I feel my lip curve with the urge to sneer, but manage to keep my voice neutral. ‘Amy and Paul said that because the thing at the pool didn’t happen in school time, it’s difficult for you to punish him for it directly so you have to treat it in terms of ongoing bullying at school that’s spilled over. They said you can suspend him for two weeks for that at least.’
‘And you think that’s a good idea.’ A statement, not a question.
Which is just as well, as I’m not at all sure what I think. It’ll make everyone talk at school and of course some people are already saying that it’s not Sonny Rawlins’s fault that I’m such a wimp, while others think I was just making a fuss to get attention. The last thing I need is for Sonny Rawlins or his horrid little friends to take to shoving me in the school corridors every chance they get: the thing at the pool was humiliation enough for a couple of lifetimes. I don’t need to do an encore performance of passing out in the hall with the whole school looking on.
When I see her later, Ms Winters will probably ask me if I’m afraid of Sonny Rawlins now. And I want to say no but it’s not that simple. I’m not afraid of him in the sense that I know he can’t get away with seriously hurting me – isn’t getting away with it, at least not completely, even now – and he won’t bother to try unless he thinks it won’t come back on him. But he could still make my life miserable.
No, the thing I’m afraid of is something to do with wanting him to be at least as miserable as he’s made me and, ideally, more. That’s part of it. But it’s also something to do with wanting him to be afraid of me: something to do with how unfair it is that the only payback I’m allowed is this stupid suspension or making myself miserable by going back to the police.
It’s all bound up with how angry, angry, angry I am that I never get to hurt anyone half as much as they hurt me. Except just that once. The tang of the memory warms me from the inside out, like heat in my veins. It was nice to be powerful. About the nicest thing I’ve ever felt. How I’d love to show Sonny Rawlins just how powerful I can be.
‘Will a suspension make any difference to him later on?’ I ask. ‘Like for applying to uni?’
‘Well, these things never look good,’ Mrs Henderson says, but her eyes move past me and she doesn’t look at Amy at all.
‘They most certainly wouldn’t if we decided to pursue things via the police,’ Amy says.
Mrs Henderson’s lips thin into an apologetic line. ‘Yes, I can see that might be an attractive option, but I doubt it will make any great difference in the end, juvenile records being treated in much the same way as school ones in these regards. I’m not sure the trauma of going down that route . . .’
‘As opposed to the trauma of letting the boy who tried to drown my daughter come back to class with her?’ Usually Amy gets loud when she’s angry, but today she’s quiet. Quiet and cold.
‘He didn’t try to drown me,’ I say. ‘He’s horrible, but he’s just normal horrible, Amy.’
Amy’s gaze is anguished. ‘It’s not right,’ she says and there’s a quiver in her voice.
‘I’m sure that what your husband proposed the other evening about getting Sonny’s parents to arrange some counselling involving anger management therapy would be a far more productive avenue to pursue.’
‘And less messy,’ Amy adds acidly.
‘Yes,’ Mrs Henderson says, suddenly sharp. ‘It would be much less messy. For everyone. You won’t get anywhere with the police. Which is not to say that I don’t see where you’re coming from,’ she adds quickly, holding up a hand, though Amy hasn’t made any move to interrupt, ‘or that I won’t push as much as I can with Sonny’s parents. They will, I am sure, be most unhappy to realise that the agreement the four of us reach here is not open for debate. Not unless they want to test my willingness to consider something more serious than a short suspension. And that’s not the sort of trouble they’ll want to invite.’ Mrs Henderson is looking at me, and I’m surprised by what I see in her gaze now. ‘It’s better than nothing,’ she tells me. And this time the apology is sincere.
And so is my smile. I like the idea of Mrs Henderson blackmailing Sonny Rawlins and his parents because I know that making Sonny Rawlins pay – really pay – will ruin things, even though it’s wrong that that’s the way things are. It’s wrong that some people get away with things and other people have to hold themselves in because they know they won’t.
