Glimpse (6 page)

I sighed, turned over in bed and shut my eyes. Tomorrow was a whole new day. Tomorrow, I would see nothing I didn’t want to, and everything would be just fine.

The next morning, I worked hard on washing every trace of yesterday from my skin. I swapped my long white nightie for a new pair of navy trousers and a cream T-shirt that no one would look twice at. I washed my hair and plaited it, and applied just enough make-up so that when I looked in the mirror I was a vision of understated normality. Not weird, not eye-catching, just normal. New me.

I even made it to the bus on time. The bus, however, was less punctual.

I arrived to registration five minutes late, my back damp from running. When I scanned the classroom, there was only one empty seat – the one next to Scott.

‘Sit where you did yesterday, Elizabeth,’ Mr Scholars called from the front of the room. ‘If we can all keep the same seats this year, it’ll make life easier.’

I was glad he started calling the register then, so I didn’t have to speak to anyone at my table when I sat down. Smiling was difficult enough.

Doesn’t matter, I told myself. Dad would tell Crowley about his new work hours today, Scott would be gone from my home, and then I wouldn’t have to worry about him.

‘So we’ve got our own Bess,’ Mr Andrews said, as he handed out stacks of orange cards in my first English lesson. ‘Elizabeth, you could be straight out of “The Highwayman” poem with those lovely black curls of yours. Pity we’re not studying it this year or you could have given us a tour of your inn.’

I smiled weakly, more for the benefit of the twenty heads now craning in my direction than for the teacher.

‘Bess, the landlord’s black-eyed daughter,’ Mr Andrews intoned as he distributed cards to the tables behind mine. ‘Bess, the landlord’s daughter, plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.’

Susie prodded me with her elbow. ‘See, I told you the English teachers were going to bug you over that poem,’ she whispered.

I smiled. Registration had been a flop in terms of seating arrangements, but my first English lesson was making up for it. I thanked the school timetable gods when I discovered that Susie was in two of the same classes as me. I practically dissolved with relief when she remembered who I was, and let me take the seat next to her.

It was the first time I’d spoken to Susie since yesterday. I had planned to say hi while waiting for the bus this morning, but she’d been with her boyfriend again, each totally absorbed in the other.

I hoped to make up for it now – ‘Get friends’, and all that – but, so far, I’d barely had a chance to say more than ‘Can I sit here?’ The English teacher was an enthusiastic talker, and he seemed to have picked me as his subject of the day.

‘Are you a poet at all, Elizabeth?’ Mr Andrews continued his tour of the room, sliding a stack of orange cards onto the table between me and Susie as he passed. ‘Can we expect some epic romantic verse from you, since you’re living in the building that inspired one of our nation’s favourite poems?’

‘Um.’ I tugged at a curl that had escaped my plait. ‘No.’

‘What a shame. Maybe you’re a budding romance novelist, then? Or maybe you’re more of a horror writer?’

‘Ha,’ I said. ‘No, not really.’ I tugged at my hair a little harder.

Susie prodded me with her elbow again. I rolled my eyes towards her.
Help
.

‘Well, do let us know, Elizabeth, if Bess or the highwayman turn up.’

Romantic, poetic ghosts were one thing; horrific Glimpses were another. I shivered at the memory of that creepy, disembodied face.

‘Okay, enough chit-chat.’ Mr Andrews handed out his last pile of orange cards, and headed back to the front of the room. ‘Welcome to A2 English. I commend you all on your terribly good taste in academic subjects. What a delight to see so many familiar faces. On to today’s Learning Objective.’

He picked up a pen and wrote on the whiteboard: ‘To consider the effect of a character’s past on their actions’.

‘Write it down. Underline it. Let’s start as we mean to go on.’

There was a rustling as twenty sheets of paper were pulled out, twenty pens taken from pencil cases.

Glad the focus had shifted off me, I exhaled and copied down the words. When Mr Andrews turned his back to the class, I whispered to Susie, ‘Does everyone here know about my inn?’

‘Yup,’ she whispered back. ‘You don’t know how obsessed the teachers are with that poem. I can’t count the number of essays and poems and paintings and clay models and dramatic interpretations—’

‘Susie—’ Mr Andrews’ voice was jovial but firm ‘—don’t lead our new girl astray now.’

