Friends for Life

by Andrew Norriss

  And Francis said no, he didn’t think it was silly at all.

  Aunt Jo would only allow Francis to work on the letters in the mornings. She said it wasn’t good for him to be doing that sort of thing all day and insisted that after lunch he go off and have some fun with people his own age. Francis wanted to point out that the only friends he had of his own age were on the other side of the Atlantic, but in a short space of time that wasn’t exactly true.

  Mrs. Parsons phoned him a week into the holidays. “I’ve got a problem,” she said. “There’s a youth drama group using the school over the summer—they’re doing West Side Story—and they need some help. Are you busy at the moment?”

  “I’m not much good at acting,” said Francis.

  “No, no, they don’t want you for that!” Mrs. Parsons chuckled. “The last thing they need is another prima donna. But they are a bit stuck on costumes. And I seem to remember that’s something you’re quite good at.”

  Francis agreed to take a look at the problem, and that afternoon he walked to the school, where some twenty or thirty teenagers were gathered in the main hall tapping out a dance number that involved a lot of swirling skirts and stamping feet. The woman in charge was called Mrs. Wigley, and she told Francis that the person who normally did their costumes was in the hospital having a baby.

  “We were hoping she’d hold off until all this was over,” said Mrs. Wigley, “but she was caught short yesterday, right in the middle of a rather complicated fight scene.” She led the way out of the hall and into a classroom that was filled with costumes hanging on racks. “We’ve rented most of the stuff, but of course none of it fits. What we need is some whiz with a needle and thread who can sort it all out.” She looked hopefully at Francis. “Any chance you could help?”

  Ten minutes later, Francis was sitting at a table with a sewing machine, and for the next three weeks found himself altering, cutting, nipping, and tucking, and sometimes tearing whole costumes apart to make new ones. The experience was something of a revelation.

  All the time he was there, not one of the people who came to have their costume fitted, not a single one, ever suggested that it was odd to have Francis doing the work. The only thing that any of them ever worried about was how they were going to look on stage, and once they found Francis was the person who could sort this out for them, he was treated with considerable respect. They would knock on the door to his room and ask apologetically if he could take in the waist on their pants, or find them a different-colored top. And when he did as they asked, they would tell him in extravagant language how wonderful he was and how grateful they were.

  Sometimes, when they weren’t needed on stage, they came into his room simply to talk. They would sit on one of the tables while he was darning a hole or mending a tear and tell him things about themselves that Francis would never have dared to tell his own mother. They behaved quite differently from anyone he had known before, and the biggest difference was that they seemed to like being different. It was not something that made them ashamed or unhappy. It was something they enjoyed.

  The show ran for a week and was a huge success. After it was over, Mrs. Wigley told Francis that she thought the success was almost entirely due to his wonderful costumes and, even though he heard her tell the man who played the piano that it was mostly due to his music, he didn’t mind. He had loved every moment of it and, as everyone hugged and kissed each other good-bye on the last night, he readily agreed that he would be around next year to do it all again.

  Jessica, he couldn’t help thinking, would have loved it.

  Two days later, Andi and Roland came back from Canada. Both of them were barely recognizable. It took Francis several seconds to realize that the figure hurtling toward him across the arrivals lounge was Andi. She had dyed her hair blond, her skin was deeply tanned, and she was wearing a short flouncy skirt with a halter-neck top in colors that were deliberately chosen, she told him later, so that he would have something to criticize. She leaped on him from a distance of several feet and held him in a grip that drove every ounce of breath from his body.

  Roland looked even stranger. He was several inches taller, twenty pounds lighter, and exuded the sort of confidence that only comes from hiking through mountains, rappelling down cliffs, and canoeing through white-water gorges. He was bigger than ever, but in a different way. Detaching himself from his mother, he came over to say hello.

  “Hi, man …” His voice was big and deep as he grinned down at Francis. “How’s it been?”

  As they drove back to the house, swapping stories of play productions and encounters with grizzly bears, it was clear that one thing at least had not changed. The three were as close friends as ever. Everything else in his life might have altered, Francis thought, but it was good to know that some things had stayed the same.

  Quite how much everything else had changed Francis did not fully realize until the start of the autumn term a few days later. It was a lunchtime, and he was sitting on the bench by the playing field, enjoying the heat of the sun and sewing up the hem of a skirt for a girl in ninth grade.

  The girl was Rowena Evans and she had been in the drama group in the summer, singing and dancing as one of the Jets. The skirt was something her grandmother had bought her that didn’t fit properly, so she had asked Francis if he would mind making a few alterations.

