The Things We Do to Our Friends(16)

I was confused by why she’d want to swap, but before I could even protest, she put her coat on and then shimmied out of her blouse like a snake shedding skin. I saw the flash of soft flesh just under the lace edge of her bra, and the most perfect oval of a bruise sitting there. A mottled purple kiss situated on the high crest of her ribcage. Squirming, she hooked her blouse under one arm and then proffered it to me, a scrap of fabric hanging on the end of one finger. And I took a deep breath and tried to ignore the other students around us who were starting to stare, as I pulled my top off, awkwardly cloaking myself with my jacket. Felt a rush of excitement that made me dizzy.

I passed it to her, and she pulled it on.

“Ta-da!” she exclaimed, tearing her own coat away to show me.

She looked good.

Things like that, all the time, meant that whenever the pace slowed, I knew she wouldn’t let it stay sluggish for long.

I kept her top and I slept with it next to me, on my pillow, because it smelled of her. Of sweat and musk and sugar sweets and artificial lemons.

We didn’t integrate with the rest of the student body much. I felt people’s eyes on us—of course they watched us, why wouldn’t they when we did things like swap clothes in public and talk loudly—but I never felt too embarrassed. I was happy and, most importantly, I didn’t do anything bad. That only happened once during my first year in Edinburgh.

It’s the sense of being wronged. When I think that someone has mistreated me, it’s not something I can forget and move on from. It was manageable at that point because I had worked hard not to let things affect me like they used to. I could rein it all back in with my carefully formulated tricks. There was no one to punish anymore.

There were a few times in that first term when I’d sit in the flat at 9 p.m., too early to go to bed but late enough to feel the pull of whatever was going on outside. The walls closing in on me became too much. I would need to go out into the city, onto the streets, to stay alive.

There was one night.

One night when I dressed up, which I liked to do occasionally as it was out of character. Pointy shoes and a short, short skirt because it made me feel like someone else.

When I walked out of the door, I was sure I was hallucinating. Everyone was in costumes, their faces too bright with big broad clown grins on plastic masks. There was a doughy sumo wrestler in a blow-up suit, his arm wrapped around a girl dressed as some kind of sexed-up cat in a leotard with scrappy whiskers painted on her cheeks.

The two of them were already stumbling, and she shrieked, holding on to him to stop herself from falling.

Of course, I realized it was Halloween, and I weaved through the busy streets, clotted with partygoers, to a club where I could lose myself, alone in a crowd packed together. I danced for hours that night, until I was sweaty, screaming to the music, and my arms ached and my throat hurt. As I left the club, I was still in my own world. I was deep in the Edinburgh night, snaking through the streets with the bass still moving through me, looking for the parts where nobody was to continue my walk and decompress.

I saw a group of men or boys ahead of me, staggering down the road.

Their voices echoed in the alley. First years like me, I guessed by the excitement levels. You could tell they were incredibly drunk from the way they kept pushing each other, hardly able to keep together in a group. Then, somehow, the pack fractured, ambling off into the night to cause havoc separately as the boys branched down different streets, blessing the world with the sound of their deep, rumbling goodbyes.

Not all of them, though. One boy lagged behind the rest. He kept walking slower and slower in front of me, waiting, I think, for us to meet and walk side by side.

I was close to home, and I was alert; I didn’t want to be cautious. I felt electric coming out of the club. The bite in the air. It made me jangly—a word my parents always used about me when they thought I was behaving a little too boisterously.

Just me and the boy; he stopped and leaned against a wall then set his pace to mine as I passed.

Clever of him.

I recognized him. I’d seen him the first time I’d met Tabitha and Imogen—he’d paid the bill at the bar. Chinless Wonder.

I avoided eye contact, but he’d already seen me, and I could tell he was interested in a confused way. A drunken narrowing of the eyes, a hunger behind them that betrayed his intentions.

“Hey, you,” he said, too loudly for how close he was to me. So confident that I’d want to speak to him. “I know you.”

“I don’t think so,” I replied.

“No, I do. From that bar, right?” Amiable now and slurring.

I wanted to get away from him, but I didn’t feel especially nervous about his closeness, more that I was irritated by his lack of fear.

How relaxed he was.

And how different this was for him than it was for me or for any girl alone at night. To never be thinking of soft footsteps behind him. Certainly, no sense of danger. Even at three in the morning, where the line between the dead and living fades. Tourist trickery in the day becomes real in the dark, with a cold gust and candles snuffed by spirits’ breaths. The sudden sense of the maze of vaults below where screams echo. The dead are near in the city when night falls. They press against you, but I think it’s the living who come for you.

Just the two of us in a dim alley.

She had it coming to her, walking alone in that short skirt so late—the beginning of every story you hear when that kind of thing happens.