Some Thoughts on Stories

Sixteen. Most people that age haven't lived a life worthy of telling a story. At least, not yet.

I know I personally could tell you some stories. I could tell you about my very first memory: falling down the stairs after my curiosity got the better of me. I found out the answer to “What's over there?” was just tears, a few bumps and bruises, and even more kisses from my mother.

I could tell you about my first day of school – tears, bumps and bruises…and kisses from my mother.

I could even tell you about the day my father died when I was 9. Cancer.

I'd rather not though. Too many tears, not enough of anything else.

But I know that I have at least this story to tell. And this is not a fantasy where I pretend that I grew up burdened with my father's death and worked to find the cure for cancer. I have not, and nor has anyone else found a cure at this moment in time. Which is annoying. No, this story is not elaborate, it is not fantastical, it is not as fleshed out or orchestrated as the many high fantasy novels you can purchase.

I argue, however, that it is still a story worth telling. Everyone has a story worth telling. Maybe not everyone has one to tell by the time they are sixteen, but I believe that everyone has a story to tell, and there will always be people to listen to it.

This is my story.

Though, it’s more a story about a girl. I'm sure, like most stories coming from guys my age, this story would inevitably involve a girl. But that does not mean that this is a common, unimportant, well-worn story. It is not just a tiny seed among billions, tossed across the ever toiled, ever expansive soil, cultivated in the remains of human history.

Every person, every life, is important. Humankind only has the capacity to remember so many people. This is a story about those who should be remembered.

So it comes to this, the documentation encompassing events that occurred when I was sixteen. In doing this, I hope that those involved shall be made immortal through my words. Never forgotten. Not me, not Her, not anyone.

This is a story about a guy, a girl, and the innocence and the corruption of youth. My best days. And my worst.

And none of it would have been possible without meeting Scarlett Amelia Stevenson.

Chapter One

The summer after leaving high school was tough. Sure, I’d start sixth form the following September – itself essentially just high school with the majority of the annoying people gone – but the time between those educational institutions was still pretty tough.

I had my friends to keep me sane, of course. I was fortunate in the fact there were people who tolerated me, and I could call those people my friends. During that summer however, I was left pretty much alone.

Luke – my friend with enough nationalities of descent to probably account for a good chunk of the UN – was abroad visiting family. Where exactly, I can’t recall, but if I threw a dart at a spinning globe I’d probably be in with a chance of getting the right country.

Daniel – my half-Welsh, all-awesome friend – was down in Wales for the summer, spending time with his grandparents in some town I could never pronounce or spell…But if I attempted running my face across a keyboard, I would probably be close.

And of course, there was my best friend in the entire world, Marcus. Taller than two Lukes and 100% less Welsh than a Daniel, Marcus certainly stood out from the crowd. We’d known each other since primary school, and we knew each other so well that everything was second nature. We were just that in sync.

As for what he was doing that summer: He was at work. The one person out of the friendship group who least needed a job, and he's the only one who got one.

Such is life, I suppose.

With my friendship group scattered around the town, country and even the world, the only person who was without distraction for a portion of the summer in my town was myself.

Alexander Robert Taylor, sixteen years old. The only child of a single mother. Average height, slightly above average grades, and below average popularity.

None of these particularly concerned me, mind you. My height ruled out success in most sporting fields, which didn't matter to me. I never dreamt of going to Oxford or Cambridge, so my grades weren’t an issue (not to mention going there would cost a fortune).

Above all else, however, was the fact that I never actually wanted to be popular. I may have escaped the drabs of high school society and would soon enter the more bearable world of sixth form…But regardless; I just wasn't bothered at all about my popularity. I managed to continue living a life that was generally unremarkable and still rather comfy.

Or so I would like to lie to myself. The fact of the matter is: I really would prefer not to be an average person. I wanted to be something; I wanted to actually be known by others. I wanted to be someone else entirely, but I didn't quite know how to go about doing that.

I was never particularly talented. I mean, I could write pretty well, and by telling this story you can see that. I was pretty good at basketball and rounders, but as previously mentioned, my height would hinder any success with the former, and the fact rounders is a sport reserved mainly for high school P.E. and not a professionally-recognised sport, I wasn't going to be a star playing that either.

