The Places I've Cried in Public

by Holly Bourne

  Her swearing jolts me into the room a little. She swore?! She’s a teacher and she swore?!

  “I know this is a sixth-form college,” she continues. “Therefore we’re a little less pastoral here. But, Amelie, and I’m being totally unprofessional here…it would break my actual heart if you, of all people, messed up your music A level. I simply can’t allow it.” She crosses her arms. “So, can we please talk about what the hell happened between you and Reese Davies, and work out how we’re going to get you back on track?”

  I jerk my head up at the mention of your name.

  She notices my response. “So, this is all about him?” I see a very small eye-roll. “I assumed as much. You two were quite obviously a couple, alongside being writing partners. What’s happened? Have you split up?”

  She’s the first person who’s asked this with genuine caring in their voice. It’s too much. The dam breaks, yet again. I lean forward and my shoulders heave as I cry. All I am is crying. The only emotion I have is grief.

  “He…he…he ended it,” I get out. Such an ill-fitting choice of words for the severity of the mess. Yet it’s enough for Mrs Clarke to push back her chair and crouch next to me, her hand awkwardly patting my shoulder. She lets me get it out, this new batch of crying. After ten minutes or so, it runs out of energy. (Worry not though, there’s plenty more where that came from.)

  “Is this your first break-up?” she asks. “Sometimes the end of first love can feel like the end of the world.”

  I shake my head and wipe my snuffly nose. “I had a boyfriend before.” I sniff. “This break-up feels different. I feel like part of me has died. I don’t understand what’s happening to me.” It feels so good to talk, to let out all these thoughts that have been crammed into my skull. My parents hate you, Reese, so I’ve not felt able to talk to them about you. I forget she’s my music teacher and that this is all probably an overshare and just find myself stuttering it all out.

  “Mrs Clarke, I don’t know where I’ve gone. Does that make sense? I mean, I’m here. I know I’m here. But it’s like I’m not, too. Do you understand? And I hate myself. I hate myself so much for ruining everyt—”

  “Hang on, why do you hate yourself, Amelie?”

  Oh, here comes the crying again. Reese, I’ve run out of words to use that mean “crying”, and we’re not even at the Cube yet. I’m going to have to thesaurus.com the word. By the end of this, I’m going to be bewailing and lamenting just so I don’t bore you with the word cry. “Because I messed it up,” I bewail. “I was too much for him. I should’ve been better, but I screwed it up because I’m too egotistical and wasn’t considerate enough of his music and…” I break off for more lamenting, and I feel Mrs Clarke’s hand tighten on my shoulder.

  “It’s okay,” she keeps saying. “It’s okay.”

  She lets me cry myself out again, and part of me feels like this is a really, really, good way of dodging the bollocking about my coursework. Though I don’t think anyone could act the way I cry, not even an Academy Award winner. Eventually, I calm down and wipe my nose on my cardigan sleeve until it’s sodden with snot.

  “And there I was,” Mrs Clarke deadpans, “thinking, Brilliant! Amelie has a broken heart. She’ll be able to write a break-up album that tops Rumours by Fleetwood Mac.”

  I giggle, which is a huge breakthrough, I have to say. “I’ve not been able to write,” I admit. “I can’t play. I can’t do anything. I’ve never felt this empty before.”

  Then she asks a question, Reese. One that nobody has thought to ask before.

  “Reese. Was he…did he…I mean, was he nice to you, Amelie?”

  The rooms feels very small all of a sudden, the walls flexing and boxing me in as I consider my answer. And my immediate response isn’t “Yes”.

  “He loved me,” I say.

  Because that’s what you always said, after you did anything bad.

  Mrs Clarke is quiet, and already I’m worried I’ve said too much. I don’t want her to hate you. She teaches you! She can’t be thinking you’re bad news. You’re not. Are you? Are you, Reese? I start to panic. The thought of Mrs Clarke thinking badly of you is unendurable, like the itch of chickenpox.

  “He was a great boyfriend,” I start to gabble. “Sorry, I don’t know why I didn’t just say yes. Of course he was nice to me. I mean, I wouldn’t be so sad about the break-up if he wasn’t, would I? I’ll do my coursework. Sorry. I’m just finding it hard to write, like I said. But if you give me an extension, I promise I’ll stick to it. Please don’t hate Reese. I’m sorry. It’s all my fault, you see. I don’t think I explained it properly. All of it was my fault.”

