I think I am drinking spit. I can feel it on my tongue, just that bit thicker than water, sliding down my throat like egg white. Gabrielle is banging her palm on the sticky table, repeating the start of a drinking chant we all know, in a tone that is slightly too aggressive for 7am. Her eyes lock onto the pint in my hand and I down it with obedience. The string of spit is taut before it drops into the pit of my throat. 

In this moment, we are eighteen and still encased in a thick layer of puppy fat. Our skin is oily and pimpled, and our thirst for adulthood borders on desperation. We have spread to conquer the corner of the only bar in the only terminal of the airport closest to home. We are a swarm, seeping like honey over toppled chairs and swirling patterned carpet. At the other end of the table, Jessica is poking at a spot on her cheek, the bubble of red mixes with the orange on her skin like a tequila sunrise. She’s rolling her eyes at her panicked mother on the other side of a phone call. 

‘Yes, everyone is fine. I won’t Mum, I promise. I’ll be safe.’

The tannoy crackles as the announcer clears their throat. Our flight is ready to board. I watch the rain hit the tarmac like darts beyond the wall of glass. 

As we take our seats on the plane, my stomach bubbles with something somewhere between excitement and pre-emptive homesickness. Hannah holds my hand as she orders two double-vodka-cokes and I feel like a proper grown up for the first time in my life. Together, we embark on this journey with ritualistic adherence from before, to what is next.

In a different moment, a few years later, Hannah will drunkenly hold my hand for the first time in years, as though it is muscle memory. The warm of her palm will make me want to cry, because I’ll realise that we aren’t eighteen and I can’t finish her sentences without trying anymore. The pain of her pulling away still stings like a stab wound.

Our hotel is the first on the border of the town, balanced precariously at the tip of the island, so we are the first to stumble off the bus into the dusty heat. It looks nothing like the photos on the website. As we enter, we are greeted with an onslaught of warm air; a sweaty mouth breathing down our necks. The receptionist explains, after taking our payment, that the air-con only blows hot. 

‘Nice in winter,’ she nods. 

The five of us follow the maze of yellowing stucco walls, peeling off into a pair and a trio and turning little green keys into locks. Hannah and I are in the three. Our roommate is a girl we’ve had very little interaction with; new to the school only a year before we left it, Issy struggled to squeeze into ill-fitting gaps in friendship groups formed over many years. She asked to come, and we said yes because we felt bad and hadn’t learnt to say no yet. 

Issy chooses the single bed, sensing perhaps that it is already decided. Her suitcase is remarkably light, and I make a mental inventory as she takes each item out (bikini, pair of denim shorts, pair of flip flops (tags still on), pair of sparkly sandals, t-shirts (one red. one pink) bodycon dresses (one red. one pink)). The remaining space is filled with a first aid kit and a plethora of herbal teas (nettle, peppermint, raspberry leaf, ginger, turmeric, chai, camomile and echinacea). 

We watch silently, observing the space between our bed and hers as she lines the boxes up on the chest of drawers. Hannah shifts beside me, and I know her thoughts without looking at her. 

Pre-drinks and photos are held in Gabrielle and Jessica’s room because they have a balcony. I note Gabrielle’s childhood stuffed toy nestled in the leg-hole of a pair of pink bikini bottoms. He is limp, nothing more than a loose sack of frayed fur and thread. I want to stroke him. 

‘You brought Teddy on the girls’ holiday?’

‘He comes everywhere, you know that.’

She hides him under a packet of condoms. One of his beady eyes follows me from under the Ultra-Safe Durex. I wonder what Teddy makes of the trip so far. 

When we are older, I won’t know the name of the street Gabrielle lives on, or what her boss is called, but I’ll know about Teddy, what she would cry about when she was a teenager, which bottles were okay to steal from her parents’ garage and which were not, and I’ll wonder if that is still worth something. 

We walk as a pack down the only road in town, our feet moving in instinctual synchrony, bodies pulled by some invisible string as The Strip, alive and glistening, calls to us. The drinks are eye-wateringly cheap, the drugs are as easy to buy as paracetamol, and a packet of 20 Marlboro Reds is only 3.60 euros. There are those that have sworn themselves to The Strip in return for a permanence in this nocturnal existence. These people are The Reps. They speak the language of salesmen, trying to charm, to force leaflets into hands, to coax the swarm into their places of employment. We drain the fishbowls they offer and slip back into the gushing stream of drunken youth, where hedonism has settled onto the potholed tarmac like heat-haze. It disguises the cigarette ends, discarded bottles, baggies and vomit under our flip-flops and we float above it all. 

