Chapter 18 Where Is My Mind?
WHERE IS MY MIND?
In the stuffy train carriage, Jeremy flicked through a well-thumbed textbook, while Francesca rested her head on his shoulder, pretending to sleep — I could tell by the way her eyelids fluttered.
“Your mood’s up and down like a bride’s nightie, Trusty.
Are you sure you’re okay?” Jeremy’s voice practically dripped with smugness, like the stupid grin that had spread itself over his thin lips ever since we’d boarded the train and Francesca had chosen the seat next to him.
She hadn’t breathed a word to me all morning, only dusted the occasional sultry look over me.
It was a cruel, deliberate game, and the hollow ache of rejection throbbed in my chest.
I grunted a response and clenched my jaw, focusing on the barren grey landscape rolling by outside the misted windows.
Since the night we’d spent together, Francesca had shown up at the cottage again, but I buried myself under my duvet and ignored the muffled pleas and raps at the door until she gave up.
I spent the rest of the Christmas break alone in my room, filling my head with resolutions about what I would and wouldn’t stand for. I hoped the distance I’d wedged between us over the last few days would give Francesca space to figure out what she really wanted.
Me or him. I wasn’t prepared to let her have us both.
Winter clutched the start of term in its icy fist. The weather, in all its varying degrees of wet, descended like a grey curtain. From my dorm room window, I watched as Jeremy came calling for Francesca, collar turned up against the cold.
Pain twisted my gut as they left, huddled together against the bitter wind that howled across campus.
I threw myself into my studies; that was what I was here for, after all.
This is good for me. I stretched my neck and narrowed my mind to focus, devouring textbooks, scribbling notes until my hand ached, and seeking solace in statistics, as I tried to block out the image of them.
But the phantom of her scent clung to my skin.
January unravelled with the same inevitability as my resolve, and by the second week of term, Francesca was tapping at my door and calling my name.
I stood on the other side, my forehead pressed to the painted wood grain, determined to hold my ground and maintain the fragile peace I’d wrapped around myself.
But there was something different in her voice — something that sounded a lot like remorse.
“I miss you,” she said, and I caved.
I opened the door, my chest squeezing at the sight of her — sad eyes painted dark and dressed again in her gothy blacks and ripped denim. She looked so vulnerable, a raw contrast to the girl who had so recently chosen another over me.
“What do you want, Francesca?” I asked, my throat clenching around the words.
She looked up at me through her claggy eyelashes and, with one word, disarmed me.
“You,” she said.
Mentally tearing up my resolutions, I swept aside my better judgement and pulled her into my room.
Francesca’s minty tongue speared into my mouth, her fingers tangling in fistfuls of my hair as she pushed me back against the door and made my world spin.
“Nothing tastes as good as you do,” she teased into my ear.
I arched, yielding to her persistent press as a flood of desire overtook me.
After that, we fell into a new pattern: one where Francesca wound up in my bed most nights.
We’d have sex and fall asleep wrapped in each other.
Sometimes I’d lie awake, watching the light change through the gap in the curtains and wondering how it was possible to feel so close, yet so distant to someone at the same time.
Or how Francesca could make me feel like I meant everything and nothing all at once.
It was fine unless I tried to talk about feelings, or Jeremy, or anything she didn’t want to talk about. Like the flip of a coin, Francesca’s mood would change, darkness clouding her eyes as her temper flared.
“Isn’t it obvious how I feel, Catherine?” she’d rage before pushing me onto the bed and showing me with her tongue, her body a tempest against mine.
“I think it’s a you problem,” she’d say with such confidence it had to be true.
“It’s you I’m fucking, isn’t it?” Her words dripped with disdain, but I found some small satisfaction in the implication that it was only me.
I loved the things we did together in the sanctuary of my room, the way her skin felt against mine, the way her body moved, and the secret language we shared, but every touch stoked a slow, painful hunger that left me emotionally malnourished.
“You’re very clingy, Catherine. Perhaps it’s because you lost your mother so young,” she said without stopping to consider the harsh words.
They stung like a slap, but I told myself not to be greedy, to be grateful for what was on offer and not take too much.
I could only hope my restraint would be rewarded with abundance, so I continued to offer myself up to her as communion.
