Flawed

by Cecelia Ahern

  “I’ll come back in a few days to review the dressings again, but if there’s anything I can do before that, contact me directly.”

  I don’t bother to nod.

  Everyone speaks on my behalf now anyway. They speak about me like I’m not in the room.

  I’m not here.

  I close my eyes and allow the pills I’ve just taken to help me drift away again.

  DAY TWO

  Sleep. Nothing but sleep, and pain, and disturbed dreams.

  DAY THREE

  There’s a knock on my door, and I close my eyes. Mom enters. I know it’s her from the perfume scent and the effortless, perfect way she glides in and sits without disturbing a thing. After a while, she speaks.

  “I know you’re awake.”

  I keep my eyes closed.

  “That was Tina at the door. Tina from Highland Castle. She was asking for you. It took a lot for her to come here, especially with, you know, them outside. She knew you wouldn’t want to see her. She just wanted to give you these.”

  I open my eyes and see a box of pretty cupcakes. Pink, lilac, blue, and yellow, with glittery flowers on top.

  “She said her daughter made them for you. You can eat one this week,” she says, trying to make that sound fabulous.

  One luxury a week is all a Flawed is allowed to have. It is part of the basic living we must abide by, so that we can purify ourselves. We must eat staple foods, nothing luxurious or fancy, nothing considered unnecessary for our bodies, for our life. Basics. Our intake is measured at the end of every day by a test I’ve yet to experience.

  “And she brought you this, too.” Mom hands me a bag.

  It’s a Highland Castle tourist shop paper bag, which I feel is highly inappropriate. If she thinks I want a trinket to remember the worst experience of my life, she is sorely mistaken.

  Inside the bag is a box. I barely want to open it, but curiosity gets the better of me. Inside the box is a snow globe, enclosing a miniature Highland Castle. I shake it lightly, and the red glittering particles are churned around inside the glass. Extremely inappropriate. Even Mom views it with distaste. I’m surprised by Tina, but I’m sure she was trying to be kind, maybe even say sorry, or that’s my own wishful thinking. I put the globe back in its box and straight into my bedside table. I don’t want to ever see it again.

  I close my eyes.

  DAY FOUR

  I have a visitor. Angelina Tinder sits beside my bed, dressed in head-to-toe black, which is a look I’ve never seen on her before. She looks like a lady from Victorian times grieving her dead husband. She is wearing fingerless leather gloves to hide the branding on her hand. Her long piano fingers are as pale as snow beneath the leather. She’s not allowed to wear these when she’s out in public, but she can hide it in her own home if she wishes. She is not in her own home. She is breaking a rule. Though it’s not me she is hiding it from, it is herself. She sits upright in the chair, looking at me rarely, just enough to see if I’m listening now, and then she speaks.

  Her eyes are rimmed with red, as if she hasn’t stopped crying since she was branded. The tip of her nose is red, too. She is paler than I have ever seen her, as though she hasn’t seen the sun in weeks.

  “You’ll have a Whistleblower appointed to you,” she says. “They’re giving you mine. She’s senior. A horrible woman with nothing better to do with her time. She’d volunteer for the post even if she wasn’t paid. Mary May is her name. Calls herself a Christian woman. She’s the same kind of woman who was burning other women at the stake. She won’t give you an inch, Celestine, you remember that.” She quickly glances at me, then away again. “She’s looking to catch you out. She thinks you’re disgusting.” She sniffs as if smelling a bad odor herself. “But they are. The Flawed. Absolutely disgusting. We are not one of them, Celestine, and don’t ever let them think that of you. Though, what on earth were you thinking helping that Flawed man to his seat? Saying all that in the courtroom? It’s everywhere, you know that. The footage of you on the bus has gone viral.” She looks at me, her face twisted in confusion and disgust.

  I don’t answer. I can’t answer. I wouldn’t anyway.

  “Be home by ten thirty. They say eleven, but she’ll be waiting for you, and anything can happen. Allow for delays, mistakes, anything. They will probably even try to trip you up. They’re always testing you. I missed the curfew once. I won’t miss it again, I can assure you.” She thinks for a moment. “She’ll test you every evening to make sure you’re sticking to your basic meals, and a lie detector test to ensure you’re telling the truth about following all rules. They rely on these to work. They can’t keep their eyes on you all the time, but God knows they’ll create something soon enough in those laboratories. A camera sewn into our head or something, seeing everything we see, hearing everything we think. Because that’s what they want to know, you know. It’s like they want to crawl inside us, under our skin.”

  She sniffs again and scratches at her arms. I look at her fingers and see that they’re trembling.

  She sees me looking at them.

  “They won’t stop. I can’t play anymore. It’s like they’re not mine anymore.”

  She leaves a silence, and I try to prepare for the next onslaught, which inevitably comes. “It’s awful. A woman looked at me today as though I had murdered every one of her children. I would rather they had killed me instead of living like this.”

  I’m glad my tongue is so damaged that I can’t speak. I wouldn’t know what to say.

  “Good luck, Celestine.”

  She stands and leaves the room.

  Mom comes to my room later with a hopeful look on her face. “Did that help, sweetheart?”

