The New Girl

by Harriet Walker

  When the doorbell rang an hour after the end of the school day, I knew it would be Helen on our front step even before my mum showed her into the sitting room. She let her rucksack fall to the floor, shrugged her blazer off, and dropped into the armchair opposite me.

  “I told Margot I had to help my mum with something at home,” Helen said, looking at me levelly, as though trying to watch my thoughts as my brain projected them on the inside of my head. “We didn’t have much to say to each other, really.”

  She stared at the frayed cuff of her school sweater, and I shifted on my pillows. I was acutely aware of how childish I must have looked to her in my tartan pajamas: hair unwashed, pale faced, and sniffly.

  It struck me that Helen had done a very mature thing in coming to see me when I was ill. It was the sort of thing I supposed grown women did to look out for each other, the sort that live by themselves in flats made of glass and steel with balconies and potted plants. They’d pop round with shopping for each other, offer to put a wash on: the careful and considerate overlap of independent adult existence. Margot and I were still at the stage when our mothers called up the school to explain an absence and we’d be content to see each other the next day. Helen seemed to have so much more autonomy than us, and I was all the more impressed with her for it.

  “Margot’s a funny one, isn’t she?” Though Helen’s attention was seemingly on the invisible loose threads on her sweater, her voice was suggestive, her body tensed for my reply. I understood she was trying to prod me into saying something disloyal.

  I knew, too, how Margot must have felt relieved to have had their afternoon together cut short—and that she’d be devastated to learn it had ended with Helen’s coming to see me.

  “She gets very nervous.” I tried to defend my best friend, without feeling much enthusiasm for the task. I thought of Helen, lying so easily, then slipping off to get the bus to my house. It never would have occurred to Margot to do anything other than go straight home. In that moment, Helen seemed to care for me in a way that was immediate and genuine, sincere rather than giggly, serious instead of a catchphrase and a silly voice.

  I gave a nonchalant shrug that I hoped would belie my pajamas and pigtails, the empty soup bowl on the tray my mum had brought through at lunchtime, the kids’ programs flickering on the TV with the sound turned down. I said what I thought I’d say if we were having the conversation at a polished chrome bar, legs crossed in sheer tights beneath it after a long day at work, fingers picking olives off toothpicks from tall vaselike glasses. “She’s just a bit young, I suppose,” I said.

  Helen looked delighted with me, and the warmth that rose in my torso melted the heavy, nagging suspicion that I had let Margot down, had told the new girl a secret that wasn’t mine to give away.

  When Margot phoned later to see how I was, I didn’t mention my visitor.

  3

  All it took was that one holiday. A week off school at the end of term because her parents could get the cottage cheaper that way. I stood and waved Margot off from Helen’s front door, the pair of us silhouetted against the light from the hallway as she trudged down the drive, diligently turning back every few paces to check we were still watching. She had to head home early that Friday evening to pack her suitcase, as they were leaving before the sun came up the next day.

  She looked uneasy as she left, her eyes flitting anxiously between our two faces as she made us promise to text her while she was away. Margot’s complex blend of insecurities, combined with her shyness and an almost pathological curiosity for anything that happened in her absence, had made for a heady draft of desperation in those last few weeks with Helen, but this was the first time I noticed how it hung about her, heavy and cloying.

  As she rounded the corner out of sight at the end of the drive, Helen turned to me with a slow-spreading smile.

  “Right then,” she said. “Shall we have some real fun? Call your mum and tell her you’re staying here tonight.”

  I’d never been drunk before—and I probably wasn’t very that night, not by grown-up standards—but I felt as though my every sense was intoxicated with what Helen had to offer. We swiped our pudgy girlish faces into mature contours with her big sister’s cast-off cosmetics; she drew silver eyeliner onto my lids that forked into lightning bolts on each side and outlined my lips in matte maroon. She fished a silky scarlet camisole out of a drawer and showed me how to stuff my bra with wads of toilet roll until two perfect half-moons of flesh appeared over the top of it.

  Helen took the schoolmarmish barrette out of my hair—“I’m confiscating this!”—and curled my hair in front of the mirror she kept propped against the wall in her bedroom, and I watched both of us in it as she did so. I didn’t recognize the me inside the reflection—it would have taken even Margot a few moments to twig whose that pout was—but I felt more myself than I ever had before. Why hadn’t I met this girl yet? Helen had found her for me.

  We had a shot of everything in her parents’ bar, a large oak bookcase with a fold-down cabinet at its center where the bottles sat. We played the mixtapes we had made for each other and danced on the sofas. Then we got on the bus at the end of her road and went to a club that I didn’t know existed but that Helen said would let us in.

  There we danced more, sharing sugary bottles with alcoholic lemon bubbles and the tang of additives inside them. When the lights came on, we went outside and Helen found us a taxi while I breathed out fog into the starry sky and contemplated this, the beginning of my new life.

  Did I think of Margot? Not until the next morning, when my mind kicked in again and, dry-mouthed, I peeled my head from one of the pillows on Helen’s double bed. Margot and I only had singles, so we’d had to top-and-tail whenever we stayed over with each other. That morning, I’d woken up beside Helen, as though I were her wife.