After a while, an anaesthetic-like numbness set in — even though her words still cut, I barely felt it anymore. I’d lap up every crumb of a compliment, then sit back, bloated and glowing, because if she makes me feel this good, how can it possibly be bad?
Francesca changed Jeremy and me in ways we had no words for.
She seemed capable of carrying on as if our weird dynamic was perfectly normal.
For a while, I let her drag me along to our old haunts.
I spun like a third wheel as the two of them flirted, the whole time relishing the fact that it was me who’d fall asleep and wake up beside her.
Inevitably, a chasm formed between us. Time alone with Jeremy was out of the question; he talked endlessly about her, stirring an unpalatable cocktail of smug pride and sickly guilt inside me.
I knew things he’d never know — the sweet taste of Francesca on my tongue, her whispered confessions in the dead of night, and the way she wrapped herself around me like I was hers.
I wanted to tell him everything, but I didn’t want to crush him with the weight of it.
So I pulled away, making excuses to while away my time in the library and lose myself in the hushed rustle of pages.
And that’s where the collision occurred.
Two over-caffeinated, bleary-eyed students crashing together in a shower of books and awkward apologies.
“I’m Mei,” she giggled, peering at me through her long fringe as we swept up the fallen books from the floor.
“Catherine.” I offered my hand, and she shook it with both of hers.
“Cat…e…reen,” she repeated, her accent butchering my name in the most endearing way.
“Close enough.” I laughed, and she did too.
“Some words can be difficult for me.” She frowned, and a deep line formed between her brows. “Maybe it’s better for both of us if I can call you Cati?”
I nodded, already basking in the warmth of her energy as I shifted my heavy book bag back onto my shoulder.
The next day, we sat sipping coffee and exchanging the headlines of our two decades of existence, both of us fascinated by how our cultures merged and diverged.
Mei was unlike anyone I’d ever met. She jiggled with frenetic energy, as if her petite frame couldn’t contain her spirit. Her laughter was contagious, and she had the most chaotic and colourful dress sense of anyone I’d ever seen.
Mei confessed to finding it difficult to make friends — the other foreign students arrived in their cliques, and the British students avoided her, perhaps assuming she spoke poor English. And so, she’d fallen through the social cracks.
For my part, Mei had arrived right when I needed a friend, so we became study-buddies and cappuccino-confidants.
Unlike Jeremy and Francesca’s company, Mei’s was uncomplicated.
She told me about Malaysia and how this was the farthest she’d ever been from home.
Mei’s parents saved hard to give her the chance they’d never had.
She was their bright spark, their one big wish for the future.
As a result, the heavy pressure weighed her down, as if their hopes were rocks in her pockets.
Something about her wide-eyed curiosity cracked me open. I told her about losing my mum, how my dad had curled into himself ever since, and how at times I felt so alone it was like my own thoughts echoed inside my head.
Weeks passed, and the connection deepened, until one day I found the words I’d been burning to say taking slow shape in my mouth.
“Mei… would it change your opinion of me if I told you I was gay?”
I carefully watched her reaction, waiting for a recoil, a flinch, or for her to run from the Wimpy café we frequented in town — a place I knew Francesca would never step foot inside.
Mei slurped her strawberry milkshake through the straw and shrugged. “I already knew this about you, Cati.”
“Oh!” I tilted my head, the echo of my words still ringing in my ears. “You, er, you don’t mind?”
Mei giggled. “Why would I? It’s who you are, and I like you.”
I nudged my glasses back up my nose. “Right, yes. Okay. Good then.”
Mei leaned forward. “You want to know something about me?”
My eyes snapped back to hers, which were sparkling with a secret.
“I’ve never liked anyone like that. Not a boy or a girl. Not one person, ever.” She crossed her index fingers in an X.
“Maybe you just haven’t met the right person.”
Mei grinned. “What — like maybe you just haven’t met the right boy?”
I opened my mouth to respond but closed it again because I’d already lost the point.
“See, I’m different. I know I’m different.” Mei shrugged. “I think that’s why we’re friends. We’re both different.”
A slow warmth spread through me. I felt seen and understood for the first time, like another layer had been peeled back and Mei hadn’t been horrified by what lurked underneath.