Chapter One: Saturday's Kids

She was nice. I mean, ugly as all hell, and quite probably deranged, but nice. I tried to keep that at the forefront of my mind as I moved closer. As I looked into her eyes. As I noticed the yellow tinge to her buck teeth and it occurred to me that these might in fact be the worst teeth I’d ever seen in my life "worse than the set my grandmother kept in her bedside table, worse than the ones my dog had removed during his battle with gum disease… She was nice, real nice, f*****g mad kind of nice. So I did it anyway. I kissed her. And it felt like I was contracting herpes.

It was the tenth kiss I’d ever had "or possibly the eleventh, on account of a somewhat blurry night last May "and it was definitely the worst. Looking at this insanely nice girl, though, watching her smile at me with her rodent teeth like I was Jesus or some goddamn thing, well, it made me smile a little too. Maybe I’d wake up in the morning with blisters crusting over on the inside of my lip, but at least I’d made that girl happy for a minute. Well, closer to thirty seconds "there was no way I could’ve stuck it out for a full minute.

“Elliot!” I’d never been so happy to hear my name called, and, with a quick nod at the poor girl, I tore off in the opposite direction. Across the room, leaning against the doorframe in that casual, effortless manner that he had that made me want to clock him, Laddo was shaking his head at me. As I came within earshot, he just dissolved into a fit of laughter.

“Munted Megan?” he sniggered. “Did I seriously just see you get with Munted Megan?” I was silent. That was the only way to take it. “Mate, you just ruined your life, honestly, you’re never going to hear the end of this. There is no way you can possibly live this down! It’s "it’s f*****g hilarious man, I mean, what were you thinking? Nah, don’t answer that, I don’t want to know what creepy perverted thoughts you were having about Munted Megan.”

“Look, Laddo, can we just drop this?” I cut him off, starting to get annoyed. “You won’t tell anyone else, will you?”

“Nah, course not mate.” My airway finally opened back up, and I breathed a sigh of relief. “Only, I think people might figure it out when they see this photo I just posted.” From that moment on, his speech was unintelligible, completely masked by his stupid cackling, and as much as I wanted to put his balls on a skewer and grill them, I elected not to. I wanted to be the bigger person, and also, I knew the kid would have me face down in the dirt before I could even switch on the gas.

Laddo was the sort of person who managed to rub everyone the wrong way at some point, but we all liked to keep him on our side because he had great contacts in the illicit substance world, and he really was a good laugh when he wanted to be. By all definitions he was much cooler than me: he had more rowing trophies, more girls’ phone numbers, more punk rock t-shirts and much more attractive hair. Despite this, and despite the fact that he was a self-declared little s**t, we were actually pretty good mates. He was also the one who got me into that party in the first place, so I wasn’t allowed to abuse him too brazenly.

It was one of those packed, shambolic events where no one really knows who the host is and enthusiastic drunken eaters are raiding the fridge like it belongs to them and aspiring pimps are directing handsy couples into bedrooms like it’s their own private brothel. I’d been to many such events in my lifetime, but unfortunately for me the only time I’d ever been sent into a bedroom was to pass out, all by my lonesome.

Well hey, if I get really desperate, I’m sure Munted Megan would be up for it, I thought to myself, then threw up a little in my mouth. No. Absolutely not. If I ever become that desperate, I’ll ask Laddo to smother me with a pillow; he’d do it, too. Would probably be more than happy to help out. So, solid plan.

My father would always embark on one of his long-winded morality speeches when he heard me say things like that; he thought those jokes were ‘in extraordinarily bad taste’. I guess he had a point, but if you were trying to be truly politically correct, you’d never be able to say anything about anything. I liked to take a different approach "basically make fun of everything, and then nobody could take offence because otherwise everybody would have to take offence. Sure, some of them are serious issues that really twist your heartstrings: racism, AIDs, suicide, terrorism, whatever. That doesn’t mean they should be off-limits for an especially entertaining joke, though. I never thought of it as belittling the problems, but more like turning them into something other than problems, d’you know what I mean?