A woman wrapped in shawls is perched on the wall outside of the first club we enter. Her cardboard sign reads:

‘Henna Tattoos: five euros, extra two euros per letter more than four’

Too hot to dance any longer, Gabrielle and I opt for one to pass the time. For my five euros, I receive GAB ♥ on the inside of my forearm. Gabrielle is accepting of the fact that her name contains too many letters, and I only have a fiver left in my pocket. In return, Gabrielle is stained with my name in the matching spot. 

‘Wet. Don’t smudge,’ The woman tells me sternly as she moves onto the next drunkard of the night. 

It is wet, and it does smudge as soon as we re-enter the club. For the rest of the month, my arm is marked with a brownish red ‘G’ and a skid mark of henna. 

‘Mine itches a bit,’ Gabrielle moans, as I scowl at my arm. 

The next morning, once the vodka wears off, Gabriella’s itching turns to burning and Issy and her first aid kit are called in. Issy inspects the blistering skin, humming and occasionally shaking her head. 

‘You’re allergic to Henna,’ is her professional opinion and we all take the news gravely. 

Gabrielle runs her arm under the cold tap for an hour and Issy prepares her a turmeric tea. 

We get real tattoos on the holiday too. At least, Hannah and I do. No one else wants to. They are probably the smart ones, but it feels better that it’s just the two of us to become permanently inked.

Years later, my tattoo will still be bold and unflinching, because I’ll moisturise it like the guy in the waiting room tells us to. Hannah’s will fade because she gets it under her bra strap so that her mum won’t see it. Lace and cotton will rub it down to a remnant of something that used to be there.

We leave the back-alley studio and make our way back to the hotel to debrief on our first night. Those who have managed to crawl out from under the hot breath of the aircon blink against the blinding sunlight and fall like they have been dropped from a great height into the cool reprieve of the pool. Despite Gabrielle’s scarring, we decide that we feel the night went well. We call our mums and assure them that we are still alive. We eat crisps, and smoke cigarettes, and rosy our skin until we begin to peel in bubbling patches. 

Facebook will let me know that I have ‘new memories to look back on’. 7 Years Ago Today: Gabrielle is asleep by the pool, her tan nearing the precipice of burn. Hannah has drawn a penis on Gabrielle’s stomach with Issy’s spf 50. I’m laughing, cigarette in hand, feet in the pool at the foot of Hannah’s sun lounger. I’ll share it to the group chat, as though putting a coin into the meter of friendship. 

Jessica: lol 

Gabrielle: you’re all dicks

Hannah: still funny 

The chat will go quiet again.

On our second night, I watch Hannah as she slides from the stage at the pool party. I rush in that slow bobbing way through the water, arms up, as her blood begins to mingle with the mystery iridescence that has slicked the surface of the pool. Four stitches and a rudimentary sling later, and we are back to the club, her head leaning on my shoulder in the indent that has worn there through ten years of the same weight. 

The next night, a stranger loudly calls Jessica fat in the street. 

‘Oi, Fatty!’ 

‘Jesus, she’s obese. What’s she doing in shorts?’

I watch the sunburn drain from her face as the group of boys laugh and pretend to jiggle in their gangly teenage bodies. I hold a towel to her wrist on the walk to the hospital a few hours later, her blood drying into the crevices between my fingers. It only needs three stitches this time. I plaster a smile to my face and call her mum to ask about the insurance details, I tell her that Jessica slipped in the awful showers at our awful hotel. I lie as I say she’s fine and that I am too. 

When we are older, the same thing will happen in the bathroom at a party in our friend’s first flat. She won’t tell me why this time, maybe she doesn’t know. She will refuse to go to hospital, and I will bandage her up myself with toilet paper and Sellotape. 

