The piss taking when we went back to school on Monday was horrendous. A whole day of people walking past us in the corridors pretending to be drunk out of their heads. Some of them I remembered being at the party, others must have heard on the grapevine. I wouldn’t have minded but it wasn’t exactly something you don’t expect fifteen year olds to do. Fortunately Al took the brunt of it, seeing as he was the one who’d ended up lying in the car park vomiting through his nose. I suppose if Al had wanted to he could have shifted the focus to me, after all it was me whose parents had had to call the paramedics. Al would never mention it though, and that only made the bond between us stronger.
Liquid Honey to My Ears
April 1999.
My month of being grounded had passed, only it hadn’t quite been a month. Five days of coming home from school and ruining my mum’s evenings; either by sitting in the front room complaining about the trashy soaps on television, or going upstairs and fighting with Dean over whose bedroom it was, had proven too much. Terrified at the prospect of having me at home, moaning for a whole weekend, I was asked if I’d learnt my lesson, which obviously I hadn’t, and released back into the world. I think a lot of the reason they gave in was because the whole being grounded thing was a wasted exercise. It wasn’t to punish me, it was to stop me from seeing Al; pointless since we went to the same school.
Having nearly gotten in a fight at the first party I’d ever been to, on top of having had to be driven home by the birthday girl’s dad, I wasn’t holding out much hope of being invited to another. The only thing I had on my side was the fact that no one at school knew about the paramedics apart from Al.
So you can imagine my surprise when three weeks later, not only was I invited to another party, but I was invited by a girl I didn’t think even knew I existed. Now I’d known she existed from almost the very start of my time at the school, and although she wasn’t the only girl there who had caught my eye, she was the one who on walking into the room would make the others as good as disappear.
As I saw her walking down the school corridor towards me we locked eyes. Those big blue eyes I was sure I could swim in.
“Luke,” she said in that soft, husky voice I adored. All the air I would normally have used to talk vanished from my lungs. “How are you?”
“OK,” I squeaked. “You?”
“I’m good thank you,” she replied, the sound was like liquid honey to my ears and the part of my brain that composed proper sentences stopped working.
“Good, er....I’m glad you’re good,” I said. She smiled again, she could obviously see the effect she had on me. I looked down, away from her blue eyes and long blonde hair in case I’d gone red, her waist was so thin I pictured putting both my hands around it and having my fingers meet at the back. If she’d only let me try.
“I’m having a birthday party next Friday, would you like to come?”
“I’d like that,” I said, knowing full well that I might be making an empty promise as I wasn’t allowed to parties after what had happened at the last one.
“And I’d like it if you came. Could you invite Al for me as well when you see him? I assume you’ll see him, you two are normally together.”
Fuck! She’d invited me before Al! I might even have been the first person she’d invited. It was just a shame I wasn’t the only person she’d invited. I managed to articulate a thank you or something equally stupid sounding before I watched her walk away down the corridor. Then a familiar feeling of regret washed over me, the same feeling of regret I’d had all those times we’d passed in the corridors before. Me willing myself to talk to her, telling myself to just man-up and get on with it, right up until the point we’d meet and my mind would go blank and she’d smile politely and walk away. Next time Luke I’d say. Well that was next time, that was the perfect time! She’d done the hard bit for you! There was only one thing for it. I had to go to that party, and I had to make amends. But first I had to work out how I was going to get there without my mum knowing.