Freshers

by Tom Ellen

  ‘Well, she clearly didn’t mean to take a photo of you and then send it to you, but, yeah. I think it’s safe to assume that she wants your body.’

  I laughed and felt a little flickering glow inside me, like someone had switched on the central heating in my stomach. ‘Do you reckon I should message her back?’

  Rita rolled her eyes. ‘No, obviously don’t message her back, Luke, you idiot. The poor girl’s probably mortified. She’s probably buried under three duvets, crying her eyes out as we speak. And what would you say, anyway?’

  I thought about it. ‘Dunno. “Thanks for the message” or something.’

  Her eyes rolled back the other way. ‘“Thanks for the message”. Brilliant. You might as well punch her in the face and be done with it.’ She took a sip of tea. ‘How do you know this girl in the first place?’

  ‘Well, we went to school together, actually. But we didn’t really know each other then. We met properly last week. I sort of said I’d go to that quidditch thing with her at Freshers’ Fair.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Why didn’t you go, again?’

  ‘I just . . . forgot.’

  She made a face. ‘Right, well . . . You should probably apologize. And make up a better excuse.’

  ‘Yeah. I guess.’

  ‘Do you actually even like her?’

  ‘I mean . . . I hadn’t really thought about it before. But now . . . yeah. I sort of think I do.’

  Rita groaned loudly. ‘So when she’s just a random girl from school you don’t give her a second look, but as soon as she accidentally informs you that she wants to jump your bones, you’re suddenly in love with her. Men are such predictable twats, honestly.’

  I didn’t bother arguing with that, because, to be fair, she had a point.

  She finished her tea and plonked the mug down on Arthur’s bedside table. ‘Well, this has all worked out perfectly for you, hasn’t it? You like her, she thinks you’re the hottest boy on Earth . . . I mean, it’s all good by the sounds of it. You’ve not got a girlfriend or anything, have you?’

  I thought about Abbey, who I hadn’t heard from in more than a week now; the longest silence between us in almost three years. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I haven’t.’

  Rita shrugged. ‘There you go, then. Say sorry for being a dick about the quidditch, and then, I dunno . . . Ask her out, or something.’

  Suddenly we heard the tinkle of keys outside, and the door was kicked open. Arthur stood in the doorway, holding a massive cheese sandwich and frowning hard at us.

  ‘You know I could report you to the police,’ he said, chucking his keys on the desk. ‘You have broken into my property. You are literally criminals.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Watling,’ said Rita. ‘Your room’s like the living room. It’s a communal space.’

  ‘It is not a fucking communal space!’ Arthur yelled, jabbing his stinking sandwich at us. ‘This is my actual, private, personal room! What if I was in here doing something actually private and personal?’

  ‘What, like weeing in the sink?’ Rita smirked.

  ‘No. Like romancing a girl, or something.’

  Rita clicked her tongue against her teeth. ‘You won’t be romancing anyone now that you constantly stink of brie.’

  ‘Wrong, actually, Maurita. I’ll be romancing sophisticated French women who appreciate once-in-a-lifetime supermarket deals.’

  They grinned at each other, and not for the first time I wondered why they weren’t a couple. They seemed pretty much perfect together. But then, me and Abbey had seemed pretty much perfect, too. How the hell are you ever supposed to know if you’re right for someone?

  I stood up. ‘I’ll leave you two to it.’

  ‘Are you going to initiations?’ Arthur asked, eagerly. He’d become weirdly obsessed with the football initiations. He thought they’d be some kind of mad combination of freemason ceremony and Satanic ritual. Maybe he was right.

  ‘No, they’re next week. I’m going back to my room. Need to do some reading.’

  ‘Are they all right then, that football lot?’ Rita asked.

  ‘Yeah, they seem cool,’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘No, nothing. Just, we had that Will Barnes on the corridor below us last year. Do you remember, Arth? He seemed like a bit of a . . .’

  She tailed off and just let the sentence hang there, unfinished, in the air.

  ‘He seems all right to me.’ I shrugged.

  She smiled. ‘No, yeah. I’m sure he is. I don’t know him, to be fair.’ Arthur flopped down in his swivel chair and she said: ‘By the way, Arth, you’re not gonna believe what Luke just got sent.’

  Arthur turned to look at me but I headed for the door. ‘You can fill him in, Rita. I’d better do this reading.’ I clapped Arthur on the shoulder as I left. ‘You got a note about the cheese, by the way. First of many, I reckon.’

  ‘That cheese is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,’ he said, stiffly.

