Chapter 4 #2
Alice tugs on my arm as I play Where’s Waldo with her friends, eventually spotting Jenna and Bryn lined up at the bar, Jenna dressed up in tight jeans and silky shirt, Bryn dressed down in jeans and a plain black tee.
We shimmy through the crowd, my body squeezed in a human vice, and by the time we reach them, I’ve already gotten more intimate with everyone in the bar than I did with my date for prom.
‘What are you drinking?’ Jenna yells. ‘Bryn’s buying.’
‘I am?’
‘You tried to kill the woman, buy her a bloody drink.’
‘You don’t have to, I don’t really—’ I start to say, one hand pressed against my stomach, but before I can finish my sentence, both Jenna and Bryn have already turned back to the bartender to order something called a ‘double first’.
I watch, speechless, as assorted bottles are tipped upside down, multi-coloured liquids poured into a huge plastic pitcher then mixed together with a spritz of soda.
‘You’ll love it. Eventually,’ Jenna assures me, handing one empty glass to me and another to Alice.
Bryn picks up four at once in practised hands, and we all follow him across the room to a cosy corner where Michael is guarding an empty table, scowling at anyone who comes too close.
No sign of Oliver but it’s so crowded in here, he could’ve been standing right next to me at the bar, and I wouldn’t have seen him.
‘Here we go.’ Jenna pours the drinks as we all choose a chair, then distributes them around the table. ‘Double firsts all round, cheers to the third year.’
‘And to new friends,’ Alice adds.
They all turn to look my way, drinks raised. The sweating glass is slippery in my hot, clammy palm and every second I don’t lift it to my lips drags out into an hour. After too long of an awkward moment, Jenna is the one to break the silence.
‘I know a pint of squadka isn’t exactly the classiest cocktail on the planet but it’s a tradition. The first one can be a challenge but by the time you’re on your second, you’ll be golden.’
‘I thought it was a double first,’ I say, staring at it.
‘It is. A double first is a double squadka.’
Which clears up nothing.
‘And what is in a squadka exactly?’
‘Traditionally, it’s orange squash and vodka but every student union has their own take on it,’ Alice explains, the remaining bright orange liquid in the pitcher swirling ominously.
‘Ours still has vodka and orange juice but we add some cranberry juice and lemonade, a bit of triple sec and depending on what we’ve got the most of, some elderflower or blackcurrant liqueur.
To make it a double first, you just double the vodka. ’
‘Wow, I’m sure it’s great,’ I say, sure of nothing. ‘It’s just that, I don’t drink.’
‘You don’t?’ Jenna’s eyes open wide as Bryn and Michael exchange a guilty look.
‘I’m not anti-drinking, I just don’t.’
I wish I had a better line prepared, but I still haven’t worked out a way to say it without sounding like a Sunday school teacher who’s trying too hard.
‘It’s not a big thing with me,’ I go on, unable to stop talking. ‘You should all drink, get totally wasted, please. I’m not weird about it.’
Exactly what someone who is weird about it would say.
‘Oh, we will, don’t worry,’ Michael says. ‘Maybe you just haven’t found the right beverage.’
Jenna clacks her hot-pink manicure against her traffic-cone-coloured drink. ‘And you think squadka is the place for her to start?’
Before he can answer, Alice takes the glass out of my hand and pushes it away across the table like it’s radioactive. Which, from the way it’s glowing in the dark, I fear it might be. Then she stands, pulling a slipping spaghetti strap back onto her shoulder.
‘We should’ve asked, I’m sorry. I was going back up for a bag of crisps anyway, what can I get you?’
‘No, you don’t have to, I’ll go—’ I shoot up to my feet, but Alice shakes her head and gently but firmly pushes me back into my seat.
‘I’ll get served faster than you, my elbows are sharper. What’ll it be?’
‘A Coke would be so good,’ I reply, grateful. ‘Thank you.’
She smiles like it’s nothing then melts away into the crowd, and when I look back at her friends, no one looks annoyed. Either it truly is no big deal or they utterly despise me, and this is that British reserve I’ve heard so much about.
‘Honestly ought to be off the booze myself.’ Michael’s actions contradict his words as he tips back his sparkling cocktail and drains half the glass in one gulp. ‘I’ve got training first thing in the morning.’
I cock my head to one side. ‘Training?’
He leans back in his chair with a modest shrug. ‘I just so happen to be the best goalie Hemden has seen in a decade.’
‘You guys play hockey here?’ I ask, surprised.
Jenna howls as Michael rakes his light brown hair back from his face.
‘Thankfully, no. The last time I put on ice skates, I made Bambi look elegant. I’m talking about football.’
