Truth or Dare
Page 27
“You haven’t done anything. This isn’t your fault.”
“But it’s my fault I’ve not been to see him.” She stills. Listens. “I love him so much I thought I’d do anything for him, but … I can’t even go and look at him. Too scared to face up to what he’s become and…”
As I lean forward into my hands, Claire’s arms tighten around me as if she thinks I might fall and a nervous “Sef!” escapes.
“… I’d rather risk my own life than find out what Kam’s doing with his. That’s not right.”
“No,” she says, still clamped around me. “It isn’t. So perhaps we could maybe stop risking your life and you climb back over to the safe side, where all we have to worry about is getting squashed by a train?”
She presses her face into my back, planting a kiss on my T-shirt.
“It’s all right to be frightened,” she says. “Living is pretty scary.”
MARCH
SEF
Fears like mine can’t be fixed overnight and it’s taken a lot of counselling for me to get here. Counselling that was there for me from the start, if I’d been able to accept it.
If I’d believed I’d deserved it.
“Sign here and I’ll get you a visitor’s badge.” The woman behind the desk is businesslike and it’s helpful, somehow, not feeling like she might be judging me for not coming sooner – because how could she possibly know?
They all offered. Mum, Amir, Uncle D. Even Dad. But having them here would make me feel like I owed them something, their expectations shaping how I behaved.
This is something I owe myself and my brother. No one else.
I slide my hand into the one that’s waiting, her fingers slotting together with mine.
That doesn’t mean I wanted to do this alone.
“You got this,” Claire says quietly, walking with me to the staircase, one step at a time closer to seeing Kam.
I’ve talked to people a lot about the accident. My counsellor and my family, but it was Danny who helped me the most and all it took was the truth.
“What did you want to know?” he asked as the pair of us sat in Mrs Bennet, parked up miles away from town.
Below us, through the rain-spattered windscreen, the fields stretched down to the town nestled in the crook of the dull brown river, the bridge lined with cars. The viaduct.
“Why was he up there?”
“Same reason I was. Same as Hamish.” Danny shrugged. “We wanted somewhere to hang out, somewhere better than the pub, you know? A place we’d feel like the only people in the world.” When I looked across, I caught him in a smile, in a memory of everything he’d had before the worst had happened. “For a while there, we were.”
“What happened?”
“A bat.”
“A what?”
“A bat. Flying mammal. As in blind as a…” He wasn’t smiling any more. “A bat happened.”
I watched, waited.
“Kam was sitting on the wall, back to the river, like, and me and Hamish had just cracked open another round and then…” A sudden, sharp flare of his hand right up towards his face had me jumping back in my seat. Danny noticed, stared at me for a second. “Yeah. You’ve got the idea.”
He turned away to stare out the window on his side, his voice muffled as he raised a hand to his mouth, nibbling at the ragged flesh around his thumb. “One minute we were laughing, the next Kam had flinched away as something swooped towards his head and…”
It was a long time before he finished his sentence.
“… a stupid fucking shitting bastard bat.”
Nothing at all to do with what I’d said to Kam earlier that day.
Doesn’t change the consequences, though. Someone still has to pay for his care.
CLAIRE
Neither of us had known that the app on Sef’s phone was still running after he’d sat down. Every word of our conversation had been live-streamed to Moz, Sef’s chin in the corner of the frame, the rest filled with sky.
And Moz put the whole thing up on his channel.
If Moz thought he’d seen me angry after the car stunt, I was apoplectic with him for this one. Had I not been too worried about Sef to leave him, I’d have travelled the hour and a half it took to get to Moz’s house and live-streamed me tearing a strip off him for exposing so much of Sef to all the tens of thousands of unsympathetic eyes and hearts, opening up the boy I was desperate to protect to a new wave of vitriol.
Claire. I get it. I really do. But please trust me. Just one last time. I’ll take it down tomorrow, but just wait, OK?
He hadn’t given me any choice – and, for once, I’m glad of it.
When we started this, I’d been so sure of humanity that I genuinely believed strangers on the internet wanted an excuse to donate to a good cause. A certainty that drained out of me with every day that passed, every credit we didn’t get, every gross comment about me or Sef. The grossest ones that sought to question Kam without even knowing who he was.
I’d long lost faith that more people wanted to do good than bad and yet Moz – the most morally grey human I know – is the person who gave it back.
One week after he posted the video, the people of the internet, land of the truly free, raised enough money to make a difference to Kam’s life. For the next six months, at least – but the care he’ll have in that time might mean he’ll stand a better chance of a more independent life beyond that. They’re still donating now, no longer to Kam, but to a charity that helps more people like him.
I’m not sure if how we went about it was right, but one way or another, Sef and I, we did a good thing.
SEF
At the top of the stairs, there’s a pair of double doors. Across the top of the doors, there’s a sign that says I am about to enter the Bueller Wing.
One step at a time.
Claire presses the buzzer and a nurse comes to open the door. He smiles at Claire before he smiles at me and asks, “Here for Kam?”
And I nod. Once. My grip tightens in Claire’s and she glances up to check on me.
“I’m OK,” I tell her – tell myself.
We follow the nurse along the corridor and he stops by one of the doors, leaning in to check something and he nods.
“He’s just here.”
With every step, my world narrows until I’m barely even aware of my body, of my surroundings. All I know is that I’m about to see my brother for the first time since September. Approaching the door, I become aware of what lies beyond, the enormous Moon poster on the wall, the row of pictures along the top of the chest of drawers exactly as they were in the picture that Amir showed me at Christmas.
From the doorway I take in the walls lined with the posters and pictures that used to hang in our home, the globe on his windowsill. The present wrapped in newspaper that must have been sitting there since Christmas, waiting for both of us to be ready to open it.
And then I take in the person who lives here.
For a long, long moment my brother and I search each other’s faces, trying to work out who exactly we are to one another before he looks away, mouth moving, preparing to speak.
“Come in,” he says.
And I step inside.
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Non Pratt’s real name is Leonie, but please don’t call her that unless she’s done something really bad. She grew up in Teesside and now lives in London. After graduating from Cambridge University, Non decided to work in children’s publishing. Since then she has worked as a non-fiction editor at Usborne and a fiction publisher at Catnip. She now writes full-time. Her first novel, Trouble, was shortlisted for the YA Book Prize and longlisted for the Carnegie Medal. Her second novel, Remix, was described as “smart, funny and very real”.
Follow Non on Twitter (@NonPratt).
www.nonpratt.com
Other books by Non Pratt:
Tr
ouble
Remix
Unboxed
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. All statements, activities, stunts, descriptions, information and material of any other kind contained herein are included for entertainment purposes only and should not be relied on for accuracy or replicated as they may result in injury.
First published 2017 by Walker Books Ltd
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Text © 2017 Leonie Parish
Cover design by Walker Books Ltd
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:
a catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-4063-7525-1 (ePub)
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