Page 31 of Sad Girl Hours

Chapter Thirty-one

Saffron

I’m walking back from the bus stop after my last lecture of term before the Christmas break. My breath’s condensing in front of me – it’s only half four but it’s pitch-black – and there’s a chill creeping into my bones.

In a way, the pressure is off. Uni is done for nearly a month now.

I should be feeling relieved. But I still have my meeting with my tutor about my ‘attendance’ tomorrow, and then at the end of the week I’m going back home for Christmas.

Or, at least, I’m going back to my parents.

When I think about ‘home’, I certainly don’t picture my parents’ clinical kitchen, everything made of glass and right angles. Or even my room upstairs.

When you’ve gone to places as dark as I have, it’s hard not to make associations with the physical places you were in when you felt that way.

It’s like I filled each room with tears, and now the ghosts of each drop linger in the air, filling my throat when I walk in, and making me remember how easy it could be to drown again.

I’m walking up my street now. I can see the tree we decorated with Nell in the window, multicoloured lights shining through the window. The light’s on in the kitchen too, so someone must be home.

I blink back the tears that sprang up earlier at the thought of going back to my parents’ house and walk through the door.

“Hello!” I call out, taking my shoes off and placing them on the rack. “I’m back.”

“Saffron, hey!” Casper pops his head out of the kitchen. “I’m just making a snack before we go and pick the others up for our big bon voyage evening. Do you want anything?”

“What are you making?” I ask, knowing that I’ll politely decline whatever it is.

“A whole bag of Yorkshire puddings to dip in gravy. Snack of kings,” he says promptly.

Of course. “Thanks, Casp, but no, I’m good.”

We’re meeting Nell and Jenna at their house and then going to the square outside the town hall where there’s outdoor ice skating and a fair.

It’ll be gone by the time we get back next term, so Nell suggested we go this week and have a nice evening together before we scatter around the country for nearly a month.

I’ll miss her. Them. I’ll miss all of them. It feels like an awfully long time. And who says it’ll just be for those weeks? I know there’s a very real chance that I won’t be coming back in January. This really could be goodbye.

An hour later and we’re all huddled round Jenna and Nell’s front door. We’ve pressed the doorbell and discovered it remains broken. We’ve knocked several times but there’s no answer. We can hear music playing somewhere inside, though, and they’re definitely expecting us.

“Vamos,” Vivvie says. “Let’s just go in. I bet they’ve got distracted with a dance party again when they were getting ready.”

We head in, the door unlocked. I follow Vivvie up the stairs, Casper right behind me. The music seems to be coming from Nell’s room – her ‘Very Merry Christmas’ playlist that she’s had on since the first of December.

There are voices from Jenna’s room at the other end of the corridor, however. I gesture to the others that they’re there. I’m about to push the door open when I hear something that makes my hand falter in the air.

“You know, upon reflection, I really should have known that you were asexual,” Nell’s saying. “Remember when we went to that pub called the Horn of Plenty and you said we should call you the horn of plenty because you were sure feeling plenty of—”

Jenna laughs. “Yeah, OK. That wasn’t very convincingly allosexual of me, I will admit.”

Vivvie’s head snaps straight to Casper.

Curiously, Casper’s face is uncharacteristically calm, betraying no feelings about this revelation.

“We should go back downstairs,” I whisper. “Maybe we can pretend we didn’t—”

“Too late,” Vivvie says grimly as the door swings open. Jenna’s in the doorway, Nell right behind her, looking beautiful in a brown tartan dress and corduroy jacket, her hair curled underneath a baker boy hat, her black ‘stompin’ boots’ on her feet.

“Hello … everybody.” Jenna blinks at us. “How much of that did you hear?”

“Pretty much all of it,” Vivvie contributes.

“All of it?” I detect a note of panic in Nell’s voice.

“Well, that Jenna’s asexual,” Vivvie says, arching her eyebrows. “Why, was there anything else?”

Nell draws back, looking reticent. “Nope, that – that about covers it.”

“Well, all right then.” Jenna leans against the door frame, looking remarkably chill about just having accidentally outed herself to us. “You may each ask one question about this, and then we should leave for town.”

“One question?” Vivvie says.

“One question. Make it count.”

“So you and Casper aren’t fucking?”

Jenna pulls a face as Casper looks down at the floor. “ Jesus , Viv. No. Never have.”

“Hmph.” Vivvie takes this in. “Interesting.”

“Saffron?” Jenna turns to me. “Your turn.”

“Oh. Right. Well.” I have a think. “I don’t really have any questions about the actual asexuality – congrats and also sorry, by the way. We really didn’t mean to—”

She cuts me off with a wave of her hand. “It’s fine. Honestly. I’ve been ready to talk about it for a while.”

“OK.” That’s a relief. I was readying myself to feel crushingly guilty. “Good to know. I guess my question is why do you two always leave things together then? With excuses like—”

“Why is it so hard to believe that a person can get a desperate urge to do a puzzle at two thirty in the morning when it’s so easy to believe they had a desperate urge to shag Casp?”

“You know, that’s a valid point,” Viviana notes.

