Rite of Passage

When you’re a teenager, everything is a rite of passage.

You have to get detention for swearing at a teacher, and it’s mandatory to refuse to run the cross-country course at least once. Spin the bottle transforms from innocent pecks on the cheek to full-blown snogging sessions in the nearest available space. Suddenly you’re passing over Skittles in favour of the cheapest cigarettes you can find, and you worry about trying drugs when your biggest dilemma used to be Spongebob vs. Pokemon. It seems like your dad has to try and teach you to drive, even when you insist that it doesn’t count for shit anymore unless there’s an actual professional instructor in the car. And it seems only fitting to pierce a part of your body that a needle really has no business going anywhere near.

Then there are the mental breakdowns over university choices, accompanied by the many nights endured at your local fast-food restaurant, wearing a hideously obnoxious uniform and serving people who deserve to have their food shat in, let alone spat in.

Whether you’ve completed these tasks or not, it remains a checklist in your head; the things you need to do in order to later prove that you were a normal, rebellious teenager. Unfortunately, I’d managed to miss two major – fuck that, monumental – points off my little checklist by the time I was nearing eighteen. Eighteen meant adulthood, and that meant that my experimental time would soon pass, whether I was ready for it to be over or not. I’d completed all of the above with relative ease, even when it turned out that I was painfully allergic to metal piercings of all kinds (trust me, that was an awkward trip to the family doctor). Yet I still considered myself a failure as a teenager for not having completed two of the biggest teenage rites of passage: intoxication and sex.

I can’t really say that the two were connected in any way, though I’m sure the former would have made the latter a hell of a lot calmer an experience. But for whatever reason, I found myself nearing my eighteenth birthday with my sobriety and virginity regrettably intact.

Okay, so I’m kidding myself a little – I know exactly why they were both so untarnished. Firstly, alcohol had never really held a massive appeal to me. I’d tried it, of course, but after having found that the taste was bitter and unwelcome on my inexperienced tongue, I’d quickly swapped the alcoholic beverages for the familiar comfort of the fizzy drinks I’d known since childhood. Also, having never experienced the pleasant buzz that alcohol brought with it, I’d remained oblivious to the appeal of drinking just for the sake of drinking. Surely being a foolish, giggling twat for the night really wasn’t worth the aggravation of empty calories, wasted wages and a thundering headache the following morning?

Anyway, here we come to the second point. Sex. It’s a simple enough word – one syllable, three little letters. But it had always weighed as heavily on my tongue as it had my mind. Those with the experience that matters had always told me that I wasn’t missing out on much; that, yeah, it was good, but there were better things in life. Screw them. They knew. I didn’t, and I so desperately wanted to.

I discovered this at a fairly healthy age, I guess. There was only one problem, and it was a big one at that; around the same time that I discovered I did actually have a sex drive, I realised that it only seemed to kick into gear around one person. A person who was very much off-limits to me… in every way possible. It wasn’t like I hadn’t tried to make myself fancy other guys, and I even got close to going all the way once, but I chickened out at the last minute.

I may have had pretty loose morals otherwise, but I was naïve and traditional enough to have wanted my first time to be special. My best friend, Abby, commended me for this, but I could tell she didn’t quite get it. Why would she? She’d lost the V-card at the tender age of fifteen (and by Sheffield’s standards, this pretty much made her a spinster). Of course, I’d never actually confessed my secret crush to her. The mocking would have been too torturous, no matter how good-natured it may have been.

But now, a year on from my ‘near-deflowering’ (her words, not mine), she was growing impatient. I’d even faced an amusing inquisition over my sexuality, since she was convinced there could be no way I still fancied the guy after all this time – especially since I showed no signs of liking anyone else and wouldn’t tell her who this guy was. Though I’d laughed off her awkward suggestion that I try it on with a girl, she was as relentless as ever in trying to convince me to ‘finally let someone shag yeh’.

