‘The computer’s over there,’ she said, pointing to her computer desk. ‘Obviously.’ She smiled, warmly. ‘Do you need anything? A drink or something? I might be able to find some biccies.’
She was a still a kind person underneath, Noah thought, even though she wasn’t his friend now. He shook his head.
The problem wasn’t serious, it was just a matter of doing a basic rebuild of some of her files – something she could have done herself, if she’d known how. He was disappointed. He knew that if he told the truth and said, ‘It’s nothing,’ and sorted it out in an instant, she’d thank him and then he’d just go home, and that would be that. He wanted to spend time with her – he realised he might not get another opportunity. So he said, ‘Hmm, I can see what you’ve done. Don’t worry, it’s nothing too serious, but it’s a job and it will take me a while to fix.’ He hoped she hadn’t noticed his shaky voice. He wasn’t used to lying.
‘Oh, right,’ she said, getting up. She didn’t seem interested. ‘I’ll leave you to it, then.’
‘Well,’ he began, and tried to think of a reason to make her stay. ‘It’s just that I might need you for passwords and stuff. It would be better if you were here.’
‘Oh, OK then.’ She shrugged and sat back down, hard, making the bed bounce. It reminded Noah of the times that they used to jump up and down on it, pretending it was a trampoline, until Pam told them off for wrecking the springs.
‘It’s been a while,’ he said, smiling, hoping she’d remember too.
‘It sure has,’ she replied, in the vaguely amused tone people use when they’re either not sure what you’re talking about, or don’t want to continue the conversation.
He fiddled around on her computer for a while, tidying her files and cleaning things up. He was still hoping she’d start chatting to him, but she didn’t. She just sat in silence, thinking about something or nothing – he couldn’t tell – although he was fairly sure she wasn’t reminiscing about their shared childhood. He would have said something himself, if he’d known what to say, if he hadn’t been so afraid of saying the wrong thing. Every so often, he’d glance around at her and smile in a goofy way, and she’d smile back, but only with her mouth. So he just got on with the job at hand. When he asked her for her passwords, he expected her to tell him to budge up, so she could type them in herself, privately, but she actually spelled each one out loud for him. She must have forgotten that he had a photographic memory; he would still remember them all weeks later.
‘All done,’ he said, eventually, twisting around in the chair. He couldn’t think of any other delaying tactics. It wasn’t as if she was talking to him anyway. Well, that’s it, then, he thought, opportunity lost, and he made a move to get up.
‘Before you go …’ she said, and, surprised, Noah sat back down. ‘Do you know anything about blogs?’
‘Sure,’ he said, smiling to himself. There was nothing about blogs he didn’t know. He’d been blogging even before they were called blogs. ‘What do you want to know?’
She hesitated. ‘It’s not for me, I mean, it’s not my blog, it’s for a friend of mine. She wants to start one up and she’s not sure the best place to look, or how to make it searchable and stuff.’
Noah wondered which friend she meant. There was the short girl with the blond hair and the shrill voice, the one who wore too much make-up – she might have been called Hannah, or Honey. And there was Amanda, the skinny one with black hair and shiny shoes, who all the boys seemed to like, although Noah couldn’t understand why. ‘It all depends,’ he said, and checked himself. Ruby didn’t need to hear a long list of technical specifications. That would be like announcing, ‘Yes, you’re absolutely right, I am a computer nerd!’
‘Well,’ he continued, ‘there are some good ones, easy ones to use. I can set you – I mean, your friend – up if you want. Why don’t you tell her to call me?’ He took a deep breath, daring himself to say it. ‘I could give you my number.’
‘Yeah,’ said Ruby. She paused again. ‘Um, I’d rather you just showed me now, if that’s OK. I mean, if it’s not too much hassle.’
Noah was hurt. He figured that she probably didn’t want her friend to find out that she knew him, or that they were neighbours. And she didn’t want his number. She thought he was an embarrassment to her, didn’t she? For an instant he felt like telling Ruby where to stick her friend’s blog, but that feeling passed, and then he went back to feeling that he’d do anything for her, because when she was around he couldn’t help himself. ‘OK,’ he said, getting up from the chair. ‘You’d better sit down here and tell me exactly what your friend wants.’
Chapter 2
‘But you promised!’ said Ruby, stamping her foot on the pavement in frustration, even though the gesture was futile because the person on the other end of the phone couldn’t see her do it, and she was wearing soft-soled sheepskin boots, which made virtually no sound at all. ‘You said that you’d definitely be here today to pick me up, whatever happened! And you were going to look at my dodgy computer too.’
‘I’m really sorry, Rubes,’ said her dad for the third time, from wherever he was this time. Watford? Reading? Halfway down the M1? She hadn’t taken in anything after ‘I’m afraid I’m not going to make it today after all.’ All that mattered was that he wasn’t coming. ‘Work is manic at the moment,’ he continued, ‘what with all the redundancies and cutbacks, and I really can’t say no to the directors. It’s not my fault the economic situation is so tough, now is it? It won’t be like this forever.’
