“Hey, Lampforth!”
Peter doesn’t turn. He keeps walking, head down, towards the school gates. A hand catches his shoulder, swings him round.
“Where’s your girlfriend?” Colin spits at him.
Peter’s been expecting this for a week. Ever since he told Ms Bolt everything that happened between him and Alyssia. Ever since she called Colin in that afternoon, and he emerged pale-faced and scowling. Yet still, the only response he can muster is, “What?”
“They think I bullied her into running away,” Colin says. “Doesn’t take much for you to stab your friends in the back, does it? First her. Now me.”
His hands are curled into fists. Peter slides his phone into his pocket for safekeeping.
“Col,” he says helplessly, “it doesn’t have to be like this. All I did was tell the truth.”
“No. You chose a side. And it wasn’t mine.”
Confronted with the perennial dilemma of a boy wearing glasses – whether to take them off and not be able to see his opponent properly, or leave them on and almost certainly break them – Peter reaches up to his face.
Colin punches him.
The fight doesn’t last long. Afterwards, limping away with a bloody nose, Peter tries to decide if he’s sorry he did it. His brief stint of popularity is over. It’ll be taunts and shoves and solitary lunchtimes from now until he finishes school – and no Alyssia to get him through. Yet despite that, he feels a sense of peace. Wherever she is, whatever she’s doing, he did the right thing by her. Even if she’ll never know it.
The last time they talked was after he’d already cast her aside for the sake of that same fleeting popularity. After he’d cut her dead in the corridor, walking past with Colin’s voice in his ear, everyone around them laughing. He saw her heading for the bus stop and ran after her. “Alyssia, wait.”
“Why?” She didn’t bother to look round. “So you and your friends can laugh at me some more?”
“I’m sorry.” And he was. “I didn’t plan it that way.”
Coming to an abrupt stop, she turned on him. “You know, I’d have more respect for you if you had.”
“What?”
“If you’d spent all that time talking to me so you could dig out my secrets for the entertainment of the masses, I’d at least admire you for your ruthless cunning. As it is, you’re just a weak little boy who wants people to like you.”
It hit him hard, as words always do when they contain truth. And he wanted to hit back. “At least I live in the real world, Alyssia. At least I don’t have such a sad, pathetic excuse for a life that my only friends live in my imagination – ”
He stopped, pressing the back of one hand to his mouth. They stared at each other. He felt it unravelling, the reason he’d come after her in the first place: his only chance to apologise, to make things right. And so he let it go, all the way.
“Why’s it matter to you, anyway? You said none of this is real to you. So what do you care what I think of you?”
She was silent a moment, studying him. Then she shrugged. “You’re right. I don’t.”
After that, there was nothing left for him to do but lurk in the background as Colin teased her, convincing himself that as long as he didn’t join in – as long as he only laughed, a bystander rather than a perpetrator – it was all right. It took her disappearance to make him realise that it wasn’t all right, and it never had been.
Instead of going straight home, he heads for the park. For a bench at the top of the hill where people sit and look out across the town in all its concrete glory. He and Alyssia came here, once. It’s where they shared their first and only kiss.
He would have kissed her more, if she’d wanted it. But instead, she laughed and said, Sorry, that was weird. And he said, Yeah. And that was that. They went back to being friends, until it all fell apart. He’s never allowed himself to admit that maybe, just maybe, he threw away their friendship because he couldn’t have anything else.
He doubts she’ll ever come back. Why would she? There’s nothing for her here; he and Colin made sure of that. But if she ever does return …
If she does, he’ll do better.