Don't Ask (5 page)

I ordered a pizza with mushrooms and Jack had one with anchovies and olives. He was easy company; I could be one hundred per cent myself and chatting to him felt as natural as talking to Katie,
although we weren’t as rude to each other, obviously. I wondered whether the way Jack ate his pizza said anything about him and whether it meant we were compatible. I always start from the
inside out, leaving the empty circle of the crust on my plate. Jack ate his way around his pizza in a clockwise direction, as if he was consuming a clock, hour by hour. He caught me staring at him
and put down his fork. ‘Are you OK, Lily?’

‘I’m great,’ I said. I didn’t want him to think I was the sort of person who analyses the way people eat pizza, even though I am. Not on the very first date. ‘I
guess I’ve just got order envy.’

‘Here,’ he said, cutting me a neat little triangle of his pizza and placing it on his fork. ‘Try some.’

He leaned in towards me, holding his fork to my mouth, and there was a brief moment of awkwardness when we both realised that this was exactly the kind of clichéd romantic thing couples
do on a date. It reminded me of the kiss we hadn’t yet enjoyed, the kiss that, hopefully, would come later.

‘Mmm,’ I said, lying – literally – through my teeth, as I bit into the pizza. I hate anchovies. I think they taste like salty worms, although I’ve never actually
eaten a salty worm, so I can’t be sure.

‘Do you want to swap?’

‘No, no, that’s very chivalrous of you, but I’m fine with my mushroom, honestly.’ And, I thought, chuckling to myself, you’re already a ‘fungi’ to be
with – although I’d never have dared say anything that cheesy (ha!) aloud.

It’s just as well that I didn’t say it, or I’d have ruined what happened next. Jack must have been thinking exactly the same as me (about the kiss, not the mushrooms) because
he looked directly into my eyes, put his knife and fork down and took my hands in his. Then he snogged me right there and then, in the middle of the restaurant, not caring who was watching. It was
amazing, even if his mouth did taste a bit salty. He moved his chair so that it was next to mine and we kissed until the cheese on the pizza had grown so cold it curled up and turned to rubber. And
when the restaurant staff started stacking up all the chairs, Jack paid the bill and took me home.

It was on our first date that I learned not only what a great kisser Jack was, but also how cagey he could be about certain aspects of his life. To start with, I thought he was
a just a very good listener. That’s on the checklist of ‘qualities to look for in a boyfriend’ in every magazine I’ve ever read, so I ticked it off, happily. He
wanted to know all about my friends, my schoolwork, my family, what films I liked, music, the books I’d read, everything.

As the evening went on, I started to think that maybe he was
too
good a listener. Much as I like talking about myself, I wanted to know about him too. And in that respect, he was a lot
less generous. He was happy to tell me all about his karate classes (it turned out that was the type of martial art he did – apparently, it’s all about discipline and self-control and
other stuff that sounds no fun at all) and his college and his new friends, but when it came to anything more personal, he didn’t have much to say. It was almost as if he’d learnt and
rehearsed a set of answers, and he couldn’t deviate from them. Even asking the most basic, obvious questions made me feel I was prying. He’d deflect everything back to me, as though we
were playing tennis with facts.

‘How come you moved here?’

‘My mum got a new job.’ No pause for breath. ‘What does your mum do?’

‘She’s a nurse. So are your parents divorced?’

‘No, my dad died.’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Jack. When?’

‘When I was twelve.’ No emotion. ‘Have you always lived here?’

‘Yes, since I was born. That’s awful, Jack, you must really miss him.’

‘Not really. I hardly remember him. Your parents seem cool, for parents. Do you get on with them?’

And so on. It was frustrating and not a little bit weird. I justified it to myself, thinking he must be a private person and that things I could talk about as openly as what I had for breakfast
were simply harder for him to reveal. Then he kissed me, and I discovered a much more pleasurable way of getting to know him better. It’s amazing how kissing someone can make you forget all
your niggles, for a while at least, and how it can make you feel you know them inside out, even when you don’t.

On our second date, we went to the cinema, so there wasn’t much time for talking – and the people in the row behind us would have had something to say about it. By our third date,
when we went bowling, we’d been talking on the phone for an hour every night and my state of continued ignorance was starting to nark me. I planned to have it out with Jack the next time I
saw him. But as soon as I opened the front door to him for our fourth date (ice skating), some sort of chemical reaction occurred which made me feel too into Jack to think anything other than,
‘Wow, you are so gorgeous’ (when I wasn’t thinking, ‘Arghh, I’m going flying’). I’m not making excuses, honestly. I’d just look at him and my stomach
would fall into my feet.

By our fifth date, a burger and chips followed by a DVD at my house, we were beginning to slot into the routine of each other’s daily lives and had gone beyond those sorts of basic
‘getting to know you’ questions altogether. There comes a point when, if you’ve grown close to someone, you feel you can’t ask certain things because you believe you should
already know the answers. It’s embarrassing. It’s like not knowing how many brothers and sisters your best mate has, or realising you don’t know the colour of your
boyfriend’s eyes. It shows you haven’t been paying attention, that you’re a bad friend or a rubbish girlfriend. So you stop asking.

