A friendship

Every Tuesday

Two reluctant friends keep a promise every week, and the promise keeps changing.

Ages 12+236 pages
Cover art for Every Tuesday

The story

Assigned to the same after-school programme and united only by resentment, Priya and Dan agree to meet one Tuesday to get it over with. Then they meet the next Tuesday. Then the one after that.

Over a year of Tuesdays — through a bad diagnosis, a move, a falling-out that lasts four weeks — the meeting stays, even as everything it means quietly rearranges itself.

A warm, funny, closely observed novel about the friendships that get built by showing up rather than by deciding to.

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Every Tuesday

Chapter One — The First One

The arrangement was Mrs. Okafor's idea, which meant nobody had actually agreed to it and everybody was going to do it anyway.

Priya arrived at four and sat on the far end of the bench with her bag between them like a border post. Dan arrived at six minutes past and said nothing about being late, which she decided to hold against him.

They got through eleven minutes. It was, she thought afterwards, an unusually long time to sit next to someone and produce no sentences at all.

At the end of it Dan stood, put his hands in his pockets, and said, "Same time next week, then." It was not a question, and neither of them ever worked out why she said yes.

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