It Sounded Better in My Head - Nina Kenwood Page 0,10
to look a lot more confident than I am. There are two guys I don’t know sitting on the steps leading up to the front door. They glance at me as I open the gate and walk towards them but continue their conversation. Should I say hi? I should say hi. I imagine myself saying hello in my nervous, too-formal voice and I imagine them raising their eyebrows at each other and then mimicking me behind my back as I walk in. I won’t say anything. That’s safer. I should pretend to be on my phone. But it’s too late for that now. I’m right beside them. Oh god, is one of them Benny?
I pause at the steps and manoeuvre awkwardly around them. They don’t even look at me or stop their conversation as I brush past.
The front door is open. There’s a long hallway with a stained carpet that could be grey or brown or blue—it’s impossible to tell—and music. I follow the hallway, peering into empty rooms as I pass them (a messy bedroom with an unmade bed and three guitars propped against it, another bedroom with posters of people I don’t know on the walls and a stack of dirty dishes on the bedside table) until I find a big lounge room where a bunch of people are sitting on couches and beanbags. There are double doors thrown open to a courtyard, and I can see more people out there, smoking and vaping. I can’t see Owen. Everyone looks so much older, even though I know most of them are only a year or two ahead of me.
I hover in the doorway to the lounge room, feeling like an idiot. I spend ten agonising seconds trying to look relaxed and normal, scanning every face desperately for Owen or Alex, and then I turn around and walk into the bathroom and lock the door.
I sit on the toilet for a while, and play on my phone until the battery goes down to 40% (I somehow forgot to charge it this afternoon, an amateur mistake) and then I stop, because getting through the rest of this night without a phone is an unbearable thought. I should just text Owen. He might even be here and I just didn’t see him, but I can’t bring myself to go back out there. How do people do it? How do they walk into a room of strangers and join conversations? And even if I could pretend I was comfortable doing that, I’m not sure this is the kind of party where that can happen. I don’t have the first clue how to interact with these people, who all know each other and go to university together and are utterly comfortable in each other’s presence. I’m some weird high-school kid who’s spent her whole life reading about parties rather than going to them.
I’m nervous-sweating now. I put bunches of toilet paper under my armpits to stop myself from getting sweat marks on my clothes. I’m wearing a cheap patterned dress I bought from a chain store that’s designed to look like it might be a 90s vintage dress from an op-shop. I bought it because it looked soft and floaty on the mannequin, and because it has cute buttons on the front, but it’s not quite soft and floaty on me. It’s itchy and doesn’t sit straight over my left boob. But the buttons do look cute.
Someone knocks on the bathroom door and I say nothing. They turn the handle, find it locked and knock again. I call out, ‘I’m in here. Sorry’. I hear footsteps walking away.
I really, really want to call Mum to pick me up but, no matter how grim this night gets, I won’t do that.
I start looking through the bathroom cabinets because I have nothing else to do. Panadol. Fungal cream. Birth-control pills. Toothpaste, with the cap off and a thick gloop of it on the shelf. Multivitamins. Mouthwash. Condoms. Lots of condoms. Medication that looks like antidepressants. I close the cabinet door, feeling bad for snooping.
They have a big, grungy bathtub that looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in months. I put an already damp towel in the bottom and sit in the bathtub, because it seems less gross than sitting on the toilet. I can see several dark hairs clinging to the side of the bath. There’s nothing more disgusting than other people’s bathrooms. I sit there for what feels like a long time, but is