You Don't Know Me (22 page)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Falling

R
ose. She got everything. The talent. The music. The boy.

I don't really sleep after that. When morning comes, I feel as though my body is filled with lead.

Jodie calls me at ten. She's still buzzing from last night.

‘Woo! Sasha and Dan, sitting in a tree . . . So what happened, then?

So she'd noticed.

‘Nothing,' I mutter dully into the phone. ‘Nothing happened.'

‘What? Wait.
What?
That guy was all over you. What d'you mean,
nothing happened
?'

‘He didn't touch me. They played “Breathless”.'

‘So?'

‘I think he used to go out with Rose. Look, I don't want to talk about it, OK?'

‘WHAT? HE USED TO GO OUT WITH ROSE? God, Sasha, how can you say that and not talk about it?'

‘There's nothing to say.'

‘Shut
up
, Sash! There's everything to say. I'm coming over.'

‘Please don—' But she's already put the phone down. She's on her way.

She arrives twenty minutes later, bearing chocolate. ‘I would've bought croissants, but your mum makes the best breakfasts anyway.' Mum has in fact made me a stack of pancakes, sensing something was seriously wrong. She leaves us to it while Jodie helps me eat them. Or rather, while Jodie eats them. I've lost my appetite.

‘So tell me everything,' she says, reaching over for the Nutella. ‘Oh blimey.
He's
not Breathless Boy, is he?'

It took me months to work it out, and Jodie about thirty minutes. I cry silent tears. Jodie abandons the Nutella for a moment, and enfolds me in a tender hug.

‘Are you sure?' she asks eventually.

‘I don't know. I mean, I
am
sure, but I can't prove it.'

‘So how did she meet him?'

I think it through.

‘The jackets! Those damned military jackets. Dan said they got their gig gear from Mrs Venning. Rose did my summer job for me for the extra cash, remember? She could have met him then.'

‘I s'pose so,' Jodie agrees, going back to her pancake. ‘Or maybe in the music shop on the high street. They could've been looking at sheet music, and their eyes met.
Or checking out guitars . . .'

‘Look – can you not keep picturing their eyes meeting?'

‘Yeah, sure. Sorry.'

Jodie eats in silence for a while as I take it all in. Impossible to imagine now that I felt so fabulously good last night, and it felt like it would last forever. It was as if I was speeding towards the edge of a cliff without knowing it, and now I'm falling.

‘But why didn't she tell anyone?' Jodie muses. ‘Oh, wait: nobody to tell. I was on holiday. So was Nell. You were in America. Still, she could've emailed.'

I find my voice, or what's left of it. ‘Rose doesn't do email.'

‘She could've called.'

She could have, but maybe she didn't want to. I think of myself as a girl with secrets, but Rose has far more. And I can't help thinking back – painfully – to how I felt about Dan, until last night. Dan's the kind of boy you want to hug all to yourself. If you can.

‘Anyway,' I say, ‘it was over by the time we all got back. She told me about it yesterday. She didn't say it was him, though.'

‘What happened, d'you think?' Jodie muses. ‘I mean, if “Breathless” is anything to go by, it was bad.'

‘Uh huh.'

‘Are you going to talk to her about it?'

I shake my head. ‘She obviously doesn't want to.'

‘Yes, but if it's stopping him from—'

‘Nothing's stopping him,' I sigh. ‘Only himself.'

Jodie offers to tell Nell about it for me, but I beg her not to. If she does, Nell will spend her whole time fussing
over me. I'd rather she just stayed her usual, cheerful self.

But that doesn't happen. By the time we get to school next day, Nell is not her cheerful self at all. The news has leaked out that we were with Rose on Saturday. A blurry picture of the four of us sneaking out of Lockwood House is already plastered over Interface, and half the gossip websites too.

You'd think people might be pleased that the band got back together. It doesn't work that way, though.

Looking thin and drawn, Rose Ireland has been seen secretly getting back together with the girls who originally dumped her for being overweight.

ROSE BACK WITH BULLYING BANDMATES – SEE PIC

RT @RoseIrelandSinger Stay away from the #manicpixienightmares #dropthefatgirl

Suddenly our band page is filled with hate-filled comments again. Almost every FaceFeed message is an angry rant. It's like having a bucket of cold water thrown over you repeatedly, by people who've never met you. They think they're protecting her. We just feel tired and sick.

In school everybody, it seems, is staring. We take refuge in the practice rooms, but when the lesson bell goes, we have to head back to class. There's a blockage caused by maintenance men with stepladders, dust sheets and paint pots. The Head is having all the corridors repainted in honour of the visiting TV crews for the ad launch. While
we wait, several people start crowding round us, asking about Rose. Some even take pictures. They're not threatening, like the FaceFeeds, but I sense Nell starting to get claustrophobic.

