I blink at them. “What? That’s a stupid idea! Why on earth wouldn’t you want to live with us?”
“Thera,” Dad says as if he’s trying to be patient. “Your Mum and I are getting a divorce. You’re going to have to be a grown-up about this—” he starts to say, but I leap off the chair and my voice explodes into the room.
“What the hell?”
“Thera! Language!” Mum says.
“Are you kidding me? This is literally the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard ever. You two are horrible liars, and this whole time you’ve been lying to me! Why do I ever trust you at all?”
“That’s enough!” Dad says. “Calm down, we’re trying to talk to you like an adult.”
“Why? You don’t fucking talk like an adult, you talk like a lying idiot, and you don’t want me to know the truth about anything, not Billie, and not why you’re arguing, and not rape or men being violent and bad or anything!”
“Enough!” Dad roars. “How dare you shout at me like this?”
“You’re shouting at me!” I roar back. “You’re such a hypocrite!”
“This is a very difficult situation, Thera, but this is no time for dramatics,” Mum says.
“How could you?” I ask her.
“Sweetheart, we don’t want to get divorced.”
“Then don’t.”
“But we don’t want this house to have an atmosphere of arguments and have everybody upset all the time. We don’t want shouting. We need you to try to understand and be strong, for us and for Sam.”
“Looks like I’m the only person who has to be strong for anyone around here.”
“What?” Dad says. I shrug.
“Thera,” Mum says, “enough of this attitude. And I’ve had enough of you being angry with Dad in general. What’s got into you?”
“But you’re angry with Dad in general too!”
“So it makes sense we live separately, doesn’t it?”
I frown. She’s tricked me again. There is an awful lot of tricking me this afternoon.
“You promised me you would be a good girl,” Mum says. “Go to your room, and when you come down tomorrow I want to see a changed young lady, or we’ll send you to stay at Nan and Granddad’s for the rest of the summer.”
“And if I don’t change?” I say quietly. “Will you send me away after that, to boarding school?”
“We’re not millionaires and this isn’t an opportunity for you to play Malory Towers,” Mum says. She always knows what I’m thinking. “Go to bed.”
“I’m hungry.”
“I’ll bring you supper,” says Dad. “Since you missed tea.”
I don’t want to, but I nod at him. “Thanks.”
I go quietly upstairs and fall asleep in all my clothes.
When I wake up, the glow-in-the-dark strips on the hands of my alarm clock say it’s ten thirty at night, and my supper is next to me, cold. I eat the cheese on toast and drink the milk anyway. How come the cheese is cold but the milk is lukewarm? How does that happen?
I can’t sleep. I lie in bed thinking about Nathan, because normally it makes me feel nice. But it doesn’t make me feel nice tonight, because his mum won’t let him see me, and maybe he doesn’t want to see me. I really like him. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think I was in love with him too. I can’t think about him. It’s too painful.
For a while I kiss an imaginary boyfriend who looks like Nathan. But then I realize he’s probably a dead person, like the dead girls, and I feel bad but I tell him I can’t hang out anymore because I am upset he is dead. He goes away and I cry because I don’t want him to be offended. I’m just tired of thinking about dead people all the time, and we could never be forever because the dead boy will always be his age and beautiful, and I’ll get old and uglier and uglier. I mean, for a while my boobs will get bigger and I’ll be more beautiful, but then soon enough I’ll be old, forty, gray-haired, and middle-aged. He’ll just be a little boy. And then will that make me a pervert? I don’t want to be a pervert. I cry harder into the pillow.
All the options for my life are horrible. To go on without Billie? Without my bestest, truest, forever friend? To go on without Nathan? What if I never fall in love again? What if I never find someone as heavenly beautiful, with those soft, guarded eyes and shiny brown hair? The way he kissed me so softly on the cheek, and the way he was in his bed. Even though it hurt, I liked hugging him. Life is awful. Will I always be alone? But then I feel doubly bad because Billie is dead and I’m still alive and I ought to be grateful. But I miss her so much and I haven’t seen her for ages. She hasn’t even shown up today, after everything I did to try to snare the killer. Maybe I’m going in totally the wrong direction. Maybe she’s disappointed in me. I’m holding tears in but that just makes them run down inside my nose. I sniff, and wipe the snotty tears away with the edge of the duvet.
