Page 22 of We Used To Be Magic

I can tell that he believes that, at least. And in spite of knowing better, maybe I do too.

AUDREY

WE’RE INTHE BACKOF ACAB WHENMY PHONEBUZZES.

‘It’s that guy from earlier,’ I tell Marika. ‘He’s sent the address to his party.’

‘Let me see,’ she replies, reaching for my phone. I lean over and watch as she taps on his profile. It’s a colourful mish-mash of food, local scenery and selfies. Reassuringly normal.

‘It’s not his party,’ she says, scrolling. ‘There’s no way this guy lives in Midtown.’

‘Maybe it’s a friend’s place,’ I offer.

Marika looks at me sideways, passing my phone back. ‘Did you fancy him? Is that why you want to go?’

‘No!’ I say hotly. ‘But he seemed nice, right?’

‘ “Seemed” being the operative word here.’

‘Okay, well – I won’t go if you don’t. I just thought it might be fun.’

‘You and I have different ideas of fun.’

‘Parties aren’t fun?’

‘Not house parties. They were tragic at school, they’re tragic now.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ I admit.

‘You’ve never been to a house party?’

‘Well – one, actually. Once. It turned out weird. I kind of fell out with the girls that invited me, so …’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s fine,’ I say quickly, glancing out of the window. It’s embarrassing, talking to Marika about school. I don’t want her to know how crushingly unpopular I was.

The sixth-form college was the last school I ever joined. I was sixteen – my parents had agreed that we’d stay in the same place while I finished up my A-levels, and I was excited about the prospect of making someactualfriends. There’d be other new kids, I figured, making me less of an anomaly. And for a while, everything actually went amazingly. I was partnered on an English Lit project with a pretty, syrupy-voiced girl called Becca, and she more or less adopted me. I started spending all my time with her gaggle of friends, who were, for lack of a better word, popular. I wish I’d been enlightened enough not to care about all that, but I wasn’t – I loved it. Because they’d deemed me worthy of attention, people started paying me attention. It changed everything. Suddenly I was striking and mysterious instead of gangly and awkward. Even the fact that my clothes were boring and I didn’t wear make-up was a bonus, because they loved to dress me up. And I wanted so badly for them to like me, even though they didn’t always seem to like each other that much.

I was stupidly excited when they invited me to that party. The house was big, the music was loud and I was wearing a borrowed, too-short dress that I felt ridiculously self-conscious in until I was about three drinks deep. That was around the time when a boy called Hugo from my biology class spoke to me for the first time – a big deal, seeing as I’d been nursing a crush on him since our very first lesson together, when he held the door open for me on my way in. We’d never spoken, but he sat a row in front of me and sometimes when I answered a question he would look over his shoulder at me and smile, and I’d feel myself melt into a puddle. ‘How come you’re so smart?’ he asked me that night. I don’t remember what I answered, butI do remember a curl of his soft, dark hair brushing my forehead when he leant in to kiss me.

It wasn’t my first kiss. There’d been other schools, other boys, other crushes. If a class was particularly boring, I’d sometimes pick someone within my eyeline and justdecidethat I liked them. Every so often they’d reciprocate, and I remember those interludes as stilted but sweet, nervous, pursed-lip pecks and scribbled love notes passed between sticky hands. Things evolved as I got older and the general enthusiasm for that kind of thing grew, but it never stopped feeling at least a little bit performative until Hugo. It was the first time I’d ever felt eclipsed by the enormity of my own desire, self-preservation slipping through my fingers as easily as silk.

He asked me if I wanted to find an empty room, and I did. He asked me if it was okay if we sat on the bed, and it was. And it was okay when his lips met mine, my dress riding up as we sank down on to the mattress – better than okay, it wasgood, and we only stopped because I somehow felt like I should want to. Everything was happening so fast, I explained, and he nodded and smiled and asked if I wanted a drink of water. I said yes, and as soon as he was gone, I started smiling so hard I thought my face might break, because in that moment my life was so, so beautiful. The boy I liked liked me, and he was kind, and he was handsome, and we were going to be boyfriend and girlfriend and spend the rest of the school year arm-and-arm in hallways, at parties, on weekends …

Except we weren’t, obviously. It quickly transpired that one of my new ‘friends’ had staked a prior claim on Hugo’s heart, and the fallout commenced that very night.

It was so awful that I still feel sick just remembering it, and though I tried to apologise, they either didn’t believe that I hadn’t known or they didn’t want to – given the dramatic mileage they got out of hating me, I’m inclined to think thelatter. Either way, I was persona non grata for the rest of my academic life, spending the majority of that year in the library. Hence my near-perfect grades – so, silver linings, I guess.

I don’t know if Hugo ever looked at me in class again. I stopped answering questions and kept my eyes on my work.

‘Can you wait here for us?’ Marika says, and I snap back to attention to see her leaning towards the driver and handing him a neatly folded note. ‘We’ll be five minutes, tops.’

‘Will we?’ I ask, startled. We’re back at our apartment already – I hadn’t even realised.

‘Well, yeah,’ Marika says matter-of-factly. ‘If we’re going to a party then we need to change. I’m not about to let some drunken moron spill beer down this dress.’

‘You want to go? Really?’

---