Heart-Shaped Bruise (8 page)

‘And why was that important, Emily?’

I had to take a breath before I said it. ‘Because I could make her beg for it.’

Naomi is with Doctor Gilyard so I’m in my room. Lily is asleep on my bed, her eyelashes fluttering. I wish I could sleep like that; she looks so content. I think she’s used to it now – this place. I think she might even be enjoying it. She certainly seems to relish asking me question after question. She just asked me what it was like, being someone else. I didn’t lie. I told her that I enjoyed it; the lies, the melodrama, the weeks of smiling at Juliet and feeding her sweet little lies while she looked at me with wide brown eyes, devouring every word.

I expected her to be more suspicious – of me, of Sid – but she wasn’t at all. Our three lives knotted together the moment we met in that classroom. We went to classes together and had lunch together. In the evenings, we went to the cinema and, while it was still warm, we sat in the park, sharing bags of crisps
and watching the sky change from pink to purple to black, like an old bruise. On Friday nights there was a pub in Camden that didn’t check IDs and on Saturdays there was always a party; Sid always knew someone who was DJ’ing somewhere or a mate who was turning eighteen. It was like the summer before I met them, the summer before Juliet stabbed Dad and everything fell apart, back when we were young and free and unbreakable.

I even started having dinner at Juliet’s house two, sometimes three, times a week. Her foster parents – Mike and Eve – ate up my grumbles about my parents’ divorce and how my mother was never home, just like Juliet had, and as soon as they did, as soon as they started feeding me roast chicken and asking about college, I knew that was it
. . .
I’d been invited in.

I didn’t tell Lily this, but the best thing about being Rose Glass was that I didn’t have to be Emily Koll. And the best thing about not being Emily Koll was that I could start again. I could cross that year out, the year Dad was on remand, the year I was in Spain, and be sixteen again.

It’s a terrible thing, I suppose, to be seventeen and to want to start again. It’s not like before then – before Juliet – I was unhappy. I was popular at school. Okay, I wasn’t one of the shiny-haired girls who looked at your bag before they looked at you and I wasn’t as cool as the girls who drank coffee and read Murakami, but I had found a corner for myself – I played the cello. It wasn’t the guitar and I wore black dresses instead of black nail varnish, but I was good, good enough to make Dad and Uncle Alex cry when they came to my recitals. And I had friends;
I swapped clothes with Catherine Bamford and held Alma Peet’s hair every time we went to a party and Max Dalton fed her vodka shots until she puked. And when Olivia’s grandmother died, I got everyone to sign a card and we made a donation to Cancer Research.

But that was before. So forget about that Emily; she went away the moment Juliet stabbed Dad. Now I’m Harry Koll’s daughter. That’s all I’ll ever be, so forgive me if I wanted to be Rose Glass for a while.

I know it’s moments like this when I sound utterly insane, but I learned a lot from being Rose. Before I had to be someone else I didn’t think too much about who I was. I was who I was, if you know what I mean. I didn’t think that could change. I thought my personality was as much a part of me as the colour of my hair. But then I dyed it red and I didn’t look like me any more. I looked like Monday Fitzgerald.

Monday was in Year 11 when I started at St Jude’s. She didn’t have shiny hair or read Murakami, but every girl in my year was in awe of her. Where we were small with too much hair and not enough personality, Monday was tall and graceful with huge cardamom-coloured eyes and a smile that could stop a horse mid-gallop.

Every girl at St Jude’s wanted to be Monday Fitzgerald. Not because she was popular or pretty or destined for greatness, but because in a school where everyone looked the same and dressed the same and went out with the same handful of boys, Monday Fitzgerald walked through the halls in her rolled-up tartan skirt
and Doc Martens absolutely and unashamedly herself. And we loved her for it.

If we’d had any idea who we were, we would have done the same.

It’s funny how it took becoming someone else to realise who I am. Who I
could
be. I thought the world was split into people like Monday and people like me. I didn’t think I could walk into a room with a swing of the hips and a smile for everyone. I don’t know why; I only had to do it once and then I would have done it. But I guess if someone tells you something enough, you start to believe it. All my life, all I’d ever heard was: Emily’s so shy, Emily’s so quiet, Emily’s so clever. Thinking back on it now, I don’t know if I ever was any of those things, or if I just became shy and quiet and clever because everyone said I was.

