by Byrne, Tanya
I laughed, but Naomi poked me in the side with her finger. ‘She’s right. You’ll never get over it because you won’t get it out of your system. It’s there for ever.’
I laughed again. ‘For ever? Stop being so melodramatic.’
‘I’m not! It’s like a dream. You never remember a dream if you dream it out, you only remember it if you’re interrupted, like if you wake up, or something. So if you let a relationship run its natural course, it will just fizzle out and die and you won’t give a shit. But if something happens, like the timing’s off or he’s with someone else, then it’s just on hold, like you’ve hit the pause button or something.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘It’s true.’ Lily nodded. ‘We did this poem at school and it said that only one type of love lasts – unrequited love.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘I love you, Lil. You don’t know who Hello Kitty is, but you can quote Somerset Maugham.’
‘Whatever.’ Naomi waved her hand. ‘If you ever want to get out of here, you need to talk about it. You can’t avoid Doctor G for ever.’
‘Says the girl who schizes out every time her boyfriend comes to visit.’
Naomi sat up. ‘At least I let myself feel something. That’s what you’re scared of, Emily.’ She pointed at me. ‘What all of us in here are scared of, of being happy. We haven’t felt it for so long, we wouldn’t know what to do with it.’
When I looked at Lily she was nodding and my heart clenched like a fist. This always happens to me, I look away for a moment and everyone grows up without me.
Doctor Gilyard didn’t look surprised when I asked to see her this morning.
‘Are you ready, Emily?’ she asked when I’d sat down.
‘No,’ I said, but she smiled and opened her notebook.
‘Tell me about Sid.’
As soon as she said his name, my heart started ringing like a bell.
It rang just now, when I wrote it down.
‘When did you meet him?’
I had to close my eyes for a second. Then I took a breath and brought my legs up and rested my chin on my knees. ‘That morning in English Lit, the morning after I dyed my hair.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing. He just walked in.’
He walked in and everyone looked up, because when Sid King walks into a room, you look up. Sometimes I wonder if time has softened his edges, if nostalgia has made his eyes darker, his skin a warmer shade of brown. But then I remember how every girl softened, how the boys sat a little straighter, their shoulders back as he walked across the classroom.
He was older than the rest of them, I knew – my age, at least. You could tell by the way he walked, by the way he didn’t care where he sat, he just headed for the first empty seat rather than looking around the classroom for someone he knew.
His hair was long then and that morning it fell in still-wet waves over his ears. ‘Sid plays with his hair a lot,’ I told Doctor Gilyard as I thought about how dark it was, how the too-white fluorescent lights hit it so I could see the threads of brown it would eventually dry to. ‘That’s kind of his thing. He plays with his hair. Juliet pulls the sleeves of her jumper over her hands because she’s always cold and I tug on my ear lobe when I lie.’
‘That’s good to know,’ she said with a smirk, writing it down.
‘He ran his hand through his hair twice before he even got to where we were sitting.’
‘What else did you notice?’
‘His tattoos, on his wrists: sink’ – I touched the inside of my right wrist with my finger, then my left one – ‘and swim. And he was wearing this black Sonic Youth T-shirt—’
Doctor Gilyard interrupted. ‘Why do you remember that?’
‘Because Juliet was reading a book about No Wave.’
‘New Wave?’
‘No Wave, y’know, post-punk, anti-new wave,’ I started to say but Doctor Gilyard looked bewildered so I gave up. ‘Never mind. It was just kind of perfect, that’s all.’
And it was. I don’t believe in fate – I don’t believe in much any more – but it’s those little things that make me think all of this was meant to happen.
I remember turning to look at Juliet to find her watching him too, her lips parted as he dropped his ink-stained backpack on to the desk in front of ours. Of all the desks. And that’s another of those things: would any of this have happened if he’d sat on the other side of the room? Maybe not. But he sat there, so close that I could smell the shampoo in his hair.
‘So what did you do?’ Doctor Gilyard asked and I smiled to myself.
