—
THE MEETING on the train sort of answered the question of what made Day think she could be a Homely Wench, but it didn’t answer the question of who a Homely Wench is. Second year was a year of conscientious study for Day; she couldn’t have another exam result fiasco like last year (too much time spent visiting Pepper at Oxford Brookes), so she could only return to her questions of wenchness after she’d done as much work toward her degree as was possible, all the reading and note-taking and following up on references that she could do in a day. Queen’s was in Day’s blood, since it was her father’s college too. In his day he’d flown thousands of miles specifically to enroll, whereas she’d come in from Suffolk. Her college library was at its best late at night. At night the stained-glass figures in the windows seemed to slumber, and the lamps on each desk gently rolled orange light along the floors until it formed one great globe that bounced along every twist and turn of the staircase to the upper levels. When she surveyed the entire scene it seemed to be one that the stained-glass figures were dreaming. And she was there too, living what was dreamed. She stretched, sighed. Well, I’m a fanciful wench, but am I a homely one? Her sister Aisha was gunning for Murray Edwards, their mother’s college.
—
DAY HADN’T SIGHED quietly enough: A few desks away Hercules Demetriou (first-year Law) looked over at her and smiled. She looked away. She didn’t think he was evil or anything, but he was a problem. The issue was all hers for fancying him even though he’d already been elected to the Bettencourt Society. The boy was tall and well built and had wavy hair, excellent teeth, and unshakable equilibrium. Up close you saw smatterings of acne but that was no comfort. His skin tone lent him enough ethnic ambiguity for small children whose parents had a taste for vintage Disney to run up to him and ask: “Are you Aladdin?” He’d flash them a dazzling smile and answer: “Nah, I’m Hercules.”
Hercules of Stockwell. So full of himself. This was not an attraction that Day could ever confess to anybody. Hercules talked to her, though. He’d say, “See you in the bar, yeah?” as he and his friends walked past her and her friends. Then Mike or Dara or Jiro would turn to her and say things like, “So will you see him in the bar? Or his bed, for that matter?” Horrible. When Hercules Demetriou spoke to Day her heart beat loudly and her loins acted as if they didn’t know what the rest of her knew about him. What was he after? Day didn’t actually think she was unattractive: Her appearance was mostly passable, and sometimes even exceeded that. Two things that were not in her favor were her spectacles, which often led people (including herself) to incorrectly anticipate a sexy librarian effect. You know . . . the glasses come off, the hair tumbles down, and there she is. Nope. She had unreasonably large feet too. She’d never walk on moonbeams. Why would the perfectly proportioned Hercules Demetriou keep trying to befriend her? It made no sense. Unless the slimy Bettencourters were compiling another List after all.
—
THE YOUNG HERO was still looking over. Day took her glasses off, cleaned them, put them back on, and then typed a couple of paragraphs.
—
WHO IS A HOMELY wench? Is a girl who exhaustively screens every man her mother contemplates seeing a homely wench? Leaving these things to Aisha meant just letting it all go to hell. How about a girl who sometimes finds it easier to talk to her dad’s boyfriend than she does to her dad—what manner of wench is she? Day’s dad still fasted at Ramadan even though he didn’t go to mosque anymore, and from time to time he flared up at signs of Day and Aisha’s “secular disrespect,” which he was almost sure they were learning from their mum. (They weren’t. If anything they were learning it from Dad’s boyfriend, Anton.) But apart from being less hung up on manners, Anton was less sensitive than Dad. Day had once mentioned being envious of her friend Zoe for having two mums—she’d been talking about the miracle of having two mums who were both so cool, but her dad had taken her words to mean that she didn’t want all the family she had, and he’d looked so crestfallen that she’d spent ages explaining her original comment and making it sound even more dismissive of him and Anton until he’d had to laugh.
—
A GIRL at the desk next to Hercules’—Lakmini, Day thought her name was—wrote him a note; must have been a hot note because he fanned himself with it. But Miss Dayang Sharif couldn’t have cared less what the note said, no way.
—
WHO ARE THE Homely Wenches of today?