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She laughed. ‘Try telling that to my grandfather.’
She started to open up after that, though she tended to talk obliquely, and I knew there were things she was keeping from me. All the same, I got a fair glimpse of her life, her real life: the bullying at school, the neglect of her parents, how her uncle was her only ally in her family.
Tristan and Theo were the only reasons she was surviving her adolescence. They helped her see that everything would be okay, out on the other side.
And then the fear, the crushing confusion, of what it was like to be sixteen and drawing the greedy eyes of boys and men, and to maybe be falling in love with someone you shouldn’t.
33
BEFORE
After my little porn bonfire, I can’t sleep. Not for the whole night. I give up at sunrise and shower, hoping no one will hear the boiler. The mirror confirms I hate each individual part of me.
And so I pick up my scissors and cut off my hair so I’m not me any more. The dark cuttings stick to my damp toes.
But I’m still me. And now I look like a mushroom. So I’ll have to hide until it grows back. Plus ça change.
My mum demands to take me to school herself but I say nothing and she doesn’t make me talk. I shouldn’t have cut my hair. I shouldn’t have made her worry about me and risk her wanting to know why I did it.
But maybe she isn’t worried. Maybe she hasn’t noticed. Not really.
At school, as per, I eat my lunch balanced on my legs in the toilets, stopping chewing, stopping breathing, whenever I hear the door open and girls flood in.
Twice I’m mentioned.
‘She took them down, right? It wasn’t, like, her mum swooping in and saving her poor darling and putting us all in the shitter?’
And, ‘My favourite was the massive lesbo-sheep-athon. It all makes sense now, doesn’t it? Why she was so desperate to hang out with the pretty girls?’
So, I’m a lesbian now? Who knew this fancy school was home to homophobic troglodytes? I let my sandwich drop in the bin.
That might be nice, actually. If there were something to pin this on. If, in the orchard, Princess had called me a dirty dyke. And then I could get the world’s hottest girlfriend to burn them all to cinders for me.
I decide to go contemplate suicide in the library. At least no one talks in there.
I head down the stairs, into the corridor, my eyes on the tiles – if you can’t see them, they can’t see you – and walk slap bang into… oh shit.
Wide blue eyes, slightly too far apart, lips like a bow, red hair neatly swept back under a purple Alice band: Spanish.
Whip was always going to fall in line behind Princess, behind Don. But what had Spanish ever had against me? Had she really taken up agricultural porn collage, just to torture me?
‘Did you do it?’ I say, not caring any more about self-preservation.
Her slow cat eyes search the hallway.
‘What did I ever do to you? What have I done to deserve this?’
She spies Princess at the same time as I do, standing in a classroom doorway, watching. Spanish fixes her face in a smile.
Her backpack is only on one shoulder and I grab it so fast she can’t stop me. I shake it upside-down, but only books and a make-up bag and an apple fall out. As if she’d be carrying porn around the next day.
Behind her, Princess catches my eye then slips past and pushes into the toilets. Our toilets. With the vent for hiding things.
Spanish’s smile fades as the door closes behind Princess. ‘It wasn’t my idea,’ she says.
‘But you went along with it.’
‘You shouldn’t have been so mean to Princess,’ she says, her jaw jutting.
