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There’s a little inky black cat on the low wall outside number nineteen. It looks at me with a tilted head, trying to work out if I’m a threat. A boy with bear arms, carrying a backpack.
I step forward, reaching out to stroke it, but it jumps down and scampers away behind two grey bins.
“Screw you then, kitty.”
The cat pokes its head out and stares. I stare back.
“Didn’t really want to stroke you anyway, fleabag. Might eat you later.”
Carry on walking. Can’t wait to start smashing now. Seventeen. Fifteen. Thirteen. Check my bag. The chipped sky-blue of my trusty helmet. If I properly go for it this morning, might even take the afternoon off. Go to the river or something. Eleven. Nine. Yeah. That’s a plan. Stop.
Look at the house.
And feel a wrecking ball hit my chest.
The clock ticks.
Ten minutes in
and my page is still empty.
All around me, a gym full of people, sitting in rows, heads bobbing like a gridded flock of feeding birds, speed-scrawling answers to questions we’ve spent months preparing for.
Every few breaths, a head will pop up, like it heard something. The distant call of that great idea. That one quote that could turn forty UCAS points into forty-eight.
This is it.
Final exam. Sixth form’s last supper.
Scan the room. Mouth everyone’s name.
Most of us have been at this school since we were eleven. Some of us even went to the same primary school. How many memories do we share?
Izzy Maynard. Tolu Clarke. How different are mine to yours? Eli Hanson. Hardeep Khan. How does it work? So many versions of everything that happens. Everything that happened.
I remember play fights; you remember getting punched. You remember lunchtimes packed with hide-and-seek; I remember hiding in the craft cupboard and people forgetting about me.
We all remember laughing when Simon Harris tripped and threw pink custard over dicky Mr Page.
When you think about it, it’s thirteen years. More than two-thirds of our lives so far sharing the same space and, after today, most of us probably won’t see each other again.
We’ll say we will, but we won’t.
Maybe accidentally in town, one random summer Saturday.
Or five years from now, on a train platform at New Street, heading in different directions.
Or maybe in middle age, at some badly soundtracked class reunion when we’re all swollen or wrinkled or both and crying into our gin and tonics about how we chose the wrong path. Isn’t that just a little bit weird? Has anyone else in here even thought about it?
Sean is four across and two in front. I watch him scribble, then pause, scribble then pause. Scratching his head. Questioning himself, whether he’s following the right thought.
Cara is two across and three in front. Even from behind, the calm in her slender shoulders is clear.
Prepared. Sure. Tattooing her future on to paper. Ready for the rest of her life. When she’s finished, she’ll look back, checking in with me. That things are going to plan.
I look down at my page.
Still empty. Still waiting.
I know what I’m supposed to do. And I know what I want to do.
Last chance.
My pen tip scratches the blank paper. Like a claw.
And then I feel you.
For the first time in years. Watching me. Knowing my thoughts.
I look up.
Across the room.
And there you are.
Outside.
The tinted glass facade of reception.
Me, reflected, sitting on the low brick wall, backlit by a fuzzy white afternoon sun.
A life-size, full-page panel. Top left, one thought box.
I did it.
My pen is still in my hand. I actually did it. Can’t be undone now.
No more school.
No more lessons.
No more sawdust-dry assemblies.
No more cafeteria parade.
Nearly seven years spent shuffling around this place, nodding at teachers, passing notes, hanging back in cross-country, swapping homework. Come September, somebody else will sit where I sat. Use my locker. Answer the questions I would’ve answered … And a new crop of wide-eyed Year Sevens will step on to the secondary conveyer belt, just as we step off. Into our futures.
My skin is tingling, my whole body buzzing like a light bulb.
And there you are. Behind me. Your reflected silhouette. Bigger than I remember. Broader. Just me and you in the frame. “I did it, Thor.”
Your name is honey in my mouth.
The sliding glass doors of reception part and you’re gone.
Cara skips out, arm in arm with Leia and Naomi, like a half-Chinese Dorothy and her friends, off to Oz. A stream of other sixth-formers follows them, squinting as the sunlight hits them. I stand up, and wait for her to see me.
“What the hell, Mars!” she shouts, breaking off from the others and walking over. “How do you do it?”
We’re the same height, but my dandelion Afro gives me a few extra centimetres. Cara lifts her arms in celebration and a strip of smooth, pale midriff shows itself above the edge of her skirt.
“How’d you finish so quick?”
I pull my blouse away from my stomach and shrug back. “Said what I wanted to say, I guess.”
She smiles. She has more teeth than she needs, little white overlapping roots that on anyone else would look weird, but on her look like evidence of intelligent design.
