Am I Normal Yet? Read online

  “It’s proper weird.” He waved his hands about all crazy. “It’s a neurological condition where your hand, like, grows its own brain and does crap all on its own accord.” He grabbed his throat and pretended to strangle himself.

  “What, even jazz hands?” I asked, trying to make light of it through my inner doomness.

  He made his fingers jazzy, waving them in my face as I laughed nervously. “Yeah, maybe. But alien hand randomly slaps people, or chucks stuff on the floor; it might even try and strangle someone else. Here, I’ll show you.”

  He got out his phone and pulled up a YouTube clip, checking our sociology teacher still hadn’t arrived, leaning right in close so we could watch together. It was the closest a guy’s face had ever been to mine and I felt all panicky, in a good way. Ethan smelled of bonfire, in a good way. I could hardly concentrate on the hand video.

  I drew back first, and got my textbook out. “I don’t believe it,” I said. Not wanting to believe it.

  “It’s real, honest.”

  “How do you get it?”

  Ethan put his phone back in his pocket. “It’s usually a side effect of an operation to cure epilepsy.”

  I let out a big, real, sigh of relief. “Oh, good. I’m past the age where you develop epilepsy.”

  Ethan burst out laughing again, just as our teacher arrived and shushed him.

  Class began. Our teacher paced in front of the interactive whiteboard, introducing us to Marxism and Functionalism. Ethan kicked me under the desk. I looked up and he held my gaze intensely, before retreating back under his hair, a small smile on his rounded dimpled face. I withheld a grin and delivered a retaliatory kick. When he looked up, I held eye contact for only a second.

  Best game ever. Kick, stare. Kick, stare. Goosepimples stood to attention all over my body as our teacher’s lecture faded into background noise.

  I didn’t have one bad thought the entire lesson.

  In our next class, I was ready for him.

  “Capgras Delusion,” I said, before he’d even sat down.

  He threw back his hands. “Aww, man, I’ve got one too. I wanna go first.”

  I shook my head. “Nope. Mine first.”

  “All right, all right. What’s Capgras Delusion?” he asked.

  I put on an authoritative voice. “It’s when you suddenly believe someone close to you, like your husband, or your sister or something, has been replaced by an identical imposter trying to take over their life.”

  “Woooooah. No way.”

  “I know.”

  “Like an evil twin?”

  “I guess.”

  “That is so cool.”

  “I guess.” I’d already checked on Google and I wasn’t in the high-risk category.

  Ethan threw his bag down and stretched back in his chair.

  “Pica,” he said.

  “Whata?”

  “Pica. It’s an eating disorder where you love eating inedible objects with no nutritional value. Like rocks, and laptops and stuff. You’re just compulsively hungry. You’re always in and out of hospital because you’ve eaten stuff you shouldn’t.”

  I was about to open my mouth but he stopped me.

  “Don’t worry. You’re unlikely to get it. It’s linked with autism.”

  I nodded happily. “Cheers.”

  We smiled at one another but were, once again, interrupted by our teacher, daring to teach us.

  Over the next few lessons, we took it in turns to share a new disorder we’d discovered. Until suddenly one day Ethan seemed intent on actually learning. I watched him scribbling in his notebook as we were introduced to Karl Marx’s big revelation that poor people aren’t treated right by rich people. I tried to concentrate too, opening my own pad to make notes.

  That was, until his notepad slid across my desk.

  Can I ask you out?

  My breath ran out of me and I smiled the entire lesson. I wrote back only one word…

  Maybe…

  The bell rang and everyone stood to reload their bags. “So,” he said, sitting on my desk right in front of me. He was so confident. I liked it.

  “So, what?”

  “Are you about this weekend?” he asked. “I like you, Evie, you’re on the cute and kooky side of weird.”

  KOOKY!? I’d finally made it down the weirdness spectrum to merely kooky!

  I flicked through my plans. “I’m going to a house party on Saturday. There’s this girl in my form, Anna. She said her mum is really cool and lets her have house parties. Her first one is this weekend.”

  “Cool. Can I come? With you I mean?”

