Freshers

by Tom Ellen

  She shrugged. ‘In this case it’s more a not-wanting-to-get-gastroenteritis thing.’

  Connor necked the glass himself. Then he leapt into the bath and lay down, knocking his sombrero off in the process. ‘Come on, team!’ he yelled. ‘Bath of booze!’

  Josh came in wearing a donut rubber ring around his middle and his normal jeans and T-shirt. He looked at Connor. ‘That might not be totally cool with health and safety, but whatever. It’s the last night of Freshers’.’

  ‘Last night of Freshers’!’ Connor bellowed.

  ‘Right,’ said Josh, ‘quick round of I Have Never and then head to the bar.’

  We all went back into the kitchen and started arranging the chairs into a massive circle around the table and I noticed Connor, still dripping with bath booze, position himself next to Liberty with one deft move.

  ‘Guys, before we start, I just want to say thanks so much for adopting me,’ Frankie announced. ‘Honestly, I actually feel emosh. I love the old people because obviously they share their pâté with me. But you guys actually saved me.’

  ‘You’re an honorary D-Blockite,’ Josh said. ‘So you can start the game.’

  I looked around the table. I had been really lucky; everyone was so nice. Even people like Phillip and Nathan, who never got that involved, were here. We had formed a random but solid little group.

  ‘I have never felt attracted to anyone in this circle,’ Frankie said proudly.

  A murmur rippled around. Connor, Liberty and Josh all drank.

  ‘Do you know by the time you leave uni there is an eighty per cent chance that the telephone number of the person you are going to marry is in your phone?’ Frankie nodded exaggeratedly as she said it.

  ‘Have you got Will’s number in your phone yet? That’s the question.’ As Liberty screamed it, everyone made cooing noises at me.

  Will and me had somehow become a thing. I got nervous when I saw him walk into a room, and giddy when he smiled at me. So far, in the bloke stakes, uni was definitely delivering.

  ‘I read that too, about the phone numbers,’ Negin said. ‘I’d like to see the evidence.’

  Frankie put her hand up again. ‘My parents met at uni.’

  ‘It’s just more stress,’ I said. ‘By third year we’ll all be scrolling through our phones hysterically.’

  ‘I have never vomited in the shower,’ Connor bellowed, and then stared at Liberty.

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ she wailed, and pulled her angel wings around to cover her face.

  ‘I have never had sex outside,’ Josh said, and took a big sip of beer.

  You had to be so on your guard in these games; come across as grown-up and experienced and fun. They felt exposing. I didn’t really care, but for people who were really private – like Becky – they must feel like torture. I suddenly wondered if that was why she was still in her room.

  Things progressed until there was no punch left in the bath, so Connor pulled a quarter-full bottle of vodka out of the cupboard.

  ‘We need to go soon,’ Josh said. ‘Last round.’

  ‘I have never wanked!’ Connor shouted, and burst out laughing.

  All the boys drank. Every single one. Even Nathan and Phillip. They all did. None of them looked the remotest bit shy, not like they had done with some of the sex questions. I felt my face go ever-so-slightly red and I stared down at my glass. I glanced sideways to look at Frankie but she was just talking to Negin as if neither of them had really heard. Liberty giggled to herself but kept her glass in her hand. I felt like between the girls it was suddenly awkward, even if between the boys everything had got more jovial. Wanking. Even the word is a boy word. Boys wank. Maybe none of the girls drank because they didn’t even associate the word with themselves.

  For a second I thought about drinking, but I wasn’t brave enough. Even Liberty the sexy cherub wasn’t brave enough. It’s weird how so many things in the world are unsaid.

  Connor turned the empty bottle upside down. ‘Let’s go,’ he shouted.

  LUKE

  Arthur opened his wardrobe to pull out what appeared to be a large, puffy, brown dress, held up by brown braces. Then he twirled it round and I saw the dress had two big googly eyes painted on it.

  ‘It’s the pile of poo!’ he said, cheerfully.

  ‘Yeah, I can see that,’ I said. ‘Are you really wearing that?’

  He downed the dregs of his lager and chucked the can at the bin, missing by a fair distance. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I wore it last year, too.’

  ‘I thought you said you got off with three girls at the emoji party last year?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘What, dressed as a massive turd?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Impressive.’

  ‘Cheers. Who knows? I might even beat that this year.’