So, all I really had was writing. I had a pretty decent amount of general knowledge too. I always seemed to be good playing along with game shows on television, but I think a lot of people feel that way. I’m sure if I were actually in the hot-seat answering questions I would completely lock up. Alexander Taylor. Specialist Subject: “Ums”, “Errs” and “I don’t knows”. That sort of thing.

These were all things I had to accept and just go about my day-to-day life. There may be a time where I would be able to make my mark, but that time hadn’t come. Instead, I got on with life as it was. That’s all I could do.

When you’re younger, and you’re going through primary school and high school, summer is the best thing in the world. All those months and months go by, full of the monotony of compulsory education, and you just want a break. Sure, there’s Christmas, there’s Easter, but those are two, three-week deals at best. Come the summer, you got a good six weeks. Six weeks of freedom.

Of course, come the time you leave high school, the summer break feels completely different. You finish earlier and suddenly all this time is available to you, which is great, if your friends are free or if you’re able to get a job, that is. These were two conditions that were not present for my summer after high school.

Instead, there was just me. In the six weeks of summer during primary school or high school things were fine. I’d play football in my back garden, watch Mighty Morphin Power Rangers on TV, play on my Mega Drive…Simple things like that got me through the weeks.

But the much longer time given through study leave and the exam period in Year 11 – because let’s face it, you don’t spend all that time studying – felt like an entirely different world. Especially when there was no one to share it with.

Sure, at a stretch, I had my mother. That is, when she’s not working as a doctor all the bloody time. I also had my cousins I suppose, though they were either too old or too young to really click with me. Once you eliminate the option of resorting to family to fill the lonely void of an extended holiday, with your entire inner-circle already unavailable to you, you only really have yourself.

Which I could live with, I suppose. After Dad passed away, I never had anyone to tease me about girls, or be goalkeeper for me when I practised my horrible football skills, or be the player two for Sonic The Hedgehog. I had gotten pretty used to being alone.

My mum, thankfully, never remarried. By saying that, I may sound greedy, but I assure you, you just could not replace my dad. You couldn’t. I’m glad my mum thought along the same lines.

So what does a sixteen-year-old guy who’s an only child and has no friends in town do over the summer holidays? Well…Nothing. Nothing productive at least. Though, being “productive” was a concept I never really grasped. I could understand it if I had a job that involved creating something – whether it was more art or more problems in the world – was productive, but how can a sixteen-year-old be productive? By making a card tower? By making an inspired representation of the state of the world with my scattered laundry? I wasn’t in school over the summer, I couldn’t get a job, and I had no talents that could be rewarded by using them. How could I possibly be productive?

The answer was that I couldn’t. So instead, I did what I usually did on Saturdays and Sundays, but I did it every day of the week: Wake up super late, have a fried breakfast I was sure to regret in my later years, play video games, watch TV, and surf the Internet. That was the life. Except it really, really wasn’t.

The thing about Saturdays and Sundays is that they are the best days in the week, and bookend the week of monotony in-between them. They are treats, they are rewards, and they’re the after-dinner mints of a five-course meal. They are a satisfying breath of fresh air in moderation, but you can’t live on that alone. Which is a shame, but after a couple of weeks full of Saturdays and Sundays, and you’d prefer something more to do.

Which led me having to mix it up. I was going stir crazy in my house, interchangeably stuck in front of a TV screen and a computer monitor. The only problem with my leaving the house in search of something to do I was then met with a dilemma: There is absolutely nothing to do in my little town but go to the cinema. Despite this, leaving the house and going to the cinema seemed like the lesser of two evils. So I went.

With my town being small and unimpressive enough to have a cinema as its only draw, everything was pretty much in walking distance. Running distance if you were dedicated. This was definitely not something to complain about, as I actively chose to walk everywhere, as opposed to taking the bus, because if I didn’t, the only movement I would have in my summer life would be walking back and forth between the PC and TV.

The route I took from my house to the cinema was neither dull nor exciting. My boring little cul-de-sac gave way to the loud and frantic road into town, then to the park that was little more than a tree and some swings, and then to the river. Impressive when the tide's in, pathetic when the tide’s out.

But the river was the nicest part of my route in a way. It was just far enough from the street to allow me to ignore the bustling traffic, though not far enough from graffiti and other vandalism to remind me I haven't escaped my little town.

