by Kate Le Vann
‘Don’t forget me,’ Bruno whispered in my hair.
‘Are you crazy?’ I choked, worried he was saying that this was it, the last time we’d see each other. He squeezed me harder and kissed me over and over, and then let go.
We sat together, obviously, on pre-booked seats. Rachel slowly and carefully unpacked some French magazines, an apple, a bottle of water and her MP3 player, placing each of them carefully on the table in front of us. I deliberately didn’t put anything out, hoping she’d realise this meant I wanted to talk first.
‘Rach,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s going on with us right now, but I hope we get past it.’
‘Mm,’ she said, stiffly.
I got quite angry. ‘Look, for God’s sake, maybe you can’t stand me right now, but you could at least tell me why. I can’t believe you’re just going to give me this silent crap.’
‘Oh, leave me alone, Sam,’ Rachel said, and I realised she was crying. ‘You’ve had your perfect little holiday romance: you win, you’re the best. Naturally you want to talk about it all the way home, but if you don’t mind, I’m just going to listen to some music and try to sleep.’
‘I genuinely don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said.
Rachel sighed. ‘This summer was the first time I wasn’t just Sam’s saddo friend, the person waiting to hear what happened to Sam tonight. I did my own thing, I had my own stories. And for some reason that really bothered you. For some reason you have to be the only one we talk about and the only one with a life. You know, fine, fair enough, if that’s what you need. But forgive me for just this once wanting to take a break from the next chapter of Samantha Barnes’s Diary, OK?’
‘I just don’t know how you can say that, or think that,’ I said. ‘You didn’t just “do your own thing”, you had a total personality transplant and you expect me not to worry about that even slightly? But every time I tried to find out how you were, you got really angry and said I was judging you.’
‘You were judging me!’
‘Well, why shouldn’t I? You kept screwing up!’
‘How do you know?’ Rachel snapped loudly, and everyone in the carriage looked at us. ‘How do you know what I wanted?’
‘Yeah, well, it was a really sane idea hanging out with someone who told the whole town he was going to have sex with both of us for a bet! Smart, Rachel!’
‘Thanks,’ Rachel said in a tiny voice. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to go back to my music.’
‘Rach, I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘No doubt,’ Rachel said.
When our parents met us at King’s Cross, they were all weepy and huggy and I tried not to let it show that we weren’t talking to each other, because I didn’t want my mum to ask questions. Luckily, she didn’t notice. She gushed all the way home about how much she’d missed me and asked me a million questions, and I closed my eyes and laid my head back on the car seat, and just yawned and said I was glad to be back.
There was an email from Bruno waiting for me when I got in. I was happy and excited and read it twenty times, but the reason I stayed at my computer for so long was because I was hoping Rachel would send something too.
Chapter 22
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.