  I had woken up a grown-up, and I couldn’t wait to do it all again.

  Margot never stood a chance.

  * * *

  IT HAD RAINED IN NORMANDY, she said when she got back to school, and they’d been stuck indoors. Margot had quickly finished the books she had brought to read and zipped through the money she’d put on her chunky old mobile phone, texting me mostly but Helen too. I’ve lost count of the number of times since then that I’ve wondered whether things would have been different if group chats, or social media, had been invented then.

  She messaged out of a compulsion to keep herself in our minds, asking questions to which she knew the answers, sending meandering thoughts on meaningless things. She even made up anecdotes about her family that she thought might amuse the two of us, but when her credit ran out, so did our replies.

  By the time Margot returned home, Helen and I had changed, infinitesimally perhaps, and invisibly to anyone else, but irretrievably. Remarks Margot made that would usually have earned her a giggle sank into the silent air between us. Questions she asked were met with a sigh before they were answered. When she spoke, a flicker would pass between her oldest friend and her newest; the more she tried to ingratiate herself, the less interested and more irritated we became.

  I told her all about our night out when she got back from holiday—a rare moment when it was just the two of us. Down the road, Helen was lying, mouth open, in the chair at Margot’s father’s dental practice. His daughter lay with her head in my lap as I tweezed her already perfect eyebrows into a pair of modish tadpoles—the perfect angle from which to see her icy blue eyes darken with worry.

  “How could you afford it? What did you tell your mum? What if somebody had spiked your drink?”

  I watched as her cautious mind built every obstacle to fun it could think of, the very same obstacles I had so enjoyed scaling with Helen by my side. I knew then that I had outgrown what there had been between Margot and me.

  It wasn’t like anything had even happened between us—until it did.

  Margot n
oticed one break time that I was listening to a hand-labeled mix cassette that Helen hadn’t made a copy of for her: of songs we had danced to on our night out together. At the school gates that lunchtime neither of us waited for her, and when she arrived alone at the Peppercorn, I was sipping a peppermint tea.

  I know now, as the mother of a dead child, that cruelty is at its worst when it is arbitrary. When it can’t be reasoned into part of a logical equation of cause and effect. I wondered, when Jack died, whether it had happened because of the things I had done wrong over the course of my life, but Charles, rightly, told me to stop being superstitious.

  I remember Margot’s asking me one day how she’d offended me, why Helen and I didn’t want her around anymore, why we were shutting her out—and I remember shrugging. There wasn’t a reason, we just could; that’s how cruel we were, that’s how teenage girls work.

  The day after we’d left her behind, Margot approached me and Helen at the top gate at the end of classes and I made a sort of half apology.

  “We got paired in French while you were away, and Helen’s going to help me practice for the speaking test,” I mumbled, my eyes on the ground. “You know how good she is.”

  Margot’s smile wobbled. “Oh yes! Of course. Well, I could wait while you do that, I’ve got some stuff I need to do, too. Just get on with it, while you’re…”

  But she could see from our expressions that we were waiting for her to finish speaking rather than listening to what she was saying. I felt her watching our backs all the way up the hill, before she turned to catch the bus, her cheeks burning with the humiliation of it, throat lacerated with acidic tears she managed to stopper until she got home.

  When we got to Helen’s half-timbered house on a leafy avenue lined with driveways much longer than the ones on my road, she showed me a letter she’d typed up on the computer that sat in a nook on the landing. It was for Margot: a brief but businesslike character assassination, an agenda of flaws, intended, Helen told me, to help her grow up a bit so she could hang out with us again.

  “…too worried what people think,” I read, scrolling as sickness broke inside me like waves, my hands cold and slippery on the mouse. “Being shy isn’t an excuse…could do with being more spontaneous…juvenile…spineless…embarrassing…Does everything have to be a joke?”

  It didn’t exactly feel right, but Helen’s observations spoke to my own. I wouldn’t have said any of it to Margot’s face, but I had been exasperated by many of the same complaints behind her back—especially recently. I saw it as yet more evidence of Helen’s maturity, of her wanting to solve a problem rather than let it bed in. She seemed genuinely upset at the prospect that Margot could lose touch with us.

  “What do you think?” she asked me, running one hand through her short hair and chewing on a fingernail. “I just want to make sure she understands that she has the chance to save our friendship if she wants to. Don’t you?”

  She printed it off, put it in an envelope with a clear plastic window that she found in the top drawer of the desk, and held it out to me.

  “You should give it to her in math tomorrow, Win,” Helen said reluctantly. “She’ll take it better from you.”

  Then we went downstairs to watch Australian soaps, a couple of cheerful little psychopaths able to switch without pause from breaking our friend’s heart to discussing which actress’s hair we preferred.

  * * *

  I GAVE MARGOT THE LETTER in the next teaching period we had together. I slipped it to her as I sat down and she looked at me quizzically: an “et tu Brute” across the desk. I could feel her reading it next to me, her shoulders hunching her smaller with every paragraph, the page trembling in her grasp. My insides roiled as she scanned it, and I realized with a jolt that it was less with empathy than exhilaration.

