Amelia O’Donohue Is So Not a Virgin (6 page)

The girls arrived back at school that night. According to Aimee, Mandy and Louisa headed down the forest track almost as soon as they arrived.

“So how was it?” I asked when the door to the derelict shack was finally opened. I hadn’t been inside the shack before. It was for cool people who smoked and shagged and then spray-painted the details on the walls (J has a huge c***, francis is a s***, h and m did it here…twice). I had no business there. But the weekend of almost complete solitude had made me yearn for my old friends.

“Fine,” Mandy said, touching her new fringe. She’d had her beautiful curly hair permanently straightened and framed by strand-perfect bangs. It didn’t suit her.

“What did you get up to?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said, all distant and monosyllabic. The constant smile I used to love had completely vanished. She’d injected a pout into her lips.

“What about you Louisa?” I asked.

“It was boring. It rained. You?”

“Just study,” I said, watching as Mandy got up and left the shack without saying so much as good-bye. Louisa lit another cigarette. She said she loved smoking—she was like pure gagging for nicotine—but she didn’t look as if she loved it. Every time she inhaled she winced. And she held the cigarette like a robot might hold one: stiffly, as if there were rules about where your fingers should be and the rate at which they should connect with your mouth. I got bored, and the smoke made me feel terrible. “You want to head back?” I asked.

“I’ll just have another one,” she said. “See you up there.”

At dinner, Louisa and Mandy sat at a different table, even though I was the only person sitting at our usual one. It’s obvious when someone is deliberately not looking at you. Their necks go rigid and they don’t blink, and the rest of their face looks at you by turning red. This is what Mandy and Louisa did as they ate dinner and as they walked out afterwards. It all made the cauliflower cheese congeal inside me. I waited a minute, then
walked back to my room and tried to read another book from the curriculum. But I couldn’t concentrate.

Jennifer Buckley, the very short girl with curly brown hair who’d cried about her cat in the first week, knocked on my door that night. She had a cabin-sized suitcase which she rolled in carefully before sliding the door shut and resting it on the floor at her feet.

“This is Mercy,” she said, unzipping the case to reveal her ginger tabby. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

I oohed and ahhed and stroked even though I find cats scary in the same bony, nippy way that ferrets are.

“She is beautiful,” I lied. Then I told the truth: “I understand how much you need her here. I’m taking this information…” I put out my hand as if her secret were lying on it, then put it in my mouth. “And I’m eating it.” I chewed and swallowed. “It’s gone.”

After Jennifer, no one knocked on my door to unleash their woes. Maybe they didn’t need me anymore. Maybe they’d formed solid friendships now and could tell each other. Was I sad about this? Or was I glad? All I know is that my cubicle suddenly felt completely separate from the rest of the school. A whole other world.

Oh shite, an island.

Eventually, someone else did knock on my door. It was Mandy, but she didn’t have a secret.

“Hey Mand!” I said.

“Hi…I have to tell you some things,” she said, declining my offer to sit next to me on the bed. She was still withholding eye contact too, which is totally creepy when someone’s talking to you. “First, I split up with Andrew.”

“Oh no, I’m so sorry, I know…”

“It’s fine,” she interrupted, moving her eyes from the window to the mirror. “Second…Oh god, I’m just going to say it! John told me to tell you you’re chucked.” She was actually tweaking her new bangs as she spoke.

“Well, that’s no surprise.”

“Are you okay about it?” She looked at me, at last.

I thought for a moment. “Yes.” And I was. What I wasn’t okay about was Mandy. She was so rude and distant. Why wouldn’t she sit down? Why did she have to stand over me, all rigid and threatening? Why were her eyes so mean?

“Have I done something to upset you?” I asked.

“No.” Eyes away again. Back to the mirror. Was she happy with her legs in her new high-waisted shorts?

“I know you, Mand. I know you’re angry.”

“All right. I’ll tell you this. It’s just that you’ve been so dull
since you came here. You do nothing but study and you’re in your room like
all
the time.”

“I’m working…”

“I know you are. That’s all you do, apart from acting like you’re some confession-taking priest.” She was now touching up her lips with the lip-gloss she’d retrieved from the pocket of her shorts. “What’s that all about? Everyone’s saying it’s like big time strange. Everyone’s saying they’re not gonna tell you anything anymore. Me and Louisa especially.” Mwaa Mwaa. Her lips were done.

