buddy, you’re five minutes early … fresh start to the New Year, eh?’ he laughed. Colleges have these people, support assistants, agony aunts, whatever you like to dress it up as and they are assigned to a case, like a detective, to shadow. To make sure that their days run smoothly. At this college they are known as ‘buddies’ and Matt is Abigail’s buddy. Some people would say that Abigail was lucky that her buddy wasn’t a tight-fisted old hag with a melting face but Matt was just as difficult to get along with for different reasons. Matt was 32 years old. When his head wasn’t consumed by a tight beanie, he had his hair all spiked up like he had used a whole tub of Brylcreem … (excuse me … I mean … Wella) to get that out of bed look. He played around with it all the time, constantly referring to it as his flea pit but the warm smells of coconut shampoo and limey gel haunted him on his day to day whereabouts; it was very clear that his hair was washed more than the hands of the man with OCD. Matt wore baggy jeans that cut an inch or two too high around the leg; sort of swung around his ankles, showing off his Family Guy socks, making him look very awkward and slightly try-hard. Then there was that skater chain that hung so blatantly from his side pocket, reflecting Abigail’s dismal grimace and every other spare reflection in its twinkling presence, screaming, ‘I’M MASSIVLY OVERPRICED, WAS I EVEN BOUGHT FROM A COOL SHOP? WHAT THE HELL AM I USED FOR?’ Matt had the vocabulary of a fourteen year old; he used words like ‘sick’, ‘wicked’ and his good old favourite, ‘random’.
‘It’s raining, random.’
‘Hey, the guys have got a football, we should totally play, could be random?’
Which frustrated Abigail because she found that when something was actually ‘random’ she couldn’t bring herself to use the word itself, she was tired of having to find alternatives … ‘Yes, the lottery balls are chosen at … melon? Transformer? Broomstick?’ You see, it just doesn’t work.
This wasn’t the only thing that annoyed Abigail, it was the relentless refusal to give-up on her. He loved it. Abigail spent almost everyday giving off all the signals that she didn’t need him around. When he spoke – she stared at the floor, folding her arms aggressively, scuffing her boots along the walls. When he sat near her at lunch – she would get up and move away but he would still come after her, like the stinky boy in class with the bad breath and the dried smudges of sleep sculpted around his eyes. He would still want to be next to her to make more pointless comments about the weather or The Simpsons or what he had eaten for breakfast. ‘Toast. Random.’ The ‘buddy’ system was even more painful as it quite frankly made matters worse. Bullies just made jokes about Abigail going out with a teacher, the girls would crack up laughing for no reason at all whenever the two of them walked past and the boys would make ludicrous sex noises:
‘FUCK ME, MATT.’
‘ONLY WITH A BLINDFOLD YOU UGLY SHY BITCH.’
Matt was so polite and so protective of Abigail he would just play along with the comments, laughing hysterically, creasing his newly wrinkled face and sometimes overacting by putting a hand on his stomach. ‘You guys!’ he’d hoot breathlessly, dramatically slapping his thigh. Matt wasn’t fooling anybody; he was as transparent as a looking-glass. Abigail knew that she had no friends; she knew that she was the pinnacle of everybody’s fun and she knew that it was her that everybody was laughing at. She just knew.
So when Matt greeted her at the entrance to college at the start of the new term, she already had a pretty decent idea of what the next few months were going to work out like. (Which is why she pretended not to notice him.)
Matt was engulfed in some meaningful conversation about Japan with the librarian. Rebecca, Florence and Leilah paraded in through the library doors like three long-legged exotic birds and began gabbling over the other side of the room,
‘Just a minute, Matt,’ the librarian excused herself. ‘Girls, you know the library policy, keep it down, please. Thank you.’ To which Rebecca stuck up her middle finger as proud as a kitten that had managed to shit on the expensive rug. Then the whispering began. Rebecca was more of a threat to Abigail in comparison to everybody else, the reason being, she was the only person from the college that had been to her house. She came over to ‘knock for James’ and ended up having a glass of lemonade and a cherry bakewell. This meant that Rebecca knew perhaps an extra 60% more information about Abigail a.k.a Ugly Shy Girl than the rest of the outside world, which made Abigail feel slightly vulnerable and certainly uneasy. Rebecca was also renowned for being a top-class bitch. She had mastered the art of being a bully. Now, whispering across the room she had Florence and Leilah suckling on her words like bees on nectar. And her strong eyes, as fierce as two axes, were pinned to Abigail, strangling her with their pupils. Florence got up and sauntered over to Abigail, pulling up the chair opposite her and swinging it round so she was sitting on it back to front. Just like that song sung by that woman with lots of hair, this was irony in its finest form. Abigail was caught like a fly under a swot. The girls had slipped in through the cracks in the brickwork and where was Matt? Having a blast with the Librarian in the turtleneck.
‘Rebecca and Leilah reckon you haven’t got any pubes. I’m saying you do. You do right? If you do could you pull out a few so I can show them to shut them up?’ snickered Florence. Abigail picked at the edges of her diary.
‘Well you have or you haven’t?’ Florence started again.
Abigail’s head was facing so far forward it felt as though it could snap. Her fringe smothered her eyes which were scampering wildly about, searching for an escape.
‘Or are you one of those girls that are dark on top but ginger downstairs. Hope not. You can felt tip them, you know. Not with a Berol though, it has to be a permanent marker really.’
Abigail’s heart was beating so quickly she was sure everyone could hear it. Leilah and Rebecca sat across the room, bog-eyed and long-necked.
There was a long, painful silence.
‘Agh, who cares anyway? She’s a baby, she hasn’t got any.’ Rebecca chuckled wickedly, threw her head back and snatched a copy of HEAT magazine off Leilah, flicking through it without glancing at a single page. Then her face contorted into a grimace and she began to waft her hand dramatically in front of her face.
‘Saying that though, she certainly doesn’t smell like a baby. Ugh, she smells like rotten fish. Shut your legs can you, Ugly Shy Girl? Jesus, I can smell you from here.’
Rebecca carried on wafting the nonexistent stench out of her face.
‘I can’t smell anything,’ said a confused Leilah.
‘Me neither,’ huffed Florence, annoyed. Both girls were clearly not horrid enough to catch onto Rebecca’s vile rope.
‘Well you’re lucky, it’s disgusting,’ Rebecca said, peering back down at her magazine. ‘I’m bored of this, let’s go and watch Amy Benton in her leotard, she’s got stretch marks up to her eye balls.’
Abigail, who had been rooted to the spot, paralysed by fear, breathed a sigh of relief as Matt plodded into the room, grinning like a happy bear. ‘The librarian
