Free Worse Than Boys by Cathy MacPhail Page A

believed any of the crap you were spouting in there?’
    I reached out to touch her arm and she drew herself back as if I was a leper. ‘You must think my head buttons up at the back, Driscoll. Because I am no friend of yours and never will be again.’ Then she leant close to my face. ‘And we are going to get you for this. Don’t you worry. We’re going to make you sorry.’
    And then she was gone, clattering down the corridor at full speed. And I knew then it was no use. I was no longer her friend. Never would be again.
    It was over.

Chapter Twenty
    The days seemed to merge into a nightmare – a nightmare I never seemed to wake from. I was literally without friends. I had never needed any others except for the Lip Gloss Girls – hadn’t bothered making any. In fact, I’d shunned most of the other girls. We all had. They weren’t good enough for any of us. Now they were all getting their own back on me. They shunned me.
    ‘Don’t try to be our pal now, Driscoll,’ I would be told. ‘We don’t want Erin’s cast-offs.’
    That was the message whenever I tried to be friendly with anyone. I was Erin’s cast-off and nobody wanted me. I would stand silently in a corner of the yard and watch as they passed me by.
    I would see Wizzie and the rest forward their text messages about me from one phone to another, giggling at me, laughing out loud at whatever was written. I wasa joke. And I had no answer for them.
    ‘Where’s your smart mouth now?’ someone asked me one day. Yes, where was my smart mouth? I couldn’t find the joke in this at all. Didn’t know how to handle it.
    I was pushed and jostled in the corridors, left to sit alone in the canteen. Always alone.
    ‘How does it feel to be bullied yourself?’ Nan Gates, one of the other girls in my class, asked me one day.
    ‘I was never a bully!’ I said to her. Yet I remembered the times we had made fun of her frizzy red hair, called her a ‘ginger’, rejected her attempts to be one of us. Had I been a bully?
    How I hated going to school. I made futile excuses to stay home. They seldom worked. Mrs Tasker watched me closely. She knew her little ploy hadn’t worked, but she didn’t try again. I couldn’t blame her. It would have been no use. There was nothing left. It was as if me and the rest of the girls had never been friends.
    Mum asked why my friends never came round to visit any more. Why was I never round at Erin’s? Why didn’t they phone? I made excuse after excuse. I became an expert at lying.
    ‘We’re all studying hard.’
    ‘Heather’s been grounded.’
    ‘Erin has flu.’
    I even took to going to the cinema myself, and pretended I was meeting the girls there. Sad, or what?
    One awful night I was sitting in the back row when they all came in, Erin and Rose and Heather. They were giggling, chucking popcorn at each other and everyone else, making too much noise, talking too loud. I slid so far down in my seat I was practically on the floor, terrified they would spot me – see how pathetic I’d become. And yet, I couldn’t bring myself to leave. I was mesmerised watching them, wishing I was still one of them, still sharing all that fun.
    I wondered if they ever missed me too. Missed my jokes. Missed all the fun we’d had together. I watched them for ages in the dark of the cinema, then I snuck out, almost crawling on my hands and knees. Crawling like a dog. Ridiculous, and funny too. Even I could see the funny side of it.
    That night I cried myself to sleep. I hated myself for being such a wimp. I wanted to be angry at them, but I couldn’t. It was me I was angry at, always feeling sorry for myself, drowning myself in misery.
    Next morning, I came to a decision. I would makeone last-ditch attempt to explain things to Erin. What did I have to lose? I was going to write her a letter. She couldn’t erase a letter. Surely, she would be intrigued enough to read what I had to say?
    It was Sunday. Mum went off to Mass without her usual