Chapter 36
Hot-pink lipstick. My most obnoxious false lashes.
My favourite babydoll dress. Some silly little strappy shoes.
This is all I need for the Quad end-of-year/end-of-magazine party.
I want to wear my initial necklace, my little symbol of sparklier times before it all went a bit shit, but have I done one single thing about untangling it? No. I have not.
‘Felix can’t make it,’ is the first thing I hear when I walk through the door of the union. Tyler is right up on me, reassuring me that it’s actually completely fine for me to be here.
‘Oh?’ I say, my nerves calming a little bit at this news.
‘Yeah, he’s stuck at the . . . Guadeloupean Embassy sorting out his visa or something.’
I check the time on my phone. ‘At this hour?’
Tyler shrugs. ‘Might be an excuse, who knows?’ they say. ‘Let me get you a drink. They’re trialling some weird pink lemonade shit that’s got Mary-Elizabeth Baxter written all over it.’
‘Sounds like a bit of me,’ I say, scanning the room for Laurie. But no Laurie yet.
‘Cheers,’ Tyler clinks their glass against mine when they bring the drinks over. ‘End of an era.’
‘End of a bloody era.’ I take a sip of the pink lemonade and, to my delight, it is truly delicious. ‘Ten out of ten, would drink again.’
‘Oooh, watch out, your nemesis is about,’ Tyler says, raising their eyebrows and looking over my shoulder.
When I turn, I see Laurie sloping in and my heart does a little backflip.
The crush is, unfortunately, inescapable and embedded at this point.
While I was revising for my exams, I would use daydreaming about Laurie like a little holiday.
I would take a break from reading Clement Greenberg’s essay ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ and let my brain try to conjure up his face, his hands, his smell, the way he slept all pretzelled up in that chair and, more than anything, that kiss that almost was.
‘Oh,’ I say, smiling. ‘I’d forgotten he was my nemesis.’
‘He copied your column! You were fuming! What are you talking about?!’ Tyler exclaims dramatically.
‘It’s a long story.’ I sigh, and it strikes me how much my and Laurie’s story has played out in private, how it wasn’t something I shared with everyone in gossipy gasps and silly little vignettes about my life.
It’s like I knew he was something different.
‘I’m not even that bothered he stole my column any more,’ I add. ‘I’ve achieved serenity, or something.’
‘You’re such a dark horse,’ Tyler murmurs, as Katie Jones, the magazine’s lifestyle editor, who is not making the cut for the newspaper staff next year, and esteemed features editor Lucie Hardy, who is returning to the newspaper now that her ex-boyfriend is about to graduate, slide up to us and join our chat.
I participate as well as I can, but my attention is hovering around the room, trying to pick up on Laurie’s location, mood, vibe, who he’s chatting to, whether he’s flirting with someone (ha ha, as if).
Finally, the anticipation has built up inside me like a Coke bottle that’s been shaken, and I can’t keep it in any more.
‘Sorry, guys, I’ll be back in a second,’ I tell Tyler, Katie and Lucie, who nod and get back to their chat, but when I scan the room again, I can’t see Laurie anywhere.
The panic sets in that I’ve missed him, that he’s come and gone, and my chance to speak to him has evaporated until, what, the autumn?
As romantic as it feels, this would be the downside to a whole crush played out in person, where we don’t have each other’s numbers, don’t message back and forth between seeing each other.
And then, finally, I spot him, ensconced at a round table with various people from the newspaper, including the ubiquitous Charlotte Sherman.
The relief floods through me like a wave, the knowledge that he’s not gone, that he’s right here in front of me, at once comforting but also now something I have to act on.
I take a deep breath, stand up straight, put my shoulders back and walk extremely confidently over to their table.
I don’t look at anyone else, not even Charlotte, and say directly to Laurie, ‘Hi, Laurie, I’d love to chat to you if you’ve got a second? ’
A murmur of intrigue goes up from around the table, but Laurie just nods and gets to his feet, extricating himself from the cosy corner.
‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ he says over his shoulder. Charlotte is looking at me with the utmost disdain, whether for my general existence or specifically for my fake eyelashes.
