Page 5 of I Love You, I Love You, I Love You

‘Girls, a fox has regrettably sniffed out the henhouse and it is only a matter of time before he strikes.’

We shriek and flap about on cue like the flustered hens we are.

Oh, she can’t wait for this fox of a man to strike so that battle can commence. But he never returns again.

Once, a boy called Maximilien, a name meaning The Greatest, is brave enough to take part in an exchange programme and comes all the way from classy France to be a student at our girls’ school. For two whole weeks a real-life actual boy takes RE with us. Geography, History, Science. Even PE with us. One boy versus hundreds of us. It dawns on me that if Maximilien tried hard enough, he could possibly potentially get ALL of us pregnant and we could recreate a whole community without ever needing another man ever again and that is both a startlingly scary and powerful thought. How far can sperm stretch?

Maximilien is just a boy, any boy, and we perve the absolute life out of him: gawping, winking, pecking, poking, frothing at the mouth. All every girl in our whole entire school cares about is which one of us Maximilien will choose to be his bride. We aren’t sophisticated enough at this point to understand that attraction comes into it, that actual consent comes into it. That girls might not even be his preference whatsoever. Because for us, this isn’t about Maximilien; it’s a case of: whoever gets chosen to be the wife of the exchange student is, by default, Queen of the Fucking School. All hail.

It’s easy for me. One of the perks about not being pretty is that Life Olympics such as these seem to simply pass me by. I don’t have to enter them. Like, there is just NO point. I can hold my hands up from the start and say, I’m out and just write about the chaos I witness in my notebook instead.

Total pandemonium ensues. The popular girls start wearing gloss on their lips as thick as mayonnaise, rolling up their skirts, stuffing their bras with balled socks and pads of tissue. This Maximilien must think he’s died and this is his heaven – if angels all wore bogey green and had greasy fringes and retainers they had to take out before they ate their tuna melts. At first he rocks it. For a minute Maximilien, the boy with the name like a new chocolate bar, lives up to his namesake – he must really feel like The Greatest. But then the pressure, prowling and, let’s be honest, harassment clearly overwhelms him. His once almost-starched popped collars begin to droop, his shoulders to cower. Towards the end of week one Maximilien lunches by himself or with teachers who shield him and his panini like bodyguards. Maximilien is a trophy. A sword in the stone. And the girls are on odysseys driven by throbbing hormones and hysteria. He begins to creep, sheepishly, around the corridors like a quivering lamb, avoiding the growls of hungry lions (I am an alpaca) to the safety of the accessibility toilet – the only toilet he can use without fear of being spied on and terrorized. The door pounds, the handle jiggles, perverted whispers smoke him out through the gap in the door, or a girl just bursts out from behind the hand-drier with a ‘gotcha’.

I mean this is not OK. This is fucked up.

He counts down the days before his release and then he RUNS out of that school, boy, probably not breathing a single sigh of relief until his plane zooms off into the sky and the drinks trolley is coming round.

Some girls have boyfriends who hang around outside the school on bikes. Or even inside cars. The teachers do not like this. Boys are a DISTRACTION. And girls like Aoife and me, The Unchosen, walk past Boyfriends like they’re a road accident, minding our own business, but craning our heads to steal a look. The Chosen girls look at us with screw-faces like we are after their parking space or table by the window at Pizza Express.

Some of the girls aren’t interested in boys. Yet or at all. Some hold hands freely with other girls. Sometimes, I hold Aoife’s hand too, but I don’t get any fanny tingles.

As I walk out of the school drive towards the gates and I see the boys, I can almost trick myself into thinking that maybe the boys are waiting for me. It’s a sad fantasy daydream game that occasionally my dad wakes me out of with the horrible honk of his battered old Saab.

Or worse – The Vespa.

Nothing wilts my heart at much as Dad arriving to pick me up from school with his Vespa. It means having to lift my actual leg up, flashing my bobbly knickers enveloped with potentially a sticky sanitary pad, wings spread to the entire world, my heavy book bag digging into my bum, a badly fitted helmet rattling on my head and quivering all the way back home with Dad ordering me to ‘lean in’ with him at the corners.

You mean lean in to death, Dad. To having my face shaved off by a pavement. And he wonders why he has a hernia.

I come home, leg hair windswept, muscles taut and tense, eyes streaking, freezing cold and needing a hug.

On Fridays I walk home, taking my time winding down the back roads, sometimes with Aoife; then, in my freezing cold attic bedroom, we talk about boyfriends.

Aoife thinks boys are terrific. We say terrific because it’s the one word my little sister Violet’s Barbie doll says when you push the button in her spine: ‘terrific’. It’s terrific that Ken has cheated on her with the Pocahontas doll, that she’s been trapped in the shoe cupboard or dragged around by her hair by Sonny. ‘Terrific, terrific, terrific,’ she announces like a psychopath.

‘Something in the Way’ plays on repeat and Aoife lies on her back staring up at my DIY wallpaper: cut-outs from magazines, printed song lyrics and photographs. Her glasses steam up and she sighs, ‘Ohhh, Elbow,’ her nickname for me because once a teacher asked me what Ella was short for and Aoife said, Elbow and now it’s stuck. ‘I just really want a boyfriend BADLY. Don’t you?’

‘So bad,’ I say to fit in, but secretly I’m frigid as hell. I miss Hibjul, my boyfriend from nursery. He was such a decent bloke.

In truth, I don’t think a man or intimacy is what I’m after right now, given that my idea of great physical pleasure is diving into the massive rolls of oversized carpets that hang like a giant’s mangle at Carpetright (because obviously an entire pixie universe is to be found back there). That’s the kind of out-of-body utopia I’m trying to get to but I’m worried that if I don’t at least meet a boy up close and personal any time soon that I’ll be like this forever. Rolling into carpets whilst my mates are getting married.

‘How the hell do we get one?’

‘Maybe our blood isn’t sweet enough?’ I offer.

‘Go on … ’ Aoife takes it like I’ve only gone and cracked it.

‘Mum says the reason mosquitos don’t bite me as much as Violet is because I don’t have “sweet blood”. Maybe it’s the same with fit boys? We repel them? Maybe my blood’s just too – you know – savoury from eating all that smoked cheese and turkey wafers?’

‘True. So, what you’re saying is that we just need to eat more chocolate biscuits?’ Aoife takes on the Old Wives’ hack, until she remembers: ‘Oh no wait, I always get bitten by mosquitos.’

I won’t lie, my heart wilts at the thought of Aoife’s blood being all Snapple sweet. I bet mine’s all briny like the gross juice they put around tinned tuna.

‘Where are all the boys?’

Where is the boy zone?

Boys cut from the metre rolls of Boyfriend Material are scarce.

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