A Totally Awkward Love Story by Tom Ellen

Author:Tom Ellen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2016-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

10

SAM

We’d only been in the car twenty minutes before Ben passed out. Completely out. Chris slapped him in the face and he didn’t even twitch. Although, since he started chain-smoking spliffs as soon as Robin put the key in the ignition, I suppose twenty minutes of consciousness was actually pretty good. Chris put Robin’s novelty Rasta hat next to him in case he woke up and vomited.

Robin’s driving, which is erratic at the best of times, was bordering on suicidal as we hit the highway and headed west toward Woodland Festival. I began to worry that his mum’s Corsa wouldn’t make it back in one piece.

He was way excited about the festival. We hadn’t been to a festival together—him, me and Chris—since Reading, when we were fifteen, but that doesn’t really count since we were only there for about five hours because our parents wouldn’t let us camp overnight.

When Robin is excited about something it’s nearly impossible to get him to focus on anything else. That’s one of the things I like best about him, I suppose. However, as we were bombing down the M4 at 90 mph and he was tapping his right foot (the one on the accelerator) along to the music, it became a bit tiresome.

Three hours later we pulled into the shoe-sucking mud of the Woodland campsite. Ben—newly refreshed after his long sleep and now enthusiastically back on spliff-smoking duties—asked me if I wanted to “toss a Frisbee about,” but I told him I’d rather just get going on setting up our tents. The clouds were already starting to gather. A few little ones directly above our field were openly scowling at us.

I was starting to regret telling my mum—who’d urged me to bring a stout pair of rubber boots—that “wellies were for children and farmers.” I only had my old, battered skateboarding shoes with me. If it rained, I was screwed.

By seven p.m. it was raining. Actually, “raining” sounds too tame. By seven p.m. it was raining really fucking hard. Instead of just falling out of the sky like normal, these drops felt like they were being deliberately and angrily hurled at us. As if the clouds were irate neighbors trying to get us all to turn the music down.

But the music carried on despite the monsoon. So we decided to carry on, too. I prepared to leave the tent by strapping two Sainsbury’s carrier bags around my already-sodden trainers. Ben had his dad’s knee-length raincoat as well as a waterproof fisherman’s hat to protect his spliffs, so he was fine. Robin had three cotton hoodies on, under the illogical assumption that because there were three of them, he somehow wouldn’t get wet. Chris was wearing a trash bag like a dress. He had punched a hole in the top for his head to go through.

“I should wear this all the time,” he said as he examined himself. “It’s cheap and practical.”

I noted to Robin as we were all leaving the tent that Chris still looked annoyingly good, even when wearing a trash bag.

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