“Oh my God, that was so much fun,” Daniel said, getting into the car. Angela took off as quickly as possible. Daniel’s mam was waving a broken piece of glass and yelling in the rearview mirror.
“What are you guys doing here?” I said to Meabh and Kavi. “How did you know?”
“When you didn’t come back for ages I panicked. I called Kavi,” Angela explained.
“I called Meabh,” he said.
“I was already outside she phoned,” Meabh said. “I heard her telling you to give her your mum’s number. I didn’t answer because I didn’t know what your plan was and we’d already decided on ours.”
“You’re going to be in so much trouble, Daniel,” I said.
He shrugged. “Yeah, I mean, it could have gone smoother, but you know, she’s way too strict. If I’m going to have to stand up to her, I want to do it when there’s a getaway car.”
I laughed, glad that he didn’t seem to be annoyed, even though I still felt like I’d failed the task.
As we drove toward Angela’s house, the rain began beating down. Her windshield wipers were no match for it.
“Shit, guys, I can barely see,” she said, swerving to miss what looked like nothing from where I was.
I turned around and whispered, not very subtly, “She mounted the pavement twice on the way here and it wasn’t raining then.”
“It was dark, Aideen,” Angela said testily.
“That’s what headlights are for,” I replied. “Why the accent?” I asked Meabh then, changing the subject.
Meabh blushed. “I don’t know,” she said, covering her face with her hands. “It just came out.”
“I didn’t hear the accent,” Angela pouted. “Do it now.”
“No way.”
“Go on,” Kavi said. And the rest of us pleaded with her. A chorus of “Go on, go on, go on.”
Finally, cheeks a deep pink, Meabh blurted out the first thing that came to mind.
“Keep yer eyes on the road, lassie.”
We all howled.
“That’s so offensive to the Scottish,” Angela said.
“Seriously though, keep your eyes—”
“Ahhhhhhhhh,” we all screamed in unison as the car hit an unmistakable something and Angela screeched to a stop.
A few seconds of silence followed. I dislodged my heart from my throat.
“Is everyone okay?” Angela asked.
A chorus of yeses answered.
“What do you think we hit?” I asked.
“I can’t look,” Angela said. “If it’s a cat I’m going to kill myself. Go look, Kavi.”
“Why me?” he protested. I could see him looking out the window at the lashing rain.
“You’re the boy,” Angela answered.
“I’m a boy,” Daniel piped up. “But this is my good shirt. I’ll ruin it for you ladies though.”
“Sexist,” Meabh replied. “Chivalry is simply another form of misogyny that places women on a pedestal, thus denying them full humanity and agency.”
“So you go look, then,” Angela retorted.
“No, I don’t want to. It’s raining.”
I rolled my eyes, opened the door, and stepped out in the downfall. I was instantly drenched right down to my underwear.
“It was a glass bottle in the road,” I said, getting in the car again, shivering already. “But we have a bigger problem. The tire is busted. Do you have roadside assistance?”
Angela grimaced.
“You have accidents all the time. How are you not more prepared?”
She didn’t even look apologetic. “I keep meaning to . . . But I never get around to it. There’s a spare tire though.”
I stared at her. She stared back. I was not going to win this one.
“I have no idea how to change a tire,” I said.
Meabh buried her face in her hands and then spoke through the gap between her palms.
“I do. But I’ll need help. I can’t kneel on the ground with my boot on. But I can talk someone through it.”
Kavi sighed and looked at Daniel’s party clothes. “I guess that’s me.”
We pulled up to the house, three-fifths of us soaked to the skin and turning blue. The rain had stopped as soon as we’d got back on the road, which had only taken about twenty minutes thanks to Meabh and Kavi’s teamwork. When we got there, there were several boys playing a very muddy game of Gaelic in the garden.
“That can only end well,” Meabh mused as we got out of the car.
“I’m sure it wouldn’t pass your strict health and safety regulations,” I said.
“I know you’re making a joke about how I am overly invested in rules and regulations, and there are some criticisms to be made of bureaucracy, but most health and safety regulations are important for preventing injury. The weird ones are usually because there’s some asshole who did something really stupid and then sued because nobody had told him not to.”
