I met Lauren when we were 11 and started a brand new school. I looked tiny in the uniform that swamped me (yes, Mum, I did 'grow into it' but I was in Year 9 by then and the uniform had long since been chucked after I'd exhausted all wear out of it). I was scared senseless. Francesca, my best friend from Primary School, had gone to the local all-girls school (a fact she grew to hate. What was the point of school without boys?) and I felt alone and completely out of my depth. I'd heard all the horror stories and they were playing on a loop in my head. I'm not saying that Francesca could ever have stopped the older lot shoving my head down the loo for a good old-fashioned bog wash, but it would have been nice to have her by my side. To have an ally.
I had no-one.
And then I met Lauren.
Lauren McIntosh was everything I was not: tall, confident and wearing a uniform that fit. She didn't shuffle through the unfamiliar corridors with her head down, afraid to meet the eye of the older kids in case they bog washed her. She practically skipped through those corridors between classes, smiling and chatting to everybody and anybody, no matter what their status was. Most popular girl of Year 10, teacher, vicious bully, it didn't matter to Lauren.
'Are you lost?' Lauren had stopped as I stood, eyes wide and darting, trying to get my bearings without making eye contact with anybody, just in case. I was lost, but I wasn't about to divulge that information and confirm everybody's suspicion that I was a bit of a loser in my baggy jumper and below-the-knee skirt.
'I'm just having a rest.' Yes, because that was better than being lost, wasn't it? Losers didn't stop in the middle of a busy school corridor for a rest between classes, did they? I was truly the biggest dweeb on earth and deserved a dunking in the loo.
'It's exhausting, isn't it?' Instead of laughing at me - or worse - Lauren looped her arm through mine and began wandering down the corridor. 'My old school was tiny compared to this place. Where did you go?'
And so, on our way to maths, with Lauren very much leading the way, we chatted about our previous schools. Like me, Lauren had parted ways with her closest friends. But worse than me, Lauren was new to the area and so couldn't even catch up at the weekends like Francesca and I. During that short walk (it turned out our classroom for maths was just around the corner, up a flight of stairs and the first door on the right), Lauren and I became friends.
Sixteen years later, we are still friends. Best friends. We've always planned to live together - like Rachel and Monica in Friends (although neither of us are particularly neat so we'd both have to be Rachel) - but it hasn't happened yet. Lauren is still working her way through the debts she accumulated while at university and I earn a pittance. But the dream is still there. One day I will escape my family. That thought is the only thing that keeps me sane at times.
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