Freshers

by Tom Ellen

  ‘How is that girl a fresher?’ I said. ‘Seems like she knows everyone.’

  ‘I saw her earlier and she was writing in marker pen on this boy’s stomach.’ Negin didn’t seem to have an opinion about this, just delivered the information matter-of-factly.

  ‘What, like her phone number?’

  ‘No, I think it was a line from a song or something.’ Negin rolled her eyes. ‘Deep.’

  ‘I saw her arrive this afternoon. She didn’t have any stuff at all. Nothing. She just walked into her halls carrying a colander. Like, she is so cool, all she needs for the next three years is multi-coloured hair and a colander.’

  ‘Like she fell from space.’ Negin nodded.

  ‘Exactly. She just sauntered in with the belly and the colander. She hasn’t even got changed. I genuinely think those are the only clothes she has.’ How do you even become a person who is brave enough to get a rainbow bowl cut and wear boys’ trackies on a night out? What does your life preceding that point even look like?

  We kept staring at Bowl-Cut as the DJ gave her his headphones and she started waving her hands out to the crowd.

  We found the rest of our corridor and all started dancing together. You could tell we were all from the same halls because of the luminous glitter the Scouse girl, Liberty, had enthusiastically doused on us before we came out. Negin was dancing in her reserved way and the really shy girl, Becky, was hardly dancing at all. Every time the klaxon sounded she looked panicked. Liberty oscillated around the group, hugging us all and breaking out into random and unexpected stripper moves every so often.

  The klaxon sounded again and Connor, the boy in the room next to me, jumped into the middle of the circle, took his T-shirt off, and started swinging it round his head like a lasso. None of us was in danger of forgetting his name, as he had ‘Kiss me I’m Connor’ written right across his forehead. His boom was so loud that you could hear his ‘First night of Freshers’!’ war cry reverberate around the room.

  The exaggerated lasso-swinging was making everyone jostle and my Yoda ears fell on the floor. I bent down to get them, and stood up face-to-face with Luke Taylor. He had come out of nowhere, just as I had forgotten about him for one second.

  ‘Hey.’ I tried to smile demurely.

  ‘Hey,’ he shouted over the music. The klaxon went off and he handed me his bathrobe. ‘It’s . . .’

  There was this moment where I didn’t know what he meant. And then I did and it was like a stone had appeared in my stomach.

  ‘Phoebe,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, of course.’ He smiled. ‘Phoebe. I’m Luke.’

  I could feel my face getting red and tight. ‘Hey.’

  Negin was trying not to seem obvious and was sort of half dancing next to me, her back slightly turned the other way. Her being there made it worse. I wanted to replay the night from the beginning and not have blabbed on about him like some desperate idiot.

  I handed him the Yoda ears and he put them on.

  ‘So random we’re both here,’ I shouted brightly.

  ‘Yeah, I kind of . . .’ He felt in his pocket for his phone and then glanced down at it. ‘Sorry, I . . .’ He didn’t finish the sentence, just looked across the room and started to shuffle away. He didn’t even say goodbye. If I’d seen someone from school, even if I didn’t really know them, I would have made an effort. We were 200 miles away from home. We had known each other to look at since we were eleven. It was like he actively didn’t want to be associated with me. Like he didn’t want anyone here to even know that we were connected. I took a deep breath and turned to Negin.

  ‘So . . . that was him, then?’ she said, cupping her fingers around my ear so I could hear her over the music. I bit my lip and nodded.

  She shrugged. ‘He’s not all that.’

  ‘It was a big school,’ I said. ‘So not everyone knew each other.’ I felt ridiculous. Like some psychotic weirdo. We had only directly spoken, like, five times in seven years, but I thought he knew my name at least. I felt like someone had let the air out of me. I made a conscious effort to pull myself together and smiled at Negin really widely. ‘I feel like such a loser.’

  She shook her head. ‘My aunt still calls me Leila. That’s my sister’s name.’

  ‘D Block squaaaaaaad!’ Liberty shimmied over and hugged us both and made us smile for a selfie. We cuddled together and she took it.

