Between Us, Part 8: The First Invitation

Between Us, Part 8: The First Invitation

The Story Begins

On Monday evening, a message appeared in the 8.B class chat from Zuzka, who was in charge of the posters.

“Reminder: Friday is the school talent night. If you’re helping at the stalls, come at four. If you just want to watch, you can come at six as usual.”

One heart appeared beneath the message first. Then a thumbs-up. After a while, Kaja wrote: “And who’s going with whom? That’s clearly the most important organisational question.”

Three laughing emojis followed, then a reply from someone in Class B, and then a brief silence. It lasted less than a minute, but Filip looked at it as if it had a weight of its own.

He sat on his bed in the sports jacket he still had not taken off after training. Beside him lay a bag with a physics notebook sticking out of it. He held his phone so close to his face that the glow of the screen shone into his eyes.

Kaja wrote again: “I’m going with fries. The most stable relationship in my life.”

The chat came alive again. Someone sent a GIF of a dancing potato. Adam reacted with only a thumbs-up, which, coming from him, could mean anything from strong agreement to not feeling like typing anymore.

Filip opened a private chat with Nela.

He typed: “Are you going to the talent night on Friday?”

He read the sentence for a moment. Then he deleted it.

“Do you want to go to the school event on Friday?”

He deleted that too. Suddenly, it sounded as if he were offering her a ticket to something serious. But it was only a school event in the gym, where a ninth-grade band would play, cakes would be sold at the snack stall, and teachers would stand by the doors to make sure no one went outside without a jacket.

But Nela would be there.

Around her, Filip never felt like speaking too loudly. He did not have to make up a joke just to keep something happening around him. It was enough that she sat beside him during group work or handed him the pen he had forgotten after class. It was ordinary. And that was exactly what confused him a little.

At last, he wrote: “Hi. Are you going to the talent night on Friday? If you want, we could go together. I mean, arrive together. If you’re not already going with someone.”

His finger hovered over the send arrow.

Another message appeared in the class chat.

“Filip, you’ll definitely be at the entrance handing out autographs,” someone wrote.

He almost smiled, but he did not laugh. Instead, he sent the message to Nela. He put his phone face down on the bed, as if that could stop everything that might happen once he had sent it.

The next morning, he arrived at school earlier than usual. The hallway smelled of wet jackets and sweet tea from the vending machine. A few eighth-graders were gathered outside the classroom, comparing whose trainers had got wetter.

Nela stood by her locker with an open notebook in her hands. Her long brown hair fell over one shoulder, and a small damp spot from the rain marked the sleeve of her hoodie. When she noticed him, she smiled for a moment.

Filip realised then that he had not been staring at his phone the night before because he was waiting for an answer. He had been waiting for this morning.

When Things Start to Change

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” Nela replied. “I wrote to you.”

“I saw.”

It was a stupid answer. Of course he had seen it. Her message had glowed on his screen until almost midnight.

“So…” he began, adjusting the strap of his backpack. “I meant it normally. That we could just go there together. If you want.”

Nela looked at the open notebook, though she was clearly not looking for anything in it. “And what does normally mean?”

Filip drew breath, but Kaja and Adam passed them just then. Kaja looked at them, then at the phone in Filip’s hand, and her eyebrows rose in exactly the way that meant she had noticed something.

“Morning, mysterious people,” she announced. “Nela, we’ve got maths. If we survive that today, talent night will be easy.”

Adam gave a brief smile and carried on. Kaja was already at the door when she looked back once more.

Nela pulled the notebook to her chest. “I’ll write to you later, okay?”

“Sure,” Filip said too quickly. “Absolutely fine.”

When she went into the classroom, he stayed by the locker alone for a moment. He pretended to look for something in his jacket pocket, although he knew perfectly well it contained only gum and keys.

During the first lesson, Nela opened the notebook covered in stickers. There was a little blue moon, a dog wearing glasses, and the word CHILL, with one of the Ls already peeling away.

The teacher was explaining something about sentence parts. Nela took notes, but instead of examples, two short sentences appeared in the margin of her page.

He invited me because he doesn’t want to go alone.

He invited me because he doesn’t want to go with me as just a friend.

She looked at them for so long that the letters began to blur. Then she added a question mark after both possibilities.

It did not bother her that he had invited her. She knew that much. What felt uncomfortable was that, when she pictured Friday, one moment she wanted to smile and the next she wanted to disappear behind someone’s back. What if Filip meant something different? What if she meant something different? And what if the whole class watched them, even if nobody said anything aloud?

During the break, Kaja sat down at her desk without asking.

“Well?” she said quietly.

Nela closed her notebook. “Well what?”

“Come on. Filip looked in the hallway as if someone had told him the written test would be oral.”

“He just asked me something.”

“Aha.” Kaja reached for Nela’s pen. “And did the thing he asked about happen to be scheduled for Friday at six?”