I sighed as I recollected our heated discussion from that very morning. The guys – my idiot older brother included – were taking a much-needed break from touring for a week or so, and had chosen to celebrate the fact by announcing a blow-out in the woods near our town. I’d originally been thrilled by the idea; my recent A-Level exams had left me in desperate need of a way to blow off steam, and even for a sober attendee such as myself, the blowouts were always beyond entertaining. But then Abby had started hinting that tonight would provide the perfect opportunity to meet a decent guy. By ‘meet’ she meant ‘fuck’. And by ‘decent’ she meant ‘horny’.

I loved her, I really did, but sometimes I wanted to slam her head against a brick wall. What had started off as excitement had since turned into trepidation that tonight would mostly result in me running from whatever guy Abby tried to force on me. It didn’t even seem to bother her that my brother would be there. But that might have been due to the fact that he found her frequent attempts to force guys on me more hilarious than anything else.

I wasn’t quite sure if he knew about my virgin status, but Lee seemed to understand more than anyone else that I wasn’t the kind of girl to hook up with random guys in the woods. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Very rarely did he intervene in Abby’s grand plans, and it wound me up a little. On the one hand, it was a relief not to have some over-protective macho older brother on my case all the time, but there were times when I wished he were a little more protective of me. I wasn’t asking him to punch every guy who even looked twice at me, but it was kind of disturbing to have your older brother laugh when his drunken friend slapped your arse.

Not that I wasn’t happy with our relationship. Hell no. Despite the fact Lee was five years older than me, I’d never felt subordinate to him in any way. He gave me advice, sure, but he wasn’t the type of guy to stop me from going to parties and having fun. He’d even been the one to teach me the easiest way to sneak in and out of the house in the middle of the night (the window in the downstairs bathroom was ridiculously easy to open if you had a pocket knife and the know-how).

And I had to admit, having such a laid back brother did come in extremely handy sometimes. For instance, I would have been royally fucked had he not offered me a lift to the woods tonight. It really was a concern that he was taking his car at all, since I knew his claims that he was an amazing drunk driver were absolute bull, but I wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. Abby had a car, but she and Tom were driving out together, and the last time I’d been stuck in a car with them alone, I’d been about ready to blow chunks all over the car’s faux-leather upholstery. They were one of those oddly mismatched couples – Tom with his slow smile and shy eyes, and Abby with her loud laugh and crude attitude – but they were sickeningly cute with it.

Even safe in the knowledge I had a lift secured, I still hovered somewhere between indecision and anxiety for the entire day before the party. Lee kept eyeing me like some escaped mental patient as I frowned to myself and gnawed on my blunt fingernails, but was too distracted by his X-box to actually wonder aloud what the hell was wrong with me. It was amazing to me that so many of the guys’ fans hero-worshipped them, since they were the kind of stereotypical boys you’d find in any living room in Britain – loud, dirty and obsessed with video games.

It was only when I accidentally drifted into his line of sight for the fifth time in as many minutes that Lee eventually spoke up.

‘Hols, if you’re gonna keep walking in front of me I will punch you, little sister or not.’

I jumped a little, my startled eyes darting up to meet his annoyed gaze. “Sorry,” I automatically murmured, nibbling at the skin surrounding my thumbnail. Then I realised that I was pacing in the public domain of our mum’s living room. “Actually, no I’m not,” I corrected. “I can walk around my own livin’ room if I want. Sod off and take your game upstairs if you’ve got a problem with it.”

Far from being offended, Lee just smiled and ducked his head to the left in order to peer around my frame at the television. “What crawled up your butt and died?” he queried.

“Same thing that’s been livin’ in your hair all day,” I retorted, eyeing the mess atop his head. For most people, showering was one of the first things you do when you wake up, but my brother had always been an exception to this rule of hygiene. I sincerely hoped he bathed more frequently on tour, or the bus must have gained an almighty stench every time he stepped foot on it.

“Huh.” He paused thoughtfully, his eyes shifting to the clock so swiftly I barely caught the movement. I tensed when a wicked smile grew on his face. “Guess I should shower then.”

