I was surprised by the shame I felt when word got around that Rach and I weren’t friends any more. It was almost like a divorce: we’d been friends from the beginning. I told myself I wouldn’t bitch about her or say anything bad about what happened in France, but then I’d hear things she’d been saying about me and . . . well, I was an idiot to think they hadn’t been distorted somewhere along the line, but I fell for all of it anyway, and couldn’t help coming back with little snide asides. So the line was drawn and the people we knew tended to fall on one side or another.
Team Rachel was certainly more exciting than Team Samantha. Rachel was charm on toast, with her new dress sense, her new way of walking, the confidence and strength. And for what it was worth, the mere fact of her having lost her virginity seemed to give her some kind of membership card to a new club. I don’t know how that worked, but the girls who had, seemed to share a different closeness; they talked with authority. For the first time, I understood why people felt under pressure to join that club, and not just pressure from boys. I sometimes wondered if I should have taken things to the next stage with Bruno, but I knew that rushing into anything wouldn’t have been proof of our feelings, and could have made a good thing tricky. Some people just need a little time; I’m one of those people.
Bruno and I email every day, sometimes a couple of times a day. Sometimes we instant message, sometimes we even phone. When we’re just typing, and Bruno is just words on a screen, I sometimes worry that nothing is real – that it’s a nice internet friendship, but my memory has played tricks on me and there wasn’t a real romance. Then we’ll talk on the phone again, and his voice always sounds different at first, but quickly, everything comes back the way it was.
We’re meeting in London next month, December the eleventh, after his term finishes. When I try to guess what will happen to us I get scared or excited, and both ways, my heart beats a lot faster. Que sera sera – oh, that’s almost the same in French.
Speaking of French, yesterday we had a double period of it, and Ruby Garway (who has tried to stay neutral after the big break-up, but I think is a bit more on my side than Rachel’s) was presenting her essay on Boule de Suif, a French novella, to the class. Our teacher, Ms Mathur, was asking her questions, and as Ruby stuttered through her pre-prepared answers it was as boring as these things usually are. But then Rachel suddenly spoke up and argued with Ms Mathur about what the end meant – I’d explain, but you’d be bored, I’d have to tell you like the whole story and I’d be using French quotes and I don’t know how good your French is – and Ms Mathur argued back in her brilliant French, and then I heard my own voice adding to the debate, in strangely fast and fantastic French that I would never have believed I was capable of. I was doing the accent, even, and I’d always felt stupid doing that, especially in England. Rachel answered me, and I answered her – it was the most we’d said to each other in one go since getting off the Eurostar, and you could hear everyone in the class getting all twitchy and excited because it was us, the famous rivals and fall-outs, talking to each other in French, and because our French was suddenly completely ace (compared to the way we’d been before). Then we looked at each other, just for a moment, and Rachel’s eyes gleamed and I saw her smile, as if she couldn’t help it, and I couldn’t help smiling too. Both of us turned our mouths down again as much as we could, but the gleams and the smiles had escaped and there was no real way of fetching them back.
But we walked out of the class still ex-best-mates, and didn’t speak again all day. When I got home the first thing I did was check my emails, but there was nothing. I checked again at about ten, and the inbox was bold and black with the promise of an email.
Bruno had written.
His email made me smile, but it didn’t compensate for the disappointment, and somewhere inside me, I ached. I immediately started writing an email to Rachel. I kept thinking back to when we were kids and I’d phoned her after she’d seen the cartoon I drew of her in the sweaty tracksuit, and how simple it had been in those days to make someone like you again. In the email, I said that with all my big plans for us to spend our summer together, I’d messed up, and I’d actually made sure we spent it apart. No wonder it’d had been hard for us, we’d never been separated before. I told her this was one of the most important moments of our lives – one of those forks in the road – and we might never get the moment back.
We spent our lives building this friendship,
I wrote,
and we’re going to let one summer kill it?
I worked on the email all night, writing and rewriting, and when I thought I’d got it right, I stopped and stared at the send button, the arrow of the mouse trembling above it.
I moved the email to my drafts folder and went to bed.