Fierce Fragile Hearts

by Sara Barnard

  ‘God, Roz,’ Caddy hisses, face flaming brighter than her hair. ‘Was that actually necessary?’

  ‘Did you know about this?’ Rosie demands of me. ‘This is you, isn’t it? The two of you have been hair-colluding and leaving me out.’

  I put my hands up in mock-surrender. ‘I’m an innocent bystander. This was Tarin.’

  ‘Can you both stop acting like this even matters?’ Caddy says. She’s shrunk into herself, shoulders hunched, face still pink. ‘It’s just hair. God.’

  ‘I’m unconvinced,’ Rosie says to me. ‘A massive hair-change has your muddy Suze-paws all over it. And it actually looks good. This is all you.’

  ‘How are you able to simultaneously compliment and insult both of us?’ Caddy asks.

  ‘Years of practice,’ Rosie says. ‘Should I have changed my hair? Is that a before-uni thing?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s an older-sister-gift thing. Can we please talk about something else?’

  Rosie grins. ‘Hey, Cads? I like your new hair.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Caddy attempts a casual hair-toss. ‘OK. One drink here and then on to La Choza?’

  It’s our last Friday together before Rosie leaves for Norwich, and we’ve had this evening planned for weeks. Cheap wine at a pub, then on to La Choza for burritos and margaritas. After that, it’s more cocktails and then shots and then the dizzying crush of a club, the three of us interlinked and close from dance floor to bathroom to bar, sweaty hands clasped, arms around necks, kisses on cheeks. The whole thing is magic. I love them both so much, it fills me up.

  We end up on the beach in the early hours, sharing a bag of cheesy chips, huddled together on the cold pebbles. Caddy is loose and giggly, tapping at her phone screen and whispering, ‘I just love him. I love him so much, guys,’ while Rosie takes endless photos of the sea, our feet, our faces.

  ‘Don’t leave,’ I say to them both, after Caddy has started complaining about her phone screen being all greasy and Rosie is telling her off as she tries to wipe it with the ruffle of her clutch. ‘Can’t you just stay?’

  ‘Look who’s talking,’ Rosie says. ‘The queen of disappearing.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Caddy says. ‘At least we’ll visit.’

  ‘Ooh,’ I say. ‘Bitter!’

  Caddy puts her arm around me and plants a kiss on my cheek. ‘I love you.’

  ‘I know you do,’ I say.

  ‘But not enough to stay,’ she adds. She lets out a happy sigh. ‘Rosie loves you too, even if she won’t say it.’

  I glance at Rosie to see that she’s smirking her Rosiest smirk. ‘Rosie doesn’t feel the need to inflate Suze’s ego any further,’ she says. ‘She knows she is beloved.’ Only Rosie could get away with saying something like this to me, and we both know it, which makes it perfect. I slide my arm through hers and squeeze, and she wrinkles her nose affectionately at me in response.

  ‘Thanks for making space for me again,’ I say. Their shoulders are warm against mine, and I’m so happy.

  ‘Always,’ Rosie says lightly.

  ‘Always, always,’ Caddy adds.

  8

  ‘Hang Loose’

  Alabama Shakes

  The day before Rosie leaves for Norwich, I go to her house for the afternoon. She’s still in the midst of packing, her bedroom floor covered in boxes, and when I walk in I find her on her knees, sorting through a pile of books.

  ‘Hello!’ I say. ‘Your mum let me in. Has she been crying?’

  ‘Probably,’ Rosie replies. ‘I think it’s just hit her that I’m going. She keeps wailing about empty nests. I was like, I’m not exactly going to the moon.’ She leans back on her ankles and sighs. ‘Hello, by the way! How are you?’

  ‘Fine. Want some help?’

  ‘No, just company.’ She smiles at me. This is a softer Rosie than I’m used to; it feels like maybe she’s been crying, too. Or come close to it, at least.

  ‘Here,’ I say, opening my bag and pulling out a bottle of Tuaca. ‘Your going-away present from me.’

  Her smile widens into a grin. ‘That’s so perfect.’

  ‘Well, I thought so. You could share it with your flatmates as, like, an icebreaker? If you get nervous or something. Not that I think you’ll be nervous.’