I had been sitting up to this unknown person’s kitchen bench, staring at the bowl of chips in front of me like it had b***s. I had kind of fallen into the habit of doing that "zoning out and unintentionally alienating the entire world around me, that is. Not the imagining parts of female anatomy where there are none thing, though if I’m being completely honest, this was not the first time I’d done that. Anyway, while I was gazing into the distance looking possessed, nobody ever really bothered to approach me. That night was the first time somebody actually dared interrupt the lunatic’s stare. 

“Excuse me?” It was a voice I didn’t recognise and, even more surprising, it sounded female. With slight trepidation, because these situations had always been rather unkind to me in the past, I turned around to match the voice to a face. I couldn’t help smiling when I saw her; she was smiling at me, and when somebody has that devastating a smile, you kind of have to return it. She was small and she could barely keep her feet still, like one of Santa’s elves late for a delivery. Honestly, she looked like she might break into a tap dancing routine any moment. Pretty, but not in an obvious way. In fact, there was nothing at all conspicuous about her, nothing striking, but somehow she had caught my attention, and I’ll tell you now, she didn’t let go of it for a long time.

“Excuse me,” she repeated, dragging me out of my musings, “do you know where Brooke’s bedroom is?” Her voice was soft and unobtrusive, reminding me of something from a meditation podcast (not that I have ever listened to one of those).

“Umm…” I had no idea where Brooke’s bedroom was, of course, or who on earth Brooke was, but I knew if I said that instantly then the girl would be gone, and I wouldn’t have the chance to dazzle her with my wit "or my extensive accumulation of Jedi trivia. Amazingly, it was her that saved the painfully awkward silence from consuming us.

“I’m Alison, by the way,” she said, still smiling, still patiently awaiting my response. And I had just about formulated it "no, really I had, I’m not just saying that now because it’s convenient "when we were rudely interrupted. The word ‘rudely’ is remarkably apt in this instance, as the interruption was Laddo.

“Honey,” he slurred, throwing a lazy arm around Alison’s shoulders, “don’t even think about getting with him. He just took advantage of a poor retarded girl, you know.”

I began to stammer an objection, but Alison had already turned away from me to ask Laddo where Brooke’s bedroom was, and he was already leading her off, and once again I was the hopeless idiot who never stood a chance. My world was full of people who seemed to know exactly what they were doing, and I felt desperately alone in it. I don’t mean to sound like a whiny, self-involved little b*****d, but I guess we all feel like that sometimes. Sometimes we can’t help it. We feel trapped, confused, uncertain about ourselves and where we’ve come from and where we’re meant to go from there. It’s not as if I’d been through anything extraordinarily tragic…

You see all these documentaries about kids with alcoholic mothers and abusive fathers and all kinds of mental illness, and you think, well, they’ve got reason to be fucked up in the head, d’you know what I mean? They’ve actually got real problems with real ramifications and without real solutions. They’ve earned the right to complain just about as much as they like. People like me, who’ve had everything handed to them but are always searching for something more, cannot bear to stand beside those other kids, those real tragic kids, because we look horrific by comparison. Sometimes, when I see people on the street, I wonder what category they might fall into. Whether they’re just like me, or whether they actually are real tragic kids. Because you can never really know for sure. I mean, I would look at Laddo and think he was a bit of a prick who had no concept of tragedy, but there could’ve been far more to him, layers that I simply didn’t know, because he simply hadn’t told me. Perhaps Alison, behind that bouncy exterior, was torn apart inside. Maybe Brooke, whoever the hell she was, was secretly struggling with things I could never hope to understand. A person can masquerade as one of us for the longest time, but then turn out to be something else entirely. Or they can pretend they are a real tragic kid when really they’ve come no closer to tragedy than Donald Trump. Then again, Donald Trump himself might be the most tragic of all "there’s just no way to be sure.

The party soon disbanded into a collection of exclusive little sub-groups, none of which I seemed to belong to; I lasted another five minutes at most before calling my parents to come and pick me up. On the drive home, my dad was silent, as he always was, and my mum was prattling on about random and slightly disturbing episodes from her own youth, as she always was.  