  I close my eyes and drift away.

  DAY FIVE

  I wake up. And just as I have done every day for the past three days since I’ve come home, I force myself to go back to sleep. I realize it was not all a nightmare. It is true. Sleep is my only friend these days, so I roll onto my side, for my back is in too much pain, move my head on the pillow so that my temple doesn’t brush the fabric, try not to crease the skin on my chest so that it doesn’t sting, and leave my right hand flat and open, the dressings preventing me from closing it anyway. This is the only way I can find respite, though for a girl of definitions, I use the term respite lightly.

  I have not left my room for three days. I have left my bed only to go to the bathroom. Apart from Dr. Smith and Angelina Tinder, Mom, Dad, and Juniper have been the only others I’ve seen. They’re shielding Ewan from me, and I agree. Mom has tended to me night and day, cleaning my wounds, changing my dressings, putting whatever potions and lotions on them to take away the pain, to fight off infection. I have woken some nights to find Juniper sitting in the chair beside my bed staring into space; and then when I wake again, she is gone, so I wonder if it was merely a dream. We spoke briefly when I returned from the castle, but it was awkward, stilted. Though I know she did not plan for any of this to happen to me and it’s not her fault, something is bubbling beneath me, an anger over her part in it. She could have come to my aid on the bus, and she could have testified in court that I didn’t help the old man to a seat. Why couldn’t she have said it? I sensed her guilt as soon as I saw her when I came home, and it made me angry, it made me want to blame her. Anything so as not to blame myself.

  I am plied with painkillers, and I like this. They give me a woozy, out-of-body experience that takes me away from reality, softens the blow. I am aware, at different stages, of a crowd outside our house, but I don’t watch them and we don’t talk about them. I know when Dad leaves and arrives home from work, not because of the sound of his car engine, but from the camera clicks, the jump to life by the pack, the shutter speeds, the shouted questions. Some are kind, some are disgusting, directed at him as he comes and goes. I never hear his responses, if there are any, but I, too, would like to know if he could still love the most Flawed person in the history of the state.

  “Do you love your daugh
ter, Mr. North?”

  “How can you still love your daughter?” another shouts.

  Still, I appreciate the latter’s assumption that there is still love for me at all, despite the fact that they find the very notion bewildering. It would never happen to them, not to someone they love. Impossible. I am poison to some of these people, but I am merely entertainment to others. I learned that from the way I hear some laugh when he drives away and they get back to whatever they were doing, having found the entire thing fun. My life is drama at its mightiest.

  I recognize some of their voices. They are the gossip reporters, the news anchors, the familiar voices of my past. And now they’re talking about me. Only it doesn’t sound like me, not that person, just this revved-up version that I don’t recognize. They analyze and dissect my own behavior with more thought than I’ve ever given it myself. I’m too weak to care about it and too embarrassed to listen to it properly. It is wafting in my ears and mind, and quickly out again. I would rather sleep.

  There is a television in my room, but I haven’t turned it on, nor have I turned my phone on. It’s for the part of me I lost, the invisible part of me that I never knew was essential. The part I gave away to become nothing.

  So far, technically, being Flawed has not altered my life. I haven’t been anywhere, haven’t done anything. I have stayed in this bed, and yet I don’t feel the same at all. Not because of the physical scars and ache, either, but I feel different to the bone. Just what Crevan had intended.

  There’s a knock on the door, and I know that it’s Mom. I’ve developed a way of knowing who’s there, of recognizing the different styles. Dad’s is tentative, hesitant as though he’s afraid of disturbing me; Mom’s is all business, like she belongs in the room. She doesn’t even wait for a reply and enters. I turn over on my back to face her, feeling the pain in my spine as I do so.

  “Your dad has worked out a way for people to visit. He blacked out the windows of his Jeep. So he can meet visitors at the station, then drive them directly into our garage without anyone seeing.

  The garage has direct access to the kitchen, so nobody has to set foot outside the door.

  “So if there’s anyone you want to see…”

  “Art,” I say simply. Probably the first word I’ve uttered in days. It would be romantic if it weren’t for the circumstances.

  She looks down at her hands, the dread clear on her face that I’ve asked about him. I thought he would have visited me by now. I’ve been waiting. Listening. Each time I hear the doorbell, I hope it’s him, but it’s not, it never has been.

  “Nobody knows where he is,” Mom says, finally. “After your verdict, he went home and packed his bags and took off.”

  “I bet Crevan knows where he is,” I say groggily, my tongue still heavy in my mouth. My throat is dry, and the words don’t come out easily. My tongue feels huge in my mouth. It is this that has been the most difficult sore to deal with as it blisters and scabs.

  “No. He’s pretty much going out of his mind trying to find him.”

  I smile. Good.

  Mom hands me a glass of water with a straw.

  “Are people ashamed to visit me? Is that why they’re going through the garage?”

  “No.” She pauses. “It’s for privacy. So you can come and go in privacy.”

  “I don’t plan on going anywhere.”

  “School.”

  I look at her in surprise.

  “Next week. When you’re healed. You can’t hide in here forever.”

  I strangely hope I’ll never heal, so I never have to leave.