I don’t want to talk here with all these people around, so I lead us out of the union, round the back to the bench where he bandaged up my foot. Everything about tonight is different. I’m not injured. The air is warm. I know how I feel about Laurie.
Before I can begin, Laurie speaks. ‘Mary-Elizabeth,’ he says, not looking at me. ‘I really want to apologise for what I did at your flat. I’m not proud of myself at all. It’s really been weighing on me and I don’t blame you if it’s changed the way you see me.’
‘Look, I can’t stress enough how much I wish I’d punched him myself,’ I say gently.
‘I don’t know if you know this, but . . . me and him, we have something of a history.’
I nod. ‘Felix mentioned something.’
‘Did he?’ Laurie’s voice is sharp. His head jerks up swiftly to look at me.
‘Yes, but after I got to know you a bit, I didn’t believe it.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Well, that’s the thing, he was never very specific, just said something about . . . about you and a girl at school, and you being a creep?’
‘God, he’s such a piece of shit.’ Laurie’s tone is bitter in a way I’ve never heard it before.
‘So what actually happened?’
‘What actually happened is that Felix Balfour assaulted a girl at a party we were at. I found her afterwards, crying in a wardrobe – I could hear her, you know? Hiding and crying. I went into this spare bedroom just to decompress a bit – it wasn’t my natural habitat, a massive party like that, but I went anyway because some of my mates were going, and there I was in this spare room and I hear this noise coming from a wardrobe and she’s just in there.
So I talked to her and she told me what had happened, and she was terrified I was one of his friends and I assured her I absolutely was not and that I wouldn’t let him near her again, and we just chatted until she’d calmed down and felt a bit safer, and I asked her what she wanted me to do, and she said she wanted me to walk her to the bus stop.
I told her she should get one of her parents to pick her up, but they were busy so she had to take the bus, and she was still crying, you know, and shaking?
She clearly wasn’t OK and I didn’t want to leave her, so I asked if she wanted me to take the bus with her and she said yes, if I didn’t mind.
So I went with her, but one of Felix’s mates saw us at the bus stop on his way to the party, so Felix decided that was the perfect way to deflect from what he’d done, to make it about me cosying up to her and trying to, in his words, “get in there”, when it wasn’t like that at all. ’
It all sounds so very much like Felix, doesn’t it? And, I think, with a lump in my throat, so very much like Laurie.
‘What happened to the girl?’ I ask.
‘She’s OK now, mostly. It rattled her a lot, I think, but she’s at uni in Manchester and seems to be doing well. We chat every so often.’
‘Is that why you were so . . . careful to take care of me?’ I ask.
He nods.
‘There was briefly some suggestion that Felix wouldn’t be allowed in to QAC, but of course his daddy sorted that out.
’ I remember how easily Felix dismissed any suggestion that he wouldn’t get in.
‘I was basically ostracised for the rest of the year for taking her side, for accusing him of doing what he did when everyone else had already decided she was just a . . . you know, a slut, I suppose.’
‘Oh, Laurie,’ I say, reaching out to put my hand on his. It twitches, the instinct to pull away so clearly there and so clearly being fought. ‘I’m so sorry.’
He shrugs, pulls his hand away, runs it through his thick hair. ‘I’m not the real victim in all of this. Just collateral damage.’
We sit in silence for a moment. My hand feels oddly cold and lonely without his there. I want to feel him close to me, want the warmth of his skin, the comfort of his physical presence.
‘Thank you for telling me all of that,’ I say quietly.
Finally, he smiles. ‘You are rather easy to talk to.’
‘I regret that our dinner got cut short that time. I was enjoying it. I was . . . enjoying being with you, in that way, I think.’
Laurie clears his throat a little awkwardly, like maybe he can sense what’s coming, but he doesn’t interrupt me.
‘And I was thinking, maybe if you’re in London over the summer, we could .
. . we could do something sometime?’ I pause, wondering if that’s too ambiguous.
‘Maybe . . . even . . .’ I swallow, my heart pounding away inside my ribcage.
For someone who shoots their shot as often as I do, I feel very nervous indeed. ‘Maybe you could even call it a date?’