  ‘What, really?’ I said, genuinely surprised. ‘I thought you were . . . You know? You and Rita?’

  Arthur laughed. ‘I wish.’ And then his grin dissolved for a second, and he blinked down at his shoes. ‘I mean, I do wish a bit.’ He caught himself and snapped straight back into banter mode. ‘But anyway . . . Come on, let’s get on it!’

  We rounded up our corridor from the kitchen and headed down to the bar. Beth had glued a hockey stick emoji to her sweatshirt, Barney was wearing a wink-smiley beanie and the chemists all had specially made T-shirts featuring the cry-laughing emoji in protective science goggles.

  The bar looked easily the maddest it had all week. Everywhere you turned there were ballerinas doing shots, giant bunches of grapes dancing and tons of people wearing those big ball-shaped lightshades on their heads, sloppily painted yellow with random emoji faces.

  Arthur spotted his second-year mates, Dan and Hassan, at the bar, so we headed over. As I ordered some beers, I felt a damp plop on my right shoulder, and looked down to see that a clump of stringy spaghetti had fallen on me.

  ‘I’ll have a pint and a shot, Fresher,’ said Will, picking the pasta off my shoulder and putting it back into the plastic bowl he had strapped to the top of his head.

  ‘Pasta emoji,’ I said. ‘Like it. Very niche.’

  ‘Cheers, mate, I thought so.’ He thumped my shoulder and leant in. ‘Listen, we’re not officially sending emails till next week, but I might as well tell you now. You made the first team.’

  PHOEBE

  ‘I feel like they are having a heart-to-heart.’ Frankie took a sip of her drink. ‘Will keeps touching Luke Taylor meaningfully.’ We were all just stood in a row on the dance floor, watching them. Frankie grabbed my cheese necklace, pulled me towards her and stared into my eyes.

  ‘“Touching him meaningfully,”’ Negin repeated, and shook her head.

  ‘I know, when he’s supposed to be doing that to Phoebe.’ Frankie burst out laughing at her own joke and sprayed me and Negin with blue WKD.

  ‘Stop staring. Can we all go and dance or just do something else?’ I pleaded.

  Negin and Frankie ignored this and carried on looking at them, so I did too.

  ‘Your greatest love sprung from your greatest hate.’ Frankie put her arm around me.

  ‘Will hasn’t sprung from him,’ I said. ‘And I don’t hate Luke.’

  ‘Are you saying you love Will?’ Frankie took another sip with her arm still around me, putting me in a kind of headlock.

  ‘Will is obviously trying to pump Luke Taylor for information about you,’ she boomed.

  ‘Luke Taylor doesn’t know anything about me.’

  Frankie ignored this completely. She put her hand to her ear like she was reporting live. ‘Now Luke is saying, “The biggest mistake I ever made in my life was bailing on quidditch. I just couldn’t face Phoebe’s beauty. I was intimidated. I was a pathetic excuse for a man. But now my heart burns for her. It yearns for her. I would literally die for her. She is my first, my last, my everything.”’

  Negin frowned. ‘Bit creepy.’

  Frankie squeezed my shoulder hard. ‘Oh my god, and that h
and movement Luke’s doing now, see that? That means, “I will fight you to the death for her, Will.” That basically means, “Meet me by the vending machines at dawn, bring a pistol and the victor shall have Phoebe’s heart.”’

  ‘Are they going to eat her?’ Negin said.

  ‘Stop!’ I yelled. ‘They’re gonna see us looking.’ I was laughing so hard I could barely hold my drink.

  Frankie was still in full flow. ‘Now Luke Taylor is saying that Phoebe makes him insane with love. He is saying he would eat his own face just to be close to her.’

  ‘Funny how he never indicated that all through school, and he probably still has a long-term girlfriend he is madly in love with.’

  Frankie unwrapped her arm from my shoulder and looked at me. ‘If you had to marry Will or Luke Taylor Quidditch Bailer right here, right now, or you’d be put to death, who would you marry?’ She held her bottle up to my mouth like a microphone.

  ‘Will,’ I said. ‘Obviously Will. Because I really like him and he actually fancies me and he is actually really, really nice.’

  LUKE

  ‘Honestly, mate, fucking good effort today,’ Will said. ‘Not that many freshers get straight into the Ones.’