I yawned pointedly.
Daniel Something was halfway up the drive and looking like Dorothy landing in Munchkinland. Angela was several steps ahead of us, ready to rejoin her party and leave us behind.
“Okay,” I said, in a changing-the-subject tone of voice, “let’s see if we can’t get out of these wet clothes.”
I looked at Meabh when I said that and then immediately regretted it, feeling a hot flush warm me up. Neither Kavi nor Meabh seemed to notice and we traipsed up to the house, squelching as we did.
Angela showed us in the front door and gave us a tour. By which I mean she pointed ahead and said, “Kitchen” and pointed to her left and said, “Living room.”
She started to leave us but Meabh grabbed her by the shirtsleeve.
“Maybe we could use your tumble dryer?” Meabh said pointedly.
“Do you have one?” I asked.
Meabh frowned. “Of course she does, who doesn’t have a tumble dryer?” Then she realized what she’d said and met my eyes.
“Sorry. That was a stupid thing to say.”
I shrugged it off. It was weird when things like that happened. Like when I was really little I didn’t know we were poor. And then I figured it out and I avoided saying certain things that I knew marked me as “the poor kid.” But sometimes there were little things that I hadn’t thought about and they popped up and embarrassed me. Like not assuming that someone has a tumble dryer, when other people would assume that of course they do.
I could see Meabh felt terrible and I didn’t want to have to say it was okay. But I didn’t want her to feel bad either because she hadn’t meant anything by it. The others didn’t seem to notice anything weird about our exchange.
“One time,” Kavi started, and I pinched the bridge of my nose before the story even got going, “when I was little I told my brother that he should get in the tumble dryer and we’d turn it on and see what happened and then my mam found me trying to help him in, you know like stuffing his limbs in there, and she almost had a heart attack and started screaming that appliances are not for people and then she told my brother to get out of the tumble dryer and never go in there again, but when he tried to get out again he was stuck and we had to call the fire brigade to cut him out of it. Then we didn’t have a tumble dryer for ages but now we have one that’s a washing machine and tumble dryer in one.”
Kavi to the rescue.
“Of course,” Angela said, pointing toward the kitchen letting the story wash over her. “Laundry room is beside the kitchen, there’s towels and stuff upstairs in the hot press.” She hesitated and then whispered conspiratorially to me, “There’s some extra beers in the fridge in the garage if you want them. Just pace yourselves.” Then she swept past suddenly. “Hey, you. Spill on my rug again and I will end you.”
I watched Angela confiscate a can and then we went to look for the towels. There were a fair few kids from school milling around but it wasn’t quite what I expected. I think I’d seen too many movies and thought there’d be people doing keg stands and dancing on the tables. In reality there were a few people in the living room sprawled around a sofa playing what appeared to be a Murder, She Wrote drinking game while Angela Lansbury solved crime on the TV, and in the kitchen there were several pockets of people doing an awkward half-chat, half-dance shuffle with bottles of Corona in their hands. Just when I thought I hadn’t been missing much by being a hermit, a girl shrieked “I SAW YOU KISS HER, RONAN” and everyone turned around and started watching them fight.
“That’s the party content I came for,” I said.
I peered through a gap in the assembled audience and realized it was Jill. She was a bit drunk but mostly she was absolutely fuming.
“IT WASN’T A REAL KISS, IT’S A PARTY,” Ronan shouted back.
“OH RIGHT, RONAN, BECAUSE AT A PARTY YOUR TONGUE IS NO LONGER REAL AND HER MOUTH IS NO LONGER REAL AND I SUPPOSE IF YOU HAD SEX YOUR DICK WOULDN’T BE REAL EITHER.”
Ouch. Well, I could have told her that would happen; Ronan was a scumbag. But she wouldn’t have listened to me.
Kavi, Meabh, and I squelched upstairs and looked for somewhere to change.
I tried the door nearest to me. Locked. I tried the next one. Towels. Jackpot. I threw one each to Kavi and Meabh. The next one was the bathroom.
Kavi sighed. “I’ll take the press. Youse can use the bathroom.”
