Friend Request Read online

  The new girl’s name was Maria Weston. She looked OK, sort of normal uniform, not trendy but not square either. Miss Allan made Sophie look after her, but Sophie basically showed her where the toilets were, and the lunch hall, and then ignored her for the rest of the day. Esther Harcourt tried to make friends with Maria, but even a new girl could see that Esther, in her hand-me-downs and thick-rimmed glasses was not the route to social success at our school. Funny to think that I used to hang out with Esther all the time at primary school. I loved going to her house because her mum let us go off into the woods for hours, although they were vegetarian hippies so we got some odd stuff for tea. I sort of miss her in some ways; we did used to have a laugh. Couldn’t be friends with her any more though – nightmare.

  Anyway, at lunch Sophie hadn’t even sat with the new girl, and Esther was already staying away by then because Maria had been so cold to her at morning break. As I got closer to the tills, I started on the daily task of scanning the cafeteria trying to work out where I was going to sit. Maria was sitting on her own at one end of a table with a group of real swots at the other end, including Natasha Griffiths (or, as Sophie calls her, ‘Face and Neck’ due to her orange foundation and white neck). Face and Neck was holding forth on the subject of her English homework and how brilliant Mr Jenkins said it was, and how he’d asked her to stay back specially after class at the end (I bet he did; everyone reckons he’s a right old perv). I was about to pass Maria, wondering whether it was going to be OK to sit with Sophie (she was with Claire and Joanne on the far left corner table which for some reason is the cool table – basically unless you are only having a yoghurt for lunch it’s fairly embarrassing to sit there), when I caught Maria’s eye. She was eating her jacket potato and listening to Natasha banging on about her Shakespeare essay, smiling like she could already tell how full of crap Natasha is, and something made me slow my pace.

  ‘Is anyone sitting here?’

  ‘No, no one!’ she said, moving her tray to make room for me. ‘Sit down.’

  I unloaded the shameful fat-filled lasagne from my tray and sat down, pressing the sharp end of my apple juice straw into the little silver disc until it popped, a bead of amber liquid oozing from the hole.

  ‘So, how’s your first day going so far?’

  ‘Oh, you know, good; of course it’s difficult… you know…’

  She trailed off.

  ‘So, crap basically?’ I grinned.

  ‘Yeah.’ She smiled in relief. ‘Total crap.’

  ‘Where did you go to school before? Did your mum and dad move?’

  Maria concentrated very hard on cutting the skin of her potato. ‘Yes, we lived in London.’

  ‘Oh right,’ I said. April seemed like a funny time of year to move, so near the end of GCSE year.

  She hesitated. ‘I was having a bit of trouble with some of the other girls.’

  I sensed she didn’t want me to press her, so I didn’t.

  ‘Well, everyone’s really nice here,’ I lied. ‘You won’t have any problems like that. In fact there’s a group of us that goes into town most days after school, you should come.’

  ‘I can’t today, my brother’s picking me up outside school to walk home. But I’d love to another day.’

  First lesson after lunch was maths, and Sophie swung into the seat next to me, freshly made up after a bitching session in the toilets and reeking of Christian Dior’s Poison. I told her that I’d been talking to Maria and that I’d invited her to come into town with us. She turned to me.

  ‘You’ve invited her out with us?’ There was a dangerous edge to her voice.

  ‘Yes… is that OK?’ I tried to check the tremor in my voice.

  ‘Does Claire know?’

  ‘No… I didn’t think anyone would mind.’

  ‘You could have checked with me first, Louise.’

  ‘Sorry, I thought… she’s new, and…’ I rearranged the books on my desk needlessly, panic building. What had I done?

  ‘I know that. But I’ve heard some things about her already, stuff that happened at her old school.’

  ‘Oh, it’s OK, she told me about that.’ Maybe this would be OK. ‘None of that was true.’

  ‘She would say that though, wouldn’t she? Did she tell you what it was about?’

  ‘No,’ I admitted, my cheeks beginning to burn.

  ‘Right. Well, maybe you should get your facts straight before you go inviting people out with other people.’

  We carried on doing our algebra in silence for a few minutes, although I noticed Sophie was still looking over my shoulder to copy my answers.

  ‘She can’t come tonight as it happens,’ I ventured eventually. ‘She’s got to meet her brother.’

  ‘I heard he was a bit of a weirdo as well. Anyway, I can’t go into town tonight. I’m doing something with Claire.’

  I clearly wasn’t invited to this mystery outing, so I said nothing. I was surprised Sophie couldn’t feel the heat radiating from me, shock and worry oozing through my pores.

  When the bell went she scooped up her stuff and went straight off to the next lesson. At the end of the day she didn’t even say goodbye to me, she just went giggling off, clutching Claire Barnes by the arm, without looking back. I was so frightened that I’d ruined everything with her. Shit shit shit. What was I going to do?

