Black Chalk by Albert Alla Page B

brushed my thigh again, and it stayed there, and I felt happy.
    Late one night, we looked back on our beginnings, and decided we’d started being a couple after our second drunken full night. Unlike the night up Old Road, we’d spent the morning together, as couples ought to do. It was as sensible a guess of a starting date as we could come up with.
    Part of me, the romantic part, wanted her to say the relationship had started earlier, in our GCSE history class, when I’d spent all my spare time turning back and talking to her. But when I mentioned those months, she told me she’d been in love with Jeffrey then, much like half the girls of my class. She said it like she was sharing an old joke: all the girls had been in love with him then, and now they all wondered why.
    Over a year later, we were safely out of Jeffrey’s shadow and together. And we went on bike rides, and we watched movies, and she came to mine, and I went to hers. I liked to think of her, to call her, to talk about her – in all, love made me rather content. And yet, it was never an intense relationship. It never felt like it had to be. When school resumed, we spent most of our time with each other in and around class, perhaps meeting out of school once a week. I didn’t own a mobile phone at the time; there were no late night calls, no texting flurries.
    It was emails that brought it down. I’d gone to Cornwall with my family for the first week of the holidays, to visit my father’s parents, as we’d done for many years. There was no internet there, and my grandfather had no intention to install it, even a dial-up modem. For six days then, I read novels into the afternoons, went for short walks in the countryside, and came back to Grandma’s mulled wine.
    Back in Hornsbury, I didn’t feel the need to check my emails until the second morning after my return. When I opened my inbox, I found five emails from Anna. I started with the most recent one, in which she asked me to ignore her earlier emails, hoped I’d had a great time with my grandparents, and told me not to break up with her. Puzzled, I went back through the earlier messages. I don’t think I ever read the third and fourth in their entirety. It was too much, the outpour. She was asking me to stay with her, and she was repeating it, and I was reading it again and again, and I was no longer paying attention, and I was thinking of us broken up. I closed the browser, left my desk and went for a walk. And I went to bed with my sword and sorcerer book, finishing it the next morning. Then I watched a movie, called Jeffrey and talked about nothing in particular. It was the next day I called her: our conversation didn’t flow. We met in a park – I had no plan in mind, but when I saw her, it was there, in her already wide eyes, in the head she didn’t dare raise, in the way she flinched when I asked her how she was. With a misplaced sort of sympathy, I understood that, to her, the relationship was already dead. Much like I’d accepted her hand on my thigh, I accepted her expression then.
    â€˜It’s a pity,’ I told her, and she seemed relieved. Everything we said after that took the break-up as a given, and I felt like we’d done the right thing.
    It didn’t have to make sense.
    My days split between video games and a series of novels, the holidays dragged on. When school resumed, I was expecting a return to normal, if not in our intimacy, at least in our preceding friendship. Instead, she ignored me in the halls. She organised gatherings with my friends without inviting me. She went as far as to install her friend Laura in my old physics seat. When I challenged her over it, she looked away, pointing me towards Laura. Telling me I could take her seat, Laura’s mannerisms mimicked Anna’s in their disdain.
    I don’t want to judge her for it. I don’t want to judge myself. We were both young. But whereas I