Don't Ask

by Hilary Freeman

  I was especially disappointed because I’d been looking forward to it all week, planning my outfit with Katie and anticipating all kinds of exciting possibilities, all of which involved people I hadn’t yet met. That was, of course, where I went wrong; in my experience, you only enjoy the events you have to be dragged along to. It’s like an equation in maths: anticipation multiplied by expectation is in inverse proportion to actual enjoyment, or something like that (clearly I can’t do equations). Maybe if they taught maths using real life examples, instead of ‘x’s and ‘y’s, it would make more sense.

  By ten o’clock I’d had enough. Katie was too busy examining the tonsils of a boy in the year above to notice, but even if I could have dragged her away we couldn’t leave. Dad wasn’t due to pick us up for two hours and we didn’t have enough money for a cab. So I decided to take myself outside for a change of scene and to kill some time. It was an unexpectedly warm October evening, the last gasp of summer before it croaked for good. I circled the garden twice, pretending not to notice the snogging couples and then sat myself down on a stone wall, hoping something interesting might happen. The wall was hard and uneven and slightly wet from an earlier rain shower, and I couldn’t get comfortable. I folded my skirt over, to cushion my bum, then shuffled around and swung my legs back and forth in time to the pounding bass line that was bleeding from the house. Feeling sleepy, I rested my elbows in my lap and cradled my chin with the backs of my hands. My eyelids began to flicker shut . . .

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘What?’ I sat bolt upright and swung my legs over the wall, twisting my body around to face the owner of the voice. I peered through startled eyes. It was a boy, tall and stocky, with thick, sandy hair. ‘Yes, I’m fine.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were crying,’ he said. He sounded concerned and embarrassed and that made me warm to him instantly.

  ‘No, no. I was just . . . never mind.’

  ‘Now I feel like an idiot,’ said the guy.

  ‘Don’t. It’s nice of you to bother. Most people wouldn’t. My grandma fell over on the high street once and loads of people walked straight past her. Some of them even stepped over her.’

  ‘That’s awful,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t step over your grandma.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. Except she’s actually dead and buried now, so technically, it would be OK.’

  ‘Oh,’ he mumbled. ‘Sorry . . . again.’

  ‘No need to be,’ I said, aware that this was probably the most awkward opening to a conversation I’d ever experienced. I changed the subject. ‘I didn’t see you inside the party.’

  ‘That’s because I’ve only just arrived.’ He smiled. ‘OK if I sit down?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I wasn’t invited – I’m just here to pick up my sister. I’m a bit early, so she’ll kill me if I drag her out now. Ruth Parmiter, do you know her?’

  ‘No, sorry, I don’t,’ I said, observing him as he sat himself down next to me, close enough so that I could feel the warmth from his body, but not too close. He frowned as he noticed the dampness of the wall seeping through his jeans, but he didn’t comment on it.

  ‘So what’s your name?’ he asked, raising his eyebrows expectantly.

  I could just have told him, but now I’d woken up I was in a mischievous mood, full of energy that I hadn’t been able to expend at the party. I chewed my lip. ‘Guess.’

  He looked me up and down, and then back again, his eyes big and bright. ‘Jessica?’ he suggested.

  ‘Not even close,’ I said, with a smirk.

  ‘Really? You know you do look like a Jessica.’

  ‘And what does a Jessica look like?’

  ‘Ooh, pretty, dark, a bit mysterious, I don’t know. I guess I’m thinking of all the Jessicas I’ve known before – the ones in my class at school. There were three of them.’

  ‘And they were all pretty, dark and mysterious?’

  ‘No.’ He smiled, cheekily. ‘Actually, one of them was ginger.’ He paused, checking himself. ‘Not that I have anything against gingers. I was trying to be flattering.’

  I felt a warm glow spread across my cheeks. So he liked me? I caught his eye and then quickly looked away again. I once read in a magazine that this is what girls do when they like someone – look deep into a boy’s eyes for a second, and then lower their eyes, bashfully. Body Language for Beginners, the article was called. After reading it, Katie and I spent days practising some of the ‘moves’ at school. None of them seemed to work for us, but that could have been because we accompanied them with raucous, wet-yourself-level giggling. Or because the boys at our school don’t read articles entitled Body Language for Beginners, and so remain clueless about the hidden meaning of a hair flick or a lip lick.