  He handed me a shot and we clinked glasses and drank.

  ‘Cheers,’ I gasped, just about managing to keep the minty vodka down.

  I was having to concentrate fairly hard on not being sick, and my right shoulder was literally heaving with spaghetti, but I still felt amazing. Even Reece hadn’t managed to get straight into the Ones at Nottingham.

  ‘Oi, mate!’ Will called to the barman. ‘Two more, yeah?’

  He passed me a pint, and I paid. ‘So, where are you from, then?’ he asked, taking a sip.

  ‘Kingston,’ I said. ‘What about you?’

  ‘London, mate. Fulham. I swear we’re pretty much the only Londoners in this whole uni. It’s fucking wall-to-wall northerners up here.’

  ‘Well, we are in the north, to be fair.’

  He shrugged, like the idea had just occurred to him. ‘So, what you studying?’

  ‘English’.

  ‘Oh, mate!’ He took a big swig of his pint, landing a massive dollop of spaghetti on to the bar behind him. ‘Fucking good ratio. So many girls do English. You’ll be well outnumbered in the seminars, trust me.’

  ‘Oh, OK. Right. What are you doing?’

  He frowned and wrinkled his brow. ‘PPE.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Philosophy, Politics and Economics. My dad’s choice. And he’s paying for all this, so . . .’ He swept his hands about grandly, as if ‘all this’ literally meant Jutland Bar. ‘Still,’ he carried on, ‘at least I’ll get a decent job after uni. Unlike you, who’ll be stuck in a skip, writing poems.’

  ‘That’s the dream,’ I sighed. ‘Although you don’t walk straight into a gig like that. I’d probably have to intern in the skip for a few months.’

  He laughed and finished his pint just as Dempers came bustling over, looking even more sweaty and red-faced than usual. He was wearing a pretty horrendous gold T-shirt with a bright-green dollar sign scribbled on it; maybe the only person here who’d made less of an effort than me. A couple of the other third years from trials were with him, and he introduced them as ‘The Ox’ and ‘Geordie Al’. They were both dressed in tiny black leotards, which was particularly distressing in the case of Geordie Al, whose thick, wiry body hair was poking out from every available corner.

  He laid a furry hand on Will’s shoulder. ‘Mate, when I said we need to find some freshers tonight, this wasn’t exactly who I had in mind.’

  Will laughed. ‘Chill out, I was just telling Taylor he made the Ones.’

  Al clinked his pint glass against mine. ‘Nice one, mate. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to locate some freshers of the opposite gender.’

  ‘As if you’re getting anything tonight dressed like that,’ Dempers smirked. Al shrugged and smoothed his leotard down. ‘It’s a conversation starter, innit?’

  ‘You shouldn’t need a conversation starter on the last night of Freshers’,’ Will murmured, scanning the dance floor. ‘It’s always carnage.’

  Dempers nodded. ‘If you can’t get some on the last night of Freshers’, you might as well chop it off.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Will nodded towards the dance floor. ‘On you go, then, Dempsey . . .’

  Dempers rolled his eyes. ‘All right, watch.’ He huffed off, and as we watched him go I spotted Phoebe and her mates by the speakers, all three of them staring straight at us. They clocked me looking and suddenly spun round and started dancing really energetically. Phoebe’s tall blonde mate was doing a weird kind of robotic chicken move. I decided right then that at some point tonight, I’d finally go over and say sorry to Phoebe. End the awkwardness.

  ‘What you saying for this evening, then, Taylor?’ Will asked. ‘Any hotties on your corridor?’

  ‘Er . . . Not really, no.’

  ‘Well, come on, then,’ he said, scanning the bar again. ‘Who d’you want introducing to?’

  Geordie Al whacked him on the back, spilling more pasta everywhere. ‘Barnes has got himself sorted, so now he’s trying to sort out everyone else. What a fucking legend. What a gent.’

  Will shrugged, modestly. ‘I’m not definitely sorted . . .’

  ‘You’ve got with her pretty much every night this week,’ said The Ox, and I suddenly knew who they were talking about.

  ‘She’s fit.’ Al shrugged. ‘Hair’s a bit mad, but still. Fit.’ I wondered if I should tell them I knew her, too.

  ‘Yeah, well, we’ll see what happens,’ said Will. Then he turned back to me. ‘But come on, Taylor. You’re a fresher, for fuck’s sake. You can’t not get laid this week. That’s, like, illegal.’

