by Sara Barnard
I shove a spoonful of Weetabix into my mouth and scowl, but that’s all I can do. Part of being unflappable is being impossible to argue with, and I can tell that there’ll be no changing Carolyn’s mind on this.
So I send a quick text to Connor. Coming to Kett today? and he replies almost instantly. I picture him at his kitchen table, eating cereal while he makes tea for his mother and gran. Nope. Going w/ Mum to hospital at 11 for check-up after the fall on Friday. Will revise at home instead.
I send a sad face, hoping he’ll realize I mean it for his mum and not for me (even though I do kind of mean it for me too) and tell him to call me later so we can meet up.
‘Didn’t you get any papers this morning?’ I ask.
‘No,’ Carolyn says. ‘And that’s for your own good. There’s nothing in there worth reading. I promise.’
‘I’ll just look on the way to school,’ I say. ‘So you might as well’ve just got them.’
Carolyn rolls her eyes. ‘You can lead a horse to water,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘Finish your breakfast. I’ll drive you to school.’
I know that the decision to come into school was a mistake as soon as I walk through the gates. For one thing, there are journalists hanging around on the grass, some of them with cameras, and just the sight of them makes me nauseous. For another, Molly Kale and Livia Vasin practically leap on me before I get halfway across the car park.
‘Oh my God, Eden!’
‘What the hell’s going on with Bonnie?’
‘Mr Cohn?!’
And the like.
I try to shake them off, but they only multiply as we make our way through the main building and down into the science block where our revision session is being held. By the time I get there, I can’t even count the number of my classmates that are surrounding me.
‘I don’t know anything!’ I keep saying, but it’s not making any difference. The door to the classroom is locked, so I’ve got no choice but to stand there and let everyone bark questions at me.
‘Do you think she’ll be back before Wednesday?’ someone asks.
‘Of course she will,’ I say. ‘Bonnie wouldn’t miss our exams.’ The sea of faces before me all look doubtful, which makes my stomach twist with an anxiety I don’t want to feel. ‘Look, just fuck off, all of you, OK?’
‘Eden McKinley,’ a stern voice says, and I groan. Mrs Berwick, our Head of Year and Biology teacher, is walking towards us, pulling a key from her pocket to open the door. The sea of students parts to let her through. ‘That’s not the sort of language I want to be hearing on school grounds.’
‘Sorry, miss,’ I mutter. I hate Mrs Berwick, and Mrs Berwick hates me. We have an understanding on this.
‘Inside, everyone,’ Mrs Berwick says, opening the door. ‘Let’s try to calm some of this hysteria, shall we?’
That’s all she says on the subject for the rest of the session, which takes an hour and a half and is, somehow, even more boring than actual Biology lessons used to be. I doodle vines up and down the length of my notebook, thinking about Bonnie and where she is, what she’s doing, at this very moment. I wonder what the day-to-day is like when you’re on the run. I imagine it like a film montage of laughing, kissing, eating strawberries and sex (except the figures in my head are a generic couple and not the Bonnie and Mr Cohn I know, like my brain still can’t quite compute this scenario), but that can’t be it all the time, can it? There must be boring moments too. Or maybe not. How would I know?
‘I think that will do for today,’ Mrs Berwick says, and I look around at everyone starting to pack up their stuff. ‘I’m hoping to see most of you back here tomorrow afternoon,’ she continues. She’s smiling her cold smile, and I wonder, not for the first time, whether she thinks it makes her look friendly instead of evil. ‘I know these sessions aren’t compulsory, but they are important. You’ll be grateful come results day.’
I doubt that, somehow, but I don’t have much of a choice about attending the session or not. Carolyn made it pretty clear that for me these sessions are compulsory, even with everything that’s going on with Bonnie. So I know I’ll be back here tomorrow for a last-ditch attempt to learn all the stuff that didn’t go into my head the first hundred times around, even though all of this seems to matter even less to me now than it did last week. And it barely mattered then, either. I’m just not an academic person. And you know what? That’s fine. I don’t need A grades to work with soil and plant flowers and create an entire garden, but I’ve spent the last five years having all my education concentrated on getting better grades. What a joke. What a total waste of everyone’s time. I’ve never got an A in my entire life. If you ask me, school and teachers have completely warped priorities.
