“It was you, wasn’t it?” I shook my head. “’Course it was. Not like Nancy or Ella have the brains to plot this little coup d’état.”
“Hey!” Nancy spat indignantly, but Dot made this little gesture with her hand and she shut up. Ella was trying to work out what coup d’état meant.
“You always underestimated me,” she said simply. “You expected me to jump when you said the word and to know my place. Well, Is, I’m finished, and guess what? So are you.”
“I’m trying out this new thing where I stop telling so many lies,” I said, and I really wished that Nancy and Ella were someplace else because this was between me and Dot. “So, look, I’m sorry that I was a bitch on wheels, but I did it to survive this place and you’re going to find out exactly what I mean. It’s tough at the top.”
Dot smoothed the edges of her fringe with a finger and gave me a smile that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention. “It’s worse at the bottom.”
“Oh yeah, did your boyfriend get the note I shoved on the windshield of his crappy little car?” Nancy suddenly piped up. I so wouldn’t miss her squawking voice.
“You shouldn’t have dragged him into it,” I said to Dot, who all of a sudden didn’t want to meet my eyes. “None of this was to do with him.”
“Bet he dumped your sorry arse,” Nancy chimed in.
“Did you phone him, Dot? I’m not gonna be angry, I just need to know what you said.” I had this awful note of pleading in my voice, but I didn’t care. “You can have it—all this power that you think is going to make your life complete—but if you have one ounce of respect for the fact that we used to be friends, then you have to—”
“I don’t have to anything,” Dot snapped, sliding forward so I wasn’t leaning against the sink anymore but pressed right into the enamel. She wasn’t looking quite so pretty right then. “It was all right for you to slag off every guy that we liked, but then you fall for some lanky student and . . . God, Isabel, it was embarrassing to hear you go on. ‘Oooh, Smith, he’s so dreamy. He’s so thoughtful. He holds me all night long.’ ” Her voice rose up in this simper that sounded nothing like me, while Nancy and Ella came in on the chorus with these synchronized titters that made my skin crawl.
It took several long moments before I could resist the urge to rearrange Dot’s smug little face with my fist. “Fine,” I said at last, forcing myself to twist out from against the basin. Bad move. Then I had Ella and Nancy bookending me so I couldn’t get to the door. “Okay, did you have this big finale planned where you flush my head down the loo? You’d better make it quick, I should be in detention.”
“Let her go,” Dot said graciously. “We can continue this tonight. I want you around at mine at—”
“No.” I was already at the door. “I’m grounded until I’m thirty, which, I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know, is a result of your evil machinations, but see, we don’t have to pretend to be friends now.”
“Oh, we don’t hate you.” Ella sounded pretty sincere, but then it was hard to second-guess Ella—she never seemed to be playing with the full set of cards. “You’re, like, on probation so we can still hang out and stuff, but you have to be the new Dot now.”
“But you’re still the old Ella,” I pointed out. “Sucks to be you, eh?”
“Not half as much as it sucks to be you.” Nancy glowered.
“Ella’s right,” Dot said smoothly, cutting through Nancy’s angry mutterings. “We wouldn’t want you to be all on your own. Not after all the crap you’ve pulled on other people. It would be really unfair. So we had a big talk about it last night and we decided that you can still be one of us if you agree to a few little rules.”
I looked at their eager faces; they were waiting for me to throw myself at their feet in supplication, literally. I thought back to all the fun times we’d shared, all the fond memories of hanging with the gang—and I couldn’t come up with anything. Not one single happy moment when the four of us were in perfect harmony about anything that didn’t include making someone’s life utter misery. It was quite a revelation.
“You know what?” I said conversationally, making sure my fingers were already on the door handle. “It’s really nice of you guys to be looking out for me, but I think I’ll pass. When have we ever been there for one another, without some nasty ulterior motive?”
Dot shifted uncomfortably like she had itching powder in her pants. “You’d have done exactly the same, Is.”
“Maybe I would. Guess we’ll never know. But my point is that we’re not friends, we never were, and I certainly don’t want to waste any more time with a bunch of retarded, wannabe sluts like you.”
And the matching expressions of utter disbelief on their faces were almost worth every indignity I’d had to suffer in the last twenty-four hours. Almost.
Let'sGetLost
Let's Get Lost
23
School was rapidly becoming my favorite place in the whole wide world. At least it wasn’t home, where I was on intimate terms with every inch of my bedroom walls and had to choke down dinner under Papa’s ever watchful glare. I put my elbows on the table one night and he almost had an apoplexy. Fun times.
At school it was easier to ignore six hundred people who hated my guts. I clamped on my headphones, and rose above the threats and the smirks to a sound track of angry-girl music. Being chaperoned every minute of the school day was a big help, especially as one of the Year Nines on my lunch table told me that some of her classmates had put a contract out to have me pushed down the steps. It was like The Sopranos meets Bring It On.