But even though I’ve got Amy and Paul and Uncle Ben now, and that’s too much to risk losing, I’m afraid that one day all that unfairness will spill over, spill out and all I’ll be able to think of is how the things I’ve got to lose stop me being free. Stop me being powerful. Stop me making things fair.
Usually Amy would tell me stuff about ‘an eye for an eye making us all blind’ and I know Gandhi said it and it was a smart thing to say if we want the world to be a good place. Only it doesn’t feel like that. And the worst bit is that I know that if I did make Sonny Rawlins pay, he’d never dare to even look at me wrong again. It wouldn’t be like the time with the flowers, or the cigarettes, or every other little thing since, when my pushing back against his attempts to hurt me have only made him try harder. It wouldn’t just be a little victory in the moment, making sure his hatefulness backfires – Yes, I know what these flowers are called. No, if I ever really made him pay, that would be the end of it.
‘Ms Winters has volunteered to keep a particularly close eye on things when Sonny comes back to school, so hopefully that will help Evie feel more secure,’ Mrs Henderson is saying when I tune back into the conversation, ‘and I have every confidence that that will do the trick to keep him in line. Now, was there anything else you wanted to discuss, Evie?’
Paul puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes, but when I turn to Amy, her face is still full of anger and frustration.
‘No,’ I say. ‘There’s nothing else.’ I don’t listen to Mrs Henderson’s parting words.
By then it’s the end of the day so, after passing by the classroom to pick up my stuff, we head home. In the car, Amy glares into the window, while Paul’s fingers jitter and drum against the wheel.
Amy is out of the car as soon as Paul parks. He pulls a face and sighs.
When we sidle into the kitchen together, Amy is slamming cupboards open, wrenching the drawers out so roughly that the cutlery jangles discordantly. A fork falls, hits the floor at a strange angle and ricochets back into the air, then clatters a drumroll against the tiles as if fighting to stay airborne. When it has stilled, I look up to find Amy standing braced over the sink.
‘I’m sorry, Evie.’ Her voice is hoarse.
‘It’s OK,’ I whisper. I swallow and try again, louder. ‘It’s OK.’
Amy shakes her head, but doesn’t turn.
Paul moves to touch her arm, but she steps away from him, hands raking through her hair. ‘I know you think I’m not pushing,’ Paul says, his voice tight, ‘but Evie’s got enough to deal with without a pointless battle.’
‘It’s not pointless, Paul,’ Amy hisses, still not looking at either of us.
‘Yes,’ Paul says as I take a quiet step towards the door, ‘it is.’
‘It’s not pointless just because we can’t win,’ Amy whispers. I take another step. ‘Sometimes people need to fight, Paul. We can’t always just give in.’
‘And which battle should we fight?’ Paul demands suddenly. ‘The little one we can’t win or the big one? Which unwinnable battle should we make Evie fight, given that she’ll have to do most of the work? What type of losing is going to make her feel better?’
I turn and leave them to it, though they fall silent as I make my way upstairs.
‘There are better things to spend our energies on,’ I hear Paul say as I reach the top of the steps. ‘There’s more than one way to get where we need to be, Amy.’
I curl up in bed with a book, but I don’t even manage to turn one page before Amy, eyes rather red, comes to fetch me for dinner an hour later. It’s a qui
et meal, though the tension that has haunted the week seems to have gone for now.
Amy goes to bed early, while Paul and I stay up to watch a movie. Only neither of us watches. Instead, I watch Paul as he stares blankly at the TV, wondering if we’re both thinking about the same thing: other ways of getting even and those night-time adventures he keeps having with Uncle Ben.
And that’s when I realise what my ‘but’ is: why I’m with Paul rather than Amy on the whole Sonny Rawlins thing. Although I’m glad they would if I asked them to, I don’t want Paul and Amy fighting this battle for me because they don’t understand how much I want Sonny Rawlins to pay. They’d never make him sorry enough. They just don’t have it in them.
And I love them for it. I love that they don’t know how wonderful, and terrible, it is to be powerful. I couldn’t bear for them to lose that . . . that innocence because of me. It wouldn’t be right. If it was going to happen, it should have been when Adam and Aunt Minnie and Nanna Florrie and Grandad Peter died. But it didn’t.
