Authors: Melody John
‘Last week of the first term!’ Laura crowed, flinging a handful of popcorn into the air.
David picked kernels of popcorn out of Dmitri’s hair and ate them, grinning. Dmitri grinned back at him, and slung his arm across David’s shoulders.
I tried to smile as though I didn’t care.
‘We should do something,’ Laura said. ‘Before the holidays.’
‘The beach,’ I said. I’d meant it sarcastically, but David’s eyes lit up.
‘Yes!’
‘Dude, it’s
winter
,’ I said. ‘You know. In case you missed it, it’s freaking
freezing
.’
‘Yeah, but think about it! The crashing waves, the freezing winds, the unparalleled force of nature in all its raw power… And also nobody else will be there.’
‘There is that,’ I acknowledged.
‘There’s a guy in one of my classes who has a van,’ Laura said excitedly. ‘We could—oh my god, I know what we should do, we should take the van down and like camp over there; it’ll be just like one of those indie movies with loads of Imagine Dragons on the soundtrack, but it’ll be even more hipster because it’s in winter, not summer.’
‘So hopefully fewer lens flares!’ I agreed. I was actually starting to get a bit excited about it now. ‘Oh, dude, we totally should. What do you guys think?’
Dmitri shrugged and looked at David. ‘What do you think?’
‘Do you want to go?’ David asked him.
‘I’ll go if you go.’ Dmitri glanced around at the rest of us as though he meant all of us in that ‘you’. But I knew he meant David.
‘Wow,’ David said. ‘So it all rests with me now. I hold our future in my hands.’
‘Yeah, don’t hurt yourself,’ Laura said, flicking another popcorn kernel at him.
David grinned. ‘Then yeah. We should totally do it!’
‘Sweet!’ Laura cried.
‘Sweet,’ I echoed.
Dmitri smiled at David, then at the rest of us. He hadn’t treated me any differently since he’d found out about my power. Since he’d hooked up with David.
I didn’t know whether to be mad about that or not. I think I would have preferred it if he had been mean, rubbed it in my face and been catty about it all. Then I could have hated him, and that would have felt good.
But he wasn’t mean. He never went on about it; he never made it seem like he’d won and I’d lost—he was nice, and he was so clearly into David, and David so clearly into him, that all I could do was squash down my hurt feelings and sit on them so they never showed. I think Dmitri could tell, though; he knew how upset I was sometimes. But even then, he was tactful, diverting attention when I didn’t think I’d be able to hold it back for any longer.
So damned tactful. So damned nice.
I tried to be glad about that, for David’s sake. That was another thing—if Dmitri had been a jerk about things, then I could have felt justified in hoping that he and David would break up, because David deserved to be with someone nice, someone as nice as he was. But Dmitri wasn’t a jerk; he was so damned pleasant that I hated how miserable I felt, because he and David were doing really well.
I knew I should be happy for David’s sake, and I tried to be, and I tried to like Dmitri. It was very hard.
‘So wait, how far away is the beach?’ Dmitri was asking.
‘Dunno,’ Laura said. She had her phone out, and was busy texting. ‘About a hundred miles?’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yeah, actually.’ She laughed. ‘Wow, a hundred miles. But yeah, that’s why we need the van.’
Unless we fly there, I thought, and bit my lip. Without meaning to, I glanced over at Dmitri, and I found him looking at me. We exchanged glances, and he grinned. I grinned back, a bit uncertainly.
‘How long’s it going to be?’ David asked. ‘Overnight?’
‘Maybe? Or two nights?’
‘My train ticket for back home is already booked,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a nine hour train ride up north, so I’ve got be back here by Friday.’
‘Okay, just the one night, then.’
‘So, wait,’ I said, ‘we’re going this week? Like, tomorrow?’
‘I guess so, or the day after. See what Ted says.’
‘Wow,’ David said.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I feel like we’ve pushed the big red button.’
‘Don’t, stop, come back,’ Dmitri said, perfectly imitating Gene Wilder’s deadpan delivery.
‘Aw, babe!’ David said in delight. ‘Your first movie quote in everyday conversation! Quick, let’s take a picture.’
Dmitri rolled his eyes. ‘Oh my god, you’re such a dork.’
‘Says the person who just quoted
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
,’ I said. I actually smiled, and tried to mean it. ‘And it’s the original as well, not the remake.’
‘If you did quote the remake, I would have to have severe words with you,’ David said.
Laura’s phone buzzed, and she checked it, then said, ‘Okay, so Ted says we can have the van, but only if he can come with a mate.’
‘Who’s the mate?’ Dmitri asked.
‘He doesn’t say,’ Laura said.
‘It’s going to look a bit weird if you ask, though,’ I said. ‘And what if he says someone who we hate, and then we say no, and it’s going to be obvious that we said no because we hate the other person.’