“Marcie Baker, super-brain,” she says, and we hug. I close my eyes and breathe her in.
Honesty, confidence and ambition. That’s Cara. Since forever.
“We did it, Mars,” she says over my shoulder and squeezes me with her thin arms. I can feel her little pointy boobs pressed against my fuller chest.
“Yeah.”
People are scattered down the wide school driveway, hugging and hi-fiving each other. Sean, Mo and Jordan are tearing pages of revision notes into confetti over the bonnets of teachers’ cars. Jordan already has his tie around his head. Cara lets go of me and wipes her eyes.
“I feel like I can breathe again, you know?” Her sharp bob shines like black ribbon. “I can’t wait for uni! We’re gonna have so much fun! Did you do the ‘role of women’ question?”
I look down at our feet. Her crisp white Vans. My battered Chuck Taylors.
“Yep.”
Then she screams. Like a proper animal-type scream, head thrown back, arms stretched out. Someone else behind us takes their cue and screams, then someone else, and someone else, like car alarms triggered by each other, until I’m watching a school driveway full of A-level English students howling at the sky like wolves.
The pack starts to move towards the main gates.
“Everyone’s going to Jordan’s,” says Cara.
“Cool,” I say.
She flashes a knowing smile. “You’re coming, Mars. Don’t you dare even start.”
I nod. “OK.”
“We did it, Mars! It’s done!”
Nod again. It’s done.
No undoing it now.
What looks like half our year is sprawled across Jordan’s big back garden, like a sixth-form Where’s Wally? Shirts are undone. Cigarettes rolled. Detention memories and impressions of teachers are shared. Miss Langley’s cleavage. Mr Kelsey’s breath. Stormzy’s “Shut Up” pumps out through open French doors.
Some people managed to get boxes of wine and cans of Red Stripe from the outdoor, Old Mr Thomas serving teens in school uniform as a “fuck you” to the new Tesco Express.
I sit in the shade of the big oak tree, on a cast-iron garden chair, making cloud prints on the stretched cotton of my navy skirt with the wet bottom of my glass.
I can’t tell whether I feel light or heavy. Have I let something go or picked something up?
I scan the party, looking for you. Like you might actually be here. Stupid.
Cara’s on the grass, part of a captive horseshoe audience listening to Sean tell a story. His untucked shirt hangs open off his bony shoulders. His limbs have got longer this year.
“You remember, Mars? How mad they were?” he says, looking over, smiling. Audience heads turn my way. I wasn’t listening to the story at all.
“Yeah,” I say, “course.”
Sean waits a second for me to say more, then just dives right back into the narrative, taking his audience with him.
Nabil and David are trying to scale the concrete garage at the bottom of the garden, their shirts long discarded, shoulders gleaming with a sheen of sweat.
I scoop up my stuff just as Nabil gets to his feet on the garage roof like he conquered a mountain.
“I’m gonna jump!” he says. “Somebody film me!”
As people turn to watch, I walk inside.
Jordan’s mum’s downstairs bathroom is easily the most glamorous bathroom I’ve ever been in.
From the waist up, the entire wall in front of me is mirror, the sink a chunky white porcelain square set into the glass. The shower cubicle to my right is as big as our entire bathroom, the white towels neatly stacked in a pyramid on the shelves to my left look like they’ve never been used, and it smells like a swimming pool.
I drop my stuff and stare at myself. My uneven ’fro is wilting. My school blouse grips my chest like my skirt grips my hips. “Full bodied”, that’s what Coral said, the day she took me for my first proper bra fitting. Standing in the Selfridges changing room, arms out like a new prisoner. Remember it felt like I’d gone from nothing to too much, in one summer. Like my body was some fast-tracked puberty experiment. Cara’s face when she came back from France. She wanted to be the one who got boobs first.
There’s nothing more attractive than a full-bodied woman, Coral said. Just look through history, real history: full-bodied women are nature’s queens.
Not really the most humble way to describe yourself in Freshers’ Week though, is it? Yeah, hi, I’m Marcie Baker, I’m from Birmingham, I’m into reading and films, I used to draw a bit, oh, and I have the attractive, full body of a natural queen.
Something about this mirror having no edge makes it feel less like looking at my reflection and more like staring at someone else. A nearly eighteen-year-old girl.
I make myself smile and she smiles back. Smooth cheeks, more dark freckles than a face needs. The gap between her two front teeth is big enough to be embarrassing. An unwanted hereditary gift from a woman long gone.
I close my eyes. And breathe.
“You look older.”
My body stiffens.
You’re standing behind me, big enough to almost completely block the door.
