Sophie didn’t mention Maria for the next few weeks, so I took my lead from her and said nothing either. I saw Maria around school, and sometimes we chatted, but I had Sophie’s words ringing in my head, I’ve heard some things about her already, so I didn’t let it go too far. I saw Maria sitting with Esther Harcourt at lunch a couple of times, both of them laughing their heads off, Esther looking happier than I’d seen her since primary school.
Three weeks after that first encounter with Maria in the cafeteria, I was walking down the corridor when I saw her standing alone at the end of the lunch queue. I was going to have to join her, unless I turned back and didn’t go to lunch at all. Sophie had left with Claire at the end of double French without speaking to me so I assumed it was one of those days where she wasn’t going to sit with me. Maria was facing straight ahead, so I touched her arm. She jumped, and whipped round to face me.
‘Oh! Hello,’ she said, her eyes brightening.
‘Hi. How are you?’
‘Good, thanks. Yeah, I’m OK.’
I could see Sophie and Claire Barnes ahead of us at the front of the queue, Sophie throwing her head back to laugh, her shining hair flying over her shoulders. I felt a sudden spurt of anger. Why should I have to sit alone on the days when she doesn’t deign to sit with me? I turned back to Maria and smiled.
When we got to the puddings, Maria helped herself to a doughnut, so I did too. I never do that when I’m with Sophie. It was so nice to be able to have whatever I wanted. She looked a bit embarrassed when we got to the till because she had one of those tokens for free school dinners, but I pretended I hadn’t noticed.
Before I had a chance to suggest we sat elsewhere, Maria had placed her tray down on the table behind Sophie and Claire, who were sitting with Sam Parker and Matt Lewis. I could hear them all talking about the drugs they’d taken the previous weekend. They’d gone to one of those raves they go to over on some farm near where Claire Barnes lives, where apparently everyone takes Ecstasy or speed. I’ve never been invited, not that I’d be allowed to go anyway. I remember thinking that day that I’d be too scared to take drugs, although part of me was a bit intrigued. Maria rolled her eyes.
‘God, people who take drugs are so BORING,’ she said, taking no trouble to lower her voice. ‘They can’t talk about anything else.’
It might have been my imagination, but I thought I saw Sophie’s back stiffen slightly.
‘Have you ever done anything?’ she asked.
‘I’ve tried dope,’ I said in a low voice, barely more than a whisper. ‘It didn’t really do anything for me, apart from making me feel sick.’
‘Same,’ she said, grinning. ‘Like I said, boring.’
A wave of laughter built inside me, and soon we couldn’t stop giggling, neither of us really knowing why. I saw Sophie half-looking round a couple of times, but even that couldn’t stop me. When we’d finally calmed down, Maria said, ‘I could go into town, if you like. After school? My brother’s not collecting me today.’
She said it casually, but I could hear the hope in her voice.
‘Sam!’ I heard Sophie say behind us, mock-horrified. I looked over as she laughed artificially loudly and gave Sam a push on the arm. He took her hand and snaked it around behind her back, smiling lazily and looking straight into her eyes as she struggled uselessly to free it.
‘Get a room, you two,’ said Matt Lewis casually, but I could see the whites of his knuckles around his fork and his eyes that never left Sophie’s face.
‘I’d love to,’ I said to Maria.
I’d forgotten that it was the first day of the fair, and after school the market square, instead of being full of stalls selling polyester skirts and mixed nuts, was a riot of colour and lights. We wandered around looking at all the rides, competing fairground tunes jangling discordantly in our ears. Maria bought a stick of candyfloss the size of her head and I had a toffee apple, the tangy sweetness as my teeth cracked through the shiny layer of toffee giving way to disappointingly woolly blandness within. Because it was only four o’clock it was mostly little kids on the rides, but we went on the waltzers anyway, the kidney-shaped carriage spinning on its axis as the carousel turned. We staggered off afterwards, heads fuzzy and stomachs heaving, clutching each other, breathless with laughter.
‘Do you want to go and get a hot chocolate or something?’ Maria asked, zipping up her coat against an unseasonably chilly wind. We got the good table in the window at the Oven Door and sat in cosy, companionable silence, watching the street outside.
‘There’s your mate.’ Maria gestured towards the window, and there was Sophie sashaying down the pavement, mucking about and holding hands with Matt Lewis and Sam Parker. I felt a brief pang of hurt, but then Maria laughed.
‘My God, she’s such a slapper! What does she think she looks like?’
‘I know.’ I smiled, astonished at this heresy, and at my ability to find it funny. I’m not used to people laughing at Sophie.
‘Shall we go to Topshop?’ I asked, draining the last of my hot chocolate.
‘Yeah, OK,’ Maria said casually, failing to hide her pleasure at being asked.
We took loads of stuff into the changing rooms. Maria tried to persuade me to get this bright red miniskirt but it looked awful on me. She tried on this cool trilby but she said it made her look like she was trying to be Michael Jackson. When we came out, still laughing about the hat, there was Sophie again, sitting on a bench flanked by the two boys. This time she saw us.
‘Hello, you two!’ She sniggered. ‘Having fun?’
I was about to mutter something when Maria said brightly and with a certain edge, ‘Yes, thanks! You?’
Sophie looked taken aback, then smirked.
‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ she said, flinging a casual arm each around Matt and Sam. ‘Having loads of fun.’ Sam put his head on her shoulder and grinned up at us through half-closed eyes, but Matt held himself more stiffly, his hands placed awkwardly either side of him on the bench.
Maria raised her eyebrows and said, ‘Mmm, looks like it. Well, if that’s your idea of fun, I know what that makes you… Come on, Louise, let’s go.’
