THIS IS WHAT love feels like.
It’s a burning in your chest. A free fall through whooshing air. It’s an itch in your skin which can only be soothed by touching. It’s how you store up every little word and expression and hoard it for later, when you can go through it in your head and look for the coded messages. It makes you greedy and jealous and resentful and sad. It makes you hate the person you were born as – a jigsaw with a piece out of place where your heart should be.
No. I want to think about the good parts, not the bad parts.
Love gives everything another meaning, another layer on top. It means that even a wave or a smile is significant. It makes food taste better; it makes air delicious. It makes the blood pumping through your body feel like a miracle. And when you think about it, how unlikely is it that out of all the atoms in the universe, they have somehow combined to make both you and the person you love, and that chance has brought you together to be on the same patch of Earth at the same time as each other. There must be a million reasons why you should never have existed, why you should never have met. And yet you did, one morning at the school gates when neither of you had anyone but each other.
Sometimes I think about fate. If Dad hadn’t died, if Mum hadn’t married Richard, I would never have met Avril. Maybe I would have been happier. We would never have moved, or maybe we’d have gone back to Cambridge and maybe I would have met a girl who could have loved me back. Maybe I’d be out; maybe I would have told Dad and he would have told Mum and everything would be calm now, no scene or worries. Maybe I would feel normal, or as normal as I ever could.
But I would never have met Avril. Never seen her smiling at me across a crowd, never shared secrets and bags of crisps, never linked arms or held hands or breathed next to each other at night. And the thought of that is worse than the thought that I’ve missed maybe being happy, maybe in another time, another place.
Since I’ve met her, every April has been her month. I haven’t told anyone; like so many things about Avril, it’s my secret. I watch the trees and flowers bud and spring into new life and I’m always happy. It feels like the world is starting over again and that something has been renewed in me.
If I love her, if I truly love her, I want to love her no matter what. I want to understand it for the miracle it is. I want to love her without being greedy, without being jealous. In a pure way. In the best way, without any consideration of my own happiness.
Can you even love that way, in the real world? When you’re itching and burning and hurting? When all you want to do is scream and kick things and rail against the fact that Avril was born without that thing that I have that makes me love her?
This is what love feels like. It feels hopeless and helpless, like holding on to a slippery rock in a churning sea. And I wouldn’t give it up for anything.
I wouldn’t.
‘What are you writing about?’ asked Bailey, and Lydia shut her notebook.
‘Nothing. Just some formulae.’
The bell had gone and everyone else had left the Maths classroom, but Bailey lingered by Lydia’s desk. ‘It looked like words, not numbers.’
‘I think better in words. Sometimes I write down the problems in words so I can understand them better.’ She stood and began shovelling her books into her bag.
‘I was wondering if maybe, if you’d like to come over to mine today maybe after school,’ said Bailey.
Today? Seriously? Their last day before exam leave, their last day of proper school ever, before exams and the sixth form?
‘I don’t know. I think I’m doing something with Avril.’ She was doing something with Avril: a party at Sophie’s house, while her parents were working late. It had been planned weeks ago. Harry would be there.
‘Avril could come too. I like Avril.’
‘Everyone likes Avril,’ snapped Lydia, and walked out of the classroom, Bailey tagging along with her.
‘Well, just let me know,’ said Bailey. ‘You could stay for tea and stuff if you wanted. My mum makes this really good pizza. It’s gluten free but you’d never know it.’
From the corridor behind them, a burst of laughter. It sounded like Erin’s.
‘Maybe,’ said Lydia, and as soon as they got to the door of the Maths block, she peeled away, walking rapidly across the school yard towards Geography, even though it was break. She wanted a few minutes on her own. If worse came to worst, she could go into Mr Graham’s room. He never locked it and she could pretend to be doing some extra revision.
A group of Year Sevens came chattering out and after them, Mr Graham. He was reading something on his phone and when he saw Lydia he stopped, staring at her for a minute as if he couldn’t quite place her. Then he smiled, as he always did. The younger kids called him Mr Grin because everyone knew the rule that new teachers weren’t supposed to smile for the entire first term they taught at a school, so that all the students would think they were mean. Mr Graham had smiled right away, in his very first tutor session with Lydia’s group. He wanted to be liked. It was a weakness in a teacher, and he got some stick from some of the boys in her year because of it, but you couldn’t exactly tell a teacher they should be less nice. They had to figure out those things for themselves.
