by Sara Barnard
“I can just watch,” she offered, looking nervous. “Is there somewhere I can sit and watch?”
“On badminton courts?” I asked, hearing the snide tone in my voice, unfamiliar and unkind.
“Don’t be silly,” Rosie said easily. “We’ll teach you to play. It’s really easy, right, Cads?” She smiled at me. “It’ll be fun to do something a bit different. It’ll be way better than just the two of us.”
She had taken to saying things like this a lot, and I wished she’d stop.
One particularly low point came in early October. I stayed after school until almost six p.m. working on the set design for the school production—My Fair Lady—with Mishka and a few other girls from my art class. Just before I left, I tripped over the stepladder and spilled paint down myself. When I got home, Mum shouted at me for being clumsy and careless, and I eventually ended up sulking in my bedroom. All of this aside, my real mistake was logging on to Facebook, where Suzanne had just tagged Rosie in a series of pictures with her and other classmates at the Globe theatre. They were decked out in full Shakespearean gear and they looked ridiculous, but utterly happy.
I was clicking through the pictures, my throat getting tighter on each, until I landed on one of Suzanne and Rosie, arms around each other, beaming. A gigantic turquoise hat with an unnecessarily large feather was balanced across their two heads, which were bent toward each other. Suzanne had tagged the photo Lady Rosanna Caronforth and Lady Susannah Wattsimus. Rosie had commented, 17th-century besties. Suzanne added, Innit. Forsooth.
I bawled until I was hoarse.
Here’s the really stupid thing: I didn’t actually dislike Suzanne. In fact, I probably would have liked her if I wasn’t so terrified about losing my best friend to her. She was sarcastic and hilarious and fun to be around, but she was also friendly—far friendlier to me than I’d been to her, and probably friendlier than I deserved. I could see why Rosie wanted the three of us to be friends, but I resented her trying so hard.
And there was something else. For someone as extroverted and chatty as Suzanne, she was surprisingly reticent when it came to talking about herself. Or, more accurately, herself pre-Brighton. I still had no idea why she’d even moved here. Not that I was expecting her to offer this information to me—still a relative stranger—but I couldn’t even get it secondhand, because Rosie didn’t know either.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off, even though Rosie claimed not to care. Why did Suzanne live with her aunt, and why did she never mention the rest of her family? If the subject came up she’d answer whatever question it was so casually it was easy to miss—“Siblings? Yeah, a brother, he’s twenty.”—and then change the subject or make a joke. It always took me at least a minute to catch up with what she’d just said, and by then it was too late to go back. It was the artful way she did this, so clearly practiced and finely tuned, that really got to me. She had to be hiding something big, and what could be so bad that she couldn’t just tell us what it was?
* * *
Half-term seemed to come out of nowhere, like always. My two-week holiday felt long overdue, but I was still impatient for the first week to pass, so I could be joined by my non-private-school friends. The extra week off was definitely a perk, but sometimes I felt, like with so many perks of the private-school life, that it was wasted on me.
Toward the end of the first week of freedom I went to a party at Luca Michaelson’s house. He was one of the St. Martin’s private-school boys everyone knew, and his parties were the stuff of adolescent legend. I’d never been to one, mainly because I’d never been invited, but this time Kesh practically forced me into a dress and dragged me along with her, Allison, and Mishka. The really shocking thing in all of this was that I had a good time. I drank vodka and Coke and knocked back shots when they were handed to me. I kissed a skinny boy called Jonny who tasted of cigarettes but had told me I was pretty. I sat in the bathroom with Mishka while she sobbed about her ex and held back her hair when she threw up. I thought, in one of those moments of drunken clarity, Maybe I’m good enough by myself.
In the morning, waking up on Luca’s living-room floor with Kesh using my legs as a pillow, I tried to hang on to this feeling. I imagined cutting myself loose from Rosie, leaving her with Suzanne. I could add the prefix “best’ to my friendship with Mishka and Kesh, and even Allison. It would be easy.
But then I looked at my phone.
