Chapter 3
My first proper kiss is in Ireland. We’re there for Aoife’s great-grandma’s eightieth – a dark function room with a giant cream cake and loads of pissed-up adults. We sit there, awkward as hell with our sleek fringes, nursing our lager tops to fit in and eating 500,000 dry-roasted peanuts. Aoife anxiously picks her spot scabs. I pick my fingers. We were hoping boys our age would be here. But it’s just Aoife’s cousin – who has a diamond earring and is quite fit but he’s brought his girlfriend, who has streaky fake tan. The kiss takes place the next day with a boy called Connor who works on the miniature steam train opposite our hotel. He has a Nike tick shaved into the back of his head. He’s Irish and calls kissing ‘going away’. He says, and I quote, ‘Do you want to go away with me?’
‘Where to?’ I ask innocently looking at the nearby lake and wondering if he owns a rowboat, anxiously biting the dead skin around the edge of my thumb until blood comes. But with a twinkle of his lazy eye, oh I know where we’re going alright. On a fast ride to Adulthood, that’s where alright. This is my chance. A crash course in snogging. If it goes badly, nobody has to know. I may as well get it out the way. And so we agree.
The Kiss takes place on a grassy shrubby hill in the playground by the tree next to a windswept carrier bag, a twist of dried-up dog poo and the hipbone of what I’m pretty sure is a rat. I press my bleeding thumb into the sleeve of my hoody to soak up the blood and the soft locked bruise of a kiss. For a minute, the electricity of oxytocin surges through me but actually I think I just got a static shock from Connor’s shell suit rubbing against my thigh.
The going away with me is a contract. One of those spit pacts they make except with our actual faces. When the painful everlasting seven seconds are up, THANK GOD, I unashamedly wipe my mouth in victory in front of him. Right there on my sleeve is the evidence. A snail trail of saliva that snaps back at us like snot. The deal is sealed. I am no longer a real snog virgin.
Thanks for that, Connor. Thanks for that, Ireland.
And away I go back to grey London feeling like I’m made of gold. Like I’ve been invited to the Ambassador’s Reception off the Ferrero Rocher advert. Like people will notice that something about me has changed. My boobs that bit bigger, my hair that bit shinier in a swingy pony-tail. At last, I stand, a woman.
It seems I am on a roll. More mosquitos want my savoury blood. Now that the seal has been broken, my second snog follows swiftly after. Lex goes to the Steiner school behind mine that has an intake of about fifteen students between the ages of toddler and teenager, with a sheep ratio of about seventeen to every child. He has impressive acne and wears it confidently – a constellation upon his bum-fluffed cheeks. I admire this about him. His hair is bleached like Eminem’s – FIT – and gelled into stiff spikes like snowy mountains, and, better than that – Lex is a skater.
I ‘meet up’ with him one weekend at Brixton Bowls, where we ignore each other for the entire day and only when it’s time to say goodbye do we finally say hi. We go ahead and do the snog over a hip-height wall, him on one side, me on the other, his skateboard in-between as a metaphor of why it will never work. How a money-grabber kisses someone for their debit card – poor Lex must know that, deep down, the only reason I like him is because he skateboards. I’m such a skateboard-grabber.
It is the driest snog of my life, like licking the seal of an envelope. Like I’ve been dared to eat all the salty maize snacks from the shop. Still, there is much to celebrate: I’ve just snogged a skateboarder on home turf, which feels ten times more legitimate. I race for my bus home, tingling. Feeling like I want to do something crazy like … Oh, goodness … I don’t know … get the top bit of my ear pierced or something. But I just press my face into a pillow and squeal.
Then once again: drought. Like when the hyenas take over in The Lion King. There is a thirst.
At school we ignore it and get on with eating Wispas and toasties, fattening up for a feast of some sort. Great if we’re to be the main event of the feast, like the glazed pig in the centre, but boy, as the measurements on our skirts go up – we are somehow STILL hungry. Starving for that sweet treat that just can’t be found in a secondary school tuck shop.
LOVE.
But no new boys will ever find us here behind the bolted gates, so we are entirely reliant upon chance, fate and luck until eventually our prayers are heard. A few weeks into the school year, Mia abruptly leaves our form to go to a mixed school closer to her new house. We take turns to warmly hug her goodbye whilst hiding the fresh livid bitterness of seething jealousy, reminding her of our closeness so she remembers to bring us forth into her new life of being at school, every day, with boys.
Given the circumstances, I suppose I can, just this once, forgive and forget the rumours she spread about me. ‘I’ll miss you so much,’ I bleat like the others.
Mia is awaiting a transformation. From kiwi-eating, fluffy-pen-carrying, Trolls are my best thing, rumour-spreading, shit-stirring Mia, to a New Girl.
And down she she’ll go like blood in the ocean to a classroom full of sharks … and jellyfish her newness everywhere and see what they make of her.
Mia has a chance to start again. An opportunity, just like Maximilien, to be hot.
I mean, spicy.