‘How’s it going, Lydia?’ he asked her and she smiled back at him, a fake smile, but he’d never know that, because it was the same fake smile she’d been giving everyone.
‘Good,’ she said.
‘Were you coming to see me about something?’ He stuffed his phone in his pocket, almost guiltily, and Lydia wondered if he’d been looking at porn on it or something. Glacier porn. Girls posed on icebergs. She and Avril had a joke about it, like they had a joke about Miss Drayton’s inappropriate fixation with all the sexual metaphors in every single thing they read.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I was just going to dump my stuff before the lesson.’
‘Oh, OK. Go ahead, be my guest. I’ll be back in a minute.’ He smiled again, even broader than the last smile, and walked off rapidly to mainline caffeine or whatever it was that teachers did in their staff room during break time. She watched him go, and then slipped round the building past the shrubbery, to the place near the fence where sometimes people went for fags.
She didn’t recognize them at first: it was just two blue jumpers and a mass of dark hair leaning against the brick building, on the blank side without any windows. Then she saw his black trainers, her long legs, his hand up her top, rucking it up so that Lydia could see a glimpse of smooth belly. The abandoned bags with the keychain Lydia had given Avril lying on the ground. Then she saw their faces, properly saw their faces: eyes closed, mouths pressed together.
The bottom fell out of her stomach. She bit her lip to stop from making any noise and backed away. Their faces hung in front of her, the little moist sounds their lips were making as they snogged. Her back hit something – at first she thought it was a tree or a post, but then it laughed and she smelled stale cigarettes and it was Winston Anthony, saying ‘Watch where you’re going.’
Lydia fled to the girls’ cloakroom. There was a queue – there was always a queue at break time, and more girls standing at the mirrors doing their hair – but she pushed through and took the final cubicle, ignoring the protests of the other girls. She sat on the toilet with her head in her hands while they complained loudly about her. She thought she might be sick.
She knew they snogged, she knew it was happening. Why was it so bad to see it? His hand up her top, the way his legs were spread and planted on the ground as if he owned it.
She sat there until the end of break and then went to Geography, where Mr Graham said something to her that she didn’t hear, and where Avril came in late, breathless and pink-cheeked. She poked Lydia on the shoulder as she passed and Lydia just looked down at the practice exam that Mr Graham had given back to her, as if she were more interested in his pencilled-in comments than in anything else.
It was the last day of proper school, the last day they were still children.
‘So, can you?’
Bailey was waiting for her outside the school gates. Avril had gone to Sophie’s; all the girls had gone, but Lydia had pretended she needed to talk with Mr Singh about something so she told her to go on ahead with Erin and Sophie and she’d catch up.
‘Can I what?’ Lydia asked.
‘Can you come over to mine?’
Bailey was alone. She was still wearing those goddamn ankle socks. From the expression on her face she had been thinking of nothing except for this question since she’d asked it this morning. Did she even know about Sophie’s party? No, she couldn’t. She had a round face with freckles, light blue eyes and a crooked fringe, and in the inflection of her voice and the wrinkle in her forehead Lydia could see every inch of her loneliness. Imagine being so eager for a friend that you had to wait by the school gates just to have someone to talk to. Imagine if being a puppy dog was preferable to being alone.
Lydia had never been alone. Not since she’d met Avril at these same gates, going in. Since then, she’d never had to be afraid of being alone.
Until now.
‘Fine,’ she said to Bailey. ‘I’ll come over for a while. I just have to text my mum.’
Bailey nearly sagged with relief, though she had the good sense not to show it for more than a split second. ‘OK, that’s cool. Let’s go.’
Lydia texted her mum as they walked, and Bailey got out her phone too and made as if she were checking it for messages, but there obviously wasn’t anything there, so she put it back. Lydia considered texting Avril, but she couldn’t think of anything natural to say, anything normal. Anyway, Avril wasn’t likely to miss her if Harry was there.
‘My mum will be at work,’ Bailey told her. ‘She works in IT and my dad is an engineer. What about your mum and dad?’
