THE MESSAGES JUST keep on coming. One after another, relentless. I shouldn’t look, I shouldn’t turn on my phone, but I keep on hoping for something from Avril. Anything. Even more angry words would be better than silence.
But she hasn’t got in touch. Instead I’ve had the Facebook posts, the texts, the emails. I’ve read every one. I shouldn’t. But I can’t look away. There’s the name-calling and the filth, some of it from people I have never even heard of, trolls and weirdos, but there are also some messages of support. Whitney, who has never spoken to me in her life, seems determined to defend me to all and sundry, and educate everyone about What It’s Like To Be Gay.
Somehow, the messages of support are even worse than the filthy stuff. It’s like I’ve become an issue, a cause, rather than a person. As if I’ve done something or am someone that has to be defended. It all underlines that from now on, I will be the girl who came out by snogging the least popular girl in the school, the girl who That happened to. I’ll be a label, a focus, a stereotype, someone people will whisper about when I’ve passed in the corridor. My name will be shorthand for a bullied lesbian. Nothing else I’ve ever done or felt or thought about will matter.
All these people looking at me.
I’m also the girl who freaked out in her exam. Who ran out, didn’t take it, will fail English because of it, totally fucking up my chance to go to Cambridge, which was one of the only two things I’ve ever really wanted.
The other thing is Avril.
I haven’t rung her. She doesn’t want me to. She wants nothing to do with me. I saw the revulsion in her face, not because of who I am but because I lied to her. I lied to her. Every day, every minute, from the first time we met. I lied to her because I am a fucking coward and because I didn’t trust her heart to be big enough to keep on being friends with me even if she couldn’t love me, too. I chose a hopeless dream instead of a real relationship. I betrayed her and everything I feel about her, and I’ll never get her back. Never.
That’s why I look at every single message online: as penance. Because I deserve it.
Mum and Granny H keep on knocking at my door. Mum left a tray outside with lunch, and then, when I didn’t eat that, she left another outside with dinner. I could smell the food through the door and it made me feel sick. Mum has started pleading with me to come out, to talk. She’s said over and over and over again how sorry she is for shagging my teacher. She thinks that’s what this is all about, and I’ll admit it felt good to be angry at her for it, but now I think it’s so small, so desperate, so sad. Like the kiss I gave to Bailey, when I wanted to be kissing Avril.
Granny H came up too. Forty-five years, she’s been lonely. Is this what I have to look forward to? Being needy like Mum, or being alone like Granny H?
Mostly, I’ve been sitting on my bed looking out through the skylight. Watching the clouds gather and the rain begin to fall. It hits the glass in burst circles. It’s a cliché to say it looks like tears.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Dad. How everything changed for him in a moment, too. Everything gone for ever.
OscanIrie went to bed, and after some more pleading and knocking, Mum went to bed, too. I thought she’d camp outside my room to be honest, but eventually I heard her go downstairs, heard the water running faintly. And then everything was quiet, and it was dark outside, and my phone was silent for minutes at a time. It had stopped raining. I opened my bathroom window wide and I gathered up all of my paper cranes. They weighed hardly anything. I put them in the bathtub and then, with a cigarette lighter, I burned them, one by one. The smoke lifted out of the window and away.
I didn’t understand why Granny H burned that letter she got from my grandfather, all those years ago, without opening it. But I understand now.
I know what I have to do to make this stop.