Amelia O’Donohue Is So Not a Virgin (3 page)

There was a young girl called Bronte in the bed opposite mine. She was fourteen and talked nonstop and her mother brought her whatever she wanted, including photographs of her boyfriend and bags and bags of those Italian chocolates with nuts in the middle.

“Have you had sex?” she asked when old lady Joan had finally left the building.

“None of your business.”

She said, “I have. But don’t tell anyone.”

“I never tell secrets,” I said, which was true. I didn’t like it when people a) told me their own secrets or b) told me other people’s. But if they did, I never mentioned it again, because it was personal, private, and would almost always harm someone if passed on.

In fact, I’d had a reputation for secret-keeping on the island since Louisa MacDonald stole a ten pound note from a cheese stall at the monthly farmer’s market and she saw me see her do it. After that, she told me all her secrets. Most of them were pretty lame, like she cheated on a math test and put dog shit in a bag and set it on fire at her ex’s doorstep. Then, one by one, people started trusting me with stuff I wish they hadn’t, accosting me at the playground or after church and whispering into my ear things that I didn’t want to hear, and certainly didn’t want to repeat.
Keep quiet
was my motto.

“This is Dean.” Bronte showed me a photo of the boy in question. He was at least three years older than her. He was in Speedos, banana hammocks. He made me need my mask.

I sucked the steroid-infused air from my nebulizer.

I had some other visitors during my stay. Mandy and Louisa came by twice with homework, candy, and magazines, and my father came alone one evening and held my hand.

“Are you happy?” he said, tearing up.

Retard.

• • •

When I got out of hospital, my mother made me lie in bed for three days before letting me hang out with Mandy.

The Grogans lived on the farm next to ours. They had more land, and better land. They had sheep, pigs, horses, and cattle. They had four girls. Mrs. Grogan wore designer clothes bought on the biannual shopping sprees in Glasgow as well as shipped up four times a year from a designer friend in London. She asked me to call her Aunty Jen, which I did, even though it felt bizarre ’cause she was no more my aunty than my father was. She baked, every day, and entered her perfectly sized, exceptionally straight carrots into the church fair each year. She always won and always wrote about the fair (her win) in daft newspaper articles that my father always published because Mrs. Grogan was my Aunty Jen. The articles went something like this:

BEST CARROTS ON RECORD!

Mrs. Jennifer Grogan won first prize at the annual island show last Saturday for carrots described by judges as “the best carrots on record!”

“It’s nothing,” Mrs. Jennifer Grogan said. “Just good luck, hard work, and a certain oneness with nature.”

My mother didn’t like Aunty Jen. She’d come over to our farm at least once a day with baking that reminded my mother that she was a crap baker, homegrown tomatoes that reminded my mother she was a crap gardener, and tales about her livestock that reminded my mother she was a crap farmer. Whenever Aunty Jen left, my mother would shut the door behind her, sigh heavily, and stare into space.

I liked her, though. She was a normal parent. When Mandy had sleepovers, which she did at least once a term, her mother would totally leave us alone except to yell at us (“Girls, we are trying to sleep! Turn that music down! Mandy, didn’t I tell you to switch those straighteners off when you’re finished? You’ll burn the house down!”). Unlike my mum, who—during the one sleepover I’d had; I would never host another one—was always popping her head in my room and smiling and asking us in a soft voice if we were all right and if we wanted anything.
So
embarrassing.

The Grogans were in the process of sending all four of their big-chested, perfectly groomed blondies to Aberfeldy Halls for their final year at school. Don’t know why they bothered, really. The
two who’d been already had only just scraped through. One was working in a bar in Aberdeen. One was in beauty school in Inverness (which was tougher than you might imagine, apparently).

• • •

I walked over our paddocks, through the fence I’d fixed just before my asthma attack, and across the Grogans’ fields to their huge white two-story house (all houses on the island were white). The journey from ours to theirs only took about ten minutes cross-country, but it was like being transported from the world of the peasant to the world of the landlord. They had stables with horses and all. I hadn’t been outside for a long time, and there seemed to be too much light and air. Everything was wobbly, especially me.

“You get to go into town on Fridays and do whatever you want,” Mandy told me as she showed off her gorgeous blue and maroon uniform.

We were in her attic bedroom, which had a blue-tiled private bathroom, a double bed with one of those flouncy white things flowing down from the ceiling, a computer, and a telly with satellite. It was so unfair.

