‘Should I tell Rowan?’ I could feel the heat of panic spreading up my chest and towards my neck. If I’d looked in a mirror, I was sure I would have been greeted with the blotched skin of a bad reaction. Only I couldn’t look in a mirror on account of not being able to stand the sight of myself. ‘I really think I should tell him.’
A fourteen-year-old Faith was perched on the edge of my bed. She ran a hand through her hair and sighed. ‘I don’t think you need to do that.’
‘But we kissed.’
‘I was there, you know.’ She laughed but she sounded sad, even as she was trying to smile. ‘Look, Edi, you’re with Rowan and you’re straight and now you know what it’s like to kiss a girl. So, what more is there to say? You tell him and it’ll cause – well, fuck knows. Maybe you’ll lose him.’
I was sitting on the window seat in my childhood room, trying to work out how it had happened. One minute we were on my floor making notes for an English presentation. Then the snow started. We stood and watched until an hour had rolled by, maybe more. Betty and Rowan had texted us both during that time and we’d ignored it. I’d even put my phone on silent – ‘They’re so needy sometimes.’ – and we’d laughed about it all. We later saw that they were texting us to check that we were okay – just in case we didn’t feel bad enough already. But into the second hour of standing there there’d been a flurry, and Faith had leaned over to point at a dog in the distance and—
‘Edi, it doesn’t matter how it happened. It’s just one of those things.’
‘But I cheated.’
She laughed, but it was a curt noise – like she maybe thought I was being an idiot. ‘Shut up, you did not cheat. It was a single kiss.’ But we both knew that was a lie; it certainly wasn’t one kiss. ‘We kissed and it didn’t mean anything.’ Oh and there’s another fib, I thought, unless it didn’t mean something to you … ‘You don’t have to tell Rowan. You don’t have to tell anyone. Over time it’ll just—’ she made her hand into a flying object ‘—drift away and be forgotten.’
‘I’m not a bad person?’
She stood up. She didn’t ask for a hug, but she held her arms out to offer one and I closed the gap between us. ‘Edith Parcell, you are one of the nicest people I know in the world and you always have been. This doesn’t make you a bad person or girlfriend.’ She moved away and held me at arm’s length. ‘Take comfort in this: if you and Rowan don’t last, this really will never matter.’
‘Do you think we won’t last?’ I hurried the question out in a panic.
‘Hypotheticals, Edi, it’s all hypotheticals. Here’s another for you: if you do last, all the nice things you’ll do—’
‘It won’t make up for it, Faith. Nothing will ever make up for this.’
She hugged me close again. ‘Well, we’ll see. But you’re definitely not a bad person.’
‘And …’ I hesitated. ‘Am I still straight?’
She laughed harder, and I felt the judder of her body go through mine. But she didn’t answer.