I woke late on Saturday, and I knew that the play was over and everything was bad. I didn’t want to get up and be in the world; I was terrible at it. I wondered whether I would feel more secure if I tried some meditation, or found some rules to follow.
In Year Seven and Eight I’d had a low-key friendship with a girl who had an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Shayla. It was thanks to Shayla that I stayed away from the kinds of behaviours that people would casually call ‘a bit OCD’, just in case, for me, they might be a sliding slope to actual OCD. Shayla had scrubbed her hands raw, had been tormented by visions of horrific things that would happen to her parents and brother if she didn’t complete her rituals in the right way at the right time. It had been awful for her. At the end of Year Eight her family had moved away and I didn’t think anyone from our school had stayed in touch.
I hoped Shayla was all right. I tried to imagine how she was dealing with what was happening right now.
I wasn’t Shayla, and I knew instinctively that I shouldn’t clutter up my world with ritual in case it became too important. My main way of getting through the days was by being unnoticed. Invisibility was my superpower.
I pulled on a big sweatshirt over my pyjamas, tamed my hair into a ropey plait and went downstairs to make some toast.
I would say I was born quiet, except that Mum said I cried the whole time as a baby and she thought I was going to be the noisiest child ever. But from my earliest memory (screaming and clinging to her when she tried to leave me at a nursery) I couldn’t interact with people I didn’t know. I never worked out how to be myself in a way that I could bear. I never knew how to trust the world when it was outside my control.
Now I was studying for A levels in drama, English and Spanish (exams scheduled for beyond the end of the world). And I still couldn’t speak. I had picked two subjects that involved talking, but that was because I could wear them as a disguise. English was fine because I could just read a book and then write down what I thought about it. I loved drama. And I was taking Spanish because I knew I was good at languages, and because most of it didn’t involve actually speaking: I could get through the parts that did by acting a character who lived in my head. Her name was Carmen and she was immense. She didn’t flinch at the prospect of having a long conversation with a stranger about deforestation in the Basque region; she just got on with it.
Somehow, though, I couldn’t manage to channel Carmen, or Juliet, or anyone but myself in the rest of my life. I had tried and tried and tried, but it didn’t work.
I walked my usual way to college on Monday. I put my head down and walked, alone, through the rain, with my hood up and a scarf wrapped twice round my face and shoulders. My bag was heavy on my back. I wondered what would happen if I just carried on walking, past the college, out to the main road, and on and on and on. Eventually I would reach the sea, where the bad stuff was happening to the Earth, and then I would see what happened to me.
When I passed Zoe’s house I slowed down: occasionally I managed to time my walk to college in such a way that she would come out as I was passing, and we would walk together. I thought Zoe barely noticed me when we weren’t in drama, but she would walk beside me companionably enough if we met by accident, or ‘by accident’.
Her house was smaller than ours, and there were more people living in it. I’d never been inside, so I didn’t know much more than that, but I knew that her parents were lovely. Her dad, Chidozie, was Nigerian, and her mum, Sam, looked like a classic Winchester Tory but was actually very funny, and their family was always smiling. I wasn’t stalking them.
The door opened and Hector, her little brother, came out. I heard him yell ‘Bye!’ back into the house, and I saw him slam the door and fast-walk down the pavement, with no coat on, his body braced against the rain. I watched his afro heading away from me, in the direction of our old school, and I knew he hadn’t seen me at all.
At college it turned out I was still someone, residually. It seemed that there had been a lot of our fellow students in that Romeo and Juliet audience; they were there, I supposed, to support their friends. (Can I break off here to say that I wasn’t completely friendless? I’ll come to my friend in a minute.) There was a bit of a buzz as I walked down the corridors. Perhaps I was imagining it, but I was sure I heard someone say ‘Juliet’.
A couple of people turned to look at me and I stuck my head down and pretended not to notice. I had unwound my scarf when I got indoors, but I pulled my hair across my face and used it as a shield instead. My college was a massive sixth form, with thousands of people in it, and I had liked it as soon as I arrived last September because it felt anonymous. It was far better than school had been, and also there were lockers in hallways so I could ghost through it pretending I was in one of those American high-school movies.
This morning was the first time I had felt like an actual character rather than an extra.
The corridor smelled of polish. It always did on a Monday morning. My first period today was tutor, and I was nearly there when a boy stepped in front of me.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘You’re Olivia, right?’
I hesitated. ‘Yes,’ I said, but the word stuck in my throat and I ended up swallowing it back down. This happened a lot. Luckily for him, I was nodding my head at the same time.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Knew it. Saw you in the play. You were epic.’ He started walking with me. He thought I was epic. This was my moment to step out of myself. I needed to say thanks. That would have been a starting point at least. This was the person I needed to be, just until September. That was how I would hang on to a little bit of Juliet.
‘Thanks,’ I said (whispered). Triumph!
‘Yeah, it was a great production. I love it that you did it all female. Was that, like, your take on the fact that it would originally have been done all male? So Zoe Adebayo as Romeo was the equivalent of Richard Burbage?’
Yes, I wanted to say. Exactly that. The fact that the people who had signed up were eighty-four per cent female had set us off on that track, and we decided to go for it. We researched the original all-male production as best we could. It happened sometime before 1597, and every single character was played by a boy or a man. We had decided to do the opposite.
I was pretty sure my new friend already knew this, though, because all that had been in the programme, including the bit about Richard Burbage. Still, it was nice of him to want to talk. I was pleased that he’d actually read the programme notes. Zoe had been a wonderful Romeo: impulsive, sure of herself, romantic. Devoted to me.
That was all the stuff I said in my head. When I opened my mouth to join the conversation in reality, it turned out my stupid brain condensed it to ‘yep’.
He waited for me to say more. He was, I could see, a nice-looking boy, even if he did have a man bun. I tried to say more words, but then I saw that we were outside my tutor room.
‘Tutor,’ I said, motioning to it with my head, and I went in without saying goodbye.
I heard him laugh, behind me. ‘Enigmatic,’ he said. His footsteps walked away.
I went to sit with Max. One of the reasons I liked Max was because he never really wanted to talk either. He found social things as impossible as I did, and he spent all his time drawing.
‘All right,’ he said, looking over the top of his glasses at me. Max had been born in Singapore and had lived here since he was six. I considered him my best friend, even though we barely exchanged six words a day. We wrote messages to each other – that was our medium. We said quite a lot by email and WhatsApp and text. We said hardly anything through speech.
I nodded.
‘Play went well then.’ He didn’t look up from his notebook. I looked over, and saw that it was covered in a comic strip of aliens performing on a stage out in space. I tried to read what they were saying, but it was too far away.
‘Did.’
‘I wanted to come.’
‘S OK.’
We smiled at each other.
‘Hey, Libby Lewis!’ said a girl called Esme. ‘You were, like, amazing in the play. So cool!’
I felt Max looking at me. I drew up all my talking strength, and I smiled and turned to look at her, and I said, ‘Thank you very much.’ I said it clearly, and I looked her in the eye and I smiled.
‘Who knew you had it in you?’ she said, and then she lost interest and turned back to her friends.