“Marg used to meet her boyfriend from Baltyre Academy and they’d go down the river,” she said. Marg was her beauty-therapist older sister.

“You get to smoke on the fire escapes,” she told me, holding up her gold handbag-esque schoolbag. “There’s about a thousand butts at the bottom and the teachers don’t say anything. You get to go to ceilidhs twice a year.” She started showing off her new white duvet cover and weekend clothes. “Marg says Baltyre Academy boys are good looking and can dance.”

I walked back to peasant-ville. My legs were working better now, but everything still felt otherworldly. Our small white house, in particular, seemed to shift and blur in the distance. As usual, a feeling of dread settled in my tummy as I approached home. I would have to go inside. I would have to eat dinner at our quiet table. I would have to sleep in my small room with no flouncy white thing, no computer, no private bathroom, and no satellite.

I had to find a way to go to Aberfeldy Halls.

• • •

“You need straight As to get into Medicine at Oxford,” I said to my parents that night over roast lamb and roast potatoes and broccoli.

My father said, “And why would you want to get into Medicine at Oxford?” He always answered a question with a question, using as many words from the original question as possible.

“So I can be proud of myself,” I said sadly, knowing it was never going to happen.

Why would they understand my ambitions? Neither of them had ambitions anymore, not like in the old days. My father had been a high-flying world affairs journalist for a national newspaper. He’d traveled all over the world to report on big (mostly tragic) events. He used to whistle nonstop. Now he ran the local newspaper and wrote about ferry cancellations and trapped sheep. He never whistled. My mother had been a fund-raiser for a big charity. She used to wear gorgeous designer clothes that made her look like a French movie star. Now she dressed in old jeans and woolen jumpers. Now she stared into space and sighed heavily while her brain crunched like a computer that’s slowed by a virus, and tried to look after some of the sheep my father reported on. They’d been proud of themselves once. It hadn’t gotten them anywhere.

• • •

A week after my release from hospital, my mother and my father dropped me off at the village dance.

“We’ll pick you up at 10 p.m.,” my father said. “Wait with Mrs. Grogan inside the foyer until your mum comes in to collect you.”

I wore my fave outfit: denim mini skirt, silver top, silver shoes. I looked good. But my nose was red and my eyes were slightly intense, and I had three pimples on my chin and no matter how long I blow-dried my thick, wavy, brown hair, it didn’t flatten it the way Mandy’s ceramic straighteners did hers.

Mandy and I were embarrassingly early. We sat on two seats near the DJ, watching as the lights dimmed enough for the town’s Populars to make their entrance.

“Did you meet a girl called Bronte in hospital?” Mandy asked.

“Yeah.”

“She’s a total slut.”

“That’s not nice.”

Mandy was like, “Did you not notice her stomach?”

“No.”

“Eight months. Maybe some boy called Dean, maybe not. Her parents are putting her under house arrest. They’re never letting her out again.”

She was about to volunteer more unwanted info when John walked up to us.

“Dance?” he said. He had very bad low-cut jeans that revealed two inches of his gray boxers, and a tight black T-shirt.

“Thought you chucked me.”

“Well, I’m picking you up again, aren’t I?” he said.

We danced then John went and got some Irn-Bru and sat beside me in the corner.

• • •

About an hour later, I found myself sitting on a toilet seat in the bathroom.

“Rachel!”

I opened the door to the toilet cubicle and peered out. It was my mother.

“Come with me.” She grabbed my hand and dragged me from the ladies’ toilets and through the dance floor (everyone stopped and looked) and through the foyer (everyone stopped and looked) and into the car out the front.

Mrs. Grogan had seen me and John. She’d called my mother.

What followed turned out to be the best week of my life.

I was grounded.

No telly. No phone. No pals. No reading.

But it was still the best week of my life because at the end of it, my mother and my father sat me down at the dining table and said, “Darling, you’re going to Aberfeldy Halls.”

M
y mother and my father drove me to Aberfeldy Halls a few weeks after the school dance. I’d been so excited I hadn’t gone out at all since that night. Besides, there was no use risking another asthma attack, no use risking the need to hide out in a toilet. I’d bought books online, read as many of them as I could, and packed and re-packed my suitcase about one hundred times.

Finally, the day came to leave.

