Undercurrent

Chapter 28

"Is it four o'clock yet?" I asked Mum for the third time as I paced up and down the living room.

"Still no, Nina," Mum sighed. "You only just asked me a minute ago."

"Sorry," I said.

"Nini, sit down." She took hold of my hand. "You'll wear a hole in that carpet."

"Sorry," I said again.

Mum pulled me into a hug. "You'll be fine. Stop worrying."

I grimaced. Mum must have told me at least a million times in my life to stop worrying. Not once did it have the desired effect.

This time though, I didn't think I was worrying unduly. Ro was on her way over and I hadn't seen her since I left the carpark after our ice-skating session. I hadn't seen her since I'd realised that our friendship wasn't what I'd thought it was.

I wasn't sure what Ollie had told her but she'd seemed pretty desperate to see me. I'd had several missed calls from her and loads of messages asking me to get in touch and that she was sorry. It had taken me nearly a week to build up the courage to reply.

With only a few days to go before Christmas, I decided to bite the bullet and get it over with. Whilst I'd have preferred to skulk away from this friendship without any kind of final ceremony, it seemed that Ro wasn't up for that. At least doing it now meant I could gorge myself with as many tins of Miniature Heroes as I liked over the next few days and pretend it was just because I was feeling festive.

"Look, Nini," Mum said. "I know you're not looking forward to it but just think, in an hour's time, it'll all be done and you'll either feel better or no different. You're not likely to feel any worse than you do now are you?"

"No, I guess not," I conceded. "I just don't know why we can't ignore the whole situation and then when we're back at college, pretend we don't know each other."

"Because that's not how friendships work."

"We're not friends though, Mum. I'm not even sure that we ever were, really."

"You're telling yourself stories, Nina."

"What do you mean?" I was confused.

"I mean that you're telling yourself that you were never friends because you think that'll make it easier to accept that the friendship might have changed or even be over."

"You sound like Emma," I said.

"You've spoken to her about this then?" Mum asked.

Emma was my new therapist - my grief counsellor. After leaving the hospital, the Mental Health Team had been in touch, just as Dr Howard had advised they would. We'd talked around options – CBT came up a few times – but eventually decided that I needed to face my grief head on before we could go any further.

I liked Emma. She didn't seem much older than me really, which made it easier to talk to her somehow. She listened and didn't offer any judgement. It was almost like just voicing my thoughts out loud was enough to take the sting out of the particularly bad ones. It was starting to feel a little bit easier to acknowledge that Zach had really gone. I still forgot sometimes, or probably ignored it, but on the whole, I was starting to think about it with more certainty.

"Yeah," I said. "I told her about what happened."

"So, what did she say?"

"That I wouldn't be able to accept it until I understood exactly what had happened," I sighed. "So, either way, I'd be better off once I'd spoken to Ro and not just going off my own thoughts."