Page 60 of Try Hard

“When would you have played rugby?”

She was quiet for a moment, the silence loaded as if she was waiting for me to read between the lines, to pick up something I’d missed.

“I remember,” she said eventually, “that you won at least two awards at Prize Giving Evening every single year. I remember that you got some of the best exam results in our year.”

I groaned but was a little amused and embarrassed. “Yes, thank you. I’m sure my mum and dad still have all those certificates.”

“As they should.”

“They’re not exactly gold medals,” I joked, recalling our conversation about her Olympic success.

“They’re the academic equivalent when you’re at school, and you never missed that podium finish.”

I burned with embarrassment. “You didn’t either. You only know I was at those evenings because you were there too.”

She breathed a laugh. “I think, unless you were at some specialist sports school, if you’re a good enough athlete to make it to an Olympic team, you probably did dominate sports awards at your secondary school…”

“You’re just saying that to minimise your own excellence.”

“This whole conversation is about you minimisingyourexcellence,” she shot back, laughing, before letting out another pensive hum. “I also remember how much you hated the corridors between classes.”

“Well, yes, they were far too small for all of us, and people were wild in them,” I said before I fully realised what she’d said. She’d paid attention. My friends knew I detested feeling like a battered sardine in the corridor, but I’d never said anything to Eve about it. She’d simply… observed me in the corridors and known?

“Mm. You could have walked behind me, you know? I kind of… cleared a path.”

“I did once. Right behind you. Close enough to reach out and touch you. It was a completely different experience, you know? Everybody looking at you, getting out of the way, saying hello. It was like following a celebrity to class.”

She laughed. “I’ll take you to a professional rugby match sometime and we can recreate it in the crowds.”

“You better not lose me.”

“You can reach out and touch me this time.”

I sighed. I’d wanted to that day, too. I never would have, but she’d been so close and I’d been so very into her. All I’d been able to think about was what it would be like if she reached back and took my hand, kept me safe in the sea of people.

“I remember,” she continued, “that every one of our teachers looked delighted when you walked into their class at the beginning of the year.”

“They did not.”

“They absolutely did.”

“I remember that, for the last couple of years, you wouldn’t eat lunch in the canteen on Mondays or Wednesdays.”

“Peer Mentor meetings on Mondays. Music on Wednesdays.”

“Right. That you’d get a mint hot chocolate every morning, that you brought a packed lunch but Tanika would still have you queue up with her while she got her hot meal, that you practically ran from class to uni prep sessions on Tuesdays when we were in year twelve.”

“Oh, god.” I buried my face in my arm. “I wanted my application to be good! And my class was all the way on the other side of campus.”

“I know. You used to bolt past my French class to get there.”

I knew I was bright red and dying of embarrassment, but, inexplicably, it felt okay with Eve. Perhaps because she sounded so very happy that she got to see me doing that each week.

“Okay, okay, okay,” I said, shaking my head. “You had rugby every single morning. You ate lunch with Kim’s husband-to-be and about a million other people who sprawled over two of those long tables in the canteen. You had rugby practice on Thursdays after school too. You wrote an amazing persuasive essay in year ten that got put on display in the classroom—”

“—as did you—”

“—and one of your art pieces got put up outside the head teacher’s office.”