The bathroom had a large bath and was themed of the seaside. Something I’ve never quite understood. I’m not sure what it is about peeing that makes people think of lighthouse ornaments and soaps shaped like seashells in a seashell.
“I’m too cold and wet to be awkward about this,” Meabh announced as soon as we were alone in the bathroom clutching our towels.
“You made it more awkward by saying it.”
“I didn’t. If you say it then it dispels the tension. You’re acknowledging it and moving on.”
“I don’t think so. I think it makes is far more uncomfortable than just pretending it’s not happening.”
“Should we stop arguing about this and take our clothes off?” Meabh suggested.
“Yeah, okay.”
I unzipped my coat and shrugged it off onto the floor, where it landed in a squelchy heap. Meabh did the same, and shed a zip-up camogie team hoodie at the same time. Most of the bathroom was taken up by the tub and there wasn’t a lot of space so twice Meabh elbowed me in the process.
“Sorry.”
She was wearing a damp white tank top and I could tell that she was wearing one of those sports bras with the fancy crisscrossy straps. Then I realized that I shouldn’t be noticing that. Meabh pulled off the top and threw it on the ground and I realized she was used to changing in front of other girls from playing camogie. And she was wearing one of those crisscrossy bras. She was unbuttoning her jeans when she paused, noticing that I was frozen in place.
“Do you want me to turn around?” she asked.
“No,” I replied. “You can if you want. Or not. It’s no big deal. I don’t care. I don’t have anything special under here that you haven’t seen before.”
“I haven’t seen anything you have under there before,” she said. “You always skip PE. When do you think I’ve seen you undress?”
“That’s not what I meant.” I blushed. “I mean, I just have. You know. Like regular boobs. You’ve seen boobs. I mean, probably.”
“You think I go around the changing rooms looking at girls getting undressed?” she said, affronted. “How can you think I’d do that? I’m not a pervert just because I’m a lesbian. You should know that better than anyone.”
“That. I didn’t. I don’t.” I covered my face with my hands. “I don’t think that. I meant I don’t need you to turn around because I don’t think you’re going to be looking at me like that because why would you because you get changed around girls all the time and it’s not weird for you.”
“I really feel like I should turn around now.”
“No,” I said, and I yanked my jumper off. I wasn’t wearing a T-shirt so I was now standing in my black bra from Penneys and felt glad it wasn’t the white one that came in the two-pack, which has since turned a depressing gray. “I’m fine, really. See.” Hurriedly, and with zero grace, I scrambled out of my jeans and I stood there in my underwear and spread my arms wide. “Totally fine with it.”
Meabh stared at me for a second. A long second. I felt warmth rise in my cheeks. Was she thinking I should work out? I’m kind of chubby and she obviously exercised a lot and was quite thin so maybe she thought I should be too. I had no idea why but my heart began pounding and I began to notice the smallest details. There was a small appendix scar peeking out from her waistband where she’d unbuttoned her jeans. Her skin was pinching in goose bumps all over her stomach. I couldn’t help but notice where her nipples pressed against the fabric of her sports bra and when my eyes reached her neck, this thought, this picture flashed in my mind. I looked at her and she was looking back at me. It felt like she could see what I’d imagined. I’d thought of kissing her there, of pulling her close and feeling her skin against mine. I thought about trailing my fingers down her waist and sliding them down past the open buttons of her jeans to—
“Are you guys changed?” Kavi sounded confused.
I jumped. Meabh jumped.
“Just a second,” I said, and I cursed my voice for wavering.
Meabh threw the towel I’d dropped on the ground and I wrapped it around myself. With surprising deftness she removed her boot and shimmied out of her jeans and I did not look. Nor did I find that her choice of underwear (a pair of green polka-dotted boy shorts) made me think about what it would be like to take them off with my teeth. Oh, for fuck’s sake. What was wrong with me? In the space of a few seconds I’d turned into some kind of sex pest. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.
Meabh was annoying.
I did not fancy her.
Yeah, because bickering never leads to sexual tension. Dumbass.
No. There was no sexual tension. Okay, so maybe I’d had a weird inappropriate moment, but tension involves both people having the inappropriate thoughts and Meabh would never think about me like that. And I would never think about her like that again.