Without another word, he darted for the stars, leaving the television to noisily proclaim that his character had been eaten by zombies. Realisation dawned on me as I glanced at the clock, taking in the positioning of the small hand, which rested dangerously close to our planned hour of departure from the house. I suppressed a frustrated groan and mentally kicked myself for forgetting what an arse Lee was when it came to shit like this. He would always leave getting ready to go out to the last minute, which was incidentally when I usually chose to get ready. There was something to be said for having free reign of the bathroom when he was on tour.

“Lee, you shit!” I yelled, taking the stairs two at a time, only to have the bathroom door slam noisily before I even got halfway up them. By the time I reached the top the lock was sliding noisily into place. I vented my frustration at my brother by aiming a kick at the heavy wood of the door. All I gained from the action was a bruised toe.

“Lee!” I banged on the door noisily. “It takes yeh like five minutes to shower. It makes more fuckin’ sense to let me get in there first!” It was a futile argument, but had become almost a comforting routine over the years. In a strange, frustrating way, I’d missed it while he was away on tour.

“It might only take me five minutes to get a shower, but I need a shit!” he called out, unabashed.

A disgusted, indecipherable noise rose in my throat, followed quickly by a growl of sheer frustration. Under normal circumstances, now would have been the time for our mum to come sighing up the stairs and calmly talk us through our dispute. However, she was out on a date, so I was left with little option but to wait Lee out. He was usually charitable enough to allow me just enough time to let me scramble to get myself sorted.

By the time he had finished doing whatever he had to do, I had grown impatient enough to have plonked myself down against the wall opposite the bathroom, my back pressed firmly to the warm radiator in an attempt to keep away the November chill that always managed to permeate the house. Lee meandered from the room lazily, steam frantically twisting to escape round his somewhat pudgy form. His fair hair was darkened by the water that weighed it down, small droplets falling from the ends to saturate the thin material of the t-shirt he’d just pulled on.

“Could you have taken any longer?”

“Yep,” Lee affirmed.

I sighed as I began to climb to my feet, only to have him push me playfully back down again as he started towards the stairs. Experience afforded me the knowledge that it would take him no more than five seconds to get back to his video game, which he would gain his undivided attention until we had to leave.

It took me just ten minutes to shower (a personal record, in my opinion), but by the time I was making a mad dash to my bedroom, familiar human voices were drifting up the stairs from the living room, replacing the gory screams of artificial zombies. It probably should have freaked me out to be running around upstairs with nothing but a towel clutched to me, but I was so used to seeing the faces connected to said voices by now that they could have wandered in to pee while I showered and I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. The one thing I had gained from having an older brother with so many intrusive friends was a more relaxed approach to personal boundaries; I gave up trying to keep any semblance of my dignity right after the first time Vegan kept watch as I peed in a bush.

Strong male laughter was my background music as I hastened to squeeze into a pair of skinny jeans and one of the Drop Dead tees I’d stolen from Oli. Time constraints meant I had to make do with my naturally wavy hair, over which I jammed a grey beanie, and a few swipes of mascara and lip balm as makeup. But I did manage to find time to give myself a new bruise, idiotically stumbling into my bookshelf as I attempted to simultaneously hop into a pair of combat boots and pull on my parka. I blamed Lee entirely, since he was the one bellowing up the stairs for me to get my arse in gear.

I considered it a victory that I didn’t somehow fall down the stairs. It always annoyed me when people claimed clumsiness was cute or endearing – what it happens to be is fucking annoying. There is nothing cute about a bruise the size of china on your butt from where you fell down the stairs, or anything remotely endearing about a black eye gained from dropping a remote control on your own face (don’t even ask).

And when you happen to trip on the last step of the staircase because your brother is still yelling at you, his friends don’t coo and awe at you. In fact, they make absolutely no attempt to hide their amusement at all.

“Bastards,” I swore up at my brother, Oli Sykes and Vegan from the flat of my back, lifting one hand hopefully into the air.

Oli grabbed it, still chortling, and hauled me to my feet. “Still as clumsy as ever,” he noted.

