Don't Ask (6 page)

Love Alex xx

Result! I couldn’t have hoped for more. Alex was friendly, she wanted me to write back and she seemed really keen to get to know me better. She even thought she
remembered me! It’s amazing what people will say so they don’t seem rude or ignorant; they will even convince themselves that a complete fabrication is the truth, rewriting history in
the process. Alex probably spent hours racking her brains, wading through the fog of her distant memories, trying to put Laura’s name and face on to the body of a little ten-year-old girl
whom she met at some stupid kids’ summer camp years ago. She wiped that poor girl’s identity and replaced it with mine (Laura’s). She concluded that I was someone she had once
known.

So excited that I could barely steady my hands to type, I texted Katie:

OMG K! Alex msgd!

OMG!!
came her reply. And then a moment later:
Call me!

I cnt,
I texted back.
Fk tan is wet.

It can’t have been more than ten seconds later that my phone started ringing. I put it straight on to loudspeaker.

‘Oh my God, Lil,’ Katie shouted. ‘You can’t use fake tan as an excuse not to tell me the most exciting thing that’s happened in weeks!’

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ I told her, as my own voice echoed back at me through the speaker. ‘You don’t need to use it. Your skin is all lovely and golden brown
all year round, already.’

‘OK, OK,’ she said. ‘So I don’t get fake tan. For God’s sake tell me what Alex said!’

‘It’s mad. She actually thinks she remembers me.’

‘No! How come? What else did she say?’

‘She asked me which football team I support and said it was good to talk to another girl who’s into football. I told you football was the line to go with, didn’t I? She wants
me to write back.’ I read Katie the message, so she knew as much as me about Alex.

‘Ah, she sounds really nice. Are you going to write back? Are you going to ask her about Jack?’

‘Don’t be a zombie, Kay, I can’t just steam on in there and say, “Hi Alex, good to hear from you and, by the way, it’s not just an interest in football that
we’ve got in common.”’

‘I know that,’ said Katie, sounding hurt. ‘I was only wondering.’

‘Sure, hon. But I think I need to get to know her a bit before I ask any probing questions.’

‘So what are you going to say?’

‘I think I’ll tell her a little about myself – about Laura. I’ll ask her a few questions too, so she has to write back, and then take it from there. If I treat the whole
thing like I’ve just made a new friend, and I’m getting to know her, like I’d get to know any new friend, I reckon she won’t suspect a thing.’

Making a new friend was, to all intents and purposes, exactly what I was doing – if you ignore the fact that the friendship was built on slightly dubious foundations (a nicer term for
lies), and that my motives weren’t exactly pure. I genuinely didn’t know much about Alex at all, save her name and the fact she’d once gone out with Jack, so it wasn’t as if
I was going to have to pretend to be ignorant about her. If I’d met her in different circumstances, she could have been someone I might choose to be friends with. Jack liked her, and Jack
liked me, so we must have some qualities in common.

Was I using her? No more so than many people use their friends. Why do people make friends with each other anyway? They do it because they want to be in the cool clique, or because they’re
lonely, or because they want to show someone else how interesting and how much fun they are. Everybody uses each other to a certain extent, even if it’s just to have someone to go shopping
with.

I wrote back to Alex later that evening. I said it was great that she remembered me from camp but, no, I wasn’t playing football any more. Was she? And wasn’t it a coincidence that
she was an Arsenal fan because, guess what, so was I! All I really knew about Arsenal was that they were a north London team, which made them my local team. But I knew I could get some more
information out of Jack about them, if I needed to. I asked her what A-levels she was doing and told her I was doing my AS-levels that summer – thereby making myself (or Laura) skip a whole
year like a total brainbox, when I hadn’t even chosen my options yet. She couldn’t know I was a full two years younger than her, or she might think I was some kid with a crush. I
didn’t think we’d still be in touch by the summer, when I had to take my dreaded GCSEs, so it didn’t really matter. I signed off my message with three kisses, even though
she’d only put two. But who’s counting?

I read my message three times before I sent it, to make sure there weren’t any slip-ups, like accidentally writing my own name instead of Laura’s, or mentioning Jack. You know when
you’re not supposed to think about something, so you can’t stop thinking about it? It’s like being on a diet and craving chocolate all the time, when if you weren’t dieting
you’d only want it a couple of times a week. The whole time I was writing to Alex I couldn’t stop thinking about Jack, so much so that I initially wrote, ‘I jacked in playing
football,’ which isn’t even an expression I’d normally use. That was the guilt typing for me, I guess. It was probably also guilt that, a few minutes after I’d sent the
message, made me call Jack and tell him I was missing him, even though we’d spoken only an hour earlier.

Once we’d started writing to each other, Alex and I fell into a pattern of messaging or emailing at least a couple of times a week. She’d tell me what she’d
been doing and I’d tell her whatever I decided Laura had been up to that day, which was usually what I’d done, with a bit of embellishment. The key to telling a good lie, someone once
told me, is to make it as close to the truth as possible, so your stories ring true and you’re less likely to slip up, or forget what you’ve said. Laura was ninety-nine per cent me; she
talked like me and she thought like me. The differences were just fine print, the tiny type at the bottom of the page that no one reads when they download a ringtone or enter a competition.

When it came to Jared, on the other hand, the fictional boyfriend of my alter ego, I could be as inventive as I liked. The less he was like Jack, the better. Jared, I decided, was dark and
skinny, and he was the bass player in a band. Part of the reason for this lie was that Jack is tone deaf, so I thought it would throw Alex off the scent, if she ever grew suspicious. Plus,
I’ve always kind of liked the idea of having a boyfriend who played in a band.

