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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 forhim. 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’syou. Unless you want people to, that is.’
    Ruby had laughed at that. She knew there was no way on earth that Hanni could ever