  “Besides, they won’t let you stay in any longer. You have to face the world, Celestine.”

  I wonder whether she will apply this to herself, too. She looks tired around her eyes. She hasn’t left the house for as long as I have been home, no visits to her clinic for a pick-me-up, though she will probably want an entirely new face after the scrutiny she has come under. I wonder how all this will affect her work, if she has been dropped from any of her portfolios. It would be naive to think not. No one can be discriminated against for having a relationship with a Flawed family member. They are not responsible for the actions of their loved ones, but still, people always find a way to get around that. My mom’s life is just another life I’ve ruined.

  “Mary May is your Whistleblower. She has stopped by every day, she has been thorough in what we and you are allowed to do. She is … meticulous in her work,” Mom says, and I detect nerves. This woman must be some force of nature. “She has insisted on seeing you every day, but I’ve held her off,” Mom says with a determined look in her eye, and I know it couldn’t have been an easy task. “You’ll meet her in a few days. She’ll run through the rules and then stay with us during dinnertime. She wants to observe that we are abiding by the rules for the first few days. And you will see her every day after that. Each evening she’ll do two tests.”

  “Angelina told me,” I interrupt her, not wanting to hear about the invasion again.

  “She won’t be in your life apart from that.” She tries to make the daily invasion not sound as bad as it is. “You need to eat something,” she says, looking at my tray filled with food. “You haven’t eaten for days.”

  “I can’t taste anything anyway.”

  “Dr. Smith says your taste buds will come back.”

  “I can taste blood, so I must be okay.” Bad joke. And I’m not sure I can taste blood. My tongue is blistered and scabbed, and I just imagine it flowing down my throat whenever I swallow.

  Mom winces.

  “Maybe it’s better if I never taste again anyway, given the food I have to eat every day of the week for the rest of my life.”

  “It’s a healthy diet,” Mom says perkily. “Probably one we should all be eating. And we would, but we’re not allowed to join you, sorry.”

  “Are you going to defend everything they do?”

  “I’m just trying to look on the bright side, Celestine.”

  “There is no fucking bright side.”

  “Language,” she says, propping me up with pillows again, but she doesn’t sound like she cares what I say.

  “Are Flawed not allowed to swear, either?”

  “I think more than anything, Flawed are entitled to swear,” she says.

  We smile.

  “There she is,” she whispers, tracing a line around my face with her finger. “My brave baby.”

  I look at her properly. “How are you, Mom? You look tired,” I say tenderly.

  “I’m fine.” Her resolve weakens. “I’ve booked myself in for an eye lift,” she says, and we both laugh. It’s the first time she’s ever admitted doing any work to her appearance.

  “Where’s Juniper?”

  “She’s out at the moment.” She stiffens.

  “She’s being funny with me.”

  “She’s afraid, darling. She thinks you’re angry with her.”

  I think of the sad way she looks at me when she sees me, the gentle tone in her voice when she asks me what she can do for me, and it makes me bark back at her. I’d rather we return to the banter that we used to have. I’m more comfortable with her being irritated by me, but instead now I see her pity. I think of the fact that she didn’t come to my aid on the bus and how she didn’t testify in court. Mom is right; I feel nothing but anger at her. I know I’m wrong, but somehow it is burning inside me.

  “Are you angry with Art?” Mom asks. I know the point she is making: How can I be angry with my own sister and not Art? But somewhere deep down, I keep wondering why he didn’t try harder to make it stop. Why couldn’t he convince his dad? But I understand. I once trusted Judge Crevan, and he wouldn’t have expected his own dad to land me in so much trouble.

  “Do you think he’ll come to visit?”

  She purses her lips and pauses, and I know it’s a no. “I’m sure he just needs to think about a few things. Away from his father,” she says, and I see the anger in her eyes. “But, Celestine”—she thin
ks about how to say it—“don’t expect him to—”

  “I don’t,” I interrupt. “I already know.”

  The realistic view would be to believe that Art will never come back to me. I know that. But it doesn’t stop me from hoping. And it doesn’t stop me from dreaming of the way things used to be.

  “I know you don’t want to talk about this, but we’re thinking of contacting Mr. Berry to discuss the extra brand.”

  “No,” I interrupt before she takes it any further.

  “Listen, Celestine, it wasn’t part of the original ruling. What happened is unheard of. We want to talk to him to see what your options are—”

  “And what might they be?” I say angrily. “Are they going to make it disappear? Is Crevan going to say sorry? No. Just because it’s unheard of doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. It’s Crevan. He does what he likes, and he can do whatever he likes to me again. Promise me you’ll leave it alone.”

  She purses her lips and nods. “I understand, Celestine. Your dad wants to protect you. He wants to defend you. Fight for your name.” She smiles softly, loving this part of him. “But I agree with you. I think we should stay silent about it. If we talk to Mr. Berry about it, then I’m afraid we’ll bring more attention to it. I’m not sure if he’s aware of it or not, but your file still says five brands. They haven’t contacted us to update it, and it hasn’t been in any of the media reports. They’ve only mentioned the five. Nobody in the media knows or is talking about a sixth brand.”