  “All of what, Amelie?”

  “It.”

  The “it” that I’m working through now. The messy line of biro. The dots on a map where you made me cry – I’m sure it’s all my fault somehow. If only I’d done things differently. Been…less me, then I wouldn’t have driven you away.

  Mrs Clarke is talking all slowly now, like she’s panicking she’ll say the wrong thing. “If someone we love is unkind to us, Amelie, it’s never our fault. You get that?”

  I nod, but I’ve stopped listening properly. My brain for some reason is yelling REJECT, REJECT, THAT’S NOT RIGHT, but I nod because I know she wants me to. Mrs Clarke stands up, telling me all sorts of things I should probably be listening to. She’s saying she can give me an extension, but I am very behind on everything. She’s saying she’s spoken to my other teachers and I’m also behind on my other subjects. They are concerned. They do not want this to get to the point where my parents have to come in.

  “Now, you don’t have to answer straight away,” Mrs Clarke says. “Have a think about it. We can catch up after our next lesson?”

  I jolt out from the nothing I was lost inside. “Huh?”

  “The college counsellor.” She looks right at me, her face heaving with concern. “It can’t hurt to go there and talk things through.”

  I wrinkle my nose. “But I’m not, like, mentally ill, am I?”

  She smiles gently. “That’s not what they’re for. Well, that’s not only what they’re for. Mrs Thomas is really lovely, and she’s been here for years. There’s no teen drama you can imagine that she hasn’t helped with. Break-ups included.”

  “But…” I stammer, “who needs to see a counsellor about a break-up?”

  Me. Pathetic me. Pathetic me, who has always been too sensitive and too needy and feels too deeply. If only I’d been less pathetic, maybe you would still love me. If only I wasn’t like me. Stupid me. Shitty me. Unloveable me.

  “You can see a counsellor about anything, Amelie. And break-ups are painful things. Just ask Fleetwood Mac.”

  I blink and feel something shift inside my body. When I open my eyes again, there’s a tiny light that’s been lit. I can feel it, right in the tip of my tiniest toe. There’s a flicker of a flame. A spluttering one, one I could blow out without even really trying. But the flame could grow if I protect it from the wind. The flame feels like it could be called hope.

  Hope that I won’t always feel like this. That I can get past this, get past you.

  Hope that someone might understand, might be able to fix it. Fix me.

  Though I’m still going to carry on with my memory map. Remembering it all hurts, but I know I need to do it. I need to rip off the plaster and let the wound breathe so it can heal. I’ve got the Cube this afternoon, if I have the strength.

  But talking.

  Talking to someone.

  It could help?

  I look up into Mrs Clarke’s eyes and there’s nothing fake in them. She really, genuinely, cares and really genuinely wants to help me. I can’t tell you how it feels to have care radiating off someone onto me. It’s been so long since anyone but my increasingly frantic parents have shown me any care at all.

  “Okay,” I tell her, as the second bell shrills, jerking us out of the moment. “I’ll think about it, and let you know next lesson.”

&
nbsp; I’d like to say that our Kodak moment inspired me not to bunk off my afternoon lessons. That wouldn’t be true, however. I’m missing the whole afternoon. I did go to the library though, and actually tried to write some lyrics for my coursework piece.

  I managed one whole line.

  I’ve been retracing all the memories, sketching the map of me and you.

  Only a snatch of a sentence, but it’s better than nothing. And it took me an hour and a half to get it down. It felt right though. For the first time since everything kicked off, I’ve put pen to paper again and tried to make sense of my feelings the way I used to. It feels good.

  I take a bus out of town and towards the Cube. It’s grey, drizzly and outside the bus window everyone looks sad and downtrodden and really generally pissed off that spring hasn’t showed up yet. An electronic voice announces my stop in a clipped accent, making “cube” sound more like “coob”. I step out from the hissing doors into the giant concrete car park, looking up at the Cube and shaking my head. The last time I was here, the sky was black, the air wasn’t properly cold yet, and this place…

  …this place looked like somewhere dreams came true.