10:09: Hope your having a gd time! Take a pic so I can see the dress. Miss you x
10:11: Dont get toooo drunk, OK?
11:49: You just called me and hung up. Are you OK? Call me back plz xx
11:56: Cads? Pick up your phone xxxx
12:03: I never knew how hiliarous you are when your drunk OMG. You should get like this every weekend. CALL ME when you wake up so I can tell you all the stupid things you said. Love you to pieces, you drunkard.
I was so busy smiling at these texts that it took me a moment to realize there was another message from someone else waiting for me. I clicked on it, expecting Tarin, and saw Suzanne’s name. For a moment I was confused, and then realized that her message was a reply to one from me.
“Shit,” I whispered out loud. A big part of me wanted to delete both messages without even looking at them.
11:46: Why do you have to be soooo perfect?
I felt a flush of pure embarrassment so acute I actually lifted a hand and tugged at my hair. Oh, God. I tried to tell myself it could have been worse. Somehow.
11:59: Um. Thanks? :/
I felt a little sick, and not just because I was hungover. My fingers hovered over the keypad, trying to figure out how to respond. I couldn’t just ignore it surely, much as I wanted to.
8:37: Oh God. I was drunk! I’m sorry, don’t even know what I was talking about.
Her reply didn’t come through for another couple of hours, when I was sitting in McDonald’s with Mishka and Kesh. I had to force myself to look.
10:59: Haha, no worries. One day you’ll get why I laughed so much when I saw it. Hope you’re not too hungover! See you later x
So she got to be magnanimous and mysterious, and I was the drunken embarrassment. Great. I pushed my phone back into my bag without replying and took a sip of milk shake, trying to bring back the feeling I’d had from the night before, that sense of possibility in myself. It didn’t work.
7
WHAT I ALWAYS THOUGHT OF as the “real” half-term—that is, the week that Rosie was also off school—was well underway when I stayed over at Rosie’s house. It was Tuesday night, and it was just the two of us. Suzanne planned to meet us the following day, with some of their other friends from school.
Rosie was in the bathroom, getting ready for bed, and I had seized the opportunity to do some quality stalking. As I’d hoped, she’d left her Facebook logged in. Squashing any guilt, I typed Suzanne’s name into the search bar and then clicked on it when it appeared.
Her page unfolded before me, full of updates and pictures and messages. She’d changed her profile picture since I’d tried to look a few weeks ago; now it was just her, holding a dog. I scrolled down slowly, looking over the messages. Most were obviously from friends from her old school, because they were variants of “Miss you!” I noted that earlier that day Rosie had posted a photo of a rabbit wearing a pair of round sunglasses. For some reason Rosie had captioned this: It’s you! Suzanne had written, Oh, shush, you. Five people had “liked” it.
Directly below the photo, an exchange caught my eye.
Ellie Lewis Zanne, have you been watching Corrie?
Suzanne Watts Yes :/
Ellie Lewis L Are you OK? I can’t believe they didn’t put a trigger warning on it or something!
Suzanne Watts Yeah. I’ll call you, OK?
Ellie Lewis Oh yeah, sorry xxx
This was such an odd exchange that I read over it a couple of times. It made no sense to me, which was to be expected because I had no idea who Ellie was and I didn’t watch Coro
nation Street. Plus I didn’t know what trigger warnings were. I was about to click on Ellie’s name to take my creepy jealous-friend stalking to a new level when I heard the shower turn off.
I clicked back onto Rosie’s home screen and slumped back on the bed, pulling out my phone. I tapped “trigger warning” into the search and scrolled through the results, which only confused me more. The top entry was, bewilderingly, something to do with feminism. A couple of entries below that, a Wikipedia entry for trauma triggers. I opened the page and scanned the first line.
“What are you looking at?” Rosie asked, coming out of the bathroom in her pajamas, a towel wrapped around her head.
“Just Facebook,” I lied, turning my screen off. Trauma triggers: experiences that trigger traumatic memories. Trigger warnings: brief messages that appeared before content deemed to be potentially triggering.
