It was a blurry photo of some girl with her arm around some guy.
“What am I looking at?”
“Cute American boy,” Steph replied in her duh voice.
I huffed, “You can tell he’s cute from that picture?”
“Uh no. You miss everything. Everyone who has met him is talking about how cute he is on WhatsApp. When are you going to download it?”
A niggle of worry pierced at me but I just shrugged. “I’ll get around to it.”
“You say that all the time.”
The truth was I didn’t want to download WhatsApp and join our class group. The thought of my phone binging every second with a notification made my toes curl in my shoes with irritation. And yes. I was aware I was an anomaly among my kind.
“Anyway,” Vicki said, taking pity on me. “You’re coming, right?”
I really, really just wanted to get back to my book. The heroine had a crush on this boy at this new boarding school she’d been sent to, and I was at this part where it looked like he might like her back. “Whose party is it?”
My friends shared a look.
“Well?”
Steph sighed dramatically. “It’s Heather McAlister’s...but what she did was so long ago, Comet. You really need to get over it.”
“Her words.” Vicki pointed to Steph. “Not mine.”
Hurt pierced me. While Heather no longer bothered me, having made the decision sometime ago to pretend I didn’t exist, there was a time when she was my mortal enemy. She’d taken a dislike to me in our first year at high school for whatever reason and had tortured me for a year. Hid my uniform after P.E. class so I had no choice but to finish the rest of the school day in my gym clothes. Told Stevie Macdonald that I had a crush on him, prompting him to come up to me in the hall to let me down. He told me he was flattered but I wasn’t really his type.
What he really meant was I was a geek and he was already having sex with girls older than he was.
Not that I’d had a crush on Stevie.
And let’s not forget the time the teacher asked us in English what our favorite book was and Heather said, in front of everyone, that my favorite book must be Matilda because I could relate to having parents who hated me.
I’d suspected at the time that Steph had let something slip about my relationship with my parents when she’d attended Heather’s thirteenth birthday sleepover. Vicki, like a true friend, had turned down the invitation, but Steph had said she thought that would be rude.
She didn’t think it would be rude. She was just afraid of not being popular.
I was mad at her but I hadn’t said anything. Vicki said enough for the both of us, Steph stopped talking to us for a few weeks and then after a while we were all friends again. Like nothing had happened.
But Steph’s attitude now brought it all flooding back. “If she’d called you STD Steph to your face and behind your back for an entire year, would you have forgiven her by now?”
My friend’s cornflower blue eyes widened. “Did she call me that?”
“Probably,” Vicki muttered.
“I’m making a point. The girl chanted ‘Comet, Comet, she makes me want to vomit’ at me every day for weeks.”
Steph exhaled. “Look, Com, I didn’t mean to be insensitive. I know she was mean to you. But she hasn’t bothered you in years. Come to the party.”
If it was Heather’s party, that meant the guests would be every kid at our school who had no idea who I was. Meaning the ones who were involved in extracurricular stuff like...sports. Their social adeptness, their ability to walk into a room and just start chatting and laughing with complete strangers, was foreign to me. I was socially awkward and pretty certain no one was interested in hearing anything I had to say anyway.
Why would I put myself in an uncomfortable position, go to a party that would make me insecure and miserable, when I could be reading a book that made me feel giddy with anticipation?
“I can’t.” I shrugged, stepping back into my hallway. “I have to have a shower and get stuff ready for school tomorrow.”
Vicki frowned at me while Steph threw up her hands. “What was the point?”
I flinched but shrugged, trying to appear as apologetic as possible.
“C’mon.” Steph grabbed Vicki’s hand. “It’s freezing standing here. Let’s go.”
Vicki gave me a half-hearted wave and one last look I couldn’t decipher, but hoped wasn’t irritation. I watched my friends stride off down my garden path. They stepped outside, closed the gate and walked away along the esplanade.
The Studio, our house, sat right on Portobello Beach. Which meant I just had to walk out of my garden and across the esplanade, and I stepped right onto the beach. My bedroom, a guest bedroom, the kitchen, sitting room and a bathroom were situated on the ground floor of the white-painted brick midcentury building we called home. Upstairs, taking full advantage of the sea views, was Carrie’s art studio and my dad’s office. My mother was famous among the art crowd as a successful and generously compensated mixed media artist. My dad was a writer. He’d won a few literary awards for his second novel, The Street, a commercially successful book that had even been made into a British television mini-drama. The money from that novel paid for our house in this sought-after location. Although he did well with his books, my dad had never achieved the same heights with his subsequent novels, and I think he kind of enjoyed playing the part of the frustrated artist.
Most people thought it must be pretty cool to have semifamous artist parents.
It wasn’t.
At least not my parents.
The most thought my parents have ever given me was in choosing my name. For two weeks I was Baby Caldwell while they struggled to find something unique they could agree upon. Then they gave me a name I couldn’t possibly live up to and proceeded to treat me with offhand kindness, disinterest and sometimes outright negligence. I was an accident, and not a happy one. My parents were too much in love with their art and each other to have any love left to spare for me.
That’s why my friends were important to me. But so was self-preservation.
I shut the front door and locked it, then leaned back against it as a sudden headache flared behind my eyes. This wasn’t the first time I’d refused to hang out with Vicki and Steph.
When we were kids we were all quiet, geeky, book-types, but when we got to high school they started to change. Steph decided she wanted to be an actress and even won a part in a local advert for a soft drink company. She came out of her shell, landing parts in the school plays, and as the years turned her from an average blonde girl into a stunning teenager, she got so much attention from boys that she became boy-crazy.
Vicki seemed happy to spread her wings, too, socially. And where Steph’s bubbly loudness got her what she wanted, Vicki’s laid-back, effortless cool made people flit to her. She was the kind of girl everyone wanted to be friends with. She was my BFF, and seeing her friendship circle grow was hard for me.
I would admit to being a little jealous.
Now I was worried, as well.
If I kept refusing to hang out with them if it involved hanging with other people, would Vicki and Steph one day give up on me?
The thought caused angry butterflies to take flight in my stomach and tears to prick my eyes. Some days I wished I could be more like my friends. But if it meant pretending to be something I wasn’t, exhausting myself trying to please people who didn’t really care about getting to know the real me, then I chose lonerhood. I chose books.
I