Pairs
Ewan doesn’t like Alice. Alice probably doesn’t like Ewan. They sit next to each other, paired up only by virtue of their surnames which start with a D and E respectively. Alice doesn’t pay attention much in class, she’s too popular for that, and someone will probably give her the answers anyway, the only time she’ll ever have to actually work will be for the A-Level exams in two months.
There’s a lot that Ewan knows about Alice that she’s unaware of. He knows that she lost her virginity at sixteen. He knows her and Jacob disappear in his car every few days at lunchtime. Alice probably doesn’t know that Jacob spends most of the next class boasting to everyone about how many times he made her come. She definitely doesn’t know that at one point in year nine Ewan had been so overwhelming attracted to her that he could think of nothing else as he lay in bed at night.
He’s wearing a smart shirt with a v-neck jumper over the top. She’s wearing an uncharacteristically conservative dress that comes down past her knees. They’re studying Women’s Suffrage. Ewan had only picked History because he was interested in the Russian Revolution but a whole two years focused on remembering dates of different victorian era laws has been his penance for expecting anything short of totally monotonous. It’s not the topic he dislikes, just the structure behind it. How they are measured. He has books filled with dates that he can’t, or won’t, remember. They stare back at him idly as he tries to pack them into his mind but they don’t actually do anything. They don’t jump off the page towards him. They don’t encourage him. If anything they act as lackadaisical and uninterested as he does, worse probably.
Alice makes an uninteresting observation about Millicent Fawcett or something now, he’s not really listening.
‘Mm-hm,’ he says.
‘And I think that her stance against militancy was justified, though how else were they supposed to grab attention?’
It’s annoying because he agrees with her, he doesn’t want to let on so much that they share the same opinions though. Instead, he inhales and lets the thick smell of body odour fill his nose. The year sevens use this classroom before them, directly after they have PE and the necessity of deodorant is yet to be engrained within their dense skulls.
Alice smiles at Ewan then, condescendingly and unnaturally. She never did anything totally wrong to him really, he thinks, only at the start of year ten when she had made some abhorrent comment to him about his mental problems had he really started to form a sort of unambiguous dislike of her. Her actions since have been neutral at best, patronising at worst.
Sophie looks over, he can see out of the corner of his eye. Ewan smiles back at Alice. She turns a light crimson and he turns to see the jealousy in Sophie’s eyes.
Alice likes Ewan. Ewan probably doesn’t like Alice. She’s grateful that her surname is Edwards and his Dunn. They have been paired together in the classes they share on nearly every occasion since they started in year seven. Alice struggles to focus in class, often she has to work hard in the evenings to inspire any retention of facts in her brain. Ewan looks up at her for a second, catching her eye and then looking away again at a picture of Millicent Fawcett on the sheet in front of them.
Ewan’s attractive. No-one tells him this though. Not that he actually talks to anyone really, apart from Pete and Jacob, sometimes Sophie when she’s off with Ryan. Never when they’re on. Ewan likely doesn’t know that Alice fancies him. In truth, she wasn’t totally sure she actually did fancy him until it was presented in front of her when the school had gone to watch their Rugby cup final over in Truro. His shirt tore slightly and she found herself looking at him with a startled lust. Ewan definitely doesn’t know that one evening after a party at Rachel’s house, Jacob had drunkenly confided in her that he had slept with two men. They drive off at lunch together sometimes now, only as a social escape for Jacob though, not for anything else. Ewan definitely knows she slept with Janine’s older brother once when she was drunk. It was revealed in a childish game of truth or dare when a few of them camped out by a small triangle of woodland just east of the school.
She dislikes history. She only picked it because her options meant she wouldn’t be able to study both French and Geography.
‘Cut Geography, it’s just maps anyway isn’t it?’ her father said, so she did.
Ewan is still looking at the worksheet in front of them. Alice assumes that Ms. Porter ran out of white paper as the black ink blends disagreeably with the dark blue paper and Ewan’s holding it up to the light slightly to reveal some of the words.
Some time ago now, when they were in year ten, Alice discovered that Ewan was in therapy. Specifically, he was in therapy and her mother was the therapist. Alice looked out of her bedroom window and watched as he exited the office at the bottom of her garden.
‘If you’re shagging my mum, you could just tell me,’ she said to him in school the next day.
She laughed then, punching his arm playfully and quirking her mouth into a smile.
‘What?’ he said.
‘You were in her office the other day?’
‘Who told you that?’
’No-one.’
He walked away after that and she’s rarely spoken to him outside the confines of a classroom since.
In the present, the groups around them are discussing the topic at hand and she starts to feel like their lack of conversation is causing them to fall behind.
‘I think Millicent was probably one of the biggest factors in gaining women’s rights,’ she says.
‘Mm-hm.’
He hasn’t even acknowledged that Alice called her Millicent, like in some other world they would be close friends who spoke to each other on a first-name basis. Maybe she would even call her Milli then. No, that’s ridiculous.
‘And I think that her stance against militancy was justified, though how else were they supposed to grab attention?’ she says.
Alice knows he agrees with this, she’s only saying it because she’s heard him mention it in class before. He doesn’t respond. She smiles at him, a friendly and innocent smile, in the hopes he may cheer up. Ewan looks over to her and returns the gesture, she can feel herself blushing.