My inner voice snorted.
Meabh wrapped herself in a towel as well and we both awkwardly shuffled out of our underwear. She was naked under there now.
What a stupid thought. She was naked underneath her clothes all the time. Oh, holy mother. Was that what I was going to think every time I looked at her now?
“Let’s go. Poor Kavi is standing in the hall on his own in nothing but a towel,” I said.
I scooped my clothes into a bundle with one hand, using the other to keep my towel firmly in place. When we emerged I noticed something I’d never noticed much before.
“Kavi!” I exclaimed. “You’re hot!”
Without his shirt on I could see that Kavi had broad shoulders, and although he wasn’t Marvel-superhero ripped or anything, he could hold his own on a teen soap opera.
“There isn’t one way to be hot,” Meabh said, chastising me. “Kavi has the kind of traditionally glorified body we’re used to seeing on a pedestal—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “That’s a bit rich coming from Miss Pull-Ups over here.”
“What now?” he said before Meabh could retort. I could see she had something to say.
“Dryer, obviously,” I said before she could.
“None of us are wearing any clothes,” Meabh said, pointing out what I’d overlooked. The dryer was downstairs, through the kitchen.
I looked at Meabh. She looked at me. I looked at Kavi. He was looking back at me.
“This is your fault,” Meabh said reasonably, and pushed a bundle of clothes into my arms. Kavi copied her.
“Fine,” I grumbled. “You two tagalongs are useless.”
I turned and began to stomp down the stairs. Then I froze. My stomach dropped. At the bottom of the stairs was Jill, sobbing into her friend’s shoulder. Her friend Holly. Holly who very clearly was not visiting her grandmother.
“I’m so humiliated,” she was saying. “Amy said she did sleep with him. She didn’t know we were together. He told her we’d broken up. I hate him so much. I hope something awful happens to him.”
“Karma’s a bitch,” Holly said. “Something bad will happen.”
“His mother would absolutely kill him if she knew. She’s so religious. I could just tell her, she’d murder him for me. But then she’d tell Amy’s parents and it’s not Amy’s fault.”
I watched Holly stroke Jill’s hair and murmur comforting words and I felt my eyes water against my will. I thought I knew what Jill might feel like right now. I felt betrayed and stupid and like Holly must be laughing about me behind my back. She’d told me she was at her grandmother’s. She didn’t want to tell me she was going to a party because then she’d have to ask me to go and she didn’t want me there. But I was good enough to hang around with on Sunday afternoon if she’d recovered from her hangover. Maybe she was waiting to see if Jill would want to do something instead. She liked Jill in a way that she didn’t like me anymore. Maybe some part of her still loved me, but it was a memory, an old version of us that no longer existed.
I had been caught between two conflicting messages that made me feel like I was losing my mind. I’d felt like I was being paranoid or clingy or seeing slights when they weren’t there. But really all it was, was that Holly didn’t have the balls to tell me she didn’t want to be my friend anymore. If she had, it would have hurt. But it would have hurt less than the slow pick, pick, picking of the last couple of years.
I felt someone jostle me and I looked up. Kavi was taking the bundle from my arms.
“I’ll go,” he said. Meabh was watching too. I wondered what they saw on my face.
I pulled Meabh by the hand back into the bathroom. I wasn’t going to sit around on the landing in a towel listening in to Holly and Jill and worrying that they might come upstairs.
I let go of Meabh’s hand and got into the bath. I sat width-ways, my knees pulled up to my chest. Meabh got in too but she sat at the other end of the tub. We didn’t say anything for a few moments but I could tell she was working up to something.
“Spit it out.” I said, hoping she wasn’t going to talk about me staring at her before in an attempt to “dispel the tension.”
“Why did you say it was a bit rich coming from me?” she said, and I could hear the pout in her voice. I turned my head and saw the pout on her face. She was staring at the wall opposite like it had personally offended her.
“What?”
“You said bit rich coming from me. You called me ‘Miss Pull-Ups’ when I said that there was more than one way to be hot.”
I gave her my most incredulous look. Then I laughed. She was probably trying to distract me. But maybe she was also genuinely annoyed.