Ruby pouted, although her dad couldn’t see this either. ‘You always say that,’ she moaned. ‘It’s always about money, or work, or whatever. What about me? Aren’t I important too?’
‘Of course you are. You’re the most important thing in the world to me. Why do you think I work so hard? It’s so I can look after you. I hate having to let you down like this, I really do.’
‘You could at least have told me earlier, before I stood outside the house for an hour like a total idiot.’
‘I did try, love, I tried several times, but you were on the phone all afternoon. I didn’t just want to leave a message.’
It was true. She’d been talking to her friend Hanni for the best part of an hour, using up her free minutes, and then Amanda had called to tell her about the DVD she’d just seen, and …
‘Still,’ she said. ‘It’s not fair.’
‘No, it’s not. And I will one hundred and fifty percent be there next Saturday.’
‘That’s what you said last week,’ she said. And, she thought, probably the week before, and the week before that. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘It really can’t be helped, my love.’ He sounded hurt, and she was glad. At least it showed that he cared. ‘I promise I’ll make it up to you,’ he said. ‘I’ll think of something really special.’
Yes, she thought, he’d buy her something: some shoes or a designer bag or a stupid gadget, like he always did. She didn’t want things, she wanted him to want to spend time with her.
‘I’d better go – I’m on the hands free. I’ll call you tonight and see you on Saturday, OK?’
‘OK,’ she said, sulkily. ‘Bye, then.’ She hung up the phone before he could tell her he loved her, or ask her to tell him the same. She wasn’t in the mood, and anyway, it embarrassed her.
Now she’d have to go back into the house and unpack (what a waste of time choosing which clothes to take had been), and her mum would say it was such a shame that her dad wasn’t coming, and she’d make that smug ‘I’m disappointed for you but I can’t say I’m altogether surprised’ face that she always made when her ex-husband let Ruby down. And then Ruby would feel like she had to defend her dad because it really wasn’t his fault, was it? She’d feel torn and confused and – what was that great word that she’d heard someone say? Dis-com-bob-u-lated, that was it. Yes, discombobulated, like someone had put all her insides in a giant mixing bowl and swirled them about.
When they’d split up, Ruby’s parents had sat her down and made her a solemn promise: ‘We’ll never make you choose sides, Ruby. We’ll never use you to score points off each other and we won’t bitch about each other to you. We love you equally and we want you to do the same.’ It was what was called an ‘amicable’ divorce. There was no affair, no nastiness. They’d just fallen out of love, they told her, grown apart. Ruby knew that was supposed to make her feel better, but it didn’t. She lay in bed at night wondering how, if two people really, truly loved each other, they could just fall out of love. It would almost have been better if something dreadful had happened to make them hate each other, so at least there was a tangible reason. Because if people could fall out of love for no reason at all, then it meant that nothing good lasted forever. What hope was there that she’d ever find anyone to love her eternally? And if her parents could just stop loving each other, who was to say that maybe, one day, they wouldn’t just stop loving her too?
Noah was at the window again. Sometimes – and she might have been mistaken – she thought that he was watching her. Not in a creepy way – he wasn’t a stalker, whatever Hanni had said, although she was ashamed to admit she had giggled at the idea – but in a sweet, protective way, like a fairy tale prince who yearns to save the princess imprisoned in the tower. Ruby laughed aloud at the notion of Noah as a prince (although not, it must be said, at the notion of herself as a princess). He was so lanky, so awkward, so overgrown. If he tried to clamber up a tower he’d be all arms and legs, like a chimpanzee. No, not a chimpanzee. That was too cruel, it made him sound ugly, which he wasn’t. They’d been friends when they were little kids, but that was a long time ago, when she was another person. She’d read somewhere that every seven years all the cells in your body change entirely: they undergo a complete turnover. She didn’t know if it was true, but it was a good notion. It must have been almost five years since she and Noah had been proper friends, so by now, nearly all her cells would have turned over – her hair, her skin, even the ones in her brain. She really wasn’t the same person. Maybe that was why when she looked at pictures of herself when she was little, at that sweet, wide-eyed girl with dimples, it felt like she was looking at a distant cousin, at someone with similar features, who she knew only vaguely.
She couldn’t remember exactly how it had happened, how she and Noah had gone from being best friends to being nothing, but she knew they had drifted apart around the time that her parents were arguing a lot. She hadn’t wanted to spend time with anyone who knew her too well, then. It was easier to be around strangers, people who didn’t know what was going on at home, people who wouldn’t ask questions, or give her sympathetic looks. That way, she could pretend everything was normal. And by the time everything was normal again – the new normal, after Dad had left – she had a big group of mates, and Noah just didn’t fit. Not that he’d want to. He was a superbrain, interested in completely different things. He didn’t look like one of the nerds, but he’d ended up among them. People like him made her feel stupid. If they tried to make conversation with her, she’d become self-conscious and anxious that she didn’t have anything interesting to say. She didn’t mean to be rude, or abrupt, it just came out that way. Everyone – her parents, the teachers – said she was bright, and she got decent marks (deliberately not so high as to make her stand out, of course), but she felt like a fraud. So she reasoned that if she just said a brief hello to Noah when they passed, and walked on, she wouldn’t get found out. It wasn’t as if she missed him; she had plenty of friends, she didn’t need one who lived across the street.
