What You Become (2 page)

‘Don’t look,’ she said at the same time as I said, ‘Jesus!’

‘You say “don’t look”
before
you pull your pants down, Ti. Like a second or two
before
, not after.’

Ti farted in response. I couldn’t believe it when she did things like this; it was like she didn’t care what anyone thought of her, and that impressed me more than anything. She and Ophelia were exactly the same in this respect, though they showed it in different ways. They’d inherited it from their dad, Fabio, who shouted instead of talking, and swore like an angry chef (which he was).

‘I don’t know if I can go,’ Ti whispered. ‘I don’t know if I’ve got anything.’

‘You can do it, Ti. I believe in you.’

‘I’m not sure,’ she said, ‘the cupboards might be bare,’ and her voice as she strained was gross, but it only made us laugh harder. I’d told her to bring toilet roll, but she’d insisted she didn’t need it on account of her gift for doing what she referred to as ‘ghost poos’.

My shoulders shook, and the urge to pee was strong, but I daren’t go here, in spite of Ti’s encouragement. ‘It’s the most natural thing in the world!’ she said. ‘Don’t be such a prude.’ All the same, I couldn’t do it. Not in a teacher’s garden.

We were having fun again now, but still I counted down the seconds until we could leave. I pictured us safely on the coast path, sharing out the tea in Ti’s rucksack.

‘
What are you doing? Stop!
’ I hissed, because she’d promised to leave as soon as she’d delivered her present. Downstairs the lamps were dim, floral blinds down. The faintest glow escaped, lighting up Ti who had crept forwards and now was metres from the window, trying to look in.

‘Sexy music!’ Ti hissed back. ‘She’s got someone in there!’

Her voice shook with delight, and I knew from experience there was no getting through to her now. For the first time in the history of nightwandering I wished to be tucked up in bed, with a nice sensible friend who liked to sleep at night after watching a film with a face mask or maybe plaiting each other’s hair, and then Ti took another step.

The tin clatter was deafening against the moon-quiet night. The metal dog bowl she’d stood in spinning round and round.

Click!
The garden flooded with electric light.

All in the same second Ti stopped laughing, I sprang for the loose fence panel, and Chase appeared at the patio doors in a lilac satin dressing gown.

Ti backed away, but it was too late. Chase had stepped on to the decking outside her house. She clutched her gown at the neck, red feathered hair loose around her narrow shoulders, and it was so private seeing her like that I almost closed my eyes.

‘Titania?’ Chase said, disbelieving. She insisted on using Ti’s full name, and pronouncing it in this fancy way – Tih-tahn-yuh – completely different to Fab’s version – Tie-tan-yuh – and it drove Ti doolally, though perhaps she wasn’t thinking too hard about that right then.

I was outside the pool of light, the palm trees beside the house providing cover, but I could hardly breathe. Any second Chase could walk from her spotlit patio and catch me.

She couldn’t finish sentences. ‘What . . . ? How . . . ? I don’t . . .’

I inched forward, the grass crunching ear-splittingly with every step.

‘
What
in god’s name are you doing in my garden?’ Chase said, getting herself together at last. ‘This isn’t funny, Titania. Don’t think this can be shrugged off as a prank. I’ve called the police!’

At the mention of police I pushed the loose plank aside, and squeezed back through the gap into the garden with the trampoline. Before I’d even thought about my decision, I’d sprinted into the road and was crouching behind a car, panting.

With my fingers crossed, I waited for Ti to emerge with the defiant look she wore at school, the closest she got to a uniform, but she never came out. Finally, a police car arrived, and if I’d dared to look up as it left, I would have seen Ti, ashen, in the back seat.

Three

Whenever I heard the word
kindred
, I thought of me and Ti. It was a rainy Monday in Year Six when she turned up in my classroom. She was big-boned and fearless-looking, with short dark curly hair that stood out all around her face. She’d moved from Italy, Mrs Gamble said, and so at break the kids made fun of her accent, and tasselled leather shoes, and the extra vowels she put after words when she talked.

She didn’t run shrieking to the veranda like the rest of us girls when it started raining, but stood face to the sky, and let herself get drenched. After dinner, when Mrs Gamble paired us together, I was secretly pleased. I could be trusted to be helpful and kind, Mrs Gamble said, but the intense look she gave made me wonder if she knew how I longed for someone who thought I was brilliant all the time. Unlike Charlie Fielding who laughed with Mia Lewis whenever I got upset.