I guess this is why weak people talk to God.
After a while of trying to get to sleep, I think I feel the dead girls. Even though they still freak me out, I steel myself, open my eyes and sit up quickly. But instead it’s Hattie, standing at the end of my bed, looking moody as usual. Sometimes I imagine Hattie talking to me. She’s one of the evil voices in my head, as opposed to Billie being the good one. Well, Mum says I imagine her, but I think Hattie probably astral-projects herself into my room, just so she can annoy me even when we’re not at school. She is hovering above my bed.
“Urgh, what are you doing here?” I say witheringly.
“Hello, killer,” she says snottily.
“I’m not a killer, Hattie, stupid bumface, I’m the hero!”
“You basically did nothing today; you just ran around like an idiot crying. No wonder Nathan wouldn’t go out with you.”
My bottom lip juts out without me wanting it too. “I didn’t catch the man.”
“Well, you’re not pretty—of course you didn’t.”
“Well, if you had been bait, maybe it would have worked out.”
“Probably. But I can’t be anymore; I’m too grown-up for a kiddie-fiddler.” I heard the word “kiddie-fiddler” from Sam. He said that’s what Barry’s dad calls the pervert. “Although…” says Hattie. She raises an eyebrow.
“What?” I say, even though it’s annoying because I know that’s what she wants me to ask. She’s just being dramatic.
“Now I’m haunting you…”
“You’re not haunting me, you’re astral-projecting.”
“Am I? Or can you see me because I’m the next dead girl? Or maybe I’m already dead?”
“Shut up!” I yell. I put my hands over my ears. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
Suddenly Hattie is gone, in a puff of nothing. I’m staring straight into five translucent faces, because the dead girls are stood at the end of my bed. They make me feel crazy because sometimes they just sit and stare at me, willing me to do things for them that I can’t do. Even Billie is driving me crazy, just waving and making faces and not saying a word.
“Why are you haunting me?” I whisper-howl. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, but I can’t save you. I’m just eleven! I can’t do anything for you!”
They don’t move. They just smile.
“Why won’t you talk to me?” I cry. “I tried! I promise I tried.”
They still don’t talk, but I look down the line of them, five girls. Billie is on the left, wearing the backpack she set off home with, then there’s Haadiya with her long, dark hair in a braid. After Haadiya is little Ellie, holding her pony, and then Jenny Ann Welder, aka the girl with strawberry-blonde hair, and then the older girl in her school uniform. I squint at her. She looks smart, with her hair brushed and some makeup on her eyes, stood at the end of my bed. But if she wasn’t wearing that uniform, and her hair was slightly messed up…I remember seeing someone who looked really like her recently. Just a glimp
se. I open my mouth slowly, looking at her, and think myself back to the bench on the green triangle. I wasn’t really paying attention to the walker’s wallet as he pulled out a little plastic folder the size of a playing card and flipped through the pictures…but if I look back, I see, in my peripheral vision, a photograph that looks exactly like her, wearing a strappy top. He called her Kerry. And then in my mind’s eye he turns the page and there is another photo, of a pale little girl with bleary eyes, propped up on a pillow. It’s Ellie.
There was a discrepancy between our roles, like there was between my mother and Dad. With us, it was less defined by who cooked and who cleaned, and more by what happened outside the house.
After we married, I still wasn’t allowed to spend time with other male students. It became an issue with one of my professors—my personal adviser on my dissertation. I had to switch, to a woman. They asked why. I pretended I had been raped. I don’t know why I said that. It just came out of my mouth.