It’s like the shutters have been pulled down on Laurie’s face. In an instant, his expression changes. He breaks my gaze. ‘Um, actually, there’s been a slight development . . .’
I don’t need him to tell me. I can already guess what it is. ‘Oh,’ I say simply.
‘Yes.’ He clears his throat again but doesn’t say anything else for a moment. ‘It just felt . . . like the right moment to give it another go.’
Look, I’m not actually upset, it’s just a little bit of cringe, but for some reason, as well as my cheeks flushing, I can feel little needles stabbing at my eyeballs. But obviously I’m not upset. It’s fine. Just a bit embarrassing, that’s all. Nothing I can’t survive.
‘Of course,’ I say, and before I can stop myself, I add, ‘Lucky her.’ It comes out high-pitched and scratchy.
‘I’m . . .’ He shakes his head, looks slightly bewildered. ‘I’m sorry for all of this.’
‘It’s OK,’ I say, reaching out and putting my hand gently on his arm.
But it’s not OK. I’m just pretending, for Laurie, for my own dignity.
Inside I’m furious, hot with embarrassment, regret, resentment.
It’s not pretty and I don’t like it about myself, but it’s what I’m feeling.
Why have I been able to get every boy I’ve ever liked except for this one?
The only one who’s got more depth than a fucking puddle, who has an actual backbone, who isn’t just someone I like because they’re hot but someone I like because they’re kind and interesting and surprising.
‘We’ve come a long way since the last time we were in the union with you wearing that dress,’ he says, smiling sadly.
‘You remember I was wearing this dress?’
He nods. ‘I remember thinking, Why am I being so rude to this very pretty girl? It was like I couldn’t stop myself, like it was self-defence or something.’
‘And then you thought, Let’s take this to the next level and really rile her up by copying her column?’ I say, nudging him with my knee.
‘What?’ he says, frowning.
‘You know, the No Nonsense column,’ I say, frowning right back.
‘That . . . wasn’t me,’ he says slowly. ‘I mean, it was sort of my idea – I said it as a joke in the first meeting of term – but I never wrote them.’
‘It’s fine, Laurie, you can admit it. I’m not even annoyed about it any more!’ I say, but part of me already knows he wouldn’t admit to it being his idea but lie about writing it.
‘But really, it wasn’t me,’ he says, fixing me with a very serious look. ‘I didn’t know you . . . didn’t know that.’
‘Well, who was it then?!’ I say, feeling completely on the back foot but equally inclined to believe him.
‘Mary-Elizabeth,’ he turns to look at me, ‘Felix wrote those columns.’
It’s like all the wind has gone out of my sails. ‘What?’
‘Like I said, I sort of mentioned it as a joke, that maybe we needed an advice column, and Charlotte really ran with it as an idea and then all of a sudden there it was, and when I pressed her about it, she finally admitted it was Felix. Something about how he wanted to get in with the newspaper in case the magazine folded. But it would be under the radar, you know? Not like actually writing for them openly.’ He runs a hand through his hair, not looking at me.
‘I told her I didn’t like it but couldn’t bring myself to tell her about the whole .
. . situation between me and him, and I figured I couldn’t object too forcefully without having to air all the dirty laundry. ’
I nod. ‘I can’t believe how wrong I got it.’
‘I didn’t realise you still didn’t know,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘But it makes sense. You’d say things sometimes and I’d think, What does that mean? And now I get that it’s because you thought I was the one writing that column,’ he says, nodding thoughtfully.
‘We’ve made a bit of a mess of this whole thing, haven’t we?’
He nods again. ‘I think so.’
I think of that little silver knot in the trinket dish on my dressing table. ‘It feels like a necklace that’s got tangled in ways you can’t even really figure out, let alone untangle.’
Laurie smiles. ‘Yes, I suppose it does.’
‘You haven’t got any delicious fruit in your pocket as a farewell gift, have you?’ I ask, my voice cracking.
‘Would you believe me if I told you’, he says, reaching into the big pocket on the front of his jacket, ‘that I am in possession of some of the finest lychees money can buy?’ He produces a small brown paper bag. ‘They travel surprisingly well.’
‘For me?’ I ask.
‘For you.’
We eat them in silence, and both understand that this is an ending.