  OHMYOHMYOHMYOHMYOHMYGODDDDD.

  “Sure,” I said, as nerves and goodness went crazy in my bloodstream.

  “Great, where is it?”

  I reached the platform two minutes before the train was due and tapped my foot whilst waiting. I allowed myself to get excited. Like, really excited. Was I going to fall in love? Was this the start of it? Had I managed to find a nice sexy boy in my very first attempt at dating? Was this karma making up for the crap my life had been for the past three years?

  Yes. Maybe. No, hell, yes.

  The train was coming. Ethan was coming. For once, finally, I was living my life as it should be. For once I was going to catch a break.

  The train doors opened… Ethan appeared amongst a crowd of passengers getting off…and tripped over his feet, landing flat on his face. An empty two-litre bottle of cider rolled out of his hand.

  “Bollocks,” he yelled. He tried to stand but fell again, rolling onto his side and laughing.

  This wasn’t supposed to happen.

  I took a tentative step towards him. Passengers sidestepped us, giving us both dirty looks.

  “Ethan?” I asked.

  “WOAH, EVIE, I NEED YOU TO GIVE ME A HAND HERE.”

  He reached out for my arm, and I took his body weight – staggering under it as he righted himself. He absolutely stank. Of cider. And maybe a bit of sick.

  “Ethan…are you pissed?”

  He fell back a couple of steps, stopped his fall and broke into a proud-of-himself boy grin.

  “Don’t worry, love. I’ve got plenty left for you.” He reached into his backpack and retrieved another two-litre bottle. Only half of it was left.

  I realized Sarah might’ve been right.

  Three

  It was only a short walk to the party but, with an intoxicated Ethan, it took much longer.

  “Out of the road,” I said, steering him away from oncoming traffic. He took my hand-holding to mean something else entirely and squeezed mine tight. His felt warm and clammy.

  I tried not to think of the germs. I failed.

  He stumbled over his feet. “Whoops, wow, you have good reflexes.”

  His body weight shifted and swayed under my arm; I was practically dragging him to the party. He kept stopping to glug back more cider. Half of it went down his Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt, and some dribbled down the sides of his mouth. Could I run away? Was that fair? Or had I just met my match in weirdness? Was this the sort of behaviour the Love Gods had seen fit to pair me with? I couldn’t leave him: I’d definitely been stranger than this in the past.

  Ethan chucked the second empty cider bottle over a fence, right into the middle of someone’s front garden.

  “Go and get it.”

  “Okay.” He didn’t even argue.

  We turned down Anna’s road.

  “Almost there…” I said, like I was taking my child to Disneyland.

  Ethan ran ahead, then turned round so he was walking backwards, facing me. “Hey, guess what?” His smile was so wide I couldn’t help but smile a bit too. Those treacherous dimples.

  “What?”

  He looked at his hand, then stretched his mouth into a horror scream and pretended to strangle himself, like in sociology. “LOOK, IT’S THE ALIEN HAND, IT’S OUT OF CONTROL.”

  Despite myself, I giggled.

  “WHAT’S IT GOING TO DO NEXT?�
�� He slapped his face. “Oh no, it wants to jump bodies.” And he reached over and grabbed my boob. I looked down at my chest in horror.

  “HONK HONK.” Ethan beamed at me. I slapped his hand away.

  “Did you just grab my boob?”

  Too pissed to pick up on the scary in my voice, Ethan smiled wider.

  “It wasn’t me. IT WAS THE ALIEN HAND.”

  How? How was this happening to me?

  I pushed past him and stormed through Anna’s front door into the party. Ethan lurched behind yelling, “WAIT, THE ALIEN HAND IS SORRY.”

  Rock music blasted my eardrums the moment I got inside. I stopped at a people blockage in the hallway. There were groups of college friends everywhere, spilling up the stairs like bubbles in an exploded bottle of champagne. The bass made my heart beat faster. I looked around for anyone I knew. Ethan caught up with me.

  “Hey, you ran off.” He looked all lost and cute. I melted a bit and let him take my hand again.

  “No more alien hand, okay?” A sentence I never thought I’d say.

