Chasing Butterflies (10 page)

“Joanna died?”
Why the hell didn’t Yara tell me?
“How? Why?”

“I’m worried about Yara,” Mum says, completely ignoring my questions.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask, completely ignoring her too.

“I would have, if you’d gotten in at a decent time,” she retorts.

Yara’s grandmother died yesterday, and I’ve just dismissed her from my room like she’s a naughty child. I groan and drop my head into my hands. “Did Yara find her?”

“Yes,” Mum replies sadly. “Poor thing. But there’s something not right with her, Gabriel. I don’t know how well you know her, or how much time you’ve been spending with her, but she’s a very messed-up young girl.”

“You’ve never spoken to her before,” I snap. “The only time you’ve ever seen her and spoken to her properly is when she’d just found out her only living relative had died. I imagine I wouldn’t look right if it had been me in her shoes.”

“I think she needs help,” she tells me. “Professional help.”

“God, Mum,” I say with a sigh. “Give her a break.”

She holds up her hands. “You didn’t see the house yesterday or her behaviour. Joanna had been dead for hours, probably more than a day, and Yara had been painting the bloody walls. When I got there, she was blaring weird music out of the speakers as if her grandmother wasn’t lying dead in her bed.”

I wince, hating the fact that Yara must have been scared, not knowing what to do. “Did you ask why she was painting?”

Mum nods. “She said she just wanted to paint and that she thought Joanna had gone out.”

“Well, then that’s what happened.”

She shakes her head. “The music…the painting. Gabriel, even if she really didn’t know Joanna was dead, don’t you think that’s weird?”

I take a deep breath and finally lower myself onto a chair. “What music was it?”

Mum blinks, looking confused. “What?”

“What was she listening to?”

“She said it was Kate Bush, and it was a song about clouds or something. Why?”

I smile to myself. “It’s not weird, Mum. It’s just Yara. That’s how she is.”

Yara

I tiptoe back into Gabriel’s room and quickly get dressed, trying to see through the wall of tears that have built up in front of my eyes.

So his mum thinks I’m weird. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Everyone else does, so I don’t know why she would be any different.

I sneak out the open window, dropping down onto the grass before sprinting all the way back to my empty house.

I hate that I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. The house is too big and old for me to look after all by myself, but I guess I don’t really have a choice. I don’t even know
if
I have a choice, actually. I know I’m legally an adult, but what if they check my doctor’s records?

I’d be screwed, that’s what
.

Yara

I squeeze the sponge, letting the dirty water drip back into the bowl, and then drop the sponge into the other bowl that’s full of clean water. As I let it all soak up, I huff, pushing some hair out of my face and look up at the house.

Somebody—and I’m guessing it’s Jasmine—has painted the words
Granny Killer
and
Witch
onto the front of my house in big, white letters. I sigh as I realise the last two hours I’ve spent out in the scorching heat have hardly made any difference. I don’t know what she painted it with, but it’s not coming off—not easily anyway—and I don’t have time for this. Taking care of the house all on my own is hard…much harder than I ever thought it would be.

It’s been four days since Granny died, which means it’s been three days since I last saw Gabriel. His mum has been over to visit me a couple of times to make sure I know how to work things in the house, but I don’t think she really wants to. She’s uncomfortable when she’s here, always fidgeting and shuffling about on her feet, and her eyes never stay still for even a second. I want to ask her what she’s thinking when I see her forehead crinkle into a frown, but I always keep my mouth shout.

I’m afraid of talking to her actually. I don’t want to hear her telling me the same things she told Gabriel in their kitchen. I don’t need anyone else in this awful village telling me that they think I’m crazy. And I don’t want her going home and telling Gabriel that she’s seen things that cement her beliefs either.

Because for the first time in my life, I truly believe that I’m not crazy. That I was
never
crazy. I think it was Granny. She was the one who needed help, but because I was young and stupid—and because the whole village already treated me like I was crazy—I just accepted it. She told me things…wicked and evil things. She told me the devil was out to get me, and that I’d burn in hell for the things I’d done. But I didn’t even do them. It wasn’t me. It was her. It was always her.

I wipe the tears off my face with the back of my hand and carry on scrubbing at the bricks. I’m tired of feeling sad all the time. I don’t like missing Granny because she was mean and horrible to me, but I do. I miss her every single minute of every single day, and it’s exhausting.