“I don’t ask people to tell me stuff.”

“Has anyone said anything about me?” Back at me again. Not nice eyes. Take them away. Give them back to the mirror.

“Mandy, you know I don’t tell.”

“Well, it’s pissing me off. Secrecy pisses me off. Since coming here, I realize you’ve never really told me anything about yourself and I’ve told you everything! You never give back, you know. You just suck people in and hold your breath.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s weird. You’re weird.” With this, she turned around, opened my door, and left without shutting it.

I
n the months before christmas, the only thing I did other than study was eat. It made me feel better, and I have to admit I didn’t feel well. Perhaps because I’d cut my family off and because my friends seemed to have cut me off.

If anyone wanted to tell me secrets (and there were very few now) I refused to listen. “I’m sorry, I just don’t want to hear,” I’d say. After a while, all the girls stopped asking. Perhaps they resented that I knew too much. Perhaps they no longer needed to confess, having sorted themselves into gaggles of friends— the Populars, the Sporty types, the Keeners (i.e., geeks), the Internationals, the Emos, the Goths, the Bi’s, the Brains, etc., etc. I didn’t belong to any of the groups. I was alone. I ate everything on offer in the dining hall and visited Sammy in the afternoons for one of his famous curry dishes.

Mandy became entrenched in the Populars, which included Amelia and her clone, Taahnya. This group spent all their time bitching about others, doing makeovers, and swapping clothes.
Louisa flitted between Mandy and the Populars and a group of studious types from Asia (the Internationals). One morning while I was waiting in the queue for breakfast, I got chatting with one of the Internationals, Jan. She came from China, but her Scottish accent was perfect.

“You a friend of Louisa’s?” she said.

“We come from the same island,” I told her.

“She’s good at English. Probably be dux.”

Louisa. Dux. Hmm. A few months ago this would have sent me straight to the library. I still wanted to succeed, but somehow, I didn’t have the energy to compete for glory.

One evening, Amelia came into my room to ask for help with a math question. “Hi, Rachel,” she said. “I am going crazy with this. Have you got a moment?” This soft, kind voice was new. I hadn’t heard it since she’d said good-bye to her parents on the first day. Somehow, though, it seemed completely natural. I worked through the problem with her. She said thanks sweetly afterwards, but as she slid the door shut to enter the hallway (i.e., the real world) this flash of humanity flew to the wind because Jennifer Buckley accidentally bumped into her (“Out of my way, turd!”). Somehow, I didn’t mind too much. I knew we both had our own pressures and our own ways of coping.

With no friends at Aberfeldy Halls, Sammy became my best pal. With him, I felt kind of light, like a single slice of fluffy white bread. He made no assumptions about me. He had no expectations. He called me R. I called him S.

Having decided I was more bottled up than ketchup, he devised silly games to try and un-bottle me. “There are four essential ingredients for happiness,” he said. “Fresh air… exercise…and giggling.”

“That’s three,” I said.

“Aha…the fourth is the most important one. You have to work that one out for yourself.”

I had no interest in working it out. But I enjoyed the first three. All his games involved these components. Our three-legged race, for instance, went like this:

1. In the park behind the shops, S ties his foot to mine. It’s windy. We’ve never stood so close before.
   
2. S puts his arm around my waist. I worry that he might notice I’ve been eating too much.
   
3. I put my arm around his. Three parts of my body are in direct contact with his. These parts feel tingly.
   
4. S says, “Let’s walk first, then run when I say.”
   
5. We walk slowly, our strides matching after six or seven
   steps, then he says, “Run!” and we run towards the pond, and all the way around it. We are a good team. We go faster and faster.
   
6. S says, “Stop!” but I don’t do it fast enough and when he stops and I don’t, I trip and drag him to the ground with me. We giggle. It’s been a long time since I’ve giggled. My jaw hurts with it. I don’t want him to untie our feet.
   

We met most afternoons for several weeks after that, never talking about secrets or study or feelings or family, just playing silly games. One Friday, I’d taken the bus into town with the rest of the girls. This was the big weekly event for our school. It had been fun the first time—Louisa, Mandy, and I had eaten McDonald’s and tried on makeup. But after the second time (when Mandy decided to steal a jumper from Asda with Taahnya—not even nice a jumper—and Louisa had asked me to go buy cigarettes from the newsagents ’cause I looked older than her), it stressed and bored me in equal measures. This particular time, Jan the International asked if she could window shop with me. god bless Jan, but she was more boring than fencing, so I told her I had to meet someone and hopped on the local bus back to Balbir’s.