  “This is amazing,” Hannah said, staring up at the billboard. “I can’t believe your name is actually on the sign. At the Cube. This is the most exciting thing that’s happened to anyone I know.”

  Reese stood behind me, arms around my waist, chin resting on the top of my head. “They’ve not made your name very big,” he commented, and Hannah’s nose wrinkled.

  I was almost too filled with fright to care about them both getting on, though. I’d finally managed to pull them together, to see if they’d be able to get on, and I was hopeful they would. I’d invited Hannah and Jack backstage to try and plaster over the weirdness between us. But mostly all I could see was my name in lights and all I could feel was really, really sick. This was a whole new realm of stage fright – I’d physically vomited twice already that day.

  I let out a not-very-calming breath.

  “I hope you’re all emotionally prepared for me to publicly humiliate myself,” I told them and they all sighed – Reese, Hannah and Jack.

  “You’re going to be fine,” Jack reassured me.

  “More than fine, you’re going to be BRILLIANT,” Hannah added.

  I stared up at my name again – in lights. Yes, it was very small compared to the headliners, but still – my name, in lights. When I’d arrived for soundcheck earlier, I was even led to my own little dressing room with my name on it. It was insane.

  “So, you and Jack, huh?” I asked Hannah later, as we both crowded around my dressing-room mirror.

  She grinned at her reflection and applied a red lipstick that somehow complemented her hair. “What can I say?” she replied. “This northern girl came along and told me to kiss him, and it turns out she gave pretty good advice.”

  I blushed, not able to handle the compliment on top of all my other terror, and Hannah sensed it. “Jesus, Amelie. You’ve turned green. I didn’t even know that was possible. Are we in a cartoon?”

  “Stop it. I don’t know how to calm down. I still can’t believe I’m doing this.”

  Everything about the last few weeks had felt like a dream sequence. Getting the gig, Mrs Clarke telling everyone at college and being congratulated wherever I went, rehearsing my set list whenever I got a spare moment from falling madly in love with Reese, telling my parents, and how they wouldn’t stop hugging me and saying how proud they were. I’d typed out a message to Alfie and stared at it for a really long time. I’d been on the cusp of sending it earlier that morning, during soundcheck, but Reese turned up to surprise me, so it lay dormant on my phone.

  Hannah pulled me in for a quick hug. “You’re going to be amazing. That’s why you were picked.”

  “What if I vomit onstage?”

  She shrugs. “Then it will be really, really funny for everyone else.”

  I laughed into her shoulder. “Such reassuring advice.”

  “I’m not built for such things.” She turned back to the mirror and wiped invisible bits of lipstick away from around her mouth. “How do you think Jack and Reese are getting on at the bar? They’re not, umm, natural friends, are they?”

  I felt a pinprick of upset, even though she was right. I couldn’t understand how anyone couldn’t like Reese, when he was clearly so very likeable. But getting him and my friends to mix was like trying to combine oil and water.

  “They’ll be managing,” I said. “Reese really likes you both.” That statement was a lie.

  And Hannah’s bullshit detector was on full power. “Yeah, right.”

  “He does,” I protested though I couldn’t think of one nice thing he’d said about them to back up my claim. There were plenty of not-nice things. “I don’t know why you hang out with her, she’s so up herself, with all that Drama stuff. I’m not being funny or anything, but have you noticed how Jack is like very, very girly? His voice! He can hit notes you can’t. Oh, come on. It’s just an observation. Do you think they’re jealous of us? I do. You can tell they’ve not even slept together yet…” I’d squawk and protest and pretend to hit him, and Reese would then catch my hand and promise me he wasn’t serious. “Oh, come on, Amelie. It was a joke! Of course I like your pretentious Drama friends!”

  “How are things between you two anyway?” Hannah asked. “You’re, like, literally inseparable.”

  I saw myself smile in the mirror’s reflection, a grin curling up my green face. “It’s going really good. I wasn’t expecting any of it…” I trailed off. “I know you’re not his biggest fan.” She opened her mouth to object then closed it again. “But, I can’t tell you how amazing it is when it’s just us two.” My stage fright (and face) faded to grey as I got lost in contemplating how utterly perfect we were.