  When the bell rang, Margot scooped up her belongings silently and left the room ahead of me. By the time I reached the corridor, she was lost in the swarm of heads and Helen was waiting for me.

  She shrugged and gestured down the hallway, pursed her lips: “She didn’t take it very well, did she?”

  4

  It couldn’t have come at a worse time, really. I’ve often wondered, in the decades since then, whether if Helen had shown up a year or two earlier, things would have gone differently. It wouldn’t have been too late—in a school where most students didn’t stay on for sixth form—for Margot to meld herself into one of the other cliques. She could have carried on as normal, bruised from the experience but not forever scarred by it.

  As it was, our year group was counting the months until our exams finished at the end of the semester and we were free to go our own way beyond the gates. Nobody was interested in making new friends at that point. Margot could hardly blame the rest of our cohort; she wasn’t particularly interested in them, either.

  I barely even saw her during the weeks after the letter and before what happened next. When I called her at home the night after she’d read it, her mother told me—a new crispness to her local burr—that Margot was busy and couldn’t come to the phone.

  One day, Margot met me as I came out of a lesson she knew I was in without Helen, had come to ask me what was going on. It was maybe a month after she’d come back from holiday, after my and Helen’s night out and the letter, and we’d been avoiding her, cutting her out of our plans, stonewalling her attempts to start up a conversation with the two of us.

  At first I had felt guilty about it, but her desperation to win us back became intoxicating, and I began to enjoy the power that being unavailable to her gave me.

  She’d made me a mixtape, a gesture so tragic that it made me want to laugh in her face at the moment she handed it over. As she held it out to me, Helen came out of a classroom upstairs and down the upper flight to find us talking.

  “What are you doing, Margot? You know she doesn’t want to speak to you. Neither of us do.” Helen’s voice was cold but it had that calm, reasonable edge that teenagers think lends credibility to terrible behavior. As if she were simply stating facts.

  “I haven’t come to talk to you,” Margot mumbled, looking at the floor. In that instant, I willed her to make eye contact at least, to show a bit of backbone, to deny Helen a reason to despise her any more.

  I was embarrassed for her, this nervous girl whose friends had deserted her, for her being sad that they’d gone even though they’d been so unkind, for her missing them although they continued to wound her. It was an embarrassment that bordered on pity but that contained no compassion, only contempt.

  “Well, I don’t have anything to say to you, Margot,” I replied. “And you certainly don’t seem to have very much to say for yourself—as ever.” I did a theatrical eye-roll at Helen, who sniggered appreciatively.

  “She’s not worth it, Win,” Helen would say, always by my side during our estrangement, the few times Margot tried to greet me and start a conversation. “Leave it. Don’t bother.” Or, “It’s sad, really, isn’t it?”

  We didn’t pick on Margot, taunt her, call her names, or even try to intimidate her—and that was perhaps the worst thing about it. We were just…indifferent. I remember sort of shrugging my shoulders apologetically, as if to say, “It is sad, Helen, yes. It’s sad that someone could be such a dreadful loser and have to sit by themselves all the time because nobody else wants to be their friend.”

  After that, Margot became silent. She was hardly in a mood to make small talk. I knew the only thought that pulsed around her head was that life had been better once, that she had been happy at one time, that things had been easier—before Helen.

  I knew without checking there that Margot had gone back up to the practice rooms. She spent morning breaks listening to her Walkman and waited out her lunch breaks reading on the sofa we used to share, rather than sitting under the beady eye of the poisonous librarian. She brought books in from home, chosen specificall
y from the shelves of her mother’s study for their tortured-sounding titles. Samson Agonistes. Les Misérables. De Profundis. She told me years later that the latter had actually gone some way to making her feel better, while it was in front of her, at least.

  When the bell rang, she had to force herself up and back down and onto the landings, crisscrossed with stairways that were crammed with bodies between lessons like an Escher-Lowry megamix.

  It didn’t strike me until several years afterward that perhaps Helen felt guilty about the letter as well. Teenage girls don’t do culpability. We didn’t want to think about how Margot felt, so we froze her out. Looking after her wasn’t my job, I told myself, even though I had a dragging feeling that I had failed my old friend.

  I resented her for it: I just wanted to be able to enjoy the future that was opening up ahead of me with Helen. Why did Margot insist on being a constant reminder of the childhood I was leaving behind—and of a lapse in judgment that would haunt us both for years?

  The letter. There was an unspoken agreement that it would never be mentioned again. Even then, thinking about it made me squirm; I knew how unkind we had been. Helen seemed supremely bored by Margot anyway. I got the impression Margot was relieved by our indifference: that we weren’t about to bring up her failings for everyone around us at school to hear.

  And ears were pricked, eyes peeled. Though the rest of St. Dominic’s had written the pair of us—and Helen once she’d arrived—off as snooty, clever posh girls, with our weird private jokes and our funny made-up language, they were only too eager to congregate and watch as the ties that had bound us so closely began to unravel. It became a live soap opera, a tragedy with the student body as chorus. Areas of the hallways and grounds fell to a hush whenever the three of us were in proximity, in case any words passed between us were missed.