Chapter 4
Chapter Four
The first time I intentionally noticed Ross Mercer, I was supposed to be listening to Mrs Hadley explain the difference between similes and metaphors.
I wasn’t.
Lisa had passed me a note under the desk, folded into a tiny square the way she always did, edges tucked in tight so it wouldn’t come apart in transit.
I opened it on my lap, one eye on Mrs Hadley’s back as she wrote something on the whiteboard in her cramped capital letters.
The note said ROSS M KEEPS STARING AT YOU.
I glanced up, and Lisa was already watching me, her lips pressed together, eyebrows raised, her whole face doing that thing she did where she tried not to laugh, and it only made her more obvious.
I didn’t look at Ross. Not straight away.
I studied the whiteboard and pretended to copy what Mrs Hadley had written, and my handwriting came out shaky because my pulse had gone funny.
Because I already knew he looked at me sometimes.
I’d noticed it weeks ago – in the canteen queue, in the corridor near the science block, once across the field when I was sitting with Lisa and Melanie on the grass and he walked past with his mates and his eyes found mine for a second too long.
I’d told myself I was imagining it. Fourteen-year-old girls imagine things like that.
They see a boy glance in their direction, make it into something it isn’t, then feel stupid when it turns out he was checking the clock behind their head.
But Lisa had seen it, too. And Lisa didn’t imagine things.
I folded the note smaller, tucked it into my blazer pocket, and spent the rest of the lesson with my heart pounding and palms sweating.
That was the start of it, I suppose. Not the start of Ross – he’d been there all along, dark-haired and quiet at the back of rooms, a boy who didn’t try to be noticed and somehow was – but the start of me admitting to myself that I was watching him back.
It got worse after that. Or better. I still don’t know which.
At lunch, I usually sat with my friends outside near the sports hall if it was dry, or in the canteen if it was raining.
There was a whole geography to it that mattered enormously at fourteen and means nothing now – who sat where, who was near which table, whether you were in sight of certain people or shielded from them.
I’d started to track Ross’s movements without meaning to.
I knew he sometimes crossed the yard with Dan Platt and Jake Osborne.
I knew he sometimes went to the library.
I knew he sometimes sat on the low wall by the car park with his bag at his feet and his head tilted back, staring at the sky like he was somewhere else.
The library was the thing that interested me.
Our school library was nothing special, a room off the main corridor with scuffed carpet tiles, tall windows, a handful of battered computers in the corner, and shelves that smelled of old paper and the plastic covers they put on the spines to stop them falling apart.
Most people didn’t go there at lunch. It was too quiet, too uncool to be on your own when you were supposed to be out there proving you had friends.
But I liked it. I’d always liked it. I liked the fact that nobody expected anything from me in there – no performance, no laughter at the right moments, no worry about where I was sitting or who could see me. I could read, or pretend to read, and nobody cared.
And Ross went there sometimes.
I started going more often. I told Lisa I had homework to finish, or a book to return, or I needed to use the computers, and she believed me because Lisa believed most things if you said them with a straight face.
She’d shrug and say, ‘Suit yourself,’ and go back to whatever conversation she was having with Melanie about lip gloss or someone’s older brother, and I’d pick up my bag and walk to the library with my stomach in knots.
I wasn’t sure what I was hoping for. I wasn’t the sort of girl who approached boys.
I wasn’t bold, or flirty, or any of the things that Melanie managed without thinking about it.
I was the girl who noticed things and said nothing.
The girl who wrote stories in her head and lived most of her life somewhere behind her own eyes.
So I went to the library, sat in the same chair near the back corner, by the window that overlooked the staff car park, opened a book and read the same page four or five times because I was too busy listening for the door.
Some days he came. Some days he didn’t.
When he came, he never sat near me. He’d go to the opposite end, or stand at the shelves with his back to me, sliding out books and putting them back as if he couldn’t find what he wanted.
He’d stay for ten minutes, maybe fifteen, and then he’d leave without saying a word.
I’d sit there afterwards with my face hot and my chest tight, not sure whether I was relieved or gutted.
We did this for weeks. Him arriving, me pretending I hadn’t noticed, both of us in the same room with all that silence around us.
I told myself it was coincidence, that I was being ridiculous.
I told myself that a boy like Ross Mercer – good-looking, slightly strange, slightly separate from the rest of them – would have no reason to come to the library because of me.
Then one Tuesday, he sat at my table.
I remember the day because it had been raining all morning, and the corridors smelled of wet coats.
The heating had come on too strong so the library was stuffy and warm.
I was reading a book I’d found on the shelf about a girl who ran away to an island, which sounds childish now but felt like the most important book in the world at fourteen.
The door opened, I glanced up, and it was him.
He didn’t go to the shelves or to the other end of the room. He walked straight to my table and dragged out the chair opposite mine. The legs scraped on the carpet tiles, and he sat, put his bag on the floor, and stared at me.
My stomach dropped to my feet.
‘What are you reading?’ he said.
I turned the book towards him so he could see the cover, because I didn’t trust my voice. He leaned forward and read the title, and his mouth did something that wasn’t a smile but was close.