  “Okay.”

  We pushed through the crowds, saying “hi” to people as we passed. Jane – TRAITOR – was on a sofa in the living room, surgically attached to Joel. Somehow she found it in herself to stand up and hug us both hello.

  “Evie, you guys made it!”

  I gave her a weak hug then pulled away, examining her face. A new piercing dangled angrily out of the bottom of her face.

  “Wow, Jane, you’ve had your lip pierced.”

  And your personality eaten by your soul-sucking boyfriend.

  “I know, right?” she said, all thick and girly. “It hurt like a mofo, but Joel says he loves it.”

  I raised my eyebrows at Joel.

  “Some gal you got there,” I told him.

  “I know, isn’t she the greatest?” He pulled at Jane’s leg like she was a puppy that needed controlling.

  “Aww, Joel,” she simpered.

  To distract myself from the mini-sick in my throat, I gestured to my date. Hoping like hell he could control himself.

  “Hey, guys, this is Ethan.”

  Joel waved, not even bothering to stand and say “hello”. Joel didn’t bother with many people. “WOOOO,” Ethan yelled, like a frat boy at a stag do. “GREAT PARTY.”

  I leaned over to Jane and yelled in her ear over the music. “Jane. He’s really, really drunk.”

  “I can see that.”

  “What do I do?”

  Ethan made the metal sign with his fingers and jumped up and down on the spot. Everyone stared, bemused.

  Jane looked like she was about to offer advice but then Joel pulled her back onto the sofa and kissed her urgently. I stood alone for a moment, contemplating what to do. Distance. I needed distance from the situation.

  “I’m going to the kitchen to look for alcohol,” I yelled over at Ethan. He stopped mid-headbang.

  “Will you get me some cider?” he asked.

  “Are you sure you’ve not had enough?”

  “You can never have enough cider.”

  “I think you’re living proof that you can.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  Why Jane was a traitor

  Jane and I. Me and Jane. It has always been us against the universe. Well, us against secondary school at least. We met in Year Eight and bonded immediately over our mutual disregard for everyone else.

  “Hi,” she’d said, sitting next to me – all bag banging on the table in an I-don’t-care way. “I’m Jane. I’m new. I hate everyone in this room.”

  I looked round at the gang of popular girls preening in the corner, the boys all making fart noises in their armpits, the goody-two-shoes craning their necks in the front row.

  “I’m Evelyn. I hate everyone too.”

  She flicked me a wicked grin. “Great. So we can be friends.”

  I’d never known closeness like it. We spent almost every waking second together. We walked into school, spent lunchtimes huddled and gossiping, drawing stupid pictures of our classmates, making up our own in-jokes. After school we’d go round to each other’s houses – watching films, making up silly dance routines, gobbling up one another’s deepest darkest secrets.

  In Year Nine, I got sick.

  Then I got worse.

  Then I got whatever is worse than worse.

  Jane was always there.

  Always there with me in the school toilets, calming me down, shushing me as I scrubbed my hands so raw that blood poured into the sink. Always there at my door after school, on Bad Days, when the thought of even stepping outside was unimaginable – with my homework clutched in her hand and the latest gossip to tell. Always there at the weekends when I couldn’t do anything, or go anywhere, because everything was terrifying. She never pushed. She never judged. She never complained. She just let me lie on the sofa in her living room whilst she played the clarinet.

  When I got better we were stronger than ever. She fought my corner when people called me a weirdo. She didn’t mind that I freaked out last minute and couldn’t make it to prom and we’d watched Carrie instead. On our last day of Year Eleven we jumped up and down, hugging outside the gates.

  “We’re leaving, Evie, we’re actually finally leaving,” she said. “College is going to be so different and amazing and brilliant. We can be completely new people.”

  “I won’t be ‘the girl-who-went-bat-shit-crazy’ any more.”

  She smiled her sparkling smile.

  “And I won’t be ‘that crazy girl’s mate’.”

  We were euphoric the whole summer – planning our new lives, our future happiness, with the same determination of a crazed bride-to-be.

  Jane met Joel on our first day of college.