  Chapter 3

  2016

  I’m still sitting shell-shocked at the kitchen table, Maria’s Facebook page open in front of me. Questions crowd my mind. Who is doing this, and why now? I try to wrap my mind around the horrifying possibility that somehow, somewhere, Maria is still alive. When a new Facebook notification pops up, I click on it with trepidation.

  Sharne Bay High Reunion Committee invited you to the event Sharne Bay High School Reunion Class of 1989.

  Reunion? I click feverishly on the link, and there it is: Sharne Bay High School Class of 1989 Reunion, taking place two weeks on Saturday in the old school hall. On top of the request from Maria, it’s a sucker punch right in the solar plexus. Can it be coincidence, getting this the same day? I click on the Facebook page of the group organising it, and although there’s no way of telling who has set it up, it seems bona fide. There’s a post pinned to the top of the newsfeed from our old English teacher Mr Jenkins, who apparently still works at the school. There were all sorts of rumours that used to go round about him – keeping girls back after lessons, looking in through the changing-room windows, stuff like that – but I don’t suppose there was any truth to them. We all thought the PE teacher was a lesbian because she had a glass eye, so we weren’t the most reliable of witnesses. The rest of the newsfeed is full of excited chat from people going to the reunion, dating back a couple of months. Why has it taken until now for me to be invited? My neck is flushed and there are treacherous, foolish tears prickling at the back of my eyes. How easily, how stupidly, I am transported back through the years; how quickly that familiar rush of shame washes over me: shame at being left out, being left behind. Still not really one of the gang. An afterthought.

  I click on the list of attendees, furiously scanning for his name. Yes, there it is. There he is, eyes crinkling away at me from his profile photo, his right arm around someone out of shot. Sam Parker is attending this event. Why hasn’t he said anything to me? Obviously we hardly spend hours chatting, but he could have mentioned it when I was dropping Henry off. Maybe he’s hoping I don’t find out about it.

  Other names I recognise jump out at me: Matt Lewis, Claire Barnes, Joanne Kirby. For a heart-stopping second I see Weston and think wildly that it’s Maria, but no, it’s Tim Weston. My God, her brother. He wasn’t at school with us – he was a year older and went to the local sixth-form college – but he used to hang out with Sam and some of the other boys in our year so I suppose it’s not so surprising that he’s going. There are loads of other names – some I know, others that I don’t remember. So many names, but not mine.

  I keep scanning the list of attendees unt
il I find Sophie. I knew she’d be there. I click on her profile. I’ve looked at it before, but always resisted the temptation to befriend her. This time I go straight to her ‘friends’ section, but Maria’s not there. Of course that doesn’t mean that Sophie hasn’t received the same request I have, only that she hasn’t accepted it. She’s got five hundred and sixty-four friends. I’ve got sixty-two and some of those are work-related. I’ve thought about deleting my account before, to prevent myself from getting sucked into that terrible time-wasting vortex where you find yourself poring through the wedding photos of someone you’ve never met instead of meeting a work deadline; but actually it’s important to me, particularly in the last couple of years. Since Sam left, I have had to shrink my world, in order for the important things not to fall apart: Henry; my business. I don’t have the time or energy for anything else, but Facebook means I haven’t completely lost touch with my friends and old colleagues. I still know what’s going on in their lives – what their children look like, where they’ve been on holiday – and then on the odd occasions that we do meet, the thread that binds us is stronger than it would otherwise have been. So I keep posting, liking, commenting; it stops me from falling out of my world completely.

  The wind is rising outside and a strand of the wisteria that trails around the outside of my French windows taps on the glass, making me jump. Even though I know it was the wisteria, I get up and peer out, but it’s nearly dark and I can’t see much beyond my reflection. A sudden sprinkle of rain rattles against the windowpane, as if someone has thrown a handful of gravel and I jump back, heart thumping.

  Back at the kitchen table, I click on Sophie’s profile photo. It’s one of those faux-casual ones where she looks impossibly gorgeous but manages to give the impression it’s any old snap she’s thrown up there. Look closely and you’ll see the ‘natural’ make-up, the semi-professional lighting, the filters applied in the edit. Lean in closer and you might see the lines, but I have to admit she’s worn well. Her hair is still a tumbling waterfall of molten caramel, her figure enviably but predictably unchanged since her teenage years.

  I wonder if she’s ever looked for me on here, and I click back to my own profile picture, trying to see it through her eyes. I’ve used one that Polly took, me sitting behind a table in the pub, glass of wine in hand. Under my newly critical gaze it looks like the photo of a person self-consciously trying to look ‘fun’. I am leaning forward on the table in a short-sleeved top and you can see the unattractive bulge of my upper arms, in grim contrast to the gym-toned, honey-coloured limbs on display in Sophie’s photo. My mousy brown hair looks lank and my make-up is smudged.

