by Lily Bailey
Over the next few weeks, we start weekly classes in the Special Needs Department. Mrs. Hall, the teacher, is plump and looks like a mole. She is kind to her core. We think she sees through the slow-processor diagnosis, because instead of focusing on “improving our reasoning skills” as instructed, after two sessions she asks us about our files and our work notes. We admit to her that we don’t file anything or write many notes in class.
She asks us if it’s because we are thinking about something else. We don’t have the heart to lie to her, even if it means the time is taken away. We say yes, it’s because we are thinking about other things. Thankfully she doesn’t ask what. She tells us to bring a file from a different subject each week.
Mrs. Hall brings us in a box of Celebrations every week. She pours them out across the desk and tells us to eat as many as we like, because she says we need fattening up. The two of us guzzle our way through the box, and she chats about her son Michael and her three dogs.
We sort through the notes we have managed to write, and the hundreds of worksheets and handouts that have ended up piled under the bed in our dorm because we don’t have time to organize them. The papers sift through her podgy hands and into appropriate plastic folders and topic sections in a whir of efficiency. Something about her puts us at ease. By the end of term, everything is beautifully highlighted, subheaded, and in its place. If anyone checked, there would be nothing to indicate that we weren’t the perfect student.
The morning of GCSE chemistry is a letter avalanche. On stressful days, more things are done wrong and must be recorded. I wonder whether we generate letters simply because we’re more anxious and not because recording them serves any inherent purpose. She shrieks:
NO! NO!
That idea is ludicrous. The correlation is false: the words are valuable in and of themselves and caused by real mistakes and nothing else.
I’ve never seen her get scared before, but something about my suggestion made her tremble. I saw a vulnerability I didn’t know existed. Why?
Today, Wimborne is united. We have an early breakfast and sit in silence, forlornly spooning cereal into our mouths. Textbooks are spread across the table, and between mouthfuls, everyone is trying to absorb as much as possible about ionic bonding.
What is going through their heads is unknown, though Ellie is weeping. For our part, we have seventy-four letters to account for. It’s 8:10 a.m., and the exam begins at 9:00. No time for last-minute revision. We frantically try to go through our list without doing anything else wrong.
We walk across to the sports hall at 8:45 a.m. Alice tells everyone who is going on about how badly they are going to fail to shut the fuck up, since we all know the only person who is going to fail is her.
The doors to the hall open at 8:55. The whole grade files in, and hundreds of shoes squeak across the floor and chairs squeal as they are pulled out from under desks. “You’ll do great,” Mum texted this morning. “You’ve done so much work. You deserve to nail it!”
What really happened was that over the Easter holidays, we sat upstairs in our bedroom at our desk in front of the window, with textbooks and notepads spread out in front of us, for about ten hours a day. Mum brought us snacks on little saucers and kept showing up with mugs of tea. We used this time as an extended Pause. We went over all the bad things we’d done since we started Hambledon, focusing hard on the things that were so red they’d made it into the Master Archive. This was mixed in with assessing the minutiae of day-to-day things that made it onto our list during the holidays.
All in all, the revision we actually did was limited.
It’s 8:56 when we find our desk. By focusing hard and engaging in as little pre-exam chat as possible, we’ve managed to assess 56 of the now 102 letters. If we’re going to start the exam on time, four minutes remain to deal with the rest.
We’re stuck on 57. There is no way to excuse it.
VAIN: We were waiting with Naomi and Trish to meet the rest of the house for breakfast. We were focusing hard on going through the words when Trish said “Stop staring at yourself in the mirror, you gimp.” We realized we had been standing vacantly in front of the mirror for about two minutes while thinking about letters. To be vain is an awful thing. We said “I’m not looking at me,” but it was too late. Trish thinks we are self-obsessed and will probably tell everyone.
At 9:01 a.m., we hear the proctor say “You may start now.”
But of course, we may not start.
We may not start until 9:41 a.m., which is how long it takes to sort everything. The official exam ends at 10:30, at which point the chairs squeal outward again as the majority of students in the room leave the hall. Outside the door we hear a swelling roar of postexam chat, unsuccessfully quashed by proctors calling out “SHHHHH, the exam isn’t over for everyone!”
There is something calming about a room that is intended to hold a lot of people being empty, or in this case, relatively empty—nine of us are left. It’s like a theater after the performance when everyone has shuffled out, and all the adrenaline has evaporated because it no longer serves any purpose. The room is silent apart from the soft flicking of pages—the others are checking through their papers. The only constant sound is our own pen scribbling; we’re writing so furiously we would not be surprised if when our exam paper gets taken away, the tracks of everything we wrote were inscribed on the desk. In this last half an hour, blissfully, we manage to finish the paper, adding the word GEEK to our list to account for anyone who noticed us scribbling away madly.
Afterward we leave the room with Alice, a fellow Extra Timer.
“How did it go?” we try.
“Shit,” she replies, swigging from her water bottle. “Why do you even get Extra Time anyway? It’s so unfair, because you’re really clever.”
“I’m a slow processor.”
“What does that even mean? It sounds totally made up.”