Conversely, while I’d thought he might stop seeing other women after we were married, he didn’t. He still went out some nights and didn’t come back until three or four o’clock in the morning. He would make comments about being out with friends, even though I didn’t ask. In fact, I didn’t say anything to him about those nights, about the smell of sex on him. I was terrified of losing him, but I also felt oddly apathetic at the thought of any action on my part. What would it accomplish? I didn’t want him to leave me, and I was sure he wouldn’t change. Perhaps he would start lying to me outwardly, slipping away in secret, telling me I was being controlling.
There were times he would become angry. He failed the exams at university. He couldn’t get qualified. He became unhappy, frustrated. Once, when I asked him what he was going to do instead, he slammed his hand down on my hand on the table. I screamed, and he shouted at me for the noise I was making. The sex we had afterward was frightening. He threw me on the ground in a ball. He tore my skirt in two. Afterward he was sweet to me. I had bruises all the way down the left side of my body. He said he didn’t know his strength, as if he were proud. I believed him, because everything good that had ever happened to me had happened because of him. Not to believe him would be to end my own happiness, to risk everything that gave my life meaning and color.
I think he knew I knew about the other women. He didn’t hide it. He kept a packet of condoms in his coat pocket that would diminish then be replaced. One day I read in the paper that there had been a series of assaults on women on our campus. I worried for him, I thought he might see something and get involved, try to stop it happening and be hurt. But then I realized, one night while he was gripping my neck. I asked him to stop. It was too hard. He said of course he’d stop; I was his wife. With that comment I understood he made a differentiation between me and other women. With other women he wouldn’t stop when asked. I knew his sexual appetites were voracious; his approach to relationships was adoring, but controlling. He liked to flirt and make a woman want him, then take her harder than she had planned. One day I was doing his laundry and found blood on his jeans, around the zipper. I knew he didn’t have a cut on him. I had given him the sex he had demanded that morning. I saw the blood and ran through to the kitchen, vomited in the sink. The assaults. It was him. I cried, thinking about my perfect life, my perfect marriage; how hard life was before and how relieved I had been to find him, how relieved I still was not to be alone; how much he loved me and how sweet he could be. How, if I told anyone, I would have to give that up.
He didn’t choose to be turned on by these things, he just was. And then something happened that crossed a line, for both of us.
In the morning, I get up and put on clothes that don’t make me look pretty. Inoffensive tomboy clothes, like my big baggy T-shirt with Garfield on it and my long shorts. I put my hair in a ponytail, brush my teeth, and wash all the makeup off my face. It doesn’t all go, but it basically does. I haven’t slept much, so I’m yawning my head off. I’ve been thinking about the walker all night. Something just isn’t fitting right about him and the way he talked to me. He must be the killer, because of the photographs, but I didn’t get a killer vibe from him somehow. It seemed like he cared about me. I think he wanted to cuddle me, not kill me. I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but I’ve always had good intuition. I knew where to find Billie, didn’t I? Granddad says some people, particularly children, have great intuition, and those people also tend to be able to hear spirits and see auras and all sorts of things. The Ouija book says the same thing. I should trust my instincts. They’ve got me this far. Aren’t I the one the dead girls talk to?
I’m just walking out of my bedroom and toward the top of the stairs, when I stop. A shiver goes through me. I reach out and steady my hand on the banister. The cold air that comes with the dead girls is around me, but when I look they aren’t there. I frown. A thought is moving like fog through my mind, and suddenly it solidifies, becoming clear. What if the walker is the pervert, but not the killer? I hear a knock at the front door. I frown and listen. It’s only eight, so Mum is still here. I hear her clompy steps reach the door, and the click of the latch. “Hello, Nathan! What a nice surprise.”
“Um, hi, Mrs. Wilde. I’ve brought Thera’s bag back. She dropped it the other day.”
“That’s very kind of you, Nathan. Would you like to speak to her? I think she’s up.”
“Nah, I’m fine,” Nathan says quickly. “I have to go and do some chores for my dad.”
“Oh, is your dad home?”
There is a pause. “Kind of.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to stay?”
“Can’t,” Nathan says shortly. “Bye.”
