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five.” Handing me the phone back, Ruby looks at me for a long moment. “Are you
sure
about this, Kaz?”

4 • NOT MY IDEA
KAZ
    All the way from South Slope to where Tom’s camped in Three-Tree Field I tell myself the same thing.
    I am sure. I am sure. I am sure
.
    Once I’ve seen Tom we can get on with our weekend. It won’t change anything. I just want to say hi, to show how fine I am being friends. Just to prove it to myself – to Tom – to Ruby. Just to double-check that’s all we are. It’s been a long time and maybe Tom’s missed me the way I have him…
    Tom told Ruby that they’re camped next to someone flying a fluorescent pink Jolly Roger. Ruby spots the flag first. I spot the boy.
    Tom looks the way I always imagine him. Body broad enough to hold me, tall enough to make me safe – big but gentle, like a bear from a fairy tale or a picture book. His haircut is the same one he’s always had (apart from the winter of the unwise buzzcut) and the smile he’s wearing as he talks to the person next to him is the smile I’ve missed every second of the last sixty-nine days, twenty-two hours and … twenty-three minutes.
    Maybe I am not so sure about this after all.
RUBY
    How can Kaz fancy someone with such appalling trousers?
    Oblivious to the awkward, Tom gives Kaz a hug before turning to me as I take a quick step back and nearly stack it on a guy rope. I can fake friendly on a phone call, but Tom is not a person I am prepared to hug. Which definitely puts him in the minority, because I am usually all about the hugs.
    “Hello, Tom,” I say.
    There’s a moment in which Tom and I communicate our feelings without having to say a word. He knows that I would quite happily strangle him with the rogue guy rope I’ve just dislodged and I know that he doesn’t think he deserves it.
    Tom Selkirk buys into his own reputation as a nice guy. One who helps little old ladies with their shopping and gives up his seat on the bus to pregnant women. A reputation that isn’t a reality.
    Tom has known Kaz longer than I have – they spent summers together, shared hiding places and secrets and sweets and a healthy resentment of Naomi. They have the kind of history that should have been worth more than an evening’s conversation and the eternally shit sentence “I just don’t see you like that any more.”
    When I am wizened and old and have forgotten how to use a hairbrush, I’ll still remember the look on my best mate’s face as I sat on the sofa with her that same night, and the tears she couldn’t stop as she endlessly,
endlessly
asked me what was wrong with her. The answer is nothing. She is Kaz. She is
perfect
– and this boy, this normal, “nice” boy, who was meant to be as much friend as boyfriend, made her feel worthless.
    Tell me how I’m ever supposed to forgive that.
KAZ
    Tom introduces me to the three girls from the camp next to theirs (the one with the Jolly Roger) and the girls make polite noises, whilst looking not entirely happy to have Ruby bowl up and sit down between Roly and Naj and take a handful of crisps from the bag Naj has just opened. Tom and his friends might be the year above us at Canterbury College, but Ruby’s as comfortable in their company as if she was sitting with girls she sees every day at Flickers.
    “So how’ve you been?” Tom passes me a coffee brewed on their gas stove. I like that it’s exactly the way I take it without me having to ask.
    “Fine.” I smile at the surface of my drink, thinking how peculiar it is to be seeing him for the first time in a field a hundred miles from the town where we both live. “How was France?” Every year Tom and his cousins stay with his grandparents in Brittany. This year I was supposed to go too.
    “Bof,”
Tom says, before changing the subject. “Speaking of French, Dad said you got a set of insanely good results?”
    “I did better than I expected.”
    “Some of us always knew you were a genius,” he says. I elbow him in