  ‘I’m so nervous,’ she says, surprising me.

  ‘Really? Why?’

  She laughs. ‘Because it’s terrifying? Moving to a whole new place and living with a bunch of strangers?’

  ‘Why’s that scary?’

  She gives me a gentle shove. ‘Oh, stop it, Miss Popularity. You know what I mean.’

  I don’t, really. I’ve moved to new places a bunch of times and lived with strangers. At least in this scenario everyone’s in the same boat. At least she doesn’t have to live by herself in a bedsit. What she’s doing seems to me like the most exciting thing in the world. A socially acceptable new beginning. Who wouldn’t want that?

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ I say instead of voicing any of this, because I know it’s not fair. ‘I liked you straight away when I met you.’

  Her face lifts. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. I could tell you were a good egg. Plus you were wearing those owl earrings, and who wouldn’t like someone wearing owl earrings? Make sure you wear them tomorrow.’

  ‘You know what?’ Rosie says, tossing the book she’s holding into the box and reaching for the bottle. ‘Let’s have some of this now.’ She casts around for a cup, then shrugs and takes a swig straight from the bottle. ‘Ugh,’ she says, shaking her head. She hands it to me with a grin. ‘Delicious.’ She waits until I’ve taken a sip and replaced the cap before she says, ‘Listen, I need to tell you something.’

  ‘OK,’ I say cautiously. That kind of sentence is right up there with ‘We need to talk’ for a signpost of something you don’t want to hear.

  ‘I wasn’t sure about telling you now, or waiting until, like, later. But then I thought, well, if something happens, I don’t want it to be like this great ta-da! You know?’ She’s rambling, which she never does, and I just blink at her in confusion. ‘So I figured now would be the best time, when it’s not tied to any one person, and you’re not going to think, well, of course, she’s at uni now—’

  ‘Roz,’ I break in. ‘I literally have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  She laughs a breathless kind of laugh that is mostly tension-releasing rather than about actual humour. ‘OK. Sorry. God, I thought this would be easy. I mean, it’s you! But it feels hard anyway? Like … God. I’ve never had a big reveal moment before. I should probably have planned this better.’ She stops talking, rolls her eyes to the ceiling and smiles a resigned, self-deprecating smile. ‘So I’m bi.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Yeah. So that’s a thing.’ She twists the Tuaca bottle in her hands, finding the cap and unscrewing it to take another swig. ‘It’s not a big deal, like, in any way,’ she says. But her face is flaming.

  ‘OK,’ I say, trying to follow her lead. ‘Thanks for telling me.’

  She shrugs, looking away from me, her cheeks still blazing pink. ‘Course I’ve … well, I’ve known for a long time, I think, but it seemed like I should be, like, sure … and I wasn’t sure. But now I figure that’s a part of it. Not being sure. Am I making sense?’

  I nod quickly.

  ‘I actually think I might …’ She stops, bites on her lip, then looks at me. ‘It might just be girls. I don’t know. I’m still figuring it out.’

  Apprehension has clouded her face, and it makes me want to tell her that I’m fine with it, but I know better. It’s not like she needs or is asking for my permission. I say, ‘Does your mum know?’

  At this, she smiles. ‘Oh yeah, I told her a while back. She got really excited; it was like I’d just told her I had super-powers.’

  I laugh. ‘That’s so nice, though.’

  ‘Yeah, she’s all right.’ She gives a small shrug, still smiling. ‘She was like, “Bringing you up in Brighton, I’d hope for nothi
ng less.” And then she got me a rainbow cake.’ She tucks her hair behind her ear, her shoulders relaxing, and begins picking up books again. ‘Is it crazy to take the entire set of Harry Potter books with me?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Do it anyway.’

  ‘I probably won’t even read them.’

  ‘That’s not why you want to take them.’ I’m guessing, but it’s probably true. ‘They’re comfort books.’

  She smiles. ‘I like that. Comfort books.’ She puts the books into the box and glances at me. ‘Listen, are you going to be OK, with us gone?’ Her voice is casual and even, like this isn’t a heavy question.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say.

  Her smile quirks. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You know me,’ I say. ‘I’m always OK.’

