The First Day of Spring

by Nancy Tucker

  “How?”

  “I did it.”

  “You never.”

  “I did.”

  She stood up and walked backward until she hit the wall. My legs were starting to go numb from crouching, so I put my bottom down on the floor and rested my chin on my knees. I had a bad pain in my throat that I couldn’t remember ever having had before. I thought I must be getting tonsillitis. Linda slid down the wall like a piece of scrambled egg sliding down a plate, and she sat with her knees up to her chest too, so we were mirrors of each other. Ruthie lay between us, smaller than she had been when she was alive.

  “Please don’t kill me,” said Linda.

  “I won’t,” I said.

  “Did you kill Steven?” she asked. “Is that why you wrote that?” She looked at the wall behind my head. I didn’t need to turn around. The words were stuck to the backs of my eyelids. I saw them every time I blinked.

  I am here. I am here. I am here. You will not forget me.

  Steven was stuck to the backs of my eyelids too. He was there when I blinked, when I went to sleep, his knee in my belly, my hands on his throat. I was squeezing all the life out of him, until he was lying underneath me like an empty tube of toothpaste, until he was so dead I knew he wouldn’t come back alive again for days and days. And then I was leaving his little body in the middle of the floor and running to meet Linda at the handstand wall. I was turning myself upside down beside her. And then Donna’s mammy was running past, breasts wobbling, cries ripping, and I was pretending to be just as surprised as anyone else that a little boy was lying dead in the blue house.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I killed him.” I had imagined saying it so many times, and in my head it had always sounded shiny. Out loud it sounded dull. Linda didn’t say I wasn’t her best friend anymore or that I couldn’t come to her birthday party. She said the other thing she always said when I did something she didn’t like.

  “I’m going to tell my mammy.”

  She inched herself up the wall with her eyes on me, as if she thought I would leap forward and put my hands on her neck if she moved too quickly. I stayed sitting. I was too tired to do any more killing. I was too tired to do anything at all.

  “All right,” I said. She snaked an arm around her back the way she had done when Miss White had been trying to get her to tell the time at school, the way she always did when she was frightened or didn’t know the right thing to do. She stood still.

  “Why did you?” she asked.

  “Why did I what?”

  “Kill them.”

  Tightness crept into my face. I put my hands on my cheeks so she couldn’t see them turning pink.

  “It was just an accident,” I whispered.

  “You can’t kill people by accident,” she said.

  “I thought they would come back,” I whispered.

  “People don’t come back when they’re dead,” she said.

  “I just wanted to,” I said.

  “Why, though?”

  “Because it wasn’t fair.”

  “What wasn’t?”

  “Just everything,” I said. You couldn’t understand about fair and unfair when you had a mammy who made scones and a da who put your name into songs.

  “Why did you make me come?” she asked.

  “Just did,” I said.

  “But I’m going to tell my mammy now. Everyone’s going to know it was you,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Do you want people to know it was you?” she asked.

  “I used to,” I said.

  “Do you now?” she asked.

  “I’m just really tired now,” I said.

  It wasn’t really true. I felt different to tired, more than tired. I felt the way I had felt the time we had been playing hide-and-seek and I had snuck into the church to hide under the altar. I had curled up small and listened to my heart bamming in my chest, smelled the dusty smell of hymnbooks and old yawns. Donna was doing the seeking. I waited for her to find me. The longer she took, the more excited I got, because I was more and more sure that I had won. I waited until my knees went numb. I waited until my back seized up. I waited until the chill of the church got into my bones and made me stiff and sore. It was lonely, being hidden.

  In the end I crawled out from under the altar and went back to the streets. I found Linda peering into the bushes at the side of the car park. When she saw me she smiled.

  “There you are!” she said.

  “Donna’s meant to be seeking,” I said.

  “She got bored,” she said. “She went home for dinner. Everyone did.”

  “Why didn’t you?” I asked.

  She looked confused. “We hadn’t found you,” she said.

  “You could have just given up,” I said. “The others did.”

  “I didn’t want to give up,” she said. “I wanted to find you.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s the whole point of the game.”

  “But you could have given up on the game. You could have played another game without me. Why did you want me?”

  “Don’t know. You’re my best friend. I like you.”

  I hugged her. She was taller than me, so my face pressed against her collarbones. I squeezed so tight I felt like we would turn into one girl. Squeezed and squeezed and breathed her in and thought, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

  That was how I had felt after I had killed Ruthie—not strong and sparkly like after I killed Steven, but cold and numb like when I was crouched under the altar. It had stopped being fun. I didn’t want to be hidden anymore. I just wanted Linda.

  “You’re going to go to prison,” she said. She didn’t look like she was going to hug me or tell me she liked me this time.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Probably for the whole rest of your life,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Won’t you miss your mammy?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  She took a step to the side, so she was closer to the stairs, but she didn’t go down them. She still had her hand behind her, hanging on to the end of one of her plaits. When she pulled it her head tipped back and the skin on her neck stretched taut. I could see the veins under the surface. I could almost see the blood pumping through them.