‘I asked Juliet about her summer.’ She raised her eyebrow at me as if to say, And? ‘I called her Nancy. I made her name sound about a minute long.’
‘Were you trying to catch her off guard?’
I nodded. And it worked because Juliet shuddered like I’d just shaken her awake in the middle of the night.
‘What did Juliet say?’
‘That she’d moved in with her aunt and uncle.’ I remember how she said it, stiffly, as though she’d been practising it. She probably had.
‘What did you say then?’ Doctor Gilyard pushed.
‘I asked her why.’
‘How did she react?’
I shrugged. ‘She looked at me like I’d betrayed her. She hadn’t asked me anything about myself, so I guess she didn’t think I’d ask her anything.’
That’s the thing with not wanting to answer questions, you have to stop asking them.
‘What did she say?’
‘She told me that her parents had died the month before.’
‘How did she say it?’
‘Quickly, like she was trying to run away from it.’
I remember how Juliet looked at me after she’d said it; it was a look that said, Enough. I think she thought that would be it, that I’d leave her alone.
‘How did you react, Emily?’
‘I didn’t feign horror or offer her a useless condolence, I just asked her how.’
‘What did she say?’
‘That they were killed in a house fire. That’s when Sid interrupted.’
‘What did he say?’
I sniggered. ‘Shit.’
‘Did you know he was listening?’
‘No.’
‘So you weren’t trying to embarrass her in front of him?’
I frowned. ‘I was goading her, but it was nothing to do with him.’
‘Okay,’ Doctor Gilyard nodded, ‘so what happened then?’
‘He looked mortified – I don’t think he realised he’d said it out loud.’
‘Did he apologise?’
I sniggered again. ‘Yeah. He said he was saying shit about something he heard the day before. Then he flashed us a smile that would make girls lose their balance.’
‘Did you lose your balance, Emily?’
‘No.’
‘So you weren’t attracted to him immediately?’
I shrugged. ‘I thought he was good looking.’
‘Just good looking?’
‘Yeah. He’s my type: tall, dark, artfully untidy.’
‘So you were attracted to him?’
I got what she was poking at and sighed.
Doctor Gilyard took off her glasses and looked at me. ‘What, Emily?’
‘So I did all of this because I fancied a boy?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘No, but that’s what you’re implying.’
‘I’m not implying anything, Emily. I asked you a question: were you attracted to him when you first met him?’
‘Why does that matter?’
‘Why are you finding it so difficult to answer the question?’
‘I know what you’re doing,’ I told her, shaking my head.
‘What am I doing, Emily?’
‘You’re trying to work out what came first, the chicken or the egg: did I fancy him all along or did I fall for him after I used him to get back at Juliet.’
‘Which is it?’
‘I did it for Juliet!’ I hissed, holding on to the arms of the chair and sitting forward. ‘Everything I did was to fuck her over! That’s why I was glad that day, when they met.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I knew she liked him. He made his joke then he smiled at her – just at her, this slow, secret smile – and that was it, I wasn’t in the room any more.’
‘How did that make you feel, Emily?’
‘Happy,’ I said, my nails digging on to the arms of the chair.
‘Really? It was the first time since she stabbed your father that you could get near her and suddenly this boy was between you.’
I shook my head. ‘Do you wanna know why I didn’t kill her?’ I asked with a smug smile. ‘Why I didn’t just stick a knife in her heart and be done with it?’
‘Why, Emily?’
‘Because she was already dead.’
The words seemed to bounce off every wall. I imagined them rolling under the door towards the TV Room like marbles.
She frowned. ‘Dead? How so?’
‘Her mother died of breast cancer when she was four and she’d survived that, but then she stabbed Dad and she lost everything. Everything. Her father, her house, her school, her friends. There was no joy in killing her. No release. She had nothing to fight for.’
‘Then she did,’ Doctor Gilyard said and my smile widened.
