Dear Charlie. Natália Gomes

of the big slide and simply acknowledged my presence by nodding. The others followed suit, each offering up their own identity – Worm, Max, Debbie, Neall. And there I was, just Sam. No cool nicknames or funny anecdotes to follow. Before I had time to question myself any more, we were off. Hopping onto the 39 bus, we occupied the back row of seats as regular teens do on a Saturday night.

      It was a little after ten o’clock when we reached the music hall. I didn’t want to mention that I usually went to bed by nine. The queue of people spread over a whole block, showcasing an eclectic mix of facial piercings and neck tattoos. Instead of joining the back of the line, Dougie led us around the back of the building past the rubbish bins. We huddled outside the back door and waited almost twenty minutes in awkward silence before the door opened, hitting Worm in the face. Standing in the doorway was a lanky guy in his mid-twenties with a chain that seemed to be painfully and unnecessarily connected from his right nostril to his right ear lobe.

      ‘You brought too many. I said three, max.’

      ‘Come on, there’s only six of us,’ pleaded Dougie.

      ‘Seven,’ corrected Izzy, motioning towards me.

      I could feel people’s eyes on me, so I lowered my head until part of my face was hidden in the collar of my coat.

      ‘Fine but if anyone catches you, you tell them you sneaked in. OK?’

      Dougie shrugged and slid past his cousin. ‘Didn’t even see you.’

      Inside, music blasted from all around me, crushing my head like heavy stone. It would take at least a couple of days for my ears to stop ringing. Sweaty bodies danced too close to each other and flipped their heads back and forth to a song that seemed to consist only of screaming and loud banging.

      ‘Do you like punk rock?’ screamed Izzy over the noise.

      ‘Love it!’ I yelled back at her, possibly too quickly. Was punk rock a sub-genre of rock? Or, did it refer to a specific band? Honestly, I hated whatever was happening on the stage in front of me. Aside from the singer who was dressed in a torn tuxedo, there was no real music to be found. Ten years of piano lessons had embarrassingly left me with only a preference for the classics. And whatever this was, it was definitely not classical.

      Within fifteen minutes, I had found my place for the next three hours – in a corner by the men’s bathroom. While Debbie flailed her arms around on the dancefloor like she was having an epileptic fit, Worm, Max and Neall bartered to get two older guys to buy them beers. I hadn’t seen Dougie since we walked in. Eyes scanning the room, I searched for him and Izzy. When a group of dancers left the floor for another round of some white-coloured liquid that was served in a test tube that belonged in a chemistry lab, I saw her. Standing alone by the stairs, Izzy stared out momentarily transfixed. Her face glistened in the strobe lights, and she clenched her jaw. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Dougie propped against the bar, beer in hand, talking to two girls. One had red streaks in her hair and the other had a lip ring. Whatever he was saying must have been funny, because they were laughing and throwing their heads back.

      When I looked back at the stairs, Izzy was gone. I wouldn’t see her again until the end, when we all met up back at the exit.

      ‘Dougie, where were you all night?’ asked Worm.

      ‘Who’s hungry?’ grinned Dougie, as he headed out the exit.

      Three streets down and one street left, I found myself inside a 24-hour cafe near the city bus station. Izzy had clearly forgiven Dougie because they were holding hands by the time we got a booth for seven people.

      I sat down in the chair at the end of the booth, while the others poured onto the frayed red leather benches. Menus lay on the table in front of us and I could see that the top one had a sticky red stain, like tomato sauce. My fingers pressed into the edges of the chair until I awkwardly looped them together on my lap. Looking at Dougie’s faded black David Bowie T-shirt and torn plaid shirt, I was suddenly very aware of my appearance. The round collar on my saggy navy-blue jumper itched and I squirmed uncomfortably in my beige cords.

      Izzy sat directly to my right, huddled into Dougie as his arm carelessly hung around her shoulders. In the fluorescent overhead lights, I could see that her eyes were thickly rimmed with black liner. It made her eyes look smaller than they were. Debbie had told me that Izzy only started hanging out with them last year, that before that she was ‘Isabel’ and too popular to even acknowledge them. I had asked Debbie why that was, but all she said was Izzy had ‘had a bad year’. Then one morning she came to school and she was different. It was as if she’d woken up and decided to become a new person. Soon she started going out with Dougie, dyed her hair black, began organising student rights protests about better food sourcing for the cafeteria and became fixated on the 1970s era. Now she looked like Deborah Harry, with her thick make-up and dyed hair cut short with a heavy long fringe resting on her eyelids. I don’t know why she picked the 1970s. Perhaps she didn’t know that it was a period heavily shadowed by the Vietnam War and social propaganda.

      ‘You hungry, Sam? See anything you like?’ she asked, a wide grin stretching across her face. Did she see me looking at her?

      I quickly looked away, before Dougie saw me staring too. ‘I don’t know,’ I mumbled. Honestly, I didn’t know if I was hungry. I was only hungry if everyone else was and I would only order a drink if someone else did. But the waitress approached me first.

      After a few moments of silence and an exchange of glances around the table, the waitress finally snapped. ‘Are you going to order something or not?’ she said.

      I looked to Dougie for some sort of cue to what I should order, but he was staring across the table at Debbie and Neall with a smirk and a slight gleam in his irises.

      ‘Well?’ the waitress hissed, her pink lipstick smearing across her front teeth.

      ‘Um… I… just a bowl of cornflakes with milk,’ I eventually stammered. I hadn’t looked at the menu and didn’t even know if cereal was available, but at the time it seemed like an appropriate choice. It wasn’t. The whole table erupted in laughter and my face burned red. When I looked away from my sweaty palms in my lap, I saw that the only one who wasn’t still laughing was Dougie.

      ‘Make that two bowls of cornflakes,’ he added, still smirking.

      The laughter faded out as the waitress scribbled down six more orders of cornflakes before tearing off the sheet and begrudgingly handing it through the open hatch to the kitchen. She looked back over at our table, and rolled her eyes contentiously the way my brother used to whenever Dad tried to talk to him after a few beers. After a while, the only person Charlie talked to was me. And soon that stopped too.

      After a few minutes of steady silence, the waitress came back over and slammed down seven individually wrapped boxes of cornflakes, seven bowls, spoons and a jug of milk. Quietly everyone began pouring their cereal, sneaking small smiles back and forth. Finally, Dougie slammed his spoon down on the table, and with cornflakes falling out of his mouth, he yelled, ‘You’re so weird, Sam. I love it!’

      Soon several chaotic conversations ensued, my eyes darting back and forth hungrily consuming all of them. Dougie and Max were talking about a music band I’d never heard of, and Debbie was showing Izzy her newly tattooed wrist, which was covered in tiny blue stars. On top of that, Debbie would intermittently interrupt Max to chime in with her opinions of the depiction of women in music videos, while Izzy and Dougie shared the occasional inside joke and stolen exchange. Worm and Max competed for the best impersonation of John Major, while Neall talked even louder to block out Debbie’s voice.

      I’d never been to a tennis match but I would imagine that it would be close to what I was experiencing. After a few minutes, my neck ached so I started counting through my pennies to pay the bill. I immediately wished I had brought more so I could have paid for the whole bill, rather than just for my measly share. Maybe they would want to hang out with me again if I paid the whole bill. I would remember that next time. A dull ache suddenly grew in my belly – would there be a next time?

      I was still kicking myself for not bringing