‘Hey, Eden,’ a voice says from beside me. I glance up to see Alfie Higgs leaning right over, his elbows on my desk, as the room rustles with people packing up to leave.
I look at him, instantly suspicious. Alfie and I aren’t exactly friends. ‘Hi . . . ?’
‘Charlie and me wanna know,’ he says, gesturing behind him at Charlie Ruthers, who grins. Charlie and I went out for about five minutes in Year 9. His kissing was traumatizing.
‘Know what?’ I can guess what.
‘Do you think they did it in this classroom?’
‘Oh, get lost,’ I snap, but it’s too late. The very horrible mental image of Mr Cohn and Bonnie doing things right on the desk Alfie’s leaning on is already parading through my head in full, horrifying technicolour.
‘Did she call him sir?’ Alfie somehow manages to choke this out through his guffaws, and even though I hate him so much I could slap his stupid face, I’m struck dumb, just sitting there, face flaming with rage and embarrassment. Damn Alfie. Damn Bonnie.
And then Charlie leers over the table and says, ‘Can’t believe the nerd queen was actually getting laid when we all thought you were the easy one.’
Alfie lifts an appreciative hand for a high-five, and the two of them laugh like the pathetic little knobs they are. I want to tell them to fuck off, but the words have sliced into me and I don’t quite trust myself to speak.
I’m rescued by Mrs Berwick, of all people. ‘Eden, could I speak to you for a minute?’ she asks.
‘Bye, guys,’ I say, shoving my notepad into my bag and legging it to the front of the room, leaving them cackling behind me. My skin is still prickling with that mix of fury and humiliation that comes with guys being guys to girls like me. Girls that have a reputation. A reputation that, in my case, is entirely unearned. I mean, I’m not a virgin (and anyway that’s a social construct, blah blah blah), but that’s only because Connor and I tried having sex just after we first got together (basically because we thought we were supposed to) and it was so crap (I’m not even sure if it even counts as sex) that we agreed we wouldn’t try it again until we were both super ready, and that’s just never come up since. I know that it will one day, probably very soon, and I’m even quite excited about it, but there’s no rush. In the meantime, there’s other stuff. And Connor’s really, really great at the other stuff.
Clearly, everyone thinks we’re at it like rabbits. I got my totally baseless reputation as an easy shag somewhere around Year 9, which shows what a joke the whole thing is. (One blurry boob picture, and I’m labelled for life.) I wonder sometimes about the other girls who got labelled that way. Are they secretly not having sex, either? Is the whole thing an elaborate con?
The really stupid thing is that as crap as it is for me, it’s good for Connor, who gets to enjoy the backslappy bullshit that boys seem to think is a requirement for the sexually active from the same guys who used to bully him for being weedy. It’s all such a joke.
So I can try and pretend I don’t care what anyone says about me, but let’s be real: I still want to cry when a clown like Charlie Ruthers announces to the room that I’m easy. I practically run to the teacher I hate to get away from him.
In fact, I’ve never been so enthusi
astic about going to talk to Mrs Berwick, and she looks a little startled by my eagerness.
‘Hello,’ she says, clearly trying to cover herself but actually making things weirder. ‘How are you, Eden?’
‘Fine,’ I say.
‘I wanted to check in with you,’ she says, ‘to make sure you’re coping with everything that’s going on with Bonnie Wiston-Stanley and –’ she hesitates ever so slightly, but I see it – ‘and Mr Cohn.’
What a bizarre question. What does she think? That I’m suddenly going to forget five years’ worth of being one of the certified Kett lost causes and confide in her or something? Even if I wasn’t coping – which I am – why the hell would I talk to Mrs Berwick about it?
‘I’m coping fine,’ I say.
‘We’re all concerned,’ she says. ‘The staff and myself, I mean. Concerned that this . . . spectacle could be disruptive at such a crucial time in all of your lives.’
‘OK,’ I say. ‘Well. I’m fine.’
