Page 4 of I Love You, I Love You, I Love You

Me and Jase. Jase and me. We are so in love. Yes, I know I never mentioned him before but that’s because I met him on MSN messenger, silly billies, and he lives in Slough. His great-grandad owns the Cadbury chocolate factory so when we get married I’ll get unlimited Crunchies. He’s going to get me a gold Argos ring with our initials engraved. We go to Thorpe Park and queue up for the teacups and people are jealous of our young love as we inch along in our spotless matching shell toes. Tongues tied in a red-hot lasso of Dr Pepper, Carmex and sour pineapple gum. He wins me one of those massive teddy-bears holding a heart in its paws with the words stitched I LOVE YOU. We plunge down the log flume together and I sit in-between his open legs, leaning back, casual, as we splash down the ride, blinded by the flash of the camera – but still posing – so we can get it printed onto a keyring so I can tell everyone that’s my boyfriend, Jase. We go to the cinema and I get fingered. Pretty easily actually because in the fantasy I am wearing those Adidas tracksuit bottoms with the poppers that Mum won’t buy for me. We celebrate in KFC. After that great day, I get to lose my virginity to K-Ci & JoJo’s ‘All My Life’.

But alas, my fantasy takes an unexpected turn. I fall pregnant and have to quit school, but I’m happy at first because I hate school anyway. I work in Shoe Express, which is a dream because it is my favourite shop of all time, but it’s not easy with our baby – Topanga – strapped to my chest, which is especially annoying when it comes to sizing people’s feet and eventually the novelty of employee discounts on sexy-ish school shoes wears off once I realize all the shoes at Shoe Express are made in the back room with a glue gun by a man called Keith and I have no reason to wear school shoes because – oh yeah – I don’t go to school any more so Jase could follow his dreams of just going to the Go-Kart track all day long until one day a girl with a push-up bra is having her eighteenth birthday party there and he fancies that girl instead and I’m left alone with Baby Topanga.

Eugh. I hate it when a fantasy goes off-piste.

I scrunch the photograph up and throw it in the bin. Those are minutes I’ll never get back. I hate Jason. I feel so used and dirty. Like I’m wearing someone else’s knickers. That’s the thing about lies – annoyingly, you just can’t lie to yourself.

I look at my mood ring to access my feelings. It glistens a yellowy amber, which can 100% only mean absolutely one sure fire thing … mixed emotions.

Oh.

The symptoms: uncertainty and nervousness.

Classic.

At this highly academic girls’ school I am in bottom set for everything from English to Science, which does absolutely nothing for my self-esteem. I know I only really got a place because Mum wrote some convincing sob story letter about how good I was at creative writing and stapled some of my scruffy handwritten poems to the admission form. One was about a fading beauty queen with feet like dead dormice. The other was about imagining if I had cancer.

I am exhausted by the teachers not giving me extra time, not making me their passion project or being excited by my potential. For all they know, I could be the expert they never knew they had who fosters a particular skill for finding rare fossils or accurately counting how many sweets there were in a jar just by glancing at it. Turns out, nobody wants to see my doodles and drawings and letters. My – don’t laugh – designs. One, a skin-tight white boob tube dress with a barcode down the side reading 2 XPEN5IV3 4 U. Cool, right? Or if somebody invested the time to teach me the guitar, I could turn my poems into songs for my band, ‘Skipped Disk’ (which is a hilarious and clever pun on the spine-injury slipped disc, and on the CD itself will be an X-ray image and of course the disc will inevitably skip – as all CDs do – and then the joke will really pay off. It’s really fucking cool actually).

‘We cultivate talent,’ they say. Only they don’t mean talent-show talent; they mean please be a genius at stone-cold maths or create something ‘outstanding’ like an entire grandfather clock or a 3-D printer you designed on your lunch break that goes on to make a chamber to slot inside somebody’s dying heart. Being great at chemistry, cricket, gymnastics, classics, choir or painting a still life of fruit tumbling out of a goblet also counts as talent – not, spending all of double science giving the girls a manicure with a pot of Tipp-Ex. Well, they’ll be sorry when I start my ‘collective’ and earn critical acclaim by creating gigantic, distressed canvasses with progressive art upon them, which will basically be a blank canvas with a word like BITCH scratched in massive letters and I can charge twenty grand for that one. No doubt they’ll be begging me back to give a motivational talk on Careers Evening and I’ll say no.

Aoife, my best friend, is the smartest person I know and for Aoife there is no telling where school stops and home begins. Living is education. Her interest for life is infectious and inspiring. All lethally supplied in heaped unfiltered doses by her South London hippy parents, who hide nothing from her. This level of honesty is refreshing and I appreciate it, as my own parents seem to be in on some hilarious in-joke of despising each other for the past year whilst plummeting us into debt and despair and not uttering a single word about it. I reckon the only reason they’ve got the bigger house is so they don’t need to be near each other. My dad always scuttling off to sleep on the spare bed in his hideout. Separate from Mum.