  Francis had been happy to oblige, and he was already halfway around the hem when a shadow fell across his work. Looking up, he saw a boy about his own age standing in front of him.

  “What are you doing?” asked the boy.

  “I’m sewing,” said Francis.

  The boy stared down at him. “Only girls sew,” he said.

  “Interestingly enough,” said Francis, “the idea that sewing is girls’ work is comparatively recent. My great-great-grandfather was in the navy, and in his day, the men never left that sort of thing to a woman. They thought they weren’t neat enough.”

  The boy gave a snort of derision. His name was Kevin and he and his family had recently moved down from Sheffield. At his old school, if a boy had been seen sewing a girl’s skirt, they would never have gotten home alive.

  “You wouldn’t catch me doing it,” he said.

  “No,” Francis agreed. “Probably not.”

  Kevin continued to stare at him for a moment; then, shaking his head in disbelief, he wandered away.

  “What did he want?” Roland had sat himself down on the bench beside Francis.

  “Nothing really,” said Francis. “He thought it was a bit odd to see me sewing.”

  “He wasn’t bothering you, was he?” Andi sat herself the other side of him and pulled open the lid of her lunch box. “Because if he was, Rollie and I would be very happy to have a word with him.”

  “It’s okay,” said Francis. “He wasn’t any bother.”

  And it was true. The encounter with Kevin hadn’t bothered him in the least, which was odd if you thought how much it would have mattered at the start of the year. He wondered what it was, exactly, that had changed.

  Roland was unpacking his lunch.

  “It’s sliced avocado and Brie in whole-wheat baguettes,” he said when Andi asked, “with green peppers, sliced tomatoes, and a drizzle of olive oil.” The lunches Mrs. Boyle made for her son were rather different these days, but they were still mouthwateringly delicious.

  Quite a few things had changed in the last eight months, thought Francis, and it wasn’t easy to say which had made the most difference. It certainly helped to have friends—particularly friends as dauntingly large as Roland or as scary as Andi—but it wasn’t just that …

  The school itself felt different these days. Ever since Lorna had tried to jump off the top of the hospital parking garage, the staff took any form of bullying very seriously, and these days, Francis knew if he was ever bothered by jokes from someone like Quentin and reported the fact, it would be taken very seriously. Mrs. Parsons had made it abundantly clear that the right to feel sa
fe at school was one of her top priorities, and there were several initiatives to help make sure that it happened.

  But it wasn’t just that either …

  “Let’s swap,” Andi told Roland. “You can have some of my lunch and I’ll have some of yours.”

  “What’s in it?” Roland asked, peering inside the sandwich Andi had given him.

  “Jam,” said Andi. “Red jam. Come on, hand it over …”

  The biggest change, Francis thought, wasn’t in either his friends or in the school, but in himself. The real reason that it didn’t bother him when someone laughed at him for sewing a skirt wasn’t that he knew he could tell Mrs. Parsons, or that Andi would come to his rescue. It was because it didn’t matter what other people thought anymore. If they said that what he was doing was funny and wanted to laugh … then let them. After all, it was a bit funny. And different. But that was how he was, and the people around him would have to live with it.

  And the strange thing was that, now that he didn’t really care what other people thought, most of them seemed quite happy to let him be as different as he liked. They might see what he was doing, as Kevin had done, and make the odd remark, but because he didn’t mind they tended, as Kevin had done, to drift away. If anyone made a habit of making remarks like that, he might have to do something about it, but it hadn’t happened yet, and Francis had a feeling it probably never would.

  “I suppose you want some as well?” Beside him, Roland was holding out a twelve-inch chunk of bread with soft cheese dripping from the edges.

  “Oh, thanks …” Francis took it absentmindedly. They always wound up eating Roland’s lunch. Mrs. Boyle made healthier food for him these days, but had never quite conquered the habit of making three times more than was needed.

  So many changes and they had all, when you looked back on it, happened so fast. It was something he often talked about in the letters he still wrote at Aunt Jo’s house to the people who emailed her website—the speed with which life could change. How it could appear so impossible at one moment, and so full of hope and possibilities the next.

  And you never knew how or when that change might happen, thought Francis. You never knew what was around the corner in life and what it might throw up next. You never knew when someone like Jessica was about to walk over and sit herself down on the bench beside you …

  That was how the change had happened in his own life, of course. It had all started on the day Jessica joined him on the bench. Meeting Andi and Roland, sorting out Quentin, saving Lorna—it had all begun with Jessica. She was the one who had set the change in motion. She was the one who had taught him how much fun there was to be had in life, how full of opportunities it was, how many chances it gave for enjoyment …

  It was an odd lesson to have learned from someone who was dead.