I was turning these definitions over in my mind, trying to match them to what I knew of Suzanne, when Rosie flopped onto the bed next to me and grinned.
“Stalking a certain Jonny?”
“Guilty as charged,” I said, even though I hadn’t thought about Jonny for days.
“You can do better,” she promised, which was nice if not exactly true. “Here,” she said, pulling her laptop over and opening Facebook, “let me show you Liam.” Her current crush, a football player from the year above who’d smiled at her during assembly.
I looked at the pictures and made all the right noises, but my mind was working overtime. Trauma. What kind of trauma? And what did it have to do with Suzanne? Surely finding out what was happening on Coronation Street would help me answer this, but when I tried quickly Googling it on my phone while I was meant to be brushing my teeth, the top results were all about an actor who’d just been arrested for drunk driving. I couldn’t figure out how to ask Rosie without giving myself away, so I decided I’d wait for an opening in the conversation the following day, when there was group of us to hide in.
I can try to pretend that I just hadn’t realized that bringing up a subject I’d learned was potentially “triggering’ for Suzanne in front of her friends wasn’t a particularly nice thing to do.
But that would be a lie.
* * *
The following day Rosie and I arrived at the American diner on the seafront at lunchtime—a few minutes late because we’d missed the bus. Suzanne, Levina, and Maya were already there, saving us a booth, talking animatedly. Suzanne was gesturing with her hands, and they were all laughing.
“Hello!” Rosie sang out, throwing herself into the booth.
“Hey,” Suzanne said, grinning at us.
“Charlie texted me,” Levina said to Rosie. “He’s going to meet us later, with his friends.”
“Cool,” Rosie said. “What were you guys talking about?”
“Suzanne’s incredibly successful date with Alex,” Maya said, smirking.
“And by incredibly successful,” Suzanne said, taking a sip from her cup, “she means a complete disaster.”
“What happened?” Rosie asked.
“He’s just an idiot. I mean, we had an okay time. We just went to the beach, and he was telling me about his band.” She made a face. “Who sound like crap, by the way. They’re modeling themselves on the Smiths. I was, like, aren’t you a bit young to try to be the Smiths? And he got all huffy and said that Morrissey was universal.”
“That should have been your first clue,” Maya said.
“I know that now! Anyway, it turned out the band is actually his brother’s, and Alex is basically the guy who carries the amps and stuff. So I was ready to forgive him for that, but then he started talking about Grand Theft Auto instead, and I just about died. I kissed him just to get him to shut up.”
“Oh, Suze,” Rosie said, rolling her eyes.
“It was worth it. He was actually pretty good at it. But anyway, that’s not the disaster bit. So I go home, and later that night he texts me. At first he’s being normal, and then, I swear out of nowhere, he says to me, ‘Send me a picture of your boobs.’ ”
“What?” Rosie and I said at the same time.
“I know! It’s, like, learn to read the signs, dude.”
“What did you say?”
“What do you think I said? I said no! And so he tried to be all ‘ohh, I won’t tell anyone, please.’ Really pathetic.”
“God, this is so disappointing,” Levina said, looking sad. “I thought he was cool. You’re ruining the illusion.”
“Ruining the illusion is a public service,” Suzanne said just as the waitress arrived.
We ordered our food even though I’d barely glanced at the menu, and waited until the waitress was out of earshot before starting up the conversation again.
“Tell them about the Snapchat,” Maya urged. She was grinning.
Suzanne was pressing her lips together, clearly trying to suppress a laugh. “So, after I’d said no a few times, he Snapchatted me a picture of his dick.”
“What?” Rosie and I shrieked this time, and our whole table burst out laughing, so loud that people at other tables turned to look at us.
“I know,” Suzanne said. “I couldn’t believe it either. And it was like this.” She held her hands in the gesture I recognized she’d been making when we first walked in, indicating, I presumed, a small penis. “Definitely not picture material. Which I guess is why he Snapchatted it.” She sighed. “The real sad thing is that it was a Snapchat, so I can’t even show you.”