But when I was Rose, I didn’t have to be. It was as though I could shuffle off Emily like she was a winter coat and it was too warm to wear it any more. Then I was free to say what I wanted, wear what I wanted. I listened to bands because they made me feel restless, not because someone said they were cool. In clothes shops, I began to stray towards the rails which previously I would just have gazed at, try on the clothes I thought didn’t suit me. Maybe they still didn’t suit me, but I didn’t care, and that’s the point: Rose was the girl I wanted to be but I was too scared that Dad wouldn’t approve of or who my friends would think was weird. But the truth is: I am weird. I’ve always been weird. And when I was Rose, I could be. A mismatched,
red-haired Kerouacian kind of weird perfectly fitting of a girl called Rose.

And I liked it.

Then I met Grace Humm.

Grace Humm was my personal tutor. It felt strange calling her that. Everyone at St Jude’s was Miss or Sir. There were no first names. But at the College of North London we were adults, apparently, and could call teachers by their first name.

I met Grace the morning I started at the college and I spent the three weeks after that avoiding her. I’d ducked into classroom, locked myself in the toilet and once hid behind a bin in the canteen. But when I finally met her, I kind of wished I hadn’t, because if Rose allowed me to be weird, then Grace showed me how to own it. How to wallow in it. She taught me to wear weird like a feather in my hair.

If I ever grow up, I want to be Grace Humm.

But I didn’t know that back then. All I thought about was Juliet, so I didn’t want to sit with a teacher and discuss how I was getting on with my classes and what universities I wanted to apply to. I wasn’t going to university. I wasn’t even going to be at college much longer. I thought another two – maybe three – weeks and it’d be done, I’d be gone and she wouldn’t even notice. But that was my first mistake, thinking she wasn’t paying attention.

‘Rose,’ she said, walking towards me one day as Juliet and I were standing by our lockers plotting how we could get Sid to try sushi. ‘Are you avoiding me?’

Juliet and I exchanged a look and I contemplated making a run for it, but when I saw how busy the corridor was, I blew a bubble with my gum instead.

‘Hello, Miss,’ I said, tossing a book into my locker.

‘Oh, Rose. I’m so glad this isn’t awkward. I thought it would be awkward,’ she said, her forehead pinched with mock concern. ‘I was worried that I came on too strong after enrolment, calling and emailing like that. My ex-husband says I’m too needy. Was I being needy, Rose? Did I scare you off?’

I tried not to laugh as I closed my locker. ‘It’s not you, Miss, it’s me.’

‘Where are you going?’ she asked, trotting after Juliet and me, her heels clicking on the parquet floor as we began to walk away. ‘Don’t leave me, Rose! Don’t leave me like he did.’

‘I have to get to sociology.’

She checked her watch. ‘Not until eleven.’

‘Yeah, but I have to do that thing first.’

She stopped in front of me so I couldn’t get past. ‘The thing in my office?’

‘No.’ I pointed over her shoulder. ‘That thing at the thing.’

‘Oh,
that
thing. The thing where you to talk to me now or I call your mother?’

I sighed and rolled my eyes at Juliet. ‘Run. Save yourself.’

I didn’t have to tell her twice and as soon as she had disappeared down the corridor, Grace turned to me with a smirk. ‘Is she really going out with Sid King?’ When I nodded, she laughed. ‘Sid and Nancy. Too cute!’

‘Yeah.
So
cute. Didn’t he stab her?’

‘Oh,’ she said, drawing it out so it sounded about a week long.

I shouldn’t have bitten, but I did. ‘Oh, what?’

‘You like Sid.
Awkward
.’

I chuckled. ‘Yeah. Okay.’

She was the first one to call me on it. I hadn’t considered it before then, but as soon as I did, the tops of my ears started burning.

‘Awkward. Awkward. Awkward,’ she said with each step.

I made myself look at her feet in case my cheeks looked as hot as they felt. She was wearing high heels, green suede high heels. I remember staring at them. The teachers at St Jude’s didn’t wear green suede high heels.

‘Here we are! Come in,’ she said when we got to her office, sweeping in with her arm out as though she were introducing me to an old friend. ‘Welcome to Graceland. Get it? I’m Grace, and this is my, y’know,
land
.’

I raised an eyebrow at her. ‘You’re quite the wordsmith.’

When I stepped into the office, I had to stop.

‘I know.’ She nodded, walking over to the chair opposite her desk and picking up a handful of newspapers so that I could sit down. ‘This is what the inside of my head looks like.’

