It Sounded Better in My Head - Nina Kenwood Page 0,20

emphasising the hiding in the bathroom part, which they enjoy, and explaining the Owen peeing moment, which Lucy makes me retell more than once (‘What did you see exactly?’), but I skip over the spin-the-bottle ending, because I know Lucy will become laser focused on that part and Zach will act weird about the fact Alex and I got each other, but mostly because I’m not ready to say it out loud, because to speak the words of what happened might reduce it to the very small thing it really is.

If it’s not already clear, Lucy and Zach are my everything. I met them both at a writing camp when I was fifteen. Several schools in my area were asked to choose two students each from year ten to attend a special writing retreat set over three days in the wilderness. There would be workshops, sessions on creativity, book discussions and time to write. Everything about it sounded amazing to me, even the wilderness part, even though I would undoubtedly perish within thirty minutes if I ever got lost in the bush on my own.

I was one of the students chosen from my school, and I made myself sick about it. I had never wanted and not wanted something so much in my life. I had started my serious acne medication four months prior to going, and it was working, which was so miraculous I was still getting used to the idea, but it made my lips so cracked and dry they would sometimes bleed just from opening my mouth to eat something, I had to put on lip balm every ten minutes (that’s not an exaggeration, I truly had to apply lip balm up to ten times an hour in order to function) and I had rough, scaly hands and elbows and a weird, shiny red patch had appeared on my left cheek—all side effects that I was very self-conscious about.

Also, because of my self-imposed post-puberty social isolation, I wasn’t very good at meeting new people, or staying at a house other than my own, or sleeping in a bed that’s not my own, or making small talk with new people. I wasn’t good at existing outside a set of very narrow confines (the walls of my house, basically). I had spent three years turning myself into a socially incapable shut-in, and I didn’t know how to undo that.

On the other hand, I had wanted to go so badly it made my chest ache. I had actual heartburn from wanting it so much, and knowing I would probably let myself down. I wanted to go to this camp more than I had wanted to go anywhere in my life. I was chosen because I was an A+ English student and I won the school’s short story competition the year before (for an admittedly very melodramatic but honestly amazing story, if I do say so myself, called ‘Remember Me’ about a girl whose boyfriend is dying of a mysterious disease that causes him to forget his past a week at a time and he is cured just before he is about to die, but he’s lost his last memory of her), and possibly because I spent so much time in the library reading at lunchtime. But, looking back, a little part of me thinks I was chosen because of fate. I was destined to go on this camp and find the two people who would help me survive the rest of my teenage years—and the rest of my life, I hope.

Mum and Dad were overjoyed by the news I had been chosen. It was as though I’d been picked for the Olympics. I know they fretted about having an unbearably self-conscious hermit for a daughter, but if they broached the subject with me, it would usually end in a meltdown of tears and self-pity (mine, obviously, although Mum has a flair for the dramatic, which is where I get my best material), so my lack of social life and friends became the Topic Not To Be Discussed.

The camp invitation had opened the door to that topic again, and Mum wouldn’t let it be. We went around in circles: Mum telling me I had to go, and me telling her I would probably go, I would almost certainly go, I would try my best to go, but never quite agreeing that I would definitely go. It calmed me to know that there was still the option to not go. Because what