‘Hi Mum,’ she called out as brightly as she could, as she let herself back into the house. ‘I’m home!’ She tried to made it sound like she wasn’t bothered about her dad not turning up, as if she’d intended to stand outside the front door for the best part of an hour for no good reason.
Her mother came into the hall. She gave Ruby that look and sighed, but didn’t say anything. Ruby was thankful. ‘I’ll just dump my bag upstairs,’ she said, her foot already on the bottom step.
‘OK, love, I’ll put the kettle on. And we can have those cookies I made too, the chocolate chip ones.’
Mum was always cooking for other people. She’d prepare hearty casseroles for sick friends and bake cakes coated in buttercream to sell at charity fairs. For gifts, she enjoyed filling up boxes of the finest Belgian chocolates with hand-picked selections. ‘There’s nothing that can’t be solved with chocolate,’ she always said. Except obesity, Ruby thought. It was funny how both her parents believed that giving her things – food, clothes, jewellery, cash – would make her happy, when it was obvious to her that they would only make her spoiled and fat, if not perfectly accessorised. Her parents were pretty stupid for grown-ups.
When she came down the stairs, there was a mug of tea and a plate piled high with crumbly cookies waiting for her on the kitchen table. She sat down and cupped her hands around the mug until it grew too hot to touch, and her palms felt wet with condensation. The cookies looked and smelled good, but she wasn’t hungry, so she played with a renegade chocolate chip, pushing it around her plate until some of the chocolate melted under her fingernail. She scraped it out with her tooth. It probably wasn’t very hygienic, but it tasted good.
Her mum was on the phone. ‘They can’t do anything without them these days,’ Ruby heard her say. And then, ‘Thank you. That would be wonderful. We’ll pay, of course. Would twenty pounds be all right? Lovely. We’ll see him later, then.’ She put the phone back on to the receiver and turned to Ruby, looking pleased with herself. ‘I’ve found someone else to look at your PC, love. Noah from across the road. Apparently, he’s good with computers.’
‘Oh,’ said Ruby, a little sharp with surprise. ‘OK. I mean, thanks Mum.’ Of course he was good with computers. Noah had been good with computers when they were seven. Truth be told, he was probably better with computers when they were seven than she was now. She could just about manage to switch hers on. After that, if it wasn’t something as basic as sending a message or downloading a track, she was clueless. The way things worked, their insides, didn’t interest her. She left that stuff to people like Noah. She didn’t mind him coming round, she decided, as long as she didn’t have to talk to him, because that would be awkward and tedious. Better to think of him as any PC repair man, a stranger, which he practically was now, anyway. She’d be polite, then leave him alone to get on with the job.
In the event, he came round much sooner than she’d anticipated, but that was good, it meant that afterwards, she could still do something with the day. She was amused to notice that he bounded after her up the stairs, like an overgrown puppy. He seemed so nervous and so excited to be at her house again. It was quite sweet, really, if not a touch pathetic.
Maybe Hanni was right about him. Maybe he had developed a big crush on her. That’s probably why he wanted her to stick around while he worked, when he could just have asked her to write her passwords down for him. She didn’t want him getting any ideas about them becoming friends again, or anything else, for that matter, and she wondered if it would be kinder to set him straight there and then. ‘Look, Noah,’ she could say. ‘You’re very nice and all, and I know we used to be friends way back, but don’t get the wrong idea, OK? You and me? I don’t know what’s going on in your head, but it’s never going to happen. And I’ve got a boyfriend, all right?’
She thought about saying it, but she concluded that she didn’t want to be cruel. Why hurt him for no reason? Liking her wasn’t a crime. And what if she was wrong and he wasn’t interested in her at all like that, but just being friendly? As for that last bit, about the boyfriend, it wasn’t even entirely true. There was Ross, from the year above, who snogged her from time to time and tried to cop a feel at a party, but he never took her anywhere on her own, or called her, or even talked to her much. She suspected that he used her like a fashion accessory. He’d say things like, ‘We look good together, hon, don’t you think?’ And
she had to admit that they did.
In a way, it was good that Noah made her stay in the room while he worked on her computer, because it meant she could ask him about blogging. A group of them had been talking at school about starting up blogs, but none of them knew anything about the technical side, how to go about it, or where to start.
‘The thing about blogs is that you can write whatever you like,’ Hanni had said, ‘and no one has to know it’s you. Unless you want people to, that is.’
Ruby had laughed at that. She knew there was no way on earth that Hanni could ever write an anonymous blog because she liked being the centre of attention too much. She’d want to be one of those bloggers whom everybody talked about and whose blogs were turned into a juicy book, which became a bestseller. But that was never going to happen, because writing a blog evidently involved writing, and Hanni hated writing anything. Texts were OK, as they were short, and emails too, because you could get away with text speak in them, but writing anything longer than a paragraph was torture for Hanni. Ruby usually did her English assignments for her, in return for music downloads and makeovers.