He’d promised me that everything was going to be exactly the same. I’d heard him say it, and he’d been looking straight into my face sitting in the window where I thought he was always going to be waiting for me. But Oscar had lied to me and I knew that now, because everything was becoming completely different.
Someone else was in the middle of taking my place, living in my room, hanging out of my window, having huge long conversations with him, helping him with regional talent showcases, and talking to him about apple tarts and competitions and who knows what else, right there in the place where I used to be.
I didn’t want to talk to him or email him or send him updates on what was going on. I wanted to punish him, I think. I wanted to punish him for making friends with someone, which goes to show what a horrible person I am. How could I have blamed him for doing that? Oscar was the friendliest guy I’d ever known. It was in his nature to make friends with people, especially new people who were starting at school and didn’t know anybody. Newcomers, as everyone knows, are vulnerable and in need of decent treatment.
It was wrong of me to be so jealous. But the sting from those thousands of miles away was sharp and deep and it seemed to harden me and make me turn away from him, which, as I said, is a thing I’d never have predicted I’d have been capable of, until I did it.
Oscar wasn’t put off by my lack of communication. He kept on writing, but I knew. I knew how different things had become, and from then on, I felt his sense of duty stamped on the messages he wrote—and that stung me too. He wasn’t writing to me because he really wanted to, at least I didn’t think he was. He was writing to me because he felt it was the right thing to do, seeing as I was so far away and seeing as he’d said he would.
Oscar, I’d thought bitterly, I don’t need your duty. I’m going to show you how much I don’t need you. Wait till you see how well I can do without you.
I wasn’t able to stop thinking about the letter he’d accidentally got from me and how bloody mortified I was that he’d read it—and how even more completely embarrassed I was about how horrified he’d been at the idea of me being in love with him.
I couldn’t blame him for not feeling the same way I did. Of course I couldn’t—not logically. You can’t force people to feel things they don’t feel, or to say things they don’t mean. But even though it was unreasonable to be angry with him and even though I tried hard not to be, I was, and it’s why, even when I did get around to writing to him, this is what I said:
It was cheap and mean of me, I know. Oscar was magic and so were his tarts and everyone should have known that, especially me. But I was jealous and I wanted to hurt him and make him feel small for not liking me. And I didn’t want him and Paloma to become the stars of 3R while I was away.
I wish I could take back those things I wrote.
Oscar replied almost instantly, saying he took my point about the tarts but that he didn’t have a clue what I meant when I said we shouldn’t write. He said he was going to keep writing to me because that’s what friends do.
But I wasn’t about to change my mind. I got a load more notes from him after that—little thoughts and ideas and reminders of things we’d said to each other. Our windows felt millions of miles away from where I was sitting right then, and the things we’d said to each other were misty to me, and my memories of them were warped and dented because of how far away I felt and because of the stupid letter. That stupid letter. The letter that was never supposed to be sent. The letter I never wanted him to read, especially now that I knew he didn’t love me back.
I got a few more emails like that from him, but I didn’t answer any of them. The last one I got was four words long. Meg, where are you? was all it said.
Two weeks after that was when the news came.