“Girls of Aberfeldy Halls, it is my privilege to stand among you on the eve of our adult lives. The next few weeks will determine our success and our happiness. And we should ask ourselves: Are we proud? Have we done everything we can to achieve our goals?”
I faltered. My head was spinning. I felt as if I might faint. I couldn’t remember the rest of my speech. And everything Amelia and I had agreed on went out of my head. We were supposed to go to the office after assembly—quietly, with discretion—but since talking to Mum, this seemed the wrong thing to do somehow. My whole body was shaking, throbbing, aching.
“And…there are other questions we need to ask ourselves…”
Oh good god, my breathing had turned into quick moans. Mum was approaching the stage, worried. Miss Rose was standing, moving closer, her arm out to catch me in case I should fall.
“Let me finish… There’s one girl in particular, sitting among us, who should ask herself:
Are you scared?
Of getting caught…
Of losing control…
Being a failure…
Ruining everything?
Are you lonely?
Do you need help?”
Was I crying? Was Miss Rose taking hold of my arm and trying to get me to sit down?
I had to assert myself. I had to yell, “Who here wears size 8 underpants from Asda?”
Whispers turned to giggles.
“Does anyone here have a secret?” I pleaded, the giggles fading to silence as I pushed Miss Rose back towards her chair.
“Has something really scary happened that you don’t want anyone to know about?”
“Mum, let me finish!” She was on stage now, her arm around my shoulder.
“Let me finish!” I snapped, flicking Mum’s arm away.
“Secrets are bad. We shouldn’t keep them. We should never ask someone to keep them for us. It only makes things worse. From this moment on, there will be no more secrets. Please, please, please, think hard. Perhaps you don’t even know. Perhaps your mind has gone all strange and you can’t admit it happened. Can you come forward? Stand here in front of everyone and be unafraid? Just own up, here and now. Own up. In the words of Johann Friedrich von Schiller: ‘It is wise to disclose what cannot be concealed.’ No more secrets!”
I paused. The entire room was stunned, silent. The teachers were unsure what to do. As for me, black dots were buzzing before my eyes. Faces and chairs and walls were curvy and moving.
“Is it you, Viv?” I said, leaving the podium and walking to the very edge of the stage, trying to focus. “I saw the leaflet in your desk.”
Viv Metstein turned bright red. Then bright white. “What leaflet?” she snarled.
“Amelia, stop them!” Mr. Gillies had yanked the microphone from my hand. My mother was trying to haul me from the stage.
Amelia didn’t know what to do. She didn’t expect me to make it all so public. She was gray-pale. She was shaking her head at me.
I turned to the chairs at the back of the stage. “Is it you, Miss Rose? I saw the note from P…”
Miss Rose fell into her chair and then slid as far down into it as possible, white as a ghost.
“Amelia, come up and help me!”
Amelia stood up. “Rachel, be quiet. This isn’t the way. This isn’t what we agreed. Remember? We’re going to the office afterwards, after we’ve gotten something out of the fridge. You remember?”
Shit, the fridge. Mandy must be really cold. She’d be okay, I told myself. We’d wrapped her up nice and warm, and the vent was open.
Amelia’s plea didn’t deter me. “Is it you, the girl with the ponytail? Was it because of Mr. Burns?”
The girl with the ponytail ran out of the atrium.
Mr. Burns wriggled in his seat, shrugged at his fellow teachers and clasped his hands together so tightly they went green.
“Taahnya? Have you done it again? Did you leave it too late this time?”
Taahnya yelled angrily, “Shut her up, the retard!” She turned to Amelia, “Tell your best friend to shut up, the loony!”
Amelia looked really strange. She may even have been crying.
“Amelia?” I said, my eyes begging her to come forward.
Amelia put her head in her lap, sobbing.
“Amelia? Oh no, is it you after all? Amelia? That’s why you’re moving in with Piers…after all those times on the fire escape… It’s not the eating dis…”
I was interrupted by the Head Teacher, who’d actually put his hand over my mouth to stop me talking.