Susie rolled her eyes and fell quiet. I gave her an apologetic smile.

Mr Andrews turned on the whiteboard projector. I settled back in my seat, ready for a breather after my public grilling. My hopes rose as Mr Andrews flicked off the classroom lights – maybe we were going to watch a film.

My hopes dimmed again as the whiteboard brightened with a display of pictures. Not of books or theatre shows or anything English-related, but images of children and young teens, with their parents and friends, all smiling and happy.

I frowned in the dull glow. They made me think of the photos of my own childhood, the ones Dad dragged out to cheer me up when he thought I looked glum, but that just made me painfully aware of how much I’d changed.

Mr Andrews pointed at the board. ‘Believe it or not, I was this age once. You all were. You played in the park like this girl. You picked your nose like this little fellow.’

A few snorted laughs came from the class.

‘It may have been a long time ago, and longer for some of us than for others—’ Mr Andrews paused for effect ‘—but the things we did, the things that happened to us in our earlier years, will have affected who we are today.’

‘Yeah, James still picks his nose,’ someone in the row behind me muttered.

‘Today,’ Mr Andrews continued, oblivious, ‘I want you to choose a character from one of the texts you read over the summer.’ A few moans came from the class. Mr Andrews silenced them with a glare. ‘No complaints now, you all got your summer reading lists. Elizabeth, did you?’

I jumped – I’d been staring at the happy kids on the board – and nodded.

‘You’re going to plan an essay about the effect of one character’s past on their present.
The Great Gatsby
would be an excellent choice. Or
Othello
, perhaps. I’m going to assume you’ve all read both.’

Mr Andrews turned the classroom lights back on. ‘But first, a fun activity to get your brains ticking. Each table has a stack of orange cards. Everyone – get into pairs and take turns choosing a card. Ask your partner the question on it, keeping the Learning Objective in mind as you do so. Class discussion in ten minutes.’ He checked his watch. ‘Go.’

I read the Learning Objective on the board again: ‘Consider the effect of a character’s past . . .’

This did not bode well.

Susie and I looked at each other. If this had been any other activity, I would have let her go first. But I had a bad feeling about all this, and I slid the pile of orange cards towards me. Finally, all those lunchtimes spent playing Snap with the librarian at my old school instead of going out to the playground had paid off. My reflexes were lightning fast. I took a card and twisted it into my palm so Susie couldn’t see. I read the question with a mounting sense of trepidation. It was just what I’d feared. Mr Andrews had designed an activity perfect for digging out the very facts about me that I wanted to keep secret. I tried stalling for time.

‘So, Mr Andrews seems nice,’ I said.

‘He’s big on games.’ Susie looked around the classroom, which was already buzzing with excited chatter. She was probably regretting she’d let me sit near her. ‘So? Shall we start?’

I was New Liz now, I told myself. As long as I kept Old Liz out of this, everything would be fine.

I brushed my locket once with my fingertips, then asked her the question. ‘What did you want to be when you were little?’

‘Paranormal investigator.’

I looked up. The expression in her black-rimmed eyes was genuine. ‘Really?’ I couldn’t think of anything worse than looking for things that shouldn’t be there.

‘Yeah. My mum and I used to watch all those shows on TV –
Haunted Mansions
and
Britain’s Most Haunted
. If you’d moved here when you were ten, I’d have bugged you so much to let me look for ghosts at your house. I begged my mum for an Ouija board for my birthday every year, but she never let me till last year.’

Susie reached for the next card, so she didn’t see my bemused expression. ‘Your turn. What is your happiest memory as a child?’

‘Um.’ I looked down at the desk. I tried – just for a few seconds – to think of the real answer. But there was little point; like always when I tried to think too far into the past, my mind stayed murky as the surface of a polluted lake, its secrets hidden out of reach far beneath.

Just say something. I plucked a random image from my mind: a photo from Dad’s collection. ‘Riding a donkey with my mum on the beach,’ I said.

I looked at Susie, anxious – surely she could tell I was lying – but she just nodded and said, ‘My mum did that with me too.’

Really?
I wanted to ask.
What was it like? Did your mum hold your hand?
But instead, I just took the next card.

‘What were you scared of as a child?’