  ‘I’m gonna go to the loo,’ I mouthed. I pushed through the dance floor to the toilets. I took some deep breaths and caught myself in the mirror. I was bright red and had glitter smeared all over my face.

  I suddenly felt a bit tearful; the Luke thing had caught me off guard, made me feel small and exposed. Everything had been going really well and then I had ruined it all by banging on and on like Luke was some thing. I took a deep breath. It was only midnight. I sat on the toilet and got my phone out and there was Luke Taylor. Smiling up at me from a pre-drinks picture he had been tagged in. Friends already with a whole group of new people, looking self-assured, even in a Bon Jovi T-shirt and Superman cape. I shoved my phone into my bag. Maybe I was just drunk. I washed my face and managed to smear glitter into my hair.

  I walked out of the toilet and back on to the dance floor, but Negin wasn’t where I had left her. I scanned the room. I couldn’t see a single person I knew. Not Connor, not Liberty, not Becky, not any of them. I danced on my own for a second and then made my way back to the bar. I scrutinized the room again and again. I was going to have to go back to the corridor.

  But then I saw Josh, our second-year contact person, waving at me from across the bar. He was tall and kind of stacked and had a shaved head, like he was in the marines or something. I walked across. He was on the edge of the dance floor with some boys, playing table football. He had been so nice earlier: spent twenty minutes showing my mum where the outlet shopping centre was on the map, and labelled each of our doors with stickers with our name on and a picture. Mine was a panda, which was weirdly appropriate as my behaviour was sort of suggesting I deserved to become extinct.

  ‘I’ve kind of lost everyone.’ I glanced around the room to prove it.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ He grinned. ‘You can totally hang out with us. I’m your second-year rep. It’s basically my duty to make sure you have fun. These are my housemates, Will and Pete.’

  Will was classically good looking. Tall, with boarding-school floppy hair and the kind of smile that only comes from knowing you’re attractive. He leant over and kissed me on the cheek to say hello. Pete was smaller and less chatty and had somehow ended up wearing so many clothes he was almost drowning in them.

  Some hip hop song came on that they all liked and we started dancing. Me and Will started doing that thing where you look at each other and then look away. With every song that played, we moved a bit nearer. He was smiling at me, almost shyly, and I could sense Pete and Josh tactfully shift away. Me and Will were dancing closer and closer, and then we were getting with each other. He was a good kisser, but I couldn’t really get into it because I kept wondering if the people from my corridor were somehow watching. Or if Luke Taylor was watching. Not that anyone, least of all him, would exactly care. The whole night had already descended into a bit of a meat market, anyway. And even kissing a good kisser gets a bit awkward when you don’t really know the first thing about them, and you’re wearing a dressing gown.

  ‘I better try and find my friend,’ I said, finally. ‘She might be on her own.’

  The whole night felt a bit out of control. Like I needed to sort myself out and concentrate on making friends – not being rejected by Luke Taylor, getting lost and kissing randoms. I still couldn’t see Negin anywhere, so I walked out of the main doors and into a hall area with vending machines. There was a darkened room labelled ‘COMPUTER LAB’. At first I couldn’t work out what the noise coming from inside was.

  I creaked open the door. Gradually my eyes got accustomed to the dark, and I matched the low, gentle sound with the shape in the corner.
Facing the window and shuddering every so often. Someone crying.

  Luke Taylor crying.

  laughing.

  LUKE

  I hadn’t meant to say it. It just sort of . . . came out.

  It was like she was pushing me, almost. Daring me to say it. ‘If you don’t want to speak to me,’ she’d hissed, ‘if you don’t want to work at this, then maybe we should break up, Luke. Maybe we should just fucking break up.’

  And I’d said, ‘Yeah. OK. Maybe we should.’

  And then there was only the gentle hum of her crying in my ear, and this terrifying, exhilarating feeling, like I’d jumped off a cliff with no clue if there was water or concrete at the bottom.

  I just sat there, listening to her cry, feeling the panic and the toothpaste-y vodka fighting for space in my chest, surging up into my throat and pressing against the backs of my eyeballs.