  ‘Ah, yeah. Well, the thing is . . . I’ve sort of got a girlfriend.’

  It came out of nowhere, like a reflex. I wasn’t even sure why I said it. But the thought of Abbey had the instant effect of sobering me up slightly.

  Will nodded wisely. ‘“Sort of” being the operative phrase, there. Can’t see that lasting long in first term, mate, no offence. I had a bird when I started last year, too. That lasted all of about four hours.’ He laughed loudly, then finished his pint and slammed it back down on to the bar. ‘Cheers for the drinks, anyway. We’ll email about initiations and stuff next week.’

  Geordie Al leant in to me and started a long monologue about some drinking game he’d just played, as I watched Will walk right on to the dance floor, right over to Phoebe.

  PHOEBE

  Will turned his key in the lock. He pushed open the door and felt for my hand as we walked in.

  ‘OK, there’s no bulb in the hall and a lot crap, so go slowly.’

  I reached my other hand out and tried to feel for the wall but felt bike handlebars instead. The floor felt uneven underneath my feet and I kept treading on random shoes.

  ‘OK.’ He let go of my hand and patted the wall for the switch and we both blinked as the living room lit up.

  On one side it had a depressed-looking little red sofa that was missing one of its cushion covers. Opposite it was a wall with three bikes stacked up against each other. Various items of football kit and some T-shirts randomly hung off them. Behind the bikes the wall was covered in some sort of fantasy football scoring system that had notes written in green marker with points next to names. Josh and Will were up there and then ‘Pete’ and ‘Lolly’. I think I had met Lolly, he had a strong Northern Irish accent and had started a conga line round the dance floor earlier. The flat smelt strongly of rotting fruit.

  There had obviously been some pretty heavy pre-drinks going on, as the whole of the living room floor was covered in empty beer cans. There were also four polystyrene boxes lined up by the sofa, some still with kebab and chip remnants in. The carpet was covered in so much pasta that it was unbelievable that there had been any left for him to wear on his head. He shrugged. ‘This house is disgusting. My m
um won’t even come in. She just waits in the car.’ He didn’t seem embarrassed or anything.

  ‘OK.’ He smiled at me. ‘Now I’m going to prove to you that I wasn’t bullshitting about the midnight feast. Do you want a cup of tea?’

  I nodded and he disappeared into the kitchen. Usually I go for intense, creative types. Well, I think the main reason I fancied Adam was cos he was in a band for about seven minutes in Year Ten, and Max’s final art piece was a painting of a girl with a tear on her cheek and I thought it meant he was deep and understood women. I suppose Luke Taylor doesn’t really fit the troubled thinker mould. But then did I even actually fancy Luke Taylor, except to look at?

  Will was just hot. No one could look at him and say he was unattractive. You could say you weren’t into posh boys with floppy quiffs and perfect teeth and canvas shoes, but you couldn’t say he wasn’t hot.

  The more I got to know him the hotter he was getting, too. Over the course of the week Will had gone from random hook-up to my kind of steady person. It would feel weird now to get with anyone else. We were in a week-long exclusive thing. Well, in my head we were.

  I pushed the various games controllers and some tracksuit bottoms out of the way and sat down on the sofa. The night had passed really quickly. As soon as Will had come over, pasta flying everywhere, everything had got more fun. He was one of those people that everyone seemed to know and everyone seemed to love. Him and Josh and their mates were always at the heart of everything. Will was so relaxed. He didn’t care about making a fool of himself. He would dance to cheesy songs and at the end he got in a line with me and Liberty and Frankie and Negin and did the Macarena. And every so often we would make our way to the edge of the dance floor and he would tuck my hair behind my ears and cup my face in his hands and start kissing me.

  At one point, we were by the bar and they played ‘Jump Around’. He grabbed me and started bouncing me round and then picked me up and kind of carried me to a space so we could keep dancing a weird kind of polka together. And I just couldn’t stop laughing. Boys who make you laugh are everything.

  I made the decision in my head then that I wanted to go home with him. Because why not? I’m at uni; it was the last night of Freshers’. I’d never had a one-night stand. And it wouldn’t even be a one-night stand. And who cares if it was anyway? Isn’t the whole point that you’re allowed to go a bit mad?