Class of '19 (A Steps School AU)

4 - Friends?

Lisa's point of view
It bugged me. I mean yeah sure Faye had apologised and asked to be our friend again, so had Lee, but what if once Claire had settled in she went back to her bitchy blonde friends? I'd trusted her with everything for 8 years of my life, so I (and I suppose Lee) knew the real her better than anyone else in this school, but for some reason I still thought she'd really stoop so low as to faking being my friend to get in with the popular girls. I guess I just didn't feel like I knew her any more. Well not the her she'd acted like she was for the last year. But why would she do that? She already knew virtually everything about me, apart from a handful of things which had developed in the last year, so what dirty secrets would she even think she could pick up on by becoming my friend again?
Problem Faye doesn't know about number 1 - when our friendship group had split up I'd developed some trust problems.
So I'd concluded I'd be a little cautious around her for the next week, just in case she wasn't really my friend any more. I shot her a glance from across the RS classroom, knowing I could pass it off as looking at Claire (who by virtue of me sitting in a corner had to sit on the end of a row of bitchy girls with Faye instead), and smiled a little bit. Claire was diligently copying the notes off the board, but Faye wasn't paying attention to the work. She smiled back, before biting her lip and covering her face. She didn't know what her aim was either. Either she wanted to be my friend and was scared that it wouldn't go well, or she was worried about me not liking her. But the smile, that had been a genuine Faye smile. A true smile, not faked like it so often was.

Then the moment was lost. "Lisa, as you're daydreaming across the room, what is the Holy Trinity?" Mrs Munday asked me.
"The three forms of God - God the Son, God the Father and God the Holy Spirit." I replied, without checking my book.
Mrs Munday nodded. "Very good well done, now if you wouldn't mind looking at the board, not the new girl, I feel like that'd be appreciated."
I didn't fancy correcting her with the fact I was looking at Faye, mostly because I quite liked having dignity and staring at a new girl seemed a lot more normal than staring at someone who's been around for a while and I used to be friends with. "Sorry Miss." I replied.
For the rest of the lesson I balanced thinking about Faye out with actually doing the work provided. But I was struggling to stay focused. The work was easy, intuitive, find it in a church kind of facts so most of us already had them down from our time at primary school, but completing it quickly gave me more time to think.

When I finished the work, I pulled a piece of paper out of my pocket, about half a strip off the bottom of a page of... German work given the writing on the rough side. I wrote 'Faye' at the top then listed all the things I knew about her that might have impacted her wanting to be my friend again. Then I got out a set of highlighters and highlighted the stuff that would be a bad cause for friendship in pink. I highlighted the good ones in orange. The ones I was unsure about I left un-highlighted. The reasons highlighted in pink were all very depressing - To be more popular, to spy on me, to make Lee/me think she's nice, to truly ruin what was left of our relationship as a group and to steal Claire into her friendship group. 7 ideas in all. Then there were the orange options - She genuinely regrets what she did, she misses us being how we were like I missed them, something bad happened between her and the popular girls. That only made 3 unique situations, though I'd listed many possibilities of what happened between her and her fellow bitches. The remaining three points were white - Her mum told her to, our tutor wants us to be friends, and she's confused.
At this point I gave up, partly because it was the end of the lesson, and partly because there were way more negative reasons that Faye might be edging her way into my life. I folded the paper in half and tucked it into the inside pocket of my blazer, before packing everything else into my bag.

Claire's point of view
The Humanities block was chaos. I mean I'd thought the English block yesterday was bad, but this was somehow much worse. It was split across 4 half levels and at the moment I'd only been in the bottom level (which was somehow both lower than and on ground level because of the gradient of the school site) and I was really hoping no-one would make me do it again. The section of hallway was nowhere near big enough to line up 4 classes, especially given two of the classes doors were in an alcove together.
"Wait where are you going?" Faye called to Lisa in the crowded corridor at ground level.
"To Hu8 to meet Lee." Lisa called back.
"That's the art block muppet." Faye replied.
Lisa ducked through the crowds of other students, grabbed both Faye and I by the wrist and dragged us to the other corridor. "Hu8 is in the art block." She said, pointing to the room where a geography lesson was still happening.
"Oh that's what that room is." Faye replied.
Lisa tried not to roll her eyes. "You're really not the most observant are you?"
"I was busy, I think you'd call it, mixing with the wrong crowd." Faye replied, with a slightly scary grin.