Chapter 23: Sometimes You Don't Want to Choose, But You Don't Have a Choice

When I was sixteen, the decision over which A-levels to do caused me a month of sleepless nights. I wanted to take English, History and French, but then I wouldn’t be in any of the same classes as Hetty Winglass, my best friend since the age of seven. Hetty wanted to be a vet, so she was taking Maths, Chemistry and Biology.

We made our selections with heavy hearts, and hugged each other about the end of an era. Over the summer, at birthday parties and sleepovers, I must have regaled a million people with my calculation that Hetty and I had never spent a lesson in a different classroom since we went to proper school, which added up to something approaching five thousand hours, and now it was over. Hetty wasn’t always with me when I did this speech – though she often was – because at the parties that summer she was in the process of getting her first and last long-term boyfriend, James Dust.

Because of James, I didn’t see Hetty as much as usual that summer, but we still met up at least a couple of times each week. I made most of the arrangements, but in every friendship there’s always one person who makes the running that way, and I barely noticed it, let alone minded. I didn’t notice it officially, anyway. My mother sometimes asked me pointedly whether Hetty ever called me, and I said, ‘Of course she does, sometimes.’

Whatever. When we met up, we talked about the coming year, and giggled about James and how much he was in Hetty’s thrall, and why I wasn’t snogging anyone at these parties, which was for reasons I didn’t know, because I quite wanted to snog people, it just never happened somehow. I said, probably quite often, probably in quite a serious voice, that I was really, really sad that we weren’t going to be in lessons together any more, and this would be a real change in the routine and lives we had each lead for more than half of the years we had been on earth. ‘Yeah, Mary Sue,’ laughed Hetty. ‘But it’s just lessons!’ and she would change the subject. I thought she couldn’t bear to talk about it, which I almost couldn’t, but I was forcing myself because it was the mature thing to do to face up to this situation.

By mid-August, I could stand it no longer. I told my mother that there was no real point in my doing French A-level. Everyone knew that the best way to learn a language was to live in the relevant country, which is why a year of a degree course was abroad. I could live in a France any time, and there was no point in my doing French literature when I was doing English literature already, so it would be more balanced if my A-levels included a science subject, and I hated Maths, and Chemistry was full of Maths, and so the logical thing was to do Biology. My mother asked me if this was because of Hetty, and I told her she was being stupid, and we had a fight. My mother asked why Hetty wasn’t changing one of her subjects, and I said that it was nothing to do with Hetty, though I wasn’t pretending it wasn’t gong to be great for us both, but there was no way Hetty could change her subjects, because she wanted to be a vet. When I told Hetty, she wasn’t as instantly thrilled as I expected, but I assumed it was the surprise, because after a tiny moment, she gave me a hug.

On the first day of our sixth form, we arrived in our new, more lax uniforms. We were now allowed a jumper in one of four colours other than the standard blue. Hetty and I had agreed on burgundy, but when she arrived, she was wearing green. She said she forgot. I said I didn’t mind.

Our first biology lesson was late that morning. I was the first in the room. We’d sat in the same seats for biology all through senior school, and we knew that once we had those seats on the first day, we would remain in them for the next two years. So I sat down, and craned my head around for Hetty to join me. While I was doing so, Claire Settles slipped in under my arm with a big grin. ‘Hi, MS!’ she beamed. ‘Partners?’ Claire had never been in our class before, she’d been promoted from the second stream because she was good at sciences, and she didn’t know that I was always partners with Hetty. I was slightly confused, and I was in the process of working out how to extricate myself when I saw Hetty look over, look surprised, shrug and sit down next to Lise Palmer. My stomach was in knots throughout the lesson, which I spent trying to figure out how to explain Claire’s mistake to her.

But that never happened. After the lesson, I went to the lavatory. I was in a cubicle when I heard two people enter, laughing. One of them was Claire Settles. ‘Ok, Hets, I did it, but you owe me.’

‘I know,’ said Hetty, ‘but I totally need a break from MS.’

‘I thought you and her…’

‘That’s what everyone thinks. I don’t mind her, but she’s, I mean, she cramps my style, doesn’t she?’

‘I would have to say yes,’ said Claire, judiciously.

‘Yeah. I’m not being cruel, am I?’

‘No,’ said Claire. ‘You’re way out of her league, really. You’re basically being kind to her, aren’t you?’

‘Basically.’

It is because of that day in the toilet when I was sixteen that the adult me – sitting on the end of a bed in Harrison Ford’s mansion, having just watched a video of some people who claimed to be her protectors talking about how it would be better for everyone if she were dead – recognised the black weight in her stomach, and knew for certain that while she might be able to crush it, contain it and move on, it would always be there, added to the list of unforgettable betrayals, testament to the fact that she never seems to learn. Stupid, stupid Mary Sue.