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I pry it open and stare into its empty carcass. I snap it shut again and whip the blanket off the TV. The red standby light is on, which means someone has been using it. I press eject and it whines. But the tape that comes out is The Craft.
Who’s been watching my old tapes? Jenna and Rose. I see them lying on beanbags, submerging themselves in my teen nostalgia.
I rip all the tapes from the shelf, pulling them open one after the other, but the tape is gone. The pink tape with the yellow happy face sticker that I’d stored in the Pocahontas box.
Anybody watching it, expecting Disney, would be in for a shock when the tape started rolling.
Jenna found that tape. Rose took it from her. And now Jenna is gone.
47
BEFORE
The sky is a silk sheet pierced with starlight. Around me the grass is growing damp. A bat darts, then another and another, almost invisible, from the trees out over the clearing, catching midges in a frenzy.
Why didn’t I just get in the car with Miss Smith? Why did I trust Princess?
Because I wanted to forgive and forget and be friends again. Even after a year of them torturing me.
Pathetic.
I see again Don coming towards me, his slow smile; feel his hand brushing up my thigh, under my skirt, and that shameful, melting part of me.
Maybe if I hadn’t pushed him away, this wouldn’t have happened.
Maybe he’d have kissed me and we’d have lain down and confessed how we’d felt from the beginning – from the first time I was made to sing in front of the whole school, my face on fire, and there he was in the front row, just grinning at me.
Why hadn’t I just let it happen? All I’d wanted for years, for forever, was his beautiful tanned hands on me.
But no. I couldn’t have let it happen, not because I didn’t want it but because it was a joke. He didn’t want me. It was planned to humiliate me. He’d never have gone through with it even if I’d said yes. Although – although it had felt like he’d wanted to.
My ribs ache and my ankle sings every time I move it, and my nose feels like an explosion when I touch it. I wonder how I look.
Can I hide this? Does anyone have to know?
Because what would my mum say? And really, the bigger question – how does she not know already?
She knows something’s wrong. She must know. But what can she do if I won’t tell her?
But I can’t tell her. I can’t make her life worse. Because despite the constant, relentless, fucking inescapable smile on her unbearably beautiful face, underneath she’s always hurting.
This is all my dad’s fault. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. The way he hides himself away from us and expects us to pretend it’s normal. The way he announces his trips up to London, excited, desperate, itching, and comes back as if our home is a prison, his face like a – like what? A sick old pug? A wilted and broken petal all mushed up and – what? A dying goldfish gasping for air at the top of its festering, murky – God I hate – I hate – how my mum primps and preens herself till she looks like a show cat or a news presenter or something every single day for breakfast – for a fucking movie in the living room with – adjusting her top so her honest to God cleavage catches the firelight just – oh my God – oh my GOD – and how she glows after a compliment that he doesn’t even mean. That he throws out like a measly kernel of corn for her to peck up and gobble down and thank him.
And her birthday, Mothers’ Day, Christmas, conveniently spaced out across the year, when he wears the blue shirt and sings her ‘At Last’, like he is her, because she waited so, so long for anything to happen between them, and then takes her to her bedroom like he’s his gift to her.
I hear her crying at night. I go to sleep listening to her.
In a flash I see him grinning at me and I wish I could reach into the memory and break his face. But then he laughs. ‘These hands!’ he says, brushing my fingers where they lie resting on the strings of my guitar. He cups my chin. ‘That voice!’ And my whole body fills with pride. ‘You have a gift. You are a gift.’ And then he rolls his eyes at the earnestness of it all and snatches my guitar and starts performing a mangled high-pitched Chipmunks’ version of ‘Isn’t She Lovely’ and I clamp my hands on my ears and shout at him, cracking up, to stop.
God. I hate him for the days that make it all seem worth it.
I shiver and freeze again as a bolt of pain shoots up from my ankle. I close my eyes and hiss.
It’s not his fault really. How could my friends beating me up be my dad’s fault? My parents weren’t meant to be together. But that’s not the problem. I’m an accident – an aberration. I was never meant to be.
People hate me because they see inside of me something weak and disgusting – something subhuman.
But how could my friends turn on me like this? What did I do?
