Friend Request(15)

‘He might.’

‘No, seriously. Boys like him don’t go out with girls like me, that’s just the way it is. At the most, I might get to be friends with him. But I don’t even have that, he barely knows I exist.’

‘Then maybe you need to change that,’ she said. ‘You never know if you don’t try.’

I changed the subject then. Surely even a new girl could see that Sam was totally out of my league, even if I did have the courage to do more than smile at him.

We had such a laugh on the walk back to her house, Maria giving me her slyly observed take on various students in our year at school. For someone who’d only been in the school a few weeks she was astonishingly spot-on, identifying the frailties, insecurities and absurdities of people who to my uncritical eye had seemed achingly cool. She also did a pitch perfect impression of Mr Jenkins asking her lasciviously to stay behind after class to ‘discuss her essay’. She hesitated outside her front gate, appearing to be involved in some kind of internal debate.

‘Do you… do you want to come in for a bit?’

Inside, the hall carpet needed a hoover and was frayed at the edges, and there was a vague smell of bacon fat. The wallpaper was peeling and I could see that the handrail for the stairs had been removed, leaving a jagged groove in the wall. It was very quiet, but when Maria called out, her mum emerged from the kitchen, drying her hands on a tea towel that had seen better days. The resemblance between the two was striking: their long, wispy brown hair that fell somewhere between straight and curly, their eyes hazel pools, flecked with gold and green.

‘Hi! I’m Bridget,’ she said. I always feel a bit weird about calling my friends’ parents by their first names, and generally try to avoid calling them anything at all. ‘It’s so nice to meet one of Maria’s friends. Welcome!’ She flung out both arms in an exaggerated gesture, tea towel flicking against the wall. ‘So who are you?’

‘Louise. Hi.’

‘Oh, Louise! Yes, I’ve heard all about you!’ I wondered what Maria had told her.

‘Stay for a cup of tea! In fact, stay for dinner!’ I was beginning to feel slightly suffocated and was about to make my excuses when Maria interrupted.

‘Mum! Stop being so embarrassing. Come on, Louise, let’s go to my room.’

‘Shall I bring you up some tea and biscuits?’ Bridget called after us as Maria hustled me up the stairs.

‘No, Mum. We don’t want anything.’

Maria closed the door behind us and sank down on the bed. The paint on the walls was chipped and the carpet didn’t seem to quite fit the room, but Maria had obviously done her best, putting an Indian throw on the bed, covering the worst bits of wall with Salvador Dalí prints and filling the white Formica shelving unit with books.

‘Sorry about that.’

‘It’s OK,’ I said, lowering myself onto the bed beside her. ‘Is – is she always like that with your friends?’

‘She didn’t used to be. Before… well, before everything that happened at my old school she was fine. I mean, she still is fine really. It’s just… oh, never mind.’ Maria’s fingers went to her necklace, a gold heart on a chain that I’d noticed she always wore.

‘What is it? You can say, I won’t tell anyone if you don’t want me to.’

‘I don’t want to go into it all. I had a bad time of it. Like I told you at lunch that first day, it was so bad that we moved schools, and home. It was awful for me, of course. But Mum took it even harder. She told me once that there’s a saying, you’re only as happy as your unhappiest child. If that’s true then she must have been pretty fucking unhappy.’

There was silence for a while. It was clear that Maria wasn’t going to say any more about it, so I changed the subject.

‘I like your necklace. Where’s it from?’

‘I don’t know. My dad gave it to me.’ Her hand stole to it again, twisting the chain around her fingers. ‘It was the first thing he’d ever bought me himself. Mum always bought the presents. I should have known he wasn’t going to be around much longer. Are your mum and dad still together?’

‘Yes.’ I couldn’t begin to imagine my parents splitting up. I didn’t think of them as two separate people, more as an entity, mum-and-dad.

‘Well, mine aren’t. They separated before we left London. I think it was the stress of… everything that happened.’ What could have been so bad that it caused her parents to split up? I couldn’t tell if she really didn’t want to talk about it, or if she wanted me to force her to open up.

‘So… what happened?’ I asked.

She looked for a moment as if she was going to tell me, but then her face closed up.

‘Let’s talk about something else.’

I decided to take a different tack, telling her about the different teachers and their quirks and giving her the school gossip about who was going out with who. This was much more successful, and we were in her room for over an hour, punctuated by Bridget bringing up the unwanted tea and chocolate digestives. She lingered too long at the door, watching Maria and me laughing together, urging me again to stay for dinner, which I refused to do as I knew my parents would be expecting me back.

Maria and I said goodbye on the doorstep. I had that warm achy feeling that you get when you’ve been laughing too hard for too long. I had the uncomfortable realisation that I hadn’t worried about what to say all afternoon. I hadn’t turned every potential utterance over in my mind, examining it for possible embarrassment before letting it come out of my mouth as I have to with Sophie. Instead of feeling like a performance, my afternoon with Maria had been completely relaxed. I had simply let go.