Erin
Now, she was them.
Lisa raised an eyebrow. ‘What? The summer?’
‘School. The last five years.’
‘Are you mad? It was fucking interminable. And we still have this whole year to go.’
Abruptly, the office door opened and Miss Donovan’s floating head appeared. Both girls straightened up, braced for a reprimand, sure that she must have heard the swearing. But she just said, ‘Erin,’ flatly, and then disappeared again.
Erin stood, rolled her eyes at Lisa, and went into the office.
It was small and dim, and filled with bookshelves.
There was a line of leafy plants on the windowsill and one of those spray-bottle things for misting them on the desk.
The air smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and strongly of something floral and sickly.
As Erin took a seat, she spied a crumpled can of vanilla SlimFast in the bin.
Miss Donovan herself was in her fifties, overly made-up, with a stiff bouffant of blonde hair, smudged red lipstick, and a rotation of unflattering pant suits in primary colours.
Today, it was electric blue.
‘So, Erin,’ she said, leaning back in her chair. ‘What’s the plan?’
‘I want to be a virologist.’
A frown. ‘What’s that?’
‘Someone who works with viruses.’
A deeper frown. ‘You know, in twenty-four years, I don’t think anyone has ever come in here and said that to me.’ Miss Donovan sighed as if she had a steep climb ahead of her. ‘What brought this on?’
The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. Watching Outbreak.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s ‘Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report’, which Erin had been reading online ever since they’d got the internet at home the year before.
She specifically wanted to work with haemorrhagic fevers.
That might be with the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service or the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases – you-SAM-rid to its friends.
They had BSL-4 labs, the ones you had to wear the blue spacesuits in, where a one-millimetre tear might be the difference between life and death.
It was in Maryland but she’d live in Virginia, where Mulder and Scully had always seemed to be.
She’d have a porch swing on which to curl up with big books on summer evenings, sipping rosé, which she presumed she’d like by then.
She had it all planned out.
What brought this on?
As if her dreams and desires were a bout of feminine hysteria, or the grip of a temporary insanity.
‘It’s just what I’m interested in,’ Erin said. ‘I think it’s fascinating.’
And if that’s what she did for a living, she would be.
A couple of weeks into term, Sharon suggested that they start going to Bruce on Saturdays.
‘Bruce’ was Bruce College, a fee-paying grind school designed to achieve one thing and one thing only: stellar exam results.
It was mixed, students wore their own clothes, and no time was wasted on assemblies, religion classes or PE – which, at St Mary’s, only ever meant hockey.
During the week, Bruce expected their students to stay on after-hours for supervised study.
On Saturdays, it was open to everyone on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Sharon’s mother gave them a lift into the city and the three of them hiked up Patrick’s Hill, following a slow-moving river of sleepy, backpacked teens into the grounds of a building that had a strange, round section topped with a parapet, as if part of an old castle had been glued to an office block.
In a large, airy room with rows of single desks, Erin and Sharon took two side by side while Lisa threw them a mischievous grin before heading straight to the back.
A guy who looked young enough to be a student himself was sitting at a head table, facing them, continually and coldly scanning the rows like some kind of exam-prep T-1000.
Combined with the room’s thick silence, it was almost immediately uncomfortable.
Erin took out her English homework while, beside her, Sharon studied her chemistry textbook with a ferocious concentration that pulsated in the air between their desks.
Afterwards, when Lisa rejoined them and said, ‘The guys are going to the Coliseum to play pool. I said we’d go too,’ Erin’s first thought was that going to the Coliseum on a Saturday afternoon was something she used to do when she was thirteen.
Her second thought was typical Lisa. They’d been sitting in a completely silent room, constantly watched, and yet she’d managed to make friends. The girl couldn’t not; it was like her superpower.
Only then did Erin wonder, What guys?
Predictably, Sharon said she had to go straight home right now or her mother would kill her.
Erin and Lisa exchanged glances, mutually agreeing to an unprotested release.
‘It’s just as well,’ Lisa whispered in Erin’s ear as Sharon carefully packed away her laminated study plan. ‘Even numbers now.’
The Coliseum had actually been the Leisureplex for nearly as long as they’d been alive, but they called it what their parents still did.
It had bowling and Quasar – a laser-tag game – and pool tables that never seemed to come free no matter how long you waited or how intensely you stared at the people hogging them.