‘My mum doesn’t work and my dad is dead.’
‘Oh,’ said Bailey.
‘He died ten years ago.’
‘Oh, OK,’ said Bailey, clearly relieved. ‘What did he do before that?’
‘He was a lecturer in Physics at the university.’
‘We used to live in Southampton,’ said Bailey. ‘Before we moved here. My mum never minds if I have friends over. I used to have lots of friends over every day when I lived in Southampton.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘And we used to have pizza parties and sleepovers and stuff. I was really sorry to leave all my friends behind in Southampton. But we still stay in touch.’
Lydia nodded. Bailey, emboldened, continued.
‘I used to have this one friend Susannah, you would have loved her. She was really sporty and clever and fun. We used to go shopping together, just hanging out and meeting other friends, for the whole day. On a Saturday. And we used to go to concerts and stuff.’
Lydia glanced at her from the corner of her eye. Did this Susannah actually exist? And if she did, was she really Bailey’s friend, or just someone that Bailey wished were her friend?
‘What kind of concerts?’ she asked.
‘Oh, you know. Everything. Susannah’s dad played in a band, so he knows lots of musicians and we used to go to these local gigs for free. We were going to maybe go to Reading Festival together this summer but then we had to move. We might still go, though.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘Maybe you could come if you wanted.’
‘Maybe.’
‘You would like Susannah, I think you would be friends. And I had other friends, too. There was this one girl; Erin really reminds me of her. Do you think that Erin would think it was funny that I knew this girl in Southampton who was a lot like her?’
‘How was she like her?’
‘Oh you know, she was pretty like her. And popular. Always laughing. You know. Here’s my house, it’s this one here. It’s really close to school, which is handy. That’s why my mum and dad chose this one, though we looked at loads of them.’
Bailey’s house was a semi-detached brick cube with diamond-paned windows, older than Lydia’s and smaller, with a neatly trimmed lawn for a front garden and several inoffensive hedges near the white PVC front door. There were no cars parked in the drive and nothing to distinguish it from the other houses on Tennyson Road.
Bailey took a key out of her satchel and unlocked the door. ‘Want a Coke?’
Lydia followed her through to the kitchen. Breakfast dishes were still in the sink and the refrigerator sported a large collection of novelty magnets in the shapes of pigs.
‘Wow, someone likes pigs,’ commented Lydia.
‘Oh, I know, it’s my mum, she’s crazy about them. She has pigs on everything. It’s pretty sad actually. Want to come up to my room?’
‘OK.’
There were framed cartoons of pigs on the staircase wall. Near the top there was a large one, of three pigs, two large and one smaller. The caption read Three Little Pigs: Alan, Charlotte, Bailey. Lydia didn’t see any particular resemblance to Bailey in the littlest pig, but she thought about Bailey posing for this picture with her mum and dad, all the time knowing that she was going to be drawn as a pig, not as herself, and she felt a wave of pity for Bailey, stronger than anything she’d felt so far.
‘We can listen to music if you want,’ said Bailey, pushing open the door to her bedroom with her elbow because she was holding cans of Coke in her hands. ‘What do you like?’
‘What do you have?’
‘Oh, I can just find anything on Spotify.’ She put the Cokes on the bedside table and opened up her laptop, which was on her bed. The duvet cover had pink polka-dots, like a little girl’s. There was a matching shade on the bedside lamp and a pink fluffy rug on the floor, a collection of cheap make-up in front of the mirror. The walls were magnolia and there was only one poster on the wall, of Five Seconds of Summer. It was pristine.
‘You like Five Seconds of Summer?’ Lydia asked.
She felt Bailey gauging her quickly before the other girl replied, ‘Oh, I used to, that’s an old poster. I’m so over boy bands, you know?’
‘Fair enough.’
‘Susannah used to love them. She bought me that poster.’
‘Why don’t we listen to one of the bands you’ve seen at one of those gigs in Southampton? Did you buy the CDs?’
‘Oh yeah, but the CD player on this is broken. I’ll just go on Spotify. What do you like?’
‘I like sixties’ and seventies’ stuff mostly. The Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Aretha Franklin.’
‘Really?’ There was a slight note of scorn in Bailey’s voice. ‘Nothing new?’
