It’s only half past eight and Julia is bored already. She and the other three are in a tight circle on the dance floor, ignoring the OMG LOL!!! mileage that Joanne’s gang are getting out of Becca’s jeans. Holly and Becca both love dancing so they’re having a blast, and Selena looks happy enough, but Julia is about ready to fake epic period cramps to get out of this. The sound system is banging them over the heads with some love-based song that’s been autotuned to a slick perky shine, Justin Bieber or possibly Miley Cyrus, someone smooth in front and jerking through all the motions of sexy. The lights are flashing red and pink. The committee – shiny-haired gold-star types already working on their CVs – has decorated the hall with lacy paper hearts and garlands and whatever, in predictable colours. The whole place is gloopy with romance, but there are two teachers guarding the door in case some couple decides to sneak out and do unspeakable things in a classroom, and if anyone is wild and crazy enough to start slow-dancing, like for example because a slow song is playing, then insane Sister Cornelius charges over and practically sprays them with a fire hose full of holy water.
Most people who aren’t on the committee are keeping a careful eye on the hall doors. On the afternoon before a dance, Colm’s guys go down the road behind Kilda’s and throw booze over the corner of the wall into the bushes, where they pick it up later if they manage to sneak out of the dance. The next day, Kilda’s girls scavenge anything that didn’t get collected and get drunk in their dorm rooms. This has been a tradition for so long that Julia can’t believe They haven’t figured it out, specially since two of the teachers actually went to Kilda’s and presumably did the same thing themselves. Miss Long and Miss Naughton both look like they were born forty-year-old Irish teachers in 1952 and haven’t changed anything including their revolting tan tights since, so maybe if they actually ever were teenagers it’s been wiped out of their memories, but just recently Julia has wondered if it’s more complicated than that. If Miss Long and Miss Naughton might be ninety-nine per cent dreary teacher and still somehow one per cent fifteen-year-old muffling whiskey giggles, and loyal to that. If this is one of the secrets that grown-ups keep unmentioned: how long things last, invisible, inside. Either that or they were such losers back in school that they never heard about the booze bushes.
Julia dances on autopilot and checks furtively for pit-stains while she’s got her arms up. Last year she enjoyed the Valentine’s dance; or maybe ‘enjoyed’ isn’t the word, but it felt like it mattered. It felt knife-edge, last year, felt breathtaking, felt ready to boil over with its own momentousness. She was expecting it to feel the same way this year, but instead the dance feels like it matters considerably less than your average nose-picking session. This is pissing Julia off. Most of the stuff she does every day is blindingly pointless, but at least no one expects her to enjoy it.
‘Back in a sec,’ she yells to the others, miming drinking, and drops out of the dance. She starts squeezing her way through the crowd towards the edge. The lights and the dancing and the crush of bodies have turned everyone sweaty. Joanne Heffernan’s makeup is already melting, which doesn’t surprise Julia given how much of it there is and which doesn’t seem to bother Oisín O’Donovan who is trying to manoeuvre his hand inside Joanne’s dress and getting frustrated because the dress is complicated and Oisín is thick as shite.
‘OhmyGod, get off me, you lezzer,’ snaps Joanne over her shoulder, as Julia tries to slide past without brushing up against one molecule of Joanne’s designer arse.
‘In your dreams,’ Julia says, stepping on Joanne’s heel. ‘Oops.’
At the end of the hall is a long table of cupid-covered paper cups, arranged in rows around a big fake-glass punch bowl. The punch is a lurid baby-medicine shade of pink. Julia takes a cup. It’s squash with food colouring.
Finn Carroll is leaning against the wall by the table. Finn and Julia know each other, sort of, from debating society; when he sees her he cocks an eyebrow, lifts his cup to her and shouts something she can’t hear. Finn has bright red hair, long enough to flop into loose curls at the back of his neck, and he’s smart. These would add up to social death for most guys, but Finn has the minimum of freckles to go with the hair, he’s decent at rugby and he’s getting height and shoulders faster than most of his class, so he gets away with it.
‘What?’ Julia yells.
Finn leans down to her ear. ‘Don’t drink the punch,’ he shouts. ‘It’s shit.’
‘To go with the music,’ Julia yells back.
‘That’s just
