Page 49 of I Love You, I Love You, I Love You

‘What does avant-garde mean?’ I ask.

‘It means weird as fuck,’ says Mum. ‘Are you coming in the car home?’

I see Dom and the others in their outlandish outfits, walking in the direction of the pub where the bar staff turn a blind eye at our lack of IDs, half-waiting for me to join them. Then there’s Aoife, Bianca, The Twins, Shrey and Ronks, standing around, talking about hot chocolates and jacket potatoes at the café near Bianca’s. Even though I’m meant to be celebrating with the cast, I can’t not go with my old friends; it would be unforgivable. Besides, in my eyes, there isn’t a great deal to celebrate.

‘I’ll get the train with this lot,’ I say to Mum. I see Dom and her wonderful long black coat with the colourful felt shapes turning away in disappointment, linking arms with the New Friends from college. To them, performing anything, good or bad, is what they love: playing, creating, experimenting. It’s the process; what other people think is irrelevant and so, yes, there is much to celebrate – our wonderful weirdness, the refusal to cringe at our freedom of expression regardless of critique.

My Old Friends wrap their arms around me like they won the friendship battle, like they always knew they would.

‘Now tell me please,’ Bianca says, ‘what the FUCK was that play about?’

And we all laugh.

As we are heading out of the school gates, this guy (from my class but we’ve not spoken yet; he’s quiet – his name, maybe, Nile?) in a denim jacket who has the most charismatic face in the entire world, a big hooked nose and massive brown eyes, with the greatest Madonna gap in-between his teeth, walks past and without stopping says, ‘Great play.’

I flush rose with embarrassment as our eyes hug and say, ‘Thanks,’ but he’s already gone.

PING!

‘Who was that fitty?’ Aoife whispers in my ear.

‘Some guy from school,’ I say, a smile creeping across my face.

That weekend Dominique and I go to a wild house party with the New Friends. I’m wearing a pink spaghetti-strap dress covered in palm trees that Dom has convinced me I look ‘astounding’ in. A guy is going around cracking imaginary eggs on knee caps and letting the invisible ‘yolk’ trickle down because apparently it’s like an orgasm. If that’s true, I really don’t get the hype over orgasms. We play a game called ‘Nervous’, where you have to let someone run their hands up your leg and see how high the person can climb your thighs until you shout ‘NERVOUS!’ There’s a hot tub and the whole party clamber in with their clothes on, share bottles of sour alcohol and play spin the bottle – a real game of spin the bottle where everyone actually plays. I’m standing on the sidelines because I don’t want to catch crabs.

He’s in the garden, holding a bottle of cider. Nile. He looks like he’s walked out of the Seventies.

I point him out to Dom. ‘That’s the guy who said he liked our play.’

‘In that old brown suit?’ she asks.

I nod, yeah.

He turns to face me, under the garden lights, and smiles. We stare at each other from either side of the bubbling tub, the bottle swinging back and forth in our direction, as kids from our year group kiss.

He appears beside me with a ‘Hey.’ He congratulates me on the play, for, and I quote, having the bollocks to throw shit around. I try not to take the word shit personally, even though the damage is already done.

‘Oh, you’ve got an accent?’ Like clotted cream and rolling hills.

‘It comes out more when I’ve had a drink.’ He laughs. ‘I’m from Devon.’

He then tells me he is absolutely head over heels in love with London and I laugh. ‘I’m not joking,’ he says. ‘I just cannot get over this place. The history, the clothes, the libraries, the literature, the shops. Do you have any idea how lucky you are to have grown up here? You have all this stuff on your doorstep! You can just walk to a gig! The theatre! And the food, my God. I don’t sleep cos I’m so excited by it.’ He laughs. ‘I miss the sea though.’ His face is calming. Like the sea. He says he’s not been to Camden. Ever.

‘What?’ ‘I say. ‘You’re going to die.’

The next day, Nile and I meet up at the station to go to Camden. He’s wearing a Smiths t-shirt and a smile – toothpaste fresh. On the Tube, I wonder if people think he’s my boyfriend. I take the lead like a tour guide. We stroll the markets: the overpriced band t-shirts, the latex platform boots, tattoo and piercing shops and sticks of incense, the troughs of luminous orange sweet and sour chicken. We sit by the canal, the sun breaking through the clouds, and eat pulled noodles. It’s nice; it feels good. Simple. And easy.

Scarily, I find myself wanting to call Nile ‘Lowe’. I’ve never called anyone else ‘Lowe’ before. The rare name, to me, holds such weight. Nile must be pressing on that familiar affectionate pad in my brain – I can’t help but think of Lowe; what he’s doing today, who he’s with. How much it would break my heart to see him sitting by some sunny canal with a girl who isn’t me. But I have to move on with my life. I’m almost seventeen now, so this time with Nile, I’m trying my very hardest not to friend-zone myself.

Pretty soon we’re glued to one another. Some lunches, we skip the canteen and go to the deli. Nile speaks Italian to the staff because his mum is Italian and they can’t believe it and feel sorry for him that he’s studying so far from home – as if home is in actual Italy. ‘You’ll starve!’ they say and gift him sheets of fatty ham, thin as glass, in waxed paper and posh plump olives with the pips still in, which Nile can expertly spit out from the corner of his mouth without having to nibble the flesh like a mini apple like I do. Once, for no reason at all, they give Nile a whole panettone that comes in a massive, decorated box with a ribbon, a box so flamboyant you’d expect to find Marie Antoinette’s shoes inside. He quite sexily rips massive hunks off the sweet bread throughout the day, offering me handfuls.

Nile is the best actor in our year group. He’s shy in real life and yet, on stage, he evolves into this charismatic, flamboyant wild angry man who is good at playing gangsters; shouting and pulling at his hair and punching his chest like the gorilla in the Rainforest Café, letting himself spit when he talks on stage, spritzing through the spotlights and we sigh in awe, like, now THAT’S what I call acting! Once he lets himself get slapped during a performance and the whole theatre gasps – even the orchestra stop playing their strings for a second – and real tears bulge in his eyes and in the eyes of the actor who slapped him (who never meant to hit him that hard), and Nile’s left with a red diamond of a hand mark on his cheek. Everyone is starstruck.

It is all very fit.

Nile is the teacher’s new prodigy.

He is also my new crush.

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