Amelia O’Donohue Is So Not a Virgin (7 page)

Mandy and Louisa’s parents were there too. They’d been chatting with my folks before we got off.

“We were just suggesting you and the girls have a sleepover?” my mother said. “I could make cupcakes.”

The silence wasn’t long—probably not long enough for my ignoramus parents to realize that the girls would rather eat each other’s eyeballs than sleep at my house and have the stupid cupcakes I’d said I loved when I was like
four
—but it was long enough for my heartbeat to flit and flip at the speed of light.

“That sounds wonderful, doesn’t it, Mandy?” her mother said.

“Yeah. We’ll text you.” She looked at Louisa.

Sure they would.

• • •

When we got home, a new fence had been erected along the field between our house and Mandy’s house.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Oh, the Grogan’s always wanted that paddock,” my mother said. “We didn’t use it really.”

So that was how they could afford my school fees. They’d sold half our land to Mandy’s family. The realization made me gulp loudly. Swallow the guilt. There, it’s gone.

That night, my parents took me out to dinner in the only
posh restaurant on the island—we’d been once when I was tiny, during a holiday before we moved from Edinburgh. I remember we sang funny songs and played I-Spy for the five hours it took to get there. To my surprise, my mother and my father didn’t say grace, and I’m sure I saw them holding hands under the table when I came back from the loo. Strange. They hadn’t shown any signs of affection for years.

That night, my mother came to my room to say good night. As soon as I heard the door opening, I pounced to the floor to say my prayers.

“…thank you for everything and sorry for my sins and please may I have some humility to the power of infinity. Amen.”

I stood up and got into bed. My mother tucked me in and kissed my forehead and said, “I love you, Rachel. It’s so good to have you home.”

The next morning over salty porridge, my father found something other than evil politicians in
The
Scotsman
. “Look at this, will you, Claire?” he said, using my mother’s actual name.

“Mmm,” she said, reading from the Jobs section. All I saw was the heading: “Broadcast Journalist.”

“That looks perfect.” She patted him on the shoulder and put on the kind of real coffee we used to have in happier times in Edinburgh. I remember my father used to get up before us
and put it on every morning. “Ah,” my mother would say back then, waking beside me (I always ended up in bed with them in those days). Inhaling the coffee fumes, she’d carry me from the bedroom to the kitchen and squash me between them as she kissed my father full on the lips.

This slip back to our olden days was very odd indeed, but not as odd as christmas.

• • •

christmas was Sunday, and we started by going to church, just as we always did on Sundays, holding umbrellas, wearing thick coats, heads and shoulders down towards the ground where our lives also were.

We listened to the chant-like hymns, the sermon filled with doom and gloom and not-happy occasions.

The strange thing was that everyone looked at us oddly, like we were freaks, and while I would have agreed that my parents were in that category, I wasn’t, and it felt awful.

John was in the back row, just behind the Grogans. I turned around during the service and nodded at him. His mother elbowed him in the side. He winced, then looked at the floor.

Outside afterwards, Mandy and Louisa were chatting with him. They watched me come out of the church, giving me spectacularly dirty looks.

Even Mrs. Crookston from the corner shop managed a one-eyed dirty look. For some reason, our family was being ostracized.

“I’ve quit the paper,” my father said as we walked home.

“Why?”

“Because it was contributing to my slow and painful demise.”

What?

As we walked home, I spotted Bronte, the girl I’d met in hospital before going to Aberfeldy Halls. She was pushing a stroller along the main street.

“Hi Bronte,” I said, trying to catch her eyes, which were lurking underneath the hood of her huge padded coat.

She looked up, startled, then said hello nervously, before returning her eyes to their previous position and walking on with her wailing baby.

When we got home, my father did something outrageous. He said, “Damn it, Claire, let’s go for a drive and a walk and let’s put the radio on full blast.”

On a Sunday!

We drove to the other end of the island and parked the car on the side of the road. “We’re going on an adventure. To the cave of the winds,” my father said. For two miles, we trekked along the beach. My mother and my father held hands most of the way, except when we stopped to skim stones (I won.
Five skips on the bumpy black water) and compete in a long jump competition (My mother won. She used to be a champ at it back when, apparently). There was an uncanny amount of giggling going on. Maybe they’d been
doing it
while I was away, I thought, before thinking, don’t think about that for god’s sake, stop, oh gross, I’m seeing them, No!