  I digress. The point is, my inability to make eye contact with him for more than a second wasn’t intentional. I just couldn’t do it. Looking directly in his eyes was almost as uncomfortable as staring straight into the sun. I needed sunglasses, or one of those pieces of cardboard with a hole in you use to see an eclipse. A boy filter.

  ‘Come on, try again,’ I said, after an awkward silence that seemed to last as long as a double maths lesson, but was really only about ten seconds.

  ‘OK.’ He sighed. ‘What about, um, Britney?’

  ‘As if!’

  ‘Sorry. Christina?’

  ‘Now you’re just being silly,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to try properly.’

  ‘Then you’ve got to give me a clue.’

  ‘No, that’s too easy,’ I said. ‘I want to make you work.’

  ‘Fine. Then I’ll start at A. Stop me if I get it right. Let me see . . . Abigail. Agatha. Ada. Adele. Amanda. Anna. Aisha. Alicia. Alison. Amy. Anastasia . . .’ He spoke each name slowly, pronouncing every syllable separately, as if he was daring me to stop him at any moment. In between names, he grinned at me, his eyes twinkling with mirth.

  If he thought he could bore me into submission, he had another think coming. I’ve got a very high boredom threshold; I even sat through the whole of The Lord of the Rings without complaining, because Dad bet me I couldn’t. I looked at him, impassive, and folded my arms across each other, holding them at my waist. ‘I’m waiting,’ I said, when he got to Bettina and stopped. ‘I haven’t got all night.’

  ‘Er, Beezlebub . . .’

  ‘That’s not a name!’

  ‘Yes it is,’ he said. ‘It’s the devil’s name. I read it somewhere.’

  ‘It’s not a girl’s name, then. The devil is a guy.’

  ‘Mmm, I’m starting to wonder about that . . .’

  ‘Ha ha. OK, I’ll give you a clue. Someone famous has got my name. Although, obviously, I had it first. And mine is better!’

  He scratched the crown of his head, comically. ‘Nicole?’

  I rolled my eyes.

  ‘Scarlet?’

  ‘No. Think British. Think music.’

  ‘Amy? No, I already said that one. Cheryl? Nicola? Sarah? Kimberley?’

  ‘No, no, no and no. Oh, and no to Nadine too. Think flower.’

  ‘Rose. Um, Daisy. Um . . .’ A look of recognition crossed his face. ‘Not Lily?’

  ‘Yes!’ I shouted. ‘I thought you were never going to get there.’

  ‘You should have more faith,’ he said, laughing. ‘Hello Lily. My name’s Jack. Jack Parmiter.’

  After that, we sat and chatted for over an hour, until the outlines of the stones in the wall had imprinted themselves on the backs of my thighs. I learned that Jack was seventeen, had recently moved to my area with his mum and younger sister, and had just passed his driving test at the first attempt. He was in the Sixth Form at the big college in the next borough, loved football, practised some kind of martial art (I instantly forgot which one – they’re all the same to me), and wanted to be a graphic designer. Best of all, he was single and, it turned out, strangely rather partial to me. When I said I was getting cold, Jack took off his jacket and draped it over my should
ers, gently moving my hair out of the way and accidentally on purpose brushing my face with his fingertips. I could tell he was preparing to kiss me, and my heart began to thump against my chest wall in anticipation. I was thinking about whether I should lean in towards him, when we were interrupted by a girl who appeared to have come outside looking for him.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she said indignantly, ignoring me altogether. I recognised her from the year below me at school. Like Jack, she was fair and big-boned; she looked much older than fourteen. ‘Sophy told me you were out here.’

  ‘Hello Ruth,’ said Jack. ‘This is Lily. Lily, this is my sister, Ruth.’

  I smiled and nodded. My heart was still beating fast, in expectation of a kiss that hadn’t happened.

  Ruth looked me up and down, clocked the fact I was wearing Jack’s jacket and gave me a disdainful glance. She said simply, ‘All right,’ and then she turned back to Jack. ‘How come you’re out here? I thought you hadn’t turned up.’

