My Invisible Boyfriend (20 page)

I should be relieved. Mysterious E isn’t Simon.

But I’m not sure it matters. I’ve messed everything up. Gingerbread Ed, and E. D. Hartley, and the Leftover Squad: It’s all gone too far. I don’t belong here, with them. I’ll never belong here.

Message from: gingerbread_ed Subject: good-bye

hey,

i’m going away on an exchange trip to peru where i hear they don’t have the internet probably. so i guess i won’t be around much because it is a very long exchange trip. sorry about everything.

ed

to:
[email protected]

from:
[email protected]

dear fili,

i’m sorry, but i think i have to stop writing to you. i can’t really explain properly, and i really hope you know you have other people around you who would love to be able to talk with you like the old days. but with me and heidi not being together and everything, now seems like the right time to call this a day.

ed

to:
[email protected]

from:
[email protected]

Dear Ed,

It’s perfect timing. I’m leaving, you see. Flying the nest. Escaping from it all, the very next time they open the cage. Running away, to where they’ll never find me.

Fili

An attic. Ridiculous fictional detective Mycroft Christie is inexplicably present, talking to the unfortunately not-imaginary Miss Heidi Ryder.

HEIDI: I don’t know what to do.

MYCROFT CHRISTIE: Nonsense! There’s always a Plan B.

HEIDI: Yes. And a Plan C, and a Plan D, and Plan Z, and all of them will be stupid, like making up people who don’t exist, and handcuffs, and thinking I’m a detective when I’m too stupid to notice anything at all, and all of it is no use anyway because there’s actual real proper difficult life stuff happening to actual real people. I don’t need a Plan. I need to help my friend Fili. Go away, please?

MYCROFT CHRISTIE: I’m afraid I can’t. I’m your subconscious mind’s default response whenever faced with a crisis.

HEIDI: Can you
fix
the crisis?

MYCROFT CHRISTIE: I can defuse nuclear weapons with a fountain pen?

HEIDI: Nice. Can you help Fili?

MYCROFT CHRISTIE: (smoldery eyebrow, seductive nostril flare, manly yet vulnerable teardrop on brink of falling)

HEIDI: That’s really helpful, thanks.

MYCROFT CHRISTIE: At least I’m here for you to talk to. After all, you aren’t exactly blessed with potential alternatives. Betsy is somewhat preoccupied with moving. The Mothership would have to involve the school: perhaps not the most diplomatic choice? And as for friends…Young Dai seems to be under the impression
you’re rather devious: I doubt he’ll want to listen. Dear Ludo is unfortunately besotted with…well,
you
, not that she knows that: more than a little awkward. Then there’s Simon, who doesn’t love you after all: how tragic, to be disappointed about someone you never even wanted. I imagine he’s rather busy with his new girlfriend anyway…

HEIDI: It’s not them I want to talk to anyway. It’s Fili.

MYCROFT CHRISTIE: But Miss Heidi Ryder knows nothing. Fili didn’t choose to tell her: She told dear, kind, sensitive Ed.

HEIDI: It doesn’t matter. If people find out about Ed, it doesn’t matter, not now. I don’t care.

MYCROFT CHRISTIE: Don’t you think Fili might care? Don’t you think Fili might be even more hurt, to learn the one person she thought she could trust was nothing but cinnamon and dust?

HEIDI: So what am I supposed to do?

MYCROFT CHRISTIE: Don’t ask me. I don’t exist.

to:
[email protected]

from:
[email protected]

dear fili,

are you serious? where would you go? please don’t do anything drastic right now.

ed

to:
[email protected]

from:
gingerbread_edfrogmail.com

dear fili,

i don’t know what to do. do you want me to tell someone about this? do you want me to help?

ed

to:
[email protected]

from:
[email protected]

dear fili,

i wish you’d talk to me.

ed

to:
[email protected]

from:
[email protected]

Dearest Heidi,

Patient as I am, I find myself feeling dreadfully neglected of late, and contrary to popular song we do not have all the time
in the world. Might I beg for a fragment of your kind attention? Or should I fear your attentions are truly swayed in the direction of another?

Rest assured, you continue to have my

love & affection,

E

to:
[email protected]

from:
[email protected]

Dear E,

Look, now is really not a good time for all this stupid messing about pretending to talk funny, all right? Some of us have more important things to worry about.

Just forget about me, please? Because, whoever you are, I’m really not worth it, and I totally don’t have time for this.

