot. Her top two buttons were undone. Her collar was up. Her white shirt hung undone from underneath her tight V-neck jumper, and she’d discarded the mandatory blazer.

  While I queued at the huge, round, toaster, which the chef oversaw, Miss Rose at his side, I realized word had somehow gotten around that I was the person to tell stuff to. I was waiting for my whole-grain toast to be handed over when a girl with a ponytail and a really short skirt whispered, “I fancy the gym teacher, Mr. Burns.”

  “Really?” I whispered back, not sure what else to say. I’d never met the girl with the ponytail, nor Mr. Burns. But when I did—my third lesson was PE—I understood. He was quite young—around 25 perhaps—with dark curly hair, stubble, large muscles, and a nice manner.

  “Does anyone want to be an Olympic athlete?” he asked.

  A few girls put their hands up, including the girl with the ponytail.

  “Good. And why not? Live your dreams. Be the best you can. Now ladies, three laps of the field! Except the girls who put their hands up…you do five…”

  “Mr. Bu…urns,” the girl with the ponytail flirted.

  “Now, now, Olympic athletes never moan! They embrace!” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder and pushing her off with a smile.

  Every period excited me. The classrooms all had interactive whiteboards which communicated with electronic pens and our own personal laptops.

  My English teacher, Catherine (she asked us to call her Catherine!), began by writing two lines on the whiteboard…

  A poem should be palpable and mute

  As a globed fruit

  “What do you think this means?” she asked. Unlike in my old class, almost everyone put their hands up. Back home, questions had been answered with the communal sliding of bums down chairs.

  “It means poetry is more than words.” This came from a girl called Viv Metstein, an unruly chubster with scuffed shoes.

  “Good, Viv. Anyone else?” My head, hair and all, had suddenly become boiling hot. I know the words on the board are fantastic, I thought, but I dunno why. God, what does it mean? Don’t ask me. Please.

  “I think it means you can almost taste a good poem.” Louisa said this. Louisa was good at English.

  “Totally!” Catherine said, before glancing around for her next genius. “It’s Rachel, isn’t it?” She smiled directly at me. Oh shite. How had she managed to remember our names already? “What do you think?”

  “Um…” The heat was now having a throbbing party on my cheeks. “Is it like, tempting, delicious, beckoning?” Was this correct? Was this silly?

  “Yes! Outstanding. Girls, this year I just know we are going to have a love affair with words.”

  I blew out the heat with a loud sigh, then beamed. I stayed like this all day.

  Teachers who loved teaching! Pupils who loved learning! It was everything I hoped it would be.

  Biology was particularly fun. The teacher—Mr. Kaw Sharma from Kashmir—was passionate about his work, and he made us buzz as he talked about how oxytocin stimulates uterine contraction during childbirth. I was so engrossed that I didn’t notice Amelia O’Donohue leaving a note on my desk that said: “You’re on watch again tonight.”

  After school, we returned to the dorms for a wee rest and our first study period. I was just in the zone with trigonometry when two girls knocked on my cubicle. The first, a thin pale girl called Lucy, burst into tears when I told her I was indeed trustworthy and if she needed to talk, I would be happy to listen. Turned out, her aunty had tried to kill herself in the summer. She was worried she might try again. And succeed. Could she turn to me if this happened? The second girl was a rosy-cheeked, Girl-Guide type called Roberta. “I don’t want anyone else to know,” she chirped, “but Mum says it’s a good idea to have a friend to talk to about it. I’ve got lupus, see. I’m being eaten alive.”

  “I’m Jennifer Buckley,” said the next girl in line.

  “Hi, Jennifer, and what seems to be the problem?” I had taken to doctor-speak like a duck to water.

  “I miss my cat,” she said, showing me a photograph of a ginger tabby then bursting into tears. “She licks my toes and I know it sounds gross but it makes me feel better. Without Mercy I feel like crying all the time.”

  If people wanted to tell me things, should I try and stop them? Should I stop them unloading? Leave them to ferment? Or should I ease their burden by taking at least part of it and hiding it inside me? Did I have a choice? It seemed to me that I didn’t. It seemed to me that I was the only person who truly believed that if you break a confidence, if you let loose a dangerous truth, you may indeed be damned forever.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  Each day, the girls, the teachers, and the buildings became more and more familiar. By the end of the first month, I could hardly imagine the outside world. Here, everything was simple and everything was decided for you. The only things that could impede study were friendships and homesickness, and I did not suffer from either of them. I politely declined midnight feasts, sneaky cigarettes, and basketball clubs, preferring to work at my desk and get a good night’s sleep. I ate well—no lamb, thank god—and became particularly fond of cauliflower cheese, which I’d not eaten before. The chef said he’d never known a girl to come back three times for vegetables. I felt positive and purposeful. The feeling of dread which used to loom as I neared my croft home had disappeared, replaced by stomach-churning excitement at practice tests for math, English essays, and physics assignments. Throughout that first month, girls continued to come to my room and tell me things, and I didn’t mind, except that some of them smelled funny, and most of their problems were about missing home and feeling lonely, which I didn’t really understand.

