Chapter 1

Summer had been hard; hard to forget her, hard to move on. But the first week of uni completely helped change that. I was over her. I had forgotten her. Now, at uni, surrounded by new normal people, I could look at all the new normal attractive girls. I was saved.

My phone buzzed. She’d sent me a text:

“Wanna talk? Tomorrow 9pm ok with you? Z”

Z was Zoe. You wouldn’t believe the crap you get as a girl online, so Zoe went by the sexless handle ‘Z’. I’d teased her about Zed the gay biker in the movie Pulp Fiction a few times but she stuck with ‘Z’. And going to uni was supposed to be my escape from Zoe.

Christ, I’m making her sound like a monster, an abusive monster. Well it isn’t anything like that; nothing like that at all! Zoe is an angel. A very weird different angel, but an angel nonetheless.

A bit of back-story: Zoe and I were in sixth form together; sixth form is what we call the two years at school between high-school and uni in England. She was the frumpy quiet shy tiny girl hiding in the corner who never approached anybody, never talked, never got noticed. And if anyone tried to approach her she would have been rude and cold and uninterested. People were so not her thing.

Back when we were put together for our first team assignment she surprised everyone by approaching the teacher at the front and asking if she could work alone! There was a hush as she approached and asked, the whole class listening intently to see how it panned out. This couldn’t be personal since she didn’t even know me; it wasn’t me, it was her who had the problem. When the teacher gave us all a stern loud lecture on the importance of teamwork and communication I almost felt sorry for her.

It took at least half of that first assignment before she began to thaw. She was like Hermione Granger, which is a reference she’d appreciate because Zoe loves her fantasy books and Harry Potter is one of her favourites. We became friendly.

We never really talked, but we chatted online. After the first term it became all the time. We’d be sitting across a desk from each other, laptops open, chatting away without talking. Being computer science students, Zoe had developed her own chat web app called Zit. Actually, normal computer students don’t do that kind of thing: Zoe was an over-achiever. I think us two were the only users.

Online, Zoe was talkative; boy could she talk! She’d even make boring conversations interesting by play word games such as going the whole morning where every chat message was based on lines from a Beatles lyric or something.

“I can’t believe its happened to me. I can’t conceive of any more misery. Netflix was down”

I mean, how can you not fall in love with a girl like that?

Houston, we have a problem: boys and girls can’t ‘just’ be friends. One or the other always wants more. I wanted more. Beneath those frumpy clothes was actually a petite little pixie that enchanted me. She had a pretty little face hidden behind that boring boyish bowl-cut dirty-blonde hair. I fantasised about the rest of her, hidden beneath the frumpy baggy jumpers and jeans and sensible boots.

I lived for those moments when she would stretch. Every time our chat conversation petered out she would lean back in her chair, close her eyes and push her arms straight up behind her head, tugging on one wrist with the other hand to straighten her body out even more. And every time she did this I would get a glimpse at the hint of two tiny mounds in her woolie jumper, a reminder that there under all that unsexy garb was a girl, a real girl. Sometimes, despite the guilt, I’d deliberately engineer me sitting diagonally across from her and engineer extra many stretch pauses.

I was truly deeply in love with Zoe. Not just lusting after her body, but loving her mind, her conversation, her self. But I never ever did anything about it. Zoe oozed asexuality. She seemed completely utterly uninterested in both boys and girls, uninterested in relationships, uninterested in me in that way. She seemed to treat me only as a friend. We were, right under our classmates noses, secret best friends. I was her true friend. How could I betray that, risk losing that, by showing my feelings?

We never discussed it but I think she is somewhat autistic, or at least very definitely somewhere on the scale in that direction. Very high-functioning, though. She has a cracking sense of humour, can laugh at and point out very perceptive things about other people’s actions and motivations, and even blush. Its just that she’s completely lacking the social friendship warmth side that makes humans, well, human? How can you fall in love with someone whose mind works like a cross of Freud and Data from Star Trek? You can: I know because I did.

She never confirmed it but I think I was her only friend. Not that, as I’ve explained, she seemed to need any friends; sometimes I got really depressed at the thought she didn’t even need me. I had been sure that when we went our separate ways she’d hardly even remember me. Was she really feeling any kind of connection to me like I felt for her?

And now, after a summer of abstinence, she’d sent me a text. Reaching out to me. Bursting the bubble of distance I had put between us. I had actually chosen this particular uni because she’d already told me which uni she was going to and I wanted to get away from her. That sounds mean but its a self-defense thing. I needed to meet and fall in love with a normal girl and have a normal relationship.

I wasn’t sure if I should answer. Perhaps I should just quietly never reply? I had just started uni, was staying in the uni halls of residence with the other freshers, surrounded by healthy normally-functioning girls with normal bodies with healthy dispositions to display them, and I was loving it. Admittedly loving it from afar - I hadn’t yet really made many friends, more just acquaintances in my hall, but it was early days and there were distinct possibilities...

Who was I kidding? I was still madly deeply in love with Zoe, the feelings welling up in me just from getting a single simple message, and tomorrow couldn’t come fast enough.

Tomorrow came, 9 pm came. It came slowly. The waiting took forever. I sat in my room with my laptop open and my phone ready, not sure how Zoe would reach out to me. I opened the Zit webpage: it was still running, it seemed. Zoe had given it a makeover.

At 9pm sharp Zit dinged. Did I want to accept an incoming video call from Z? This was new. She’d obviously added video calls to Zit now. Damn I hadn’t expected that, and my room was a mess. My room was worse than a mess: it was a pigsty. Worse, I was a mess. I was an scruffy unshaven mess. Oh well, not much to do. I sat on my bed with my laptop on my knees, determined to sit still and not show her any glimpses of discarded dirty laundry or used dishes and glasses. Glad she couldn’t smell the stink.

There was some fuzzy static animation and matrix knock-off special effect and then padlocks sliding across the screen and then it cleared to show Zoe sitting at her desk. Behind her you could see a normal student room just like any other. A tidy bed, a large pin-board covered in tidy organised notes and a cheesy poster of Ed Sheeran. The Ed Sheeran poster surprised me- I didn’t know she listened to any music made after we were born. If it had been a The Who or Abba poster I wouldn’t have been surprised at all. It just goes to show how you can think you know someone but, after two years of chatting online across rooms at school, you realise how little you know when you see the window into their mind that is their bedroom.

Except, was it really Zoe? How could this be Zoe? Her hair was longer, shoulder-length now and off her face, tucked back behind her ears. And her hair was ... bright pink! And she was wearing a low pink tank top with string straps, showing her pale delicate perfect shoulders, half-hiding her brilliant white bra straps, showing her chest and the hint of cleavage. She was smiling nervously.