I’d never seen anything like it. The teachers’ offices at St Jude’s had crooked stained-glass windows and oil paintings of sullen alumni glaring down from the wood-panelled walls. But the walls of Grace’s office were covered with posters for giving up smoking and safe sex, and the light from the only window was
filtered though the tired leaves of a spider plant that hung over the edge of the windowsill as though it was trying to summon the energy to throw itself into the bin beneath it.

When I sat on the chair opposite her desk, she had to slide a pile of paperwork out of the way so that she could see me. ‘Peek-a-boo!’ She grinned, then gasped, ‘Oh!’ and scribbled something illegible on to a pink heart-shaped Post-it note.

When she slapped it on the desk, I tried to read it. I think it said MILK, but I gave up and looked into the mug by her phone instead.

‘Science project?’ I asked, pulling a face.

‘Don’t worry about her, that’s Penny,’ she said, and I blinked at her.

‘You named your mug?’

‘Penny, penicillin, get it? She’s gonna save the world one day, aren’t you, Penny?’ She tapped the rim of the mug with her pen. ‘Yes, you are.’

Sometimes, when I’m sitting in Doctor Gilyard’s tiny white office, I think of that moment, of Grace and her pink heart-shaped Post-it notes.

‘Right, Rose. Rose Glass,’ she said, sliding a file out of one of the precarious piles on her desk. The pile wobbled, but didn’t fall. ‘How are you doing? Tell me everything.’

I shrugged. ‘Fine.’

‘How are you finding the College of North London?’

‘Fine.’

‘And your classes?’

‘Fine.’

‘You’re doing A levels, right?’ She looked down at the file. ‘English lit, sociology, history and art and design? That’s a lot of reading. Are you keeping up?’

‘Yeah, I suppose.’

‘And I see you’ve made friends. Sid’s in my drama class. He’s brilliant, isn’t he? So sweet.’ She gave me a theatrical wink.

I noticed the framed
Spring Awakening
poster on the wall behind her desk and suddenly wished I was in her drama class. When Olivia had suggested doing
Spring Awakening
at St Jude’s, Mr Carmichael almost had a stroke.

‘And Nancy seems lovely, from what I’ve heard,’ she said, and I remembered why I wasn’t doing Drama. Why I was there.

‘She’s been through a lot,’ she added and I looked at the poster again.

‘You have too, Rose,’ she said, her voice lowering. It made my stomach knot.

‘I suppose.’

‘How are things at home?’

I shrugged. ‘Fine.’

‘How’s your mum?’

‘Fine.’

‘Your parents just got divorced, right? You’re living with your mother now. How’s that going?’ She held her hand up. ‘Don’t say fine!’

‘
Good
.’

‘Good? That’s two words! Now we’re getting somewhere.’ She
pointed at me over the desk. ‘Let’s make it three. Tell me about your dad, do you still see him?’

I knew she’d ask, but it still made the tops of my ears burn again so I lowered my chin until my hair fell over them, sure that if she saw how red they were, she’d know I was lying.

‘No. He’s a surgeon, so he works weird hours.’

‘And your mum?’

‘She’s a medical rep so she’s on the road a lot.’

‘That must be hard.’

‘I suppose.’ I started to pick at my nail varnish. It was so quiet that I could hear a tutor in the corridor berating a student for not turning off his phone in class.

‘How’s your mum? All of this must have been really hard on her.’

‘Fine.’

‘Okay,’ she said with a long sigh, pressing her fingers to her eyelids. If she wasn’t a teacher, I think that’s the point at which she would have picked me up and shaken me. I kind of want to introduce her to Doctor Gilyard, sometimes, but I’m sure that if you put the two of them in a room together, one of them would spontaneously combust.

‘Okay, Rose,’ she said, holding her hands up. ‘Okay. I know things are all over the place right now and I’m the last person you want to talk to about it. I do. If I was seventeen, there’d be about forty-seven people I’d talk to before I talked to a teacher, including the bloke who used to stand outside Oxford Circus tube with a megaphone asking everyone if they’re a sinner or a
winner.’ She smiled softly. ‘All I’m saying is that I just got divorced. I know how horrible it is at home right now. I’m just grateful I don’t have kids so that they don’t have to see me sobbing and eating cheesecake straight from the freezer.’

‘It isn’t like that.’ I sat back in the chair with my arms crossed. I don’t know what she said to make me so defensive, if I’d agreed or pretended to cry about how miserable I was, like I did with Mike and Eve, she would have left me alone. But I glared across the desk at her. ‘Mum’s fine. Not all women are hysterical and eat their body weight in Ben and Jerry’s because their husbands leave them.’