‘There’s already been a fair amount of press intrusion,’ she continues. ‘Journalists trying to gain access to the school, digging for any kind of information to pad out their stories. They’re banned from school grounds, of course, but with the internet a physical ban is only half the battle.’ I’m starting to wonder if she’s really having a conversation with me or just herself when she asks, ‘Have you had any of that kind of trouble? Any journalists trying to contact you on Facebook? Twitter? Instasnap, or whatever it’s called?’
I shake my head and shrug at the same time. This is just a reflex, but it confuses her and she frowns. ‘No,’ I add helpfully.
‘Nothing?’ she says, her voice and expression dubious. ‘Other students have already told me that journalists have tried to reach out to them through their social accounts. It’s quite surprising that they wouldn’t try to reach you, as Bonnie’s best friend.’
Oh God, this was so easily escapable – well done, Eden. I should have just said that I’d had a couple of messages, but I’d ignored them, or something. I don’t want to have to go into why no one’s tried to contact me, but I can tell Mrs Berwick has locked on to this now, may even be getting suspicious, so I resign myself. ‘I don’t use my real name on social media,’ I say, adding mentally, not any more.
‘Oh.’ She looks first surprised, then impressed. Mrs Berwick has never, not in five years at Kett, been impressed with me. ‘Well, that’s very sensible, Eden.’
‘Mmm,’ I say, hoping I can leave.
‘If only some of our other students had your foresight,’ she says. ‘And some of the teachers!’ She gives a little laugh at this, and then looks at me, as if expecting me to join in with this sudden, unearned camaraderie. I blink at her. ‘Well,’ she says finally. ‘You just let me know if they manage to track you down, OK? We’ll take care of it.’
‘OK,’ I say, even though the very last place I’d go for help is Kett.
The thing is, there was nothing sensible – or impressive – about me adopting pseudonyms on all of my social media accounts. It wasn’t foresight; it was necessity.
I walk out of the classroom and down the empty hall, pulling out my phone and bringing up the Facebook app.
Heather White. My fake name to hide my real life. All of my privacy settings are on, hiding not just my activity and photos, but also my friends and connections. Anything that could lead someone to me. A specific someone, that is. My mother.
‘Real-life subterfuge,’ Connor had said, a long time ago, when I first explained to him why I had a different name on Facebook. ‘That’s cool.’
‘It’s not cool,’ I’d snapped, and he’d faltered and apologized – he’s the kind of person who apologizes immediately even when he doesn’t know what he’s apologizing for – and I’d tried to take it back and be relaxed and normal again, but I couldn’t, not really. The thing is, nothing gets me as crotchety and brittle as having to talk about my mother with other people. It’s just too bloody complicated to be able to explain.
It’s not about missing her, that’s what you have to understand. It’s not about wanting to see her. It’s not even about whether she wants to see me. It’s about boundaries. Boundaries she has a history of bulldozing right over, given half the chance.
I haven’t seen my mother since I was thirteen, which was the first and last time Daisy and I’d had an unsupervised visit since we’d first been fostered by the McKinleys five years before. The visit had ended in failure because my mother is an addict, not because she’s a bad person – I feel like I should make that clear, too. So I know, rationally, that she didn’t mean to abandon Daisy and me at a random McDonald’s in Margate while she disappeared with my money and my phone. Just like she didn’t mean to forget to feed us when we lived with her, or wash our clothes, or pay the electricity bill. Some things, she said on the phone to me after that last awful visit, just fade out when you need a hit. It’s an illness. She’d been sobbing, like her whole damn heart was broken, and I’d been silent. You understand, don’t you, Eden? You know I don’t mean it. I’ll be better next time. But when I’d hung up, I’d told Carolyn and Marisa – my social worker – that I didn’t want to see her for a while. And they agreed, and they spoke to Mum, and she agreed too. Understood it was for the best. But she still kept trying to contact me, trying to get to me, even when she’d promised to let some time pass, and so eventually I had to make a choice. And that’s when Eden Rose McKinley faded from the internet, and Heather White was born.