  Jack smiled at her. ‘I thought you’d be pleased not to have to come home early,’ he said. The tone of his voice was different; he sounded older, protective, kind of like a dad.

  ‘Yeah, but you could have told me that you were,’ she shook her head in my direction, ‘ . . . you know, out here.’

  ‘Sorry, I lost track of time.’ He looked at me, apologetically, and stood up, smoothing down the back of his jeans with his hand. ‘Give me a minute, Ruth. Why don’t you go and get your coat.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ She smirked at us, turned, and walked back towards the house, looking behind her for a second just before she went in through the patio doors.

  Jack held out his hand to me, helping me up from the wall. I could feel my dress sticking to my tights, the material all creased up and slightly soggy. ‘Keep the jacket if you want,’ he said. ‘You can give it back to me another time.’

  ‘It’s OK, my dad will be here in a second and I’ve got a jacket inside,’ I said. I let him lift it from my shoulders, hoping that the kiss might at last materialise, but the moment had gone. Instead, he leaned to the left and gave me a peck on the cheek.

  ‘Can I have your number, Lily?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, trying not to sound disappointed. He typed it straight into his phone, gave me another peck and promised to call. Then, with a smile, he headed inside.

  I told Katie all about Jack in whispers, as we huddled together conspiratorially in the back of Dad’s car.

  ‘So that’s where you got to,’ she said. ‘God Lily, only you could go to a party and pick up someone’s lift home!’

  ‘It’s my special talent. Anyway, he’s only seventeen. Not even a whole two years older than us.’

  I glanced at Dad in the mirror. He was pretending to be concentrating hard on the road, but I knew he was straining to hear what I’d been up to. He hates it when I sit in the back with a friend. ‘I’m not a free taxi service, you know,’ he always says.

  ‘Yes, but he’s got a car,’ Katie said, a little too loudly. I saw Dad’s shoulders rise a fraction.

  ‘Shh,’ I said. We both giggled. ‘You’re just jealous.’

  Katie leaned in closer, so that her mouth was right by my ear. It tickled. ‘Did you snog him?’

  ‘No, but he said he’s going to call me.’

  She squeezed my arm. ‘Excellent,’ she said. And then in a loud, bright voice, the cheeky cow announced, ‘Lily’s got a new boyfriend, Mr Lawton, and he drives a Vauxhall Astra,’ and Dad almost swerved into the pavement.

  Chapter 3

  I don’t feel guilty about what I did. Not really. What someone doesn’t know can’t hurt them, right? And it isn’t as if I murdered anyone. Nobody died; in fact, you could argue that the opposite is true. I didn’t steal or beat or disrespect anyone. I didn’t happy-slap. I didn’t betray or cheat or swindle, or kiss and tell. I didn’t even gossip or swear or spit. No one was left bleeding or bruised, nobody lost anything at all. I just told the teeniest lie, a little white lie, a lie as light as a feather.

  People always says it’s good to be creative, to use your imagination. That’s all I did: I invented a new persona. I changed my name, my identity, my profile – I pretended to be someone I’m not. But how can that be any more terrible than being me? Names are just labels; hobbies and interests just a collection of activities you pick up along the way and deposit in a list, so other people can compare your list with theirs. It’s all random. In a parallel universe I could just as easily have become someone else altogether.

  And, let’s face it: everyone lies. We say we like reading, when the only thing we’ve read in months is Heat magazine. We say we’re sporty, when we moan if we have to run for the bus. We claim to to be fans of the cool new band, when we’ve only heard that single from the advert. If we were honest, our profiles would read like this: goes to school, watches TV, texts mates, eats chocolate, picks nose in secret, sleeps a lot. But nobody says that. So we’re all liars. So I’ve got nothing to feel guilty about. Not really.

  It was surprising how easy it was to create my new identity. A doddle. All I needed was one of those free email addresses and a bit of imagination. That Saturday afternoon, I waited until Katie had gone home to do it. She wanted to stick around and help – once she’d realised she couldn’t talk me out of it – but I made her leave. I knew if we collaborated we’d just end up dissolving into giggles and coming up with a ridiculous name like Ermintrude Heffelhump. The name I chose had to be believable, simple, and inconspicuous. The new me had to be someone anybody might know – the girl who always sits at the back of the classroom or who sometimes goes to your youth club. She couldn’t have any strange hobbies, which might draw attention to her, and she must not have achieved anything which would make her stand out, or worse, anything which could be double-checked. At the same time, she had to be interesting enough to make her an attractive prospect as a friend. She had to be a little older than me, so Alex thought of her as an equal. And, most important, she had to like football, so she had something in common with Alex.