It happened so quietly, her and Sid. It wasn’t one of those stories they’d tell their children. There was no rain, no chance encounter. Sid didn’t pull her out of the way before she stumbled into the path of a bus. But I felt the classroom hum with it. The floor shivered. Pens rolled off desks. Books fluttered off shelves like broken birds.
‘I knew then that she had a life,’ I told Doctor Gilyard. ‘A future.’
‘And why was that important, Emily?’
I had to take a breath before I said it. ‘Because I could make her beg for it.’
Naomi is with Doctor Gilyard so I’m in my room. Lily is asleep on my bed, her eyelashes fluttering. I wish I could sleep like that; she looks so content. I think she’s used to it now – this place. I think she might even be enjoying it. She certainly seems to relish asking me question after question. She just asked me what it was like, being someone else. I didn’t lie. I told her that I enjoyed it; the lies, the melodrama, the weeks of smiling at Juliet and feeding her sweet little lies while she looked at me with wide brown eyes, devouring every word.
I expected her to be more suspicious – of me, of Sid – but she wasn’t at all. Our three lives knotted together the moment we met in that classroom. We went to classes together and had lunch together. In the evenings, we went to the cinema and, while it was still warm, we sat in the park, sharing bags of crisps and watching the sky change from pink to purple to black, like an old bruise. On Friday nights there was a pub in Camden that didn’t check IDs and on Saturdays there was always a party; Sid always knew someone who was DJ’ing somewhere or a mate who was turning eighteen. It was like the summer before I met them, the summer before Juliet stabbed Dad and everything fell apart, back when we were young and free and unbreakable.
I even started having dinner at Juliet’s house two, sometimes three, times a week. Her foster parents – Mike and Eve – ate up my grumbles about my parents’ divorce and how my mother was never home, just like Juliet had, and as soon as they did, as soon as they started feeding me roast chicken and asking about college, I knew that was it . . . I’d been invited in.
I didn’t tell Lily this, but the best thing about being Rose Glass was that I didn’t have to be Emily Koll. And the best thing about not being Emily Koll was that I could start again. I could cross that year out, the year Dad was on remand, the year I was in Spain, and be sixteen again.
It’s a terrible thing, I suppose, to be seventeen and to want to start again. It’s not like before then – before Juliet – I was unhappy. I was popular at school. Okay, I wasn’t one of the shiny-haired girls who looked at your bag before they looked at you and I wasn’t as cool as the girls who drank coffee and read Murakami, but I had found a corner for myself – I played the cello. It wasn’t the guitar and I wore black dresses instead of black nail varnish, but I was good, good enough to make Dad and Uncle Alex cry when they came to my recitals. And I had friends; I swapped clothes with Catherine Bamford and held Alma Peet’s hair every time we went to a party and Max Dalton fed her vodka shots until she puked. And when Olivia’s grandmother died, I got everyone to sign a card and we made a donation to Cancer Research.
But that was before. So forget about that Emily; she went away the moment Juliet stabbed Dad. Now I’m Harry Koll’s daughter. That’s all I’ll ever be, so forgive me if I wanted to be Rose Glass for a while.
I know it’s moments like this when I sound utterly insane, but I learned a lot from being Rose. Before I had to be someone else I didn’t think too much about who I was. I was who I was, if you know what I mean. I didn’t think that could change. I thought my personality was as much a part of me as the colour of my hair. But then I dyed it red and I didn’t look like me any more. I looked like Monday Fitzgerald.
Monday was in Year 11 when I started at St Jude’s. She didn’t have shiny hair or read Murakami, but every girl in my year was in awe of her. Where we were small with too much hair and not enough personality, Monday was tall and graceful with huge cardamom-coloured eyes and a smile that could stop a horse mid-gallop.
Every girl at St Jude’s wanted to be Monday Fitzgerald. Not because she was popular or pretty or destined for greatness, but because in a school where everyone looked the same and dressed the same and went out with the same handful of boys, Monday Fitzgerald walked through the halls in her rolled-up tartan skirt and Doc Martens absolutely and unashamedly herself. And we loved her for it.