“Did you have fun at the party, Eli? It’s a very nice house, isn’t it? I remember there was a girl in my class at school who had a house just like that, and one weekend her parents were out of town so she threw a party, quite the rager really, and do you know, halfway through the night I found a used condom in her kitchen sink! And kitchen sink is not a euphemism here, Elliot. Now, the moral of the story: always be safe, but, more importantly, always clean up after yourself, because nobody wants to see something like that, do they? Remember that, Elliot; one day you will need to know these things.” Hopefully that day isn’t too far away.

 

***

 

Monday sort of just came out of nowhere. I remember walking through the school gates that morning and thinking, Hey, wait a second, how did we even get here? The rest of the weekend had just disappeared on me. Maybe it was the dreadful hangover, maybe it was shame over certain uncomfortable events that shall not be mentioned again, but it felt like what I imagined waking up from a coma to feel like. I was glad for it at the time, but it had lulled me into a false sense of security. Back in the real world, the torture had barely begun.

The second I turned the corner, a wall of sound accosted me: the sound of a hundred loud, rowdy, heckling schoolboys trumped up on testosterone. I couldn’t make out specific words, but I already knew what it would be about. People say girls are the most chatty, gossip-obsessed bunch on the planet, but I’m telling you, news from a weekend out spreads just as fast at a boys’ school. On top of that, there is way more exaggerating and s**t stirring and generally duplicitous behaviour, and there is absolutely no subtlety about it. I suppose that’s a good thing in a way. Once, as I was queuing for the bus, I overheard a group of girls absolutely tearing apart one of their mates behind her back, and I had to feel sorry for her; at least my friends had the balls to make fun of me to my face.  

Laddo, of course, was the first to emerge from the pack and give me a hearty slap on the back. He was grinning like a shark possessed, and I realised then that the best thing I could do was laugh with him. In fairness, it was actually f*****g hilarious "in a fairly mortifying sort of way.

“Now, now,” said Laddo, holding up his hands to silence the shouting. “Come on, lads, give the man a break. We all know Megan is totally for the boys.” And they all raised their hands in their favourite salute, the FTB gesture that you had to be a hermit not to recognise in that place.

“What about you, though?” I asked Laddo as the crowd dispersed and we started out on our usual route to first lesson. “What happened to you Saturday night?” He had a hideously smug look pasted across his face, and immediately I knew that he had something to tell me that I probably didn’t want to hear. I just hoped it wasn’t anyone that I knew, or anyone nice, or anyone with any character to speak of. It’s not that Laddo was the physical embodiment of the ninth circle of hell or anything, but any nice girl could definitely do better.

“Oh nothing. Well, I mean, a little more than nothing… I fucked her, that little brunette girl that you were scaring off in the kitchen. Alison, that was her name. Not a complete knockout or anything, I know, but when I got her in that room… I’m telling you man, she was an animal.” I kept my face as unequivocally neutral as I possibly could, but I can’t say I wasn’t caught off guard by the story. Okay, I didn’t expect Alison to be some kind of saint or something; I just thought she seemed like a girl with her head screwed on the right way. I assumed she would’ve had better taste than to sleep with Laddo. Obviously she was allowed to have a bit of meaningless sex with a man w***e if she wanted it, but I certainly hoped she knew that that was all it was. Girls had been fooled by Laddo before, and I wouldn’t have liked to see that happen to Alison. Not that I was catching feelings "hell, I didn’t even know the kid "she was obviously just an alright sort of girl, d’you know what I mean? Oh screw it, I’m making myself sound like a complete tit. I didn’t even know what I wanted, but things had got all mixed up in my head and I found I couldn’t quite look Laddo in the eye that morning.

So I sat myself at the back of the classroom, built up a very nice mental fort around myself and pretended to be completely engrossed in the Cold War. When the bell rang, I fairly sprinted to my locker, brushing past everyone, not really caring whether they were trying to speak to me or not. None of those morons would’ve had anything worth saying anyway, I was sure. Regrettably, I was so focussed on avoiding eye contact with passers-by that I didn’t look up as I approached my locker. So when I finally did raise my head, I came face-to-face with Munted Megan, close enough to get another good look at the gingivitis eroding her gums. I mean, it was only a 2D version of her, a full-page printout some clever b*****d had taped to the front of my locker, but it gave me the fright of my life, and was met with a fresh outbreak of guffawing from my incredibly sophisticated peers. Laddo had called it right. I was never, ever going to live this down.

 

***