  A couple of these sessions stick out in my mind. A girl called Vanessa, with a Mohawk and a nose-piercing, came and said only two sentences: “I’m in love” and “Should I tell the person?”

  “If it feels right,” I said, recalling that this girl was the alleged fourth-floor lesbian.

  She nodded her head, sighed, and left.

  Another evening, a girl called Janey Harris came in and fidgeted nervously on the edge of my bed. “I can’t tell you, no I can’t…It’s too awful.”

  “You don’t have to,” I reassured her, but before I knew it she’d lifted her shirt to reveal a hairy lump underneath her left arm. I tried to disguise how sick it made me feel. It was a bumpy fur ball, three inches in diameter.

  “It’s my twin,” she said, bursting into tears. “I took it over in Mum’s tummy and I absorbed him…Mum says I should just get it removed, but I can’t do it. They call it parasitic. I call him James.” She stroked it.

  Holy fudge, was that a tooth?

  When she left, I ran to the loos to puke. Gross.

  The wee soul.

  I suppose I didn’t realize it, but I was becoming pretty isolated. I called my mother and my father once a week from the phone in the hall downstairs. Once, while I was waiting my turn, a girl called Gillie was talking to her boyfriend. She was sitting on her foot and wriggling, obviously desperate to go to the loo but not wanting to say good-bye (“No you hang up, no you, no you…”). When she finally did, we both saw at the same time that she had poo all over her sock. Later, she came to my room and said, “Thank god it was you, Rachel. Someone else might have told everyone.”

  “Believe me,” I said. “I know how important secrets are. I know how destructive it can be to pass private information on. I will never tell anyone about your sock.”

  I played guard for Amelia O’Donohue, who did ruder and ruder things each time she met her boyfriend on the fire escape. I peeked every now and then. I don’t know what she saw in him. There was only one stubble-filled inch between his bottom lip and his neck. He made me feel a little queasy, especially when he was saying, Oh Amelia, oh, oh.

  I did toilet duties one day every fortnight, which involved scrubbing slimy showers and toothpaste-dotted sinks and brown-stained loos. Once, I had to wait a
n hour to clean one toilet. As I waited, I heard a disgusting retching sound. Finally, Amelia O’Donohue opened the door.

  “What?” she said, startled that I was waiting outside her toilet door. “You stalking me? Creep.” She rinsed her mouth in the sink. “It’s those bloody abortions.”

  On Sundays, I begrudgingly went to the church at the other end of the town, as I had promised my folks. This was the only hour of the week that depressed me. Each time, I almost ran back through the village, across the bridge, and up the welcoming driveway to my new home.

  I rang John once. Sat nervously over the phone before dialing, then just tapped in the numbers and held my breath. His mother answered the phone.

  “Is John there?” I asked.

  “He’s out,” she said.

  “Could you leave him a message? Tell him Rachel called. My number’s…”

  I started reciting the school telephone number, but she interrupted me.

  “I’ll tell him,” she said, and hung up.

  I don’t know why I phoned him, to be honest. I didn’t really like him very much. And the thought of him made me nauseated, like bad prawns from the night before. I never tried phoning again. And he never tried to contact me.

  • • •

  Gradually, my distaste for the island and the adults who’d imprisoned me there made me sick and angry. After four weeks, something seemed to snap. I couldn’t bear to think, hear, or talk about that place. So much so that I rang my mother and told her I wouldn’t be home till christmas. With the academic year starting in August, the September weekend was the first proper break from school. When we lived in Edinburgh, my mother and my father used to take me camping on the September weekend, as a good-bye to the summer. We’d get all the gear out of the enormous hall cupboard in our bright forty-foot hall and pack the car to breaking point. It always rained, and we always ended up playing monopoly and giggling in the tent, then getting no sleep ’cause my mother snored.

  “But we thought we’d go camping…” she began.

  “I have a lot of work to do. I’ll be fine,” I said.

  “I want you to come home.”

  “Why?”