My stomach twists. Have I offended Jenna?

Like she can see me think this, however, Jenna carries on.

“I’m kidding. Mostly. And the answer is that while most people are in other people’s DMs, I’m just in the DSM.

I have anxiety,” she explains. “And, when I get overwhelmed, Casper’s always really great and helps me escape somewhere calmer, so it doesn’t reach panic-attack stage. ”

She turns to Casper, reaching out to him with her smile. He gladly returns it, looking so soft the edges of his person blur as he gazes into her eyes.

I feel guilt start to warp my insides again, though. “I’m sorry again. I didn’t mean to—”

“Saffron, chill . It’s literally fine. I’m not ashamed or anything.

Loads of people have anxiety. I’m not special.

” She snorts. “Well, I am. I’m a goddamn superstar.

I just mean you don’t need to worry about anything.

I kind of liked sneaking off with Casper to do some nonsense puzzle or rehearse my lines while you all kept partying.

It wasn’t a secret because I was ashamed.

It was just a secret because I hadn’t told it. If that makes sense.”

It does make sense. But it’s not what I’ve been doing.

“Right.” She looks at Casper again. “Nell got her questions in last night, so I guess that just leaves you, Casp. What’s your question?”

“I’ll ask mine later on if that’s OK,” he says, and Jenna looks thrown for a second before she continues.

“Sure. Then I guess that’s it. Shall we?”

As we walk downstairs and out of the house, I fall into step with Nell by my side. “Hi!” she says brightly but she’s concentrating hard on my face.

“Hi,” I say back. “Are you excited to ice-skate?”

She smiles with something that looks like relief. “Absolutely. I do need to reiterate, however, that my enthusiasm for something does not necessarily correlate to my skill levels in said activity.”

“Which translates to you telling me that…”

“I suck ass at ice skating. I’m like a baby penguin on the ice but at least those guys have the excuse of being, you know, being fresh out the egg.”

I laugh. She looks forward again and I shiver, remembering again how cold it is, adjusting my giant scarf so it’s covering the whole back of my neck.

“Hey.” Jenna joins us and Nell smiles at me before swapping places with Jenna and lightly jogging to catch up with Viviana and Casper. I watch her put her arms on their backs and, I think, start trying to convince them to ‘one, two, three, wheee’ her.

“She’s ridiculous, isn’t she?” Jenna says. “But you can’t help but love her.”

“No,” I say. “You can’t.”

I remove my gaze from the other three and note Jenna’s ever-so-slight shake of her head as she smiles at me.

“I’m sorry for ambushing you earlier,” I say. “We should have waited outside and not come in. I feel awful that—”

“Saffron, I’m only going to say this one more time. It’s fine . Don’t beat yourself up for something that if I wanted to beat you up about I would have done already. OK? I’m not one to postpone a bollocking.”

I nod, trying not to smile. “That is true. Thanks.”

“I’m glad, honestly, that it’s all out in the open. Sure, it’s been nice to just chill with Casper, but it’s also nice that I can talk to all of you about things now. I, Jenna Adebayo, am asexual. And I have anxiety. Really collecting those ‘As’, aren’t I?”

“Seems like it. But it’s nice to meet you, Jenna Adebayo, asexual person with anxiety. I’m Saffron.”

My sentence ends there. There’s more I could add like Jenna did. I’m Saffron, an allosexual lesbian who has seasonal affective disorder and who is also just a general mess of a human being.

“You’ve always been so brave.” The words come out before I think about whether they’re the right thing to say.

“I have,” Jenna says. “I’ve had to be. But I’m also a person.

I get scared. Nervous. Anxious, obviously.

Like yes, I’m amazing. I’m going to conquer the musical-theatre world and also pen plays that will win awards at fancy award ceremonies where I’ll get to say thank you and also fuck you to the old white men who’ve been so gracious as to finally stop sleeping on the achievements of people like me. ”

“Iconic behaviour.”

“Thank you. But no one is infallible, Saffron.” Her use of my name feels pointed. “Everyone’s got their own thing going on. I wish we all talked about that way more than we actually do.”

Definitely pointed. Another piece of evidence that I’m not as good at hiding my difficulties as I should be.

Although, the thought occurs to me that Jenna’s making a lot of sense, and maybe hiding things away doesn’t make sense. Why should I hide it all away? Who exactly is it serving to not talk about these things?

You , something in my brain says. Because what if you did tell them and that made it harder to keep it all in from now on?

Or you did keep it in but now they knew you’d been hiding things from them all this time, and lying about where you were last winter, and everything fell apart and they didn’t want you around any more?

God, I’m tired of this. For once, I don’t want to burn myself down: I want to burn down whatever it is that’s making me feel like this.

I want to strike a match and tell it to fuck off and let me enjoy my life for a change without constantly overthinking and analysing everything I do and say.

I just want to be without thinking about it first. I don’t want to perform any more.

I told Jenna she’d been brave and she has. But, walking along with her like this, she’s not acting like some earth-shaking revelation was just shared and our relationship will never be the same again.

Because it hasn’t. She’s a person with feelings. Alert the media.

God, I think I’ve been a bit of a tit.