‘Any good?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. The word came out smaller than I wanted it to. ‘It’s all right.’
‘You’re always in here,’ he said.
Heat climbed the back of my neck. ‘So are you.’
He looked at me for a second, and I couldn’t tell if he was surprised or pleased. Then he smiled a lopsided smile that was gone almost as soon as it arrived, and said, ‘Fair enough.’
We didn’t say much more than that. He got up after a few minutes and went to the shelves.
I sat there with my face burning, my hands trembling against the pages, and I felt as though something enormous had happened, even though any normal person would say it was nothing.
Two teenagers. A table. Three sentences about a book.
But it wasn’t nothing. Not to me.
After that day, he came every time I was there.
Not to the shelves, or the computers, or the other end of the room.
To my table. He’d sit opposite me and read, or pretend to read, and sometimes we’d talk in low voices about whatever came into our heads – school, teachers, music, the fact that Jake Osborne had been caught smoking behind the bins and everyone thought it was hilarious except Jake, who’d been given a week’s detention and cried in the toilets about it.
Ordinary things. Safe things. Conversations you could have in full view of a librarian and not feel exposed.
But underneath it, there was something else.
A current. A pull. Every time his foot brushed mine under the table, I felt it in my throat.
Every time he leaned forward to see my book, his sleeve touching my arm, I forgot how to breathe.
I started dreaming about him. Not big, dramatic dreams – small, vivid ones where he was sitting across from me and reaching for my hand.
I’d wake up with my heart banging and my pillow damp with sweat.
I didn’t tell anyone, not even Lisa.
This was mine.
The kiss happened on a Thursday. All morning, I’d been thinking about going to the library at lunch. By then there wasn’t much room in my head for anything that wasn’t Ross Mercer.
The library was empty when I got there. Mrs Penrose, who was supposed to supervise, had left a note on the desk saying she’d gone to a staff meeting and would anyone using the library please behave themselves and not touch the computers without permission.
The room was quiet except for the rain against the tall windows and the hum of the radiators, and the light was grey and flat.
Everything smelled of warm carpet and old books.
I sat in my usual chair. I opened my book. I read the same paragraph three times.
The door opened.
Ross came in and stopped when he saw the empty desk, the note, the fact that we were alone.
He stood there, his bag over one shoulder, his school tie loosened the way all the boys wore theirs, his dark hair damp at the edges from the rain.
He looked at me, and I looked at him, and neither of us said anything.
He closed the door behind him.
He crossed the room and sat, not opposite me this time but next to me, moving a chair round so we were side by side with the window behind us, the shelves in front of us, and nobody watching. Nobody at all.
‘Kim,’ he said, and his voice was quieter than I’d ever heard it.
‘Yeah?’
He didn’t answer. He was fixated on my mouth, and I knew what was about to happen the way you know a wave is coming when you’re standing in the sea – you can feel it before you see it, the sand shifting under your feet.
He leaned in, I leaned in, and our mouths met somewhere in the middle.
It was clumsy and strange, and his lips were softer than I’d expected.
I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so I gripped the edge of my chair.
The kiss lasted maybe three seconds before we both drew back and stared at each other with wide, terrified eyes.
My heart was hammering so hard I was sure he could hear it.
‘Sorry,’ he said. But he was smiling.
‘Don’t be,’ I said, smiling, too. I wanted him to do it again more than I’d ever wanted anything.
He kissed me again. Longer this time. His hand came up and touched my jaw, just his fingertips, light and careful.
I closed my eyes and felt the whole world shrink to the size of that room – the rain, the warmth, the smell of carpet tiles, damp wool, and something underneath it that was just him.
When we eased apart, I was trembling, he was breathing hard, and neither of us spoke for what felt like a very long time.
‘Nobody can know,’ I said, and I didn’t even know why I said it, except that I knew it was true.
This thing – whatever it was, whatever it was becoming – belonged to us.
Only to us. If I told Lisa, she’d make it into gossip.
If I told my parents, they’d make it into something to worry about.
If anyone found out, it would stop being the purest, most private thing I’d ever felt and become something ordinary.
I wasn’t ready for it to be ordinary.
‘I know,’ Ross said. And the way he said it told me he understood. He felt it, too. The secrecy wasn’t a game. It was protection.
The bell went. The corridor outside filled with noise – doors banging, voices, shoes on hard floors, someone shouting about football. Ross stood, picked up his bag, and looked at me one more time. The look said everything his mouth hadn’t, and then he left.
I sat there for another minute. Maybe two. My lips felt swollen and strange. The book lay open on the table, face down, its spine cracked, and I couldn’t remember a single word of it.
I’d just had my first kiss at fourteen years old, and the boy who’d kissed me was the most important person in my world.
From then on, nothing was the same. Not the library, not lunch, not the walk home, not the way I stared in the bathroom mirror before bed, not the way I fell asleep. Everything had Ross in it now – his voice, his mouth, his hand on my jaw, the way he’d said my name like it mattered.
He was fixed inside me. Lodged somewhere behind my ribs where I couldn’t reach him and couldn’t remove him, even if I’d wanted to.