Eventually, she did look in my direction. I gave her my best, bravest grin – can we be friends? – and waited for her response. But all she did was stare and mouth something to the girl standing next to her, who then looked up and giggled.
I don’t know what they were laughing at. It could have been anything. I might have even imagined the laugh to justify my own social ineptitude. But something I am sure of is that Tabatha Brown doesn’t remember that moment. The memory of my smile, and of her straight face, is mine alone.
The next time I remember interacting with Tabatha Brown – assuming that talking about her behind her back doesn’t count – was about a year later, in a biology lesson, when Mr Dale – or Mr Gayle, as we called him behind his back, because he was rumoured to have a boyfriend – moved her next to me to stop her from ‘distracting’ the boy she was sat next to at the back of the classroom. Now of course, I can see that Mr Dale’s comment carried at least a tinge of misogyny. But at the time, I was entirely focused on the injustice of Mr Dale failing to realise that I, too, could find Tabatha distracting, although in my case it would be because of her endless hair-flicking and facetious comments, rather than because she was trying to flirt with me.
As soon as she sat down, I smelled her perfume. It was like the kind they spray in department stores, fruity and overwhelming. Apart from that, I tried not to notice her, and was fully prepared to spend the rest of the lesson in quiet contempt, with my left hand covering my work to ensure she didn’t try and copy me.
But as soon as Mr Dale left the room to fetch our textbooks from his office, leaving us each with a diagram of a plant cell to label, Tabatha turned to me and said,
‘Izzy told me that you fancy Sam Gilley.’
‘That’s a lie.’ I said to my worksheet, writing the word ‘nucleus’. Part of me was delighted that Tabatha had deemed me worthy of her attention, even if it was only because she had no one more interesting to talk to right now.