I’m nearly twenty-one now. At one point I was sure I wouldn’t make it to adulthood; I suppose I still might not. It’s hard to see at the age of fifteen, what your life would be like in five years time. The thing is, life is relatively calm for me now. Twenty four men later and I seem pretty settled; or so you’d think…
Some may call me a slut, slag, and other vile names associated with being promiscuous, but people of the same generation are likely to recognise where I’m coming from and maybe even sympathise.
It all started at the far too tender age of fifteen years old. My parents, Adam and Laura, had just had the longest break up in history, and my mum, my younger brother, Christian, and I had just moved into a three bedroom semi-detached house about a ten minute drive away from the grammar school me and my brother were attending.
At school I was known for slightly exaggerating the truth. If I’m being honest, I was a terrible liar. Everyone else seemed to have much more interesting lives and I just wanted to catch up and be on par. Looking back, however, the fact that they were slimmer and had more male attention, has just led to the majority of them being single and pregnant with their second child at this very moment in time! I tried to keep up by inventing boyfriends, saying I’d been to see certain bands when I hadn’t, etc, etc. Now, I refer to the friends I had in year ten of high school as “The Hair and Beauty Brigade” because that’s what the majority of them went on to do. The Hair and Beauty Brigade was made up of six girls including me. Hayley, Natalie, Rachel, the two Laura’s and moi.
The Hair and Beauty Brigade had desperately straight hair, all of the time; in fact, never had a hair out of place. I only had to think about moisture and mine frizzed out of all control and I ended up looking like a scarecrow.
The Hair and Beauty Brigade had size eight waists and wore skirts so short that everyone knew what colour their underwear was as soon as they were forced to bend down to pick up their school bags. I was at least three stone heavier than them and wore a skirt down to my knees. If I could have gotten away with wearing trousers, or failing that a floor length skirt, I would have done. A paper bag over the frizz would also have been a welcome addition to the school uniform.
I can’t say that I hated them, because if I truly hated them, I wouldn’t have been so-called “best friends” with them since I was eleven years of age. We weren’t the popular group, but we weren’t hated either; just nicely slotted midway into the hierarchy of peer groups. There were people that preyed on us, but there were also people for us to prey on. Laughing at other peoples expense is a cruel necessity at the age of fifteen. Unless you were in group numero uno it had to be inevitable that you dreaded school even the tiniest iota on a daily basis. With me, it was a little more than just the tiniest iota. Constantly remembering which lie you told to which person was really stressful and when I did get caught out and there was a possibility of me being confronted, I feigned illness and was absent from school until I’d thought of a ploy to throw them off the scent. Devious? Maybe. Necessary for survival? Definitely!
So anyway, you’ve been kind of introduced to The Hair and Beauty Brigade, the friendship group of the moment, so lets return to the whole “just moved into a new house” malarkey. Just remember, that those five girls pushed me into doing what I did, in their own manipulative ways. I was blameless, as always. I wish!
To the right of our new home, there was an alleyway. I learnt afterwards that it was commonly known as Jones’ alleyway. You’ll learn why pretty soon. At the end of Jones’ alleyway was a road. Three of my soon-to-be friends lived here. To cut a long story short, the end of the alleyway was a bit of a meeting place for the local teens, and this just so happened to be right underneath my bedroom window.
Me being me, and terribly nosey, realised that if I “innocently” sat on my bed with my TV muted and the window open I could listen to their conversations without them realising what I was doing. I never did it for long because I got bored of listening about the football game from the night before and which footballer is being transferred where and for how much money.
Jamie, visibly the eldest of the group, stood every evening without fail, leaning on my conifer smoking Richmond Superkings. He had short blonde hair and gorgeous big blue eyes. On the occasions we caught each others eye, usually while I was leaving the house or coming in from school, he’d grin. It was the kind of grin where I expected him to follow it up by saying something to me. He never did, and I used to stand there, waiting like a fool for something to be said, until I got too embarrassed and legged it down the driveway, scrambling in my blazer pocket amongst the rubbish for my front door key. He was bloody gorgeous, and I certainly wasn’t the type of person that get grins at by bloody gorgeous people. It was a proper weak-at-the-knees teenage crush, developing, literally, outside my front door.
