‘Jennifer, can I speak to you for a second?’ I said. Her eyes went wide and she looked at her friend, then back to me and smiled, fixing her scarf up around her neck.
‘Sure, stranger.’ She turned to her friend. ‘Margaret, I’ll see you in there.’
Margaret looked me up and down, sighed out a strange laugh, glanced at Jennifer while raising and dropping her eyebrows, then walked off into the canteen.
‘What was that about?’ I asked Jennifer.
‘Where have you been all morning?’ she said.
‘I was … just about,’ I said weakly.
‘About? You’re not avoiding me again, are you?’
‘Definitely not!’
‘You’ve been keeping me in suspense – you said you’d tell me how you got on with Ronan and his parents. Did you talk things through with them?’
‘I did and you know what? You were one hundred per cent right, Jennifer, all Ronan wanted was total friend time but I didn’t even have to bring it up because, you’re not going to believe this, he’s starting to talk!’
‘What? Why didn’t you tell me this first thing this morning? That’s amazing! What, like, did he start just last night?’
‘No, over the weekend apparently, he was making sounds he’d never made before, then on Monday with his tutor he actually started to say words. So, you were right, he was able to do all the vocabulary stuff he just didn’t want to do it with me. And I didn’t have to have that awkward conversation with the McCoys either because they came to that realisation themselves.’
‘Brendan, this is just brilliant, you didn’t even need my help. I love it when the universe works in our favour,’ she said.
‘So Tuesdays and Thursdays are just hangout time, basically. But now that he’s starting to speak it’s just, I don’t know, things are moving so fast that maybe even by this time next year … well … who knows …?’
I trailed off amidst my excitement because ‘this time next year’ suddenly felt scary. When I’d said ‘this time next year’ any time before it felt like a safe and secure thing to say because I knew I’d be in school, the same school; even if things changed like they did over the summer, I’d still be in the same place. But one year on, I’d no idea where I would be.
‘Yeah,’ Jennifer said, ‘who knows? I certainly don’t.’
If Jennifer, the girl who had all the answers, didn’t know, then what chance did any of the rest of us have?
‘We’ve just got to seize the moment that’s in front of us, I suppose,’ she said.
‘Jennifer, will you go to the formal with me?’
‘What?’
I’d said it before I even knew it. Her eyes went wide again and I shrugged as if to say,That’s all I’ve got, please don’t make me say it again. Jennifer shrugged too and then dropped her shoulders quickly.
‘I thought you didn’t want to go? You said you didn’t,’ she said.
‘I know. But you didn’t want to go either, you said it was cliched.’
‘Oh my God, it’ssocliched, but I don’t know, us going … like … together, well that somehow doesn’t seem as cliched?’ She was almost stuttering, which was unlike her. ‘Am I making any sense?’
I think I knew what she meant. There were people like Kevin and Leanne who took the formal so seriously, so there was definitely something very cliched about those two. But Jennifer and me didn’t fit in with that crowd, and it wasprobably expected that people like us wouldn’t be going to the formal at all.
‘And you’d wear a tuxedo and stuff?’ she said, looking down at her feet.
‘Wouldn’t be a cliched formal if I didn’t,’ I said. ‘If you’ll go with me I’ll even buy you a corsage.’
‘Oh God, please don’t,’ she laughed and covered her face with her hands then pulled them away. ‘OK. If I’m going then I suppose I’m going to have to get a dress.’ She looked at her grey school skirt. ‘This is one of the few dress things I own. I’m a jeans girl.’
‘Maybe we could go fancy dress?’ I said.
‘I wish! I’d love it if it was on Halloween, then I could go as something that wassupposedto be ugly.’