  And it was a shame she wasn’t here to see the results of the changes she had caused. Francis often thought how much she would have enjoyed seeing Roland these days as he strode, big and confident, through the school. How she would have loved to see Andi, with a huge smile covering her face, firmly telling them both what they would be doing that weekend …

  Though if you believed Aunt Jo, of course, maybe she could see them. Maybe she checked in on them once in a while, to see how they were doing. Maybe she had been watching through that little exchange with Kevin. Maybe … maybe she was there right now.

  The sun shone warm on his back and he could feel the heat of it spreading through his jacket into his shoulders. It was a gentle, relaxing warmth, and he sat back on the bench and took a big bite of the sandwich Roland had given him.

  It was, like so many things in life these days, absolutely delicious.

  One of the great dividing lines among writers is between those who simply sit down and start writing—with no firm idea of where their story is going—and those who like to plan the whole thing out beforehand. They know what will be in each chapter (sometimes in each paragraph) and before they have penned the first sentence, they know exactly how the story will end.

  I am definitely in the planning camp, though I have a sneaking admiration for those who dare to launch into a story, writing thousands of words, in the simple trust that their artistic intuition will eventually ensure that all the threads come together in a satisfying resolution. It’s a technique, I know, that produces the best as well as the worst of writing, but I only tried it once myself—and this book was the result. I started with the idea of a girl who was dead (without knowing why) meeting a boy … and just took it from there.

  I was halfway through the book before I discovered how Jessica had died and then, suddenly, the fact that she had befriended Francis, Andi, and Roland made alarming sense. I say “alarming” because this was not my sort of story at all. I write comedy, really—light comedy—and this whole topic was way, way too serious for someone like me. It wasn’t as if I knew anything about suicide in the first place …

  It took ten years for the story to achieve the form you can read in this book. It helped, more than anyone not in the business can know, to have an agent like Hilary Delamere to nudge it into an acceptable form—to have an editor like Bella Pearson gently pointing out the bits that could do with a bit of a rethink, and to have the legendary David Fickling firing you up with his extraordinary enthusiasm. There is something about working with such very classy people that makes you up your game. I still have the umpteen earlier drafts on my computer as painful evidence of how much their help was needed.

  As I said, I have never contemplated suicide myself, but I do know a bit about depression and, for some years, had regular visits from what Churchill called the Black Dog. At such times, I was immensely grateful for the presence of those who were prepared, patiently, to stand beside me until the clouds dispersed and the sunshine returned. And even more grateful to those, like Jessica in this book, whose mere presence was a constant reminder that, even at its darkest, life is full of possibilities and that, yes, miracles can happen.

  And do.

  Andrew Norriss

  Chilbolton, England

  2014

  Andrew Norriss is the Whitbread Award–winning author of Aquila. He taught English for ten years before starting his writing career in television. He has created and cowritten several successful British series, including a few adaptations of his own books. Andrew now writes novels full-time. He lives in Hampshire, England. You can visit him online at www.andrewnorriss.co.uk.

  Copyright © 2015 by Andrew Norriss

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920, by arrangement with David Fickling Books, Oxford, England. SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc. DAVID FICKLING BOOKS and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of David Fickling Books.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2015 as Jessica’s Ghost by David Fickling Books, 31 Beaumont Street, Oxford, OX1 2NP.

  www.davidficklingbooks.com

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Norriss, Andrew, author.

  [Jessica’s ghost]

  Friends for life / Andrew Norriss.—First edition.

  pages cm

  “First published in the United Kingdom in 2015 as Jessica’s Ghost by David Fickling Books.”

  Summary: Francis Meredith is a boy who is interested in fashion and costuming, which has made him a target at school, but when he meets Jessica his life begins to change.

  ISBN 978-0-545-85186-2

  1. Friendship—Juvenile fiction. 2. Costume design—Juvenile
fiction. 3. Suicide—Juvenile fiction. 4. Identity (Psychology)—Juvenile fiction. 5. Ghost stories. [1. Friendship—Fiction. 2. Ghosts—Fiction. 3. Suicide—Fiction. 4. Identity—Fiction. 5. Costume design—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.N7998Fr 2015

  823.92—dc23

  [Fic]

  2015002107

  First edition, September 2015

  Cover art & design by Ellen Duda, © 2015 Scholastic Inc.

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-86029-1

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.