I immediately feel shaky. The phone slips from my grasp, and in my haste to catch it, I somehow knock it flying into a boulder. It makes a cracking sound as it tumbles over the rocky surface before falling to the ground a few metres away.
‘Whoa,’ Ash says, hurrying over to pick it up.
When he returns to my side, I’m horrified to see that the screen is shattered and the display is dark.
‘Is it broken?’ I can hardly bear to ask.
He presses at it, his expression tense. ‘Looks like it. I’m sorry. Are you okay?’ He touches his hand to my shoulder. ‘You’ve gone white as a sheet.’
I swallow rapidly and nod, unable to speak. And then my vision goes blurry and a moment later two tears break free from my eyes and slip down my cheeks. I hastily brush them away before they can reach my chin.
‘Ellie, is this just about your phone?’ Ash whispers. ‘You still have your SIM, so you should be able to replace it pretty easily. Or is something else wrong?’
‘Stella died five and a half months ago,’ I reply in a choked voice, unable to keep it in a second longer.
Ash bristles with shock.
‘I still text her, but her parents must have given up her mobile phone contract, because her number has been assigned to someone else. A stranger just replied to my message.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ he murmurs, placing his hand on my lower back as my chest begins to shake with silent sobs.
Everyone around us is distracted. The boys from the family in front of us are scrapping, and behind us a group of tourists are talking loudly amongst themselves.
Miraculously I manage to wrestle my emotions under control, but Ash rubs my back for a minute before asking, ‘Can you tell me what happened?’
‘She took MDMA at university.’ I breathe in unsteadily. ‘And then she danced so hard that her heart stopped.’
Stella was my sunshine, my breath of fresh air. She was the daughter of the high-street greengrocer, and she wasdown to earth and funny, never giving a shit what anyone thought of her. For the first eleven years of our lives, we grew up in terraced houses right next door to each other and we would scrape our knees daily climbing over the fence to play. We were joined at the hip all through primary school, and I’d assumed we’d stick together at secondary school too, so I was devastated when my parents pulled me out after two years.
I felt like a fish out of water at my new school, which was one of the most elite in London. Without Stella at my side, I lost confidence. I was tall for my age, and curvy too, and some of the kids took to calling me the ‘lumbering ginger giant’, but their taunts weren’t the lone reason I loathed my new classmates. I was only there because my mum and dad wanted to rub shoulders with their wealthy, well-connected parents. I was so angry at them.
All I wanted was to go back to riding the bus with my best friend, to passing secret notes to each other in class. But while I became a shadow of my former self, Stella continued to thrive, strengthening friendships that in the past had only ever been peripheral. I envied her, but she thoughtIwas the lucky one – her parents would have killed to send her to private school. They’d been saving up her entire life for her to go to university.
We drifted apart but came back together at sixth-form college and we intended to go to the same university too. Nottingham Trent had great courses in both media studies – her choice – and furniture design, but my getting a place at Central Saint Martins scuppered our plans. My parentswanted the prestigious college to be featured in my bio on their website for the business and they refused to pay for me to go anywhere else. Stella was frustrated at me for not trying harder to convince them. If I had, would things have turned out differently?
‘We almost went to the same university,’ I tell Ash miserably. ‘I keep thinking that maybe if I’d been there, I could have steered her away from the arsehole she was dating.’ I would have eventually been honest with Stella about what I thought of Julian, if only we’d had more time. ‘He was a posh, entitled twat who flashed his cash around,’ I say bitterly. ‘The last time I saw Stella, he was snorting coke, so I’m sure he gave her the Ecstasy. We’d never done drugs before.’
At least, I hadn’t. There was a chance Stella had been keeping secrets from me. I hated that losing her cast doubt over how well I’d known her. Grieving has been a complicated process.
‘I was so furious at her,’ I say hoarsely. ‘But I miss her so much. Being able to text her has helped.’
The first time I texted Stella, I laid into her about what she’d done, telling her that she was stupid, full-on raging. I got all my anger off my chest while ugly-crying my heart out, but afterwards I was horrified at the thought of her parents reading what I’d written.
I remember how nervous I was, going to see them at the shop. When I confessed to what I’d done, her mum told me in a voice wracked with emotion that Stella’s phone was turned off and she was unlikely to ever turn it back on again.She promised that she’d never read my message and that if it helped, I could text her again. I felt so relieved.
Later, I felt compelled to apologise to Stella for all the mean things I’d said. I tried to explain why I was so angry and that helped too: I was sorting through my feelings as I wrote them down and it felt like a form of therapy before I actuallydiddo therapy – something my tutor recommended to help me through my final months at university. I was in serious danger of stumbling at the last hurdle.
But recently I’ve begun to text her more general things – my plans for interrailing, gossip about old friends, gripes about my parents. It’s been comforting.
‘I naively thought I’d be able to carry on texting her forever,’ I say to Ash.
He makes a noise of compassion and slides his arm around my shoulders, pulling me close as more tears spill down my cheeks. His strong embrace and the steady beat of his heart slowly soothe me.
‘Thank you,’ I mumble. ‘I wanted to tell you before, but it’s hard to talk about her without getting upset.’
A moment passes before he speaks. ‘I know exactly what you mean.’
Something in his tone causes me to turn and look at him properly.