This is hard to dispute.
Lying scummy cheat.
Lying scummy cheat.
Lying scummy cheat.
The rest of our GCSEs pass in a similarly uncomfortable fashion, but despite my moaning, I would be happy for them to drag on forever. The end of GCSEs will signal the end of this phase of school life. The junior-school days will be over, and we’ll move out of Wimborne and into Austen, an ugly prefab bungalow on the outskirts of the school grounds, which looks like it replaced something that got bombed in the war, except that it didn’t.
Girls going into sixth form are allowed to make a list of a few people they want to be in a house with. We and Scarlett held an emergency conference on the fire escape connecting Wimborne and Aylingforde and engineered our lists so that we’d be certain to end up together, along with Ellie. We and Alice won’t be in the same house, because all our friends outside Wimborne are different. Georgia is leaving to go to a different school, where she can focus more on her running.
It’s not a major deal who you end up with really, because everyone in sixth form gets their own room so they can revise for their A-levels. This means there will be no one to distract us from the monotony of the letters.
She will relish this opportunity to have long evenings and nights to ourselves, analyzing our data. She will say that now we have our own room, it’s better to avoid people altogether, because our bad behavior only generates more words and creates more routines.
She is about to take hold, and there is nothing that I can do about it.
· 12 ·
Coming Home
In Wimborne everyone tacked pictures round their beds, and my collection has grown steadily over three years. I cart them over to Austen and stick them up: a Technicolor wallpaper of photos, concert tickets, postcards, and pages ripped from magazines. Most importantly, an assortment of paper notes I’ve saved with cute messages on them from Georgia and Ellie—handwritten proof of a stellar performance that sold out every night these last three years, though no one ever knew it was happening.
LILY—Can w
e go for a run later? I loveeee you!
Lilz you are the best and I’m so lucky to have you as my friend. Xxxx
I have my same crepe flower chains, same spotty duvet cover, same—
Oh, but it isn’t the same, it just isn’t, because by myself with you this room is so quiet it might as well roar. Lessons finished at 3:00 p.m. today, and we came straight back here. We dumped our folders and patent pencil case on the desk, and then the door shut behind us with a soft click. The other voices in the corridor went out like lights, but that was when the bomb went off.
You took me straight to:
CBKCTHSTGMFLSPDLIAGCSHQO.
CBKCTHSTGMFLSPDLIAGCSHQO.
CBKCTHSTGMFLSPDLIAGCSHQO.
You took me there, sat rigid on the end of the bed for hours and hours, and might have kept me there forever were it not that it’s 7:00 p.m. now, which means it’s time for roll call.
We resurface from our room and paste a neutral expression over our face. Girls upon girls are cramming into the common room in small groups; the noise of their conversations all at once is a jungle sound track with no way in. A group of sofas face our new housemaster, Mr. Elingham, who stands at the front of the room, waiting to tick names off on a sheet.
There’s nowhere left to sit! But then, thank god, we see Ellie and Scarlett, scooting apart from each other on the sofa and patting an opening between them. We walk over and perch there, panic brewing because our knees are touching theirs.
Whoooosh! A girl called Stephanie zooms in. “Make way!” she calls, throwing herself upon us and lying sprawled there with her bum on our lap and her shoulders and head in Scarlett’s arms. The feeling of her on top of us is overwhelming; she’s a giant burbling baby in our arms. Our faces are too close. We are certain she smells something on our breath, our body; here comes another girl, pauses to look down at us, arms akimbo in faux outrage at the lack of space, before laughing. “Budge up!”—
(Girls upon
girls upon
girls upon
girls)
We stink! There are too many of us on this sofa, and they all know—
Scarlett nudges us, turning a dial and twizzling us back in from between stations. Mr. Elingham is looking at us expectantly.
Argh! She revs. Tsk tsk, what a little freak you are! Don’t you know your own name when it’s called?
“Yes?” we answer. He gives us a warm smile, ticks the paper, and continues down the list before starting to read out notices. I sit through it, trying not to do anything that will make her even angrier. It finally ends, Stephanie pushes off, and She marches me back to my room before Ellie and Scarlett can get in the way.
The mirror nailed to the wall is confronting.
A face stares back, but I can’t call it my own. I place my hands on either side of it and open my mouth to scream. I am not brave enough to make noise, but I open my mouth wider and watch my nose scrunch itself into a dragon snout, my eyes squeezing into slits. I didn’t know it was possible to shout on mute, but it is.
I open and close my mouth:
Arrrrrrrrghhh!
Then I pull the skin on my cheeks down hard, so the fleshy salmon rims of my lower eyelids flip outward. There’s me, finally seen as I should be, twisted into something as monstrous as I feel.
Whhhhhhhhy, I mouth. Whhhhhhhhy?
WHAT ARE YOU DOING? She yells. This behavior is the height of vanity. And you’re going to leave disgusting smudges on the glass.
I drop to the floor, forehead on knees and arms plaited around legs. It suddenly seems essential that I make myself as small as possible.
I don’t care, I say. I don’t care what happens anymore as long as it doesn’t involve letters and lists. I want to die. There. Are you happy?