I wake early and exhausted the next morning, and manage to tiptoe out of the festering pit that has become our room. Outside, the land hisses and the haze on the tarmac makes me feel unsteady. Everyone is asleep. The street outside our hotel is littered with cans, cardboard takeaway boxes and condoms. The Strip too is nocturnal, I discover. By day, it sleeps, rebuilding its strength under the baking sun.  Only the little shop at the end of the street is open, and I feel for a moment as if I’ve woken from one dream and slipped straight into another. I eat a crisp sandwich, and smoke cheap cigarettes. I wait for something to do. 

In my moment alone, I realise that I want to go home and I know that there is nothing I can do about it. There is a blood stain on my shorts, and my chest hurts from too many cigarettes and my friends are still passed out and I want to cry because I am eighteen and grown-up and all I want is a hug from my mum. 

I want to stay in on our last night, but I know it’s not allowed. Issy makes me a chamomile tea and I chase it down with a shot of tequila. An hour later, I find myself  next to another eighteen-year-old in a buckled yellow booth at the back of the club. We suck up laughing gas from red balloons and discuss the English Literature paper in between inhales. It feels like simultaneously floating up from and crashing back down to the world’s surface.

‘I fucked it; I know I did. I didn’t even mention Boo Radley,’ she sighs, her eyes closed. 

I watch the balloon deflate into her lungs as her eyes glaze over. I stay silent. She has fucked it; I know it too. I allow myself to think about the next for a breath: the results, the packing, the goodbye, and then the laughing gas takes me out of the room. 

At some point on the final night, Hannah and I stumble back to the hotel to take more euros out of the unlockable safe. The peeling corridor has no lights and I trip over a bundle of sick-drenched Superdry as I turn the corner. The stranger is a skinny boy who looks about sixteen once Hannah gets her phone torch on him. The stranger is unconscious and choking on his own sick. We wrap him in a towel and roll him onto his side in a teenage attempt at first aid. He has no phone, no ID; just himself, his holiday clothes and a belly full of vodka. We are drunk too, and I realise that we are still schoolgirls, trying to stop someone from dying. Hannah googles the number for abroad 999 whilst I pat the stranger’s face. Instead of waking, he throws up again, this time into my lap. 

We stay with him until the ambulance drives away and Hannah cracks a joke about something I don’t remember. We walk back to the bar without speaking, moving as one, listening to the clash between our quiet and the loud of the other kids around us. Later, we take a shot and I notice she is shaking like she’s cold; I wonder if she wants her mum too. 

On Gabrielle’s 25^th birthday, we will sit at her parents’ kitchen table, squashed beside each other despite the gaps left by those who can’t make it or can’t justify the trip. Gabrielle will show Jessica the scar on her arm that still bears some faint resemblance to my name, and I’ll wonder if she wishes she is scarred with the name of someone else; someone she still facetimes every week, someone she likes more. We won’t mention the scar on Jessica’s arm from the same trip, or the new ones that will appear after it. 

Hannah and I will stand to show our tattoos. Hannah will laugh and nonchalantly say that she forgets it’s even there. Under the table, I will scratch at the tattoo on my hip until it is red. 

Hannah will grab my hand in the taxi home as we swerve around a corner, and it will jolt some teenage part of me that I had forgotten the feel of. She will let go only when the taxi pulls up outside her house, and I won’t cling on like I might have done years ago. We will wave at each other through the rain speckled window as I pull away. 

On the final morning of our girls’ holiday, I watch the sun unfurl over The Strip as I smoke the last of my cigarettes. We shower, we pack, and we finish off the two-litre bottle of vodka that one of us bought. I lean my head on the sharp outcrop of bone on Hannah’s shoulder and watch Issy organise her tea like Tetris is her suitcase. Gabrielle fixes my hair with gentle precision and Jessica smiles at me as she chooses a long-sleeved t-shirt, despite the suffocating heat. I take a deep breath and take for granted the intensity with which we cling to each other, not yet knowing that it won’t last once our ages begin with a twenty. 

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Beth Brown is an MA student at the University of Manchester, where she is studying Creative Writing. Prior to this, she received her Diploma in Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge. Her work has featured in Nowhere Girl Collective. Off the page, she can usually be found in bookshops or coffee shops, daydreaming about moving to Paris, or eavesdropping on other peoples’ conversations as inspiration for later stories. Find her on Instagram @girlonpause.