Sleepovers

This is girlhood in technicolour 💖🌈🐬

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I stand at my friend’s front door, the precipice of something epic. I’m ready for my first glimpse of independence, Rugrats sleeping bag in tow. With nervous hellos and I’m fines doled out to welcoming parents, my friend and I race upstairs. The hourglass turns and the sleepover begins.

The evening stretches out before us, an open plain of possibility. I walk around my friend’s bedroom as if it’s a museum, marvelling at their possessions. She shows me the shells she collected on a beach in Spain, her sticker collection, her dolphin choker necklace, her Game Boy. Part of me wants to steal these treasures for myself. Here, take this, she says, gifting me a shell or sticker or something that is insignificant to her. It feels like a lump of gold to me. The air is drenched with Hilary Duff’s breezy lyrics and the scent of Fantasy.

More friends arrive, dumping their backpacks and sleeping bags into an ever-growing heap. Our least-parentally-surveilled comrade arrives with a wedge of rental DVDs, horror movies titles written in Arial across the dull, unbranded boxes.

Friend’s Parent calls us all downstairs for dinner. I eat a spaghetti bolognese that is so different to the spaghetti bolognese in my house. Mushrooms in bolognese sauce?! It tastes weirdly good. After dinner, my friend opens the freezer and shows me a huge drawer full of ice-creams. The expensive brands, not supermarket own-brand. I am incredulous that they have such a treasure trove at their fingertips. How do they not gorge themselves, I wonder, keeping my cool as I select an ice-cream.

We’re approaching the halfway point between being born and tossing our wedding bouquets. The journey is rough, so we stop to make camp.

While we were distracted, Friend’s Parent has laid out folding mattresses and arranged our sleeping bags in neat rows. Night falls as we diligently straighten and crimp each other’s hair, preparing for nothing other than this night. We talk about everyone we know, which is limited to the kids we go to school with and the girls at basketball practice. My eyelids are smeared in purple eyeshadow. We swap polyphonic ringtones and play truth or dare. This is girlhood in technicolour.

Once Friend’s Parents are in bed, the scary movies emerge. We huddle together on the living room rug like penguins in the tundra, illuminated by the television’s beam. Something gory and not-age-appropriate plays out on the screen, but the girl pack shields me, their mere presence a salve. I know that I won’t sleep tomorrow when I’m back home alone in my bedroom, but it’s worth it. Everything about this is valuable to me.

We swarm to the kitchen once the film ends, petrified and hyper. Someone has the stupendous idea to make a potion of Coca-Cola, mustard, soy sauce and milk and beacons the bravest forward to drink it. I was never the bravest one, but the bravest one emboldens me to follow in her footsteps. This wave of giddiness can only lead to one place: prank calls. Despite honing our skills with each consecutive sleepover, we are still extremely clumsy. We call all of our friends and crushes and enemies, putting on our wackiest voices or - a classic - simply flushing the toilet into the Nokia 3310’s receiver.

We eventually wind down, unsure of the hour and unable to stay awake much longer. There was no such thing as a skincare routine back then, no procedures, no rituals. I snuggle into my sleeping bag and inhale the unique scent of my friend’s house from the pillow. In the darkness, someone cracks a joke. I’m too electrified to dream.

There’s a moment when your parents picked you up and put you down again for the very last time. The same thing happened with sleepovers. At some point, sleepovers became staying over. A separate bedroom, a slab of clean towels, formal goodnights and see you in the mornings. Staying over is serious. It was suddenly all about when he or she stayed over for the first time, when she stayed over because she was too drunk to make it home, when he stayed over because he had nowhere to go.

I guess that’s okay. Somewhere on that long journey to adulthood, we became whole people. We severed ourselves away into the vastness our own existences, no longer needing the snuggle of our fellow baby birds to stay warm.

We were only making camp, not staying forever.