  There are a lot of things she could say in response to this, and there’s a time when she would have said them all, but today she just smiles and shakes her head a little, which is the Rosie equivalent of an affectionate hug. Then she says, ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘Did you time coming back like this? Like, with us leaving only a few months after you got here?’

  I frown. ‘What do you mean? Of course not. How would that even work?’

  ‘I don’t know, but we just wondered.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Yeah, Caddy and me. It just seemed … like, you were gone for so long. We hardly ever heard from you and you never visited until you had to. And then you tell us you’re coming back, which is amazing, but it’s not until the summer before we leave? I guess we just worry that maybe … it’s us. I don’t know.’

  I bite my tongue and breathe in slowly through my nose, waiting a few seconds before I reply so the sting from her words doesn’t show in my voice. ‘Roz, come on. You know you’re the reasons I came back at all.’

  ‘Well, that’s not completely true,’ she says, and she’s using her matter-of-fact Rosie voice that used to wind me up when we were first friends and she was lecturing me about going off with Dylan Evers. ‘Sarah’s the main reason, isn’t she?’

  ‘Actually, no,’ I say, trying to keep my voice steady. ‘It’s you two.’

  ‘But how can that be true, Suze? We’re not even going to be here.’

  ‘It’s not my fault you’re going to uni!’ I snap, then bite my lips together. I don’t want to fight with Rosie. And I really don’t want to think too hard about them not being here. ‘Listen. I know that neither of you understand anything about leaving care—’

  ‘You never tell us any of it, how would we?’

  ‘Roz! For God’s sake.’

  ‘Well, it’s true. You can’t do that thing where you don’t tell us something and then get annoyed with us for not knowing it.’

  ‘I don’t do that!’

  ‘You do it literally all the time.’

  ‘Some things are hard to talk about, OK? How can you not get that?’

  ‘Sure, I don’t get that,’ she says, clenching her jaw. ‘Me, the one with the dead sister and father who abandoned her. No one else understands bad things except you. Sure.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘Sure,’ she says again. ‘Sure, Suze.’

  There’s a long silence, both of us waiting for the other to speak. I pull my knees up to my chest and rest my forehead on them, closing my eyes. After a while, I feel her fingers on my hair. The gentlest tug. I look up.

  ‘We love you,’ she says. ‘We want to support you. And we worry about you. OK?’

  I nod.

  ‘You shut us out more than you should. That’s what I’m trying to say. We’re on your side.’

  ‘I know.’

  She raises her eyebrows slightly, like, Go on.

  ‘I couldn’t leave Southampton any earlier than I did,’ I say, trying not to sigh too obviously. ‘I had to wait until the end of the school year. And look, I’d love it if you and Caddy were sticking around. But you’ve got uni, and that’s good. It’s not like it’s forever, anyway. I’ll still be here when you get back.’

  I see something in her face then, and I finally get it.

  ‘Oh, Roz. I will be.’

  ‘I just worry,’ she says.

  Everyone worries. That’s the role I play in all their lives. The one to worry about.

  When I don’t say anything, sinking my head back down on to my knees, she speaks again. ‘Last time, when you were suicidal –’ my entire chest seizes at the word. I close my eyes – ‘I didn’t know that you were. I didn’t even realize. And I was right there with you at school. You don’t say when you’re low, Suze. You don’t talk. So of course I—’

  ‘I do talk,’ I interrupt, lifting my head. My neck feels hot. ‘And I’m doing so much better now. I take my medication, OK? I have a crisis plan for if I feel … like that again. I’ve had therapy. Intensive therapy. That wasn’t for nothing.’

  Rosie doesn’t say anything, her anxious eyes searching mine.

  ‘Roz, I promise. It won’t be like it was before. Things are so different now. And, look, we’ll talk all the time, OK? You can call me whenever you want.’

  ‘Well, ditto,’ she says.

  I wait a beat, then attempt a smile that she won’t think is fake. ‘Can we talk about something else now?’

  Rosie leaves Brighton at lunchtime the next day. I don’t know exactly when she leaves, but I still feel her absence as if I’d watched her go. Caddy comes bounding over to mine that afternoon, armed with ingredients, and we make a strawberry yogurt cake and listen to an old playlist I made her when we were first becoming close friends. Being with her is safe and comfortable; sometimes just being with Caddy feels like letting the sunshine in.

