Do You Remember the First Time?

fucking world to your will, Flora. Enjoy it on your own.’
    And he walked off, his herringbone overcoat flapping in the suddenly chill breeze.

Chapter Nine
    I just about held myself together through history – by not saying anything, and keeping a very straight face. Beside me, Stanzi was too busy writing Mrs Constanzia Danesh very carefully on the cover of her exercise book and basking in the admiring murmurings of the other girls to notice.
    At break, I almost ran out of the classroom, I was so desperate to avoid speaking to anyone I didn’t have to. Stanzi, at any rate, was being mobbed, and was hardly going to miss me.
    As far as I remembered, round the back there was a stairwell, close to the staff room – too close for the smokers and snoggers to hang around, but still not a place teachers were likely to go if there were free biscuits on offer upstairs. It was practically always deserted. Tashy and I used to come here to hide and play cards and keep out of the way of bullies. I finally let myself sit down and cry. I felt as if I’d cut the line tethering me to the mainland of my old life. Maybe I had. Maybe I’d just condemned myself for ever.This was it now. I wasn’t going to be heading home at night for one of Olly’s famous shepherd’s pies, which made him rosy-cheeked, like a stout farmer. Or taking his first corporate credit card and immediately getting drunk on it (Olly paid it all back, of course). Or that time we had in Morocco … or when he used to bring me the papers on a Sunday, then read all the good bits first. All the times I’d looked at him and thought, of this funny, gentle man, yes, this is it. This will do.
    No love affair ever lasted that started with ‘this will do’.
    I fiercely rubbed my still heavily mascaraed eyes from last night (which is absurd, because if you’re going to start living your life over again, you really should clear your bad habits, such as not taking your eye makeup off properly) on the side of my sleeve, and sniffed loudly, a proper, snot-filled trumpeting, luxuriating in, for once, being on my own.
    ‘Jesus Christ, this sounds like the elephant house at the zoo.’
    Justin was standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking at me in a half-amused, half-concerned way.
    I did that awful, painful choking thing you do when caught crying and are desperately trying to calm yourself down. That didn’t sound too attractive either.
    ‘Are you all right?’ he said, coming out of the shade, and presumably noticing the ruination of my face. ‘I had to go to the staff room.’
    ‘Actually I’m practising for a play,’ I said quickly.
    ‘A tragedy?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Oh. You’re good.’ He moved towards me gingerly. ‘What’s up?’
    ‘I split up from my boyfriend,’ I said, staring at the floor. ‘I might have ruined my life.’
    ‘Oh.’
    For a moment he looked slightly disappointed that it was a girly emotional problem, as if he’d hoped I was going to say ‘my dad just got eaten by a tiger’, which is the kind of thing boys like, and his cute face looked suddenly extremely young.
    ‘I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.’
    ‘You wouldn’t know him,’ I said, still hiccuping a bit and hoping my face wasn’t as dirty as my fingers were from where I’d been rubbing at my mascara.
    ‘I might. What school’s he at?’
    ‘He’s not at school.’
    ‘Why did he dump you?’
    ‘He didn’t,’ I said. ‘I dumped him.’
    This was clearly confusing. Let’s face it, the least popular girl in school was hardly likely to be chucking boys old enough not to be in school. If it wasn’t for the fact that I was hiding in here for my cry, rather than storming about the playground in floods, engulfed in a coterie of secretly jubilant other girls, in time-honoured fashion, I think he might not have believed me at all. Instead, he gruffly patted me on the shoulder.
    ‘Why are you upset then?’
    ‘Because you don’t just wave goodbye to four years, which nobody around you has the faintest possibility of giving a shit about, without feeling anything at all.’ I hiccuped again. ‘No, I have to sit and have dinner with my parents, and casually never ever mention the man, who my mother thought was the best thing ever to happen to me, and thefact that he was about to propose. Jesus.’ I realised I was crying again.
    Justin sat. ‘Calm down,’ he said, clearly astonished.
    ‘You have a bloody long-term relationship finish at my age and tell me to