‘Same,’ she said, grinning. ‘Like I said, boring.’
A wave of laughter built inside me, and soon we couldn’t stop giggling, neither of us really knowing why. I saw Sophie half-looking round a couple of times, but even that couldn’t stop me. When we’d finally calmed down, Maria said, ‘I could go into town, if you like. After school? My brother’s not collecting me today.’
She said it casually, but I could hear the hope in her voice.
‘Sam!’ I heard Sophie say behind us, mock-horrified. I looked over as she laughed artificially loudly and gave Sam a push on the arm. He took her hand and snaked it around behind her back, smiling lazily and looking straight into her eyes as she struggled uselessly to free it.
‘Get a room, you two,’ said Matt Lewis casually, but I could see the whites of his knuckles around his fork and his eyes that never left Sophie’s face.
‘I’d love to,’ I said to Maria.
I’d forgotten that it was the first day of the fair, and after school the market square, instead of being full of stalls selling polyester skirts and mixed nuts, was a riot of colour and lights. We wandered around looking at all the rides, competing fairground tunes jangling discordantly in our ears. Maria bought a stick of candyfloss the size of her head and I had a toffee apple, the tangy sweetness as my teeth cracked through the shiny layer of toffee giving way to disappointingly woolly blandness within. Because it was only four o’clock it was mostly little kids on the rides, but we went on the waltzers anyway, the kidney-shaped carriage spinning on its axis as the carousel turned. We staggered off afterwards, heads fuzzy and stomachs heaving, clutching each other, breathless with laughter.
‘Do you want to go and get a hot chocolate or something?’ Maria asked, zipping up her coat against an unseasonably chilly wind. We got the good table in the window at the Oven Door and sat in cosy, companionable silence, watching the street outside.
‘There’s your mate.’ Maria gestured towards the window, and there was Sophie sashaying down the pavement, mucking about and holding hands with Matt Lewis and Sam Parker. I felt a brief pang of hurt, but then Maria laughed.
‘My God, she’s such a slapper! What does she think she looks like?’
‘I know.’ I smiled, astonished at this heresy, and at my ability to find it funny. I’m not used to people laughing at Sophie.
‘Shall we go to Topshop?’ I asked, draining the last of my hot chocolate.
‘Yeah, OK,’ Maria said casually, failing to hide her pleasure at being asked.
We took loads of stuff into the changing rooms. Maria tried to persuade me to get this bright red miniskirt but it looked awful on me. She tried on this cool trilby but she said it made her look like she was trying to be Michael Jackson. When we came out, still laughing about the hat, there was Sophie again, sitting on a bench flanked by the two boys. This time she saw us.
‘Hello, you two!’ She sniggered. ‘Having fun?’
I was about to mutter something when Maria said brightly and with a certain edge, ‘Yes, thanks! You?’
Sophie looked taken aback, then smirked.
‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ she said, flinging a casual arm each around Matt and Sam. ‘Having loads of fun.’ Sam put his head on her shoulder and grinned up at us through half-closed eyes, but Matt held himself more stiffly, his hands placed awkwardly either side of him on the bench.
Maria raised her eyebrows and said, ‘Mmm, looks like it. Well, if that’s your idea of fun, I know what that makes you… Come on, Louise, let’s go.’
She seized my arm and pulled me off in the direction of her house, which we’d discovered earlier was on my way home. As soon as we were out of earshot, I turned to her, half admiring and half terrified.
‘What did you say that for?’
‘Oh, come off it, Louise, she’s such a cow. I can see that and I’ve only been here a few weeks. She deserves everything she gets. She’s just using you to make herself feel better. She needs someone who’ll hang on her every word, someone to hang out with on the days when Claire decides to ignore her. I’ve seen the way she treats you. All over you one day and then completely ignoring you the next? Deliberately flirting with the boy she knows you like?’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, the flush rising up my neck belying my apparent lack of understanding. I’d obviously done a worse job than I thought of hiding my feelings about Sam. Also, no one had ever pulled me up on my friendship with Sophie before. I suppose somewhere inside I’d always known it was a bit unequal, but I thought that was the price you paid for being friends with someone popular.
‘Oh, come on, I’m not that stupid. You like Sam Parker, don’t you? And if I can see that already, then she definitely knows.’
‘Are you stalking me or something? All right, maybe I do like him,’ I admitted. ‘But only in that way where you know nothing’s ever going to happen. I think Sophie fancies him anyway; she’s not doing it to get at me. She’s right for him. They match. He would never in a million years want to go out with me.’
‘He might.’
‘No, seriously. Boys like him don’t go out with girls like me, that’s just the way it is. At the most, I might get to be friends with him. But I don’t even have that, he barely knows I exist.’
‘Then maybe you need to change that,’ she said. ‘You never know if you don’t try.’
I changed the subject then. Surely even a new girl could see that Sam was totally out of my league, even if I did have the courage to do more than smile at him.
We had such a laugh on the walk back to her house, Maria giving me her slyly observed take on various students in our year at school. For someone who’d only been in the school a few weeks she was astonishingly spot-on, identifying the frailties, insecurities and absurdities of people who to my uncritical eye had seemed achingly cool. She also did a pitch perfect impression of Mr Jenkins asking her lasciviously to stay behind after class to ‘discuss her essay’. She hesitated outside her front gate, appearing to be involved in some kind of internal debate.
‘Do you… do you want to come in for a bit?’
Inside, the hall carpet needed a hoover and was frayed at the edges, and there was a vague smell of bacon fat. The wallpaper was peeling and I could see that the handrail for the stairs had been removed, leaving a jagged groove in the wall. It was very quiet, but when Maria called out, her mum emerged from the kitchen, drying her hands on a tea towel that had seen better days. The resemblance between the two was striking: their long, wispy brown hair that fell somewhere between straight and curly, their eyes hazel pools, flecked with gold and green.
‘Hi! I’m Bridget,’ she said. I always feel a bit weird about calling my friends’ parents by their first names, and generally try to avoid calling them anything at all. ‘It’s so nice to meet one of Maria’s friends. Welcome!’ She flung out both arms in an exaggerated gesture, tea towel flicking against the wall. ‘So who are you?’