Communications Breakdown

I was frightened of skipping class but today I could see there wasn't anything else for it. "Come on, we'd better get after her," I said to my friend. "PE's going to have to wait!"

"You would say that when we've got one-on-one," she remarked smugly, but I knew she saw as well as I did we couldn't let that other girl wander off alone - whoever she was!

We found her soon enough, in the middle of the high street by a grubby and much fly-posted old shell with a cash machine in it. She was crying her eyes out.

Oh, I remembered that red face and those tears! Tripping over on the playground, or getting hit on the head by a netball in gym. But it couldn't be her! How could it? None of this made sense!

"Aw, hon," my friend said to the golden-haired girl at once. She put her arm round her, steered her right away to sit on a bench, then gave her the precious cake she'd bought just that morning.

This sort of thing was why I loved her. She was all heart, even if she was also the biggest pain in the world! I sat down too on the other side of the weeping smelling girl, smoothing my skirts awkwardly under me.

After a nibble at the cake, our fair-haired little friend seemed to have recovered enough to talk about what the matter was. She was desperate to call her parents, she said. They must be so worried about her.

"And that stupid thing," she went on indignantly, choking a little on her tears again. "The only one around, and it would be phonecard only! Who our age even uses those?"

"Er," my friend said, though clearly she wasn't sure what to make of this, "no trouble there, hon," and she took out her phone, unlocked it and handed it to the golden-haired girl.

For a long time, that one held and looked at the slim oblong with its one lit-up face. Then very slowly she put it down in her lap, and rested it there on the pleats and folds of her blue school skirt.

"It would cheer me up to play Tetris," she explained to my friend, politely and patiently. "You're very kind. But please, do you understand that before that, it's important I call my parents?"

So saying she swivelled herself round so she was sitting facing me, and put one foot on the bench so she could take her shoe off. I gasped and flushed as I saw straight up her skirt. Those white ones again!

I had a mad impulse to reach for my French vocabulary book and write this latest sighting in its back pages. But it couldn't be her, I told myself again! It was impossible she could still be the age she was then!

Yet even the shoes were the exact same kind of little black velvet dancing shoes she'd used to wear to school, instead of proper uniform ones. I was going weak at the memory. Could it really be her?

The golden-haired girl skimmed off her navy-blue ankle-sock and took from it a ten pence piece. Very big and clunky it looked too, as she turned back to my friend and handed it over with an imploring expression.

"Please, if you know how to work it," begged the gold-haired one. My friend looked like she was wondering what a foreign coin had to do with all this! Then to help matters, clumsy as ever, she went and dropped it.

She stood up and bent for the coin, carelessly poking her butt in my face. For the second time that morning I gaped at her black knickers and stocking-tops. Then to my surprise the golden-haired girl sobbed again.

"Oh, you're missing PE on my behalf," she declared ruefully. This day was getting weirder and weirder! How did she know that? My friend and I, awed, asked her both at once.

"Well, you've got your leotard on under your uniform," the golden-haired girl explained. "I do that too when I've got a gymnastics lesson first thing. It saves having to change your underwear."

"Er, haven't you ever heard of ordinary black knickers?" my dumfounded friend inquired, and the golden-haired girl spluttered with laughter. "Yes, on someone's big sister or a grown-up!" she exclaimed.

My friend, by now laughing too, told her she didn't even have a leotard. Madly I wondered what the other girl would say if she knew we had one-on-one today. That it was her favourite too, perhaps?

This was getting too much. For the last time, it wasn't her! I decided we'd better move swiftly on, and reminded both girls about the phone call. My friend told the golden-haired one to tell her the number.

Once she'd done so, my friend tried it on her phone. "Not recognised," she reported grimly. Since the golden-haired girl had said what was unmistakably an old landline, I wasn't surprised.

Wow, I thought to myself, I'd always wanted to know her number, fancy finding it out that way! Next second I told myself yet again to stop it. There was no way it could be her - despite how everything seemed!

"If your house isn't far from here, maybe you'd just better head back," my friend advised her. I murmured at once that I didn't think the golden-haired girl was able to fly.

"Don't you go getting psychic on me too!" my friend warned me. "I've had about as much of that as I can take today! How on Earth would you suddenly know something like that?"

"Er, remember earlier today we saw her fall out of the sky?" I reminded her. "We'll have to take the bus. Um, please, where do you live?" I asked our little guest very shyly.

It wasn't like I hadn't known what she was going to say, and sure enough, the town she named was the one. I helped her put her shoe and sock back on, and together the three of us set off.

TO BE CONTINUED