‘My dad was crazy about all of that music and I still have all his CDs. I listen to them a lot, so it just became my favourite.’
Bailey shrugged. ‘OK, that’s cool. I’ll make a list.’ She cracked open her Coke and sat on her bed, fiddling with her laptop. ‘Athena who?’
‘Aretha. Aretha Franklin.’ There was nowhere else to sit, so Lydia opened her own Coke and sat next to her. She looked around the room.
There weren’t any CDs. Or books, or clothes littering the floor. There was nothing to show anything of Bailey’s personality except for the little-girl pink things, and the one poster that you could buy off any website, nothing different from any other teenage bedroom anywhere else in the world. She wondered where Bailey’s stuff was, if it was crammed into the wardrobe or hidden underneath the bed, in case someone actually came round. She wondered if Bailey had planned to invite her since this morning, and she’d prepared her room especially.
There was nothing here. Nobody. The pigs lining the rest of the house were weird, but they were at least something. This room reflected no personality whatsoever. She sipped her Coke and watched Bailey’s profile as she chose songs online from the list that Lydia had given her. She saw all the hours that Bailey must spend in this room alone, experimenting with that make-up maybe, maybe surfing the net to keep up with people she used to know in Southampton, if they even existed.
She was lonely, and working so hard to hide … what?
‘Those boys teasing you,’ she said suddenly, though she hadn’t planned to talk about it. ‘You shouldn’t let it show that it bothers you. If they don’t get a rise out of you, they’ll stop.’
‘Oh, I know,’ said Bailey, not looking up from her laptop, but colouring.
‘Basically you just have to give them nothing to talk about,’ Lydia continued. ‘Either that, or just not give a shit at all.’
‘I don’t give a shit.’
You do, Lydia thought. You give an enormous, colossal shit. And that’s exactly what makes you their target.
It made Lydia feel sad.
‘There,’ said Bailey, and the laptop started to play ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’. She put it on the bedside table, under the lamp, and settled back on the bed next to Lydia, their backs against the wall. Their shoulders just touched. Lydia looked down at their legs: hers slim and tanned, Bailey’s pale and shapeless, with those crumpled white socks.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘your legs would look even longer if you folded down your socks, or didn’t wear any.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Definitely. And if you found black ones, they’d be even better. See what I do with mine? I fold them down over my heel so they don’t show.’ Lydia toed off her shoe and showed Bailey.
‘Maybe I could try that, yeah.’
‘And Avril showed me this thing you can do with eyeliner so it doesn’t even look like you’re wearing it, but it can really make your eyes look bigger. I can show you if you want.’
‘Yeah, OK.’
Bailey sounded quite pleased. She took off her own shoes and tried folding her socks over her heel like Lydia did.
Lydia wasn’t so foolish as to think that socks alone were going to make much of a difference to Bailey’s life. But maybe if she felt more confident, if she looked like less of a victim, she would be able to resist the name-calling better. She might be able to make some of her own friends, instead of having to tag along with Lydia. Or maybe she could just relax and be herself.
‘I don’t think my legs are ever going to look as long as yours,’ said Bailey.
‘Well, that’s because I run.’
‘Ugh, I could never run.’
‘It’s not so hard, really. And after the first couple of times, it’s fun. You just put on music and zone out. The girls on the cross-country team are pretty nice. You’d probably like some of them. It’s an easy way to make friends.’
‘Hmm. I’m not sure I could do it.’
‘You can come running with me sometime. I’ll help you.’
And that would not be fun, but who knew? Maybe Bailey would take to it, and she might join the team next year and make some friends.
Maybe you’ll need Bailey as much as she needs you, said a little voice in Lydia’s head. If Avril keeps going out with Harry.
‘Is Erin on the team?’ asked Bailey.
‘Erin? God, no. She doesn’t like being seen when she’s sweaty.’
‘I wonder if I should mention to Erin that I know this girl who is just like her. In Southampton.’
‘Maybe,’ said Lydia doubtfully. ‘Could she be mean sometimes, like Erin?’
Bailey looked at her in confusion. ‘I thought Erin was your friend?’
‘Yeah. Ignore me. Do you want to try that eyeliner thing?’