The cave of the winds was just a small dark cave, not even big enough to stand up in. None of us knew why they called it that and going inside didn’t enlighten us. There was no wind, just a few empty cans of Foster’s.

I’d never known them to be such cheery rebels. It was weird as all hell. And while it was weird as all hell in a good way, I still counted the minutes before I could leave again.

That night, my mother caught me emptying tomato ketchup into the bathroom sink.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Oh, just…I need the bottle for an experiment,” I lied.

She accepted this lame excuse and left me alone to discover a ball of tinfoil. Inside, was a note:
Woods. Sunday before first day of term. 7:00 p.m. We need to kiss.

• • •

The week after christmas was quiet and uneventful. I studied, mostly, and got drawn into two endless games of Monopoly.
My parents had taken to experimental cooking with the radio on (Current music! Loud! Cooking together!). We’d marked the new recipes out of ten before an evening walk and a movie (When did they get satellite?). The night before Hogmanay, my mother came into my room. “I need to talk to you about the dance tomorrow,” she said.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am.”

“I think you’re right,” she said.

• • •

Mandy and Louisa continued to ignore me on the long journey back to school. I felt flat and exhausted by the time we arrived. The island had sapped my energy and all I wanted to do was sleep.

But I couldn’t. I had to see Sammy. I’d thought about nothing else. And when 7:00 p.m. came, I dragged myself from my bed and walked down into the woods.

I followed the dirt track from the back of the dorms all the way to the small derelict shack at the other end. Sammy hadn’t told me to go there, but it was
the
meeting place, and I assumed that’s where he’d be. I opened the wobbly wooden door expecting to find him, and gasped when I saw the girl with the ponytail kissing Mr. Burns, the PE teacher.

My gasp was a quiet one, so they didn’t notice as I walked backwards out of the shack, and shut the door carefully behind me. Blimey, a teacher kissing a student. Imagine the trouble he’d be in if anyone found out.

“Boo!” Sammy jumped out from behind a tree.

“Shh,” I said grabbing his hand and running back up the track.

We stopped in a clearing in the middle of the woods.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

I was like, “Nothing, that place spooks me.”

“I missed you,” he said, kissing me. I’m not sure if I kissed him back. But I liked it. I liked him. He tasted even more delicious than the food he made. He felt even more cozy than my favorite red duvet cover. Nothing like John, who tasted like Irn-Bru and whose tongue felt like sandpaper. It scared me to death, how nice it felt.

“I have to go back to the dorms,” I said. “I’ll get in trouble.”

“Can I see you tomorrow?”

“Maybe…” I raced off as fast as my body would take me, then lay in my bed and thought about the kiss. The warm, perfect kiss.

Oh dear, this wasn’t supposed to happen. This thing with Sammy had gone too far. This would unravel me, unravel everything.

I wouldn’t let it. I would put Sammy away somewhere safe and un-gettable.

So I didn’t meet Sammy the following afternoon. I avoided the curry shop from then on.

I
can’t remember exactly when the girls got fed up with tormenting me. Not long after christmas, I think, they began to realize that my lack of response gave them no pleasure. Also, Louisa started to realize that I was the only person she could be outwardly clever with. She came to my room a few times on the sly to talk over math problems. To add to that, Mandy and Taahnya et al., had discovered that Jan, the International girl, cried when they called her a chinky. Before long, she was the one whose bed was filled with Coco Pops. Poor Jan.

Something had changed in me around christmas time, anyway. I felt energetic, invigorated, and focused. I no longer cared about whether Mandy and Louisa liked me. I’d stopped taking the buses into town on Fridays. Girls giggling with stupid boys. Girls buying makeup and tops. Girls shoplifting and telling everyone. Fridays in town were not for me. It did my nut in. I had no interest in anything but work. And work I did. I read all the books on the English reading list three times,
then found all the literary criticism I could in the library, then wrote two practice essays for each. I liked my one on T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” the best. But my take on John Irving’s
A Prayer for Owen Meany
was pretty original, if I do say so myself. I managed to get all the exam papers for the past three years in biology, math, physics, and chemistry, and had them down pat after four or five attempts. In between, I handed in all my assignments and essays with pride and confidence. I was pretty good at this academic malarkey.