  “You got it bad, girl. And here I was thinking Jack and I were gross.”

  Reese’s words came into my head. “They are jealous of us.” I blinked the thought away.

  “You two are cute too! It’s weird watching you and Jack together. It reminds me a lot of Alfie.”

  There was quiet as Hannah recognized this was the first time I’d brought him up since the coffee shop. I could hear electric guitars strumming and a macho bloke yelling in the dressing room next door. The main band, the Contenders, must’ve finally turned up again after their very long break.

  “I didn’t know whether to ask about him.” Hannah fluffed her fringe. “I mean, I’m assuming you guys are over?”

  I watched my throat move in the mirror as I swallowed. “Well, we’d already broken up before I moved.”

  Hannah turned to look at me, her backcombed auburn bob looking all rocky and brilliant. “Yeah, but you mentioned you were going to get back together at uni. Manchester, or something? Is that off the cards now?”

  Another swallow, this one more of a gulp. “Yes. I thought Alfie was it, but now I’ve met Reese I realize it was never anything really.”

  She raised both eyebrows. “Whoa, big statement.”

  I shrugged, like I cared less than I did. Because even though Reese had eclipsed pretty much everything, there was still a tiny patch of my heart left for Alfie. A patch that wanted to cry whenever I fell further for Reese – that turned black whenever I fell a little deeper.

  Hannah laughed nervously. “Now I’m not sure if it’s a good thing that Jack and I remind you of Alfie.”

  I shake my head. “God, no. I didn’t mean it like that. Sorry. Things with Alfie were great – it was supposed to be a compliment. Shit. It’s just things with Reese are really intense right now, in a good way. I’m sure how you feel about Jack is really intense too, right?”

  Hannah bit her lip. “I’m not sure about ‘intense’. I really like him. And the more I kiss him and spend time just us two, the more I like him. But, you know. It’s a slow build. In a good way.”

  I nodded. I didn’t want to talk about it any more. Not with my set beginning in less than an ho
ur and seventy per cent of college coming to watch me. Not with the Contenders knocking on the door to say hi.

  “We’ve just been hanging out with your boyfriend,” Mike, the lead singer, said, bowling in without waiting for me to invite him. I’d met them briefly earlier and they’d loved Reese right away. Within five minutes they were all bumping fists and talking about key changes while I just stood there, feeling like a nervous shy mug.

  Hannah transformed into this weird jittering wreck. She held out her hand to shake, like she was a grown-up or something, and stammered out her name. “I’m a huge fan,” she told Mike, not letting go of his hand in an appropriate time frame.

  “That’s great, thank you,” Mike said, underwhelmed but friendly. He turned to me. “Hey, so Reese said you’re feeling a little nervous? Want to hang in our dressing room? We have whisky?”

  Hannah and I looked at each other, knowing the answer was a definite yes. I left my stuff in my dressing room and stepped out into the narrow corridor bustling with pre-gig activity. The moment we did, we bumped into Reese and Jack, who were wearing their guest passes around their necks and literally, actually, laughing together like they had an atom in common.

  Reese greeted me with a huge sloppy kiss. “Hey, stage fright, how’s it going? Have you heard about our brilliant plan for whisky?”

  A love tidal-wave sloshed through me, washing away thoughts of Alfie and guilt.

  “I have and I’m in.”

  His smile crinkled up into his eyes. “That’s my girl. Now, where’s this dressing room?” he asked Mike, like they were already mates.

  “Just to your left.”

  Reese put his arms around me, kissed my cheek, and steered me into an actual rock star’s dressing room. Then he turned back to Mike. “So,” he said. “Did Amelie tell you we actually co-wrote some of the songs she’s playing tonight?”

  It’s starting to drizzle – again – like the weather wants to twin with my emotions. Every time I cry, the sky seems to cry with me. I’ve forgotten my umbrella so I just let my hair go all fuzzy in this car park and my cardigan get heavier with rainwater. I walk around the perimeter to keep warm. There’s the stage door. What a feeling it was to walk through that. To be given a lanyard to let me know I belonged. There were so many little nuggets of joy to chew on that evening. Like Mike chatting to me as an equal, or how proud my parents looked in the crowd. None of it compared to the pure wondrous joy of what was about to come next though.