After a struggle I freed my mouth and yelled.
“Amelia O’Donohue. Confess! Tell us! Pleee…”
Two hands were now over my mouth. And someone had switched the power off. The room went dark.
Amelia fled her mid-row chair. Several feet were stamped on. Several chairs were kicked over. Could it be her after all? Not bulimic. Not unaware. A mother. With psychiatric problems. An alien dropped down from a spaceship. A screwed up teenage mother in denial. Hiding from everyone, maybe even from herself, just as she’d said.
The teachers had now risen from their backstage chairs and were trying to get the pupils out of the atrium. The girls were beginning to stand up.
“He’s perfect!” I yelled, hoping Amelia would hear me and have the courage to come back. “He’s a perfect, beautiful, captivating little boy. I’ve named him Sam. He’s perfe…”
He’s perfect, I thought, his gorgeous little face clear in my mind.
I didn’t collapse gracefully, but it was slow. Slowly, down, down, to the spot at the front of the stage I’d been standing on, the place where a large pool of my own blood welcomed me. A pool of thick dark blood which splattered all over Mum and Miss Rose when it merged with the thump of my unconscious body.
CHAPTER
TWENTY - FIVE
Oh god, I hate hospitals. What kind of subconscious screw up means I want a job in a place I hate more than anything, except that island maybe? My mind’s a mess. It’s been a mess a while now. Do I really want to be a doctor? Why? To take control, to make sure I’m not the one who’s lying in the bed waiting to be told the terrible news, but the one who’s standing over the bed telling the terrible news? No doubt about it, my mind’s a mess. Has been for a while now.
Do I really want to find out who had that baby?
I’m going there, aren’t I? To the hospital. I’m on my way, lying on a stretcher inside some medical transport machine with uniformed medical types hovering over me with worried looks on their faces, probably saying to each other, “Ah, so this is Rachel Ross. The girl who’ll spend the rest of her life in hospital…”
I don’t want to go to hospital. I want to do my English exam. Everyone will be doing their English exam. I want to go back. I want to go back to the safe place, the hiding place I’d half put myself in since the age of nine, after I did that terrible thing. I want to go back to the even safer place I put myself in since arriving at Aberfeldy Halls, where nothing exists: not family, not island, not the good lord, not bullies, not ex-boyfriends, friends, ex-friends, nothing, not even my body or anything related to it, just nice safe work, work, and work.
Could I go back please? Could you please turn the ambulance around and take me back there?
“What’s she saying?” one of the medical types hovering over me says to someone else. “Did you catch that?”
“It’s all right, my darling Rachel,” a third person says, and I realize the person isn’t medical, she’s my mum, and she’s crying.
“Take me back,” I say, but no one seems to hear me or understand me. My mask is in the way.
Always the mask. What is with the mask already? I want to take it off. I want to be maskless. Nebulizer free. I want to breathe on my own. I want to tell them, yell at them—do you not realize an actual person is at risk? Do you not realize a beautiful little boy is alone in a cupboard in a grotty, disused darkroom on the second floor of the dormitory building? Do you not reali
ze that I have to go back now? We have to go back. Turn around now. Do you not realize?!
The key, I manage to say. The key to the darkroom, it’s in my blazer pocket. And Mandy, she’s in the fridge.
“Up the morphine,” the faceless medical type says to someone I can’t see.
And I fade.
Into darkness.
And through the darkness I see another Rachel.
She’s at the island dance, nine months ago.
• • •
“Dance?” someone who makes me feel sick asks.
“Thought you chucked me.” My past-voice wobbles and bounces in my head.
“Well, I’m picking you up again, aren’t I?” he echoes. Aren’t I…Aren’t I…
He takes the Irn-Bru from my hand and puts it on the chair. “Come outside?”