  “I’ll have to get a new best friend,” she said.

  “Will it be Donna?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Maybe. Donna or Betty.”

  “Donna’s got a bike.”

  “Donna, then.”

  The pain in my throat spread down to my chest. I felt like I was being opened up, like a book being cracked at the spine, and then I was crying, and I knew why I had never felt the pain in my throat before. It was because it was crying pain, and I never cried.

  “You’re crying,” said Linda. “You never cry.”

  I didn’t make any crying sounds. I let the tears fall down my cheeks and plop onto the bib of my dress, where they soaked into penny-sized patches. It was the same way I had seen Susan cry when we had been drinking milk at the handstand wall. Silent and still. I hadn’t understood it at all back then; it had seemed such an odd way to cry. I understood it now. It was the way you cried when you were tired to the middle of your bones, when you didn’t have enough left inside you to do anything else except cry.

  “Are you sad because I’m going to get a new best friend?” asked Linda. That was sort of why, but I didn’t want her to know, so I shook my head. When she realized I wasn’t going to stop crying she took another step toward the stairs. “I’m going home now,” she said. “I’m going to tell my mammy what you did.”

  “Wait,” I said. I lifted up the skirt of my dress and used it to wipe my face, then reached into the pocket, took out Da’s marble, and pushed it toward her. The sunlig
ht made it glint as it rolled across the floor. All the colors in the world.

  “Are you giving it me?” she asked, picking it up.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “But it’s your marble. Your da gave it you. It’s your best thing.”

  “I want you to have it.”

  “Why?”

  I want you to remember me. I want you to remember to be my best friend. I want you to remember that you have to like me, that it’s your job to like me, because you’re the only one in the whole wide world who does.

  “I just do,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said, and dropped it into her pocket. She walked round the edge of the room, as far away from me as possible, her eyes still stuck to mine. When she got to the top of the stairs she paused and swayed on the spot. She raised her hand and fluttered her fingers in a little wave, and I waved back. Then she picked her way down the stairs and out of sight. I heard her shoes crunch across the glass and grime of the downstairs room, the slap-slap sound as she ran toward the streets. When she had been sitting in the corner I had noticed that one of her laces was undone. She wouldn’t be able to retie it by herself. I hoped she wouldn’t trip.

  The upstairs room was quiet with Linda gone and Ruthie dead. All my different types of fizzing had fizzled away: the sherbet type and the lava type and the spooning-out-my-insides type. They were all gone. I felt full of broken glass instead. I thought perhaps that was why if Mam ever had to touch me, she looked like she was being sliced by something sharp. Because she saw what Da and Linda didn’t see: that I was broken-glass girl. I hurt other people just by being me. There was a sicky, sour taste in my mouth, and I ran my tongue around my teeth to try to get rid of it. When I got to the rotten one I pushed hard. It came out of its socket with a squelch and a shock of pain. I spat it onto my palm. It was brown and crumbly, and my mouth felt empty without it. I wondered whether the rotten tooth had all my badness in it, whether that was why I had always been bad, whether now it was gone I might be good. I hoped so. I was getting lonely with being so bad. I wiped it on my dress, peeled open Ruthie’s hand, and tucked it inside. Her fingers were already starting to go cold.

  The light coming into the room was still piercing, the blue still bright enough to make my eyes ache. It bounced off the shiny backs of the wood lice in twinkling sparks. The sun crept into the middle of the hole and beamed straight down onto Ruthie. I looked at her, lying stiff as a baby doll in the middle of the sunlit circle. My hands were tired. My eyes were tired. My heart was tired. Ruthie was never coming back. I shuffled forward on my bottom and lay down next to her, flat and quiet. I wanted my mam. I wanted to put my head on her chest like I had done in the hospital, press her hand to my cheek and feel the lines of her palm on my skin. I didn’t know why. I just wanted it. I thought perhaps it was because I felt a bit frightened. It was horrid, feeling frightened. I put my fingers around Ruthie’s and my tongue in the gap where there was no more rotten tooth. Waited for the scream of sirens. Waited for the police to come and take me to prison for the rest of my life. Me and Ruthie lay and waited together, under the hole in the sky.

  Julia

  There were no blue lights or sirens at the station, no police cars parked outside. There was just an old man sitting at a table in Choo-Choo’s, reading a paper and drinking a cup of tea.

  We walked onto the street and I looked around. There was no one waiting to pounce. I knew I should be happy—I should seize Molly under the arms, pick her up, swing her round—but I felt coldly frightened. In my mind, the police had been going to bundle me into one car and Molly into another, drive me to prison and her to new parents. I was going to be empty and broken and relieved, because I wasn’t going to be in charge anymore. Proper grown-ups were going to look after Molly and prison was going to look after me, and giving up the burden of looking after two whole people was going to feel like taking off a bodysuit of lead.

  “Come on,” said Molly. She pulled me toward the high street. The sea loomed up in the distance, gray behind the colors of the funfair.

  “Do you want to go there?” I asked.