I’ve bullied enough people to know that the minute you show them that they’re getting to you, you’ve signed your death warrant. But if you can weather the storm, sooner or later someone who isn’t you will fuck up and the attention will shift. It was taking a long time. A week went by, then another one, and I could live with the shoulder bumping and the Diet Coke that someone poured into my open bag. The grafitti in the loos that said: “Isabel Clarke is a big, skanky ho. Stop her and ask her how,” was a nice touch, but what didn’t destroy me made me stronger. Repeat to fade.
So I kept my face blank and didn’t let anyone know what was going on inside. Inside there was this ache right where my heart used to be. It was Smith-shaped. And all those pages of A4 lined paper I covered with my crabbed scrawl had nothing to do with the extra homework Dad had insisted I was given. I was now on version nine of the Smith letter.
The first six versions lacked poetry. But what they lacked in rhyming couplets, they made up for in dogged, not-getting-a-clueness. I was in the denial stage then, so they were all variations on “I miss you,” “I love you,” “I’m sorry,” written out over and over again in my best handwriting, like I’d been set lines to prove my contrition.
Then I went into grief mode, which involved scrawling out achingly relevant song lyrics on Post-it notes, which I was going to make into this emo-tastic collage, scan it on my computer, and e-mail to him from the school computer lab.
But now I was edging into anger. It was starting to dawn on me that his entire motivation had been about getting me naked—he was everything those girls had said he was and I’d been too lame to see it. So, version nine was hopelessly stalled on the opening sentence: You really are an utter bastard, aren’t you?
I screwed the piece of paper into a ball and chucked it in the general vicinity of the garbage bin, when there was a cursory knock and my father stepped into my room. Hey, thanks for knocking.
He looked around suspiciously to make sure I hadn’t constructeda bong out of graph paper and string. When he was satisfied that I was living within the letter of the law, he folded his arms and subjected me to his gimlet gaze. To be honest, I’d looked better. My roots were starting to come through in all their dirty-blonde glory and, as I had no money for luxuries like black hair dye, they just had to stay like that. Plus, the whole pale and thin angle I was working screamed ‘teen crackhead’ really loudl
y.
His nose wrinkled, so I guess he was thinking more or less the same thing as I sat cross-legged on the bed and waited for him to say something. At least not speaking until I was spoken to meant I didn’t have to make polite conversation.
“I can’t come and pick you up tomorrow afternoon. Felix got top marks for his diorama and I promised I’d take him to the cinema.”
Typical! When I turned in 95 percent on a test, there was always a pained inquiry as to what happened to the other 5 percent. “Okay,” I said uncertainly. “What do you want me to do?”
I was sure he’d devised some scheme that heavily featured a private security firm, but his shoulders slumped. “I’m trusting you to come straight home after school. If that’s going to be a problem, then you can explain to Felix why our outing has to be canceled.”
I airily waved a hand. “It’s fine. I’ll come straight home. I won’t pass go, I won’t collect two hundred quid . . .” but I was talking to the empty space where he’d been standing, and the rest of my sentence was drowned out by the door slamming.
Friday was a very painful day. Mostly because I repeatedly got hit with hockey sticks by Ella and Nancy during Games. They apologized profusely each time Mrs. Harris caught them, then walked back to Dot so she could pat them on the head. I’d never have pulled such a cheap trick in my day. I’d had, like, style.
I was hobbling to my Art History with an incomplete homework assignment when I realized there didn’t seem much point in turning up. There didn’t seem to be much point to a whole lot of things, so I kept on walking. There was no one about, just the faint scrabble of pens, a distant voice reciting one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the whooshing flame of a Bunsen burner. And I couldn’t breathe from the faint smell of disinfectant and school dinners leaking up from the canteen and the sly looks and the head tilts and just the endless, relentless sameness of it all, which was choking the life out of me.
I walked out into the yard, through the gates, then ran to catch the bus that was just pulling into the stop.
I liked the sensation of uncertainty. Of not knowing where I was going, but as the bus headed along the coastal road, I began to recognize certain landmarks: the burger bar with the stupid dinosaur outside it, the row of mint-green beach huts. The café where Grandpa made the driver stop so he could buy Felix an ice cream to stop him crying on the way home from the funeral.
The bus dropped me at the cemetery gates and although I was sure I didn’t know the way, my feet carried me along the rows as if the rugged path through the serried ranks of graves and tufted grass was a familiar one. I hadn’t been there since that day when the sun glared down on me through the thin black cotton of the dress that my aunt Pam had bought me, and I’d stood at the back, concentrating on the tips of my toes in my one pair of nice shoes and pretended not to notice the looks and the whispering.
The grave was tucked away in this quiet little corner. She’d have hated that. She’d always liked to be the center of attention. Always had to know what was going on, even when it was nothing to do with her. There was a little glass jar of daisies, so Dad must have been here sometime in the last couple of days because the flowers were still fresh, petals milky white as they fluttered in the breeze.
