“Ethan…are you pissed?”
He fell back a couple of steps, stopped his fall and broke into a proud-of-himself boy grin.
“Don’t worry, love. I’ve got plenty left for you.” He reached into his backpack and retrieved another two-litre bottle. Only half of it was left.
I realized Sarah might’ve been right.
Three
It was only a short walk to the party but, with an intoxicated Ethan, it took much longer.
“Out of the road,” I said, steering him away from oncoming traffic. He took my hand-holding to mean something else entirely and squeezed mine tight. His felt warm and clammy.
I tried not to think of the germs. I failed.
He stumbled over his feet. “Whoops, wow, you have good reflexes.”
His body weight shifted and swayed under my arm; I was practically dragging him to the party. He kept stopping to glug back more cider. Half of it went down his Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt, and some dribbled down the sides of his mouth. Could I run away? Was that fair? Or had I just met my match in weirdness? Was this the sort of behaviour the Love Gods had seen fit to pair me with? I couldn’t leave him: I’d definitely been stranger than this in the past.
Ethan chucked the second empty cider bottle over a fence, right into the middle of someone’s front garden.
“Go and get it.”
“Okay.” He didn’t even argue.
We turned down Anna’s road.
“Almost there…” I said, like I was taking my child to Disneyland.
Ethan ran ahead, then turned round so he was walking backwards, facing me. “Hey, guess what?” His smile was so wide I couldn’t help but smile a bit too. Those treacherous dimples.
“What?”
He looked at his hand, then stretched his mouth into a horror scream and pretended to strangle himself, like in sociology. “LOOK, IT’S THE ALIEN HAND, IT’S OUT OF CONTROL.”
Despite myself, I giggled.
“WHAT’S IT GOING TO DO NEXT?” He slapped his face. “Oh no, it wants to jump bodies.” And he reached over and grabbed my boob. I looked down at my chest in horror.
“HONK HONK.” Ethan beamed at me. I slapped his hand away.
“Did you just grab my boob?”
Too pissed to pick up on the scary in my voice, Ethan smiled wider.
“It wasn’t me. IT WAS THE ALIEN HAND.”
How? How was this happening to me?
I pushed past him and stormed through Anna’s front door into the party. Ethan lurched behind yelling, “WAIT, THE ALIEN HAND IS SORRY.”
Rock music blasted my eardrums the moment I got inside. I stopped at a people blockage in the hallway. There were groups of college friends everywhere, spilling up the stairs like bubbles in an exploded bottle of champagne. The bass made my heart beat faster. I looked around for anyone I knew. Ethan caught up with me.
“Hey, you ran off.” He looked all lost and cute. I melted a bit and let him take my hand again.
“No more alien hand, okay?” A sentence I never thought I’d say.
“Okay.”
We pushed through the crowds, saying “hi” to people as we passed. Jane – TRAITOR – was on a sofa in the living room, surgically attached to Joel. Somehow she found it in herself to stand up and hug us both hello.
“Evie, you guys made it!”
I gave her a weak hug then pulled away, examining her face. A new piercing dangled angrily out of the bottom of her face.
“Wow, Jane, you’ve had your lip pierced.”
And your personality eaten by your soul-sucking boyfriend.
“I know, right?” she said, all thick and girly. “It hurt like a mofo, but Joel says he loves it.”
I raised my eyebrows at Joel.
“Some gal you got there,” I told him.
“I know, isn’t she the greatest?” He pulled at Jane’s leg like she was a puppy that needed controlling.
“Aww, Joel,” she simpered.
To distract myself from the mini-sick in my throat, I gestured to my date. Hoping like hell he could control himself.
“Hey, guys, this is Ethan.”
Joel waved, not even bothering to stand and say “hello”. Joel didn’t bother with many people. “WOOOO,” Ethan yelled, like a frat boy at a stag do. “GREAT PARTY.”
I leaned over to Jane and yelled in her ear over the music. “Jane. He’s really, really drunk.”
“I can see that.”
“What do I do?”
Ethan made the metal sign with his fingers and jumped up and down on the spot. Everyone stared, bemused.
Jane looked like she was about to offer advice but then Joel pulled her back onto the sofa and kissed her urgently. I stood alone for a moment, contemplating what to do. Distance. I needed distance from the situation.
“I’m going to the kitchen to look for alcohol,” I yelled over at Ethan. He stopped mid-headbang.
“Will you get me some cider?” he asked.
“Are you sure you’ve not had enough?”
“You can never have enough cider.”
“I think you’re living proof that you can.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
Why Jane was a traitor
Jane and I. Me and Jane. It has always been us against the universe. Well, us against secondary school at least. We met in Year Eight and bonded immediately over our mutual disregard for everyone else.
“Hi,” she’d said, sitting next to me – all bag banging on the table in an I-don’t-care way. “I’m Jane. I’m new. I hate everyone in this room.”
I looked round at the gang of popular girls preening in the corner, the boys all making fart noises in their armpits, the goody-two-shoes craning their necks in the front row.
“I’m Evelyn. I hate everyone too.”
She flicked me a wicked grin. “Great. So we can be friends.”
I’d never known closeness like it. We spent almost every waking second together. We walked into school, spent lunchtimes huddled and gossiping, drawing stupid pictures of our classmates, making up our own in-jokes. After school we’d go round to each other’s houses – watching films, making up silly dance routines, gobbling up one another’s deepest darkest secrets.
In Year Nine, I got sick.
Then I got worse.
Then I got whatever is worse than worse.
Jane was always there.
Always there with me in the school toilets, calming me down, shushing me as I scrubbed my hands so raw that blood poured into the sink. Always there at my door after school, on Bad Days, when the thought of even stepping outside was unimaginable – with my homework clutched in her hand and the latest gossip to tell. Always there at the weekends when I couldn’t do anything, or go anywhere, because everything was terrifying. She never pushed. She never judged. She never complained. She just let me lie on the sofa in her living room whilst she played the clarinet.
When I got better we were stronger than ever. She fought my corner when people called me a weirdo. She didn’t mind that I freaked out last minute and couldn’t make it to prom and we’d watched Carrie instead. On our last day of Year Eleven we jumped up and down, hugging outside the gates.
“We’re leaving, Evie, we’re actually finally leaving,” she said. “College is going to be so different and amazing and brilliant. We can be completely new people.”
“I won’t be ‘the girl-who-went-bat-shit-crazy’ any more.”
She smiled her sparkling smile.
“And I won’t be ‘that crazy girl’s mate’.”
We were euphoric the whole summer – planning our new lives, our future happiness, with the same determination of a crazed bride-to-be.
Jane met Joel on our first day of college.
She ran up to me at the end of the day – her face red, her hair flapping in the wind behind her. “Oh my God, Evie, there is the most incredible guy in my philosophy class. His name’s Joel.”
I giggled and did a gorilla voice. “Me Joel, you Jane.”