Dear Nobody Read Online Free Page B

doing it. As a matter of fact I’d often casually given the impression that I’d done far more than I actually had done. But I couldn’t have told anyone about that special night. I imagined Tom bawling it round the classroom at school. I imagined the words he’d have used about us, reducing us both, cheapening it. There’s no way I could have told him. It was too important to share.
    â€˜Well. You’re wrong. You should know me better,’ I said. ‘But I never thought you’d go around telling everyone.’
    â€˜I didn’t say I’d told everyone. I said I’d told my best friend.’
    I’d chewed away at all this like a dog picking at the scraps of meat on a bone, shaking it and gnawing it till it was dry and tasteless.
    â€˜I suppose you’ve told your mother as well,’ I’d said. We were walking apart, our hands thrust in our pockets, not looking at each other. All I wanted to do was to hold her, and I didn’t know how.
    â€˜As a matter of fact I haven’t. She’s not that sort of mother. I wish she was. You know how awkward she is, Chris. Ruthlyn tells her mother everything.’
    â€˜So I suppose she knows now, too.’
    â€˜I shouldn’t think so. Of course she wouldn’t. There’s no need for her mother to know about you and me. Chris…’ Helen had stopped and put her hand on my arm. It was like a spark of electricity. ‘Please don’t be mad at me.’
    â€˜I can be what I like.’ Actually, now the danger was passed, I realized I was beginning to enjoy my anger a little bit. I wasn’t quite ready to give in.
    â€˜You don’t own me, you know, just because of what we did together,’ Helen had said then, so quietly that I could hardly hear her. ‘You have no rights over me at all.’ And it was that quietness that had been like the touch of icy hands on me, as if she was so much older than me and knew so much more than me. I felt as if I could slip away from her, as easy as anything, and that she would let me.
    And now it looked as if it was all happening again, as if we were walking on cracked ice that threatened to spin us away from each other.
    â€˜What’s up with you these days?’ I asked her.
    â€˜Nothing.’
    â€˜I seem to be upsetting you for some reason.’
    â€˜Nobody’s upsetting me. Just go home or something, Chris. Don’t keep on at me.’
    I shrugged and kept on walking, holding my head up, whistling slightly as if I didn’t care.
    â€˜It’s not you, Chris. I started the day wrong. I shouldn’t have come out, but we said tonight, so I came.’
    I wanted to comfort her, and to be comforted by her. I wish we could have started the evening again. I glanced at her and she looked away. Her face was cast bronze in the light of the street lamps, and her eyes were gleaming. We had come to her road, big houses set in their own gardens, all the windows lit, the curtains closed to. I thought of all the families carrying on their particular lives, all the houses in the world, people loving each other and hurting each other, people closing curtains round themselves.
    When we came to her house she left her door open and I followed her in. The house smelt of paint. Helen slipped her shoes off and I remembered to wipe mine on the door mat. I never do that in our house.
    Ted Garton, her dad, was singing loudly to himself in the kitchen. He reduced it to a self-conscious hum when we went in, as if he was practising a new tune.
    â€˜How’s the guitar coming on, Chris?’ He always says that. He never really knows what to say to me. It’s a good job I play guitar.
    â€˜Not bad. Wish it was an electric, though.’
    â€˜When are you going to join my band, eh?’
    â€˜Can’t do jazz chords. They’re too hard.’
    I was watching Helen as she stood by the window, lifting her hair and letting it fall again on