  I went back to my room and tried to read Ted Hughes’ Collected Poems, but I couldn’t stop my brain flicking back to Phoebe. Rita was probably right: I probably was a predictable twat. But knowing that Phoebe liked me had made me feel totally different about her. Maybe I’d even liked her all along, but I hadn’t realized it. Maybe I’d forgotten what liking someone new actually felt like.

  To be honest, it felt pretty good.

  PHOEBE

  ‘Honestly, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.’

  I genuinely couldn’t think of anything more awful. I couldn’t think of anything else full stop. I was trapped in it, like a hamster, running away as fast as I could but not realizing I was stuck in the plastic wheel.

  Negin reached out and touched my arm gently. ‘Phoebs, do you know you’re rocking?’

  ‘It’s probably PTSD setting in,’ Frankie said from the kitchen floor. She had crumpled into the foetal position when I’d showed her the message, and oscillated between sympathetic nods and helpless laughter ever since.

  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 uni. 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.’

  ‘I don’t have a love life,’ I shouted.

  ‘You do. Luke Taylor bailed on you. And then guinea-piggate 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 leant 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 on to the floor one by one. The crashing reverberated around the kitchen. She turned the tap on.

  ‘Wh
at 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.’

  ‘Er . . . What are you lot doing?’ Connor was standing at the door looking very confused.

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

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

  ‘Nice one.’ 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 Block circle of trust.’

  ‘You’re not even in D Block!’ I screamed. I was starting to shiver uncontrollably but I didn’t feel like my face was burning quite as much.

  ‘Phoebs took a picture of a bloke and wrote underneath it that he is and I quote . . .’ Frankie made speech 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 banter 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’ve got good chat. Trust. I don’t shit where I eat, but if I did, I’d be well 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 blokes. And technology. No men, no technology. Full stop.’

  Becky took a sip of tea. ‘Well, he might message 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.’

  LUKE

  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 a whole week trying to ‘accidentally’ run into Phoebe. We’d had two lectures together; she’d been sat right across the other side of the hall both times.

  I’d even tried skulking around the entrance to D Block, pretending to browse the munchie 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 sat 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 buried in his crisp packet, cheerfully snaffling away.

  I left campus and walked up the ring road, past the massive oak trees and the weird little bungalows where the PhD students lived. It had been a week of nothingy limbo – just Netflix, microwaved lasagne and the occasional spliff with Arthur – but I felt like tonight would be the proper start of uni. This was where the next three years would actually begin. Football initiations.

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

  ‘They told us to wait outside,’ said one lad called Trev, who I’d spoken to a bit at trials.

  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 I think about it. My brother was on Pointless 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 take the piss in school the next day. “Oh, saw your brother on Pointless last night, he made a right 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 Pointless Answer. It was on flightless birds.’ He stopped talking and breathed out. ‘Sorry, man. When I get nervous, I chat shit. It’s a medical condition.’

  I laughed, and felt some of the tension in my stomach dissolve. ‘Yeah, well, I’m bricking it as well, actually. When I get nervous, I lie and pretend I’m not.’

  A few other people arrived, including one bloke 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 rain jacket.

  Drunk Toby from trials arrived just behind him, clutching a half-empty bottle of Schnapps. He started offering it round.

  ‘Mate, you do know they’re gonna be, like, plying 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 third year 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 centre.

  ‘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 second and third years I recognized. Dempers pulled a chair out at the head of the table and stood on it.

  ‘Right, freshers, shut up and listen,’ he barked, in his plummy public-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 leant in to me. ‘This bloke,’ he whispered, ‘is a fucking tool.’

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

  ‘Don’t worry, this isn’t some sick Fifty Shades shit,’ Dempers laughed. ‘You will all be handcuffed to one of your superiors –’ he gestured at the second and third years – ‘and you will have to drink double whatever they drink. So, for example . . .’

  He plonked himself down and clicked the handcuffs on to
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, you faggot.’

  I felt myself flinch inwardly, but Thrones didn’t bat an eyelid. 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 that had got 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 lads, 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’ 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 proper initiation without it.’

  Dempers chucked the handcuffs out and everyone got partnered up, and started drinking. I was cuffed to Geordie Al, who for some reason was insisting on calling me ‘Swift’.

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

  Between the third and fourth I asked: ‘Why Swift?’

  ‘Cos you drink like a fucking girl, mate. Luke Taylor . . . Taylor Swift.’

  ‘Oh, right. Bit tenuous.’

  He downed a gin and tonic. ‘That’s two G&Ts, 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 was sat groaning with his head in hands while Dempers cackled and took photos of him. I was trying to stop the room spinning, but my head and stomach were both pulsing mercilessly.