If we’d had any idea who we were, we would have done the same.
It’s funny how it took becoming someone else to realise who I am. Who I could be. I thought the world was split into people like Monday and people like me. I didn’t think I could walk into a room with a swing of the hips and a smile for everyone. I don’t know why; I only had to do it once and then I would have done it. But I guess if someone tells you something enough, you start to believe it. All my life, all I’d ever heard was: Emily’s so shy, Emily’s so quiet, Emily’s so clever. Thinking back on it now, I don’t know if I ever was any of those things, or if I just became shy and quiet and clever because everyone said I was.
But when I was Rose, I didn’t have to be. It was as though I could shuffle off Emily like she was a winter coat and it was too warm to wear it any more. Then I was free to say what I wanted, wear what I wanted. I listened to bands because they made me feel restless, not because someone said they were cool. In clothes shops, I began to stray towards the rails which previously I would just have gazed at, try on the clothes I thought didn’t suit me. Maybe they still didn’t suit me, but I didn’t care, and that’s the point: Rose was the girl I wanted to be but I was too scared that Dad wouldn’t approve of or who my friends would think was weird. But the truth is: I am weird. I’ve always been weird. And when I was Rose, I could be. A mismatched, red-haired Kerouacian kind of weird perfectly fitting of a girl called Rose.
And I liked it.
Then I met Grace Humm.
Grace Humm was my personal tutor. It felt strange calling her that. Everyone at St Jude’s was Miss or Sir. There were no first names. But at the College of North London we were adults, apparently, and could call teachers by their first name.
I met Grace the morning I started at the college and I spent the three weeks after that avoiding her. I’d ducked into classroom, locked myself in the toilet and once hid behind a bin in the canteen. But when I finally met her, I kind of wished I hadn’t, because if Rose allowed me to be weird, then Grace showed me how to own it. How to wallow in it. She taught me to wear weird like a feather in my hair.
If I ever grow up, I want to be Gr
ace Humm.
But I didn’t know that back then. All I thought about was Juliet, so I didn’t want to sit with a teacher and discuss how I was getting on with my classes and what universities I wanted to apply to. I wasn’t going to university. I wasn’t even going to be at college much longer. I thought another two – maybe three – weeks and it’d be done, I’d be gone and she wouldn’t even notice. But that was my first mistake, thinking she wasn’t paying attention.
‘Rose,’ she said, walking towards me one day as Juliet and I were standing by our lockers plotting how we could get Sid to try sushi. ‘Are you avoiding me?’
Juliet and I exchanged a look and I contemplated making a run for it, but when I saw how busy the corridor was, I blew a bubble with my gum instead.
‘Hello, Miss,’ I said, tossing a book into my locker.
‘Oh, Rose. I’m so glad this isn’t awkward. I thought it would be awkward,’ she said, her forehead pinched with mock concern. ‘I was worried that I came on too strong after enrolment, calling and emailing like that. My ex-husband says I’m too needy. Was I being needy, Rose? Did I scare you off?’
I tried not to laugh as I closed my locker. ‘It’s not you, Miss, it’s me.’
‘Where are you going?’ she asked, trotting after Juliet and me, her heels clicking on the parquet floor as we began to walk away. ‘Don’t leave me, Rose! Don’t leave me like he did.’
‘I have to get to sociology.’
She checked her watch. ‘Not until eleven.’
‘Yeah, but I have to do that thing first.’
She stopped in front of me so I couldn’t get past. ‘The thing in my office?’
‘No.’ I pointed over her shoulder. ‘That thing at the thing.’
‘Oh, that thing. The thing where you to talk to me now or I call your mother?’
I sighed and rolled my eyes at Juliet. ‘Run. Save yourself.’
I didn’t have to tell her twice and as soon as she had disappeared down the corridor, Grace turned to me with a smirk. ‘Is she really going out with Sid King?’ When I nodded, she laughed. ‘Sid and Nancy. Too cute!’
‘Yeah. So cute. Didn’t he stab her?’