I stare at my fake profile for a while, thinking about that last visit, that same horrible churning feeling in my stomach when I remember Daisy’s face as she tried so hard to stay optimistic. She was nine. She’d worn her best dress.
A text comes in from Connor, and I click on it, glad for a distraction. Check Twitter!
It’s nearly time for the end of the normal class period, so I go on a little detour to the art block where Daisy’s locker is, because I have a sudden need to see my little sister in all her bolshy, present-day glory. I lean against her locker and open Twitter on my phone while I wait for her to appear. Connor knows I’m not much of a Twitter person, so I’m assuming it must have something to do with Bonnie.
I start to type her name into the search bar and it autofills with a hashtag: #BringBackBonnie. No way. They’ve made Bonnie a hashtag? Who came up with that?
I click on it, feeling a weird kind of smile/grimace hybrid on my face. This is so, so weird. The hashtag is, apparently, the current top trend in the UK. And it’s full of this kind of thing:
@treacletoes99
omg imagine if this was u n mr johns @amieleslie wud be sooo romantic!! #bringbackbonnie
@wesleyfred4ever
So scary :’( praying for her #bringbackbonnie
@lcfc77
Beautiful girl, get her home safe! Teacher deserves to hang #bringbackbonnie
@rainbowm00n
Seeing #bringbackbonnie like she didn’t bring this on herself smh
I take a few screenshots and send them to Bonnie, adding a quick LOOK WHAT YOU DID, and that’s when a voice sounds in my ear.
‘Eden!’
It’s Daisy, of course, and even though I’m standing at her locker I jump like she’s the last person I’m expecting to see. She gives me a what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you? look, which would be a lot more intimidating if she hadn’t learned it from me.
‘Hi,’ I say, pasting on a smile and shoving my phone into my pocket.
‘What’re you doing here?’ she asks bluntly.
‘Saying hi, obviously,’ I say. And then, just because I can, I put my arm around her neck and pull her in for a headlock/hug.
‘Get off!’ she yells, shaking me off. Her face is puce. ‘God, don’t you have somewhere else to be?’
‘Aw, Daze,’ I say, grinning. ‘Why would I want to be anywhere else when I could be here with you?’
She glares at me, trying to smooth down her hair from where I’d mussed it up.
‘Why’s y
our skirt so rolled up?’ I ask her, reaching out to adjust it. ‘It’s way too high.’
She jerks away from me, slapping at my outstretched hand. ‘Because I want it like that!’
‘It’s too short,’ I point out, surprised.
‘You always had yours short,’ she replies. ‘This is how everyone wears them.’
‘I didn’t have it that short when I was twelve,’ I say, trying not to show how horrified I am. Daisy is twelve. Twelve! The skirt is barely touching her thighs.
She raises one eyebrow at me. ‘Whatever,’ she says. ‘I’m going now.’
‘Hug for your big sister first?’ I ask.
I’m teasing, and it’s worth it for the look of utter disgust that appears at the mere suggestion of displaying sisterly affection in school.
‘Hi, Eden,’ a soft voice says from behind me. I glance around and it’s Rowan, Bonnie’s little sister, spinning the dial on her locker.
‘Oh, hey,’ I say.
‘Anyway, bye,’ Daisy says, rolling her eyes and giving me a sarcastic wave. She and Rowan don’t even acknowledge each other, even though they’re in the same form and their sisters are best friends.
Rowan gives me a shy smile as she pushes her books into her locker. Her skirt, I notice, is the appropriate length for a twelve-year-old. This makes sense, because Rowan is a smaller, skinnier, shyer version of her older sister. Following the rules is in her DNA.
‘How are you?’ I ask. I wouldn’t usually talk to Rowan without Bonnie around, but she looks all lonely and sad and I can’t help myself. ‘You doing OK?’
Rowan does a little half-shrug thing and looks away from me, her chin wobbling a little, and I realize she’s about to cry the moment before the tears spill.
‘Oh shit!’ I’m so unprepared for this that I wait too long to step forward and hug her, which makes everything even more awkward. ‘Don’t cry, Row. It’s OK.’
‘It’s not,’ she whispers. She whispers it so quietly she has to repeat herself before I understand.