What surprised me most about the whole charade was how natural it felt to chat to Alex; it was like getting to know any new friend. Although, if I’m honest, I probably made more effort
with her than I would usually make with a person I didn’t know that well, especially someone I met on Topfriendz. If she didn’t write for a while, I wouldn’t let things drift, or
start getting paranoid wondering what I’d done to offend her: my typical responses. I’d just send her another message.

I think growing a friendship is a bit like looking after a goldfish. For a while, it’s perfectly happy to swim around in a bowl on its own, eating the crumbs you throw its way. But, if you
forget to feed it for a while, or don’t change the water, one day you come home from school and it’s just floating on the top. Dead.

I’ve always been fantastic at making new friends, but not so good at keeping them. (I’m rubbish at keeping goldfish too; Dad banned me from having any more.) Staying in touch with
people I meet and then don’t see regularly is such an effort. When I was younger, the friendships I made at summer camps usually only lasted until I returned to school in September. Life just
gets in the way and, after a few months, unless you keep chatting, you go right back to being strangers. It’s hard enough keeping up with your best mates, let alone people you’ve met
once or twice, or have shared a couple of weeks’ holiday with.

Making the effort with Alex was different because it was a means to an end, a project. At least, that’s how it started. Sometimes, when we were chatting, I almost forgot about what
I’d set out to do. The truth is, I hadn’t expected to like her as much as I did, or to enjoy the process of getting to know her. I’d intended to steam in, take the information I
was after and get straight out, but I couldn’t do that. Alex was sweet and funny and kind. When I told her Jared had trapped his hand in a car door (a story I made up to curtail his bass
playing for a while, after she started asking too many questions about his band’s gigs), she remembered to keep asking how he was recovering, when his bandages were coming off, and so on. She
was always thoughtful, even though her life seemed so much fuller than mine. As well as college and her football, she did drama and she even volunteered at an old people’s home. I felt so
boring in comparison, with my dearth of hobbies, that I told her I played the violin (I had a few lessons when I was eleven) and had once been selected to represent the county at gymnastics (yeah,
right).

The only difficult part of chatting to Alex was negotiating the subject of football without slipping up. God, it was boring. I’d sold myself as an expert – a former player as well as
a fan – but I was as ignorant about football as I am about brain surgery. This is the sum total of what I knew about it: a bunch of fit men in shorts run around a pitch for an incredibly long
time kicking a ball into a net. Some of them have nice legs and stupid haircuts. Some of them advertise stuff on TV. They all have incredibly glamorous wives and girlfriends, with fake tans and too
much bling. Put it this way: if
Match of the Day
were looking for a new presenter, this knowledge would probably not have got me the job.

On several occasions, being a football dunce almost landed me in trouble.

Did you see that goal?
Alex messaged one evening, after there had been some big cup match on TV.

Which goal?
I replied, trying to keep my options open.

Duh. There was only one goal! The one that Ronaldo scored.

Only kidding. Yes, it was awesome.

What? Sometimes I wonder who you support! The referee was having a laugh. It was so offside it wasn’t true. Don’t you think?

Yes,
I agreed. I had no idea what offside meant and guessed it was some new sort of exclamatory term, like phat or sick but for football.
It was totally offside
I
continued
. It was so off its side it was practically horizontal.

LOL. You have a really strange way of looking at things, Laura.

I’d got away with it again. Funny how idiocy can sometimes masquerade as charm.

Whenever Alex brought up football, I longed to change the subject. But I knew I mustn’t. Tedious as it was, football was the deal-clincher, the supposed shared interest
that had made her warm to me in the first place. Aware that my ignorance was going to give me away eventually, I accepted that I had to do something about it: I needed to learn about the
‘beautiful game’, as my dad calls it (no wonder he needs glasses). I tried the web, but I couldn’t understand a word on the fan sites, and the news reports were so dull that
reading them made me suicidal. I knew my best option was to ask Jack, even though I felt a teensy bit bad about doing it.

‘Can I ask you something about football?’ I said to him, on the evening of my ‘offside discussion’ with Alex.

‘Sure,’ he said, sounding bemused. ‘Fire away.’

‘What exactly does offside mean?’

He laughed at me, which I wasn’t expecting. Clearly, this offside thing was something everybody is supposed to know, like how to boil an egg. ‘Lily, you are such a female
cliché. I can’t believe you’re asking me that. OK, basically, it’s when the . . .’

I’m afraid I can’t remember a single word he said, until, ‘Since when have you got interested in football?’

‘Oh, you know . . . I was talking to my dad and ended up watching a bit of the match with him and I quite enjoyed it.’ For extra impact, I added, ‘That Ronaldo goal was so
offside!’

‘It sure was,’ he said, and I could tell he was grinning. ‘I really like that you’re getting into football. Although I have to say, I’m a bit surprised.’

‘Oh, I’m full of surprises,’ I said, and for a moment I really hated myself.

The consequence of telling Jack that I had suddenly developed an interest in football was that he now insisted on talking to me about it at every opportunity. I hadn’t
been aware how much he loved it, in the same way as I’d loved the Spice Girls when I was a little kid. He was a super fan; he couldn’t get enough of it. Talking about it made him sound
excitable and knowledgeable and happy, which was kind of cute, if I could have taken away the football part.

Even worse than having to talk about football was having to watch it. If I happened to be seeing Jack and there was a football match on TV, he’d suggest that we see it together, and I had
to feign enthusiasm. He found most matches so riveting that he didn’t even want to snog much (and believe me, I tried), except at half time, just in case he missed an important ball.