Yesterday I made you a card, but don’t worry, there are no pictures of families eating turkey or twinkling Christmas lights or snowmen grinning with happiness made out of stones that can’t erode. None of that festive cheer felt appropriate so I drew a bird instead, a red-tailed hawk flying above your cell, which according to Google is roughly the same size as my garden shed, but it doesn’t have watering cans or a jacket or a box of tiles that cuts into your thighs, and it probably doesn’t smell of Dad’s old sneakers, either. In actual fact there’s nothing much in your cell at all except a bed in one corner with a very thin mattress and a toilet at the opposite end of the room. If you ask me, that’s not very hygienic, and you should think about complaining to the people in charge of health and safety, or maybe writing a protest poem for the website.
Last week I read your poem “Verdict,” and according to verse two, you didn’t cry when the judge said Guilty. You didn’t shout out in anger when your brother cheered and you didn’t cry out in terror when you were escorted to the prison, because your mind was floating above the whole thing, looking down on a man in handcuffs. Honest truth, I know exactly what you mean because yesterday my brain was hovering with a pigeon near an oak tree, watching a girl in a black coat write words on a white rectangle of card.
I felt not-there as we walked to the grave and I felt not-there when we laid down our wreaths and I felt not-there as Sandra put her hand on the marble headstone and traced the gold engravings with a gloved finger.
“We’ll never forget you,” she whispered, and Stuart I could see his brown eyes staring up at me as she read out the words on her wreath. “Always on my mind. Always in my heart. Happy Christmas, my darling son.”
It was my turn to speak. I opened my lips that weren’t my lips. “Happy Christmas.” The words on the coffin lid started to burn, the heat of the truth rising up from the ground, making me flush.
I didn’t want to be there. I would never have gone if Sandra hadn’t turned up at my house earlier that day, ringing the doorbell three times.
“Is Zoe in?” I heard her say from my bedroom.
“Er, yes,” Mum said, taken aback. “Yes, she is. Why don’t you come in, Sandra?”
“I won’t stay, thanks. I just want to talk to Zoe.”
Mum started on the stairs so I threw myself on the carpet to see if there was space to hide underneath my bed. Mum poked her head around the door before I could disappear. Of course I went downstairs and of course I was polite and of course I said yes when she asked me to visit the grave, even though my brain screamed NO so loud I was surprised she couldn’t hear it.
“You sure, my love?” Mum said, looking concerned, and I tried to tell her with my eyes that I didn’t want to go.
“Of course she is,” Sandra replied. She was even thinner, Stuart, her face a skull and her fingers bones. “She wants to see him, don’t you?” I didn’t dare refuse so I swallowed and nodded, finding it hard to breathe. Anger flooded my veins. Guilt, too. They curdled in my stomach, making it ache, and it’s still hurting now, a dull throb in my intestines, like maybe he wrote the truth there, too. Stuart, I know it sounds crazy, but that’s how it feels sometimes, like the words are clawed on my insides, red and sore and swollen. The only way to make them disappear, to soothe the pain, is to write them down here. Tell them to you. I’m tired tonight, but I’ll do it anyway, starting with the day after Dot’s accident.
I was balancing on the porch step, bracing myself for the weather, when Mum said she’d give me a lift to school.
“I don’t want you catching a cold on top of everything else.”
Her face was pinched and bags hung under her eyes as we set off through the rain—proper English rain falling in lines, not dots, from jet-black clouds. She was driving so slowly a neighbor beeped to tell us to get out of the way. Mum jumped and muttered under her breath, all grumpy as if she’d been tossing and turning on her pillow without any sleep, not even the tiniest wink of it.
Windshield wipers sloshed and tires splattered through puddles and Lloyd was running along the pavement, fur stuck to his bones, half the size of the fat thing that had been slumped on the sign. My heart ached with how much I wanted to be back on the wall, saying, “At least dogs aren’t stupid enough to go out in the rain.” For the hundredth time, I wondered if Aaron had seen my phone and if he’d had a huge argument with Max, probably ending up with one of them punching the other.
