Listen To Mommy

On Mondays there was an important lecture that had to be attended. In that large, academically-charged turquoise-wood auditorium, the dutiful Miss Greer would stand at the classroom door and record everyone's attendance - no student escaping the shrewd eyes behind her oval lenses. So asking a friend to check in instead seemed like an impossible luxury. Besides, I don't know anyone close enough to be a friend. In fact, my attendance has reached a dangerously low threshold. In order not to have my visa cancelled and repatriated due to low attendance, I got up at the eighth ringing of my alarm clock, despite having s*x all night last night. The way from the bedroom to the bathroom was tougher than a ten kilometre run. I stumbled and propped myself up against the wall across the scattered piles of clothes and underwear that littered the floor, didn't bother with one of my slippers that had been flung halfway across the room, and simply left the other, too, next to the men's boxers at the end of the bed, and stepped into the bathroom barefoot. Perhaps I had drunk too much wine, and my mind was still groggy and swollen. I held the corner of my forehead and stared at myself in the mirror with both eyes blank. A swollen brow bone, a reddened nose, tiny contusions all over my lips, hickeys and teeth marks stretching from my chin to my neck, and my gaze lingers on the marks around my messy collar. Reverse-retrospective memory loss caused by excessive alcohol has left me unable to recall exactly what I experienced last night. Thankfully, my fluffy double bed was soundly occupied by my boyfriend alone, not two or three strange plumbers. I twisted the tap with one hand and squeezed my toothbrush with the other, my mouth stuffed with toothpaste foam. Just as I bent down to pick up a handful of water, a pair of thick, strong arms suddenly circled my waist behind me. Through the not-so-thin layer of clothing, I could still fully feel the touch of firm, taut muscles, sticking to my body with the damp heat of a light sweat. I glanced at the half-misted mirror and saw the light-coloured fuzz on his healthy skin making intimate contact with my woolen nightgown. “Wait, I...” I slurred the toothbrush in my mouth and had just made a brushing when the man behind me, who reeked of rich hormones, lowered his head and kissed my cheek, which was still sticky with cleanser. I locked eyes with his sleepy green ones through the mirror for three seconds before I heard him say, "I think we're going to have to break up, Paige." His English accent was pronounced, with the common nasal twang to Scots. I used to say that it was because of him that I fell in love with this quirky accent that had given me such a hard time in my language test listening, but this was the first time in a while that I had felt his peculiar way of pronouncing words to be so irritating. "You've got to be kidding, right?" A hot tear struggled to roll down from the corner of my eye, but I desperately tried to put it back. However, I couldn't stop the hoarseness and choking in my throat. For a while, in addition to the repetitive sentence "how could this happen", my head is almost blank, my mouth is also disobedient, can only hear myself in a low voice asking "why" over and over again. My reaction seemed to make him feel very impatient. He brushed his arm back and frowned straight at me in the mirror, trailing off his words in slowly: "You know I haven't passed my dissertation yet, and my roommate has been helping me pay the rent for months, so I can't go around having fun with you anymore...... I think I deserve better life , Paige." As he spoke, the right side of his mouth turned up slightly, his eyes blinked and blinked, his eyes glued to my face, and there was an eerie incongruity to his whole face. — He is lying. Suddenly full of energy and strength, I lowered my eyes to avoid his gaze and freshened up as fast as I could before grabbing a towel that was dangling off to the side and wiping my face as I turned back around. At just under 1.6 metres tall, I looked like a short bean sprout amongst the rather tall crowd on the streets of London, and it was due to the limitations of my height that I had to lean back hard on the back of my neck to gaze into his emerald green eyes. I took a deep breath, then hissed out at the loudest volume in my life: "My name is Penny! Penelope! You arsehole! Pete!" Unexpectedly, his reaction was obviously much more intense than mine: "Hell, who is Pete? I am Matthew!" — Until he slammed the door in anger, I was still trying to recall who the name Pete really belonged to. Not at all interested in listening to any lectures, the tears were falling one after the other and I simply sat on the edge of the bed clutching the tissue box and cried until my empty stomach rumbled in protest. I huffed and threw the wet and sticky ball of tissue, stained with my tears and snot, into the bin next to my bed, my eyes lingering for a moment on the inside of the bin, and gradually a wave of uneasiness came over me. I jumped out of bed in a heap and carpet searched the entire room, including under the bed, but never found what I was looking for. After a while, my stopped brain finally processed the shock. My hands began to shiver uncontrollably as I yanked up the bedside phone, crackling and slamming down the buttons, and when someone on the other end picked up I screamed at the top of their lungs in anger, "Damn it, I can't believe you didn't wear a condom!?" “……” There was an eerie silence on the other end of the phone. I wasn't in the mood to think about what the silence meant, organising my logically confused English to continue at a rapid pace, "My mommy told me that if a boy breaks my heart, I should go and fall in love with his best friend ...... So just you wait and see, I'm sure I'll go and sleep with your bestfriend-" “Hello.” The voice on the microphone was a not-so-familiar one with a purely authentic Oxford accent, politely and hardly embarrassedly saying slowly, "I'm guessing you are Matthew's girlfriend ...... ex-girlfriend, right? I'm his ......" After a long time, he finally hesitantly continued, "Friend." “……” I hung up immediately. The University's Health Centre offers a no-cost emergency contraception service, and there's a huge paper box at the front desk dedicated to distributing free condoms to students. Before entering the door I put on my sunglasses and pressed the brim of my cap to the lowest level. Ignoring the counsellor's desperate attempts to encourage me to talk to her about my ex-boyfriend, I swallowed the pills with cold water and felt more or less at ease. On the way out, I also took a large pack of plastic-wrapped condom out of the cardboard box and put it into my coat pocket. Back at the single rented flat, I simply ate some toast for brunch and then concentrated on getting Matthew's location from the location system that came with my phone. Immediately afterwards, I squeezed in well over twenty minutes on the tram, plus nearly a quarter of an hour's walk, and arrived at my destination just in time to meet up with Matthew, who was walking out of the library. I held out my arms to block his path, then raised my hand and slammed a pocketful of condoms viciously into his handsome, loathsome face. "Remember to wear a condom next time, stupid." I spat contemptuously and turned to cover my face and flee the scene of the crime. Unexpectedly, he gripped my wrists from behind and lifted me up effortlessly and gently. He looked comically ridiculous with coloured condom packets hanging between his short brown hair. I knew I shouldn't be laughing at this point, but I couldn't help the corners of my mouth from turning up. This enraged Matthew even more, and his breathing grew ragged as he lifted me by the back of my collar. I had no doubt he was contemplating throwing me like a baseball the next second. At that moment, my ears caught a laugh that didn't belong to me. Though the laugh lasted less than half a second and then passed away, I still heard it clearly. I looked over at the source of the voice, which was not far behind Matthew, on the third level of the steps to the library entrance. He looked to be in his early twenties, with a sports backpack over one shoulder, light blonde hair, azure pupils, and a tight t-shirt outlining a nice smooth upper body line. If I remembered correctly, he was Matthew's best friend.