My nerves sparked with excitement as Titania and Charlie swapped seats. Ti was still damp from her soaking, dark hair tamed into ringlets, and her toffee-coloured eyes were open and amused. She wrote questions on a piece of paper that we passed back and forth, demanding to know why everyone stared at her, and wore the same shoes, and followed Charlie Fielding with a frightened expression.

Do you follow CF?
she wrote, and my answer covered the whole reverse side of A4:
NO
.

Charlie cursed our alliance. She banned us from sitting at the good table at dinner, and made sure we were picked last for teams in PE. She invented lies about why Ti had moved here, and called me a traitor for leaving her gang, but I didn’t mind.

I’d never had a true friend before, and I knew it. Charlie had always made me feel less than I was, whereas Ti made me feel like more. She didn’t say it was disgusting if I had gravy on my school tie or sleep in my eye, and she didn’t want to talk all day about the clothes everyone was wearing. Best of all she loved school dinners just as much as me.

Ti and me were outcasts, and I’d never been happier.

She was used to it, she said, because her dad got people’s backs up wherever he went.

‘We’re a family of outcasts,’ she said. ‘You’ll see.’

And I did. Within weeks Fab had annoyed the Flushingites by feeding leftover ciabattas from the café to the seagulls in the square. The first time he didn’t know it was an offence, but after he was prosecuted it became a regular act of pure De Furia rebellion.

‘Look at them!’ he said fondly, when a small colony hopped towards us on the pier. ‘The way they jerk their necks, just like little Mafiosi – who could resist you, eh? Little brutes! Landed in the wrong place!’

Checking the coast was clear in an exaggerated fashion, he scattered a handful of chips, while Ti’s shy mum, June, first waved her arms at the birds, then collected the chips he’d thrown and put them in the bin.

Everyone felt sorry for June. Fab strode around the town like he’d always been there, with his bright checked trousers and loud remarks, and June scurried behind him, sending out apologetic looks and wincing. They were an odd match, people said.

Which were my sentiments exactly about Ti and her sister. I didn’t even know she was an identical twin until Ophelia turned up in Mr Burgoine’s class a week later.

‘Nobody notices me when Ophelia’s around,’ Ti confessed when I called her out on how weird it was, and though I’d never admit it she wasn’t exaggerating. Ti was pretty if you stopped to look, but Ophelia’s beauty
made
you stop and look. Both girls had wide cheeks and full mouths and thick eyebrows over melty brown eyes, but every time Ophelia’s features arranged themselves in the slightly more attractive way: her eyes slanted upwards where Ti’s were more square, her front teeth had a gap where Ti’s were close together, plus she was skinny (because she rarely ate), and like me Ti still had what Mum insisted was only puppy fat.

Seeing she was destined to be popular, Charlie immediately tried to take Ophelia under her wing, but Ophelia was too powerful. She burst straight through the feathers, and the two of them began their drama-filled friendship. I hated it when they fell out because Ophelia came to hang around with us; she spoke Italian to exclude me, and Ti stopped laughing at my silliest jokes, pretending to be mature and nonchalant like her sister.

They both despised being referred to as
the twins
or being asked if they felt each other’s pain, but they had a strange power over each other, and almost psychic ways of communicating, and I was painfully jealous of their bond.

Still, I never would have thought it would make us lose touch.

Four

Ti was in the middle of explaining what had happened in Chase’s garden to a disbelieving gaggle of classmates, when a smug-looking prefect called Ethan Crisp came for her. It was the end of Registration and Charlie Fielding and her horrible boyfriend Alex Riviere were thrilled, grinning and wiggling their eyebrows as she packed up her stuff.

After abandoning Ti on Saturday night, all I wanted was a chance to explain, but she hadn’t let me. She’d talked on and on, and I couldn’t get a word in, so I knew her feelings were hurt. I hadn’t even been able to tell her I’d called her house first thing Sunday morning, before they all started work at the café, she was gabbing so much.

Fab had hung up on me without saying anything, and when I called back Ophelia had said one word before doing the same.

Coward
.

