Am I Normal Yet? (10 page)

And I promptly lost interest again, staring instead at the “JESUS LOVES YOU” banner hanging limply above the stage.

As they catapulted into their next song – a really REALLY angry one – the audience rose to a new level of mass insanity. We were pushed and jostled from all directions and I began to really not enjoy myself. The random posh blokes kept bumping into us, and then falsely apologizing. Amber gave them her very best evil eye but they didn't seem to care. Then one of them pushed the other, and he pushed them back, and before we knew it…

…
Whoosh
…

A bottle of beer whistled through the air and emptied itself all over Lottie's everything.

For a moment, she just stood there. Dripping. Her hair mangled. Her make-up smudged. Her clothes drenched.

“Oh my God,” one of the boys said, moving forward from the group. He was tall and very clean-looking and his voice was the poshest thing I've ever heard. “I'm so sorry. Are you okay?”

Lottie glared at him. “Was this your fault?”

“Yes. I'm dreadfully sorry. The boys, well, we got carried away.”

He leaned in so Lottie could hear better but she pushed him away.

“Get off. I'm SOAKED.”

“I'm so sorry.”

“Good. You should be.”

“Hang on, Lottie, is it?”

“How do you know my name?” she demanded.

Her face was so full of venom even I was scared. Posh Boy backed off a bit.

“Didn't you used to go to my school?”

She nodded slowly.

“I'm in the year above you, I think. I remember seeing you around but I've not for a while, did you leave?”

Lottie was still glaring at him, but I could see her thawing a bit.

“I'm sorry,” he continued, still waving his hands, all posh. “Let me make it up to you… Can I get you a drink?”

“You know what? I'm doing okay on the moistness front.”

“Some peanuts then?”

Lottie gave him a look.

“Crisps?”

She looked to the band and back again. Joel was in the middle of a five-minute guitar solo whilst Guy lay on his side, pushing himself round in a circle using his legs. Lottie swept her wet hair off her face. “Yes. Multiple bags of crisps might do it.”

Posh Boy steered her through the crowd towards the bar whilst Amber and I looked at each other and shrugged. Jane, oblivious to all the drama, screamed, “I LOVE YOU, BABY!” through her hands. Posh Boy's mates didn't bother trying to make small talk and were swallowed by the crowd. The guitar solo made way for a five-minute drum solo…

I was getting bored. This was a problem. Boredom leads to worrying.

The clashing of the cymbals twitched my brain. The banging of the drum sped my heart. I imagined everyone's breath coming out into this airless hall. The spent carbon monoxide, the droplets of germs floating through the air after people coughed. My heart started giving the drummer a run for his money.

Most bugs aren't airborne. Most bugs aren't airborne.

But most are carried by touch. And it felt like half a million people had touched me in the last half-hour. I pictured the bacteria multiplying on my exposed arms, spreading down to my wrist and up my palms and fingers.

My throat went tight.

Trying my best to hide my inner wobble, I leaned over to Amber's ear and yelled, “Can we take a break?”

She smiled. “I thought you'd never ask.”

Leaving Jane in a love-struck trance, we elbowed and jostled our way out. My heart thudded the whole time and it seemed to take ages. But eventually we pushed through the double doors into the lobby and were engulfed in calm. There was space. And oxygen. And clean air streaming in from the entrance. I shivered with relief and delight.

“Where's Lottie then?” Amber asked, her voice a bit too loud, not yet adjusted to the lack of screaming music.

I looked round for her. “I dunno. Probably killing that guy somewhere. Did you see how wet she got?”

“I'm just jealous she had a reason to leave sooner.”

“Music not to your taste?”

Amber winced, making her freckles blodge together on her nose into one brown lump. “No. Not at all. Do you ever worry you're being a teenager wrong?”

I thought of the last three years. “I KNOW I'm being one wrong.”

“I mean, what's wrong with finding songs glorifying domestic violence offensive? What's wrong with finding live music too loud? What's wrong with a nice cup of tea and a chat?”

I giggled. “You sound like my mum.”

“You see! I'm doing it wrong. But sometimes, like tonight for example, I really don't bloody care.”

We made our way to the bar slowly, taking our time so we could delay going back in. There wasn't a queue – just some underage drunk girl half-passed out on a giant cushion in the corner, being forced to drink water by the staff.

“I can't see Lottie,” I said. “Isn't that guy buying her crisps?”

“Maybe she's drying herself under the hairdryers in the bathroom?”

We went back to the toilet. She wasn't there.

“Outside?” Amber suggested.

The air was even cooler and crisper outside. A hint of autumn winged around me, making goosebumps ripple up my arm.

“Lottie?” I called softly.

Getting a bit nervous, I called again. No answer. What if the posh drink-chucker was actually a psycho and the drink-chucking was an elaborate ploy to get Lottie away from her friends? What if he was killing her right now?

We crunched in the gravel round the car park, towards the church, and my worries were stopped in their tracks.

Lottie's body was pressed up against the wall. By Posh Boy's body. Lottie's face was pressed into Posh Boy's face. Lottie's hands were on Posh Boy's arse. An unopened bag of crisps lay at their feet.

I looked at Amber, who'd spotted them at exactly the same time.

“Looks like she's forgiven him,” Amber whispered.

“Looks like it.”

We turned away and crunched back alongside the church, which was all lit up in eerie beauty by floodlights.

“Evie?”

“Yes?”

“Would you think I was being a teenager wrong if I said: ‘Can we go home now, please?'”

“No,” I said. “I'd think you were a legend.”

So we sent a message to Jane and an otherwise-engaged Lottie to let them know we were leaving.

