Class of '19 (A Steps School AU)

3 - Sorry

Faye's point of view
Both of their phone numbers had remained in my phone after the fight so the first part of the idea I'd spent Science silently planning worked beautifully. I never thought I'd ever get this close to becoming their friends again - I'd never even dared to hope I could - it was just that deleting their phone numbers felt too permanent, too final. It'd felt unfair, I couldn't bring myself to delete them, so texting them to organise meeting up had been easy. What hadn't been so easy was deciding what to say.
Given that upon finding out I'd been in isolation my mum had decided that I wasn't allowed to go to dance at all this week, I was given the whole evening and night to try and work out what to say and how to say it. I'd written numerous drafts and all of them had got screwed up (or as I got progressively more annoyed ripped) and launched into my waste paper bin. Then having given up with that I'd lay on my floor staring out of the skylight (being in the loft conversion had it's advantages) and spent yet more hours thinking about what I wanted to say. By 8pm I was questioning if I was actually just a dumb blonde like Lee had called me when we'd all been so deep in fighting I think, I hope, we'd all forgotten who we really were. At around 11pm (having grabbed my blanket from the end of my bed) I was considering just telling them that I didn't want to be their friend at all, to save myself the pain of trying to apologise in the right way. It was about 1am when the existential dread set in; if I couldn't even work out how to say sorry to my ex-best friends, how on earth was I going to survive as an adult? I got into a light, dreamless sleep that lasted only a couple of hours before my alarm went off. I lay on the floor under my blanket aching and wondering why I'd even decided to try and apologise. I could just wimp out, pull a sick day instead. No. I had to go in, to prove myself wrong. Prove saying sorry was going to work out in my favour.

I took a shower to wake me up, something I didn't do that often. I put on my skirt and shirt, not really caring if I got them soaked while my hair dried. I hadn't been able to find my tie anywhere and it was stressing me out. I was going to end up in detention if I didn't find it. But it wasn't here and there was no point hunting for it. I might as well accept the detention if I got one, I probably deserved it for pissing everyone who got chance to speak to me off for the last year anyway.
I looked in the mirror to check my half dry hair and realised how tired I looked. Nothing make-up couldn't fix. But did I really care what I looked like that much? Hell, I'm Faye Tozer, not just another one of those girls I usually hung around with. I could do what I wanted, not what they wanted. But I wanted them to respect me too, the last thing I needed was for the most popular girls in year 8 to hate me. Then again, Lisa wouldn't want to be friends with the girls I like and hanging around with her would probably be an insult to my new found popularity. I wasn't sure that actually mattered to me though. I think that what I'd actually tried to do was replace Lisa and Lee with people, but because I couldn't find anyone like them I'd ended up in the tangled web of being a popular girl. And because of that I'd lost track of who I was, because the popular girls were really all just the same as each other, they didn't care for people being different. None of them really had a unique personality, but I still did, and I had to save myself from becoming like them. I needed to be me.

That was when I realised what it was I had to say. I didn't need to script what I wanted to say, all I needed it to do was for it to have come from the heart, my heart. Neither of them wanted to listen to some forced scripted shit, they wanted to hear me tell them that I was still their friend if they wanted me and tell them how I felt. And the more I thought about it the more I realised it was what I needed to tell them for my own sake too.

Lee's point of view
I made it to the bus stop early, in the hope that if I waited for Faye I'd be able to hand her back her tie without the other girls she was friends with watching and criticising us. I was having enough trouble about her from my friends, we didn't need her friends to join in on the craze. I had it hidden in my pocket with my bus pass, twisting it round my fingers as I waited for her to show up. I'd tried really hard not to make it weird, but her tie smelt like her, like happier times and playing silly games together when we were little. I'd been surprised it didn't smell like a tacky perfume, one of the horrible ones that were all the rage with all the other popular girls, but it'd smelt purely of her. But now the thing that had given me so much happiness in the last 12 hours, that had allowed me to relive all the best memories of our childhood, had to go back to it's rightful owner.
I avoided my 'friends' as they sneered at me, preempting the statement they wanted to make, and stood alone, as close to the corner as I could, so I could see when she was coming. I questioned walking back down to the top of the path to meet her but concluded that might be pushing my luck. Because if what was going to happen this morning wasn't what I was hoping I didn't want to upset her before we'd even got on the bus. I didn't want to upset myself. Because deep down I was starting to realise that it wasn't that I hoped Faye regretted saying she hated me, it was that I wanted her to say she loved me.