And I know what it means to go outside. I know it means more than kissing. Am I ready yet? Am I ready to do more? If I’m not, I’m chucked. If I’m not, he’ll go out with someone else. Because he’s hot. He’s cool. His parents are arty farty types. He’s going to be an actor. If I don’t, someone else will. Even if his tongue’s like sandpaper and he says the stupidest things like, “As they say in the fillems, this is very romantic.” If I don’t, he’ll chuck me, for definite this time.
So I go. I don’t want to be chucked. I don’t want to stay at home while Mandy’s down at the beach snogging Andrew, getting love-bites that require concealment in huge turtleneck jumpers. I don’t want to be any more miserable than I already am.
I go. And it’s lucky we have nothing to say to each other because it’s not necessary to talk. All I have to do is stand and hope the innards of my mouth will survive the tongue-massacre, then sit, then lie on the ground beside the wheelie bin and let myself let him.
It’s far less pleasant than a conker up a nostril.
“Rachel Ross!” This voice comes from Mandy’s mum—Mrs. Grogan. Usually I call her Aunty Jen. Usually she loves me. I’m her neighbor. I’m her daughter’s best friend. My father lets her write stupid articles in the local newspaper about exceptionally straight carrots. He even pays her.
“Rachel Ross!” she yells, with a voice that indicates I should no longer call her Aunty. She has two large, full, black rubbish bags in her hands. She’s about to put them in the wheelie bin, but now she’s seen us.
“In here now!” she yells. And all I can think is Oh no, Mrs. Grogan’s seen John’s bare bottom. It’s good. It’s firm. But I don’t think she should see it. I don’t think she’ll like it.
“Go to the toilet and stay there till I say,” she snarls, once we’re back inside the building. Already, everyone is stopping and looking.
“Please don’t tell my mother and my father!” I say.
“It’s not them you should worry about, Rachel Ross, it’s the good lord.”
“him again?” I say out loud. him with no capital h and big freaky underpants.
I feel guilty and ashamed and ill in the toilet. I sit on the plastic chipped seat and put my head in my hands and for a moment I wish I believed in the good lord because what I need now, more than anything, is to be saved. Please, someone, save me.
• • •
I open my eyes. I remember where I am. I just collapsed on the stage at assembly, in front of the whole school. I’m on a stretcher in an ambulance. And I can see them again, the medical types. They’re whispering to each other. How could this be? How could she not know? And my mum shushes them and tells me to relax because I’m not in trouble and everything’s going to be fine.
I decide I’m better off with my eyes closed, but then the moving pictures come back to the inside of my head, back from where I’d kept them hidden deep down inside somewhere, like letters in a shoebox in a cupboard, and they hurt my brain. But I can’t stop them coming at me anyways. They’re squeezing through the cracks, pushing, to get out.
• • •
It’s nine months ago. I’m in the toilet at the island dance.
“Rachel? Rachel! Come with me now!” my mum says, and I open the toilet door.
She doesn’t seem angry at me. She seems worried but not angry. She takes my hand, hauls me out of the bathroom, across the dance floor, and through the foyer. Everyone stops and stares. And here’s a shock: while the crowd stare at me, all-knowing, snarling, giggling, judging, my mother yells:
“What the f are you looking at?” Not just f, you understand, but the whole caboodle, uck and all, and then she drags me outside and into our car, where Dad has the engine running.
My mother has just said the whole entire f word and I have just opened my eyes.
• • •
“You just said the f word,” I say. I’m back in the present now. Mum’s still sitting over me in the ambulance. My words aren’t coming out right. I’m off my head. I’m pure off my head. This morphine has done my nut in. Mum can’t understand what I’m saying. She’s stroking my hair. She won’t stop crying.
“Is he okay?” I try to say, but that drip is tremendous and stupendous, and I’m out of control. So this is what it feels like to be out of control. Even the word “okay” comes out fantastic. Something like urghhhaaaa: Sprawling, garbled, unleashed, free.
“She’s delirious,” someone says.
“No, I’m Rachel, and he’s Sam,” I say, concentrating on the shape my mouth should take to make the sounds work. I look at Mum and take my time with the next sentence. “Is…he… okay? Is…Sam…okay?”