“What’re you doing, Yara?”

I flinch, dropping the sponge. When I look up at him, I sigh and pick it back up again.

Gabriel is wearing dark blue jeans and a casual t-shirt. His meadow-blond hair gleams in the bright sunshine and his chocolate-brown eyes leave me feeling breathless as they scan my entire body. It makes me remember how he looked at me right before he kissed me—when he looked at me like I was just a normal girl and he was a normal guy.

“I’m cleaning the house,” I finally reply, feeling a blush settle across my cheeks. His eyebrows quirk as if he can read my mind. I drop my gaze and dunk the sponge back into the clean water. “What are you doing here?” I ask.

“I just came to see how you’re doing.”

“It took you three days to do that?”

I hear him take a sharp breath as he snaps his eyes towards me. “Yes, and I’m sorry. I’ve been working on a house in another village, and my boss had me staying there so I could spend more time getting the garden done instead of commuting every day. I don’t have your phone number or else I would have called you, but I checked with my mum that you were okay.”

Oh
. “I see.”

“How are you doing?”

“I’m fine,” I tell him, hoping he won’t notice just how
not
fine I am. “Apart from this,” I say, nodding up towards the house.

Gabriel shakes his head and puts his hands on his hips as his eyes roam over the hateful words. “Who did this?”

“I don’t know.”

He squats and puts his hand into the soapy water and over mine. “Just stop for a second.”

“I can’t,” I say. “I can’t stop, Gabriel.”

“You have to,” he says, lifting my hand out of the bowl. “Your hands are raw, Yara. How long have you been doing this?”

I shrug, pulling my hand away from him. “I saw it first thing this morning when I went out for my morning walk.”

“This is criminal damage. Have you called the police?”

“No. There’s no point, and I don’t want any attention. I just want to get it cleaned off.”

He sighs. I can tell he’s not happy with my answer, but he rolls his sleeves up and walks towards the small plastic shed in the corner. He grabs a yard brush and walks back over to me. Then I see him looking all around the garden.

“This place needs tidying up,” he says.

I nod. “I know.”

“But I guess we should start on getting this crap off the bricks,” he tells me, dunking the brush into the water.

“You don’t have to, Gabriel.”

He freezes for a second, his eyes scanning over my face. “I want to.”

I nod again. There’s no point in arguing with him, especially since I’ve been silently begging God to send me some help all morning. “Thank you.”

Gabriel

I read somewhere once that a broken heart will always be broken. In those moments when something makes you smile or laugh, it might
seem
fixed, but it never fully heals. I call those the bandage moments. The times when you take a careful step onto the road of recovery and realise your heart is finally letting you, saying it’s okay to try and get better. And as scary as it might seem at first, I liked feeling like things were okay again.

But what I never realised was that things can happen that tear that bandage right off, opening up the wound that’s been there all along. And everyone knows that when a cut reopens, it hurts twice as much as it did the first time.

“It’s never going to come off, is it?” Yara asks, sighing.

I also didn’t realise until this moment that an already broken heart can break all over again.

Taking a deep breath, I look up at the bricks that we’ve spent six hours cleaning. The words are faded, but they’re still legible. “Not without professional help,” I tell her.

Her eyes mist over, showing me how broken she is. Unfortunately, I’m broken too, and two broken people won’t make a whole one.

She lets the sponge fall from her hands and bows her head. “I don’t know what to do,” she whispers. I pick up the bowls, throwing the dirty water across the patio, and wait for her to continue. “I don’t know how to cook or clean. I don’t know how to pay bills or do the grocery shopping. I don’t know how I’m supposed to live on my own…how I’m supposed to survive.”

“You don’t have to do it all on your own. I can help with stuff, and my mum will help too.” I pick up the sponges and throw them in the outdoor bin, then stash the brush back in the shed. Yara hasn’t once taken her eyes off me. I stand in front of her and take her hand in mine.

“I’m scared,” she mumbles. “It’s scary being on my own.”

I swallow, hating how I have no idea how to relate to her. I don’t even know what to say to her. “Let’s just forget about that for a minute,” I whisper. “If I tell you that we can do anything you want to do right now, what would you do?”