S and I strolled along the river for an hour, sat on the bank, and played “tickle-o.” This involved taking turns to tickle each other’s nostrils with a blade of grass. The first to give in and laugh was the loser. Sammy’s record was one minute. Mine was forty seconds. I was determined to beat him this time. My eyes were watering as he sat opposite me, cross-legged, and carefully tantalized my left nasal passage with his blade. As usual, he tried to catch me unawares mid-game…

“So…why didn’t you go home for the October holidays?” he asked.

“I wanted to study,” I said, glad of the distraction. If I didn’t scratch my nose soon I would explode.

“So…” he said, switching to the right nostril, “what made your parents leave the city?”

“I don’t know. I was nine.” S had managed to get the blade three centimeters up. The stopwatch on his phone had reached 47 seconds. Fourteen to go. But it felt like he was tickling my gray matter. Pain-tears were falling from my eyes. I yelled, flicked his hand away, fell back on the grass, and rubbed my nose with my hand while laughing uncontrollably. Why hadn’t anyone ever told me how wonderful silliness is?

He was dumb as dog poo. No, that’s rude. He just wasn’t academic. Never read books or watched the news. Hated math
and science. Wanted to take over the curry shop. End of story. It was much more fun, and much simpler, than it had ever been with Mandy, but it was similar in that we were perfectly incompatible and therefore the best of pals.

• • •

Speaking of Mandy. I’d never thought of her as the bullying type. I’d never thought of me as the victim type. But a few things happened in December that put us both in those unfamiliar categories.

The first was the school dance. Girls would be bussed into town to meet boys who’d also be bussed into town. I hadn’t planned on going, but the dance just happened to be on the same date as my seventeenth birthday. My mother and my father showed up that afternoon to take me out for a treat. They’d visited a few times beforehand, most notably during the October break, when they took me to a chick flick in Perth (my father fell asleep) and then to an Italian restaurant in Crieff (my mother’s forced smile ruined my appetite). I wasn’t ever mean to them, but I refused to let them get to me, as if I’d wrapped layers of insulation around me. Not reading letters and not taking every single call (my mother called every second night) was part of this self-preservation.

As we left for my birthday treat, I noticed that they
seemed to be walking on eggshells with me, like different people altogether.

“You seem very tired, Rachel. Are you okay?” my mother said.

“They’re feeding you well!” my father said when he put his arm around me.

We had Devonshire tea in some farm shop in the middle of nowhere. It was yummy, and afterwards my mother handed me a present—a dress—accompanied by an affectionate (out-of-character) plea to “have some fun, my darling, you need to have fun!” The dress was from Quiz. It was sparkly and way shorter than anything I’d ever been allowed to wear before. I approved. I kissed her and my father. And I went to the dance.

It freaked me out. Reminded me of the dreaded island dances, with girls waiting for boys to ask them to dance, kiss, and more. One boy from Baltyre asked me to dance, which I did. Then he asked me again, which I did. And again. Did. It was boring. His name was Bill. When we twirled it stifled and dizzied me. He was reasonably tall and good looking, I suppose, but he had breath so hot it could steam cooked cauliflower. And he kept breathing into my ear as he tried to converse (So,
Rachel
, where did you learn to dance? So,
Rachel
, we should meet up in town…). By the end of the fourth dance, his breath had turned to precipitation and was dripping down from my ear.
His hands were on my buttocks. I moved out to do a twirl to dislodge them then told him I needed to go to the bathroom. As disgusting as I found Bill, I was glad to have had him to dance with, because the girls all seemed to be avoiding me and the thought of approaching them made me hyperventilate. Nothing in the world—not roller coasters or blinking statues or
The Sixth Sense
—is as scary as a group of girls who’ve decided you’re a dickhead. Thankfully, when I came out of the bathroom, the bus had arrived to take us home. Couples crammed a final snog before boarding.