“Like that’s ever gonna change,” I scoffed.

Every time I saw the guys after a long tour, I expected them to look different. I don’t know how… older, maybe. It was always nice to see that they hadn’t really changed; that beneath their rising fame and glory, they were the same guys I’d known for what felt like my whole life. Maybe the badly dyed hair and uniform black t-shirts were gone forever, but none of them ever looked like rock stars to me. They were just a bunch of average blokes from Sheffield.

“I’m sure your boobs got bigger,” Vegan commented casually. We slowly turned to look at him, more confused than shocked by his statement.

“Um, what?” My face creased into what I’m sure was a very attractive look, my nose wrinkling and eyebrows knitting together.

“Your boobs… they got bigger.” He was staring at my chest unashamedly, his expression a mixture of concentration and puzzlement.

Lee just raised his eyebrows and looked at me in a ‘what are you gonna do?’ way, while Oli glanced briefly at my chest.

“Look the same to me,” he shrugged.

Vegan shook his head. “Nope, definitely bigger. Did yeh go up a cup size?”

“’S much as I’d love to stand here chattin’ about my little sister’s tits all night, I reckon we should go now,” Lee proclaimed loudly before I could even think of answering Vegan’ question, staring resolutely at the ceiling. Just because we were often more friends than siblings, didn’t mean he wanted any part in a conversation concerning my boobs.

“Yeh’re just jealous ‘cos you’re dick hasn’t grown since yeh were about three,” I smiled sweetly up at him as I brushed past him to the front door. Rather than taking the insult to heart, he rolled his eyes and scooped up his car keys from the side table by the door.

“Titch, I think yeh underestimate just how much I miss yeh when we’re away,” Oli slung a casual arm over my shoulders, giving them an affectionate squeeze. “I still think yeh should take a gap year before uni and travel the world with us,” he suggested for the umpteenth time since he’d found out I was going to university.

“I reckon everyone else would object to havin’ me take up valuable space on the bus just ‘cos you miss me, Oli. And stop calling me Titch, like I’m a freakin’ midget or somethin’.” It was nickname that my ears were all too accustomed to hearing whenever the guys were around, even though it didn’t even make any sense. I could understand when I was younger, and was tiny, i.e. ‘titchy’, compared to their gangly teenage forms, but I’d grown pretty tall for a girl during my earlier teen years, even surpassing my brother’s height. I found this fact amusing; Lee, not so much.

“I’ll be callin’ yeh Titch ‘till the day I die. And everyone misses yeh when yeh’re not there. Yeh’re alright for a kid, yeh know,” he teased as we separated to gravitate to opposite sides of the car, waiting for Lee to unlock the doors.

“Not everyone misses me, Oli,” I said quietly. His brows lifted and he opened his mouth to speak, but my brother unlocked the doors with a loud beeping, and I slid into the car without another word.

I let out a slow breath as I shut the door behind me, blocking out the mundane chatter of Lee and Vegan, who were climbing into the driver and passenger seats respectively. There was a moment’s pause before Oli climbed into the car beside me, staring at me even though I’d averted my gaze to the window.

Mentally, I was cursing myself for the slip-up. As far as everyone was concerned, I was completely hunky-dory with all of the guys. Even Jona and I got on really well, despite the fact I’d known him for less than a year, so for me to admit that I may have been harbouring bitter feelings towards someone in the band was a big fumble.

I never blamed anyone for failing to notice my strained relationship with the drummer of the band since, as far as I could tell, it wasn’t noticeable to anyone but the two of us. I couldn’t even put my finger on what the cause of the strain was – whether he’d just decided he didn’t like me anymore, or had suddenly noticed my feelings towards him or something, I wasn’t sure. But I was more careful than I ever used to be around him, and the change had only been noticeable to me in the two years or so, so I was convinced it wasn’t the latter.