  But she leaves in the evening to see Kel, and that’s how the rest of the week unfolds. Rosie’s departure has turned me into a third wheel in a way I never was before, and it feels weird to spend time with just the two of them, especially considering it’s their last week together before Caddy leaves and their relationship becomes long distance for the first time. And Caddy wants to spend time with Tarin and her parents, because it’ll be the first time she’s lived away from them, too. I’m the extra. A bonus, even. But never an unconditional first choice.

  Rosie, for her part, ends up calling me every day that week. The first time is on the Sunday evening of her arrival and she’s nervous and breathless, telling me about her flatmates as she dresses for a club night on campus. On Monday she wants to tell me about everyone in so much detail, I worry that she just doesn’t want to get off the phone and actually hang out with them. On Tuesday, after midnight, she’s drunk and tearful, homesick. Wednesday, she just wants to reassure me that she’s fine, totally fine. Thursday, she’s drunk again, but excited this time, a bit giddy. She just kissed a girl. ‘A girl, Suze!’ Friday, she wants a proper chat. She’s sitting on the steps in the main square of the university: ‘Tell me everything about Brighton. I miss you.’ On Saturday it’s a pep talk, like she’d been preparing for it, making sure I’ll be OK when Caddy leaves.

  And then Caddy does leave, and it’s fine. For one thing, I’d been so worried I’d fall apart that the fact that I don’t feels like a success. And for another, Kel is prepared.

  ‘You want to come to mine tonight?’ he asks me. ‘We’re having a new-semester party. Come and see what a proper student party is like.’

  ‘I’m not a student, though,’ I say.

  ‘That’s OK,’ he says. ‘Every student party needs a token civilian.’

  So I go, and even though I wasn’t sure at first if it was a good idea or not, it’s actually great. Kel enthusiastically introduces me to his housemates as ‘my friend Suze’, which I appreciate, and watches with a proud, brotherly smile as I do what I do best and charm the room. It feels good to be around new people on the exact night I’d been worried about being alone.

  I end up spending a while talking to a couple of girls from his course, Maisie and Kat, who work for the music section of the universit
y newspaper and get to go to loads of gigs for free. They’re friendly, clearly used to chatting to strangers, and not at all snobby about talking to the ‘civilian’; the kind of friends I hope Rosie and Caddy make. The conversation moves on to a guy Kat likes, and somehow I end up doing her make-up in exchange for a future of tip-offs about good upcoming gigs.

  I’m telling Kel about this later – I’m smoking a roll-up on his patio with his housemates and he’d greeted us with an obnoxious cough – when his face lights up. ‘Hey, did Caddy tell you about Matt?’

  ‘The musician?’

  ‘Yeah! We’ve been best friends since we were kids. Listen, he’s in Brighton next weekend to play a gig at the Third Bridge, this pub down near the seafront. It’s just a small one, but I said I’d go, obviously. Want to come? I don’t know if you’ll like his music, but hey, a free gig is a free gig, right?’

  I hesitate, wondering if it’s OK for me to hang out one-on-one with Kel like that. I’m pretty certain he’s not into me, but it’s still potentially dodgy territory, right?

  ‘Feel free to say no,’ Kel says easily. He might be the most laid-back guy I’ve ever met. ‘But I thought it might be good. Having a friend to hang out with, you know? With Cads and Rosie gone.’

  Ah. I feel a smile spread over my face. ‘Caddy told you to look after me, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yep,’ he says, unfazed.

  Caddy. My sweet, kind friend. ‘Well, OK, then. Thanks. That sounds great.’

  ‘Great,’ he says. ‘Listen, I’m not going to forget about you just because uni’s started up again and Caddy’s gone. What I want is for us to be actual friends, not Caddy-mutuals. You game?’

  I grin. ‘I’m game.’

  He grins back. ‘Cool.’

  When I see Dilys that week, she’s brought out photos from her time at the Royal College of Music and I look through them, smiling as a younger Dilys smiles back at me, violin on her lap. She can’t be much older than I am, which is weird and nice at the same time.