Page 8 of The Friend Request

I send it before I can change my mind. Then I lock the screen, put the phone face down on the desk, and press my hands flat against my thighs. I sit there in the quiet of my empty house with my pulse racing and a sick, giddy feeling climbing up from my stomach.

It doesn’t feel like closure.

It feels like a door opening.

Chapter Four

The first time I intentionally noticed Ross Mercer, I was supposed to be listening to Mrs Hadley explain the difference between similes and metaphors.

I wasn’t.

Lisa had passed me a note under the desk, folded into a tiny square the way she always did, edges tucked in tight so it wouldn’t come apart in transit. I opened it on my lap, one eye on Mrs Hadley’s back as she wrote something on the whiteboard in her cramped capital letters. The note said ROSS M KEEPS STARING AT YOU. I glanced up, and Lisa was already watching me, her lips pressed together, eyebrows raised, her whole face doing that thing she did where she tried not to laugh, and it only made her more obvious.

I didn’t look at Ross. Not straight away. I studied the whiteboard and pretended to copy what Mrs Hadley had written, and my handwriting came out shaky because my pulse had gone funny. Because I already knew he looked at me sometimes. I’d noticed it weeks ago – in the canteen queue, in the corridor near the science block, once across the field when I was sitting with Lisa and Melanie on the grass and he walked past with his mates and his eyes found mine for a second too long. I’d told myself I was imagining it. Fourteen-year-old girls imagine things like that. They see a boy glance in their direction, make it into something it isn’t, then feel stupid when it turns out he was checking the clock behind their head.

But Lisa had seen it, too. And Lisa didn’t imagine things.

I folded the note smaller, tucked it into my blazer pocket, and spent the rest of the lesson with my heart pounding and palms sweating.

That was the start of it, I suppose. Not the start of Ross – he’d been there all along, dark-haired and quiet at the back of rooms, a boy who didn’t try to be noticed and somehow was – but the start of me admitting to myself that I was watching him back.

It got worse after that. Or better. I still don’t know which.

At lunch, I usually sat with my friends outside near the sports hall if it was dry, or in the canteen if it was raining. There was a whole geography to it that mattered enormously at fourteen and means nothing now – who sat where, who was near which table, whether you were in sight of certain people or shielded from them. I’d started to track Ross’s movements without meaning to. I knew he sometimes crossed the yard with Dan Platt and Jake Osborne. I knew he sometimes went to the library. I knew he sometimes sat on the low wall by the car park with his bag at his feet and his head tilted back, staring at the sky like he was somewhere else.

The library was the thing that interested me.

Our school library was nothing special, a room off the main corridor with scuffed carpet tiles, tall windows, a handful of battered computers in the corner, and shelves that smelled of old paper and the plastic covers they put on the spines to stop them falling apart. Most people didn’t go there at lunch. It was too quiet, too uncool to be on your own when you were supposed to be out there proving you had friends.

But I liked it. I’d always liked it. I liked the fact that nobody expected anything from me in there – no performance, no laughter at the right moments, no worry about where I was sitting or who could see me. I could read, or pretend to read, and nobody cared.

And Ross went there sometimes.

I started going more often. I told Lisa I had homework to finish, or a book to return, or I needed to use the computers, and she believed me because Lisa believed most things if you said them with a straight face. She’d shrug and say, ‘Suit yourself,’ and go back to whatever conversation she was having with Melanie about lip gloss or someone’s older brother, and I’d pick up my bag and walk to the library with my stomach in knots.

I wasn’t sure what I was hoping for. I wasn’t the sort of girl who approached boys. I wasn’t bold, or flirty, or any of the things that Melanie managed without thinking about it. I was the girl who noticed things and said nothing. The girl who wrote stories in her head and lived most of her life somewhere behind her own eyes.

So I went to the library, sat in the same chair near the back corner, by the window that overlooked the staff car park, opened a book and read the same page four or five times because I was too busy listening for the door.

Some days he came. Some days he didn’t.

When he came, he never sat near me. He’d go to the opposite end, or stand at the shelves with his back to me, sliding out books and putting them back as if he couldn’t find what he wanted. He’d stay for ten minutes, maybe fifteen, and then he’d leave without saying a word. I’d sit there afterwards with my face hot and my chest tight, not sure whether I was relieved or gutted.

We did this for weeks. Him arriving, me pretending I hadn’t noticed, both of us in the same room with all that silence around us. I told myself it was coincidence, that I was being ridiculous. I told myself that a boy like Ross Mercer – good-looking, slightly strange, slightly separate from the rest of them – would have no reason to come to the library because of me.

Then one Tuesday, he sat at my table.

I remember the day because it had been raining all morning, and the corridors smelled of wet coats. The heating had come on too strong so the library was stuffy and warm. I was reading a book I’d found on the shelf about a girl who ran away to an island, which sounds childish now but felt like the most important book in the world at fourteen. The door opened, I glanced up, and it was him.

He didn’t go to the shelves or to the other end of the room. He walked straight to my table and dragged out the chair opposite mine. The legs scraped on the carpet tiles, and he sat, put his bag on the floor, and stared at me.

My stomach dropped to my feet.

‘What are you reading?’ he said.

I turned the book towards him so he could see the cover, because I didn’t trust my voice. He leaned forward and read the title, and his mouth did something that wasn’t a smile but was close.

‘Any good?’