She seized my arm and pulled me off in the direction of her house, which we’d discovered earlier was on my way home. As soon as we were out of earshot, I turned to her, half admiring and half terrified.
‘What did you say that for?’
‘Oh, come off it, Louise, she’s such a cow. I can see that and I’ve only been here a few weeks. She deserves everything she gets. She’s just using you to make herself feel better. She needs someone who’ll hang on her every word, someone to hang out with on the days when Claire decides to ignore her. I’ve seen the way she treats you. All over you one day and then completely ignoring you the next? Deliberately flirting with the boy she knows you like?’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, the flush rising up my neck belying my apparent lack of understanding. I’d obviously done a worse job than I thought of hiding my feelings about Sam. Also, no one had ever pulled me up on my friendship with Sophie before. I suppose somewhere inside I’d always known it was a bit unequal, but I thought that was the price you paid for being friends with someone popular.
‘Oh, come on, I’m not that stupid. You like Sam Parker, don’t you? And if I can see that already, then she definitely knows.’
‘Are you stalking me or something? All right, maybe I do like him,’ I admitted. ‘But only in that way where you know nothing’s ever going to happen. I think Sophie fancies him anyway; she’s not doing it to get at me. She’s right for him. They match. He would never in a million years want to go out with me.’
‘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.
As I walked down the front path, I almost bumped into a dark, thickset boy with the same hazel eyes as Maria and her mother. He didn’t introduce himself, but looked at me suspiciously. I smiled, feeling flustered without knowing why, and let myself out of the gate. I didn’t turn round, but I could feel his gaze, white-hot on my back all the way down the street until I reached the corner.
Later that evening I was in my room pretending to do my homework when the phone rang. I picked up the one on the landing outside my room.
‘Hello?’
‘Lou? It’s Sophie.’
Her voice sounded gentle and hesitant, a world away from the strident confidence she had displayed earlier in town. For a moment I thought she was going to apologise. I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the landing floor, knees up to my chin, twisting the phone cord around my fingers.
‘I’m worried about you. You hardly hang out with me and the girls any more.’
The girls? Sophie’s the only one out of all of them that ever shows an interest in me. The rest of them barely know I exist, unless they want to copy my homework. There was a part of me that automatically wanted to apologise, to put everything back how it was before. But I still had Maria’s voice in my head, still had the illusion of confidence that spending the afternoon with her had given me.
‘What do you mean? You haven’t even been speaking to me at school.’
‘That’s so unfair,’ she said in injured tones. ‘You’re the one that’s been ignoring me. I didn’t have anyone to go into town with after school today. Claire was a right cow to me this afternoon. I was looking for you everywhere.’
‘But you were with Matt and Sam! You looked pretty happy to me!’
‘Oh, those two. I only went with them because I didn’t have anyone else to hang out with. You certainly seemed like you were having a nice time.’
‘Yes… I was.’ My resolve was fading. Could she really be upset? Had I read everything wrong? ‘But obviously… if I’d known you wanted to come with us, you could have done.’
‘I don’t know about us,’ she said carefully. ‘I wanted to go with you.’
‘What’s wrong with Maria? She’s really nice.’
‘I’m sure she’s all right, although sorry but she was quite rude to me this afternoon. Also, what do you actually know about her? Where has she suddenly appeared from? The things I’ve heard about her… well, I shouldn’t gossip. If you want to be friends with her, then of course that’s up to you. But don’t dump your old friends, Louise, otherwise you’re running the risk of losing them. If you’re not careful you’ll end up like Esther Harcourt.’ Sophie gave a little laugh – but a worried one, indicating that although she was joking there was a grain of truth in what she said. ‘Obviously it’s up to you who you hang out with but if I were you I’d think very carefully about where your loyalties lie.’
After we hung up, I sat on the landing for several minutes, my hand still on the phone. I thought about defying Sophie, and what that might mean for me socially; about the parties and sleepovers that I felt I was on the verge of being invited to, and of how much I wanted that. I wondered whether I was ready to throw all that away for someone I liked very much but hardly knew, who could potentially end up being my only friend.
The next day at school I didn’t have any lessons with Maria in the morning. At break I went straight from Biology to the library and sat there for twenty minutes pretending to read a book about Anglo-Saxon England. I was going to skip lunch, but Sophie stopped me on my way back to the library and hauled me off to the canteen with her. My jacket potato was dry and starting to crack inside, and, as I added a small pot of congealed baked beans (no butter), I could see Maria out of the corner of my eye, a few places behind me in the queue. I paid and Sophie shepherded me firmly with her over to the far left corner table, settling down next to me with a protective hand on my arm. I could feel rather than see Maria coming up behind me. She put her hand on the chair next to me, but Sophie was ready for her.
‘Sorry, that seat’s taken,’ she said, smiling brightly.
‘It doesn’t look taken,’ said Maria. ‘It looks totally empty to me. Unless one of your really skinny friends is sitting there and has managed to slim down so much that nobody can see her.’ She looked at me, hoping for a smile or at least an acknowledgement but I stared studiously at my tray, running my fingers over the brown moulded plastic bumps as though they were braille, and I blind.
‘I’m saving it,’ said Sophie. ‘For a friend.’ The emphasis on friend couldn’t have been more pointed.
Maria risked one more glance at me, but my eyes were glued to the tray.
‘Right. OK. I get the picture,’ she said, and took her tray over to the furthest possible table.
As I left the canteen I looked over at her. I think of her now as she was then: sitting on her own, her lunch barely touched in front of her, hunched over, pale-faced and staring unseeingly at her maths textbook. I saw Esther Harcourt watching her too from another table where she also sat alone, unread book in hand.