Of course that doesn’t mean my questions went away. Sometimes, I’d completely forget about them for a while and then something would happen to make me think of them again. Jack might
let a new detail slip out – Alex’s surname, for example, when he was talking about a football match he’d been to – and it would get me wondering. Instead of pestering Jack
with my questions, I decided to discuss them with Katie instead. It wasn’t long before she began to come up with all her crazy theories about his past. She thought she was being funny, that
it was all a game and that I was, as usual, creating a drama out of nothing, and so the more I questioned, the wilder her fantasies became: maybe Jack’s family were in a witness protection
programme; maybe he killed his dad; maybe his dad was a famous Hollywood actor because, well, Jack did look a teeny bit like Matt Damon, didn’t he? I’d laugh along with Katie, but a
little part of me would wonder if there really was something dark or dodgy in Jack’s past.

Whenever you hear about serial killers on the news, there are always interviews with neighbours and friends who say, ‘But he seemed like such a nice guy’ or, ‘He was perfectly
ordinary’ and, ‘Nobody would have guessed’. Some of them have jobs and girlfriends whom they go home to every night, and they’ll do the washing up and watch soaps together.
A person can be charming and have perfect manners and still be a monster.

Now, I’m not saying that I ever thought Jack might have been a serial killer, because that would be crazy, stupid and totally ridiculous, but it makes you think, doesn’t it?

I did it for both of us. For me and for Jack. I thought that if I knew everything about him, if I didn’t have any more unanswered questions, then we could be properly
happy. Not knowing was stopping me from falling absolutely in love with him. If he hadn’t been so secretive, I wouldn’t have needed to involve Alex, would I?

Sometimes I wonder if I wasn’t the only one who created a new identity to get what I wanted. I only changed my name and a couple of little details, but Jack totally reinvented himself,
packing up all the memories he didn’t want to share in sealed boxes and then putting them in storage somewhere. He hardly kept in touch with any of his old friends, and he sure as hell
didn’t want me to meet them. He steered me away from his mum – I’d only met her to say hello or goodbye to – and when I asked to see photos of him as a child, or with his
dad, he said he didn’t have any. Who doesn’t keep pictures of their dead dad?

How could I believe him when he said how much he liked me, when his own dad meant so little to him? How could I be sure he felt anything at all?

It was almost two whole weeks after I’d sent my message that I heard back from Alex. Scrub that. What I really mean is that it was nearly two whole weeks before Laura
heard back from Alex. Being two people can get quite confusing – sometimes even I couldn’t remember who I was at a given moment. During that icy, bleak January fortnight, when it was
too cold and too dark to do anything else, I went on Topfriendz more than I ever had before, every morning before school and the second I arrived home, after dinner and before bed. I rarely
bothered checking my own profile, only Laura’s. Each time I logged in, I hoped for a ‘You’ve got a new friend’ confirmation and, if I was lucky, even a message from Alex.
Instead, what I received were several friend requests (ironically, Laura seemed to be far more popular than Lily ever was), a ‘Hello lovely laydee’ from Igor, and an invitation to a gig
by some band called The Wonderfulls. The lead singer was quite cute, but their angsty Emo music wasn’t my – or Laura’s – thing at all. I like music you can dance to, not
music that makes you want to slit your wrists.

I began to convince myself that Alex wasn’t going to get in touch, doubting myself for ever coming up with such a stupid scheme. Why, I asked myself, would she be interested in becoming my
‘friend’, when she already had loads of friends – real friends? And even if she did accept my friend request, it was likely nothing more would come of it. Laura would just take
her place as another name in a long list of names, there to make up the numbers. There was no reason why Alex should reply, she probably had a very busy life, what with her A-levels and her
football and her mates. To her, Topfriendz was almost certainly nothing more than a diversion, something you join because everyone else does, just as it had been for me. Maybe I should have seen
her silence as a sign: ‘Quit while you’re ahead. Don’t go there. It was a bad idea and you’ve had a lucky escape. Get out now, while you still can.’ Gosh, there are a
lot of expressions that mean virtually the same thing, aren’t there?

The only thing that didn’t cross my mind, as I tortured myself with all the what-ifs and the maybes and the buts, was the possibility that Alex might not go on Topfriendz every day, the
fact she hadn’t even seen my message yet. But I’ve never been one to let logic get in the way of paranoia.

So, when I logged on, one Thursday evening, to see alerts telling me that I not only had one new friend, but also a message from Alex Porter, it came as a surprise. A very pleasant surprise. I
was so excited I almost shouted out ‘Alex has got back to Laura!’, which would have made everyone in my family think that I was on some sort of covert spying mission in my bedroom,
exchanging secrets with the Russians in code. Or, more likely, that I’d finally lost the plot altogether. I hesitated about whether to call Katie before opening the message, so we could read
it together, but I’d just put some fake tan on my face, one of those little sample sachets that comes free in a magazine, and I didn’t want it to rub off all over my phone and go
streaky.

Tentatively, my heart bumping away in my chest as if I’d had three Red Bulls, I opened Alex’s message. This is what it said:

Hi Laura.

How’s it going? Good to hear from you. I think I do vaguely remember you from that sports camp when I was ten. Are you still playing? It’s great to talk to another girl
who’s into football. None of my college mates are, I think they think I’m a bit weird, to be honest. What team do you support? I’m a huge Arsenal fan. Don’t say you support
Spurs, or I’ll delete you from my friend list! LOL! It would be good to chat to you again. What are you up to these days?