Somebody muscles through, all elbows and aggro. It's Nina Pearson, the self-confessed chief ‘Rosebud', who seems to have forgotten she always ignored Rose in class because she was ‘weird'.

‘Can't you just leave her alone?' she spits at us. ‘Don't you think she's had enough of you? She's coming to school for that launch soon and I don't want to see you anywhere near her.'

She stands in front of us, shaking with righteous fury.

The crowd around us loves it: the drama, the passion, the serious possibility – they hope – of a fight. They watch us all to see if anyone's ready to start brawling. Instead, Nell crumples in tears, and I catch her. Nina storms off, satisfied, and the others slowly start to melt away.

‘This is all your fault!' Jodie shouts out across the heads of the parting crowd.

I look up from Nell to see who she's shouting at. At the far end of the corridor, Elliot Harrison is staring at us, pale and horrified.

‘You did this! You made this happen!'

‘Shut up, Jodie,' I whisper under my breath. ‘If people know what he really did, he's in more trouble than you think.'

‘I don't care,' she fumes. ‘He stole your phone, he stole that video. He had no right . . .'

There are tears in her eyes too.

‘It's never going to end,' Nell whispers. ‘Is it? Whatever we do, they'll always hate us.'

I try and hold the moment of us all being back together in my head – how much fun it was, the buzz it gave us – but under the weight of the glares and hatred, the memory shrinks and fades, until it hardly seems real any more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beautiful Girl

O
n the bus on the way home, I'm not exactly in the best of moods. And then a text arrives. Two words:

Gentleman Dan is back, politely apologising for breaking my heart.

Because, you know, it's not as if I needed cheering up or anything. If trending on FaceFeed again feels like being hit by cold water, getting a ‘sorry' from Dan feels like
being hit by a truck.

Unfortunately, the memory of Dan feels real, very real. Wherever I look, he's there. Up in the hills, where we walked. At home, where he helped me tune my guitar. Up in the sky. I can't even look at the sky without imagining it darkening, and him showing me the constellations, and us disagreeing about philosophy.

Where do you find another boy like that? When will that happen? What if he was the one, and he was never even mine?

Mum gets back from the café to find me at the kitchen table, with a pile of home-made brownies and a cup of tea. I tried baking. It didn't work. She can see from my face that something's wrong.

‘Oh God, it's not the internet again, is it? Is it that picture of Rose and all of you?'

‘Wha—? How did you know about that?'

She looks guilty. ‘Someone at the café said something had happened. I thought I'd better look it up.'

Oh great. Even my own mother has been Googling me.

She leans over, hugging my head into the front of her dress, promising me everything will be OK. That's Mum: she cooks, she bakes, she hugs, she's reassuring. It usually works, but not today. Today, I'm beyond reassurance, because each time something's gone wrong I've tried and tried to recover, and I thought I was a survivor, but each time something new happened and it got worse.

Mum puts cheerful music on the radio and sets about making chicken soup. She has this theory that nothing can ever be so bad that chicken soup can't make it better. Today, even the sound of her chopping celery makes me depressed. The internet hates me and I've just been
dumped by a boy I didn't even go out with. Soup is not going to solve this. Seriously.

I go up to my room and do what homework I can face, which isn't much, before going through my playlists and listening to every sad song I can find. Downstairs, I can hear the kitchen radio and smell the stock starting to simmer. Outside, it's a beautiful spring evening. The darkening sky is flecked with pink clouds. A bird in the bushy verge beside the road is chirping happily. Lambs are gambolling in the fields next to their mothers. Actual lambs. Irritatingly fluffy ones, bleating away.

Why do I have to live in the heart of Somerset? Why can't I be in Florida, where the news says there's a threatening hurricane? If this was a movie, there would be thunder and lightning for me to go out into, so I could rage against it and get soaking wet. The best I can do is Crakey Hill at sunset. It's pathetic.

I grab my phone. There's only one person I can think of right now who might get the mess I'm in because frankly, from what I've heard, he's been in worse. As I head up the hill, away from the house, I call his number. To my relief, he answers on the fourth ring.

‘Dad?'

There's a long pause at the other end. I can hear the sound of clinking glasses and bar-room chatter in the background.

‘Sasha?'

He sounds astonished that it's me. I suppose he would be: I haven't spoken to him since I got back from Vegas, except when he called at Christmas. To apologise for forgetting to send a card.

