“It’s pretty grim,” said another of my friends, dragging my attention away.
“I feel bad!” said another. “Frances is so innocent! I feel like we’re corrupting you by dragging you to clubs and making you drink.”
“She deserves a night off studying though!”
“I want to see drunk Frances.”
“D’you think you’ll be a crier?”
“No, I think she’ll be a funny drunk. I think she’s got some secret personality we don’t know about.”
I didn’t know what to say.
Raine nudged me. “Don’t worry. If any disgusting guys come up to you, I’ll just accidentally spill my drink on them.”
Someone laughed. “She actually will. She’s done it before.”
I laughed too and wished I had the guts to say something funny, but I didn’t because I wasn’t a funny person when I was around them. I was just boring.
I downed what was left of my drink and looked around and wondered where Daniel and Aled had gone.
I felt a bit weird because Raine had brought up Carys and I always felt weird when people brought up Carys because I didn’t like thinking about her.
Carys Last ran away from home when she was in Year 11 and I was in Year 10. Nobody knew why and nobody cared because she didn’t have many friends. She didn’t have any friends, really. Apart from me.
I met Carys Last on the train to school when we were fifteen.
It was 7.14am and I was sitting in her seat.
She glanced down at me like a librarian looking down at someone over a tall desk. Her hair was platinum blonde and she had a full fringe so thick and long that you couldn’t quite see her eyes. The sun silhouetted her like she was a heavenly apparition.
“Oh,” she said. “All right, my little train-compadre? You’re sitting in my seat.”
That might sound like she was trying to be mean, but she genuinely wasn’t.
It was weird. Like, we’d both seen each other loads of times. We both sat at the village station every morning, plus Aled, and were the last people to leave the train every evening. We’d done this since I started secondary school. But we’d never spoken. That’s what people are like, I suppose.
Her voice was different to how I’d imagined. She had one of those posh London Made in Chelsea accents, but it was more charming than irritating, and she spoke slowly and softly as if she were slightly high. It’s also worth noting that I was significantly smaller than her at this point. She looked like a majestic elf and I looked like a gremlin.
And I suddenly realised it was true. I was sitting in her seat. I had no idea why. I normally sat in an entirely different carriage.
“Oh, God, sorry, I’ll move …”
“What? Oh, no, I didn’t mean move, wow, sorry. I must have sounded really rude.” She sat down in the seat opposite me.
Carys Last didn’t seem to smile, or feel the need to smile uncomfortably like I was doing. I was extremely impressed by this.
Aled wasn’t with her. This didn’t strike me as odd at the time. After this incident, I noticed that they sat in different carriages. That didn’t strike me as odd either. I didn’t know him, so I didn’t care.
“Don’t you normally sit in the back carriage?” she asked me in the tone of a middle-aged businessman.
“Erm, yeah.”
She raised her eyebrows at me.
“You live in the village, don’t you?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Opposite me?”
“I think so.”
Carys nodded. She kept an unnaturally straight face, which was weird because everyone I knew always tried so hard to smile at you all the time. Her composure made her look significantly older than she was and admirably classy.
She rested her hands on the table and I noticed that they had tiny burn scars all over them.
“I like your jumper,” she said.
I was wearing a jumper that had a computer with a sad face on it underneath my school blazer.
I looked down because I’d forgotten what I was wearing. It was early January and it was freezing, which was why I was wearing an extra jumper over my school jumper. This particular jumper was one of the many items of clothing that I bought but never wore around my friends because I thought they’d laugh at me. My personal fashion choices remained at home.
“D-do you?” I stammered, wondering if I’d misheard.
Carys chuckled. “Yes?”
“Thanks,” I said, shaking my head slightly. I looked down at my hands, and then out the window. The train moved suddenly and we set off out of the village station.
“So why’d you sit in this carriage today?” she said.
I looked at her again, properly this time. Until this point she’d only ever been a girl with dyed blonde hair who sat at the other end of the village train station every morning. But now we were talking and here she was – she was wearing makeup even though she was still in lower school so it was against the Code of Conduct, she was large and soft and somehow powerful, how did she manage to be this nice but not smile at all? She looked like she could probably murder someone if she had to; she looked like she always knew exactly what she was doing. Somehow I knew this wouldn’t be the only time we would ever talk. God, I didn’t have a clue what was going to happen.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Another hour passed before it was the acceptable time to move to Johnny R’s, and I was trying to stay calm and trying not to Facebook message my mum and tell her to come pick me up because that would be lame. I knew I was lame, but no one else was supposed to know that.
We all stood up to head over to Johnny R’s. I was feeling a bit light-headed and like I wasn’t really controlling my legs, but I still heard Raine say, “This is nice,” and point at my top, which was just a very plain chiffon shirt that I picked out because it looked like something Maya would wear.
I almost completely forgot about Aled, but then as we were walking down the street, my phone started to ring. I took it out of my pocket and looked at the screen. Daniel Jun was calling me.
Daniel Jun had my number only because, being head boy and girl, we ran a lot of school events together. He’d never called me, and only texted me four or five times with mundane school-event-related things such as ‘are you setting up the cake stand or am I’ and ‘you collect tickets at the door and I’ll direct people in from the school gate’. This, added to the fact that Daniel disliked me, meant that I had no idea why he was calling me.
But