  She ran up to me at the end of the day – her face red, her hair flapping in the wind behind her. “Oh my God, Evie, there is the most incredible guy in my philosophy class. His name’s Joel.”

  I giggled and did a gorilla voice. “Me Joel, you Jane.”

  She didn’t laugh.

  “I’m serious. He stared at me, I swear, like the entire first half. And then we got paired up to answer this question and, oh Evie, he’s so deep. He like GETS Aristotle. And he’s the lead guitarist in this band. And he’s got tattoos, but, you know, like good ones…”

  She rambled on while I analysed the peculiar feeling forming in my stomach. An uncomfortable lurching, a rush of sickly…

  … Jealousy.

  I wanted to be happy for Jane. She deserved happiness. She deserved a “well done” for being so perfect for so long. I made all the right noises when she gushed on about him. I pretended I didn’t want to cry when she announced he’d asked her out only two days later. I helped her pick out an outfit that didn’t resemble anything she’d ever worn before. Seriously, Doc Martins. From the girl who played Grade Eight clarinet and owned the Now That’s What I Call Disney album.

  In return, for the past three weeks, all I’d had was missed phone calls. I got messages saying “Joel walking me in this morn, soz” and I wandered to college many mornings alone. She spent every lunch on the green, decamped in Joel’s lap, piling her tongue into his mouth. I sat to the side of them, making awkward small talk with Joel’s friends as my friend fell in love quicker than I’d ever known was possible.

  Her cute vintage dresses became band T-shirts with ripped denim mini skirts and Converse. Her beautiful blonde hair turned jet black overnight and she didn’t even ask me to help her dye it. Eyeliner was ladled around her eyes. She worshipped bands that sounded like bears having sex in an explosion of All The World’s Noise.

  She hadn’t just given her heart to Joel, but her entire personality, her entire…Janeness. So quickly, so willingly. She must’ve been desperate to get away from me. I must’ve been so annoying she was willing to morph identities, just so she could escape me.

  What I couldn’t handle wasn’t the dropping of me as a friend – although that stung like an African Ki
ller Bee – but the selling out of who-you-are and what’s-important-to-you just because a boy likes it. To me that made you a traitor against girl kind…against yourself. But maybe I was just lonely…or jealous. Or both.

  The kitchen was bursting with alcohol. Piles of beer cans, half-empty bottles of wine and a few own-brand bottles of spirits dominated the black laminate countertop. Joel’s best friend, Guy, was pouring a beer into a red plastic cup.

  “All right, Evie,” he nodded, concentrating on getting the foam right. We’d been forced into an awkward friendship since his best mate and my best mate had become love’s young dream.

  “I’m okay. Sorta. My date is, like, really drunk.”

  Guy looked up from his beer. “You brought a date?”

  I deliberately jogged his beer, making some dribble over his hands.

  “Don’t sound so effing surprised.”

  Guy smiled and wiped his hands on his jeans. He was the one half-decent thing about Jane’s transformation into a pod person. He and Joel were in the same crappy band and yet Guy was okay. Funny, sharp, just that little bit self-aware. And attractive, I suppose, if you’re into that whole messy hair, ripped jeans sort of thing.

  Pity he was a massive stoner…

  “So how drunk is he?” he asked.

  I sloshed some red wine into a cup and took a careful sip.

  “He’s headbanging. And pogoing at the same time – which I didn’t know was possible.”

  “That guy’s your date?” Guy’s thick eyebrows went all sarky.

  I laughed. “You’ve seen him?”

  “Yes. Man, he IS drunk.”

  “He pretended he had alien hand syndrome on the way here, used it as an excuse to grope my boob.”

  I regretted telling him instantly, as saying the word “boob” automatically makes boys look at yours. Which is exactly what Guy did. Blatantly. He smiled his wicked grin again and took a pull of his beer. “Can’t say I blame the guy.”

  “Hey.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Well don’t.” I crossed my arms over my chest.

  The dull thud of the music made the glasses in all the cupboards tinkle. We stood there for a moment just giggling at each other before Guy drained half his drink. “So do you like this guy?”