And so I found myself trundling down the riverside on a warmish Wednesday morning in early July. I had taken the path hundreds of times before, and yet I still enjoyed this part of my walk. All of my best ideas came from this section of my trek to town, and I always contemplated life's little mysteries while I gazed into the murky body of water.

That day's mystery was rather less profound than, say, contemplating the meaning of life, or who was the best Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle (Donatello, for anyone keeping count); today's mystery was “How did I allow myself to leave the house in such a state?”

That was the topic at hand because, quite simply, I looked a mess. I got up late to an empty house as usual – mum wasn't often home during the day – and after crunching down some cereal with the little amount of milk left in the house, I failed to spend any real time actually making myself presentable. It was a case of getting some food in me, getting dressed, and getting the hell out of there.

I did make a little effort. I tried battling my forever messy, forever impossible to handle hair, but the hair always came out on top. I had grown it out a little longer that summer just so I could flick it around and run my fingers through it as I thought about things, but I paid for that decision with hair that would never quite listen to what I wanted. One day I would win the battle against my hair, but it was not that day.

Hair aside, there was nothing out of the ordinary in the way I held my appearance. I realised at a young age I would never be a model. Outside of having a few extra pounds, those model clothes just didn't really seem my thing. Not only that, but none of the clothing cliques children and young adults had seemed to be for me either. I was not a goth, I was not a chav, I was neither preppy or grunge. I was Me. I was an Alex.

And how does an Alex dress? Lazily. Dark skinny jeans paired with any random T-shirt, with no allegiance to a brand or a pop-culture reference emblazoned on it. If it was my size and if it wasn't horrid on the eyes, it would be given a chance. Bonus points if it was black.

Today's number, if you could even call it that, was that Che Guevara shirt design I'm sure most pseudo-rebellious teenagers own in order to try a make a statement; a statement probably in ignorance of anything Che stood for with the whole mass-production of the iconic image sold to most – no pun intended – on face value. But hey, a lot of people my age didn't know about Che the person and just knew Che the icon, further proving that the human race can only remember so much.

Why did I own such a shirt? Well it was certainly not to make a statement. Unless that statement was “My mother bought this shirt for me because it was on sale, but rather than argue about what the shirt meant in the bigger picture, I was just happy to have another shirt.”

The shirt, really, was just the first thing I grabbed on the way out of the house. My jeans were paired alongside old Che, the bottoms of which were frayed thanks to the constant rubbing against the skating shoes. I always wore them because 1) They were easy to slip on and off without worrying about the seconds lost fiddling with shoelaces and 2) They were bloody comfortable.

By the time my mind had mulled over every detail of my current appearance, I snapped back into the present, and found myself with the cinema in sight.

That was another draw of my walk down by the riverside. With all the thinking I do, time becomes a blur. I found the only situation where time feels like it's going slowly is when you actively pay attention to it. A minute's silence can feel like forever, but a minute elsewhere can feel like a second.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised I didn't really enjoy the riverside at all. It was more about enjoying that I had a place completely to myself, a place where I didn't have to worry about anything, not even time. Well, maybe also my appearance at that particular moment, but that – much like time – was relative.

But by the time I realised that, I was already in the cinema lobby.

Herein laid the problem: Living in a small town where you couldn't do much except go to the cinema meant that you went to the cinema a lot. Money wasn't a problem though, every birthday and Christmas offered the bounty of cinema vouchers thanks to my gracious mother.

No, the real problem was that while the cinema offered an escape, a time-sink, a couple of hours of entertainment…There is only so much you can watch before everything had already been watched to death.

Sure, this wouldn't be a problem most of the time, when each week would offer a brand new selection of movies, but it was the summer, which meant a couple blockbusters taking up most of the screens most of the time, and frankly I was bored to death of giant robot and vampire flicks. Not giant robot and vampires together, mind you. That would be a movie I would definitely be interested in.

So as my cinema experience seemed like a failure, I stood, hopelessly staring at a monitor, mulling over the rolling timetable of films that day. It seemed like all hope was lost, I was doomed to an eternal summer of giant robot vampire movies in my solitary holiday, when something caught my eye.