Mum was sitting so far forward, her head was hanging over the steering wheel. Dot was strapped firmly into the backseat, grimacing and holding her wrist and glancing at Mum to see if she’d noticed. Mum had given her the day off from school, and Soph had tried it on, too, complaining about a stomachache, but Mum had checked her out before we’d left the house.
“You look fine to me. And your temperature’s normal.”
When we dropped Soph outside the gate of her primary school, she barely said good-bye, just traipsed down the drive as Dot waved cheerfully out of the car window with the arm that was supposed to be hurting.
The first time I spotted Max that day was in the lunch hall, and honest truth he took my breath away, which was a surprise, like one second I was inhaling quite normally and the next my lungs stopped working as he walked in with a soccer ball under his arm, his dark hair dripping wet. We smiled at each other in the queue as the lunch lady yelled, “Next, please!”
“A salad?” Lauren said as I picked up a bowl of leafy stuff. “You hate salad.”
I stared at her pointedly. “No, I don’t. I love it.”
Lauren stared right back, completely oblivious to Max’s presence. “In History, you told me you were so hungry you’d eat your own grandpa if he was battered and came with a side order of fries and mushy peas.”
Max smiled as I looked mortified, but I swapped the salad on my tray for a plate of proper food.
For the rest of lunch, I sat with Lauren in our homeroom as the radiators blasted hot, dry heat. As we doodled in our diaries, I filled her in about Max but not Aaron, making her laugh about the toilet roll and exaggerating the awkwardness with his mum in the hall. Max felt less personal somehow, more of a story, but Aaron was too private to say out loud. The party and the bonfire and the car journey, all of it had happened under the cover of darkness so it was hard to expose, especially in a classroom with boys chucking a Frisbee underneath the fluorescent strip lights. Lauren drew a house and I drew a smiley face and she drew a heart and I drew a wonky dog and cat, wrapping their tails together in a big bow.
“Cute,” Lauren yawned, tipping back her head with her mouth wide open, the Frisbee flying out of nowhere to smack her on the nose.
Lauren stumbled into the nurse’s office as I waited outside, picking up a pamphlet about teenage pregnancy. How To Tell Your Parents. That’s what I was reading when I heard a shuffling noise behind me. I spun around to see Max glance at the pamphlet, his eyes widening in alarm even though we hadn’t come close to doing it.
“I got a visit from this person called Gabriel. Bright. Big wings.”
Max looked puzzled, then amused. “I don’t always get your jokes, but I like that you tell them.”
He collapsed on the floor with his leg outstretched, mud smeared all over his school shirt, his aftershave mixing with the smell of grass and rain. Three girls in the year below scuttled past as Max pulled down his sock, giggling and whispering and holding on to each other in this helpless sort of adoration. His foot was puffy so I touched it gently, glancing at the girls. Sure enough, their eyes turned into daggers, and I liked the way the blades twinkled in my direction.
“That feels good,” Max murmured, so I did it again.
“You don’t have my phone, do you?” I asked. “Did I leave it at yours?”
Max shut his eyes and gritted his teeth. “Yeah. It’s in my locker. Meet me there after school?” Nothing in his voice told me that his brother had found the phone, and when I looked closely at his face, there were no bruises, either.
“See you there,” I said happily, and Max returned my smile.
Of course, I had absolutely no intention of kissing him again when the final bell rang, but I didn’t get much choice in the matter, like Stuart imagine a strong mouth attaching itself to yours and firm hands pushing your back against a wall. Now that I come to think of it, you might have experienced this already, because unfortunately I’ve heard the rumors about what goes on in male prisons. Even as I tried to protest, Max’s lips clamped against mine and my words got lost in all our saliva, but I have to admit I didn’t try very hard to find them again.
That night Mum and Dad had another argument that turned into a row that lasted all week, in the kitchen and the living room and the bathroom as Mum brushed her teeth so hard I thought she might knock them out. Dad wanted Mum to get a job, and Mum was point-blank refusing.
“But the girls don’t need you as much now that they’re older!” Dad said for the twentieth time on Saturday morning, waking me up.
“Look what happened to Dot!” Mum replied, spitting out noisily in the sink. “I have to be at home!”
“Who for, exactly?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The girls are at school, Jane. They don’t need you during the day so who are you staying here for, eh?”