On the bus on the way home, Mandy sat in the back with Aimee. For a while, they giggled about the boys they’d danced with (Peter, who had very sweaty hands; Jamie, who pressed up against Aimee and definitely had a boner; Brian, who had dandruff all over his black shirt; Paul, who was just too gorgeous and at the end had put his hand down psss psss psss—Aimee whispered the rest of that bit—and she shouldn’t say this but she
really
liked it.). As the bus neared the school, the chat decreased in volume, but I could hear Mandy saying to Aimee: “She’s a tease…dances with poor Bill all night, then just says good-bye, leaves him dangling.”

“That’s so not fair,” Aimee said.

“Totally. Typical,” Mandy said.

Then, while I was trying to get to sleep, I realized Mandy and Taahnya were with Amelia O’Donohue and had chosen her cubicle—i.e., the one right next to mine—to backstab me big time. Her many comments included:

Teases the boys
.
So
like
cruel
.

Screwed up.

Scandal!

Off-the-wall unhappy family. The whole island thinks so.

“Guys, stop being f…ing bitches,” Amelia interrupted. “You know she can hear. Plus, it’s boring. I’m going to watch
CSI
.”

Amelia’s display of integrity surprised me, but it didn’t stop Mandy and Taahnya from continuing after she left for the telly room…

Completely unable to have fun.

Sent away…

Boring…

Looked daft in that dress. Did you see how short it was? From Quiz! Like the one I got two years ago.

Never tells anyone anything.

Studies like all the time.

Has no friends.

“I can hear you!” I said loudly. “Perhaps you’d like to chat about me elsewhere?”

Silence for a moment, then giggling, then they moved their conversation to another room down the hall, where I could still hear them.

It felt truly awful. I’d never been so betrayed in my life. No one else knew it was my birthday, but Mandy did. How could she be so mean? I cried for ages.

The following evening, just after Miss Rose announced that supper was ready, the loudspeaker crackled, a door banged over the speaker, someone tapped loudly on the microphone, then Mandy’s voice pounded through the dorms, clear as day, and said: “Rachel Ross is a Keener!”

I tried not to cry as I made my way over to the dining hall. Mandy and Amelia and Louisa sat at the table near the window. I sat with Jan and the International girls who chatted away in Cantonese (I think). I ate. No talking. Then went to my bed to cry.

• • •

The incidents continued right up until christmas. They froze into my bones along with the weather: a wet black winter that weighed on my forehead like two bricks, then three, and so on. Hours of sunlight: none. There was backstabbing, loudspeaker announcements, and, once, I got into bed to find Coco Pops all over my sheets. I’d tried to ignore the bullying
till then, but it was now making me feel so hard and sore inside that I wanted to explode. I found myself walking as fast as I could, thinking, “Ignore them, ignore them,” and when I finally stopped walking I realized I was at the curry shop. S saw me and came out.

“Hey! What’s wrong? You look upset.”

“Nothing,” I said, panting from the angry power walk.

He lifted his hand to my hair and I felt the skin on my neck go bumpy. Was he going to hug me? Kiss me?

“What’s this?” he asked, holding a small brown thing in his hand and examining it.

“A Coco Pop.” I sighed and shook my head.

Before I could say, “Don’t ask!” he’d raced into the shop and reemerged with a bowl and some milk.

“Ha ha,” I said, more relaxed already.

Sammy kept me sane. He didn’t have a clue about what was going on at school, and treated me like a normal everyday person. By the end of December I’d gotten sick of his curries, but our friendship, or something anyway, made me feel fresh, happy, and optimistic.

• • •

“This is for you,” he said, the day before I had to leave for the christmas break.

I opened the beautifully wrapped present. Inside was a bottle of ketchup.

“That’s stupid,” I said.

He was like, “Rachel, I know we’re only young, and I know you told me like
nothing
about yourself, but…”

“Don’t say any more.”

“I really like you…In fact…”

“Shhh.”

“Take the present home. Open it. There’s something inside.”

• • •

I got a bus the next day. Mandy and Louisa sat next to each other and talked about me the whole way. I played cool, refusing to let them see that I was upset. Anyway, I had to concentrate on getting through two weeks of the good lord.

I sat in the damp, depressing corridor-lounge of the ferry and watched the horizontal rain pelt along the windows, the hazy miserableness of the island just visible in the distance. It gave me an instant feeling of depression. When we docked, and I walked out along the ramp, my mother and my father were waiting for me with flowers.

“Welcome home!” they said. They’d never given me flowers before and to be honest I didn’t mind that. Watching living things wilt and die is not my cup of tea.