All I knew was, everything was fine between us one moment, jokey and as affectionate as with any of the guys, and then everything changed before my eyes. The next time the guys came back from tour was a few months after my sixteenth birthday. I’d lost the cursed Malia pudge and finally developed actual breasts, but I didn’t think I’d changed me at all, so it was a shock to realise that, even though he was still polite around me, my previous relationship with Matt Nicholls had been lost forever. Suddenly he wouldn’t touch me; would barely even look at me sometimes, despite the fact that he used to be the one throwing me over his shoulder like a rag-doll on a daily basis. And then there were the odd few times I found him staring at me with a look of immense concentration and bitterness on his features, his jaw clenched tightly and his brow creased. For him to look anything other than hyperactive and cheeky was shocking, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the hell was wrong with him.

But there was one thing I was certain of: he would not appreciate my presence on tour. It was for this reason alone that I’d refused the rest of the guys’ pleas to join them on tour the previous summer, choosing instead to remain in Sheffield with Abby, who’d had to part from Tom due to her part-time job.

“What was that supposed to mean?” Oli asked quietly from his side of the car. I turned, eyebrows raised, to give him a questioning look.

“What was what supposed to mean?” I knew. Of course I knew, but my brain was telling me to play dumb.

“That comment about not everyone missin’ yeh. Who d’yeh think doesn’t miss yeh?” He seemed genuinely puzzled, but I didn’t really blame him. His very existence as a boy meant he was incapable of picking up on awkward situations, regardless of his surprisingly high IQ.

“I didn’t mean anythin’ by it. Just let it go, yeah?” I offered him a weak smile, hoping he’d grasp the opportunity to shut the hell up before I said anything else I would regret.

But I didn’t even give him a chance to comment, turning to poke my head between the headrests of the front seats and fiddle with the buttons on the dashboard. Lee slapped at my hands, but I laughed off his annoyance, hyper-aware of the fact that Oli was still staring at me from the back.

“Jesus, just pick somethin’, would yeh Hols?” my brother bitched as I pressed button after button and shuffled through discarded CD cases, most of which contained the wrong CD. Lee was just as disorganised as our dad, who required at least a day’s warning of my visits just so he could tidy up a bit for me. My brother may have been fine with living like a slob, but I was not.

“When do I get to listen to your new stuff?” I asked, giving up completely on finding some music I was in the mood to hear. “Yeh normally send me the CD as soon as it’s done.” Despite having had their newest record finished for a little over a month now, I’d failed to receive a copy of it, whereas I’d always been one of the earliest critics in the past. “I’m startin’ to think yeh don’t care about my opinion,” I teased as I leant back into my seat, clipping my seat belt firmly into place. With Lee’s driving skills, I would be in serious need of it.

“Yeh’ll get it,” was the vague response I received.

I shot Oli a level look, but he was now choosing to skilfully avoid my gaze. “Believe it or not, that answer doesn’t satisfy me. Why can’t I hear it?” It may not have seemed like it, but I was a little hurt that nobody had asked my opinion yet.

“’S not important,” Lee supplied.

I didn’t believe him for one second. Something was up. “What, your newest, best album isn’t important? Or my opinion isn’t?”

“Forgot how fuckin’ stubborn she is,” Vegan muttered from his corner.

“Bite me,” I retorted, sticking my tongue out playfully. Oli thumped me painfully on the arm, laughing when I began to whine pitifully. “Anyway,” I continued, rubbing gently at my arm, “what’s the big secret with the album? You guys scared I’m gonna leak it online or somethin’?”

“Just drop it, Holly!” Lee snapped, glaring at me through the rear-view mirror. I blinked owlishly at him for a moment, trying to remember the last time he’d felt the need to use that tone with me... with anybody, for that matter. No event sprang to mind. Vegan shifted uncomfortably in the front seat, clearing his throat with unnecessary vigour.

I tried to gauge Oli’s thoughts by his facial expression, but he was staring out of the window again.

“Fine,” I said calmly, gaining a distrustful look from my brother, who knew my temper well. It seemed like he was waiting for some sort of sarcastic remark, but I only crossed my arms squarely over my chest and joined Oli in staring outside.

If the guys were going to be evasive, then so was I.