thick head. Which went OK for a day or two, until one evening—right in here, actually, I think you two and your other mates were taking up the kitchen table—he started rubbing my thigh and told me how sexy I was.” She reached out a hand; Leon threw her the lighter. “Which, yeah, right. I assumed he was just taking the piss—I still think he was, actually. Like, he and his buddies had a dogfight going or something. Did you?”
“No! Jesus Christ, Su. What do you take me for?” I was pretty sure I was right to be outraged, I wouldn’t have got involved in something like that, would I? “And”—definitely true, this part—“no way would I have let him drag you into it. No fucking way.”
“Well,” Susanna said, “I knew he was setting me up, one way or another. Maybe it wasn’t a dogfight or a bet, maybe he just thought I’d be an easy shag because I’d be so flattered by having someone so totally awesome wanting little old me. Or maybe he thought he was doing me a favor in exchange for the study help. Anyway, I took his hand off me and said I wasn’t interested. Which he clearly wasn’t expecting.”
Leon snorted. “Why did he have to be setting you up?” I said. “Or looking for a quick shag? Maybe he was genuinely into you.”
Susanna threw me a look, over the click of the lighter. “Oh, come on. You know what Dominic was into. Cara Hannigan. Lauren Malone. Gorgeous popular super-groomed blondes.”
“You shouldn’t underrate yourself,” I said, idiotically. “You’re beautiful. Not everyone likes the same—”
“Toby,” Susanna said, half amused, half exasperated. “It’s OK that I’m not gorgeous, you know. It’s not some kind of deformity that you need to tiptoe around and pretend you don’t notice.”
“I’m not—”
“Anyway, I wasn’t into Dominic, so it doesn’t actually matter whether he was genuinely into me or not. Although of course that’s not how he saw it. He told me to relax, and put his hand back on my leg. I was done with the whole thing. So I told him to get off me because I’d rather eat my own puke.”
“Oo,” I said, wincing reflexively. Even after all those years I could feel, with a quick zip of adrenaline, exactly how little Dom would have liked that.
“Yeah, in hindsight, that may not have been a great call. Live and learn.” She stretched out a foot, hooked a toe under the edge of the coffee table to pull it closer so she could reach the ashtray. “He actually acted like he was taking it OK. He made a big deal of jumping back and holding his hands up, laughed a lot, some stuff about how I needed to chill out and what was I, a lezzer, cliché cliché. I got up to go and he was like, ‘What, you’re not going to help me out any more?’ I said no, we’re done. Well.” She raised an eyebrow. “He was genuinely outraged about that. ‘What the fuck is your problem, I was just having a laugh, you’re crazy . . .’ I left. I was a bit shaken up, but I thought that was the end of it.”
Leon started to laugh. “I know,” Susanna said. “Bless my innocent little heart.”
I was—deplorably, maybe, I didn’t care—thrilled by the way this story was going. I hadn’t been sure about Leon, but Susanna: there was no doubt in my mind that I would have protected her if she needed it, no matter what that took. My heart was going like I was on a roller coaster, rising towards that dizzying peak, ready for the unstoppable plunge.
“After that,” Susanna said, “whenever I ran into him, like when everyone was hanging out in the park after school, he’d get in some comment about me being frigid or uptight. Someone would crack a dirty joke and Dominic would be like, ‘Whoa, better keep it clean, Mother Superior’s here!’ And plenty of people would laugh. I tried telling him to shut up, but that just made him worse: Ooo, someone needs to grow a sense of humor, she must be on her period, she needs a good shag to loosen her up . . . And everyone would laugh harder. So after a while I just kept my mouth shut.”
I was trying to remember this. Everyone had flirted with everyone, mostly very badly, everyone had slagged everyone, a lot of people hadn’t known where to stop—we had been