It was a screening of a movie from the seventies I had never seen before, but had heard about. The cinema in my town was good for things such as this from time to time. They were all for showing random old movies at random times on random days.

I weighed up my options: I could go see that movie, the most enticing of options; I could see a different movie, which would mean watching a movie I’d already seen a million times; or I could leave. Which wasn't really an option, because I went there with the specific desire to kill a few hours, and heading into town could only hold me so long before I’d return home in utter defeat and boredom, barely an hour cut out of my day.

Needless to say, I bought my ticket for the old movie.

As much of an avid cinemagoer as I am, I rather disliked the taste of popcorn. I also rather disliked the extortionate popcorn prices, but that's another story. This is where I excelled at a practise I'm sure most people perform – the art of sneaking in my own snacks. Sure, it’s not enjoying a “complete” cinematic experience without buying popcorn, but I also felt I wouldn't “enjoy” spending a fiver.

This meant that after handing my ticket over to be torn, I could make a bee line right to the screen, skipping right over the concessions-stand that smelt like warm popcorn and washed-away disposable income, and head straight into the movie to nab a good seat.

Which would only really be a productive practise if I went to see a more popular movie. In this case however, the screen was pretty much dead. The cinema’s speakers usually played a range of elevator music interspersed with recognisable movie themes before the film began, and as I entered Screen 7 I just missed out on the Indiana Jones theme, which left me with the generic tones of some bargain basement elevator music CD. For a cinema that I’m sure got a lot of business, I wondered how hard it could be to splash out on some more licensed music.

I walked up the stairs of the dimly lit cinema and scanned the immediate area for signs of life. Old people, a kid who probably snuck into the wrong movie, and a few other random people were all scattered across the seating arrangement.

That never made sense to me, if you’re one of the only people in the screen, why not sit slap bang in the middle? Why not get the full cinematic experience this side of not buying expensive popcorn? I never understood that.

I took advantage of my situation and chose a seat in the middle row. I even worked out the exact middle of the row to find the perfect central seat, but there wasn’t one. There was an armrest. So I sat to the right of that.

It wasn’t long before the film started rolling. Apparently the four or five people sat in the screen were the only ones who were going to experience this cinematic display, so rather than cutting more into our time, things kicked off precisely on the timetabled showing time. There weren’t even many adverts before the film. That’s how much they didn’t bother about the demographic of that screening.

If only that could be the way it was all the time, but of course, money always plays its hand. However many times one might go to watch a summer blockbuster, one must prepare for about thirty minutes of advertisements. The movie business seems to put money first, entertainment second, and when you think about it, they succeed at both, so really, everyone’s happy. In theory.

The same couldn’t be said for the main character of the movie I was watching. They took to the screen, breaking the fourth-wall from the get-go, and talked about how life was full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, as well as taking some time to talk about his failed relationship.

That wasn’t to say it was a downer of a film. It was quite the contrary. It jumped all over the place, it played around with the format a lot, and, most importantly, it was funny. Something I’d take over vampires any day.

Then something I wasn’t expecting occurred during the movie, and I don’t mean in the film itself, but in the screen watching it. Someone sat next to me. Obviously, if this was any other screening, I wouldn’t raise any question about it, but you must remember, this was a screen that had a handful of people in it, at most. They could have sat pretty much anywhere.

“You know, it always makes me sad seeing someone sitting in a movie theatre alone,” a feminine voice whispered to me in the dark.

“Errm…Excuse me?” I quietly replied, trying to focus.

“You’re alone in the middle of cinema, and that makes me sad.”

I looked around the screen. The rest of the people were also alone, but unlike me, they weren’t being distracted.

“What about you? You’re alone,” I whispered, scooting back up in my seat, getting comfortable.

“Not anymore,” she responded, and I could hear a singsong undercurrent in her voice.

“Well, I’m trying to watch this movie.”

“Me too,” she said, shifting her attention to the screen, curling up onto her seat.

I tried to glance over at her to see what she looked like, but it was too dark. All I could confirm was it was a girl. And that made it more confusing. Why would a girl randomly come up and sit next to me just because I was alone? Maybe she wanted to make sitting next to me less awkward by saying something to me, but frankly, that made it worse.

I shook any thoughts out of my head and went back to enjoying the movie. Then, all of a sudden, the girl started speaking again. Not to me, but to the screen.

