Page 28 of The Friend Request

‘You never sleep well lately.’ She bit the chip in half and studied me. ‘Is there a boy?’

My stomach flipped. ‘No.’

‘Liar.’

‘There’s no boy, Lisa.’

She let it go, but she gave me one of those looks – brow furrowed, lips pressed together, the glare she saved for when she knew I was holding something back and was deciding whether to push. Lisa was good at pushing. She’d been my best friend since year seven, and she could read me better than anyone, which was exactly why I couldn’t tell her. If I told Lisa, the secret would stop being mine and Ross’s. It would become gossip, currency, something to be picked apart and analysed over a shared bag of crisps in her bedroom. I didn’t want that. I wanted to keep it whole.

So I kept my mouth shut. I smiled at her, changed the subject, and the warmth in my chest spread a little further because even the lying felt like proof. You only protect something this fiercely when it matters.

That was how I thought back then.

Ross was – I don’t know how to say this without it sounding like every other girl talking about every other boy. He was different. Not different in the ways that mattered, probably, looking back with over twenty years of distance, but different in the way he made me feel, which at fifteen was the only measurement I had. He listened properly, leaning forward, watching my mouth while I spoke. He asked questions. He remembered answers. He told me things about himself – his dad leaving, his mum’s drinking, the cold feeling he got in the house when she’d been on the wine all afternoon – that he swore he’d never told anybody else, and I believed him because I wanted to, and because his expression when he said it was too raw to be practised.

I was in deep. I knew it, and I didn’t care.

‘You’re doing it again,’ Lisa said, a week later.

We were in the canteen, and I’d zoned out while she was talking about her mum’s new boyfriend.

‘Honestly, Kim, it’s like talking to a brick wall.’

‘Sorry. Sorry, I was thinking about the art project.’

‘You were not thinking about the art project.’

I laughed. She laughed. And for a second I almost told her – the words were right there, sitting on my tongue – but then the canteen doors swung open and Ross walked in with two of his mates, and I bit down on the urge so fast I almost felt my teeth click.

He didn’t glance at me. That was the rule. In public, we were nothing to each other – two people who went to the same school, passed each other in corridors without a flicker. It drove me slightly mad, in the best way. The gap between what everyone else saw and what I knew was true felt like power.

Looking back, I think it also felt like training.

Training for what, I didn’t ask myself at the time. But I was learning, without realising it, that love and secrecy could live in the same body, and that hiding something didn’t make it less real. If anything, it made it more real. Brighter. More precious. More mine.

I should have wondered why he wanted to hide it at all.

It was a Friday – I remember that much because Lisa’s mum was out and we were at Lisa’s house, and Lisa’s mum only went out on Fridays because she had a standing arrangement with a woman from her aerobics class. Lisa and I were supposed to be revising, which meant we’d spread our folders across the kitchen table, opened a packet of Hobnobs, and accomplished precisely nothing for the first forty-five minutes. Then the doorbell went.

‘That’ll be Sam,’ Lisa said, already standing.

‘Sam?’

‘Sam Foster. From English. He said he might come over.’

‘You didn’t mention that.’

‘Didn’t I?’

She was halfway to the front door, and I heard her open it, and then I heard a voice that wasn’t Sam Foster’s, and my stomach dropped through the floor.

Ross walked into the kitchen behind Lisa, hands in his pockets, smiling, as if turning up at my best friend’s house on a Friday evening was the most natural thing in the world. Sam was behind him, seeming sheepish.

‘All right?’ Ross said. To both of us. Casually.

I watched his gaze skim over me without pausing, and for a second, something cold moved through my chest.

Then he sat. Lisa got Cokes from the fridge, Sam said something about the maths homework, and the evening arranged itself around me like a stage set I hadn’t agreed to be in.