“Of course. That sounds good. No wait, damn.” He slaps his hand against the steering wheel. “I got so caught up in our little bubble I’ve lost track of my days. I have to go away tomorrow, for work. But I’ll be back in a week.”

“A week?” I feel completely bereft at the thought of not seeing him for that long.

“I know. Should I cancel?”

“No.” I shake my head firmly. “Of course not. Your work is important.”

“So are you.”

“And I’ll be here waiting when you get back.”

The front door of Kate’s house opens and she waves. I wave back.

“You promise?” he asks softly.

I nod, because I don’t trust my words. And because I don’t like to make promises I might not be able to keep.

Notes from Ava

(Women’s Weekly, December 4)

When I was eight, Brian Thompson gave me a flower. One of those white and yellow daisies that grow willy-nilly along fences and roadsides. Until then he’d never been particularly nice to me, so, suspecting it was some kind of trap, I refused to accept it. He got angry and threw it at me in a huff, storming back across the playground to hide underneath the slide. You couldn’t blame me for being suspicious; until that point Brian was just another hot, sweaty body on the classroom mat, who occasionally pulled my pigtails and called me “Purple Pants,” due to an unfortunate case of indecent exposure when I fell off the swing one day.

The next day, his best friend, Nick, was given the task of telling me that, in actual fact, Brian was deeply in love with me, and was wondering if I would like to be his girlfriend? (Tick YES on this note if so.) Enthralled by the fact I was the first girl in our class who had been asked to be a “girlfriend” and completely clueless as to exactly what this entailed, I ticked yes. And waited excitedly to see what would happen.

Nothing happened. He still ignored me on the whole, and called me Purple Pants, but he did let me sit beside him in the back row of the mat, a spot previously reserved for boys only.

A week later, Nick delivered another note. It wasn’t working out. I was dumped, effective immediately. The note wasn’t in those actual words, of course, but the meaning was the same. Any air of mystique or street cred I had developed was gone, in a puff of childhood innocence. Lisa Ryan was the new girlfriend. I was alone once more.

I cried. My mother threatened to go around and cave in his kneecaps, but my father convinced her that grievous bodily harm on an eight-year-old was probably not an effective lesson to teach me.

“You just have to ride the pain out, honey,” he said sadly. “I promise you that you will get over it someday.”

And I did, of course. After all, I was eight. I bounced back fairly quickly, although I promised myself I would never let another boy into my heart again. Ah, the sweet innocence of youth.