Moving back to London has meant reconnecting with my secondary school friends and it’s been a real pleasure. I hadn’t seen them since I moved schools for sixth form and I always followed their lives on Instagram but was unsure if we’d ever be active friends again. We were friends from ages eleven to sixteen; so really we grew up together. I remember having a lot of strange, stupid fun at school and, looking back, we were great friends because we enjoyed playing and doing silly things and I’m very grateful that I had friends like that and wasn’t peer pressured into growing up too fast. I remember one time when Ella cut glasses out of paper and when a teacher told her to take them off she said ‘but sir, they’re my glasses, I can’t see without them’ which had me and Jenny pressed up against the lockers as if we were laughing so hard we could no longer stand. I remember the time we printed and photo framed this woman from a documentary we watched in Geography and we were obsessed with it. We kept losing it and one day saw it in the science staff room and we sent Jenny to ask for it back. I remember laughing and pushing and shoving and one time when we were playing bulldog and Jenny caught Ella by the back of her shorts and she cried out ‘STOP you’re giving me a wedgie’.

I was so excited when they messaged me and asked if I wanted to get a drink because they had seen from my Instagram that I was back in the city – it felt like they had been keeping a kind eye on me too. They are both currently living at home and we agreed to go somewhere in Clapham as it’s easiest for everyone. As I sat on the tube to meet them I suddenly became nervous about seeing them again. It had been so long and, while I have lots of great memories, I feel like a very different person now. I arrived early and waited at the meeting spot looking around for them. When I saw them bouncing off the bus I recognised them instantly. I was across the road so it wasn’t their faces I recognised but the way they moved, how they walked quickly with small foot steps, and the way Ella pulled up her jeans bending her knees and moving her hips from side to side as they waited at the crossing. They both ran up to me at the station and we hugged and they were saying how they kept looking at me and saying to one another ‘is that her?’ ‘yeah I think it must be’. Then everything felt so familiar. We were standing in our little triangle formation bending at the hips from laughter, all talking energetically with our hands and it felt like we were back in school again.

At the pub we sat at a table across from one another with drinks at the table when I realised this was our first legal drink together. We caught up a bit but there was too much to catch up on and then we fell into reminiscing about all the fun things we did at school and talking about where our peers are now and who already has kids. Ella told me ‘I was hilarious’ back at school but I don’t remember that so much. Part of my nervousness about seeing them again was that I couldn’t stop thinking about every awful thing I did when I was younger. Flying through my head was every bitchy comment I ever made, the time I pointed out someone’s acne for no reason, when I got grumpy because Jenny’s flan in food tech came out better than mine, and when I was stressed about a history exam and yelled at Ella to ‘shut up’ because I was trying to revise. I had a lot of internalised misogyny back then. It’s hard to forgive yourself for things you did that hurt other people, especially friends, even if I was a child at the time. Neither of them seem to have remembered or held onto those things and I’m sure they have incidents in their minds just like that that I can’t remember at all either.

I made brownies because it’s Jenny’s birthday. I chose brownies because most people like brownies and we’re still getting to know each other as adults and I can’t quite remember what she used to like and don’t know if she still likes it now. I dusted a small ‘25’ on one because brownies aren’t a very birthday cake but I wanted it to be more birthday. I didn’t know if I made a full cake she would be embarrassed at the restaurant — I have a gut feeling that she would. I wonder what she’s done for previous birthday’s since we left school, maybe she did lazer tag or bottomless brunch or maybe she went to an illegal rave… I must ask her.

Goodbye for now.

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