I collapsed on to my bed and turned my laptop on and went straight on to my Tumblr, where I posted all of my art. I scrolled down the page. What exactly had the Creator seen in these? They were all crap. Doodles I did to turn my brain off, so I could fall asleep and forget about history essays and art coursework and head girl speeches for five minutes.
I switched over to Twitter to see if the Creator had replied, but they hadn’t. I checked my email to see if they’d emailed me, but they hadn’t.
I loved Universe City.
Maybe that was my hobby. Drawing Universe City.
It didn’t feel like a hobby. It felt like a dirty secret.
And my drawings were all pointless anyway. It wasn’t like I could sell them. It wasn’t like I could share them with my friends. It wasn’t like they’d get me into Cambridge.
I continued scrolling down the page, back months and months and into last year and the year before, scrolling through time. I’d drawn everything. I’d drawn the characters – the narrator Radio Silence, and Radio’s various sidekicks. I’d drawn the setting – the dark and dusty sci-fi university, Universe City. I’d drawn the villains and the weapons and the monsters, Radio’s lunar bike and Radio’s suits, I’d drawn the Dark Blue Building and the Lonely Road and even February Friday. I’d drawn everything, really.
Why did I do this?
Why am I like this?
It was the only thing I enjoyed, really. The only thing I had apart from my grades.
No – wait. That would be really sad. And weird.
It just helped me sleep.
Maybe.
I don’t know.
I shut my laptop and went downstairs to get some food and tried to stop thinking about it.
“Right then,” I said, as the car drew up outside Wetherspoon’s at 9pm several days later. “I’m off to drink the alcohols, do lots of the drugs and have lots of the sex.”
“Oh,” Mum said, with her half-smile. “Well, then. My daughter’s gone wild.”
“Actually this is my one hundred per cent real personality.” I opened the car door and skipped out on to the pavement with a cry of, “Don’t worry about me dying!”
“Don’t miss the last train!”
It was the last day of school before study leave and I was supposed to be going to this club in town, Johnny Richard’s, with my friends. It was the first time I’d ever been to a club and I was essentially terrified, but I was on the verge of being so uninvolved with our friendship group that if I hadn’t gone, I thought they might stop considering me a ‘main friend’, and things would get too awkward for me to deal with on a daily basis. I couldn’t imagine what awaited me besides drunk guys in pastel-coloured shirts, and Maya and Raine trying to make me awkwardly dance to Skrillex.
Mum drove away.
I crossed the street and peered through the door into Spoons. I could see my friends sitting in the far corner, drinking and laughing. They were all lovely people, but they made me nervous. They weren’t mean to me or anything, they just saw me in a very particular way – School Frances, head girl, boring, nerdy, study machine. It’s not like they were completely wrong, I guess.
I went to the bar and asked for a double vodka and lemonade. The bartender didn’t ask for ID, even though I had a fake one just in case, which was surprising because most of the time I look approximately thirteen years old.
Then I walked towards my friends, barging through the packs of lads and pre-drinkers – more things that make me nervous.
Honestly, I need to stop being scared of being a normal teenage girl.
“What? Blowjobs?” Lorraine Sengupta, known to all as Raine, was sitting next to me. “Not even worth it, mate. Boys are weak. They don’t even want to kiss you afterwards.”
Maya, the loudest person of the group and therefore the leader, had her elbows on the table and three empty glasses in front of her. “Oh, come on, they’re not all gonna be like that.”
“But a lot of them are, so I literally can’t be arsed. Not even worth the effort, tbh.”
Raine literally said the letters ‘tbh’. She didn’t seem to do it ironically and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.
This conversation was so irrelevant to my life that I had been pretending to text for the past ten minutes.
Radio hadn’t yet replied to my Twitter message or emailed me. It had been four days.
“Nah, I don’t believe in couples falling asleep in each other’s arms,” said Raine. They were talking about something else now. “I think it’s a mass-media lie.”
“Oh, hey, Daniel!”
Maya’s voice drew my attention away from my phone. Daniel Jun and Aled Last were walking past our table. Daniel was wearing a plain grey T-shirt and plain blue jeans. I’d never seen him wear anything patterned in the year I’d known him. Aled looked just as plain, like Daniel had picked out his clothes.
Daniel glanced down and saw us and momentarily caught my eye before replying to Maya, “Hi, you all right?”
They struck up a conversation. Aled was silent, standing behind Daniel, and was hunched over, as if he were trying to make himself less visible. I caught his eye too, but he quickly looked away.
Raine leaned towards me while Daniel and the others were talking. “Who’s that white boy?” she murmured.
“Aled Last? He goes to the boys’ school.”
“Oh, Carys Last’s twin brother?”
“Yeah.”
“Weren’t you friends with her back in the day?”
“Er …”
I tried to figure out what to say.
“Sort of,” I said. “We chatted on the train. Sometimes.”
Raine was probably the person I talked to the most out of the group. She didn’t tease me for being a massive nerd like everyone else did. If I’d acted more like myself, I think we’d have been pretty good friends, since we had a similar sense of humour. But she could pull off being cool and weird because she wasn’t head girl, and she had the right side of her hair shaved so no one was very surprised when she did something unusual.
Raine nodded. “Fair enough.”
I watched as Aled took a sip of the drink he was holding and looked shiftily round the pub. He appeared to be deeply uncomfortable.
“Frances, are you ready for Johnny R’s?” one of my friends was leaning over the table and looking at me with a shark-like grin.
As I said, my friends weren’t horrible to me, but they did treat me like I’d had next to no major life experiences and was generally a massive study nerd.
Which was true, so fair enough.
“Er, yeah, I guess so,” I said.
A pair of guys walked up to Aled and started talking to him. They were both tall and had an air of power about them, and I realised then that it was because the guy on the right – olive-skinned and a checked shirt – had been head boy for most of last year at the boys’ school, and the guy on the left – stocky physique and an undercut – used to be the boys’ school rugby captain. I’d seen them both give presentations when I attended a sixth-form