  I remembered having seen one of those baby naming books in the spare room and went and fetched it. Some of the names the book suggested were a joke. I mean, seriously, who would call their baby Aldis? Someone who loved their local supermarket? And you’ve got to really hate your kid to lumber him with Boris, or Cedric.

  I played around with names for hours, but I found a good reason for rejecting everything I came up with. Once I’d added a made-up surname, they either sounded like minor members of the Royal Family (Victoria Hermitage) or characters from a sketch show (Isla White). The more I said them aloud, the less they felt like they belonged to me. In the end, I just plumped for the plainest sounding name I could think of: Laura Thompson. It was un-exotic, dependable, a bit mousey. It would do.

  She may have had a boring sounding name but, I decided, in other respects Laura would be a lot like me. It would prevent any embarrassing slip-ups. She too would be a Gemini. She’d also have a younger brother who she liked to pretend didn’t exist, and a best friend named Katie. She’d have been to the same places as me on holiday, she would have the same ambitions (in other words, be just as clueless about what she wanted to do) and she’d also have a phobia of flying insects, the type that come at you with their big, buggy eyes and dart around your face frantically. The key difference between us would be that she wouldn’t have a boyfriend called Jack. Hers would be named Jared, so that if I ever spoke to her and started saying ‘Ja—’ I could check myself in time and end ‘. . . red’ instead. Katie thought that bit was genius, when I rang to tell her.

  I set up a profile page for Laura and pasted in a blurry picture, which Dad had taken on holiday in Turkey, last summer. I was sitting on a horse (a first), my hair was tied up in a ponytail, which I rarely did at home, and I was atypically tanned. If any of my friends came across the profile by accident, it would be easy to persuade them that Laura Thompson just looked a lot like me. It was uncanny. How we’d laugh at the coin
cidence.

  If ‘Laura’ was to be convincing, she couldn’t just be a profile page; she’d need some friends. Obviously, they couldn’t be any of my real friends, even Katie, who was in on my plan. It was important that there were no links between Laura and Lily, so nobody could follow the trail and figure out what I’d done. I trawled Topfriendz for suitable candidates, girls of around my age who I had something tenuous in common with, but whom I was never likely to meet, and fired off about fifty friendship request messages, all of which said pretty much the same thing: ‘Hi, I’m new to Topfriendz and a massive fan of (insert band name / actor here). It would be great to chat.’ I picked a few random guys too, based purely on their looks, I’m ashamed to admit, but if this wasn’t a time to be shallow, when was? And finally, feeling very mischievous indeed, I asked Igor – he of the I want to make talk line – if he wanted to be Laura’s friend. I hoped it would make up for the pain of being rejected by Lily earlier in the day.

  Within a couple of hours, Laura had twenty-six friends, including one very happy Igor, and people had even started approaching her with friend requests. I think people just like collecting names to bump up their numbers, in the same way that kids collect stickers. Only a few people rejected Laura, but, strangely, that hurt my pride as much as if they’d rejected me.

  By the time I’d added some applications, like games and pointless quizzes (I deliberately ignored the ones that asked ‘Are you a good friend?’ or ‘What’s your friendship style?’), there was no way anybody could tell that Laura’s page wasn’t a genuine one. I’d almost made her flesh and blood. I decided I would grow to like having her around, in spite of her weird fondness for football. She’d be the twin sister I never had, or my imaginary friend, like little kids invent when they’re lonely. Except, I wouldn’t talk to her aloud. Obviously.

  I called Katie with the good news. ‘I’ve done it,’ I said, excitedly. ‘Have a look. It’s Laura Thompson.’

  ‘Hang on,’ she said, and I heard her typing in the background. ‘Hey, it looks cool. It’s such a shame I can’t be Laura’s friend. She’s such an inspiration.’