And the stone was up now.
FAITH CLARKE
1967-2005
BELOVED WIFE OF DAVID,
DEVOTED MOTHER OF ISABEL AND FELIX
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don’t know any other way of loving.
The last lines are from a poem by Pablo Neruda that they read to each other at their wedding. On their anniversary, Dad would always get her a bunch of daisies because she’d had them in her bouquet, and he’d go down on one knee and recite the whole poem to her, and she’d blush and tell him not to be so ridiculous. But secretly, you could tell she was pleased that he hadn’t forgotten. They were like that a lot—always teasing each other, locked into this private world where there was only room for the two of them.
Not that it had done either of them any good. Because now he was miserable and fucked up and she . . . she was lying in the ground underneath my feet.
But as I stood there, listening to the seagulls circling overhead and the distant sound of the waves, felt the long grass brushing against my ankles, I couldn’t understand why. I looked down at my hands flexing and stretching nervously and I just couldn’t understand how you could go from being alive, from having molecules and blood cells constantly shifting around inside you, and thought processes and a mind full of memories and dreams and love and hate, and in just one tiny second these miraculous things stop and you’re dead. How could all that disappear? What happened to your soul, your essence, your wonder? Just because a muscle stops beating? It made absolutely no sense.
After the funeral, the vicar had cornered me while I sat in the garden and embarked on this long speech that I’m sure he always pulled out on those kind of occasions about how when someone dies, they’re not really gone. You might not be able to see them but they’re always with you and you carry them around in your heart.
It was a filthy lie. She wasn’t all around me. She’d gone for good. She was in the ground and she wasn’t ever coming back. And it made me so mad that I reached down, scooped up the jar with the flowers in it, and hurled it as far as I could.
My iPod battery petered out as I walked slowly back into town. I toyed with the idea of storming over to Kemp Town so I could give Smith version fifteen of the letter in audiobook style. But as that would mostly have involved screaming, “You chickenshit wanker,” it was best that I followed orders and scurried home like a good little girl.
When I felt the hand on my shoulder, my immediate thought was that it was Smith, because our thoughts had telepathically collided and in that split nanosecond, my whole body came alive. But then a familiar voice said, “I want a word with you,” and I turned around to face Molly and the really belligerent look on her face.
“Oh, hey . . .”
“Don’t ‘oh hey’ me,” she snapped, wagging a finger at me, which would have been funny except she meant it. “How could you do that to Smith?”
Even though it was Molly and I did have a teensy case of hero worship, she was just another person grabbing me with hard hands and looking at me with that perfect blend of disgust and disappointment.
“Why don’t you just piss off?” I spat out.
Molly’s eyes opened Bambi-wide. “God, you look dreadful,” she breathed and, yeah, she had a point. There was the swollen cut on my face, stringy hair, and the crumpled jumper that I’d been wearing for four days, which really helped with the whole Little Orphan Annie thing I was working. But she stiffened up again pretty quickly, because obviously after the way I’d treated poor, defenseless Smith I deserved to look awful. “Smith told me what you did.”
That was big of him. I didn’t realize I’d said it out loud until her eyes narrowed and she jabbed her finger against my collarbone, which hurt.
“What are you going to do? Write a song about it?” I taunted, because I knew she couldn’t wait to rush back and tell Smith that I was obviously pining for him. Well, she could tell him how I was still the biggest bitch in the 01273 area code while she was at it.
“I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction,” she said haughtily. “I only write songs about people I like.”
“Well, somehow I’ll manage to get over that crushing blow. And you can tell Smith, from me, that he’s . . . he’s . . . a . . .” I couldn’t really summon up the words to convey exactly what Smith was. It wasn’t even straight in my own head, whether I loved him or hated him or any of the million shades in between.
Molly wasn’t exactly waiting with bated breath for me to get to the end of my sentence, anyway. She was too busy gathering me up by my coat lapels so she could get right in my face. “You stay away from him,” she warned me, no
se wrinkling up in distaste. “He doesn’t need a psycho-queen like you trying to fuck with his head.”
I wrenched away from her with a ripping noise as the collar of my coat gave up the fight. “I bet it suits you to have me out of the picture,” I shrieked, demented-harpie-style, causing shoppers to turn around and stare. “So then you can have him all to yourself because, like, you know he’s totally in love with you and you’re just stringing him along. Must remind you of your rock ’n’ roll days.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Molly stopped contemplating how she’d ruined my very expensive, very lovely coat and tried to look innocent. “Me and Smith? God, that would be like incest or something equally gross. Who told you that?”
“He told me himself,” I said with grim satisfaction. “You’d know, too, if you weren’t so tragically self-involved.”
“I’m self-involved?” she gaped indignantly. “What about you?”