Chloe touches the scalpel to the paper. She cuts through the top edge then, slowly and carefully, drags the blade down its length. There’s something so satisfying about the cccccch sound the scalpel makes as it slices through the A4 sheet. It helps her blot out the sound of Mike’s voice, and the look on his face when she slapped him. Surprise. Disappointment. And then anger. He’d scared her when he’d lunged for her. She didn’t recognise him. When her dad burst into the small hallway with his fags and beer in a plastic bag, she almost cried with relief. She didn’t. She ran straight up the stairs and didn’t look back. Her dad’s laughter followed all the way to her room. She could hear Mike and her dad talking and laughing until about three o’clock in the morning. When she crept downstairs after they finally went quiet they were both passed out on the sofas. Her dad was still asleep but Mike was gone when she and Jamie slipped out of the door in the morning, dressed and ready for school.
Ccccccch. Ccccccch.Ccccccch. She runs the scalpel over the page again and again.
‘Chlo,’ Kirsteen nudges her elbow. ‘What are you doing? You’re supposed to cut out your design, not slice through it.’
Chloe ignores her best friend and carves out another long strip. It’s Design and Technology, her favourite class, but she didn’t feel a rush of pleasure as she walked into the classroom ten minutes earlier. She didn’t feel anything at all.
‘Have I done something wrong?’ Kirsteen asks.
Chloe shakes her head.
‘Then why have you stopped talking to me?’
‘Because my dad took my phone.’
‘I’m not talking about Snapchat. I mean now. You’ve been really quiet today. Are you sure I haven’t done something wrong?’
Chloe shakes her head again. Normally she’d be quick to reassure her friend that of course she hadn’t done anything wrong and she’d apologise for acting weirdly. Normally. Normal. What even is that?
‘Chloe?’
She jumps at the weight of a hand on her shoulder and spins round, scalpel raised.
‘Woah!’ Mr Harris, her Design and Technology teacher, jumps back, both hands raised. ‘Careful!’
‘Sorry, Sir.’ Chloe puts the blade on the desk and forces a smile.
‘So you should be. You could have had my eye out. Or worse. I just wanted to see how you were getting on.’ He steps forward and peers over her shoulder. ‘Bad day?’ he asks, nodding at the pile of thin strips of paper in front of her.
‘I made a mistake.’
He smiles kindly. ‘Bit of a drastic solution isn’t it, destroying the whole thing instead of trying to fix it?’
‘No.’ She looks him in the eye. ‘No, I don’t think it is.’
Mr Harris presses his lips into a thin line and raises his eyebrows. ‘It’s your work,’ he says as he moves away and peers at Kirsteen’s neatly cut out prototype.
‘Yeah,’ Chloe says under her breath as she reaches for her scalpel and slides it off the desk and into her school bag. ‘And it’s my life too.’
When the bell rings Chloe is the only student to turn right rather than left as they file out of the D&T studio.
‘Chlo?’ Kirsteen tugs on her arm and gestures in the other direction. ‘We’ve got biology now.’
‘So?’
‘Aren’t you coming?’
‘No.’
‘Where are you going then?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why are you being so weird? You’re really starting to piss me off.’
‘You and the rest of the world.’ She yanks her arm free and starts to run towards the emergency fire exit.
Kirsteen doesn’t run after her. No surprise there.
Chloe takes off her blazer and lays it down on the ground. It’s cold, tucked away in the bushes, away from the warmth of the May sun, and she pulls the sleeves of her jumper down over her hands as she lies down.
For several minutes she does nothing apart from stare up into the leaves. There’s nothing much to look at apart from an abandoned spider’s web and a greeny-black beetle that marches along a branch like it’s on a mission. When it disappears from view, Chloe sits up. She opens her school bag and takes out the scalpel and her mobile phone, stolen from her dad’s sock drawer while he slept.
It’s nearly time.