  Then the phone went dead. And I thought: Is that it? Are we actually broken up? Can three years of your life really come to an end, just like that, in a dark computer room in the middle of the night? I covered my face but the tears wriggled out between my fingers. What the fuck was wrong with me? Half a day away from home and I was already falling apart.

  I caught a glimpse of my reflection in one of the screens. This sweaty, moony, tear-stained face with a pair of green Yoda ears on top of it. It was so ridiculous I actually started laughing. Which, if anything, made me look more insane. I took the ears off and dropped them on the table in front of me.

  Suddenly, I heard a noise from outside. I looked up but there was no one there. I wiped my face and checked the corridor, which was empty except for that Phoebe girl from school, who was getting some chocolate out of one of the vending machines.

  A little shiver of anxiety ran through me as I realized she might have seen what I was doing. Even if she hadn’t seen it, she was probably still wondering what sort of maniac sits alone in a computer room at midnight.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, trying to sound casual. She smiled and said ‘Hey’ back. Her cheeks were flushed from the heat of the bar and she had purply glitter smudged all across her forehead.

  ‘You having a good night?’ I asked, and she nodded.

  I suddenly panicked that my eyes might be red and watery, so I blurted, ‘I just took my contact lenses out.’ She nodded politely, and I realized that, if my eyes weren’t red and watery, this might have seemed like quite a random statement.

  She then said something I missed completely, because the bar doors burst open behind us and a blast of music and shouting filled the hall. A girl wearing bright-orange dungarees and Pikachu earmuffs stepped out. She wobbled on the spot for a second, and then sort of slumped down on to the steps in slow motion.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Phoebe asked her.

  The girl blinked a few times and squinted at us, as if she was having trouble focusing. She smelt strongly of tequila and sick. We helped her up.

  ‘Where are your friends?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ she slurred. Then her face fell. ‘I mean, I’ve only just met them . . . Do you think they are my friends? Do you think they like me?’

  ‘Definitely,’ Phoebe said.

  ‘Do you like me?’ she asked, and I nodded. ‘Yeah, of course. We’re both huge fans of your work.’

  Phoebe laughed, and the girl seemed satisfied by this, because she draped an arm around each of our shoulders. ‘OK, well at least we made friends. We can be each other’s friends, can’t we? First-night Freshers Friends.’

  ‘First-night Freshers Friends,’ Phoebe and I repeated, grinning at each other.

  The girl took a deep breath and examined us more closely. It seemed like every change of facial expression required massive effort. ‘What’re your names?’ she whispered.

  ‘Luke and Phoebe,’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘Hi, Lucan Phoebe. I’m Stephanie Stevens.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Stephanie Stevens. Are you going to be OK getting back to your corridor?’

  Stephanie Stevens sighed and shook her head violently, like a grumpy six-year-old. ‘Noooooooo.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  She screwed her eyes up tight in concentration. ‘Seventeen Belmont Road, Sunderland, SR1 7AQ.’

  ‘No, I mean here, in Jutland, where do you live? B Block? C Block?’

  ‘Oh. I’m not in Jutland,’ she said. ‘I’m in Wulfstan.’

  Phoebe looked at the campus map that was pinned up next to the bar doors. Wulfstan was the next college along from Jutland. ‘OK . . . Wulfstan College . . . This way.’

  We all linked arms, with Stephanie Stevens in the middle, and started trooping slowly down the covered walkway. A few ducks waddled up out of the darkness of the lake, and started quacking along behind us.

  It was mad to think me and Abbey had done this exact same walk less than a year ago, on the campus tour. Trailing our guide from college to college around the huge, murky lake, we’d talked about whether people swam here in the summer, and taken photos on the grassy banks. We’d even had a winter picnic by the main bridge, with all the most random foods we could find in the ‘international’ aisle of the supermarket. We’d sat there, chewing on biltong and weird German Haribos, and talking about all the things we were going to do here next year. The memory of it now seemed so detached from reality it was like it wasn’t even mine. I shook it out of my head, and turned ‘So, how’s your corridor?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re pretty . . . mental,’ she said. ‘We’ve got this one guy, Connor, who was a rep in Ibiza over the summer, so he’s basically taken it upon himself to force us to have as crazy a time as possible.’