Except today. When they walked in, the guys in question were standing at one, polishing cues.
Lisa liked troublemakers and Erin didn’t know what she liked yet, so there was no need for any discussion: Lisa was self-evidently here because of the beefy one – Daniel – who had a confidence that immediately annoyed Erin.
His friend was kinder, with dark hair and eyes she found herself looking in for too long.
This was Jason.
He was easy to talk to, and funny, and interesting.
She told him about virology and her hope of staying in Cork to go to UCC.
He told her that he was eighteen, almost nineteen.
He said he wanted to be a spinal surgeon, which would start with his going to Dublin to do Medicine at Trinity.
He was already a rower who’d got a sports scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, his Plan B.
He’d spent last summer working for his aunt’s catering company in Boston and, on the flight home, had made a decision: if he didn’t get the points he needed for Trinity, he’d resit the exams. When the results came out, he’d been short a devastating five, so here he was, doing it all again.
He asked her if she’d read The Andromeda Strain.
After two games, Lisa suggested they all go for pizza. But just as they went to leave, Erin collided with a dad carrying a tray of Cokes that, on impact, popped their lids, fell over and emptied their sticky, icy contents all down her front.
She looked down in horror and said miserably, ‘I can’t go anywhere now.’
Coke Dad snapped at her to watch where she was going.
Daniel snorted behind his hand. Jason picked up what was left of his own Coke, positioned it over his chest and calmly upturned it.
They all stared at him open-mouthed as he set the empty cup back on the edge of the pool table, held out a crooked arm to Erin and said, ‘Let’s go. ’
It was the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for her.
It was also the very first.
The boys weren’t actually in Bruce that day; they were just supposed to be.
They’d skived off to drink beers in some old man’s pub, then gone to the Coliseum to play pool.
Daniel had mauled Lisa in a corner of a nightclub the previous weekend – with Lisa’s express and enthusiastic consent – and they’d been texting back and forth while she pretended to be identifying economic activities on an Ordnance Survey map in the supervised study hall.
Erin had never talked to Jason but knew of him, and liked him based on what little she knew.
By the time they met up with them, the boys were already drunk enough for Jason to bump into a man walking past with a tray of Cokes, hard enough to knock them all over.
But Erin preferred her version of events.
Hers was the one she recorded in her diary, because she didn’t want to revisit these pages months or years from now and read about how the man she loved had been pissed the very first time they’d met.
It would sully their story. And she didn’t want to tell people that either, in case they thought he’d stumbled into this. It was too important for that.
So she’d say their first kiss was in the queue for tickets at the cinema, when Jason bent down to sniff her box of popcorn, only to detour and kiss her instead.
That it was sweet and gentle and sober, unlike their actual first kiss – a sloppy, 3 a.m. affair in a bus shelter on the South Mall that she didn’t even think he remembered.
She suggested ‘Iris’ by the Goo Goo Dolls should be their song because it had been playing over the cinema speakers, but it had actually been ‘Dancing In The Moonlight’ by Toploader, which she hated.
The first time they had sex – which was also the first time Erin had ever had it – it was awkward and fumbling and left her perplexed as to how anyone was supposed to get pleasure from being the most nervous they’d ever been in their entire life.
She didn’t know what she was supposed to do and had only a vague idea of what he was supposed to do, so she couldn’t tell whether he was doing it or not.
At some point she felt a sharp, pulling pain on her scalp: strands of her hair had caught in the clasp of the thin silver chain Jason wore around his neck. They stopped, and he turned on the light to free her, which broke the tension.
They both started to laugh.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘It’s not your fault,’ he said. ‘It’s mine.’
They flopped on to their backs, lying side by side, staring at the ceiling.
‘I always forget to take it off,’ he added.
It was so casual, a throwaway remark, thinking out loud. But its impact felt like the crack of a whip against her softest skin, leaving a screaming, burning laceration, and the shock of that left her winded, as if she’d just been sucker-punched in the gut.
In her mind’s eye she saw flashes of him with other girls, with women, tangled knots of bare limbs, glistening with sweat. This was her first time but, for him, it was just another Saturday night.
When he reached for her hand and held it in the centre of his chest, it took everything she had to pretend that she hadn’t just been mortally wounded.
By the time she was relaying this to Lisa the following day, Jason hadn’t said it at all.