“You play very well.”

“What?” I said.

“Oh, yeah?  So do you,” she whispered to herself. I realised she was speaking along with the movie, and not just that, she was acting along with the movie. “Oh, God, what a…What a dumb thing to say, right?  I mean, you say it, ‘You play well,’ and right away…I have to say you play well. Oh, oh…God, Annie. Well…Oh, well…La-de-da, la-de-da, la-la.”

I turned to look at the girl. Even though it was pretty much pitch black, I could tell that she was so enamoured with the movie. I could almost feel her smile as she spoke. Despite the fact she was having a great time, I had to lean over and state my case.

“You know, I haven’t seen this movie before,” I muttered.

“Have you not?” she squealed excitedly, “It’s Annie Hall! It’s my favourite movie!”

“Oh, I could tell, believe me…”

“Are you enjoying it?”

“I am-…”

“I mean, I can go uptown, too,” she interrupted, instantly jumping back into quoting along with the movie, “I live uptown, but…uh, what the hell, I mean, it'd be nice having company, you know I mean, I hate driving alone.”

“You’re disturbing the rest of the cinema,” I said.

“The rest of the cinema? There’s like five of us here, tops!”

“I know that…but still. You’re disturbing my movie-going experience.”

“I know for a fact that’s not true.”

And part of me conceded that point. It was just nice to a) Be sat next to a (hopefully) pretty girl and b) Discover said (hopefully) pretty girl had a healthy passion for cinema. Well, relatively healthy, for she continued to intermittingly speak alongside the movie, but thankfully she didn’t commit to it for the full running time. She eased off the more and more she got stuck into the movie, but she came back full force for the final lines. Her voice faltered and broke off as the final words escaped her mouth, and her tone seemed fainter, it was as if the movie’s end signified the end of a relationship she was part of.

As the credits rolled and the lights came up, I realised two things: 1) This girl was something else and 2) She was really pretty.

She almost instantly perked up, unfurling her legs from her curled up position on her chair. The girl drummed on her thighs and turned to look at me.

Purple-rimmed glasses framed a pair of pale green eyes, the credits of the movie we’d watched reflecting off the lenses while they scrolled. A wry little smile played across her lips as she brushed her fringe back into the rest of her flowing, frizzy ginger hair.

“What did you think?” she asked. Or I assume she asked, for I was still busy being enraptured by how she looked.

She wore a long-sleeved, olive shirt and drainpipe jeans. Her feet tapped in her deep purple Converse All-Stars.

“Errm…” she said into the silence that came from my end. I shook myself back to the present.

“Oh! Right…Yeah! I really enjoyed it!” I finally answered.

“Good,” she grinned, “Then this might just be the start of a beautiful friendship!”

“Errm…”

“I'm kidding! It’s Casablanca!” she playfully punched my arm. It still hurt though. “I don't even know your name!”

“Oh…I'm…Alex.” I said.

“Alex,” she repeated, and stared at my face as she nodded. It was as if she’d instantly written my name and face in her memory.

The few people in the screen with us were long gone. I went to stand up myself and she just looked up at me, still seated.

“Where are you going?” she inquired, as if I was doing something wrong.

“I'm…leaving?”

“The movie's not over yet,” she protested. “The credits are still rolling.”

“And?”

“You can't leave yet! Look at all these people worked on this movie!” she argued, waving towards the cinema screen.

“Once again. And?” I asked as I edged past her and headed for the stairs.

I took the steps down to the exit and said the usual thanks to the cleaner waiting at the door, who was no doubt glad that they didn't have to clean up much of a mess for once.

Daggers of sunlight attacked my eyes as soon as I stepped out of the cinema. There's never a problem going into the cinema, but stepping back out into the light after spending some time in that building unlocks the vampirism in all of us.

I stumbled and blinked, my eyes adjusting to the light in a second, and I checked my watch before I headed towards town.

Going to the cinema took some time out of my day, I suppose. The movie I’d watched turned out to be a good decision, it was a damn fine film, company while watching it excluded.

It seemed that sparing even a second to think about my mystery cinema guest was too much, I seemed to have summoned her in some way because by the time I was halfway down the road into town I heard the clapping of rushed footsteps behind me.

“Hey! Wait!”

