Page 24 of The Friend Request

‘No need to apologise. She’s a wonderful student. You should be very proud.’

‘I am,’ I say. And I mean it, which makes everything else feel so much worse.

I move from table to table. Maths, science, geography, art. Each teacher has five minutes, a folder, and a series of observations that I absorb and forget almost instantly, because my brain is somewhere else. It’s in my pocket, on my phone, watching those three dots appear and disappear in an endless, nauseating loop.

I check between every appointment. I sit, pull out the phone, open the app. The dots appear. My chest tightens. The dots vanish. I lock the screen, put the phone away, and walk to the next table with my hands clenched in my lap and a smile on my face.

He does it five times. Six. Every time, the dots pulse for a few seconds and then disappear, as if he’s writing and deleting, writing and deleting, testing different responses and discarding them one by one. It’s maddening. It’s the not knowing that grinds me down – the sense that a reply is forming somewhere on the other side of the city, assembling itself word by word, and at any moment it could arrive and change everything.

Or it could be nothing. He could be staring at his phone the same way I’m staring at mine, paralysed, unsure, caught between pushing further and backing off. Maybe my message worked. Maybe Leave me and my family alone landed the way I intended it to – hard, clear, final – and he’s trying to find a way to respond that doesn’t make him sound like the person he’s becoming.

Or maybe he’s composing something devastating. Something I can’t come back from.

Olivia finds me in the corridor outside the science block, where I’m leaning against the wall pretending to read a display about photosynthesis.

‘How’s it going?’ she asks.

‘Great. Everyone says you’re brilliant.’

‘They don’t say that.’

‘Mr Adebayo said your fractions are improving.’

‘He said they’re inconsistent.’

‘Improving inconsistency is still improving.’

She rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling. I reach out and tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, and she lets me, which means she’s in a good mood, because on a bad day she’d swat my hand away and say, ‘Mum, don’t.’

‘Can we get a hot chocolate on the way home?’ she says.

‘If you want.’

‘The big one, from the place on the high street. With the marshmallows.’

‘Fine. But you’re not having whipped cream as well. Last time you had whipped cream, you were sick in the car.’

‘I was eleven. My stomach’s matured since then.’

‘Your stomach hasn’t matured. You ate three bags of Haribo last weekend and complained about a tummy ache for the rest of the day.’

She grins. ‘That was different. That was recreational.’

I laugh, and the laughter feels real. The knot in my chest loosens, and I’m just a mum standing in a school corridor talking to her daughter about marshmallows. In this version Ross doesn’t exist, the phone in my pocket is just a phone, the typing dots are just pixels, and none of it matters as much as this girl in front of me with her wonky ponytail and her blazer sleeves pushed up to the elbows.

Then I feel the phone vibrate.

Just once. A short, soft buzz against my hip, barely perceptible, but it goes through me like a jolt of electricity. My face must change, because Olivia frowns and says, ‘You all right?’

‘Fine. Just my phone.’

‘Aren’t you going to check it?’

‘It can wait.’

It can’t. But I make myself wait anyway, standing there in the corridor with my daughter, talking about hot chocolate and marshmallows and the science teacher’s new haircut. The phone sits in my pocket, a lit match, and I don’t touch it, because if I look at it now, in front of Olivia, and my face does the thing it did upstairs in the bedroom when I first saw the photograph – the draining, the freezing, the visible collapse of composure – she’ll know something is wrong, and I cannot let that happen.

We do the last two appointments. History, then PE. I smile, nod, shake hands, say thank you, collect a printed report sheet from the table by the door, and walk out of the school with Olivia beside me and the cold November air biting my face and the phone burning through my coat.