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And yes, I’d thought she was suicidal before she ever even spoke a word to me.
She had a problem. I could be the answer.
‘Sorry, Neil.’
‘It’s probably nothing,’ he said.
‘Probably.’
I knew he expected me to offer to stay at the school and help, but I didn’t. I had places to be.
‘Okay, well, keep your phone on you in case this becomes serious.’
‘Will do,’ I said.
‘Right.’
‘I love you.’
‘I love you too.’
We hung up, and I sat back, my pen still poised.
I love you.
I had said it without thinking. Because I meant it. And because I needed his trust.
Why do we trust the ones we love? Why do we make that mistake again and again and again?
We had never said it before.
But he said it back.
Why? Did he mean it?
This had never happened to me before. I had never let a relationship get this far. Was it normal to say it then hang up like it was nothing?
I blinked, then got back to my marking. Children’s opinions on Shakespeare are hard enough to read even when they’re not written in smeary, slug-trail fountain pen, but all you really have to do is read the name at the top. I finished quickly. Usually, I’d have been at my dad’s, but something about that morning had kept me at PES, and that instinct had been proven right.
I started planning my next lesson with Jenna but found myself staring out the window. A group of girls were playing frisbee, watched by a group of boys. I watched them watching, till I felt enough time had passed between Neil’s call and my leaving for it not to seem as though the two were linked.
70
NOW
My whole body is numb. I feel weightless. I follow the line of dark spots up the stairs. We’re trying to be quiet, but the stairs creak with each step and Mina shrieks as she slips and grabs the banister. When she stands, her leg has a streak of red from her knee to her ankle.
Dust, cobwebs, grimy light.
This isn’t how I remember Georgia’s house.
Laughter, glasses glinting in candlelight, music, Georgia singing in the bay window as her father played the viola or the saxophone or simply a castanet. If we were there, then my parents weren’t fighting, my mother’s tiny voice silenced by the walls and my father’s booming bass shaking them.
And Georgia said it was the same for her. We conspired to bring our families ever closer, to spend as much time as we could in the golden, glittering truce of Together Time. Wednesdays, weekends, holidays, we were in and out of each other’s houses. Miss Smith and Patrick would cook delicious meals and we would eat till we were close to groaning.
It felt so normal. We were a normal family who had normal friends. It felt so real.
But that normal feeling dissipated on the drives home. Father was always itching to dissect the evening, do them down, even though I’d never seen him so happy, so relaxed.
