Chapter 24

Saturday was a ghastly Scottish November morning. The ghastly is redundant in that sentence as November in Scotland is universally ghastly. Andrew still ran for the full hour and was back in the house by 7.15 and had a hot shower to warm up. After breakfast he was off on the bus and managed to get to the playing fields a few minutes before 9am. He was wrapped up against the cold and the wind. Woolly hat, big scarf, big coat. There was very little of him exposed to the wind and he was still cold. There were three separate hockey games about to start but Andrew found the 2^nd eleven’s game and went over to the far side line from the benches. All 22 of the players looked frozen. They were waiting for the match to start and already their legs looked cold and red. There is a reason Scotland is not an international hockey powerhouse.

Andrew watched the game closely trying to understand the rules. There seemed to be a lot of whistles and one ref in particular seemed whistle happy, but he got the gist of it. The team lost 2-1 and the girls looked downcast at the end of the match.

After watching them head off back to the changing rooms Andrew headed over to Julian’s. The rest of the day and late into the evening was spent coding away. They had started to get little parts of the game routine in place. Nothing too grand yet but they were making slow progress. And as he had told Leslie the two of them sat and worked in silence. The only breaks were to change the records.

In two separate conversations Andrew told Nikki and Leslie about the resolution to the school drama and his conversations with Kate. It was Nikki who surprised him.

“So you don’t want a girlfriend, right?”

Andrew nodded at her.

“Doesn’t mean that you can’t go on a date, even a series of dates. Just talk to the girl first and be honest. Have fun with a friend and at the end of the night maybe there is a bit of light snogging. You both start to learn, you practice, and you see what happens.”

He asked Leslie about this suggestion later.

“I can see the appeal. Just be clear with them. Not my girlfriend, I may go out with someone else next week, we don’t have to kiss at the end of the night but we might. Low key drama free night. In fact you should schedule a series of dates so that there is not the pressure of going on a sequence of dates and becoming exclusive. The best thing is if you have the date on a Saturday I can get all the details on the Sunday.”

She smiled but he spotted the obvious trap.

“You’ll be told that I had a date and if it went well but you will get no details. Remember who my teacher was?”

Andrew was looking at her mock seriously.

“Just checking Andrew, just checking. Good answer.”

On the Monday morning it felt to calculating, it seemed to him that he was too full of himself. Andrew decided not to ask anyone. It was not him. He couldn’t imagine telling a girl to come for a date with him, don’t read too much into it and oh yeah, he’ll be taking someone else out next week. It just wasn’t going to happen. He saw the logic and it could be mutually beneficial but Andrew couldn’t see himself acting like that with one of his friends. Although it was taking a step back he felt relieved. His good mood evaporated walking to one of his afternoon classes. He was walking behind Mary and Hannah and without trying overheard them talking.

“Jacqui was in a right mood at lunchtime. Did you notice that there was some perv at the hockey?”

“On Saturday?”

“Yeah, Jacqui spotted him, standing away from the few parents that stayed. She was going to go and give him shit at the end but he sloped off before she had the chance.”

“Yeah, there was somebody. It wasn’t a parent, a dad?”

Mary thought about this.

“Why was he not standing with the rest of them? Jacqui reckoned it was a sad loser watching us run around in short skirts.”

“Ewww. We should tell Lyle.”

“I know. Either that or one of the dads. I mean who comes to watch 14 year olds play field hockey? There are hardly any parents that stay.”

Andrew was mortified. A ‘perv’, a ‘sad loser’? All he had been trying to do was support his friends. He had never considered how it would look to the team. There wasn’t a Jacqui in 3^rd year so she must have been one of the 4^th years. He shook his head at his myopia. He had seen the school’s first hockey game but he wouldn’t be attending any more matches. He was still subdued later at the afternoon when Suzanne and Paula came into the library. They looked at each other then sat down as usual on either side of him.

“Hi, how are you two today? Did you have a good weekend?”

“It was alright but we lost our first hockey game and it was bloody freezing. But you know that don’t you Andrew?”

Andrew lowered his head. Shit, they all knew it was him.

“What is the matter. Why didn’t you say hi, come over to the bench, wait after the game. Something you know.”

Suzanne was looking a bit pissed when she asked him that.

“Would you let me try and explain. I am still pretty quiet and shy. Especially round a large group. I am glad that you saw me and if the weather had been better I would not have had the hat and scarf. It wasn’t like my presence was a secret. On Thursday you told me about the game but it was on Friday when I realised that they were the first hockey games ever at Heriot’s. So I decided to come and support you. I had several friends on the team. I thought it would be a nice thing for you to have some support. I was also trying to be low key about it. I am still trying to figure out how to deal with women. I don’t know. I have this life goal about balance and being a better friend. I felt it was important for me to show you support. I moved something to later. Doing small things like that is a big step for me.”

He paused and looked down.

“But then today I heard Mary and Hannah talking about somebody on the team called Jacqui who said that I was a perv and a sad loser who was only there to watch you run around in short skirts. It never occurred to me how it would look. I won’t be back.”

Paula and Suzanne looked at each other.

“Thank you for coming and supporting us. It was Paula who noticed but she didn’t say anything. I thought it might be you but didn’t say anything. It was only when we were chatting at lunch that she brought it up and then it was obvious. We don’t think that about you. And I don’t think the rest of the team will either. Jacqui just likes to lord it over us all because she is in 4^th year, and she is always mad about something. We will explain to the rest of the year.”