  My cover photo is one of Henry taken last month on his first day at school. He’s standing in the kitchen, his uniform box-fresh but marginally too big, looking heart-wrenchingly proud. Only I had known his private worries, confided to me last thing at night from deep beneath his duvet: ‘What if no one wants to play with me, Mummy?’; ‘What if I miss you too much?’; ‘What will I do if I need a cuddle?’ I had reassured him as best I could, but I didn’t know the answers to those questions either. He had seemed too small to be going off on his own into the world, out there where I couldn’t protect him. I wonder briefly if Sophie knows that Sam and I have a child, or even that we were married. I push down the thought of Henry, trying not to think about what he might be doing at Sam’s tonight, trying not to worry about him; it’s like trying not to breathe.

  I think about what it will mean if I become Facebook friends with Sophie, and scroll through my timeline, trying to see it through her eyes. Lots of photos of Henry; posts about childcare stresses and working-mother guilt, especially when Henry was starting school and only went mornings for the first two weeks. I wonder if Sophie has children. If she doesn’t, she’s going to find my timeline extremely tedious. If she scrolls back far enough at least she’ll see the photos from our summer holiday, Henry and I tanned and relaxed, all tension eased away by warmth and distance from home.

  What she won’t be able to see is that I was married to Sam, that’s if she doesn’t know already. I removed all the evidence of him from my timeline two years ago when I realised that he’d deleted his own Facebook account, the one with the story of us on it. He had simply started again. All the holidays, the days out, our wedding photos carefully scanned in several years after the event: gone, replaced by his shiny new narrative. He wiped me clean away like a dirty smear on the window.

  I check to see if Sophie is Facebook friends with Sam, and she is. He must have his privacy settings very high, because all I can see are his profile photos, which are either of him alone or landscapes, and the date two years ago when he ‘joined Facebook’. I struggle to tear my eyes away from his photo. I know that I’m better off without him. Yet there is still a part of me that yearns to be with him, the two of us luminescent in a dull world that wants everyone to be the same.

  I start clicking through the photos on my laptop, trying to find a better one for my profile picture, wondering whether to take a new one, although selfies are always horrendously unflattering, so maybe not. What about one of those ‘amusing’ ones where you put a picture of the back of your head, or a blurred photo? Mind you, maybe she’s looked for me before and seen the current one, so if I change it today and then send her a friend request, she’ll know that I’ve done it on purpose to impress her.

  That brings me up short: impress her? My God, is that what I’m trying to do, even after all these years? I look back through the prism of time and it’s perfectly clear that Sophie was using me to shore up her own ego; that she needed someone less attractive, less cool than her to stand beside her and make her shine even brighter. I couldn’t see it then, but she was jostling for position as much as I was, just a few rungs up the ladder. But receiving this message from Maria has plunged me back to the playground and the lunch hall, where fitting in is everything and friendship feels like life and death. My professional achievements, my friends, my son, the life I’ve constructed – it all feels like it’s been built on shifting sands. My feet keep sliding out from under me, and I can sense how little it will take to make me fall.

  In the end I leave the photo as it is and merely send a friend request, after some deliberation not including a message. After all, what on earth would I say? Hi Sophie, how’ve you been these past twenty-seven years? That’s a bit weird. Hi Sophie, I’ve had a Facebook friend request from our long-dead schoolmate, have you? Even weirder, especially if she hasn’t.

  I sit at the kitchen table, abstractedly chewing the inside of my mouth, eyes on the ‘notifications’ icon. After two minutes, a ‘1’ pops up and I rush to click on it. Sophie Hannigan has accepted your friend request. Naturally she’s the sort of person that’s always on Facebook. She’s not sent me a message, which makes me feel a bit sick and panicky, but I trawl through her profile anyway. While it might not give me much of an insight into what her life is really like, it certainly tells me a lot about how she wants the world to see her. She changes her profile picture once or twice every week, an endless succession of flattering images accompanied by the inevitable compliments from friends of both sexes. One of her male friends, Jim Pett (who appears to be married to someone else) comments on every one: I would, one of them says; I just have, another. Oh Jim, you always have to lower the tone, she replies, mock-disgusted, loving it.

  I know that Facebook offers an idealised version of life, edited and primped to show the world what we want it to see. And yet I can’t stifle the pangs of envy at her undimmed beauty, the photos, exotic locations, the comments, the uproarious social whirl, the wide circle of successful friends. There’s no mention of a partner though, nor any sign of children and I catch myself judging her a little bit for this. It seems that even after what I’ve been through I still see it as a marker of success for women: finding a partner, creating life.

  When it comes to sending her a message, I am paralysed by indecision. How can I explain what has happened? But who else
is there that I can talk to about this? Once I might have spoken to Sam, but that’s out of the question now. I decide to keep it simple and try to be breezy:

  Hi Sophie, it’s been a long time! I type, cringing at the desperation that she will surely sense oozing from every word. Looks like we are both in London! Would love to see you some time! Too many exclamation marks but I don’t know how else to communicate breeziness. Clearly I shouldn’t have worried about that because a message pings back immediately.