The tap came on.
“I’m a mum, aren’t I? It’s my job to stay at home!”
“You can be a mum and work in an office. Part-time, especially. You don’t have to be here every second of the day. You used to juggle both things.”
“And look what happened then!” Mum shouted, and I had no idea what she meant so I sat up in bed, listening closely. “Look what happened when I went back to work, Simon!” Glass smashed against tiles as she yanked open the shower door. “I’m not risking it. Now can you please give me some space so I can get ready?”
Soph appeared at the end of my bed in pajamas, her hair sticking up in all directions.
“They don’t love each other anymore.”
I pulled the duvet over my head as the shower came on full blast, determined to enjoy the last bit of bed before my shift at the library.
“’Course they do,” I said, though I didn’t sound sure. “It’s just buried.”
“Buried under what?”
“Money worries and job worries and Grandpa worries…” I trailed off, wondering if it happened to every couple. How it happened. When. For some reason, I thought of Gran and Grandpa in the black-and-white pictures and Dad’s love letters to Mum. Gold silk hair. Calm-rock-pool eyes. Starlight confidence.
“I don’t ever want to grow up,” Soph interrupted, which is exactly what I was thinking. She flopped onto my bed. “Not ever.”
“You want to stay nine years old for the rest of your life?” I asked from underneath the covers.
“No. Definitely not. Nine’s the worst.”
“So you don’t want to be a child, but you don’t want to be an adult?” I clarified.
“Right. I want to be a… what’s left?”
I pulled the duvet down. “Death.” I started to laugh, but Soph didn’t join in.
“I’d make a good corpse,” she said after a pause, crossing her arms over her chest. “It would be nice to lie in a coffin for a bit.”
“You’d get bored.”
“Wouldn’t.”
“Would. And anyway, I’d miss you.”
She held out her arms in the manner of a zombie. “I’d come back from the dead to visit you,” she chanted in a spooky monotone. “Just you, though,” she said in her normal voice. “Not Mum or Dad. And definitely not Dot.”
At the beginning of my shift in the library, I tidied up the shelves in the History section, putting the books in chronological order. Similar to the bonfire, there was no buildup. One minute Aaron wasn’t there, and the next he was, sitting at a desk just meters from where I was standing behind the shelf. Gripping the wood to steady myself, I blinked quickly probably ten times in total to make absolutely sure my eyes weren’t imagining things. Through a gap in the Nazi section, my nose hovering above a swastika, I watched Aaron open his bag, get out a notepad, flick through the pages, and begin to write.
Fixing a pleasant sort of expression on my face, I started to walk toward his desk, changed my mind at the last moment, and zoomed back to the shelf, my stomach bursting with butterflies. Call me a coward, but I was scared to bound over all presumptuous when last time I’d snatched his number and sprinted off down a dark road. Besides, I hadn’t called, and I didn’t know how to explain that without mentioning his brother and the fact that we’d kissed in a deserted locker room for five minutes and I’d enjoyed every wet second of it.
Aaron bit the end of his pen then scribbled something in the margin. He looked up so I ducked, my fingers gripping the shelves and my heart clattering against my ribs. Slowly slowly, I straightened up once more to spy through the gap, every sinew in my neck straining as my breath quivered in my nostrils. Aaron was writing again, his shoulders broad in a white T-shirt that was the brightest thing in the library and most probably the world, and I was drawn to it by a gravitational pull because this shining boy was the center of my universe, or at least more interesting than stacking books on a dusty shelf.
Squeezing my lips together, I made my way toward Aaron, but he was so engrossed in his work and my nerves were so out of control that I just sped straight past without stopping. As I stepped clumsily over his bag, my thigh almost brushed his arm, and I could hear Aaron’s eyes pop out of his head with a cartoon booooiiiiiing. I practically ran to the front desk and lifted up the Returns box for something to do, my hands trembling against the cardboard.
I tipped it too roughly. Books clattered onto the desk. My boss, Mrs. Simpson, tutted behind the computer. Wuthering Heights. Bleak House. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. A book about the Berlin Wall and one about toads.