  I nodded. ‘There’s nothing better than enforced fun.’

  ‘Yeah. Although I drew the line when it came to drinking tequila out of a washing-up bowl.’

  ‘Please don’t mention tequila,’ muttered Stephanie Stevens, darkly.

  ‘What about your corridor?’ Phoebe asked me.

  ‘Pretty much the exact opposite of yours, by the sounds of it,’ I said. ‘No, they seem nice. Quite quiet, but nice. They’re pretty much all doing Chemistry, though, so they basically spent the whole of pre-drinks talking about polymers and matter. What are you studying?’

  ‘English.’

  ‘Ah, nice one. Same as me. Maybe we’ll be in the same tutor group.’

  There was a pause, and Stephanie Stevens stopped and said, ‘I’m doing French and Hotel Management.’ Then she threw up in a bush.

  By the time we got to Wulfstan, the ducks had abandoned us. By some miracle, Stephanie Stevens managed to remember the code to her block, so we all staggered up the stairs, still arm-in-arm. In the corridor she fumbled for her key, opened the door, murmured ‘OK, then . . . night night, First-night Freshers Friends’ and collapsed face-first on to her bed. Her room looked exactly like mine; same tobacco-yellow walls, same scratchy, Brillo Pad carpet, same weird little brown cupboard that opened to reveal a sink and mirror inside it. She even had the same brand-new Ikea desk lamp.

  ‘Do you think she’s OK?’ Phoebe whispered.

  ‘Well, she’s snoring,’ I replied. ‘That’s got to be a good sign.’

  Phoebe winced. ‘Not if you’re the person next door. Listen to her. She sounds like a didgeridoo. And these walls are really thin.’

  I laughed. ‘We should probably put her in the recovery position, right? Just in case.’

  We gently rearranged her on the bed while she mumbled, ‘I love my First-night Freshers Friends,’ over and over again.

  ‘I’m a bit worried about leaving her like this,’ Phoebe whispered.

  ‘Yeah. Let’s have a cup of tea, and then come back and check on her in a bit?’

  ‘Um . . . yeah,’ she said. ‘Yeah, that sounds good.’

  We went into the kitchen. She boiled the kettle and I found mugs and milk, then we walked downstairs, taking our teas with us. There was a little red bridge stretched across the lake, and we stood together in the middle, leaning against t
he edge, watching the steam rise from our cups.

  It was freezing, and I could feel the cold and the tea starting to rub away at my drunkenness. I thought about Abbey and the phone call and all the utter, utter shitness of the past few months. I’d spent the whole summer thinking that uni would magically solve everything. I’d go to York Met, she’d go to Cardiff, and we sort of wouldn’t even need to have the maybe-we-should-break-up conversation. Ten hours into university and I was already learning important life lessons: don’t be so fucking naive.

  ‘Oh my god, yes.’ Phoebe fished into the pocket of the bathrobe I’d given her back at the bar and pulled out a Twix. ‘Totally forgot I’d bought this.’ She opened it. ‘One finger each?’

  ‘Nice one.’ I took the chocolate off her. In spite of everything, I couldn’t help wondering why I’d never noticed how pretty she was. Masses of brown, curly hair and an amazing smile.

  I must have walked past her a million times at school. She couldn’t have changed that much in ten weeks. Maybe I was just too hung up on Abbey to notice any other girls. But, no, that wasn’t it. I’d definitely noticed Isha Matthews. And Lauren Green. And Katie Reader.

  But I’d never noticed Phoebe.

  PHOEBE

  The whole thing was beginning to feel like an out of body experience.

  This was exactly the kind of shit fourteen-year-old me was always daydreaming about. Well, maybe not Stephanie Stevens vomming everywhere and feeling like the pre-drinks ‘Freshers’ punch’ was kind of creeping ominously up my oesophagus, but the Luke Taylor part. The part where I was now alone and kind of matey with him. Like a weird Doctor Who-type thing where I had jumped back into my own Year Nine fantasies. I focused on looking unfazed and generally breezy and not babbling. Flora says when I’m drunk I over-touch people, so every time I got within thirty centimetres of him I took a step back.