‘Dad? How are you?' I wish my voice wasn't so thin
and reedy, but keeping tears at bay is harder than I'd like.

‘Er, I'm fine, honey. How are you?'

He sounds a little bit drunk and very miserable. Exactly how I would be sounding, in fact, if I'd had a few beers or whiskies to soften the blow.

‘Has anything happened, Dad?'

That's not what I meant to say, but it turns out that stuff has happened to Dad too, and he wants to talk. When I visited him in Vegas, he was living with a showgirl called Crystal and her little daughter Liberty, but they've gone. It was his fault, he says. He chooses the wrong women. When he finds a good one, like Mum or Crystal, he lets her go. He lets everyone go, or they let him go. How many beers has he had?

I'm up high above the cottage now, looking down towards the railway track and along to the orange glow of Castle Bigelow itself.

‘But why're you calling, sweet thing?' he asks. ‘Is your mum OK?'

‘She's fine. It's just . . . I'm in trouble on the internet, and there was a boy.'

‘Yes? What boy? What internet?'

My turn now. I sit on a stile at the edge of a field and tell him everything: every last miserable detail. The thing about Dad is that when you've slept rough in bus stations and on park benches while following your Elvis dream, and when you've split up with more girlfriends than you can remember, and lost some stepchildren too that you were fond of, and drunk
way
too much beer and a few too many whiskies, there isn't much that can shock you, or even surprise you. He listens to the whole story and he doesn't try and tell me it's OK. In fact, he tells me it stinks.
Which is exactly what I need to hear.

‘I'm sorry, little one. I wish I could be there. I guess I'm part of the problem, huh?'

‘It's OK,' I say to reassure him. I did a lot of that when I was little – reassuring Dad, when he should possibly have been reassuring me.

‘All I can say is, you did the right thing.'

‘What thing?'

‘Opening your heart up to that guy. It's how you know you're alive. I know it got broken, but that's what happens, honey. You just get up and get ready to have it broken all over again.'

‘Oh great. Thanks, Dad.'

‘That's what it's all about, baby girl.'

‘He said . . . he said we're like specks of dust.'

‘Who are?'

‘All of us. He said we're so tiny, compared to the universe, our problems don't matter.'

‘Hey! Are you sure you were in love with this boy?'

I laugh a little. ‘Yeah, Dad.'

‘Well, he sure talked some baloney. Of course our problems matter. You know that. You know, you make me feel so old.'

Dad is
so
not in reassurance mode. ‘Why?'

‘Because you're all grown up. Look at you – in love with a boy. Calling me long distance. It's good to hear your voice, baby girl.'

‘That's OK, Dad.' There I am, doing the reassuring thing again.

There's a long silence and I think he's forgotten me, but maybe he was just having a longer drink.

‘There's just one thing,' he says, quietly, as if he's
talking to his glass. ‘You won't get this right now but one day, when you're old and in a bar and thinking about all the stupid stuff you've done . . . maybe, if you're lucky, your beautiful girl will call you and just knowing that she's there, and you made her, that will kind of make it all worthwhile.' He pauses. ‘I'm just saying. Ignore me. It's nice to talk to you.'

‘OK, Dad. Well, . . . you did give me the phone.'

‘I gave you a
phone
?'

‘Yes. Not this exact one, but the last one.'

‘I did, huh? Must've been Crystal's idea. She had some great ideas, that girl. It takes pictures, right?' he asks.

‘Yes.'

‘Well, send me a picture of yourself sometime. Shoot a video. Show me what you're up to. Give your mother my love. Don't tell her about Crystal going, OK? She doesn't need to know. Love you, little one.'

‘OK. Bye, Dad. Love you.'

I won't tell him that Mum assumed Crystal had left him ages ago. She'd actually be quite impressed to know they lasted so long. It makes me smile to think of shooting a video for Dad. I remember the first time we had the great idea of shooting a video. Look where it got us.

I stay for a while, watching the sky grow truly dark, and the first stars start to appear. The North Star. Ursa Minor.

Dad was pretty drunk when he got to the bit about it ‘all being worthwhile' because of me. Trust Dad to bring it all back to how
he's
feeling.

I wonder what stars you can see from Vegas. None, probably, with the bright lights from the Strip blotting out the night sky. Dad won't be looking anyway. He'll still
be in his bar, turning to the guy next to him, saying his daughter just called. His ‘beautiful girl'.

I never knew he thought of me that way. I didn't think I cared that much, but maybe I do. He's lousy at reassurance, but strangely, I do feel better.

When I get home, the cottage smells irresistibly of chicken soup.