It starts with us sharing a packet of cheese-and-onion crisps, and before we know it we’re sharing everything: sucking liquorice lozenges and laughing at our black tongues in the cloakroom mirror, buying an orange lolly every lunchtime from the ice-cream man who parks on the school field, figuring out that the vending machine outside the sixth-form common room dispenses hot chocolate for ten pence when it should be twenty. We giggle like a couple of conspirators, planning what we’ll say when our dishonesty is discovered, being almost disappointed when it never is. 

People describe us as joined at the hip, our names coupled like Tom and Jerry, Mork and Mindy, Starsky and Hutch. We meet up one Saturday to go Christmas shopping and buy cheap aftershave sets for our dads and stationery sets for our mums that will never be used. We watch Abba the Movie at the cinema and bump into Janice with her twin sisters, pointing at each other when Janice asks us who dragged who there. 

By the second year, the cracks are showing. We’re no longer we but you and I. Little things start to matter. The way you shield your work with your arm in class, the tall tales you expect me to believe about your dad being a Russian spy, the time you make yourself sick on the chocolates I give you for your birthday and blame me for buying them, the comments about my greasy hair, my crooked teeth, the spots on my chin. 

More divides us than unites us. When I come top in English you say the only thing I can do with that is teach. You’re destined for greater things with your science subjects. I secretly gloat over the way you use long words incorrectly. Hypothetical, lugubrious, lackadaisical, you haven’t a clue what any of them mean, but spit them out anyway. I start spending lunchtimes alone in the library.

We stop sharing secrets. When my periods start I don’t mention it. You cheat on me with Janice, go to see Kate Bush without inviting me, despite me having spent two nights copying out song lyrics from the album sleeve for you because all you had was a counterfeit tape. I  confide in my mother that I don’t think I even like you anymore. She says she can’t stand most of her friends, which doesn’t help.

I fantasise about breaking up with you, make a list of grievances and grounds for separation, imagine a blazing row, a stomping off, a slamming of a classroom door, everyone taking sides. You’re the one who ends it though, with a whisper rather than a scream, one Wednesday morning in the chemistry lab when I struggle to light the Bunsen burner. “Useless,” you mutter. Just that, nothing else. By the end of lunchtime you’ve emptied your desk and gone to sit next to Janice. That’s when I realise you’ve been making a list of your own all along.

 *

Alison Wassell is a writer of short and very short fiction from Merseyside, UK. Her words have been published by Fictive Dream, Does It Have Pockets, WestWord, Trash Cat Lit, Frazzled Lit, Bath Flash Fiction Award, FlashFlood Journal and elsewhere.