‘We don’t hate anyone, though,’ David said. ‘Well, at least
I
don’t—I don’t know about the rest of you psychos.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Oh, it should be fine, shouldn’t it? What’s Ted like, Laura?’
Laura lifted one shoulder in half a shrug. ‘I don’t know him that well. He’s a bit too Kerouac for me, really.’
‘Kerouac?’ Dmitri asked.
‘Oh man,’ David said, ‘you’ve got to see
The Rum Diaries
—it’s insane.’
‘That was Hunter S. Thompson,’ Laura said.
‘Pff, same thing.’
‘Kerouac,’ Laura said to Dmitri, ‘was a literary iconoclast who was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.’
‘You stole that from Wikipedia,’ David said.
‘Well…’
‘He was a writer who was, like, totally a hippie, and he hitchhiked across America until he drank himself to death,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ Dmitri said. ‘I hope Ted doesn’t think that that’s our plan.’
‘Maybe that’s
Ted’s
plan,’ Laura said, busy texting back, ‘but I’m telling him that if he brings along the stash of weed that he’s always writing about, we’re booting him out and leaving him by the wayside. Then he can really live the Kerouac experience.’
*
It was all arranged surprisingly quickly. We would leave the very next day, after lunch, giving us all time to gather things together.
‘Don’t we just need, like, a toothbrush and a quilt?’ I asked.
‘Hairbrush?’ Dmitri suggested. ‘Hand sanitizer?’
We all looked at him.
‘What, hand sanitizer isn’t cool enough for you?’ he demanded.
We shook our heads.
He sniffed. ‘Well, you’ll be sorry when you all come down with food poisoning. And I shall point and laugh.’
I went to my room to decide what to bring. I gathered together my concealer and powder and eyeliner pencils. My navy blue eyeliner was almost too short to sharpen properly anymore. I would have to get a new one. Thinking back, I realised that I’d bought that pencil when I was in college. And now it was almost finished.
I looked at my face in the mirror on my desk. I touched my hair, remember how obsessed I’d been with hair extensions a couple of years ago, the blue and green streaks that I’d worn almost every day when I was in college. My hair was a little longer now; I had light blonde and dark gold highlights in my natural light brown hair, and it was still a little wavy from when Laura had crimped it the other day.
God, I felt old.
No, not old. Older.
Sometimes college had felt like a blur of
do this, it’ll look good on your university application
,
have you done another draft of your personal statement yet
,
here you should look at this university prospectus and think about your future
. Now here I was actually at university. I’d finished the first term. I’d made friends. I’d settled in.
I spun around in my chair and looked around at my room.
The Back To The Future
poster next to the
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose
print, my Funko figures on the windowsill, the postcards Mum and Dad had sent me from their sudden autumn holiday to Morocco, the little dolphin figurine that I’d got on a day out in town with Laura and David and Dmitri.
How bare and unfriendly this room had seemed when I’d first moved in. Gradually, by degrees, it had warmed and changed, and now it was truly mine. My room. And I was about to go on a road trip with my friends, to celebrate having finished our first term of university.
I spun back around in the chair, and smiled at my reflection.
‘Lizzie?’ Laura called.
‘Yeah?’
She opened the door. She held up a tangle of clothes and hangers. ‘Which one should I take?’
‘Dude, why are you taking extra clothes? We’re only staying a night.’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘Ew. Aren’t you taking anything?’
‘Well, a clean shirt and undies and stuff, but not a whole wardrobe change.’
She untangled the choices, which turned out to be four different dresses. ‘See,’ she said, ‘the blue spotty one is nice, but I can only wear it with a cropped jumper, which isn’t very warm, so I’ll probably be cold. The black one is nice, and I love it, but my mum calls it my Wednesday Addams dress, and you know, I love Wednesday Addams, but she’s not really the impression I’m going for here. The green tartan one is nice, but so is the blue one.’
I tilted my head at her. ‘What kind of impression are you looking for?’
‘Huh?’
I folded my arms, grinning. ‘Are you into Kerouac?’
‘What?’
‘Ted. Wannabe Kerouac, with his weed and his van. Are you into him?’
‘No!’ Laura sounded genuinely scandalised. ‘Why on earth would you think that?’
‘Well…’ I gestured towards the dresses. ‘This just seems like a lot of effort to go to for an overnight beach trip.’
She stared at me. ‘Oh.’ She gathered them together again.
I felt confused; I didn’t know what I’d said wrong. ‘Laura?’
‘Sorry,’ she said, without looking at me. ‘You’re right, it doesn’t matter.’
‘Laura, no, I don’t understand—’
‘No, sorry,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I’m just making a fuss. Sorry.’ She scrunched the dresses heedlessly up in her arms, then shut the door behind her.
I sat there, completely perplexed at what I’d said wrong.