Sixteen, Sixty-One. Natalie Lucas

I now began to worry. I’d tried no make-up, then just eyeliner, then full face, then scrubbed it all off and stencilled a thick kohl line beneath each of my eyes and dabbed green mascara on my lashes.

      Heather, aka I<3ellen16, was to meet me outside the station. She hadn’t been impressed that I didn’t know where her favourite coffee shop was and that I wouldn’t be able to make my own way to the town centre (she’d typed ‘omg, wtf, wot planet r u from?!’), but she’d seemed quite jovial (she’d typed ‘lol’) when she’d finally offered to just pick me up from my train and show me around.

      She was late. I fingered a hole in the sleeve of my jacket with annoyance. When a girl vaguely resembling the photo I’d studied sauntered nonchalantly up to me, though, I of course replied: ‘No, I just arrived.’

      ‘Cool,’ she muttered, making no effort to hide the fact that she was eyeing me up and down. ‘So, you want to go shopping?’

      ‘Sure,’ I smiled, realising I must have blinked and missed the ‘Hi, hello, how are you? How was your journey? It’s good to finally meet you. Hey, we might even hug at this juncture’-part because Heather was already waiting by the traffic lights at the end of the road.

      Still, her distance gave me a chance to subtly assess her in person. She was shorter than I’d imagined, but still about an inch taller than me so that was okay. Her hair had been cut since the picture I’d seen and she seemed to have a sort of natural sourness to her face that had not shown in the soft, posed smile of the photograph. I was a little repelled, but my nervous, desperate excitement won out and I began to picture us meeting like this throughout the holidays, going on picnics, holding hands and kissing by lakes.