Instead of passive-aggressively slamming the door off the hinges, Aoife’s parents discuss everything from politics to psychology, the economy to engineering, sex, drugs, to the plot of Eraserhead, over reheated sweet potato at the dinner table, where Aoife’s point of view is regarded and valued. Her parents actually listen to her as she holds the floor, debating, laughing at in-jokes about politicians and passing around a witty short story in the Guardian she’d scissored out over the weekend. Even The Lodger joins in, pulls up at the table to throw in their twopence and I watch on in awe as it all sails over my head and wonder why my potato was ‘sweet’ and orange and not white. I stay the night, brain beating, absorbing, learning about Mad Cow Disease and the Labour party and Flat Feet. And in the morning Aoife and her whole family (+ Lodger) are off on the 159 bus with a packed lunch (including two-litre bottles of carbonated water), to visit some free exhibition at an art gallery on Human Rights, eat a slice of vegan gluten-free cake at the Buddhist café, swing by a feminist protest outside the library and make it home in time to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But was Aoife our school’s kind of smart? Probably not.

Ronks is book smart; often we need her to explain to us in slow-motion what the teacher just said. She’s clever enough to go Cambridge but she brushes me off and says, ‘Ella, don’t be mad.’

Bianca is the most rebellious of us. She’s the oldest and third tallest in our year group; I’m not sure if this fact is related but she also started her period a year before everyone else – so, like in a cavewoman sense, she’s the leader of the pack. And her surname starts with the letter ‘A’ so she’s first in alphabetical order for everything at school, and because of this, she gets whatever she wants. However, Bianca’s a bit too weird for her own good and rather than being the boss of everyone, she chooses to only micromanage a small group: us. And we let her because we are scared and weak. Bianca is constantly in detention for dying her hair different colours and getting extensions, wearing her skirt too short, not covering her nose piercing with a plaster and smoking the cigarettes she steals from her dad’s duty-free cartons, whilst the rest of us are eating Flumps. Bianca lives with her dad, who will always buy us a takeaway if we annoy him enough – but he’s also the strictest of our parents. Then again, I would be strict too if my daughter was Bianca. But Bianca says it’s the other way round; he makes her act out because he’s strict.

Then there’s Shreya, who says her insides are glow-in-the-dark because when she was a baby she drank a glow stick. Sometimes she has to run out of class crying – mostly during tests – because her parents died tragically in a car crash. But I saw her parents at her fourteenth birthday and they looked perfectly fine. She then said the car crash was just a premonition.

And The Twins. Who are, you know, posh and twins.

And apart from each other, we are ignored.

The girls at school really aren’t our species anyway.

On the plus side, there are no boys, which, at fourteen, is probably a good thing for us because we really fancy them. So that means we can sit back with our skirt buttons undone and eat as many KitKat Chunkies as we like.

The art of ‘self-defence’ is very much a part of our curriculum, taught in the sports hall by a teacher called Miss Eugenie who presents herself as a handsome fairy-tale prince. Basically, she is lanky with a Leonardo DiCaprio jawline, razor-sharp blonde haircut, piercing green eyes and a love for Eighties rollnecks.

Miss Eugenie tells us not to walk down alleyways alone, not to sit on the top deck of a bus alone, reminds us that perverts could even look like old women, so now on top of being scared of every passing person we must also not discriminate or underestimate our abusers. Must trust no one.

She says, if we’re ever threatened in public, we are to stand up like a Girl Guide and shout at the top of our lungs, ‘EXCUSE ME THIS PERSON IS BOTHERING ME!’ Or better still, ‘FIRE!’

‘Passers-by might ignore a girl crying out for help, but they won’t ignore the threat of a fire!’ She holds her finger up and looks at us powerfully. ‘Trust me.’ She winks, like she’s had to shout ‘FIRE!’ more than once in her lifetime.

One time, there is a man who flashes at us. He sprints manically across the field, letting his liberated willy flap from side to side, wagging and spirited like an Alsatian’s tongue out of the window of a back seat of a car speeding down the M23. And we are instructed to get inside, girls! and the doors are bolted. Despite the squealing, we are not really scared of this man, because he is just one quite small naked man, and we are 700 girls in bottle-green uniforms with facts about the periodic table that would bore an erection to smooshed banana quicker than one could say titanium. Instead, we are kind of thrilled by the experience, excited to be out of maths. We wait in the hall to quieten down, where the view is of a different organ altogether – that being … an … actual organ.

The whole thing feels very olden days, like nuns flocking inside some church hall, waiting for Dracula to pass. The organ makes that visual really pop.

Instead, we talk, we rehearse the ‘Macarena’, try to master the CrazySexyCool of TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’, braid each other’s hair, take turns to try on Zeniyah’s new Baby-G watch. We learn that a sneeze is one eighth of an orgasm and then try to make ourselves sneeze by pinching and sniffing the dust under the stage curtains. We scrounge, like gulls, smoky bacon Wheat Crunchies and gulps of Apple Tango and squabble over which of us the man was looking at, flattered (wait… annoyed? Confused? Sickened?) that any man ever even recognized us as girls.

‘Apparently,’ says Cherise, ‘the flasher left a porno mag in the school field with a yellow Post-it note attached to it saying if any girl wanted to “show themselves” to him, he’d give them ten pounds.’ The magazine was a ‘brief’. Stage directions – this is what he had in mind. I never get to see the magazine or the note but I do wonder how the transaction would work, in a practical sense.

Would he really just hand a £10 note over?

Miss Eugenie ups the self-defence classes after The Flasher. She does spontaneous routes of the school, working her way down the corridors like a hound, pressing down on the metal handle without a ‘come in’ from whichever teacher is teaching, and begins instructing an impromptu combat class to catch us off-guard. She is always hovering, switched on, like an avatar on stand-by in a computer game. Chest heaving, blood pumping, on the look-out for danger …

---