Her eyes slowly lift until they’re locked with mine. “Anything?”

I feel my mouth twitch as I smile at her. “I guess…”

“Stay there,” she says before running into the house.

While she’s gone, I grab the bottle of water I fetched out of my truck earlier and take a huge swig. As I tip my head back, I can feel all the skin on the back of my neck and shoulders tighten from the sunburn. We were stupid to stay out in the sun for this long, but Yara wouldn’t leave it until we physically couldn’t get any more off. She showed me her stubborn streak and I liked it. Spending most of the day with Yara has made me realise that I actually really like
her
. Too much.

“I’m back!” she says, giving me a small smile.

“What have you done?” I ask, noticing the twinkle in her eyes.

“Nothing. Yet.”

“Yara…”

“Here,” she says, pushing a plastic bottle into my hand. “Since we can’t get it all off, let’s paint over it instead.”

I look at the bottle as Yara pulls five more from behind her back. Some of them are twinkling with coloured glitter.

“This won’t cover it, Yara,” I tell her. “The rain will wash it all off anyway.”

“It won’t rain for ages,” she says brightly. “Come on, let’s just do it. Even if it only lasts a little while. Hiding it for a few days has got to be better than not hiding it at all, hasn’t it?”

“I’m not sure,” I say, looking from the bottle of paint back to the house. “That’s a really big area we need to cover.”

“Shut up, Gabriel,” she says, squirting paint onto her hand.

My head swivels towards her. “Wha—?”

Then, before I know what she’s doing, Yara swipes her paint-filled palm across my cheek. “I said
shut up
,” she says, giggling as she darts away from me.

I playfully growl and charge towards her, squirting some lilac-coloured paint all over her. She yelps and skips over the patio, squealing and laughing at the same time. “We’re supposed to be painting the house!”

I hear myself laughing as I chase her around the garden. “You started it, so now I have to finish it.”

“Oh, you do, do you?” she challenges. “You’ll have to catch me first.”

An hour later, we stand side-by-side, staring at the house. “Well, it’s certainly better than it was before,” she says.

Instead of the horrible words, the walls are now covered with glittery, pastel-coloured paint. My eyes follow the trail of paint that runs down the wall, over the patio and into the grass.

“It’s like a sparkly rainbow has dripped from the sky,” she says in awe. “Shame it won’t stay like this.”

“Nothing nice ever stays nice for long.”

She turns to look at me. “Why do you say that?”

“No reason,” I say, turning away from her. “Just ignore me.”

“And they say that
I
say strange things,” she mumbles.

My eyes find hers, and then I can’t stop myself from laughing. “You’re kind of funny when you want to be.”

“I’m funny all the time,” she says quickly. “It’s just that nobody has ever bothered to find out.”

I clear my throat and nod towards her paint-covered legs. “We should get cleaned up. And I think you need to eat.”

“Okay,” she says, nodding down at my jeans, “but so do you.”

I sigh and look around at the mess we’ve made. “Are you seriously just going to leave all this?”

“Yes,” she answers quickly. “Why wouldn’t I? Like you said, the rain will just wash it all away anyway.”

“It might not rain for another ten weeks.”

She shrugs. “I don’t care. I like it like this.”

I take a deep breath and follow her as she walks into the house. “Shall I make us something to eat while you get changed?” I notice the kitchen is much tidier than it was the last time I was here.

Yara shakes her head. “There’s no food.”

What?
“Well, what have you been eating?”

“Nothing,” she says.

“Hasn’t my mum brought you something to eat?”

Yara hesitates and stares at me before she slowly shakes her head. “But your mum has been kind,” she says quietly, walking into the hallway. “She’s showed me how to use the washing machine and cooker and stuff.”

“Jesus,” I say, pushing my fingers through my hair as I follow her. “When did you last eat?”

“I don’t know,” she says, stepping up the stairs. “A couple of days ago, maybe.”

“You can’t do that, Yara.”

She stops when she’s at the top of the stairs and turns around to stare at me. “Do what?”

“You can’t just
not
eat,” I say, stepping onto the first step.

“I just forgot,” she mumbles.

“How can you forget to eat?” I ask as I climb my way up to her.

“You try being me for a week and let’s see how much crap you forget!”