Do You Remember the First Time?

magnificently dramatic thought that I would never see him again.
    Oh God, the party. I tried to call it off, but Tashy and my mother had persuaded me that of course Clelland would show up. Plus we’d invited everyone.
    The thing is, popularity is a tricky thing. It’s infectious. We couldn’t help it. It was the local comprehensive, it was pretty rough and, for some reason or another, that year everyone had decided to hate us.
    I hadn’t thought it would extend to a party, though. After all, everyone likes parties, don’t they?
    I was wearing a faintly daring red dress from Clockhouse, which I absolutely adored and spent the entire evening pulling down and panicking about whether I looked fat. (As the photos show, I looked teeny. Why on earth didn’t I realise how lucky I was before I had to wear long sleeves with everything and couldn’t brave the miniskirt any more?) How depressing. When I see all the teenagers these days marching around wearing next to nothing, Britney-style, I don’t think,ooh, look at that awful paedo-fodder. Well, sometimes I do a bit. But mostly I think, go for it, girls, because as soon as I became a student I went straight into dungarees and baggy jumpers mode, and I never got that body back again.
    Tashy had done my makeup, which involved something we’d read in Jackie magazine. We tried to copy it laboriously and somewhat unfortunately, and I had two pin-sharp lines of pink blusher up each cheek and very, very heavy blue eyeshadow. Actually, it would probably be all right now; I’d probably look like Sophie Ellis Bextor. If she was thirty-two and average-looking, instead of twenty-four and some kind of alien high priestess.
    I’d put on my nicest bra, brushed my teeth a thousand times and was desperately, desperately hoping that only one boy would ever walk up the garden path.
    Not a single person came.
    We sat and drank the punch and ate the crisps, and couldn’t even speak to each other. Tashy and I clung and tried to pretend not to cry. I looked at my best friend and felt my heart shrivel and die. This was life’s test. We were failing.
    ‘After this, school is going to be so much better,’ vowed Tash fiercely. We considered wrecking a few things anyway, just so my parents would think some people had arrived. But we didn’t. We ended up watching Dynasty . It was the longest four hours of my life. My mascara ran down and soaked my Clockhouse dress.
    A few weeks later, my dad left us. About this time of year, in fact, as far as I remembered. Well, that would be a nice anniversary for my mum tomorrow.
    Tashy was still talking, but I wasn’t listening. I was remembering the night I turned sixteen.
    ‘Your problem is, you think you only have one true love,’ Tashy was saying, bringing me back to earth.
    ‘Yes,’ I said.
    ‘NO!’ she said. ‘That’s not it at all! What I mean is, it won’t feel quite the same, but that’s just because it’s not new any more. It’s just different.’
    ‘Less exciting.’
    ‘Well, you can’t experience everything as if it’s the first time round forever.’
    ‘That’s why being grown up is so sucky,’ I said. ‘I can’t even remember what it was like the first time I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . But it was the most exciting thing that had happened to me at the time.’
    ‘Oh, you wouldn’t want to be sixteen again, would you? It was hell. Oh God, do you remember that party …?’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘It was hell then,’ I agreed, thinking about all the times Tashy and I had sat eating lunch, worrying madly about whether one breast was growing faster than the other and whether Loretta McGonagall was talking about us (she was) and whether we’d get invited to Marcus’s party (no, even though we asked him, the bastard. Just because we didn’t wear stiletto heels and make out. Well, of course that was the reason). ‘If I had to do it all again with what I know now I wouldn’t make such a hash of it.’
    Tashy sat up. ‘You haven’t made a hash of anything!’ she said. ‘Look at you. Good job. Smart car. Lovely bloke.’
    ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I said, staring at the ceiling. ‘Do you remember what you and I said we were going to do when we finished school?’
    Tashy thought for a moment and then laughed out loud. ‘Oh, yes. We were going to buy a car, travel through Europe, drawing cartoons and portraits, end up in Paris, rich and famous, live in a garret, buy a cat, then … let me see … I was