“What a shame,” Maya said, deadpan.
“And then he says, ‘You can Snapchat your boobs.’ And I said, ‘I’ll Snapchat your face,’ and he thought I was flirting with him, because then he really did send me a Snapchat of his face. And then I gave up and just stopped replying.”
“Have you heard from him since?” I asked.
“He sent me a few after I stopped replying, basically calling me a bitch.” She seemed unconcerned about this. “The moral is, I wasted my time, which would have been better spent with you guys.” She was looking at me as she said this, smiling her usual friendly smile.
I smiled back, but all I could think was, Trauma triggers: experiences that trigger traumatic memories. It just didn’t make sense. How could anyone who’d been in any way traumatized be so bright and cheerful? I watched her face as she turned to Maya, lifting her hands to illustrate some new joke she was making, scanning for hints. But there was nothing. Just her, all smirks and eye rolls and wisecracks. The picture of ordinary happiness.
* * *
After our food arrived and the conversation lulled, I decided to go for it. “So, what’s going on in Corrie at the moment?”
“You don’t watch Corrie,” Rosie said. I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, Suzanne lift her straw to her teeth and begin chewing on it, her face passive.
“I know,” I said. “But I saw some stuff about it on Facebook. I’m just curious.”
“Yeah, there’s supposed to be this big controversial storyline,” Maya said, “but it’s not that controversial really.”
“It’s been building for ages,” Levina added. “Weeks.”
Maya nodded. “It was getting pretty boring. Denise has this new boyfriend, Dave, see, and her daughter, Clarise, who’s, what, fifteen?”
“Fourteen,” Levina chirped.
“Fourteen. She doesn’t like him. And he doesn’t like her either. They’ve been having fights and stuff.”
“Clarise is a bitch,” Rosie said. She speared a chunk of tomato. “Dave is trying really hard, and she keeps winding him up and stuff.”
“Anyway, on Thursday, they had this big fight when Denise was at work,” Maya continued. “And Clarise said that Dave was . . . what was it?”
“Pathetic and past it,” Levina supplied without hesitation.
“And Dave slapped her,” Maya finished. “That’s the big drama they’ve been leading up to.”
“It was more of a punch than a slap,” Levina said. “It was like . . .” She lifted her
hand and made an odd punching motion, but without a proper fist.
Rosie laughed. “What was that?”
“Yeah, it didn’t really look like that, did it?” Levina grinned and shrugged. “It was more than a slap though. That’s why the producers made such a big deal about it.”
“Same thing,” Maya said dismissively. “I think you’re supposed to feel sorry for Clarise, but seriously? She deserved it. She’s been such a bitch to him.”
My heart was pounding a strange, tense rhythm in my chest and my hands were clammy. I was starting to feel like I’d made a huge mistake bringing up this topic. The whole time they’d been speaking, Suzanne had sat in silence, watching them, her face completely blank—too blank. But when Maya made this comment, Suzanne’s whole face flinched and she closed her eyes for longer than a blink.
When she opened her eyes again, she caught me looking at her. Her eyes squinted slightly, clearly taking in the odd expression that I must have been making, then relaxed. I watched her rearrange her face into something normal again, like the flash of pain hadn’t even happened.
“You can’t say things like that,” Levina scolded Maya, but her voice was playful rather than serious. None of them had noticed Suzanne’s changed mood. “He’s a grown man, and he did hit her, even if it was kind of more a slap.”
“Oh, please,” Maya said, rolling her eyes. “If she didn’t want to get a slap, she shouldn’t have wound him up.”
“That sounds like a horrible storyline,” I said.
Rosie reached over and took a fry from my plate. “It’s a soap—what did you expect? Do you know how many serial killers they’ve had on that one street? This is boring compared to those storylines.”
“Maybe it’ll get more interesting,” Levina said.
“Maybe Clarise will finally shut up,” Maya said. The three of them laughed.
Suzanne stood up abruptly, which was a feat considering she was bunched up in the corner of the booth.
“I’ll be back in a sec,” she said.