“Because you have one of those ‘traditionally glorified bodies’ or whatever. You look like some kind of advert for Nike in your sports bra. It’s easy to spout body positivity when you could model for Sports Illustrated.”
Meabh wrinkled her nose at the idea of Sports Illustrated but she also blushed.
“I think you have a great body,” she said, almost in a whisper.
I didn’t know what to say to that but I didn’t hate hearing it.
“I have no boobs,” she said, in the most genuinely plaintive tone I’d ever heard. It made me laugh. “Who’s gonna want to see me naked? There’s nothing to see!”
“Well, first off, all the media lesbians are elfin and flat chested and they get to wear clothes that are sexy in an androgynous kind of way. You don’t see TV lesbians with big tits. We don’t exist cos we don’t look good in button-ups.” I thought about it. “Besides, more than a handful’s a waste,” I said.
She snorted. “Not to me,” she said. “I feel bad about it because it makes me feel like I’m being objectifying or something, but I want a girl with boobs.”
I felt my cheeks heat up. “You can have one. There isn’t some kind of soul mate matching-up service based on bra size.” I put on a gruff voice: “Nah, you two can’t date, one of you is an A cup and the other has double Ds. What was that? True love? This is the Titty Equity Commission, take that shit somewhere else.”
Meabh laughed.
“I never thought we’d one day be having a conversation about breast preferences,” I mused, grateful that at least she hadn’t tried to talk to me about Holly. I don’t think I could have had that conversation with Meabh. There was too much history. Maybe she realized that too.
“I guess I never thought that either,” Meabh said.
Kavi pulled the door open, breathless and somewhat flushed. I patted the space in the tub between me and Meabh.
“Hey, Kav, c’mere and tell us what kind of boobs you’re into.”
He blinked. “This feels like a trap.”
Meabh nodded. “Yeah, I don’t think I’d be okay with any answer you give.”
Kavi nodded seriously and clambered into the bath to sit between us. I closed my eyes until he was sitting in case the flapping of his towel revealed too much. He stretched his arms overhead and then rested one on each of our shoulders. If it was any other man on God’s green earth, I’d find that move creepy. But it was Kavi, and I knew he was being sweet.
“How’d it go down there?”
“Uh. A girl asked if she could do a belly shot off my stomach. That was weird.”
“It was weird that she asked or it was weird when she did it?” I joked.
“No, it was okay when she did it. It was more that she wanted to that was strange.”
Meabh and I spluttered in unison.
“Oh my God. You let her?”
“She was cute.” He shrugged. “She had really long blonde hair though and it tickled a lot.”
“Fair enough. So tell us. How come you keep those abs a secret? If I had abs I’d walk around naked all the time like, hey, look at this, everyone. If I did all that work I’d make sure people knew about it.”
Kavi looked pleased. “I got my uncle, my living uncle not my dead uncle, to start taking me to the gym this summer. Mainly it was because I was tall and thin and people kept making fun of me for being weedy and also maybe I think there might be something to do with me being brown too but I don’t really wanna talk about that with you guys, no offense, and then I thought maybe if I got muscles girls would like me and then maybe other lads would also stop picking on me and it would be nice, but really it hasn’t done anything because you can’t walk around with your shirt off that much and so no girls noticed and the lads don’t care anyway. But it was okay really because I got to spend a lot more time with my uncle and that was nice and it turned out we have a lot in common, and it made my mam really happy and then my little brother started coming too so now it’s like a family-bonding thing.”
I felt a rushing in my ears.
“Who picks on you?” I demanded, ready to scramble out of the bath and kick some ass.
Kavi shrugged. “Just people. It’s not terrible. Little things. Comments.”
“I’ll kill them,” I said. “I will pull their eyes out of their sockets and hold them in my hand so they can watch me dismember their own body.”
Kavi frowned. “I don’t think eyes work like that. You could use a mirror or something.”
“You’re too small and weak to dismember someone,” Meabh said.
“Alone,” I replied, raising my eyebrows. “Miss Pull-Ups, you can be the muscle. I’ll be the artist.”
“The artist?”
“If I’m going to murder people I’m going to do it in style. I’m not going to half-ass it. It’s not Maths homework. It’s a passion project.”
