Friend Request(2)

Maria Weston wants to be friends.

But Maria Weston has been dead for more than twenty-five years.

Chapter 2

1989
I’ve been awake all night in an attempt to maintain some kind of hold on what has happened, on what I have done. My eyes are red and prickling with tiredness, but I daren’t go to sleep. If I sleep, when I wake up I’ll have one blissful, terrible second when I’m unaware – and then it will all come crashing in on me, its power multiplied indefinitely by that one unknowing second.

I think of the last time I saw the dawn in, lying in Sophie’s bed. This time it’s a more tempestuous and bleaker affair. A ceaseless summer rain has been falling all night, and the branch of a nearby tree is thwacking intermittently against my windowpane. It’s not just the chemicals keeping me awake, although I can still feel them coursing, unwanted, around my veins. I’ve been sitting here on the floor for four hours, as my bedroom turns gradually from darkness to a dull grey half-light. I’m surrounded by the debris of my elaborate preparations for the evening that, twelve hours ago, stretched out invitingly, bright with the promise of acceptance and approval. There are three dresses strewn on the bed, with the accompanying pair of shoes for each lying discarded in front of the full-length mirror. My eyes rest dully on the stain on the carpet where Sophie dropped my new bronzing powder and I made a clumsy attempt to wipe it up with a bit of tissue dipped in a glass of stale water.

The dress I wore lies in a crumpled heap next to me – I’ve pulled on an old sweatshirt and leggings. There are dark smudges under my eyes and my lips are dry, the remains of my lipstick clinging to the cracks and bleeding into the skin around my mouth.

I’ve been sitting here on the floor for so long only because I can’t move. I would have expected my heart to be racing, but in fact an iron fist grips it so tightly that I am surprised it is beating at all. Everything has slowed to a funereal pace. If I move my hand to brush my hair behind my ears or pick something up off the floor, however quickly I do it, it’s as though I am moving in slow motion. My brain struggles to make sense of it all, my thoughts moving sluggishly through the past couple of months, trying to figure out how it has come to this.

I suppose it all began a couple of months ago, the day the new girl started. I’d spent break listening to Sophie talking to Claire Barnes and Joanne Kirby, not saying much myself. We were all sitting on that bench at the far edge of the playground, the three of them with their skirts rolled over at the waist so many times there was hardly any point in wearing them. Matt Lewis was watching Sophie from the other side of the playground and I could tell what he was thinking. It was that day, the first one of the year where you could smell spring in the air. I sat on the end of the bench, enjoying the feeling of the sun on my face, hoping they wouldn’t expect me to contribute anything. The sky was the most amazing blue, and Sophie and the other two were sort of shining, their impossibly glossy hair reflecting the sunlight, their smooth golden skin glistening. Of course they knew the effect they were having, they weren’t that stupid.

Sophie was redoing her mascara and talking about a boy she’d got off with the weekend before at Claire Barnes’s sixteenth birthday party. Obviously I wasn’t invited. Claire and Joanne only tolerate me tagging along because I’m friends with Sophie, and sometimes I feel like I’m hanging on to even that friendship by the tips of my fingers.

‘Basically, we were kissing and all that, and then – well, you know the most embarrassing thing that can happen to a boy? That happened.’

Claire and Joanne shrieked.

‘Oh my God!’ Claire said. ‘That is so embarrassing! You know I got off with Mark that time, at Johnny’s party? We went down the fields and I was down there, you know, giving him head, and nothing much was happening and I looked up and guess what? He was asleep!’

Sophie and Joanne fell about laughing and I smiled, to show that I understood the joke. At least I know what giving head is, even if I am hazy on the details. I’ve tried to imagine doing it to someone, even someone I really like, but I can’t. I have no idea how it works, for a start; what you would do with your mouth, your tongue. I shuddered.

Claire leaned in to the other two as if about to impart some great piece of wisdom.

‘It’s all right for you two, it’s still all quite new to you, but I’m actually getting a bit bored with sex, you know. It’s all Dan wants to do. You know sometimes I’d like to go into town or go to the cinema or something?’

Sophie and Joanne fell over themselves to agree. It’s funny, Sophie’s always so cool, so together, but sometimes when she’s with Claire I can see her soft underbelly, the cracks in her facade. They’d recently started letting me go into town with them after school. We would all walk down in a group, but when you get to the path by the river it’s too narrow to walk anything but two-by-two, and I could always feel Sophie and Joanne silently jostling to be the one that got to walk with Claire rather than with me.

Until tonight, I’d never even kissed a boy, and I remember praying that day that the others wouldn’t find out. Sophie knows, but I don’t think she’d tell. At least they never try to involve me in those conversations. I’m always so frightened of saying something stupid, something that will betray my lack of experience. Most of what I know about sex I’ve learned from the pages of Just Seventeen magazine, although God knows it could be more helpful. The problem-page woman seems to assume you have a basic knowledge, so there are always phrases and words I’m not sure about. You’d think maybe sex education at school would have covered this, but no, so far it’s been an ancient 1970s video of a woman giving birth, and some embarrassed talk about penises going into vaginas. Well, even I knew that. The only lesson that had promised to be interesting was the one where Mrs Cook was going to teach us how to put a condom on a banana but guess what: Mrs Cook was ill that day so we had to make do with hearing from one of the other classes in our year who’d done it the week before.