“He’s fine, my darling. Rest now. He’s perfect. He’s beautiful. We’ll look after him.”
I close my eyes and go backwards again.
• • •
To the kitchen table of our croft house. Nine months ago. “We have made a decision,” my mother and my father—as I called them then—say. Looking at it from my half-dream, the house seems pretty. Suddenly I understand why tourists would want to come here for Hogmanay. “We’re going to send you to Aberfeldy Halls.”
I’m happy but I don’t realize how lucky this is, because at Aberfeldy Halls I will need to hide even more than ever. There, I’ll need to dig down so deep no one will find me. I’ll need to cover myself with other peoples’ secrets and when that becomes too much, I’ll cover my ears with my hands and hum, not listening, not hearing, just studying, just thinking ahead to the job, the city, living alone in a place where no one will know me and no one will find me and no one will blame me.
• • •
Oh help me, I’m in the present again, in the ambulance. It’s stopped quite suddenly. The brakes make my brain bounce against the back of my head and with the bounce, our pretty highland kitchen table flies from my mind. We’ve arrived at the hospital.
CHAPTER
TWENTY - SIX
I don’t remember it for ages. Several people have to help me find the memory ’cause I’ve hidden it so well. Several people, mostly doctors, who arrive at the same time each day to talk to me. They use several methods, mostly talking ones, but they also give me medication.
After a few weeks, the methods begin to work, and I remember this:
I’m in my cubicle bed trying to sleep off the terrible pain I’m feeling, which I definitely don’t want to feel. Not now. Not on the day before my first exam. I fall asleep and dream I’m late for my English exam, I’m falling out of the classroom window. I land. It hurts. Everyone looks down on me. I’ve screwed everything up, haven’t I? I’ve ruined everything and everyone knows.
I realize now it wasn’t landing on the ground that had hurt. It was him, arriving so suddenly, so painfully. It hurts so much I make noises farm animals make, then I shake so hard that reality spills right out of my head.
“Good, Rachel, Good,” the doctors say.
Better as a dream, the insides of my mind apparently argued at the time. Better as a dream, my confused mind and body apparently argued in the hours afterwards.
“That’s right, Rachel. Now we’re getting somewhere.”
• • •
The first three: feeling ill all the time, craving cauliflower cheese and Sammy’s chicken curries, thinking people smelled funny, taking people’s secrets and hiding them inside me along with my own, blaming my parents and the island for all the scary strangeness.
The second three: blossoming, focused, working like a dog, cut off from Sammy and friends and family. Ignore them. Ignore everything. Work.
The third trimester: nesting, cleaning my cupboards, and smoothing my favorite red duvet over and over.
All the while a baby was growing inside me, pushing at me, yelling, “I’m here! I’m here!”
CHAPTER
TWENTY - SEVEN
A melia O’Donohue here to see you,” a nurse says, and I realize I want to see her more than anything. For weeks I’ve only seen my parents and people in coats or uniforms, all with notebooks and pens, questions, opinions, concerns, ways to help me.
“How you doing?” Amelia asks, putting some books and a tin of cupcakes with coconut-covered icing on my bedside table.
“I’m totally crazy, apparently.”
She laughs, then holds my hand. “You caused quite a stir, Miss Rachel Ross.”
“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to hear.”
“I don’t care if you don’t want to hear. I’m going to tell you and you can tell whoever you want afterwards.”
I smile. “Okay.”
“The chef left his wife. He and Miss Rose have moved to Spain.”
“No way.”
Amelia was like, “Way. And Mr. Burns was sacked.”
“Oh shit.”
“No, don’t worry, he deserved it. Three past pupils have come forward since.”
“What about Mandy?”
“She fell asleep in the fridge, snug as a bug in the sleeping bag. She failed all but history. Starting hairdressing in Aberdeen. Apparently John chucked her ’cause she was a slut.”
“See that guy…” I say, shaking my head.
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