“I really don’t want you to murder anyone,” Kavi said.
“I get you.” I winked. “You can’t be involved. You have motive.”
“Seriously, Kavi, there must be something we can do?” Meabh said. “It’s not right, people giving you hassle.”
“I don’t think you can make people stop being dicks,” he said thoughtfully. “They either will or they won’t on their own time. I don’t need them to be on my side. I just need someone who is, so I’m not alone. I need people I can talk to. And I have that now.”
I felt a hard knot in my chest and burning in my eyes. Meabh looked like she might cry. I think she knew what it was like to want people to be on her side. To like her. I decided I wouldn’t call her annoying anymore. I didn’t know what it was like to be Meabh, and I certainly would never get what it was like to be Kavi, but I knew what it was like to feel alone.
Around two thirty, we had to leave. I found Angela and, slightly drunk, she threw me the keys.
“I thought I wasn’t allowed to drive your precious car?”
“I trust you,” she slurred, throwing her arms around me. Then she held me at arm’s length and squinted. “You can drive, right?”
“Of course.” I shrugged. I had driven my cousin’s car round the back roads when I’d stayed in the country with my auntie Jacinta, so I had experience if not what you might call a “license.”
I made a hasty exit, afraid she’d change her mind or I’d run into Holly and Jill, but it meant waiting in the car while Kavi and Meabh peeled Daniel off the living room floor. I turned on the engine to warm the car up and noticed Dylan Cheung talking to one of the boys on the Gaelic team. He looked miserable. I rolled down the car window to eavesdrop.
The other boy gave Dylan a limp pat on the arm.
“Look, I’m not supposed to tell you this, but he’s told all of us on the team not to talk to you.”
“And you’re just going along with it?” Dylan said, not hiding his pain at hearing this.
“You know what Ronan’s like.” The other boy looked at his shoes instead of at Dylan.
“He’s my cousin, for fuck’s sake. What is his problem? He made my life miserable on the team. So I quit. Now he’s still not happy? What did I ever do to him?”
“You know what you did, mate. You were better than him.”
The boy gave Dylan a manly slap on the arm instead of having the balls to be a human being. Dylan shrugged his hand away. When the boy was out of sight Dylan wiped his nose with his sleeve and kicked the wall a few times. I wanted to go and comfort him but I didn’t think he’d appreciate me popping up in his vulnerable moment.
Kavi appeared a few minutes later, fireman-lifting Daniel. He looked like a hero from a romance novel. He flopped Daniel into a seat and wrestled a seat belt on him before sliding in beside him. Meabh took the passenger seat and shrugged at me.
“I guess I wasn’t needed after all.”
I ditched Daniel at his house.
The light was on in his living room. We all stared at the brightness like it was a terrible vision we couldn’t look away from.
“I’ll pay for your mam’s vase,” Meabh said.
Daniel nodded. He braced himself for his fate and got out of the car, letting a chill in.
I dropped Kavi home next and noticed the lights were still on at his house.
“Were you allowed out tonight?” I said, raising an eyebrow.
“Yes,” he said defensively. “Mam’s just a worrier. She’ll have stayed up to make sure I’m okay. It’s embarrassing, I know.”
“It’s not,” I said. “It’s nice.”
He waved goodbye to us and then it was just me and Meabh.
We drove in silence, other than a few directions, to her house, and I could feel the tension from earlier creeping into the car. Pictures of her in her underwear kept flashing back to me. The long stare she gave me. Her comment about my body. It was a good thing the roads were clear because when I pulled up to her house I wasn’t quite sure how I’d got there. I’d been in my own world.
“Tonight was really fun,” Meabh said. She put her hand on my arm. It felt strange. It was just my arm and yet it felt weirdly intimate. Her touch was gentle but deliberate. I looked into her eyes. She bit her lip. My gaze fell on her lips then. It was so quiet I could hear her breathing like she was trying to keep it steady. My heart pounded. Her lips parted. I wanted to lean in.
Then a light blinded me and the silhouette of Mr. Kowalski took up most of the door frame.
“Meabh, were you allowed out tonight?” I asked with a groan.
“Not exactly.”
