Bittersweet Sixteen

When I was sixteen my friends stopped me from getting a tattoo. I was totally prepared for it: I had a fake ID, I had the money I’d made from working part-time at a local tutoring centre. I was genuinely ready to go down to the local small town tattoo parlour and get ‘Sixteen Forever’ branded across my lower back.

I’d said, ‘In my soul I’m sixteen, always will be. Being sixteen is the most girl thing a girl can do. Every year from now it’s going to get worse. I’m going to become less myself than I am right now.’

It didn’t matter what I told them, they stole the fake ID and refused to give it back until I swore not to get the tattoo. ‘We’re doing you a favour!’ they promised. Maybe they were right.

Everything was fever-pitch, everything was life or death. My friends, there were five of us, were closer than close. We shared clothes, shared beds, shared secrets, made out when we were drunk. It felt like we would always be together. I couldn’t imagine a world that didn’t include lattes at form-time, house parties on the weekend, the acid-taste of cheap shots, screaming fits of laughter, debriefs over full-english breakfasts the next day, the thrilling mission of sourcing alcohol and weed, getting matching bikinis from Primark, sunbathing at the local lido, sharing ice-cream at the park, writing in our shared scrapbook, scheming to concoct the elaborate lies we’d tell our parents.

We were out to get away with everything we could and though we got into trouble sometimes, we still got away with a lot.

I remember everything as bright and shining and new. The stars were closer to earth when they watched over the field parties where we ran wild in the dark, bumping into strangers and drinking cheap vodka that stung the back of our throats. I remember kisses that tasted of lemonade, I remember bruises of all kinds. The boys would fight sometimes, one of our friends took a punch to the eye that turned his whole eyeball black. I remember lights, lanterns strung overhead. A screaming match with a rival girl’s school.

We were obsessed with each other and the life we had, it was like a shared existence, one didn’t exist without the others. We knew that it wasn’t possible for people to be closer than we were to each other. Boys were a foreign species. We knew that one day we’d be grown ups and have husbands and families of our own. We knew it would be different, they’d never understand us like we understood us. We were a cult, our bond was sacred.

And we felt powerful. We were just kids but we commanded the attention of grown men. My friends were all beautiful and fiercely smart. They had that killer combination of desirability twinned with focused ambition. They were charismatic. When I imagine their faces as they were then, I imagine them all with very sharp, vampiric incisors. I don’t know why, I just do. Our new-found power always factored into our plans. Our group was varied in ethnicity and personal style, we knew that if necessary we could charm any man to our cause, one of us was bound to be his type. It was all very tactical. There were times we all played dumb and feigned interest to get what we wanted, there were other times my whip-smart friends issued withering put-downs, seamlessly trashing the ego of a man twice our age without breaking a sweat. We navigated various new landscapes with a burgeoning grace. We toyed with womanhood, trying it on for size, figuring out how to make it work for us, finding we quite liked it.

These girls have important jobs in the city now. They hold their own in cut-throat male-dominated industries and it’s possible our local bar was the perfect social training ground.

I thought maybe we could all live together when we were older, maybe we didn’t have to get married and have families at all. The thought of being separated from them made my heart palpitate. They were the only people I really believed when they told me they loved me. I knew it, I felt it even without words. I would have trusted each of them with my life.

A first ‘everything’, a whole future loomed like a mirage on the horizon. I had found my family and I didn’t want to do life without them. I was so dependent on these girls who made sure I ate enough at lunch and tutored me through maths class, who listened to my darkest thoughts without judgement, who looked me in the eyes and told me earnestly that I was beautiful. Without them I’d surely crumble.

I remember a frantic panic. We were hyperaware of the transience of youth, of our time running out as we raced to cram every single moment with as much fun as it could possibly contain. If we stayed busy enough perhaps we could slow the passage of time. It was obvious that things wouldn’t sparkle forever. We had to dance under the fireworks while we still could.

‘We are never going to be this young or this hot ever again!’ my friend screamed as she poured alcohol down my throat in the back seat of the taxi. This was always her justification for prioritising a good time over everything else.

Our music was playing on the aux, yellow streetlamps rushed by in a blur, the windows were rolled all the way down. The car smelt like cheap perfume. My friends’ faces - the tips of their noses, their cheekbones - glittered with stardust highlighter. We were on our way to a party where chaos would shortly ensue. There would be blood and vomit, sex, mud, a riot van filled with police, so much laughter, smashed glass, the curtain rail would come down and we would be together in the middle of it all. The five of us dancing under the fireworks.

I was wrong, it didn’t all fade to nothing. The bonds forged in the blazing heat of that year have lasted more than ten years, and seen us through break-ups, the losses of our dearest loved-ones, years spent living and working on other continents. We will always be bonded by the experiences we shared, by the way we bared our souls and howled at the moon together.

I’m glad I’m no longer sixteen, I was wild then but I’m fearless now and that’s different.

Part of me wishes I’d got the tattoo though. It wasn’t just any tattoo, it was a desperate wish. An attempt to cling onto a feeling that I knew couldn’t last. I suppose it doesn’t really matter, I still ended up with a tramp stamp anyway. I’m just that kind of girl.