‘The dark.’ She shrugged. ‘But then everyone’s scared of the dark when they’re little, right?’

‘You were a ghost hunter who was scared of the dark?’

Susie smiled. ‘I was going to be a ghost hunter who carried a very big torch.’

I laughed, surprising myself.

‘What were you scared of?’ she asked.

I stopped laughing. I didn’t know the answer. I knew I hadn’t had the Glimpses as a child, at least; I wouldn’t have smiled so much in all the photos if I had.

‘Pick a new question,’ I said, sliding the card stack towards her.

‘What is your first memory?’

This one, I knew the answer to – lying in a hospital, wondering who I was, how I’d got there, who the snivelling man by my bedside was, and why I could see body parts floating around me.

There were a lot of problems with that memory. The Glimpses being one, not recognizing my dad being another, being ten years old and not able to remember my newly dead mother being the worst.

‘Sitting on my dad’s knee in front of the TV,’ I lied, tapping my pen on the table. ‘That is my first memory.’

‘Time’s up!’ Mr Andrews called. I sagged back against my chair, as exhausted as if my brain had run a marathon. ‘Cards down. Class discussion.’

‘Class discussion’ – never my favourite words, but combined with ‘childhood memories’, I wanted no part in it.

Letting Old Liz take over, I dropped my gaze to the desk and found a bit of old graffiti to stare at. Right now, I needed to work on my invisibility. I’d passed the test with Susie, but I didn’t trust myself to come up with something fast enough if Mr Andrews called on me. Having only seven years of memories, and not one of them before the age of ten, was one of my weird traits that I really didn’t want to broadcast.

I got away without speaking for the rest of English. But even after the class discussion shifted to Jay Gatsby and Othello, my insides were in knots.

I hated that I’d had to lie so soon. It wasn’t like I thought Susie would tease me if she knew the truth. It had been beneath even Derek to bully me about the car crash that had wiped my memory, taking with it every image of my mother that wasn’t printed on photo paper.

But my amnesia bothered me. It was like knowing my brain was a mansion, but that all the nicest rooms, the rooms I’d played in as a child, the rooms where my mother was, were locked, and the rooms I had to exist in were filled with nightmares and Glimpses.

By the time the bell rang for the end of the lesson, I’d made a decision. When I got home, I was going to add one more line to my Normality List: ‘Remember Mum and my past’.

Unrealistic
, Miss Mahoney’s voice whispered in the back of my mind. And maybe it was. But I had to try.

Feeling a few hundred watts brighter, I shoved my English things into my bag and followed Susie to join the break-time crush out in the corridor. Her boyfriend, Matt – I’d deduced his name from the number of times it was written on her pencil case – was already waiting for her, the jet-black hair of his head towering above everybody else’s. Their hands reached for each other automatically, like two magnets. Click.

Time for me to leave.

‘So I’ll see you in History?’ I said to Susie, looking back over my shoulder as I turned away. I was already thinking of my locker, and of finding a quiet place to recover my composure before my next lesson.

‘Sure,’ she called. Then, ‘Hey, look—’

Something large and bony whacked into my chest. I stumbled back, banging into some lockers. ‘Sorry!’ I gasped, automatically.

I looked up, and wished I hadn’t. I hadn’t walked into one boy, but a solid block of them.

‘Watch it,’ snapped the one I’d banged into, a skinny boy with greasy brown hair. He straightened the arm of his black zip-up jacket, glaring at me as if I’d done it on purpose.

I waited for him to move so I could get past, but he didn’t. All six boys glared at me.

Then one of them smiled.

‘Hey, spider girl.’ Scott caught jacket-boy’s eye, and jerked his chin towards me. ‘She’s the one I told you about.’

My heart spasmed as jacket-boy looked at me with renewed interest.
She’s the one I told you about . . .?
I could only guess what image Scott had painted – a girl in a granny dress, screaming at spiders.

My cheeks burned. It was only a couple of seconds before jacket-boy grunted and his gang swaggered away, but it felt like an eternity.

Susie materialized by my shoulder. She touched my arm, making me jump. ‘Hey, are you okay? You’ve gone really pale.’

I shook myself. ‘I’m fine,’ I said, watching the boys retreating down the corridor.