And it mustn’t happen now, over me. Because if it did, it would mean that Fiona and her parents had taken away some of what makes Paul and Amy and Uncle Ben so different from them: it would be like the worst people I know making the best just a little bit like them.
But Paul doesn’t understand that. You can’t really, until it’s too late.
‘What is with you this week?’ Lynne hisses, kicking my ankle to draw my attention back to the board and the rubbish we’re supposed to be copying into our notes. I let my pen drift across the page while I continue fretting over last Friday: the night of the second dark moon since I wished the Dragon into being.
Even though the Dragon and I stayed in, I waited up, listening for Paul and Uncle Ben’s triumphant return, hurrying to the window the moment I heard movement below in the garden, but Paul was alone. He walked straight to the back door and let himself into the kitchen and that was that.
The next morning, he was irritable over breakfast, slugging his coffee down and taking off early for work. Was he just tired or was he worried about the consequences of his dark moon adventure? Or was he disappointed because their plans had somehow fallen through or, worse yet, because something had gone wrong? I spent the whole weekend brooding over it and I’m still not done.
Lynne kicks me again and I look up to find Mrs Poole staring at me. I blink at her for a moment, receive another kick, and realise I’ve been asked a question.
‘I don’t know?’ I say. It comes out sounding like a question and I have to resist the urge to flinch in case what Mrs Poole actually asked was something along the lines of ‘Do you think pupils who ignore their teachers should get detention?’ But Mrs Poole just sighs and turns to Jenny instead.
‘Are you sick?’ Lynne whispers. ‘Do your ribs hurt?’
I shake my head, then sigh and shrug. ‘Sort of. A little. Didn’t sleep last night.’
‘Shall I ask to take you to the nurse?’ Lynne offers.
I sigh again. ‘No. It’s nearly break anyway.’
I try, I really do, but although there are only ten minutes left my thoughts immediately drift back to Paul and Uncle Ben. The only thing I know for certain is that Amy fussed at Paul, first for coming in so late, then for tossing and turning all night (plus he tracked mud into the house: a cardinal sin).
The day grinds past. Phee and Lynne stop bothering to kick my ankles to make me pay attention, realising that it’s a lost cause, before we even get to lunchtime. I expect to spend the afternoon lurching from one telling-off to another. Instead the teachers just get this weird, sad look in their eyes and ignore my daydreaming or ask if I need to go and lie down. Even more strangely, no one picks on me about this preferential treatment: no one says anything about the fact that I should be in trouble left, right and centre today, and yet I’m not. Instead, six different classmates tell me they’re glad I’m OK and don’t have to go back to hospital, or some variation on that theme.
By the time the final bell goes, I’m so confused and baffled that my head hurts.
Usually Amy would be collecting me because Phee has tennis on Mondays so she can’t cycle home with me. But, as Lynne is off to her grandmother’s tonight and that’s just a few streets over from us, Amy said we could walk back together.
We’ve only just turned the corner from school when Lynne says, ‘See: people really do like you,’ as if she’s picking up a conversation that was interrupted earlier. ‘You shouldn’t always assume the worst.’
‘I don’t!’ I protest, but Lynne loops her arm through mine and says, ‘Yes, you do, Evie. Maybe you don’t mean to, but you always think that if people are a bit funny it’s because they don’t like you. You never think that maybe they just don’t know quite what to say.’
For a moment, I consider asking ‘About what?’ but end up not saying anything at all.
When we get to my gate, Lynne surprises me with a hug, throwing her arms tight around me and stroking her hand once down the back of my head. Then she’s off down the path before I have the chance to hug back or even call ‘See you tomorrow’ after her. I stand, watching, waiting for her to turn the corner into her gran’s street and wishing she would look back, knowing she won’t. But she does, spinning with a grin and a wave. I wave back and then she’s gone.
