Non Pratt - Trouble

“Your mother and I thought you were capable of dressing responsibly by now.”

And with that, he raises his eyebrows and makes a “hurry up” gesture.

This is the first time I’ve been to the cinema since we moved and I peer into the foyer, wondering whether they sell hot drinks in addition to unseasonable ice cream and slushies. There’s a rush of footsteps behind me and I half turn, ready for trouble, but it’s only an exuberant Gideon, who slams gloved hands on my shoulders and delivers an unnecessary “Boo!”

Anj walks up behind him, looking at her phone.

“She just got a text,” Gideon explains.

“Hannah?” I ask, wondering if Anj got the same text I did about her running late.

“Someone far more exciting…” Gideon snatches the phone, handing it to me as he shouts, “Translate it!” before clamping his arms round a frantic Anj.

It’s in Spanish and I catch the gist before Anj breaks free with a scream and grabs it back, blushing furiously.

“How much did you get?” she says, not meeting my eye as she deletes the message.

“Not much,” I lie. The text contained some distinctly extra-curricular phrases from someone called Felipe. Gideon looks disappointed and I stage-whisper that I’ll tell him later, which causes a bit of a slapping storm between the three of us until it suddenly loses wind. Anj avoids our stares when we turn to look at her.

“So I got a bit carried away with my Spanish penpal.” She glances up and blushes even more. “What?! He’s totally hot. You would.” She nods at Gideon.

“I demand evidence.”

Sighing, Anj opens up Facebook, scrolls down her friends list to Felipe Montes and clicks on his profile. I try unsuccessfully to ignore Gideon as he makes gagging gestures behind Anj’s back, for which he receives a flick on the forehead. When Anj clicks back to her friends list I see a Jason Sheppard listed there.

“Is that Hannah’s stepbrother?” I point, curious.

“Mmm… Jay,” Gideon says, dreamily.

Anj nods. “I’ll second that. In fact, I’ll call shotgun.”

“You mean dibs.”

“That too.” Anj turns to me to explain. “Jay is the most gorgeous person in the whole of this town.”

His profile picture doesn’t look anything out of the ordinary to me.

“I demand evidence.”

The pair of them smile as Anj opens up a page of his photos and Gideon says, “Hottest guy in town. Fact.”

“I thought I was number one?” I joke.

Gideon feigns thought before delivering a dismissive pat on my arm. “You come a close second.”

“For the purposes of reining in your ego, Aaron Tyler, I feel I should inform you that you most certainly do not rank second on my list of hotties,” Anj says as she jabs at the screen, trying to find a suitably pleasing picture of Jay. “No offence.”

Which makes me laugh.

I look at the picture she’s found, but I’m not sure I see what these two can.

“Man, he is fit,” Gideon mutters.

“He is a fit man all right.” And Anj lets out a lovelorn sigh.

“Really?” I shake my head. Outraged into action, Gideon grabs the phone to hunt for a more convincing picture. He’s flicking through when I see something. “Hang on a sec, go back.”

The girl on the screen looks beautiful, dark hair swishing around her shoulders as she raises a bottle to the person behind the camera. She’s standing next to Katie Coleman, who does not look anything approaching beautiful.

“Hannah looks stunning!” Anj says and we all lean a touch closer to see if we’re seeing it right. Normally Hannah wears very little clothing and a lot of make-up when she goes out, but in this photo she’s wearing a good amount of both. I scroll through a couple more photos taken on the same night — “A proper send off” the album’s called — and find one with Hannah and Jay. The two of them aren’t looking at the camera — it’s an action shot of them dancing and they’re completely natural. They look good together. Put him next to hot Hannah and I can suddenly see what Anj and Gideon mean about Jason Sheppard.

“Hello?” A hand swooshes in front of the screen and we all look up.

Aaron, Anj and Gideon all give me equally blank looks and for a second I panic that I was never really invited out in the first place. Until I remember that I was the one that did the inviting.