Andrew shook his head.

“Please don’t. I am not going to be back. No guy wants that kind of reputation.”

Eventually they agreed but it took a lot of effort to convince them. Finally they were able to start studying. The study session went well, neither of them were stupid people. They had been struggling with confidence and once Andrew helped them past a couple of mental roadblocks they were making good progress. Paula told him that she had explained what she was doing after school three days a week and her parents were as pleased as Suzanne’s. She also got less shit about his intentions because there were always three of them. Her parents were also subsidising the tutoring cost so Andrew was getting £40 a week to tutor them. It was only later in the term that he realised that he was making more than he had paid in school fees tutoring his two year mates.

Paula said she had to leave five minutes early and so was gone as the library closed. Andrew and Suzanne were walking up to the gates on the way to their buses. Suzanne was fidgeting and looking nervous.

“You okay Suzanne? What’s wrong?”

She took a deep breath.

“Andrew, would you like to go out sometime.”

She almost blurted this out.

“I know you don’t want a girlfriend and I am not sure that I want a boyfriend. I do know that I would like you to go out with me and have you think of me as a young woman. Please Andrew.”

He thought about this for a second. Suzanne had followed through on his plan unlike himself.

“I would love to go out with you on Saturday night as my friend. I will take you to dinner and go to a movie with you, walk you to your bus afterwards, give you a sweet kiss goodnight and see you on your way. Anything else is too risky Suzanne. You are my friend. The first female friend I had at school. The first female friend that is my own age for goodness sake. I don’t want to screw it up by doing something wrong on a date. I would rather not go out with you than lose you as a friend. Until this summer, I had no friends.”

“Thank you. I would like to give this a try. I think the way that you describe it sounds perfect. It takes the pressure off.”

“Great. Let’s meet outside the ABC at 6pm. We will pick the movie and get the tickets and then head down Lothian Road for some food. For the first time in my life I get to say ‘it’s a date’.”

Andrew was smiling widely. They parted and he headed home happy about the day. He sat on the bus thinking; about women and dating and kissing. Going on a date, having a girlfriend were things that he had once thought were unattainable. When you don’t know any women and are afraid to talk to them the chances of a date are pretty low. Now however, he was stuck with the question of why? Now that he could, why did he want to? Was it primitive biology? Humans had the urge to date and eventually carry on the species. That seemed plausible at one level but he looked at his own situation. Never mind his ineptness with dealing with women. He was going to university and would be 22 at least before he graduated. Was the no girlfriend thing just a defence mechanism, if so was it unconscious? He needed to get out of his own head. He had been asked for a night out, not been proposed to. Go on the date and have some fun with a friend.

Tuesday started as a normal day with his exercise routine and he was working away in class. Classes were routine. Andrew always tried to have read ahead for that day’s lesson so that he could listen better. He tuned out the world and enjoyed learning. This was the one thing that had never changed. Andrew was happy being a nerd, he liked learning new stuff. Now that he was more focused and diligent it was becoming easier and he was totally on top of every subject. Latin was still a chore and was the one subject he actively disliked but he did the work. Every lunchtime he went to the library and worked on any assignments from that morning. This had increased in importance with the loss of study time in the afternoon through tutoring.

All of this is by way of saying that Andrew wasn’t plugged in to the vibe of the school. He didn’t wander about with his head in the clouds and it wasn’t that he stayed apart from a lot of the drama so much as it just something he had no interest in. By embracing his nerdiness Andrew had stopped a lot of his stupid efforts to hang out with ‘cooler’ kids. He went to the library at lunch and after school, it was who he was. Faith and Leslie’s lessons had totally worked.

The revelation at lunchtime that Andrew was going on a date with Suzanne, he later found out, was something of sensation. You would have thought after close to three months of the girls being at the school that this would not be a cause for comment. Unless you factor in the two 16 year olds both in the 1^st fifteen rugby team who had asked Suzanne on a date and had crashed and burned. Andrew hadn’t even made it to Chemistry before he was waylaid. Pete ran up to him.

“Is it true? Are you going on a date with Suzanne Jenner?” he asked excitedly.

Andrew was just about to respond in an equally positive and gleeful manner when he remembered Leslie’s admonition.

“I don’t know what you are talking about Pete.”

Andrew stonewalled him as they walked over to the Chemistry Lab.

“Everyone was talking about it at lunchtime Andrew. Are you saying that it is not true? Is this a big wind up?”

Pete was going to need a brown bag if carried on in this breathless way.

“Pete, I don’t know what you are talking about, I was in the library as usual at lunch.”

Pete was now looking confused.

“Andrew, what the hell. Tell me something.”

He was now begging.

“Pete, you know I hate being gossiped about. I had to deal with all the whispers about my cancer and then all that crap with Jones. I don’t know who started all this but it wasn’t me. Think about this Pete. You are my friend, right?” He nodded. “Suppose you developed cancer like I did. Would you want me gossiping about how you were? What your prognosis was? Not cool. I don’t do that to my friends. We’re half way through term one of the girls here. There will be a new story or gossip about who is dating who to talk about every day for the next four years. Today it’s me. And I ain’t talking. Why don’t you ask someone out? Then tomorrow it could be you.”

This last left Pete looking horrified.

“I get your point Andrew, there is no need for such extreme measures.”

He laughed and they headed into class. Andrew’s lab partner was sitting looking sweetly at him as he came in, and sat down at the bench.