It was a stunning view. The town stretched out below us in an ocean of yellow and red dots of light. So cold my bones ached, but beautiful. I felt a bit of the angst in my stomach dissolve like a throat lozenge. The bigness of the view stood Goliath-like next to my worries, forcing them to run into hidey-holes and think about what they’d done.
Lottie banged Amber’s back until the choking subsided.
“Thanks, guys,” I spoke out to the darkness. “For, you know, taking me away from the situation.”
Lottie stubbed out her cigarette a quarter of the way down. I followed suit, glad for her lead. “Don’t worry about it,” she shrugged. “I would want to get out of there if it happened to me.”
“And it was a shitty party,” Amber joined in. “I felt like I was on a rejection conveyor belt – being sexually rejected by every guy there.”
“I’d rather that, I think,” I said. “Rather than them leading you on a false first date so they could get pissed, humiliate you, then boink someone else.”
Amber wrinkled her nose. “True… Did you just say ‘boink’?”
“It’s retro. It’s funnier than ‘shag’, less cringe than ‘make love’, and less offensive than ‘fuck’.”
She nodded. “Fair enough.”
“I watch a lot of old movies…and people just talked nicer back then.”
My phone vibrated madly.
“DON’T ANSWER IT,” both of them yelled as I searched through my bag.
“Why not?”
“It will be him,” Lottie said. “With an excuse.”
“A lie,” Amber added.
“A manipulative lie.”
Amber put on a gruff boy voice. “I’m sorry, I just fell into her mouth.”
Lottie joined in. “I just got scared of my feelings for you, but it made me realize how much I care.”
“Yikes,” I said. “Have you guys created a boy excuse dictionary or something?”
“Did you just say ‘yikes’?” Amber asked. “Seriously? Are you, like, from a time warp?”
Lottie, sandwiched in the middle, put her arms round the both of us and talked out at the view. “Amber and I may sound bitter, but we’re not. We’re just realistic. About boys…”
“…and how crap they are,” Amber finished.
Lottie patted her head. “I met her in art and she was crying over some bell-end on the football team. We bonded over drawing his untimely death.”
“What did football guy do?”
Amber’s face ducked behind her sheet of auburn hair. “Stood me up.”
“God, that’s awful. I didn’t know people actually did that in real life.”
“They do to me.”
“Hey,” Lottie said. “It could be worse. Like me. I just have guys ‘boink’ me, then lose interest straight afterwards. Usually when they discover I’m smarter than them.”
Lottie was smarter than them. She wasn’t being big-headed, just honest. She was smarter than everyone. At primary school she’d gone to special classes with the headmistress to be more “academically challenged”. She’d read textbooks, for fun. And she was definitely going to Cambridge. Even though we were two years away from that.
A miserable silence descended upon us. My phone went off again. We all ignored it. I saw the tiny light of a car in the distance driving slowly away from our town, surrounded by night. I wished I was riding in it, escaping my disappointment. I thought again of this night, and what it was supposed to be. My first ever date… My first step into the world of normality. I’d just wanted to be like everyone else, and yet my attempt had turned out weirder than even my weird head could’ve imagined.
Finally I spoke. “You guys?”
“Yeah?”
“Is it…because I’m ugly?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lottie said. “You’re not ugly.”
“Yes I am. I’m Louise and everyone else is Thelma.” I threw my hardly-smoked cigarette into the mud dramatically.
“I wouldn’t say Susan Sarandon is ugly,” Lottie said again.
“Fine then, I’m Jane Eyre.”
“Jane wasn’t ugly, she was just plain,” said Miss Going-to-Cambridge.
“Fine then. I’m the Elephant Man.”
“You’re not a man,” Amber pointed out.
“Stop ganging up on me.”
Their laughs punctuated the darkness.
“Anyway…” Lottie started. “I’m not exactly an oil painting.”
“Don’t be stupid,” I protested. She was gorgeous and she knew it. Men’s eyes practically goggled out of their faces when they met her. Her long dark hair, her everything-in-the-right-place face.
She smirked in reply. “If I were in a girl band, I would be the one that nobody fancied…”
“Hey,” Amber butted in. “That would so be me instead. I’m the ginger one! Nobody ever fancies the ginger one in bands.”
“Fine then. I’m Mary out of the Bennet sisters.”
“Well if that’s true,” I stood up. “I’m…I’m…Mr Collins,” I yelled, and the three of us dissolved into hysteria. We huddled together on the bench, chuckling and yelling “Mr Collins” until our tummies hurt and our teeth chattered from the cold.
“I really liked him,” I half-whispered, remembering far too soon why we were sitting in the middle of a field, gone midnight. I needed to message my mum actually; she would probably be freaking out.
Lottie cuddled me into her. We’d not sat like that since we were eleven.
“I know you did,” she replied. “Shitty, isn’t it?”
Amber gatecrashed the hug, giggling as she made room for herself between our heads.
“Screw guys,” she said. “Let’s meet for coffee tomorrow and spend the entire afternoon talking about everything other than boys.”
“Amen,” I replied.
And that’s what we did.
Five
By Monday I was ready and raring to see Ethan again.
I’d had so many dialogues with him in my head. They all ended with him on his knees, sobbing: “But I’ll never feel this way for anyone, the way I feel for you.”
Lottie and Amber firmly believed I should ignore him.
“Why waste time on him?” Amber’d said, the day before, at our first coffee meeting as friends. She slurped up her cappuccino. “He is not worth your H2O.”
“Oxygen is O2,” Lottie corrected.
“Oh, shut it, Einstein.”
“I just want him to be a tiny bit sorry,” I said.
“He isn’t…otherwise he wouldn’t have done it in the first place…I bet…”
“HUSH,” Lottie yelled across the table, cupping her mug of weird herbal tea. “No talk of guys, remember? Let’s discuss world domination instead.”
Thus all talk of Ethan, footballer-stander-upper guy, and all Lottie’s conquests ceased, and we chatted about ourselves instead. I learned Amber wants to go to art college. How she hates her little stepbrother because he calls her “Ginger Pubes” and her dad won’t do anything because he is whipped by her evil stepmum, so she put hair-removing cream on her stepbrother’s eyebrows whilst he slept. Then Lottie filled me in on everything I’d missed since we were eleven, laughing about how she’d almost been chucked out of her posh school after getting arrested at a May Day protest. “But Mum and Dad were really proud,” she said. She updated me on her hippy parents… “Dad is refusing to wear anything on his bottom half when gardening and the neighbours keep calling the police.”
I listened and laughed and sipped my latte, downplaying any question they fired at me about my life.
I didn’t really have any shareable anecdotes. That’s the thing about anxiety – it limits your experiences so the only stories you have to tell are the “I went mad” ones. I drank all my coffee as they giggled and shared and I wondered what they’d do if I leaned over and said:
“The funniest thing happened when I was fourteen. I, like, completely stopped eating because I thought all food was contaminated and would make me sick. Hilarious, huh? I dropped, like, two stone initially. Great diet, I know! And then, there was this one time, when my mum tried to force-feed me. She held me down and globbed mashed potato around my face, crying, and screaming, ‘JUST BLOODY EAT, EVIE.’ But I wouldn’t. And then I collapsed and they took me to hospital and misdiagnosed me with anorexia. So funny, right? And then I was super thin and still wouldn’t eat so they, like, SECTIONED ME. And it took them, like, WEEKS to finally diagnose me with OCD and Generalised Anxiety Disorder. So, anyway, have you guys ever been sectioned?”