Page 9 of The Secret Of Us

This time, his smile is a little brighter, feels more genuine. I’m closer to getting what I want.

I don’t get a chance to say anything else to him, though, because Mrs. Harper is calling my name. The world is loud again. I have no idea what she’s been talking about, so I sit up straighter in my chair and pretend like I do.

“Yes, Mrs. Harper?”

“Do you think you can show Noah around today? You’re in most of the same classes, so it won’t be too much extra effort for you.”

Noah lets out a small sigh that I don’t think he expected me to hear. I don’t take it personally, though. The first day at a new school is always rough and it must be ten times worse for him since we’re in our final year.

“Of course, more than happy to,” I tell her, and I mean it.

I don’t know much about Noah, but from our slightly one-sided conversation, it seems like he could use a friend.

“Wonderful. That’s all from me this morning. Let’s start the year off right and get to first period early.”

She dismisses us, and the room gets louder as everyone starts talking. I take the chance to speak with Noah again.

“Can I see your schedule?” I ask him.

As much as I want to talk to him, he doesn’t seem to want to talk to me. But I don’t want him to feel alone. I was lucky enough to meet my friends on move-in day, and we’ve been stuck to each other ever since.

He rifles through his bag, pulling out a sheet of paper from between two books. It’s perfectly flat, which is what you’d expect, considering we only got them yesterday. Mine, however, is already wrinkled and torn and buried somewhere at the bottom of my bag.

Noah hands it over to me, and I check to see exactly which classes we have together. He’s doing biology and chemistry too, but where I’m taking sports science, he’s taking maths.

“We can work with this. Come with me to bio and chem, and I can drop you off at maths before I go to my class. They’re not too far from each other.” It’s a lie, but he doesn’t need to know that.

I give the paper back to him, worried that my fingers might have created creases in the pristine page, but Noah doesn’t seem to care. He just places it back in his bag between two books and closes it up.

It’s like getting blood from a stone, but I am determined to have one real conversation with him before the end of the day. It feels like a cloak of sadness is weighing him down, and what’s more concerning is how unbothered he seems about it. Why does he seem so used to being sad?

Amelia provides a lucky escape for him as she comes over to talk to me. She has bio with us this morning too, so I guess he’s getting a double escort to his first class.

We start to leave and I tell Noah to follow us, but someone grabs my arm before I can get out of the room. I wrench my arm away from Ryan’s grasp. I’d forgotten all about him once Noah showed up, but of course, he’s here. His brown hair is sticking up all over the place like he couldn’t even be bothered to run a comb through it this morning.

“Why did you block me?” he asks incredulously. He kept texting me while I was at the gym yesterday and so Chloe and Amelia convinced me to finally block him.

“Because I can,” I tell him.

“What does that mean?”

“I wanted to, I could, so I did,” I say, punctuating every other word with a point of my hands.

Amelia loops her arm through mine as a show of support.

“Take a hint, Ryan. She doesn’t want to talk to you,” she says, a simmering annoyance in her voice.

“Well, I want to talk to her.” He speaks like everything he’s saying is something obvious, and I’m the fool for not understanding.

Ryan reaches out to grab my arm again, but I shove past him, tired of his behaviour. We haven’t even made it thirty minutes into the day, and he’s already annoying me. I glance behind me, gesturing with my head for Noah to follow us, and he does.

“I don’t know why you ever went out with him,” Amelia says, her disdain for him clear in her tone.

“I don’t know either,” I tell her, even though I know it was desperation.

My desire to feel wanted overpowered all the other senses that told me he was a bad idea. Even now, the way he speaks to me and grabs me like I’m an object, I can’t believe I was with him for even a second. My stomach drops when I think about how I let myself be treated like that just because I wanted to force a love story for myself.

“Sorry about that,” I say, shifting my attention to Noah and away from the hurt I feel. He must have wanted a quiet morning, and instead, I’ve dragged him into my mess. Maybe I should give up trying to be friends with him. “That’s my ex. He’s been texting me a lot, so I blocked him.”

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