I hated to think what poison she’d have been spitting in Ti’s ears about me since then.

Alisha Patel and Kiaru Aki gave me sympathetic looks as I blinked back tears, puzzling it over. Alisha was chubby, with a film-star-pretty face, and Kiaru was the only boy in our year with long hair that wasn’t to do with surfing; the only Japanese kid too. I’d started out in the same sets as them, but I couldn’t keep up, and though they rarely talked to me (too wrapped up in each other) I got the impression they were sympathetic.

Walking alone down the drive after school, I begged the universe for Ti to be all right. To have been sent home for the day or, at worst, suspended, and for her dad to have gone easy on her. I walked slowly so I wouldn’t have to overtake Charlie and Alex and the Drama lot up ahead, but when they stopped to practise the cheesiest dance routine of all time I had no choice. Joey would be coming out of Fairfields Juniors any minute, and since that horrible Monday when Mum couldn’t make it, he got scared if nobody was there to pick him up.

‘Oh, wifey!’ Alex called as soon as he noticed me, his Nike rucksack slung over one of his broad shoulders. ‘Where’s your little wifey?’

Flamethrowers lit up my cheeks, and I pretended to search in my bag for something to keep my face hidden, praying they wouldn’t notice my blush; that it wasn’t as dramatic-looking as it felt. Alex had been obsessed with Ophelia for years, before he got together with Charlie, and now he made a point of being awful to me and Ti, as though to prove his loyalty.

Charlie laughed too loud when he did it, and the whole thing made me queasy. She flicked her blonde hair now, and covered her face to hide how hard she was faking.

The main reason we had been friends in the first place was because our mums knew each other from university. They had played hockey together every Tuesday until September last year when Mum had cancelled because of what we thought then was flu. Sophie Fielding was the only one from the team who still called occasionally to ask if Mum was well enough for a game, and I loved her for it. Last week, Charlie had written a message in the get-well-soon card her mum sent, and my mum had almost cried she was so touched.

‘Aw, she’s blushing. It must be love!’ Charlie said now, and I gave her a baffled look because her behaviour made absolutely no sense to me.

‘She’s Rosie Bloooooooom,’ Alex said, and Mia Lewis and all the other Drama dimwits fell about laughing.

The joke never got old because my cheeks never stopped providing the punchline. I’d googled how to change my name by deed poll, but couldn’t follow through because my parents thought it was
perfect
. They talked about nominative determinism and Dickens, and other academic stuff that went over my head, and I just didn’t have the stomach to break it to them, that since puberty they’d basically been in cahoots with my biggest detractors.

I caught Charlie’s eye as I passed, hoping her grin might slip, and it did. Mum was always trying to convince me that she was insecure, and I should feel sorry for her, and it was difficult because she was so pretty and rich, but in that second, for the first time, I almost managed it.

Five

Joey belted out of the classroom with the hood of his blue coat draped over his head and my mood lifted completely. He knocked other kids out of the way, making machine-gun noises, and I felt the tangle of humiliation and anxiety in my stomach unravelling.

Girls and boys smiled as he passed, calling out to him as though they liked using his name. A skinny ginger girl called Lara couldn’t take her eyes off him. She called bye repeatedly in a soft, eager little voice that he didn’t seem to notice.

‘Rosie!’ he shouted, launching himself at my belly for a hug.

His head bobbed at my waist as he grinned up at me, purple ink on one cheek, beginning a monologue about the games he’d played at break time and how Lara wrote in his spelling book by mistake, which was really annoying because he was hoping to finish Year Four without any writing in it at all.

‘You know what, Joe?’ I told him sincerely. ‘You’re already cooler than me.’

At home I made him a cucumber sandwich, and took Mum’s tea and toast up in record speed so that I could ring Ti. Fab answered again, and I begged him not to hang up.

‘She doesn’t talk on the phone any more,’ he said in his booming Italian-tinged way. Ti and Ophelia had lost their accents, but for Fab almost every word still ended with a vowel. ‘Or go out. Or have friends. So you’d better just forget her.’

He hung up, and my stomach turned with nerves. Fab got angry fast, but it passed quickly too, like a jet: big noise then nothing. Was it that bad what had happened? I couldn’t cope with Ti being mad at me for long.