Sitting on the wrong side of the desk in Ms Bolt’s office, Peter tries to stop his stomach churning. He’s never been called in here before. Never been in any trouble. He gets through school primarily by not drawing attention to himself. Yet now the head teacher steeples her fingers and says gravely, “I wanted to talk to you about Alyssia.”
Straight away he feels himself flush. “What about her?”
“It’s been more than a week since she disappeared.” Ten days, Peter agrees silently. “And questions are being asked about what made her run.”
He recalls the judgmental expression in the woman’s eyes, when he showed up at Woodleigh, and his stomach plunges further.
“How should I know?” he mutters, trying desperately to stick to Colin’s line. We don’t care. We had nothing to do with it. “I don’t know what goes on in her – ”
“You were there in her English class. The day she was suspended for assault.”
Peter nods. But guilt twists inside him, and he finds himself saying, “Though I wouldn’t have called it assault, exactly.”
“She punched someone. Your friend Colin, I believe.”
“Yeah, but he kind of deserved it.” As soon as the words leave his mouth, Peter winces. If Colin heard him say that …
Coward, he tells himself. You’re as weak as she said you were.
And he makes his choice.
“We deserved it,” he says, lifting his chin. “Both of us. Him and me. If she’s run away … it’s our fault.”
“I see.” Ms Bolt’s voice is icy, her expression likewise. He can’t help but fidget. But then she sighs, leaning back in her chair as if she no longer has the energy to maintain her rigid posture. “Tell me, Peter … if I’m not mistaken, you were a friend of Alyssia’s, when you first joined us here. So what went wrong?”
“We were friends,” he agrees. “Really good friends. We could talk for hours, about anything. But then …”
He heard the rumours. Colin told him the rumours, glowing with concerned sincerity. She’s mental, you know. I wouldn’t want you ending up dead in a ditch, Lampforth. And even though Peter brushed him off … well. After he’d heard it, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Like one of those old myths, where the hero’s told not to look at a particular thing and from that point onwards, his gaze is drawn inexorably towards it. If he looked at Alyssia, really looked, he’d fail her. And maybe she’d disappear.
Yet even knowing that, some part of him wanted to.
It made him quiet around her. Withdrawn. And she noticed, of course she did. She always noticed things like that.
“Are you all right?” she asked him, one morning over coffee.
“Fine.”
“Sure you are.” Her gaze was hard, as if she could already tell what he was thinking. “Just say it, Peter. Whatever it is.”
It helped, that unexpected edge of anger. It made it harder to feel bad. Still, he didn’t look at her as he admitted, “Some guy in my Biology class was talking about you yesterday.”
“Saying what?”
“Just nonsense, I guess.”
She didn’t answer. She ran a finger around the rim of her coffee cup. And he could have left it there. He could have laughed it off. But instead, prompted by the universal human impulse to prod a sore tooth or pick at a scab, he kept going.
“Colin Bones. You know him? He’s a total loser, but … he was saying how you drift around school like a ghost. How you never speak to anyone.”
“They never speak to me.”
“He said you hear voices in your head. He said soon after you first started, you flipped out and nearly bit a boy’s hand off because he teased you.” Peter forced himself to meet her gaze. “Is that true?”
“What do you think?” She wasn’t giving him anything in the way of softness. Her folded arms and tight-pressed lips accused him.
“Well …” He deliberately let his doubt show through. He didn’t want to admit it, afterwards, but he did. And it had the effect he wanted. For the first time in the conversation, her façade cracked. She turned away, presenting him with a hunched shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Alyssia,” he said, conciliatory now. “But some of the stuff they say about you … it kind of freaks me out.”
“They don’t know the half of it,” she muttered. “They’re not even real to me. None of this is real.”
“What do you mean?”
Silence. He sensed the precipice in front of them, the point of no return. Then she turned back to face him, looking him straight in the eyes.
“I … see things. As if I’m someone else. It’s been happening ever since my parents died. And sometimes … sometimes, what I see is more real to me than all this.” She waved a hand to indicate the square bulk of Lakeview, across the road. “I told them that. Back before I had any idea what I was doing. And you know what they’re like.”
Openness shone in her face, now. She was asking him a silent question: Are you one of them? And he didn’t know the answer.
“Your imagination is more real to you than real life? That’s pretty weird, Alyssia.”
“I know,” she said. “But it’s the truth.”
“OK.” He was quiet a moment. Then he forced a grin, and started talking about something else, and things almost went back to normal.
Almost.
But he’d looked at her – really looked – and that meant nothing could ever be the same again.