Lottie was loved up. Since the band night she'd had a heady glow about her, and her phone kept going off. She disappeared some lunchtimes to meet Posh Boy (Tim) in the graveyard and would come back with leaves stuck in her hair. In that time, Ethan had stopped giving me Labrador eyes in sociology and now chatted everyone else up. I'd begun looking forward to film studies instead. Brian's lack of professionalism made it easier to get to know Oli better – we now traded film recommendations like children trading football cards. And I'd dropped another 10mg on my medication. I was now down to only half a pill. HALF! I used to take three a day, plus benzos, a tranquillizer-type drug that made me sleepy all day.

“You know,” Amber said to Lottie, as we prepared to pay for another breakfast at the dodgy cafe. “You are allowed to talk about Tim. We're your friends. We're happy for you.”

Were we? I'd privately been more sad for myself that yet another friend had procured a boyfriend whilst I remained unlovable.

“Yes, tell us,” I said. Jealousy would get me nowhere.

Lottie blushed and ducked behind her dark hair.

“God,” Amber said, with a bit of disgust in her voice. “You're proper loved-up, aren't you?”

Lottie went redder and moved the dribbling sauce bottles about on the sticky tablecloth.

She mumbled something.

“What?” we both asked.

Lottie emerged from her hair. “I said, I feel bad talking about it.”

“What? Why?” Amber asked. “Evie and I can handle your gushing, can't we, Evie?”

I nodded and put my hand on Lottie's to stop her playing obsessively with the sauce. “Of course we can.”

“But I don't want to be one of those girls…” Lottie put her head on the table briefly before raising it again. “You know, like Jane.”

Jane had got much worse since the gig. It was like she'd morphed into a mini version of Courtney Love overnight – backcombing her dyed hair, talking loudly in the canteen about wanting to get her nipple pierced. I'd even talked her out of getting matching tattoos with Joel. Tribal ones.

“Lottie, you are nothing like Jane,” I reassured her. “For one, you've not blown me off three times in the last week.”

“I know…I know…but I'm scared that if I talk about Tim with you guys then I'll fail the Bechdel test.”

“The what?” I asked, whilst Amber nodded wisely. “Nah, you won't. Don't be silly.”

I was confused. “What's the Bechdel test?” Was this something else I'd missed from school? Was it a test I was supposed to be revising for?

Lottie saw the panic in my eyes. “Calm down, Evie. It's not an actual academic test.” She patted my hand. “It's a feminism thing.”

“Feminism? There's a test for that?”

Would I pass? I quickly scanned my thoughts and feelings to check them for feminismness. The pay gap makes me cross, and yet I wear make-up. I feel sick whenever I look at the front cover of
PHWOAR
magazine, and yet I also look at the model's boobs and feel bad mine don't look like that. I hate that Jane ditched me for a boyfriend and that Joel is all she ever talks about, and yet, I would really quite like a boyfriend myself…

… My brain hurt.

Oblivious to my inner conflict, Amber explained it to me.

“Have you really not heard of it? I thought you would've done it in film studies. It's like a feminism litmus test for films and books and stuff. Basically, in the eighties, this super cool illustrator who I LOVE called Alison Bechdel realized that all female characters do in fiction stuff like films and books, is talk about men. So she made this simple Bechdel test. And, to pass it, a film's got to have at least two women in it—”

Lottie butted in. “And they've got to have at least one conversation about something other than men. Just one conversation, that's it. And it's passed.”

“Ooooooh, okay.” I thought through all the hundreds, possibly thousands, of films I'd watched, thinking it would be easy. Two minutes later I had nothing. Nothing but a dawning realization of how broken the world was. “Hang on…umm…surely…surely there's got to be some?” I said to them, feeling like my whole love of cinema had just dissolved around me, seeping into the plastic chair I was sitting on.

Lottie shook her head. “There are some films, but barely any; it'll take you ages to work them out. Like none of the Lord of the Rings films pass, and none of the original Star Wars. Even the last Harry Potter film doesn't have two girls having a conversation in it. It's screwed up, isn't it? Like, women aren't worth a storyline unless they're discussing men and what men do.” She wrapped her arms round both of us, dragging our heads towards the table and dangerously close to our remaining breakfast. “Still so far to go, ladies, still so far to go.”

I mulled it over some more whilst removing myself from her embrace. I didn't like my face being so close to a dirty plate.

“Okay, I get it. But we've just spent half an hour discussing the best way to eat eggs. And before that, we argued about which song from a musical best sums up our lives. And, just yesterday, you were explaining
The Female Eunuch
to me…so, surely we've earned the right to discuss your new boyfriend?”

“Ahh, yes,” said Lottie, patting my head, like I was the dunce student. Which I was, compared to her, who basically snorted academia in her spare time. “But if we were in a movie, then they wouldn't show any of that. They would just cut straight to this breakfast, to the moment you guys ask me about Tim.”

Whilst I sat there with my brain still throbbing, Amber reasoned with her.

“Come on, Lottie. We're your friends, we care about you. We're interested in Tim because he's something in your life, not just because he's a guy. I promise that you can tell us how deliriously happy you are without pooing on the sisterhood.”

“Eww.”

“So…is it love?”

Lottie visibly melted before us, her face softened around the edges like she was in a dream sequence. “He's…he's…” She went quiet and started playing with the bottles again. “He's really thick…”

“Umm, Lottie?” I said. “That's not very loved-up sounding.”

“But he's totally cute with it,” she protested. “And I'm not being a bitch – he told me himself he's a bit thick. Everyone at my old school calls him ‘Tim Nice But Dim' from that old TV show or whatever…but he is very sweet and I'm smart enough for both of us anyway. And…oh God, this is going to sound REALLY bad but he's a proper man's man, you know? Like HURR, or something. He's all muscly and protective and macho and sporty and everything I am technically really against, but actually, am annoyingly attracted to.”