‘Soccer to you, but don’t say that word out loud to anyone in this room if you want to make friends,’ Jenna whispers in my ear before raising her voice. ‘Whatever, Michael. Mia doesn’t want to hear about eleven men kicking a surrogate sperm around a field in search of an egg.’
‘She doesn’t want to hear your junior psychoanalysis either,’ he volleys back. ‘Psychology students are the worst.’
‘And chemical engineering students are a barrel of laughs?’ she returns, and I wonder if they’re dating or just hooking up because it has to be one or the other, the way they’re eyeing each other while they argue. ‘Now will you please let Mia speak? I’m trying to get a life story here.’
Something I am hardly desperate to give.
‘Do you all live on campus?’ I ask, lobbing out a question to dodge her interrogation.
‘Mmm-hmm. Dorchester House. We’re one over from Carpenter. Me and Bryn are both in 3A, Michael lives on the floor below. Hemden’s good like that, everyone lives in halls the whole time they’re here.’ She nods then scoffs into her glass. ‘Unless they live at home like a total weirdo.’
There’s no distracting them this time, not when my flame red cheeks do the talking for me. Awesome. Roll up, roll up, and meet the lived-at-home, doesn’t-drink, wide-eyed hick, Mia Meyers!
‘Although, I’m sure that’s really common in the US,’ she adds when she realizes her error, desperately looking around the table for help, but her friends let her flounder, hiding behind their drinks. ‘In fact, I imagine it’s loads better. More convenient.’
I force a laugh and shake my head. ‘Not at all. Super inconvenient actually.’
‘Then why live at home?’ Michael asks.
His head tilts to the side and he sounds genuine enough; the question doesn’t come off loaded or judgemental.
‘I skipped a grade when I was younger, so I graduated early. I was only seventeen when I started college. My parents are kind of protective.’ Putting it lightly.
A hundred different arguments I wish I could forget bubble up in the back of my mind.
‘They didn’t want me to live away from home until I turned eighteen, so I figured okay, I’ll wait until sophomore year then move into the dorms, but there was a break-in on campus right before the end of freshman year and they decided it wasn’t safe. ’
‘Living at home probably makes sense if you’re local,’ Bryn says. ‘I bet it has its perks.’
Michael nods. ‘Home-cooked food. A bed big enough for an adult human unlike the cots they give us here.’
‘A washing machine that doesn’t smell like a rat died inside it in 1956,’ Jenna adds longingly and suddenly I am not looking forward to laundry day.
‘It wasn’t so bad,’ I lie, because it was, but I don’t want them to know that. ‘And it was only like a sixty-minute drive each way.’
Jenna looks at me like I just said the most unhinged thing she has ever heard. ‘As in one whole hour? Every day?’
‘Maybe more like fifty if I left early or late?’
‘Yeah, sorry, that is fucking madness.’ Michael pats Jenna’s back as though she’s suffered a shock. ‘That’s farther than driving from London to Hemden and back every single day.’
‘Gave me lots of time to listen to audiobooks.’ I look over to the bar, willing Alice to return with my Coke just so I have something to do with my hands. ‘Anything good is at least an hour away from where I live. We’re kind of out in the middle of nowhere.’
‘I bet you were popular with your car though,’ Jenna says. ‘It’s the only reason we tolerate Michael.’
‘Tolerate me? You love me.’ He leans across the table towards me. ‘I’m extremely popular.’
She bats her eyelashes at him, hands clasped to her heart.
‘Thank you, o beneficent one, but if that’s the case, maybe you should piss off over there with the rest of your football cronies?’
She points across the room to a group of guys clustered on the corner of the dancefloor.
Every single one of them stands tall, shoulders pulled back, perfectly comfortable with taking up more than a reasonable amount space in the crowded room.
An unmistakeable aura emanates from them, drawing people to them from all over the bar.
Athletes are athletes wherever you go, I’d recognize them anywhere.
‘They can manage without me for now,’ Michael says, barely able to suppress his glee. They are definitely hooking up. ‘Hanging out with you is charitable outreach.’
Jenna snorts into her glass as Alice re-emerges from the crowd, several bags of chips in one hand, a tall glass of Coke in the other, and drops into the open chair next to me.
‘Thank you,’ I say as she raises her own drink to mine in a toast. ‘I appreciate it.’
‘Don’t even, it’s nothing.’ She waves away my gratitude then nods at her friends. ‘Are they behaving?’
‘Yes,’ Michael and Jenna say in unison.
‘No,’ Bryn says. ‘But Mia hasn’t abandoned us yet, so they get a pass for now.’
‘I swear, I can’t leave you alone for one minute,’ Alice says, rolling her eyes. ‘Apologies. Aside from these monsters, how do you like Members so far?’