“Bird Girl,” someone whispered, and I turned to see Aaron a few centimeters from my face. He grinned as I blushed.
“Those books won’t return themselves to the shelf,” Mrs. Simpson said, looking down her long nose. Picking up two random books from the pile, I tugged Aaron’s sleeve to tell him to follow.
Bleak House by Charles Dickens.
D.
Literature, on the first floor.
I don’t know if it was the spiral staircase or the sound of Aaron’s feet right behind me that made me dizzy. At the top, we disappeared between two narrow bookshelves. We were completely alone. My blush wrapped itself around my whole body and burned.
“You didn’t call,” he said.
“No,” I whispered. “My sister broke her wrist so I’ve been a bit distracted.”
“I forgive you,” Aaron replied, glancing at A Christmas Carol on the shelf. “I’m going to see that in a few weeks. A musical version of Scrooge with my mum. She loves it. Dragging us all to the theater. Max isn’t happy about it.”
“I love Christmas,” I said quickly, keen to move the conversation away from his brother. “Turkey and presents and all the buildup and stuff.”
“What was your best one?” Aaron asked, putting his elbow on the shelf.
“Easy. One in France. I was about seven and I made this snowman out of—”
“Snow?” Aaron finished.
I pushed Bleak House into a gap. “Well, obviously. But also a croissant.”
“Did you just say croissant?”
“Well, I didn’t have a banana or anything else for its mouth so I had to make do with what I could find. I’m very resourceful,” I told him.
“What did you call the snowman?” Aaron asked. “Pierre?”
“Fred, actually.”
“Very French.”
“He looked like a Fred!”
“How do Freds look?”
“Jolly,” I said after a pause. “And old. We stuck a flat cap on the snowman’s head and put a pipe in the croissant. A pretend one, anyway. Made out of a stick… What?” I asked because Aaron was staring at me with twinkling eyes.
“Nothing,” he said in a way that told me it was something, and something good.
He moved his finger up and down the spines, and my own back tingled. I inched forward and Aaron did, too, and Stuart there was only one book between us now, but it just so happened to be the one on the Berlin Wall, which I’m sure you know was impossible to climb over. Aaron smiled and I smiled then our faces grew serious across the great expanse of that thirty-centimeter space. Blood pounding in my ears, I leaned closer and—
“Excuse me.”
We spun around in unison to see an old lady in an anorak.
“I’m looking for a book for my granddaughter who’s coming to stay. Could you recommend something?” Grimacing in frustration, I charged down the spiral steps to the Children’s section and handed her the first thing I could find, a picture book called Molly the Moo Cow. The old lady blinked. “My granddaughter’s sixteen. And a vegetarian.”
By the time I’d found a suitable book, Mrs. Simpson had appeared by the beanbags, dressed in a pale yellow cardigan with flowers for buttons.
“There’s a lot of filing in the office, Zoe,” she said, her neat bob like a helmet of hair around her pointy face.
“But I need to return this,” I said, waving the book on the Berlin Wall. “And Literature’s looking a bit messy.” Mrs. Simpson followed my gaze. Aaron was still in the D section, waiting for me to return.
“I can do that,” she sniffed. “You’re needed in the back.”
She stared at me until I moved. Faster even than the speed of light, I sorted the papers into piles, standing over a table, scared Aaron was going to leave without saying good-bye. The seventh time I looked through the glass in the door, that’s precisely what had happened. His desk was empty. His bag was gone.
I sank onto a chair, but just as my bum hit the seat, there was a knock on the window, and Stuart I would love to pretend Aaron’s hair was sticking up and there was a leaf dangling from his fringe to make it sound as if he’d climbed through hedges and all that to get to me. But that would be a lie, because he was just standing on an ordinary pavement as cars roared behind him, and there was nothing special about it whatsoever except my heart didn’t seem to realize. It soared out of my chest and into the sky, a flash of scarlet in all the blue.
Aaron waved and I waved. He put his hand on the glass and I put mine on the glass and he did this joking face, making his eyes big and fluttering like we were having a special moment. And the funny thing was, we actually were, and we both knew it, which is why our cheeks burned the exact same color of brightest red.
From,
Zoe x
1 Fiction Road
Bath, UK