“What?” They’re still looking at me. Maybe I’ve overdone it on the eyeshadow…

“I was just showing Aaron photos of your fit stepbrother,” Anj says with a grin. “You know, the one I’ve crushed on since for ever. His leaving party looks like a night to remember.”

“It was,” I say and summon up a smile.

We move inside and I hold the door open, letting Gideon and Anj through, followed by Hannah. There’s a distant look in her eyes as if her mind is in a different time and place and I wonder what she’s thinking about. I think we creeped her out with how odd we were about Jay’s Facebook photos. It’s hard to explain that we acted like that because we’d just been re-evaluating Hannah’s hotness.

Whilst Gideon and Anj get snacks I wait for Hannah by the ticket machine, subtly checking her out as she frowns at the screen. Whatever effort she put into this outfit — a lot given the way it hides her middle yet shows off the shape of her bum and legs — it’s less try-hard than anything she ever wore to the park.

It looks good.

When I turn away from the machine I catch Aaron looking at me.

“What?” I’m sick of this. What is it with these guys tonight?

Aaron smiles — the nicest of his smiles, one where there’s nothing more than a secretive curve to his lips. “I like your outfit.”

Oh. Well. He’s forgiven, then.

I fall into step beside him to join the others and I smile at the ground.

Aaron cares what I look like.

For the first time in ever I’m looking forward to school today. Which is not like me. At. All.

It’s because I want to see my friends. Actual more-than-one-who-I-see-all-the-time friends. Plural. It’s not like I wasn’t friendly with Anj and Gideon before now, but I don’t know if I’d have said we were mates or anything. Not like with Katie.

The stupid thing is that if I’d never started hanging out with Katie, then I’d have probably been mates with Anj and Gideon instead. Anj is the only one here who went to my primary — she lived on the same road as me and we were regular trick-or-treat partners. On hot weekends Anj would come and play in my paddling pool — she still came over even once we moved in with Robert on the other side of town. The summer before we moved up to Kingsway, the summer after Lola was born, Anj and I spent most of our time running in and out of the sprinkler system on the back lawn. Once we ran out of breath, we’d go inside to get drinks, wearing T-shirts over our swimsuits in case Jay had his friends round — then act more mature if he did. None of them ever noticed.

My first day at Kingsway was terrifying. There are thousands of kids and the buildings are massive. I don’t think I’ve ever felt smaller — but at least Anj was there being small with me.

It wasn’t until halfway through the first term that I started hanging around Katie. She was really gobby and I’d been a bit scared of her, but we eventually bonded over a hatred of PE. Anj has always been sporty and she got picked first for everything, even by the boys. I was always one of the last to be chosen because I was so short and skinny; Katie because she’d decided it was better to give off CBA vibes than try something and fail. We’d end up sitting on the subs bench together and friendship followed from there.

One of the other reasons Katie was never picked was because she isn’t a team player and that attitude goes for everything, including friends. As we became mates she began edging Anj out. She’d invite me somewhere and never mention Anj. I’d sit next to Anj in a lesson and Katie would come right up to the desk and ask me to sit with her at lunch. When she invited me to her birthday party, I assumed that everyone in the class had been invited. They had — everyone except Anj. Stupidly, I’d felt special. When we started at Kingsway, out of the two of us, Anj was the one people talked to. I was just “Anj’s friend”. No one even knew my name. For someone to pick me instead felt good.

It didn’t take long before Katie was the only one coming to my house and the person Anj spent the most time with wasn’t me, but Gideon. It wasn’t a big deal when it happened — it wasn’t as if we’d started school with matching friendship bracelets — but I wish it had been. If Anj had ever asked me what I was doing, I might have actually thought about the choice I was making.

That summer I invited Katie round to our house on one of the hottest days of the year. I got my costume out and I started early in the sprinkler so that when Katie arrived I was already slick from the spray. She’d eyed me up and down when I answered the door.

“That’s what you wear in the garden?”

“Yeah. What’s wrong with it?” I’d looked down at the swimming costume I’d got to go on holiday with Dad at Easter. It was purple with a sporty white swash across my very flat tummy.