It’s our last day of primary school before the summer and I’m staying at Emmy’s for a sleepover. We’re wearing our white polo shirts that everyone signed, although Emmy’s is busier and brighter than mine because she brought a pack of twenty-four multicoloured fabric markers with her to school especially. In the playground, the boys pushed and shoved each other to be the first to scrawl their names over the top of her black bra that you could see through the fabric if you looked close enough. The parents and teachers put on a party for us in the field. There was a bouncy castle and a stall where you could throw wet sponges at the teachers. There were trestle tables with paper plates of cheese puffs and chocolate mini rolls and cocktail sausages that looked like wrinkled toes after you’d spent too long in the bath. Emmy and I kept going back up to refill our cups with Coke and cherryade so that we could pretend it was wine, our tongues staining scarlet. We stumbled about the field in our ballet flats, hiccuping and toasting our drinks like we were grown women celebrating our divorces from men who never picked their wet towels up off the bathroom floor.
Sophie was meant to be staying at Emmy’s for a sleepover too, but she felt too sick from eating too many Party Rings and doing too many tricks on the giant trampoline, so Emmy’s mum dropped her home instead. Sophie goes to trampolining classes at the local gym, which is why she knows so much. She kept asking us to watch her, but Emmy and I were too busy pretending to be drunk to focus on her for long enough. I felt a bit bad, because I probably won’t see Sophie much over the summer. Her parents send her to summer camps while they go on holiday to places like Santorini and Sorrento. By the time she comes back to school in September, she’s got new swimming badges, and more friendship bracelets and MSN Messenger contacts than Emmy and I combined.
Emmy lives in a house with parquet flooring and black leather sofas so long, we can stretch ourselves out from either end and still only our toes can touch. Emmy’s mum eats her KFC at the breakfast bar in the kitchen so we can have the living room to ourselves. At first we watch episodes of Zoey 101 on Nickelodeon and Emmy says she wishes she could go to boarding school in California like Jamie Lynn Spears’ character does, instead of secondary school in our shit town. I nod and try to think of something to say but there’s too much chilli in the coating of my chicken burger and it’s catching in my throat and I have to scrabble for my Diet Pepsi. When we finish eating, Emmy lifts up the hem of her polo shirt and digs her fingers into the flesh of her stomach, her nails leaving white moons. ‘How much weight do you think I can lose before September?’ she says. Afterwards, we disconnect the EyeToy from her PlayStation 2 and plug it into the computer in the conservatory to use as a webcam. I feel glad Sophie isn’t here, as it’s hard to fit three dining table chairs around the computer at once. When we’d message the boys in our class on MSN to go on-cam with us, one of them would always say who iz dat at da back, and it would almost always be me.
Before bed, Emmy’s mum fills up bowls with toffee popcorn, Maltesers and gummy lips and we watch Coyote Ugly on DVD. Emmy’s mum asks me if I’ve seen it before and when I say no, she acts like she doesn’t believe me. She tells me that Coyote Ugly is Emmy’s all-time favourite film and before they got it on DVD, they used to have it on VHS, but Emmy wore the tape out because she kept rewinding the scene where the girls pour jugs of water over themselves on top of the bar. Emmy says nothing. She keeps her eyes fixed on the television and sucks on a Malteser until it turns to dust.
Emmy’s the only person I know with a double bed who isn’t an adult. She has a double bed but we don’t sleep in it. Instead, we make a nest on the floor with the duvet and the duvet from the spare bedroom, and some of the cushions from Emmy’s bed and more cushions from the living room. Her carpet is thick and soft like snow. I gently finger the trinkets on her dresser while she gets changed into her pyjamas: a mood ring and a tattoo choker and a snow globe from Disneyland Florida. ‘How much make-up do you think you’ll wear in Year 7?’ she says. I tell her I don’t know. Not much. My mum talks about seeing girls from the secondary school waiting outside the corner shop where she works, waiting for the older boys with mopeds to buy their cigarettes and alcohol, and what a shame it is that they hide their natural beauty under too many layers of foundation. ‘I think I’ll wear a bit of blusher,’ Emmy says. ‘And maybe some clear mascara.’
We stay up until two a.m. We talk about what we think our favourite subjects might be, when we get to secondary school. Emmy’s excited for science, because her cousin told her that he got to dissect a sheep’s eye in Year 7. I shudder. In my head, the EyeToy camera we used earlier to ask Lewis Kelly to show us a bit of his boxers is suddenly a real eye, pale and bluish and stringy with connective tissue. I tell her I’m excited for Drama, or maybe Spanish, because apparently you can go on a trip to Barcelona in Year 10. When we get sleepy, we take turns to tickle each other’s backs. We lie on our fronts, pyjama tops bunched around our necks, the baby hairs at Emmy’s nape fanning outwards like fern leaves. My turn is always shorter than hers. I map clusters of stars in her moles, tracing the milky tan lines from her bikini around the curve of her ribs. She wriggles when I touch her waist.
When she kisses me, I don’t close my eyes. I taste toffee kernels and mint toothpaste and something faintly sour, like gone-off stone fruits. ‘Ew,’ she says, when she pulls away. ‘Your tongue is still bright red.’
