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me the digits one by one as I wrote them down, trying to keep my hand from shaking. We
said goodbye and went our separate ways to class, and I was like, Okay, Trevor. Play it cool.
Don’t call her right away. I called her that night. At seven. She’d given me her number at two.
That was me being cool. Dude, don’t call her at five. That’s too obvious. Call her at seven.
I phoned her house that night. Her mom answered. I said, “May I speak to Zaheera,
please?” Her mom called her, and she came to the phone and we talked. For like an hour.
After that we started talking more, at school, on the phone. I never told her how I felt. Never
made a move. Nothing. I was always too scared.
Zaheera and Gary broke up. Then they got back together. Then they broke up. Then they
got back together. They kissed once, but she didn’t like it, so they never kissed again. Then
they broke up for real. I bided my time through it all. I watched Popular Gary go down in
flames, and I was still the good friend. Yep, the plan is working. Matric dance, here we come.
Only two and a half years to go…
Then we had the mid-year school holidays. The day we came back, Zaheera wasn’t at
school. Then she wasn’t at school the next day. Then she wasn’t at school the day after that.
Eventually I went and tracked down Johanna on the quad.
“Hey, where’s Zaheera?” I said. “She hasn’t been around for a while. Is she sick?”
“No,” she said. “Didn’t anyone tell you? She left the school. She doesn’t go here
anymore.”
“What?”
“Yeah, she left.”
My first thought was, Wow, okay. That’s news. I should give her a call to catch up.
“What school did she move to?” I asked.
“She didn’t. Her dad got a job in America. During the break they moved there. They’ve
emigrated.”
“What?”
“Yeah. She’s gone. She was such a good friend, too. I’m really sad. Are you as sad as I
am?”
“Uh…yeah,” I said, still trying to process everything. “I liked Zaheera. She was really
cool.”
“Yeah, she was super sad, too, because she had such a huge crush on you. She was always
waiting for you to ask her out. Okay, I gotta go to class! Bye!”
She ran off and left me standing there, stunned. She’d hit me with so much information
at once, first that Zaheera was gone, then that she had left for America, and then that she’d
liked me all along. It was like I’d been hit by three successive waves of heartbreak, each one
bigger than the last. My mind raced through all the hours we’d spent talking on the quad, on
the phone, all the times I could have said, “Hey, Zaheera, I like you. Will you be my
girlfriend?” Ten words that might have changed my life if I’d had the courage to say them.
But I hadn’t, and now she was gone.