"Whatever you do, don't go writing about me in your blog, Charly Cox!"

Remember when you needed to borrow a pen at school and some shy self-effacing student would rummage in her unnecessarily large pencil case and remove a multi-pack wad of biros?
I was that girl, I was your saviour.

My worldly selfless ways didn't stop there, oh no, I'd also do my homework 5 times so you and your friends didn't have to.
With pride I would produce hot-off-the-printer essays, fact files and math sheets, desperately vying for some sort of elementary friends with benefits relationship; whereby I'd do your homework and you might smile at me in the corridor.
This technique sadly never served me too well for the 5 years I attended school, until I'd left.

"I had you wrong Charlotte, you're actually alright." Says a worryingly large span of people I bump into on a night out in my hometown just recently.
I've learnt the power of GHD straighteners, NARS blusher and a tight Topshop skirt.
Suddenly, my homework prowess is no longer needed- just the personality I was always too deafeningly afraid to show in the classroom. I've shed my geeky school persona, not from social pressure, but merely because I've re-clothed myself in the confidence that I knew I was 'actually alright' without someone in a bar telling me so.

I mould their backwards compliment into some sort of hindsight letter to my 15 year old self:
"Dear Charlotte, one day you wont have to stay up until 2am on spark notes for some boy you fancy in Religious Education. You actually make a great friend, not that half of the people you'll spend the next 3 years with will ever know- it's their loss not yours. PS. when you do cut your hair off and straighten the frizzy mess, people will start calling you Charly and want to sit next to you. Get as far away from them as possible, they're as fickle as that Frankie from The Saturday's photo you took to the hairdressers."

Some days later I find the 15 year old me pinching myself that I'm 6 cocktails in with someone I once slaved over homework for and took hideous amounts of gratification when he chose to sit next to me one lesson.
"Whatever you do, don't go writing about me in your blog, Charly Cox!"
He moves his face from mine with a mischievous grin, probably how I once imagined it.

It's a lovely smile, so it'd be a shame not to give it some space on the internet further than a Facebook profile picture.
Oops.