Heidi

to:
[email protected]

from:
[email protected]

Dearest Heidi,

How terribly intriguing you are determined to be. But please, leave the noble sacrifices to the gentleman of the party? I can’t play my part if you steal all my best lines, after all.

As ever, I am at your service.

love & affection,

E

(P.S. Seriously, you OK? I can’t ever tell when you’re kidding.)

“If you don’t want to go on the theatre trip, babes, you don’t have to.”

The Mothership stares anxiously at my untouched plate of mashed up butternut squash and pumpkin seeds, which I probably wouldn’t have wanted even if it didn’t feel like I have a canoe in my throat.

But I shake my head, and tell her I want to go. Fili has been skipping classes. Yuliya’s been telling everyone Fili’s got a cold, but I bet she’ll be well enough to come on the bus. I’m just scared she’s not planning to come back.

Which is how I end up on my way to watch a comedy about cross-dressing shipwrecked twins when reality is roller coastering its way off a cliff: not in space, not in a pirate ship, not with any monkeys or explosions or leather trousers. Just an ordinary cliff, with ordinarily hard, pointy rocks at the bottom.

I try to sit next to Fili on the bus, but Ludo spotwelds herself to my elbow and talks Ed all the way there.

I try to snag a shared room with her in the hostel they’ve booked for the overnight stay, but Prowse has allocated the rooms, and Fili’s down the other end of the hall.

I try to sit next to her in the theatre, but Henry grabs my arm and forces me to sit between him and Dai, to Dai’s obvious irritation. I shoot out of my seat between acts to see if I can sit next to Fili for the rest of the play.

But she’s not in the bar, not in the toilets, not in the theatre at all.

I can hear Venables yelling after me as I sprint down the stairs, but I’m not stopping for him, or anyone. I run back the five-minute walk back to the hostel, heart pounding. We’re in funny little dorms in an annex round the back of a hostel, the kind that knows what teenagers smell like and doesn’t want us to puke on the proper paying customers over their bacon and eggs in the morning. Girls on one floor, boys on the other, two bunks to a room. I hurry past the room I’m sharing with Ludo, past all the others, hoping I’ve remembered the number right. Hoping I’m not too late.

Fili’s at the other end of the hallway, sharing with Yuliya. Room number 13. An omen. Just has to be.

I hammer on the door.

Silence.

I hammer again, dropping my hands to rest on my knees, resting my head against the door to catch my breath. Then
there’s a click, and I’m falling forward, knocking her back onto the lower bunk.

She’s still here.

She’s still here.

She looks cold and sort of angry. Fully dressed, eyelinered, boots on.

Her suitcase is on the floor by her feet, zipped up, waiting.

“Aren’t you missing the play?” she says, quietly.

I get this spooky little flash of us, together, perched on the end of the balance beam for the first time all those months ago. All I’d known about Fili before that was her amazing ability to say Go Away, loud and clear, with just a flick of her eyebrow. And suddenly there she’d been, swinging her boots and sharing her music: a friend for the Frog Girl. She wasn’t just this little black cloud, anymore than I was just this faculty brat. She was dark and funny and interesting and odd, and the only time I saw the Go Away look was when she was defending one of us from some Finch meathead.

I’m getting the Go Away look now.

It hurts, but I’ve probably earned it.

Fili lifts a hand up and rests it on the top of her case. She drums her fingers as if she’s waiting for me to leave. I nearly do. But that’s not what I came here for.

“Look, just…don’t run away, yeah? I mean, if you were thinking of it.”

She rolls her eyes, unzips the suitcase, and lets it fall open. It’s empty.

“Oh. So…you’re not running away then?”

She shakes her head, slowly.

“Oh. Well, good. I thought you…I mean, Ed thought…”

She flips the suitcase lid down again, and looks at me sadly.

OH.

OH.

Something in my head clicks into place.

“You know, don’t you?” I say, my voice coming out all thick. “About Ed. I mean, you know he’s…” I swallow. It feels so odd, saying it out loud. “He’s not real. He never was real. I just…made him up.”

Fili nods, just once.

I flop down on the bunk bed, next to her. “I always did think he was kind of obvious. Poetic boy with motorbike who no one can ever meet who happens to fall madly in love with me? I didn’t really expect anyone to believe in him.”

“You just put him on the internet by accident. And then wrote all those messages. By accident.”

I feel my toes knotting together, and I hang my head. It’s probably a good thing we’re sitting side by side. Makes it easier not to see her face.