Bailey nodded and got up to fetch her make-up. ‘I Say A Little Prayer’ came on as she sat on the bed, cross-legged, facing Lydia. ‘This isn’t bad. Sort of retro.’
‘Yeah, it’s … one of my favourite songs.’ It was the song she played when she thought of Avril. Sometimes on her iPod, over and over and over again, as if playing it and listening to it were a prayer of its own.
Avril and Harry snogging in the bushes behind the Geography block. She swallowed hard.
‘Anyway, close your eyes,’ she said, picking out an eyeliner. Bailey tilted her head up so that Lydia could work on her. Lydia was slightly taller.
Bailey wasn’t that bad-looking. Her face was round but her skin was good, smooth with hardly any spots. The paleness that looked pasty on her legs was more delicate on her face. Blue veins traced faint lines under her eyes. She had some freckles on her nose, and her eyelashes made fans on her cheeks. Her lips were plump, slightly open as Lydia stroked the eyeliner on her eyelids. Lydia put her left hand on the side of Bailey’s face to steady it.
She’d done this same thing with Avril, her heart pounding so hard she could barely draw the eyeliner on. She’d allowed her thumb to briefly caress her cheekbone; Avril hadn’t seemed to notice, but Lydia had wondered if she’d liked it.
She did the same thing with Bailey, feeling how soft her skin was. And then she felt silly. ‘OK, open your eyes and look up now, I’ll do the bottom.’ Bailey opened her eyes and she met Lydia’s gaze for a second, before she looked up. Her irises were pale blue, and her breath feathered on Lydia’s wrist as she drew a fine line. Lydia was suddenly conscious of the pulse beating in Bailey’s throat above her school shirt, how their knees were brushing each other as they sat close together on the bed.
‘I know what it’s like to feel that you don’t belong,’ Lydia said, keeping her voice conversational. ‘I feel that sometimes, too.’
Bailey was still looking up at the ceiling.
‘But you’ll find someone who understands you,’ said Lydia. ‘You have to. There has to be someone. It would be too unfair if there wasn’t.’
She’d finished drawing on Bailey’s eyelids – she hadn’t done a great job, to be honest – but Bailey was still staring up at the ceiling.
‘I don’t know who it is,’ whispered Bailey. Her bottom lip wobbled.
Lydia dipped her head and kissed her on the mouth.
She was thinking of Avril: of sitting beside Avril as Avril cried, of sharing a bed with Avril as Avril slept. Of the weekend at the seaside when she and Avril had sat side by side on the beach at night and made different wishes on the same shooting star. Thinking of Avril. Kissing Bailey. Her heart hammering and tears burning in her closed eyes.
Bailey’s lips were slightly sticky. They were plump, softer than the lips of the boys that Lydia had kissed because she was pretending. Her skin was entirely smooth. Her breath tasted of Coke. She was the first girl that Lydia had ever kissed. Her first real kiss, with someone she didn’t even love, thinking of the person she did.
Oh God, a mistake.
Her eyes snapped open and she drew away, quickly, to the end of the bed. Bailey was staring at her, wide-eyed, her mouth open.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Lydia. ‘That was a stupid thing to do.’
‘I don’t—’ said Bailey. ‘I’m not—’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking about.’
A tear rolled down her cheek. She wiped it away, hoping that Bailey hadn’t seen it.
‘Is that why …’ said Bailey. ‘Did you think that what they said was …’
‘No! Of course not. It was a joke! But a stupid one. Anyway, I’ve got to go.’ Lydia scrambled off the bed and grabbed her phone, nearly tipping her can of Coke over Bailey’s laptop, but she caught it in time. ‘Whoo! Close call,’ she said cheerfully, in a voice that sounded just like her mother’s to her ears. She shoved her shoes on her feet, feeling Bailey staring at her. Feeling her lips still warm. ‘OK, well, see you around.’
She fled down the stairs, past the cartoon pigs, and out of the house. She ran down the street, ran in her school shoes as fast as she could with her hair whipping around her face and her bag bumping on her backside, ran until she was out of breath and rounding the corner of Shakespeare Drive into Keats Way, and only then did she realize that she hadn’t told Bailey not to tell anyone what she’d done.