Nela took her pen back. “Kaja.”

“Okay, okay. I’m not saying anything.” Her friend grinned, though not quite mockingly this time. “It’s just… if you want to go, go. And if you don’t, don’t. You don’t have to turn it into your final exam.”

Easy for her to say, Nela thought. Aloud, though, she only said, “I’m not turning it into my final exam.”

Just then, the phone she had left in her desk beneath her notebook buzzed. A new message had appeared in the class chat.

Kaja, sitting right in front of her, read it too.

“Oh no,” she breathed.

Patrik had sent the message: “So who already has a date for Friday? I need to know whose romantic mood I shouldn’t ruin by the vending machine.”

An Important Moment

Reactions quickly appeared underneath. Laughter. Eyes. A heart. Someone wrote: “Some people are suspiciously quiet today.”

Filip’s phone buzzed too, several desks away. He looked at the screen, and the smile he had just given Adam faltered a little.

Kaja muttered, “Patrik really is talented. At talent night, he could perform in the unnecessary-comments category.”

Nela said nothing. Suddenly, she felt that her answer to Filip was no longer just an answer. It was something people who had no business in it would see too.

After a while, she wrote in their private chat: “Sorry I didn’t answer properly this morning.”

The three dots appeared almost at once.

“It’s okay,” came the reply. “I didn’t ask properly either.”

Nela stared at it. She wanted to write that it was not his fault. Then she wanted to write that maybe she did not even know what she wanted. In the end, she locked her phone and put it face down.

Silence in the chat could sometimes be worse than lots of messages. This time, though, there was silence inside her too.

After the last lesson, the class spilled into the hallway. Someone hurried for the bus, someone was dealing with a forgotten hoodie, and by the door Kaja was loudly trying to convince Adam that volunteering to sell cakes counted as a good deed.

Nela slowly packed her things into her bag. She waited for the classroom to empty a little, yet she did not know what she was waiting for.

When she went out, Filip stood by the window at the end of the hallway. Beyond the glass was a grey afternoon, and car lights gleamed on the wet asphalt outside the school. He leaned against the windowsill and looked as if he had ended up there by chance. But his bag was still on his shoulder, and he had not left yet.

“Hi,” Nela said.

“Hi.” He glanced towards the stairs, where footsteps echoed, then back at her. “Can I ask you something? This time without the weird phrasing?”

Nela could not help a short laugh. “Try.”

“Do you want to go with me to the talent night on Friday?”

He said it simply. Without any additions, without pretending it was a completely casual question. That was why her answer did not come straight away.

“I…” she began, looking towards the end of the hallway. “I don’t know if I can answer that so quickly.”

Filip nodded. He did not look offended. More tired, perhaps, but calmer than he had been that morning.

“That’s okay,” he said. “I just didn’t want it to seem like I’d written it as a joke. Or like I was asking because someone in the chat would make comments.”

“They’d make comments even if you invited the vending machine,” Nela said.

This time, he really laughed. “The vending machine would probably reject me. I don’t have any change.”

For a moment, a gentler silence settled over the hallway. Not an empty one. The kind where no one has to rush to rescue the conversation.

“I’m not confused because you invited me,” Nela said quietly. “It’s more that… I don’t know what I think about it myself. Not about you. I mean, about you too, but not in a bad way. That sounded awful.”

“No, it didn’t.” Filip shifted his bag higher on his shoulder. “I think I understand. A little.”

“And what do you think?” she asked before she could stop herself.

What Comes Next

For a moment, he looked out of the window. “That I don’t have to turn everything into a joke when I’m with you. And that I wanted to invite you. That’s probably it.”

It was not a grand sentence. That was exactly why there was nothing in it she had to hide from.

Nela nodded slowly. “Okay. Can I text you tonight?”

“You can.” He smiled. “You can text tomorrow, too. The invitation has quite a long shelf life.”

“That’s practical.”

“I’m a very practical person,” he announced, and at last the familiar light humour returned to his voice.

They went down the stairs together, but at the entrance they parted, each heading in a different direction. They did not walk side by side all the way to the bus stop. They did not hold hands. They only looked back once at the gate, as if they wanted to make sure the conversation had really happened.

That evening, Nela sat at the table in her room. Her phone lay beside the lamp and showed no new messages yet. Meanwhile, the class chat was debating whether pizza would be available at talent night. Patrik sent another joke, this time about a romantic atmosphere by the school radiators. Hardly anyone replied to him anymore.

Nela opened her notebook to a clean page. For a long time, she moved her pen in circles above the paper. Then she wrote Filip a short message.

“Okay. I’ll go with you. But if the music is bad, we can pretend we’re there for the pizza.”

The reply came a moment later.

“Deal. And if there’s no pizza, we’ll say we’re there for culture.”

She smiled, set her phone aside, and wrote one more sentence in her notebook.

“Yes and no can be equally hard when you’re still finding out what you truly want.”