My father edged our four-wheel drive up the ramp and onto the ferry. It was an elderly no-nonsense carrier that was mostly for cars, but there was a thin room with graffiti-covered tables and chairs to sit in for the hour it took to sway our way to the other side. The windows were round and tiny: fogged on the inside and obscured by horizontal rain on the out, so you could hardly see anything. This was the beat-up, two-door, no-central-steering, Ford Fiesta of ferries. I’d always hated it, from the day we first drove our car onto it, waving good-bye to
the real world. But this time I loved it. It was taking me away. After an hour in water purgatory, we would drive off it and onto the mainland and freedom.

After docking, the drive took two and a half hours. I looked out the back of the car window as the island disappeared from view, thinking
good riddance floating prison, good riddance
. We drove past hills, more hills—nothing jagged, just rolling and peaceful. No trees at first, then some, then flowers on grass, and flowers in tubs on quaint riverside cottage verandas.

Aberfeldy Halls stood on the edge of the pretty market town of Aberfeldy. There were the usual shops in the village strip: butcher, hairdresser, pub/café, newsagent, pub/supermarket, post office, pub/Indian takeaway, chemist, fish and chip shop, pub. After the small line of shops was a line of quaint stone, terraced cottages set back no more than two feet from the road. Out the front of one of the cottages sat an unmanned trestle table with gingham-topped pots of homemade jam. A jar of coins indicated the high level of honesty the villagers expected from their customers. Further on from the cottages were large, detached houses with turrets and meticulously pruned hedges.

The village ended with a thin stone bridge over a fast, deep, salmon-filled river. Ten meters beyond the river, an iron gate on the left displayed the words “Aberfeldy Halls.” My limbs were
numb, my heart pounding, as we drove through the gates, up the 500-meter driveway towards the old sandstone mansion. Once, this building might have been considered imposing: the sort of place Jane Austen’s wealthier characters would live in. It was a house, originally, but the rich bloke who owned it sold it in the 1980s, and it became a private boarding school. Since then, new buildings had been added—the mostly glass office and dining building to the right, which was connected by a thin, covered walkway to the four-story pebble-dashed dorms, and the gym, nestled in behind the playing fields to the left. Behind the dorms was a beautiful thick wood. The wood and the new buildings made the whole place comfortable. It wasn’t imposing at all. It was dynamic, beautiful, and inviting.

“You get to drink white wine in the woods,” Mandy had told me. “You get to hide there during study time and have secret rendezvous with boys from Baltyre Academy.”

• • •

Miss Rose met us at reception in the office building. She introduced herself as the third-floor matron, but “matron” seemed the wrong label for her entirely. With trendy short light brown hair and a flowing multi-colored hippie skirt, she oozed all things un-matronly: approachability, tranquility, kindness. She was around the same age as my mother, but she was prettier.
Also, every second thing she said did not involve “the good lord.” I liked her immediately. She welcomed me with a hug.

Miss Rose walked us through the classrooms, all of which were located in the original manor. Despite the high decorative ceilings, the rooms were clean and crisp like the year’s first notebook. On the top floor there was a theatre and an impressive art department. The store was in the basement across from the Church of Scotland chapel, where you could light a fake candle for fifty pence.

The track and the fields were as groomed as Mandy’s mum. There was a sparking new gym with basketball courts and a pool nestled in behind them. This was a school for rich kids, I realized. And I wondered, for the first time ever, how on earth my parents could afford to send me here. One day, maybe I’d ask them. But not now. Guilt was not welcome now.

Back in the dining hall at the back of the office building, Miss Rose explained about meal times. Breakfast was from 7:00 to 8:00, lunch from 12:30 to 1:30, tea from 6:00 to 7:00. As she talked, I looked out the large glass windows towards the pebble dash dorms, desperate to walk out along the thin concrete walkway to my cubicle.

Oh sweet cubicle.

Probably not very different in size from a prison cell, made
from dark wood, with a large sliding door that didn’t lock and walls that didn’t quite reach the ceiling. Mine was second from the fire escape on the third floor (Right). Each of the four floors had a Right and a Left, with a shower block in the middle, a small communal kitchen with a microwave and kettle, two rows of twenty cubicles either side, and a fire escape at each end. I looked out my new cubicle window to see if it was true about the cigarette butts at the bottom of the fire escapes (it was—must’ve been at least 1,000), then shielded my mother and my father from doing the same, or else they’d have driven me straight home again.