I don’t know how Louisa managed to stay in with the Populars and work so hard, but she did. Maybe it was just the smoking. An inordinate amount of cool bonding seemed to take place on the fire escapes. Louisa studied almost as much as I did, and always got As. She and I were constantly looking at each other as papers were handed back, wondering who’d done better. It was always very close.

• • •

Through January, February, and March, the only incident that varied my study routine happened on the night of the second school dance. I stayed behind this time, with girls who felt too ugly or too hip or too devoted to boyfriends from elsewhere to go. Surprisingly, Amelia O’Donohue was one of them. “The boys are idiots and the girls are worse,” I overheard her saying
to Taahnya. “I’d rather watch the telly.” Which is what she did. Nonstop.

I was writing an English essay at my desk when my door opened and closed and Sammy stood before me, just like that.

“How did you get in here?”

“Just walked in the front entrance. What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing.”

“We have the most perfect moment then you disappear for months.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m not interested in getting involved.”

“I’ve never met anyone like you, Rachel Ross. You’re infuriating. You’re the cleverest person I’ve ever met and you’re funny and incredibly easy to be around, but it’s like you’ve tuned everything out. How can you do that?”

“I’m just motivated.”

“No. I don’t think it’s that. You’re scared.”

“I am not.”

“Then kiss me. And I don’t mean let me kiss you. I mean kiss
me
.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You may not understand this, but I have one goal. I don’t want anything to screw it up.”

Before I had time to stop him, Sammy grabbed me old-movie style and kissed me violently. I didn’t succumb or soften, I pushed him away and yelled, “Get out of here! How dare you? I never want to see you again for as long as I live.”

He sighed, shook his head, and walked out of my room.

• • •

By the time April came, I had taken to rearranging things in my cubicle, repeatedly cleaning out my cupboards, taking an unusual amount of pleasure from the comfort of my cocoon. Sammy left me alone, just as I’d asked. But just before the easter holidays, I bumped into him in front of the chemist.

“Hello,” I said.

“That all you’re going to say?”

“Aye.”

“You know what? You’re screwed up. There’s something wrong with you. I give up,” he said.

“Good.” I headed along the road and up the driveway.

But he didn’t give up. He ran after me. “You make me angry,” he said. “I don’t usually do angry.”

“Sammy, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m just not interested in getting into anything. I want to be a doctor. I want to go to Oxford.”

“Well, I’m not going to stop you. A kiss won’t stop you.”

“Can you just leave me alone?”

“Right, fine,” he said. “I’ll leave you alone. Like everyone else leaves you alone. So you can study alone. Work alone. Die alone…”

“Shut up,” I said, upping my pace and leaving him dangling at the end of the driveway.

• • •

I didn’t go home for easter. I read, revised, took notes, went over practice exams, worked, worked, worked. I hardly spoke to a soul. I told my mother and my father that all communication was on hold until after my exams. Reluctantly, they agreed.

Word had spread that the probable dux of the school would be asked to do a motivational speech before the higher exams began. I knew, and everyone knew, that it was between me and Louisa MacDonald. When the principal, a business-like man called Mr. Gillies, called me to the office, I guessed what it was about.

“You are an inspiration,” he said, as I sat opposite his desk. Mr. Gillies always wore blue suits and brown shoes. He said short sharp hellos to everyone as he strode purposefully through the school (hello.hello.hello). I’d never heard him say anything else before now. “Every teacher has nothing but praise for you,” he said. “Your practice exam results were the best this school
has ever achieved. Would you do a speech at assembly before the first exam? To motivate the girls?”

“Of course,” I said, feeling ambivalent about it. All the girls hated me. I was a hermit, a Keener, a Brain. An ambitious, dour-faced, boring, friendless, loveless Brain. How could I motivate them?

As I walked out of his office, Louisa spotted me from the driveway. Her eyes narrowed. She didn’t like me being favored by the principal. She cared about these things more than I did.

But I have to admit, the request invigorated me. I had the most promise. I was an inspiration! Anticipation, nerves, excitement, and angry determination welled and swelled inside me as I wrote the speech ten minutes later. I was about to succeed.

I was about to escape.