The door closes. The cold air has gone. Then Mum calls up the stairs, interrupting my thoughts. “Thera, are you coming downstairs? We’ve got a big day ahead.”
I start down the stairs. “We do?”
“Yes, we’re going to see a nice lady today.” She goes into the kitchen and I hear her bashing crockery around, doing the dishes. “You can talk to her about Billie, and everything you’ve been feeling,” she calls back through. “Isn’t that a good idea? It’s okay to tell her anything that’s on your mind. Oh! And Nathan Nolan just dropped off your backpack. It’s a good job you didn’t lose that!”
“Huh.” Nathan still didn’t want to see me. And there was that cold air when he came to the door…Hang on a minute…I think back to mine and Nathan’s conversations about the killer and I realize something: he doesn’t have an alibi.
“Ooh, it’s a lovely sunny day!” Mum calls. “Better get some nice sundresses on to go and see the lady!” I roll my eyes. Mum is being fake cheery to lure me into a false sense of security. This so-called “lady” she is talking about clearly sounds like some sort of psychiatrist, to check I’m not going crazy with grief. But I’m not crazy at all. In fact, this morning I have a new sense of purpose and clarity. I have never been more productive than lately, figuring out what happened to Billie and tracking down her killer. I’ve never been so connected to the world, feeling instincts and changes in the air, and interacting with the dead girls even though they scare me. I’m doing something useful. I’m logically following the trail to its conclusion. And now, just this morning, I have a new theory. I feel, for the first time in a while, strong.
Mum thinks she can trick me, that I’ll just go along with her fake cheeriness and forget about Billie and be fine with Dad moving out and be as stupid and quiet and obedient as they want me to be. They think so little of me. But I can trick them too.
My trick will be to lull them into a false sense of security before my next act of bravery and cunning.
So for a week I play at being good. The lady Mum was talking about taking me to see turns out to be a grief counselor, and so I go to see her to talk about Billie. I make up a bunch of stuff about imagining Billie up in heaven and wondering if she misses me and her parents, which are all lies, because
I know she’s here, haunting us. The lady recommends that I go on some pills to stop me being depressed. I have to take them every day for a few months, which I do for the first few days. They make me feel woozy and lazy, which won’t help my plan, so I start to keep them next to my teeth when Mum gives them to me, instead of swallowing them down with water. Later I spit them out.
I’m bored, obviously, because I’m pretending to be a stupid, weak girl who isn’t strong or tough, but I try to have patience. I’m waiting for Mum and Dad to trust me again and unground me. Sometimes I sit and read in the garden. The dead girls stand around me and stare at me. They make the air so cold I tremble constantly and Mum asks what’s wrong. I tell the dead girls the time is coming, and not to worry. They don’t say anything in reply, but sometimes they enter my body and hands, and make me write terrible stories of things that happened to them in the margins of my books. I promise them I won’t forget all of them, everything that happened. I promise them that I will be their champion.
Mum takes me to see a summer school teacher, who is really nice. I spend all Saturday and Sunday in her class, and I get to write and bind a book about the Greek myth of Medusa, design my own city and draw the map with all the sewerage and public services like trams and other intricate things on it, learn some Chinese, and dissect a sheep’s heart (good practice). It’s better than normal school, because we do more work and more creative things. I like learning, but school makes it so boring. I also raise two Nano Pets through infancy to two and a half, and then they die. I think that’s pretty good. They were called Aisha and Benji. Then I have another one called Frogs, but he overeats and dies of being fat. (That was depressing.) Sam and I make our packing lists, to decide what toys we will take on the plane to Majorca for holidays. Just Mum is coming now that they are getting divorced, which is stupid because it’s Dad who likes to do fun stuff like jumping over waves or lining up all our toys beneath a balcony and bombing them with tissue balls soaked in water. I shut Sam in the big leather suitcase and take him on the bed, which is an airplane, and we play going on holiday, but Mum runs in and opens the case, shouting about the lack of oxygen.
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