I turned around. I sunk a little. It was the girl from the cinema.

“Hey…” I hesitated.

“You should have stayed until the credits finished! You have no idea how fast I had to run to find you!” she panted, catching her breath.

Oh my god, this crazy stalker girl is going to kill me, I thought. Part of me panicked, wondering what I did to deserve this potentially psychotic follower.

“Errrrm…Do I know you?” I asked, just in case she was actually an old friend. I hoped something like this was the case. Any logical explanation for her following me would be better than being a totally random stranger constantly on my tail.

“Oh, no,” she smiled, her singsong nature floating through her voice. She might have been psychotic, but she was definitely cute too. That was just mean.

“Well…Bye,” I said, forcing a smile and a nod before rushing off away from her.

“Wait up! Are you heading into town?” she asked as she caught up with me, her satchel bouncing behind her.

I put my hands in my pockets and continued to walk. She wasn't going to leave me anytime soon.

To call my trip into town awkward that day was an understatement. Not only was a cute, redheaded, potential axe-murderer following me, but entertaining said person made it worse.

As I said before, our town wasn't exactly full of things to do. Outside of the cinema, there were shops, and I wasn't one for shopping, outside the odd bit of browsing of course.

That day, however, I had no choice. If it was any consolation, I used it as a way to try and shake her. Sadly, I was not successful. In fact, her proximity only increased while in town, as if she couldn't bear to be alone, clinging to me like a child would to their mother. I wasn't prepared to consider how to approach the psychology of that.

My problem was that I’m just too nice. I'm sure any other person would throw all sorts of abuse and profanity to insult and force this girl away. I wasn't like that though. I let it all slide, and I begrudgingly let her follow me, from clothes shop to DVD shop to food shop.

She tried talking to me. It wasn't a completely awkward silence between us, but we weren't exactly engaged in on-going conversation either. She weighed in on the shoes I looked at (“Too clunky”) and the DVDs I looked at (“Eww, I thought you had taste”), and just generally gave me opinions I didn't ask for (“Ringo Starr is the best Beatle”).

I finally caved towards the end of my day out and began to talk to her. We both bought sandwiches and retired to a table just outside the town centre. Sat across from each other on the benches, I finally attempted to break the ice of awkwardness and dive into the unknown.

“What’s your deal?” I asked, before plunging into my chicken mayonnaise sandwich.

“Pardon?” she replied, taking a small bite of her cheese and tomato.

“What the hell are you doing? I mean, why are you following me?”

She looked as though I was asking in Spanish or something.

“Did you want to be alone?” she asked, as if this surprised her.

“YES!” I exclaimed, crumbs flying off my sandwich as I tried to make that one word answer speak a volume.

“That’s not a very nice attitude. No sir,” she shook her head and took a bite out of her sandwich. She gulped. “I thought you could use the company.”

“Well I didn’t!”

“You seemed lonely.”

“I seemed lonely? I was enjoying a movie! You just appeared and started bugging me!” I said, in complete disbelief that she thought she wasn’t doing anything wrong. She took out a bottle of water and drank a sip.

“I…don’t have many friends, you know,” she said, quietly putting the lid back on her bottle, sliding it into her satchel. “I just thought maybe you were someone cool. Someone I could hang out with.”

“Well…you…kinda came on too strong…” I responded, my sensitivity towards others kicking back in.

“Yeah,” she said, looking down. She squeezed her eyelids shut and shook her head. “Oh stupid, stupid, stupid! I’m sorry. I…I should go.”

She clambered off of the bench and stood up, flinging her satchel around her shoulder. She brushed the breadcrumbs off her shirt and picked up her sandwich. I stood to join her on her level.

“No, no! Wait! Don’t go!” I said.

What are you doing, Alex? What are you doing? I thought.

“I guess we could hang out. For a little bit,” I said.

She sat on top of the table, her feet on the bench she had just left. Her eyes followed the cars go by in the background. I hopped up and sat next to her.

“Thanks,” she said, pulling out her sandwich to take another small bite from it. She didn’t look at me.

“No problem,” I took another large bite out of mine. I had no idea what they put in these particular chicken mayo sandwiches, but I would certainly rate it in my top three sandwiches ever, it was that good. If having a list of your top three sandwiches was a thing. “Are you new here? I haven’t seen you around.”