Please go! Please get out!
My mother and my father were asking about nurses (there was one) and nebulizers (there was one) and Sunday observance (they would make sure I attended the local free church on Sundays) and holidays (not compulsory to go home) and phone calls (no mobiles allowed, please use the pay phone in the hall on the ground floor; if someone phones you, we will call you over the loudspeaker) and
please go. Leave me alone. Let me sit in my room, with my suitcase and my red duvet and my desk. Leave me to greet Mandy Grogan and Louisa MacDonald who may arrive any moment. To write my name on the new notebooks I bought from one-eyed Mrs. Crookston at the village shop (Thank you, I’d said to her, looking straight into it).

“Right then,” Miss Rose said. “I’ll leave you to say your good-byes.”

“Good-bye,” my mother said. She seemed a tad tearful. I’d not seen her tearful in a long time.

“Good-bye,” my father said. He was always a tad tearful. “Good-bye,” I said, taking the bible my mother handed me and watching as they walked down three flights and across the walkway towards the dining hall.

I admit: I was a bit upset seeing them go. They seemed so bereft, so ill at ease in each other’s company.

But the melancholy only lasted for as long as I could still see them. Soon as I couldn’t, I did a silent-scream-while-jumping-up-and-down-a-bit. I was in heaven. Not by myself in the middle of damp nowhere, praying on a hardwood floor. Not listening to teachers who knew less than I did. In
heaven
. Putting my favorite bright red duvet cover on my bed then bouncing on it. Peeking out my window. Pushing at the fire escape door. Checking out the toilets. The cupboards on the landing. Reading the rules for the television room directly underneath my cubicle. Exploring the hobby rooms on the second floor—a bright sewing room, a messy arts and crafts room, a darkroom that was no longer in use since the onset of digital cameras.

“Submissions for ideas on the use of this room are welcome,” Miss Rose had told me when we’d passed it earlier on, pointing out a sheet pinned to the door. Already three suggestions had appeared: group study, music room, and internet café. I turned the key in the door and snooped inside—the room was empty, nothing special.

Back in my cubicle, I lay out my laptop, a notebook, a pen, a pencil, and a calculator on my desk

My own world. My own space.

This was the beginning. I would make things happen here. I would make myself proud, my parents proud. I would work hard, be good, the best, the top. Small fish in a big pond? Not me. A big one in a big one.

The beginning.

A noise.

Miss Rose again. Another mother. Another father. A girl, sliding the door to the cubicle beside me. A new friend perhaps? Someone to giggle with in the shower rooms? Someone to chat with before going to bed? Someone to learn from, study with?

I listened to the good-byes (
I love you! Write to us! Take care, eat sensibly…you know…yes? Enjoy it, won’t you! I don’t want to leave you! Love you, love you, bye!
).

Knock knock.

I slid my door open.

“This is your neighbor,” Miss Rose said. “Amelia O’Donohue, this is Rachel Ross.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Amelia O’Donohue said.

“You too,” I said.

We shook hands. She had thick, long, wavy hair, unlike everyone else who flattened theirs to look like brown paper. She wore a shirt with the collar up, and a sleeveless jumper on top that was so small the bottom of her shirt hung out from underneath it. Her eyes were the largest, brownest eyes I’d ever seen. Her skin was the clearest, brownest skin I’d ever seen. She had big boobs. She was slim, not skinny like me. I was so skinny my father sometimes put his fingers round my wrist and lifted my arm up and laughed. She had the latest high-waisted shorts and cool shoes and very white, straight teeth.

“You’re the first to arrive! Early birds! Best of friends, I can tell,” Miss Rose said. “I’m going to leave you to chatter and unpack your paraphernalia.”

Miss Rose said words like
paraphernalia
. What a hoot.

We listened to her walk down the hall and down the first flight of stairs and then Amelia’s expression changed from fake-smiley to snarly and in a very posh English accent she said, “No
coming into my room. No asking me for stuff. No touching my stuff. No geeky music. Any questions?”

“No. I think I’ve got…”

Didn’t get a chance to say “it.” Amelia O’Donohue had exited my cubicle with a spectacularly loud bang of my sliding door and entered her own, where she proceeded to plug in her iPod and play very loud music that I had never heard before but was definitely not geeky.

Obviously from a big English city, maybe even London. She probably went to clubs on weekends and bought ready-mixed Bacardi and Cokes from the liquor store without even flinching.

I did a silent-scream-while-jumping-up-and-down-a-bit.

This place was amazing! So amazing I found myself kneeling beside my very own bed on my very own hardwood floor and praying voluntarily, “Dear god, even though I don’t believe in you, thank you for sending me here. I will make you proud. I will thank you every day. And sorry for my sins. And god bless my mother and god bless my father. To the power of infinity. Amen.”