For about two weeks this went on, and still no conversation of any kind, even pleasantries, had been exchanged. It was unnerving, yet so exciting. This was the first lad who’d made it so obvious that he liked me, and I really didn’t know how to cope with it. It would be bad enough if he was a geeky fifteen year old obsessed by science who spent his lunchtimes attending Mr Westfields’ chess club. But this was Jamie Williams. I can’t even describe it, but you’d know what I meant if you were there.
I used to wait on the car park/playground at school for the Hair and Beauty Brigade to arrive. One morning I was the first to arrive and was huddled under the tree we had nicknamed Richard in our younger days - it had a growth on it that looked like a penis. Quite funny to us when we were twelve! It was quite windy and I had the hood to my thick woollen coat up over my ears to try and keep my hair fit for human eyes for perhaps a little longer than it would last on its own. I smiled and greeted the people I knew, or recognised by sight, but there was one lad I knew I’d seen before, but I didn’t think I’d seen him in school uniform before. It didn’t seem to suit him.
He was tall; over six foot, with very tanned skin that stood out against the harshness of the bare November trees. His hair was almost white, like it had been bleached with the sun and he was broad and looked more like a young man than a high school student.
“Have you just moved house?” he asked me, stopping right in front of me.
“I, er…yeah. Why?” I mumbled back. Dead cool, Olivia. Well done! God, I’m an idiot.
“I live at the back of you, down that alley. My name’s Mark.” He had a way about him that made me relax so I smiled and he gestured to the nearby bench.
It was then I placed him. He had been with Jamie and that other boy outside my house since I moved in. I had been concentrating on Jamie so much I hadn’t taken much notice of Mark and the other guy. Apparently his name was Martin but they all called him by his surname, Beeston. Basically, Mark had seen my uniform and had recognised me from being in the school play. I obviously walked round with my eyes shut, because Mark had attended the same school for roughly two years without me noticing him. He was only in year eight though, where as I was in year ten. This really shocked me as he looked so much older than thirteen. I’m not even exaggerating now, but if he was to have walked inside a bar and ordered an alcoholic drink, identification would not have been requested. No word of a lie.
He was so chatty and charming that when Natalie, the first of HABB to arrive, I really wished she hadn’t. Mark had told me that they usually don’t spend so much time standing outside my house like “saddo’s” but Jamie refused to go anywhere until someone knocked on my door. Allegedly, he’d made out like it was a dare but Mark and Beeston had talked amongst themselves and come to the conclusion that he must fancy me. The long and short of it was that the two lads were driven crazy by Jamie’s refusal to leave the alleyway, so they’d decided, after much deliberation, that the only way to make him snap out of it was to befriend me at school. That way they weren’t “giving him what he wanted” apparently. Boys and their mind games are most amusing.
That afternoon, I caught the bus home from school as usual, and as I got off the bus just round the corner from my house, I could hear the low voices of the lads and could see small puffs of smoke coming over the fence that lined the alleyway in pine.
All of a sudden I froze. God knows what was up with me but he certainly never helped. My brother carried on in front, barely noticing my look of terror. Christian nodded a hello at the boys in that cool fashion boys manage to pull off, but if a girl did it she would look so pretentious. They knew I was there now. I had to move, but it wasn’t happening.
There was a vibrating in my blazer pocket and I felt relieved to hear my normal nokia ringtone bleep out quite loudly. I answered it and braved the three hundred feet gauntlet to my front door.
“Hi Lauz!” I answered cheerfully.
“Jesus, Liv! Why are you shouting?” she winced at my enthusiasm.
“I’m not, don’t be daft.” Scuttling past them I managed to get to the front door and jam my foot in it before my brother slammed it my face in full view of the lads. Now that would have been embarrassing!
Before I shut the door, I stole a glance at Jamie who was pretending he hadn’t seen me. It was Mark that caught my eye and made the universal hand gesture to check my phone for text messages. I nodded and the door clicked shut. We’d exchanged numbers before we had ended our conversation and bonding session on the bench outside school earlier that day. Throwing down my bag and legging it up the stairs I forgot that one of the Laura’s was on the phone, cancelling her call by accident in a hurry to access the little orange envelope glinting at me in the top right hand corner of my mobile.