I just want it to end.
It’s my idea, I said it first. But She seizes it and molds it into her own shape. I feel her seep into my arms, her grip supplanting mine. The relief! It is always better to be held by someone other than yourself.
So we’re in agreement. We can’t go on like this. We need to be somewhere that doesn’t involve interactions with people day in, day out. It’s making you so unhappy, poor thing. We’ll fix it. But we need to work together on this. Because we’re on the same team.
Aren’t we?
If you want to come home from boarding school, you have to be sick. Crying doesn’t do it. Neither does lying in bed.
We can do sickness.
We make our throat raspy and throw up a few times. We do jumping jacks and put a hot water bottle to our head until we are over a hundred degrees.
“Gosh, you are hot,” says Matron, clicking her tongue, and then, a little later: “Your mother’s just called.” She rearranges the wet flannel on our head and smooths down the covers. “She’s on her way now to get you.”
Mum makes it in under two hours. She picks us up and chucks our bag in the trunk, and we whir down country lanes in silence.
Then she breaks it—smash—one hundred million shards—exploding nebulas of words and words and words—
“What the hell is the matter with you anyway?”
We hit a pothole, and the car stalls. The radio we hadn’t realized was on shuts up momentarily and rebounds like one of those annoying dolls with the weight in their bottom so they can’t topple over.
“I don’t know. Can we get something to eat?”
“Yes.”
We pull over at the next gas station.
“Do you want to get out?”
We shake our head.
“Well, what do you want then?”
While she’s inside, some men in a white van pull up. They are ogling us like there is no one inside our head to notice. We worry that we might get pregnant with their child as a punishment for letting them look when we should be charging out of the car and screaming in defense of feminism, so we give them the finger. They honk.
We sit shivering in our parka. Mum appears, running across the tarmac through sheets of rain made neon against the dark by car headlamps, shielding her hair with her arm and darting between the pumps. She passes us a plastic bag containing Jammie Dodgers biscuits and raspberries.
“Thanks.”
We eat in silence and listen to the rustle of packaging on our lap and the chomping of jaws and temples.
It isn’t much of a homecoming. Mum runs us a bath and watches us sit in it until the water goes cold. We hunch over our stubbly legs and offend her with our modesty. Then she brings us a scabby towel and looks away while we stand up, dripping suds, waiting to get wrapped up like a newborn.
In the morning we seek advice from the herbal therapist who lives in our town. His name is Monty, and we are told that he is well respected by the homeopathic community. Mum loves his shop and treats him with a level of respect befitting a brain surgeon.
She explains that we are feeling blue. We are embarrassed, but Mum says, “It’s okay, we can trust this man, he knows lots about medicine and how to make people like you feel better. He just wants to ask you a few questions.”
“Do you study biology, Lily? Do you understand about the importance of maintaining healthy mineral levels in the blood, Lily?” He has a thick South African accent. We wish he would stop saying our name like he knows us.
“I used to study it, but I dropped it for A-level.”
“When exactly did you become sick?”
“I don’t know that I—”
“Fever?”
“Sorry?”
“Shaky? Clammy? Wake up in the night in a hot sweat—take off all your clothes, only to find yourself shivering fifteen minutes later and reaching for a pair of thick socks?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“How do you feel right now?”
“Tired.”
“How often do you stool?”
Pause.
“I have a chair in my room. I’m not sure?”
Apparently this is not the right answer. People laugh. He gives us hippie pills that come in
old-fashioned-looking brown glass bottles with gold lids. They will rebalance our energy levels and make us feel better.
Thanking him, Mum ushers us back into the car. Glancing back, we see him doing some sort of farewell Buddha bow from the window.
On Tuesday Mum takes us to the GP, who measures our blood pressure and sends us off for iron and thyroid gland hormone testing. We go to the local walk-in center with a long doctor’s scrawl of things lab technicians need to search for in our body.
A spiky-haired Hungarian nurse jabs at our arm a few times, struggling to find a vein. A doddery old man with slack lips and a drooly chin leers in at us through a crack in the curtain. The nurse slaps a shiny bravery sticker we are too old for on our shirt. The truth is, we are sixteen now. If she knew, would she have taken the sticker back? She says to call back in a few days’ time if we haven’t heard.
After that we spend the next few days in bed, lying as still as possible because it’s easier not to do things wrong this way. The GP calls on Friday to say the levels of everything in our body are fine.
“A bit low on iron. You could take supplements if you like. It probably wouldn’t make much difference. It’s a personal choice. Talk to your mother about it.”
School phones too. “Is Lily coming back soon?” Something about Sunday night and everyone needing a bit of a rest sometimes. Mum hangs up. She comes to tell us, but we pad away from where our ear has been against the door and rush back into bed. We pretend to be asleep. Our heart beats fast, racing with deceit.
FAKED SLEEP: We lied in that we faked sleep, but it was acceptable. We needed to avoid speaking to Mum until composure had been resumed.
Sunday comes around too fast. All too soon we are back in the car headed for school, leaving London behind, fleeing lampposts, surrendering light and traffic for hedgerows and the moon.