Read Online Forget Me Never by Gina Blaxill - Free Book Online

to each other on the tube, on the Eye, when we’d been looking up stuff on my computer, this felt different. Maybe it was because we were doing normal things, rather than talking about murders and stalkers and police. It felt weirdly intense.
    I put my bowl down on the table. The ice cream was making me feel a little sick. As Bond blasted villains and dived out of burning buildings, I kept sneaking glances at Sophie. She was totally engrossed in the film. She had always been like this whenever we watched anything, however far-fetched the story. It was kind of cute. Her hair had got really long now, almost to her waist. As usual it could have done with a brush. I didn’t think Sophie realized how pretty she was. If she had, she might have made a bit more of herself. Plenty of times when we’d been out I’d seen guys looking at her, but she didn’t seem to notice.
    Once again I found myself thinking that I could have been a better friend to her recently. It wasn’t like I couldn’t deal with it – I knew I could. About a year ago Sophie had been acting weirdly. I’d realized something was badly wrong one afternoon when we were hanging out in Caffè Nero. I’d been telling her a story about something funny that had happened in history class, but halfway through I’d realized she was a million miles away. While Sophie might be moody, she wasn’t usually like this.
    I knew she’d bite my head off if I asked what was wrong in public, so I waited until we were alone at her house. I’m pretty rubbish at this kind of thing, but I must have done OK because she started crying.
    ‘I just can’t think any more,’ she had said. Everythings bad.’
    ‘Don’t say that.’ I put my arm around her. Sophie flinched, but after a moment pressed her face into my shoulder, which really freaked me out. I said a lot of stuff about how it was OK to get upset and I wouldn’t tell anyone and how we were going to get past this.
    Sophie had said, ‘But people don’t get past bad things. You think you have, but it always stays with you.’
    I had realized a lot in that moment. I’d always known Sophie had had pretty rubbish luck in life. She never bleated about it, but over the years I’d picked up enough to know that you don’t bounce back easily from what she’d been through. It messes with your sense of self-worth and your ability to trust. Most people thought Sophie was prickly and had a bad attitude, but I knew better. She looked after herself because she didn’t trust anyone else to.
    I also suddenly knew that it was really important not to give up on her.
    Looking back, I probably should have told someone at the time, but it seemed like I’d be betraying Soph. I knew now the reason she was feeling so rubbish. A couple of months earlier had been the anniversary of her mum and aunt dying and she’d been to the cemetery to visit the graves for the first time. The loss of her mum had really hit her then. She’d started remembering how her life used to be with her mum, and feeling guilty that she’d been taken into care, as if it had been her fault, and she kept having nightmares about cars crashing. I wasn’t sure what to say or that I even understood. I hadn’t known I had it in me to be so patient. Over autumn half-term I made her do stuff with me every day and I called and texted when we weren’t together. By the time December came she had started taking more of an interest in things.
    One day in the Christmas holidays we went to the funfair at Ally Pally and we bumped into some girls from Broom Hill. One of them was Zoe Edwards, whom I couldn’t stand. She’d always picked on Sophie in the kind of way teachers didn’t notice – nasty comments here and there, elbow pokes when Soph walked down the corridor, false rumours.
    ‘Ooh, we’ve interrupted their date,’ Zoe sneered. The other girls tittered as though she’d said something clever. ‘How’s it feel to have a crazy girlfriend, Reece? You could do so