She shook her head, still avoiding eye contact. “I’ve lived here most of my life. But I’ve been away for a while, staying with my aunt and uncle in the country. Now I’m back.”

“Oh yeah? What made you return?”

“School,” she took another bite. “I need to do my A-Levels, get into University, get a job, get a life. You know: the usual.”

I certainly knew. When you’re a kid you just want to be an adult, and when you’re an adult you just want to be a kid. The two of us were at the annoying point in life where we had no idea what we wanted, and instead our parents seemed to force the things they wanted onto us.

“Oh? So are you going to college here then?”

Her head shook again. She brushed back a stray strand of hair behind her ear before returning to her sandwich, her fingers tapping against the wholemeal slices, dusting crumbs onto her clothes. “Sixth form. I managed to get into St. Christopher’s.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at this discovery. When I responded, I acted more to the former. “No way. I’m going to St. Christopher’s too.”

Those words were like a hypodermic needle of adrenaline to her slow-beating heart, as the excitement flooded back to her face. “Really?! That’s so great! I won’t be a complete stranger after all!” she smiled and colour rushed to her cheeks.

As I watched her return to her more intensive self, I opted not to say it wasn’t an invitation, just another random happenstance bringing the two of us together.

“What subjects are you taking?” she said, a new lease of life running through her.

“Errm…English Literature, Maths, Psychology…”

“Oh boo. A thinker,” she said, like my answer was putting her to sleep. “I thought you’d be better than that, Alex.”

“Well what are you doing?”

“Art, Photography and Film Studies!” she exclaimed.

“Thought so. You seem like the arts type,” I said.

“Oh yeah? What made you think so?”

I had to stop myself before I spoke without thinking. I was going to say that her eccentric nature, her apparent love for older cinema, not to mention her pretentious opinions earlier, all leant towards the inevitable declaration that she was indeed one who enjoyed the arts.

“You…you just have that look.” I smiled, instantly dived right back into my sandwich, avoiding her gaze. She laughed.

“Yeah…I guess I’m sort of an open-book in that regard,” she bit into her sandwich again as she flicked her wrist, checking the time on her watch. Her eyes bulged. “Oh no, I have to go! Got some stuff I need to be doing.”

“Oh…Alright then,” I put the rest of my sandwich in my mouth. I brushed the crumbs off myself, jumped to my feet and chucked my rubbish in the nearby bin.

She put her sandwich back in its box, unfinished, and folded it up before placing it into her satchel.

“How are you getting home?” she asked, adjusting her shoulder strap. “Bus?”

“No…I think I’m just gonna call my mum,” I checked my watch. She was already home by this time. “Yeah, I’m gonna get a lift off of her.”

I took my phone out of my pocket, only for her to suddenly snatch it from my hands. Out of instinct, I thought she was stealing it.

“Hey! What are you doing?!”

She didn’t run off with it. Instead, I watched as her thumbs danced across the touchscreen faster than I could ever dream of doing. She smiled as she tapped the last few buttons, and she handed my phone back to me.

“There,” she grinned. “Now you have my number.”

“Why would I want-…”

“Oh believe me,” she cut in, “A guy would never turn down a pretty girl’s number.”

“I never said you were pretty.”

She burst out laughing.

“Trust me. You think I’m pretty. You need to be a little subtler about it, Alex. You better work on that,” she smiled. “But yeah…you should call me. Or text me! We should hang out again!”

The odds of me actively wanting to hang out with her were pretty low. I was never one to voice such a rude thought, however, instead I just smiled and nodded. She grinned and waved as she walked away.

“Hang on a minute! You got my name! I never got yours!” I shouted at her, going through my phone contacts.

“It’s on your phone! I’m the only girl on there that isn’t your mother!” she shouted back, not sparing a second to turn back. One second, I was watching her leave, two more, and she was gone.

I would have been offended by her reply if it wasn’t true, but it was. My phone contacts weren’t expansive, nor did they enjoy an even gender split. Outside of my mother and the guys, there were a few other numbers. Just those that belonged to family members and friends acquired across the years and copied from phone to phone. I got nearer to the bottom of my contacts, and sure enough, there it was. The mysterious girl’s number, sitting right on my phone. And her name:

Scarlett.