“It just kind of got out of hand, honest. Dai and Ludo started talking to him, and it seemed like it couldn’t hurt anyone, you know?”

“It hurt me,” she says.

OW.

“Think I was jealous,” she says, with a tiny sad smile.

“But I was jealous of you! You had Simon, and you seemed like you were so happy, and always together. And you never talked to Ed like the others did, though I suppose I get why now. I thought you didn’t like me anymore.”

“I thought the same thing about you,” she says, slowly. “I wanted to talk to you. Not Ed-you, Heidi-you. I wanted to tell you how unhappy I was with Simon, how crowded I felt, the way he was always following me around, copying me. How I felt about…”

I look up as she cuts herself off, and shakes her head.

“I don’t know why I’m angry with you,” she sighs. “It’s me who screwed up. I sort of had a thing with Eric. While he was still going out with Ludo.”

I squirm on the bed. “I know. I mean, I figured it out. Eventually.”

“I’ve wondered if you knew for ages,” she says, sounding almost relieved. “The way you kept staring at him like you knew something wasn’t right.”

I squirm a bit more.

She sighs, and twines her fingers in the tassels of her scarf, looking impossibly sad.

“You want to know what hurt me the most, though?” she says, not looking up.

I look at my feet. I don’t even know what the worst of it is: There are way too many contenders for the prize.

“The worst of it is…you actually believed all that emo crap I wrote.”

HUH?

A wan smile tugs at her lips.

“I don’t send complete strangers e-mails about my rainbows of despair, Heidi. ‘The garden of love is a thorny threshold’? I’m offended. When I do pain, I do it better than that. I kept expecting you to call me on it, but, well, apparently that’s what I am to you: the sad clown, with tears on her face.”

“I didn’t draw that,” I blurt out.

She raises an eyebrow. Drops it again. Comes up with a totally unexpected rueful laugh. I haven’t seen her do that in…I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her do that.

“We really are the screw-up twins,” she sighs, all the coldness gone from her voice now.

“So…you were just messing around? All that stuff about being unhappy, that was just…for entertainment? To punish me?”

The smile dies away, and she shrugs. “Well, some of it.”

I think I know what she means. Half-play-acting, half-truth: I know that game pretty well.

I’ve been the worst friend imaginable. I thought I must be lonely, to have to make up a Gingerbread Ed, but Fili
only
had him to talk to. No Ludo because of Eric; no Simon, who wasn’t the perfect boyfriend at all; no Betsy; no Mycroft Christie; not even a Mothership. And no me, because I was off with my precious Ed.

“I’m so sorry, Fili.”

She shrugs. “Team effort. Don’t think either of us was thinking all that straight. I do get why you kept Ed around,
you know. It was fun for a while, pretending to be someone else: talking up all my problems, waiting for it to sound bad enough for you—the real you—to step in. Only you wouldn’t do it. You kept my secret,
all
my secrets, to stop anyone from finding out yours. All to protect a boy who doesn’t exist.”

She stops and sighs, as if using up an entire month’s word quota in one go has worn her out a bit. As if she might change her mind and go back to hating me.

There are totally other reasons, I want to say: other really good reasons, like me thinking Ed could help her more than useless, thoughtless Heidi, and all those times I wanted to say something, and how I thought she’d never forgive me if I did tell, and how much I
missed
her, but then the Eric thing got so confusing, and Simon, and Mysterious E, and…

WOE.

UH.

I can hardly get the words out.

“Fili…are
you
E? Are you A Real Boy?”

She blinks at me. “No idea what you’re talking about. Things are definitely back to normal.”

They aren’t, I know, not really. It’ll take a little while for that. But she smiles, and I remember what I’ve been trying to do forever, and give her a hug. She hugs me back. It’s the best feeling in the world.

“You can tell the others,” I say, kicking at the ugly pink carpet. “Or I’ll tell them. About Ed, I mean. If you want. They’ll never speak to me again, probably, but I kind of deserve that.”

Fili frowns. “Are you going to tell Ludo about Eric and me?”

“No,” I say, without hesitating. “They’re over now. They were already over. She’s better off without him anyway. It’d only hurt her feelings.”

“So how about you keep my secret, and I’ll keep yours?”

Can it be that easy? Is this a test?

“I’ll delete him completely,” I say, in a rush. “I won’t write any more messages from Ed, to anyone. Just total and complete honesty from now on, I promise.”

She nods, then frowns.