Amy is bustling about upstairs when I let myself in, though she calls down a hello and I call up an ‘I’ll make some tea.’ But first I go to the TV and turn on the news, sitting on the very, very edge of the sofa, leaning forwards . . . But there’s nothing. Nothing at all.
When the news cycles back to sport again, I stomp into the kitchen and viciously slap the kettle on, scowling at the fridge as I slump, arms crossed over my chest, against the counter.
Maybe there won’t be anything until tomorrow, I tell myself. All sorts of things can happen and not get found out right away. It might take days, a week . . .
I shiver and push away from the counter, busying myself with getting the mugs down, fetching the milk, spooning out sugar, arranging biscuits on a plate. Telling myself that I can’t afford to go on thinking like this: that I can’t keep on waiting and hoping and willing for days on end.
I shove the tea-tin lid back on so violently it dents.
Suddenly my eyes are flooded with tears and I’m gripping the counter, shoulders bowed, because I’d been sure, so sure that Paul and Uncle Ben were going to do something on their dark moon. Even though I’d tried to tell myself that there were all sorts of explanations for why they kept going out at night, why they have been keeping secrets that for some reason Uncle Ben thinks they should share with me but not Amy . . . All that guilt and worry, all those Friday nights we stayed in, the Dragon and I, all of it wasted.
I whirl away from the counter and go hammering upstairs, slamming the door to my room behind me and throwing myself down on to the bed, careless of the agony I awaken in my ribs.
‘Evie? Evie darling, are you OK?’ Amy calls.
‘Be right there!’ I garble out around the tears, cutting my nails into my palm to steady my voice.
I hear Amy’s footsteps move away from my door and have to gulp down the sob that escapes before it becomes something louder. Catching up the Dragon, I roll over with my back to the door, face pressed into my pillow.
The Dragon winds itself around my thumb and presses its nose to mine. Through my tears, its outline seems to ripple like dispersing vapour. I don’t even know why I feel so awful. Part of me is happy and relieved: it’s good that Paul and Uncle Ben haven’t done anything that will make them unhappy or get them in trouble. Another part is angry and disappointed and betrayed . . . And another part is breathless. Still full of anticipation, as if the numbness from earlier has somehow passed it by.
I jump as a needle-sharp claw sinks into my finger.
We must not assume anything, the Dragon says. We must remain vigilant. We do not know what has happened or what is yet to come. We must wait.
The Dragon’s outline wave
rs once again and suddenly all my confusion over Paul and Uncle Ben – whether they have done something, whether that would be a good thing or a bad, bad, bad one – is gone in a rush of fear that the Dragon will dissolve away in front of me.
I am still here, the Dragon says.
I lie there shaking, staring and staring as if a blink will reveal that there never was any Dragon at all, just my little carved bit of rib.
I am still here, the Dragon repeats.
I draw in a breath and blink without intending to.
The Dragon regards me steadily.
I draw in another breath. And blink.
The Dragon’s breath warms my palm.
I am still here, the Dragon says again. Do you need anything more?
Another breath. Another blink.
My eyes lock with the Dragon’s.
‘No,’ I say.
The Dragon smiles.
‘Evie darling, Lynne and Phee are here to see you,’ Amy calls from the hall.
I toss my book aside and gallop downstairs. Paul looks up from the sofa with a smile. ‘That keen to escape a Saturday morning with your Aged Ps?’
I grin as I tear around the corner of the sofa, completely ignoring Amy’s warning to be careful. Lynne and Phee are standing in the hall, all muffled up, and grinning in deepest satisfaction.
‘Look at those smiles,’ Uncle Ben says to me. ‘There’s trouble if I ever saw it. Don’t tell us. You’ve fed Sonny Rawlins cupcakes with rat poison and you want Evie’s help to dig a really big hole?’
Lynne wrinkles up her nose.
‘I wouldn’t bother to bury Sonny Rawlins if I bumped him off,’ Phee says.
‘Exactly! Why would we want to get all muddy for him?’ Lynne adds.
‘You’re going to lure him to your garage and dissolve him in acid?’ Uncle Ben suggests.
The Bone Dragon Page 13