A Life Less Average

thirteen

lewis

Paul and I were sat in the Sixth Form common room on Monday morning before class. He was telling me everything about Rebecca Andrews's party, and telling me only the good things about the girl he had managed to kiss.

There was something different about my best friend. His eyes were brighter and his smile was wider. It seemed as though the party had changed him somehow.

After I left, Rebecca had finished off a bottle of wine and got started on the vodka. The alcohol diffused some of her bitchiness but there had been something off about her behaviour. Paul had known that it was down to me leaving, but everybody else just assumed she was PMSing or just feeling more of a bitch than usual.

The girl Paul had swapped numbers with was a university student. She was friends with somebody in our year at school and was home for the weekend. They had been texting since the party and they were planning on meeting up next weekend. Paul was smitten.

He was finishing up his story when the doors to the common room crashed open and in walked Rebecca Andrews, followed by three of her friends. She was wearing sunglasses despite the thick layer of clouds that covered the sky, and her hair was tied messily on top of her head.

The four of them settled into the sofas at the far end of the room. They all fell into the soft bottoms of the old couches, and their loud chatter immediately filled the air.

Rebecca removed her sunglasses and her eyes met mine. I tried to look away but there was something about her appearance that kept pulling me back. She looked different. Tired, maybe. I tried to shake it off. She probably had a rough weekend and still trying to recover.

Yeah, that was probably it.

But then it hit me. She wasn't wearing any makeup. And she was always wearing makeup. Even two years ago when the entire school had participated in sports day and was required to run laps around the school ground as a warm up, she still had neatly applied eyeliner and a face covered in foundation.

Paul was still talking, only he had moved onto the latest video game he was playing. I nodded along, barely absorbing what he was saying, as Rebecca was still maintaining eye contact.

"So what did you get up to on Friday night?" he asked, noticing that I wasn't listening to him talk about the new Spiderman game. "You never said."

"I met Poppy in town," I said, shrugging as though it was no big deal. Which obvious he saw right through since most of our weekends involved melting into beanbag chairs and staring at a screen.

"You? In a club?"

"It wasn't really a club," I told him. "It was a bar with a stage. A band was playing. It was fun."

"Fun?" he asked, frowning. "You left Rebecca Andrews's party for fun?"

I looked across the room, over his shoulder, to make sure she didn't hear her name. She didn't, thankfully. Her friend was too busy dramatically throwing her arms in the air as she told them a story.

"Yeah. Well, it was more than fun."

He sensed the change in my tone and stared at me, his eyes bugging out of his head as he waited for me to continue.

"She's just so cool," I told him. "Like, she's hot. Don't get me wrong, but she's just cool. Like all these girls are just clones of each other. They think the same things and they wear the same things. Poppy's different. So is Faye. They must have missed the girl-brainwashing day or something."

"So did you?" he said, throwing a wink at me.

"I don't kiss and tell."

His jaw dropped but he quickly shut it and smiled. "Yes, man."