Sam Baker - To My Best Friends

Nicci did. They all did. Lizzie was at war with her wardrobe.

‘Why don’t you just go and style her?’ Jo suggested.

Jo sat in the doorway between the hall and living room, a plastic cup of cheap white wine between her knees. She was wearing jeans. Mona and Jo both were. All three of them did, usually. Only Nicci refused, claiming they made her look even more like a boy. They didn’t, but who were Jo, Lizzie and Mona to argue? Nicci understood clothes in a way no one else did. Jo liked them – sometimes – more than clothes liked her, but she didn’t know how to play them. How to make them do her bidding.

Nicci was wearing her beaten-up DMs, with torn fishnets and one of the many vintage underslips she’d bought from a local flea market, topped off with a rabbit fur shrug she’d brought home earlier that day. The row about how disrespectful Nicci’s dead jacket was to Mona’s vegetarian sensibilities had just finished, only to segue into this.

If I didn’t love Nicci so much I’d be eaten up with jealousy, Jo thought. But she did. Nicci was Nicci. Whatever ‘it’ was, she had it. She could pull it off, black bra showing beneath the slip and all. That was just how life was.

‘Finally!’

Jo looked up at the sound of Nicci’s voice. Lizzie was hurrying down the stairs in her usual uniform of 501s and outsized man’s shirt.

‘You look great,’ Nicci said.

But Lizzie obviously didn’t feel great. She looked defeated. In the battle of Lizzie vs. her wardrobe, Lizzie had lost. Again.

They were so late they decided to skip the pub altogether. They’d drunk a bottle of the cheapest white table wine Tesco had to offer before they left the house, and had another two bottles in their bags so they went straight to the house party. The thud of the bass met them before they could turn the corner into the right street, and pissed students were already spilling onto the pavement.

The girls were so far behind everyone else on the alcohol-and-illegal-substance front that they almost kept walking.

It was Lizzie who saw him first. Not that his old-school purple Mohican was easy to miss. But in the dark, with the fug of B&H and dope smoke clouding the ceiling, and the pulsing beat of The Prodigy destroying the bits of her concentration alcohol hadn’t already wasted, it was a miracle she noticed anything at all.

Lizzie found him in the kitchen, beside a keg of Dutch cooking lager, set up on the draining board.

If she was honest his look intimidated her, but between the fierce hair and torn leather jacket were kind brown eyes.

‘Want some?’

After glancing over her shoulder to make sure he really was talking to her, Lizzie nodded. ‘Four cups, please.’

‘The party that bad?

She grinned. ‘I’ve been to worse.’

He grinned back. ‘Me too.’

When Lizzie fought her way back to Nicci’s corner, plastic cups of something warm and flat balanced between her hands, she looked different, somehow. Glowy.

‘You look different. Have you been smoking?’ Nicci asked, extracting one of the cups from Lizzie’s hands.

‘No!’ Lizzie yelped. ‘You know I don’t.’

But Nicci was right. She felt different too.

‘What is it then?’ Jo said. ‘You met someone? Fast work, O’Hara. You’ve only been gone ten minutes.’

‘Maybe,’ Lizzie said, but even in the dark they could see her blush.

‘You left one behind.’ The voice behind them made Lizzie start. She jumped, knocking Nicci’s hand and sending warm lager sloshing across her peach satin slip. ‘Bollocks,’ everyone said in unison.

‘Shit,’ said the guy with the purple Mohican. ‘I didn’t mean to . . . I mean, I was just trying . . .’

‘Yeah,’ Nicci said.

‘I’m David,’ he added helplessly.

His face was in direct contrast to his hair. If his hair was all aggression and sharp edges, his face was round and friendly, his eyes soft and brown. He looked genuinely mortified. ‘Whose is this?’ He held up the final plastic cup and Jo claimed it.

‘I’m Lizzie,’ Lizzie said. ‘And these are my housemates, Jo, Mona and Nicci.’

In the time it took her to give their names Lizzie saw it happen. She’d seen it before. She was used to it. They all were. So used it, she didn’t even mind any more. Not usually. It wasn’t as if Nicci did it on purpose.

David smiled warmly at the others but his gaze returned to Nicci, who was staring back, her mouth slightly open. Lizzie started to say something, anything, to capture his attention, but it was pointless. She could have jumped up and down between Nicci and David and neither would have noticed. She knew the warning signs, but this wasn’t just a sign, it was hazard lights and sirens and all the makings of a ten-car pile-up.

‘You’re not at uni, are you?’ Mona asked. ‘I mean, I haven’t seen you around.’

‘I know Phil, the guy whose party it is,’ David said, dragging his attention away from Nicci.

‘Mad Phil?’ Lizzie said.

David nodded, his gaze never leaving Nicci. ‘I’m doing architecture at King’s. Just finished my placement. And just broke up with my girlfriend. Phil said there’d be some fit birds here so I should come down.’

‘They must have left already,’ Jo said. Boom boom!

Lizzie rolled her eyes and stuck her elbow in Jo’s ribs. Not funny , she mouthed.

‘What course do you do?’ David was saying, but it wasn’t a general question.

‘Eng lit. No idea why.’ Only Nicci answered.

‘What’s wrong with English?’ he asked.

‘Nothing. I’m just more interested in fashion.’

‘C’mon,’ Jo said, grabbing Lizzie’s elbow, ‘let’s go and steal someone else’s bottle.’

‘But I just got—’ Lizzie protested. She knew it was futile.

‘Lizzie,’ Jo hissed as Mona took Lizzie’s other elbow. ‘We. Are. Not. Wanted. Here.’

And imperceptibly, Lizzie drooped.

One of them met a bloke, then the bloke met Nicci and that was it. It wasn’t that Nicci was a babe. Mona had the model body, Jo had better boobs and Lizzie had the wild Pre-Raphaelite curls. But whatever it was Nicci did have, men wanted it. The path to their student house was littered with the broken egos of Brighton’s straight male population. And some of the gay ones too.

Chapter Nine

Seven fifty-five p.m. Mona glanced at her mobile, double-checked the clock on her DVD and sighed. Whichever clock she looked at it was still seven fifty-five.

She wasn’t sure which made her more tense: the fact Neil said he’d phone between seven and eight, and it was now precariously close to being clear that call was not going to come at all (oh, there’d be a good reason, there always was); or that in five minutes Jo would be knocking on David’s front door and doing what they’d all reluctantly agreed had to be done. Asking him the big questions. Had he had a letter too? If so, what did his say? Had he been in on this crazy plan all along? And if not, what was he going to do about it now he did know?

‘Daniel!’ Mona yelled. ‘Have you done your maths homework?’

Silence. If you could call the drone of computer-generated gunfire and the grinding gears of video-game tanks, silence.

‘Daniel!’

Silence, literal this time.

‘ What? ’

‘Homework? Have you done it?’