Page 8 of I Love You, I Love You, I Love You

How dare she make us all take our shoes off and not them? And now we feel enormously stupid in our cupcake and animal socks. Me, even worse, in my dad’s.

Cheers, thanks a lot, Mia.

Literally on the back foot, we step outside into the turning air, pricking our skin into goosebumps; we really should be wearing jackets.

The first job is to count them. This is The Twins’ idea. ‘Count them,’ one orders through gritted teeth, ‘so we can be sure there are enough boys to go round.’ Like the boys are a tray of biscuits. ‘We don’t want anybody getting, you know, left out.’ This is such a Twin thing to count the boys, to make sure everything is fair.

One, two, three, four … They won’t keep still; I’m trying to tot up the head count but they’re just so … busy … they roll on the ground like cubs, playing, jumping off hedges and spraying beer at each other. But when they are standing, a couple of them are big. Big. Big. Giants. Men. But with rollercoaster voices that go up and down and twang like tuning forks. I see no love of my life here. I can happily sit this one out. My friends are ready, their glances changed, their looks fixed – then again, Aoife can hardly see. The Twins have the nerve to pour Lambrini into picnic cups like we’re sophisticated adults. When we’re really a joke. Bianca’s bright shock of dyed-red hair and wonderful boobs smothered in roll-on glitter are delighted with themselves, plunging buoyantly. She twists her nose stud; it winks with power. Aoife readjusts her sparkly butterfly clips. Ronke is already accepting a spliff from a boy! Ronks?! What the hell? That is very advanced. Meanwhile my fanny origamis in on itself, never to be seen again.

And it’s as if my eyes are lasers, red beams cornering off the Crown Jewels. I score a square in the air and friend-zone myself. Mentally, I see the red lines clearly, like in that film, Entrapment. And, here, in my zone, safe. Immune from romance. Immune from rejection. Untouchable. A chair. A brick. A cabbage.

Bianca confidently passes to the boys a bottle of clear hard cheap booze that smells like nail varnish remover. They take turns to swallow it down in bold mouthfuls, like they do this all the time, dragon breaths burning. They hand out cigarettes like sparklers on Bonfire night. Bianca never shares her cigarettes with amateurs. If you can’t inhale properly, it’s a waste, she says, monitoring under her shaved brows to make sure you don’t spill a drop of her cancer. There are some Monster Munch crisps in a bowl as a gesture, which The Boys tear into, so now they smell of E-number Roast Beef, rip-off alcohol … and—

Wait. Is this what teen spirit smells like? Like Roast Beef Monster Munch?

Mia is cool, casual, umpiring like the Great bloody Gatsby, honoured to be the host. It’s her free house, her territory – her alcohol, her Haribo. With her generosity, her social importance soars to such a dizzy height that she could nominate herself for Prime Minister and she’d have the vote. ‘I’ve made punch!’ she announces, raising her ladle to the sky.

Said punch is a bright orange witch’s brew. With jelly babies at the bottom that have swollen into bloated distorted pregnant goblins. The mixture tastes like Panda Pops and sticks to the back of the throat like cough medicine. ‘EUGH! THAT’S GROSS!’ Someone wretches.

Mia laughs the critique off giddily but I can tell she’s hurt. She plays harder, as if that was the reaction she was after – ‘Yeah! My punch is lethal, man!’ – as if it’s a family recipe that goes back centuries. She pours an old white bottle with a palm tree on it into the bowl, the metal cap crusty, and swirls it together, whilst everyone makes a noise about this: ‘You’re crazy, Mia.’

And Mia glances at me like, I’m not sure I want to be crazy, Ella; is crazy a good thing or a bad thing?

And I nod with reassurance like, don’t overthink it. Crazy’s fine, I think. I dunno.

When this is my brain: FUCK! THEY’RE CALLING HER CRAZY!

I’m completely sober. I have a responsibility, a job – the role of The Goody Goody Parent Pleaser. Every group needs one, especially at gatherings: somebody sober, who, in case of an emergency, can hold the fort, calm The Worried Parent down, reassure them that we’re not as drunk as they think: see, look at me? And we all drank the same amount! Tell them that I’ll be the one to text when we get there, to order the taxi, to make so and so some toast to sober up, to listen to The Worried Parent’s problems whilst the kettle boils. To distract, whilst your friend is throwing up, or crying, or getting fingered in the Treat Cupboard. It really helps.

We listen to music; we talk over each other, parading, showing off. We are loud and boisterous. Aoife is already snogging some guy, and Shreya has disappeared into a bush with someone somewhere (and they both have braces, very weird) but this is what we came here for, right?

And I have a feeling in my belly when I look at Mia, a shove of envy but mostly pride. She’s done it: she’s broken free. She is reinvented as cool.

And suddenly, what feels like just moments later, we are covered in it: thick coral vomit. It pounds down from a height, like gunge from that show Get Your Own Back. Galloping down from the open bathroom window, ploddy sick cascading down like a veil of sweet and sour cake mix. Oh, Mia.

WOAH! The Boys dodge the vomit dramatically; screaming, shouting, laughing, pointing, hopping onto the wall. Complete overreaction. Humiliation.

We turn to run towards the house to get Mia but OH, RIGHT, she’s already here, trembling in the garden, eyeliner streaking down her face like a Batman villain, her face like a Rorschach test in mascara. We rush up to her, put our arms around her, half-giggling, thinking, hoping, praying she’ll see the funny side. She does not. There are no sides to vomit.

But we all want to save her. I really don’t want to have to go home.

I run inside, into the kitchen, scramble for a pint glass, fill it with water and hand it to her. ‘Drink this … ’ I offer, trying not to show I can smell the tang of sick.

‘FUCK YOU!’ Mia dribbles back at me in a demented roar. OK, rude. And she throws the pint glass at our baggy jeans and the water soaks into our socks. Mia orders, ‘GET OUT’ and that she ‘HATES’ us. She razors, ‘JUST GET OUT MY FUCKING HOUSE I SAID, I FUCKING HATE YOU ALL!’

Maybe she does? Maybe she does fucking hate us?

The boys make comments about her, that she’s lost the plot, that she’s a psycho.

Psycho Mia. It doesn’t even have a ring to it.

And – oh shit – suddenly her dad is there, her dad, still in his black real-life-actual-job overcoat and briefcase in hand, shock and panic in terrified graphs all over his blank face, wrestling with his drunken daughter across the kitchen floor, ordering us all to leave, with immediate effect.

And as a group, we are kicked out from this house of horrors, onto the streets. The sky seems to be darkening in that impending doom way that always germinates dread. Like Sunday nights before school. It begins to rain, hard. Typical. The cars rush by.

Mia has peaked too soon; these are her new school friends and this is what she’s done and it’s hard to come back from an act like this. And we can’t pretend we’re just kids and say we ‘didn’t know’ because we know right from wrong. And I feel bad about it, proper guilt, that it’s somehow our fault, that I didn’t spot she wasn’t OK. It almost makes me want to go home.

And then I hear one of the boys ask:

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