  “The fair?” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She clapped and bounced on the balls of her feet. “Yes! I want to go on the helter-skelter!”

  The men running the fair seemed flabbergasted to have a customer, and looked at Molly as though she might be a mirage, until she jumped onto the bumper car track hard enough to make the whole structure shake. She galloped to the helter-skelter and flapped at me to come and pay. When I handed over the fifty-pence coin the helter-skelter ruler shook his head.

  “She’s too little to go on her own,” he said. “You’ll have to go with her. It’s a pound for two. You get three rides.”

  Molly put her palms flat on my front and patted me lightly. “You come, you come,” she said. “You’ll like it. It’s really fun.”

  I gave the man another coin and he handed over another mat. Molly was already disappearing above me, up the snaking curl of steps. They were built from metal mesh, and looking through them made me feel ill. By the time I got to the top the hessian weave of the mat was scratching my ankle where it bounced. Molly was waiting, hopping and twisting as if she was about to wet herself. I let her show me how to lay the mat with the pouch upturned, where to sit, and where to put my feet.

  “Now you have to wait,” she said sternly. “You have to not push off yet, because I have to get on too. So don’t go yet. Okay?”

  She maneuvered herself between my legs and pushed back against my chest. She felt very warm, very living, a thing made all of blood and skin and nerves. It didn’t fit with what I had seen on her X-ray: the black around her bones.

  “In a second. You have to wriggle your bum forward. So we go down,” she said. She was so excited she had to stop in between clumps of words to breathe. “It will go very fast. But you don’t have to be scared. I know how to do this. I can look after you.”

  She put her hands next to mine on the rope handles and shouted, “Go!” and then we were spiraling toward the ground, bodies flush, salt on our cheeks, and there wasn’t space to think or scream or cry.

  We went down the helter-skelter nine times, and then the helter-skelter emperor said we could have another three turns for free, “seeing as she likes it so much.” I had to hold on to the back of Molly’s coat to stop her kissing him. I wanted to hit him. The fairground smelled of onions and petrol, and I felt green with sickness.

  Twelve helter-skelter rides were enough even for Molly, and when I gave her my last pound coins she spent them on a Prize Every Time stall and a cloud of pink candy floss. We took her Prize Every Time (a blue stuffed animal of indeterminate species) and candy floss onto the beach, where we sat with wet sand soaking into our bottoms. The damp underneath and the swish of the sea gave me the feeling that everything was liquid.

  “I’m going to take this toy for my show-and-tell,” said Molly. She had candy-floss spit in a sticky ring around her mouth.

  “Are you?” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I didn’t really want something from that other place. I actually wanted something from here. I like here way better.”

  “Okay,” I said. The toy was hideous, but I liked the thought of it lying on her pillow in her new home. It was another way to stretch out the time before she forgot me.

  “Are we going to go home now?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “We have to go and see Sasha.”

  She sighed and wiped her mouth on her sleeve, transferring coat fibers to her lips, and I thought that there was probably no other kid in the world as sticky as Molly at that moment, and no other person I felt as indelibly stuck to.

  I stood up and reached out a hand, which she looked at for a long time. “Come on,” I said. I stretched my fingers wider. “Let’s go.”r />
  * * *

  • • •

  The Children’s Services receptionist had brown hair and brown eyes and was wearing a brown jumper that went all the way up to her chin. She looked like a mud pie. As we approached she lunged for the phone and turned away from the desk in her swivel chair, and I heard her say, “Yes, yes, just came through the door.” When she turned back to us her cheeks were flushed and her glasses were steamed up at the bottom. I thought this was probably the most exciting thing that had happened to her since she had found a jumper the exact same color as her hair and eyes.

  “We’ve come to see Sasha,” I said. I tried to keep the wobble out of my voice. The mud pie squeaked something about taking a seat. In the strip-lit foyer, Molly’s level of stickiness seemed intolerable, and I took her to the toilets to wash her hands and face.

  “I’m hungry,” she said between wipes.

  “You just had candy floss,” I said.

  “But that’s not food,” she said. “That’s just floss.”

  “Well I don’t have anything for you to eat,” I said. “You’ll have to wait.”

  “That’s not very good,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Okay. I’ll forgive you,” she said.

  We had just sat down in reception when Sasha came through the swing door, her lanyard tapping the buttons of her cardigan. Her hair was sticking up at odd angles, half in and half out of a ponytail.

  “Julia,” she said. “Really glad you’re here.” She touched my arm and crouched down, so she could speak to me without Molly hearing. Molly helpfully came round to stand in front of me, to make sure she absolutely could hear. Sasha looked as though she quite wanted to hit her.

  “Julia, I think it might be best if we take Molly into one of the family rooms. Then we can have a chat. Is that okay? I’ve asked one of my colleagues to sit in there with her.” I nodded. I didn’t want to cry, but I felt the tears there, at the top of my throat. Sasha stood and touched Molly’s arm. “Come on, Molly. Edie’s waiting for you. Have you met Edie before? I think she’s got a jigsaw she needs your help with. And maybe even a biscuit.”