Nowhere Girl

Chapter 2

 Six months before walking away from being the hero of my generation, I was in the middle of a normal school day. It was biology and I was sitting at the back of the classroom. September, the start of the school year. A good month, really. School kind of lets you off the hook in September; not near the end of term exams, and nowhere near the end of the year ones. I did my GCSEs last year. I mean last school year of course. Really they were this year, in June.

Now I was in Sixth Form, I was specialising in the sciences, as I've always known I would work in the field of AI – Artificial Intelligence. Don't ask me how I knew, I just knew. So I was doing Biology, Physics, Maths, Further Maths and Computer Science. The school had let me take an extra subject on account of me doing so well in my June exams (I aced them all). But I was coasting. The subjects weren't really difficult – or I didn't think so anyway. The other reason for not working so hard was Ben. He'd been at our school for a year now. There were only a handful of boys in our school; I actually went to what was billed as an all-girls school. Every so often, though, they let in some boys from the 'brother' all-boys school just up the road from ours – usually this only happened in the sixth form, to help out with timetabling issues. Ben, though, had joined our school in the final year of GCSEs. It turned out that there wasn't a single space at the boys school, whereas ours was unusually low on numbers. So he was with us full time for that year. Now we were in the sixth form, though, he had transferred to the other school, but still took some classes with us.

Ben took up a lot of my attention. I had never met anyone like him before. For example, he was nothing like my brother Robert. Robert was loud, practical, and loved sport. But Ben was quiet and contemplative. He was extremely clever, which is what drew my attention to him initially – I've always loved people who are bright – but there was something about him which just somehow made me feel I connected with him.

I had never felt this way about anybody. He felt like the other side of myself – the male side. He was everything that I was, but the male version. I couldn't explain exactly why I had this feeling, I just knew that it was true.

Looking back, I can see now that the connection wasn't just this big intellectual thing which I assumed at the time that it was. At this period in my life, the cockroach man had disappeared from my dreams, a fact that I was truly grateful for. Instead, I had dreams about Ben. These started off with an aching sense of absence. It didn't matter what the setting was, whether the dream was about a school day, being down at the beach, or on a train going somewhere: the dream would begin with an inexpressible sense of sadness, of something wrong or missing. Then, somehow, the dream would shift to Ben being present. I would see his pale face and his blue eyes and his mop of black hair (slightly longer in my dreams than in real life) and then I would start to feel a sense of hope emerging. But pushing that hope was an electric energy, a feeling of power, a feeling that when I was with him, anything was possible.

Then I would wake. Each time I woke, I knew that I didn't want that absence anymore – I wanted the feeling of being alive that I had when I was with him. But even though I moped around, hanging about the classroom, not wanting to leave it if he was still inside it, not wanting to go home if he was still at school, Ben didn't seem to really properly notice me. I mean, we talked, and everything. We even sat in the canteen together fairly regularly. What we talked about was maths and coding. We were both totally into computers and AI. Once we got going on a problem, we'd be there for hours, working on algorithms together, refining then, tweaking them and then moving them on to a related set of ideas. I loved this - but I was racked with doubts as to what Ben thought about me: one minute I would be sure that he must like our lunch breaks as much as I did, the next I was convinced that all he found interesting about me was how much I was into coding.