Heart-Shaped Bruise (7 page)

‘This is what the judge decided, to send you here.’

I looked up at her then. ‘But you can tell them. You can tell them I’m okay.’

‘So you’d rather
go to prison
than say his name?’

I looked back down at the blanket. When I didn’t respond, I heard her sigh. ‘You can’t go into the main wing, Emily. You’re too vulnerable.’

I scoffed at that. ‘I’m Harry Koll’s daughter. No one would touch me.’

‘Prison isn’t just about surviving, Emily, it’s about
rehabilitation
. You won’t get better there.’

‘I’m evil,’ I told her with a slow smile. ‘There’s no pill for evil.’

‘You’re not evil, Emily, and you will get better.’

‘How?’

‘By talking about it.’

‘I can talk. I can talk about Juliet until my last breath.’ I lifted
my chin defiantly. ‘She’s a fucking bitch and I hate her. I hate her. She ruined my life. And I’m not sorry. I’d do it all again if I could. I’d burn everything she has.’

Doctor Gilyard waited for me to stop and take a breath, then nodded. ‘You’ll talk about the bad things you’ve done, Emily. But you won’t talk about the good things.’

I held my arms out. ‘There’s no good here.’

‘You can talk about her because you hate her. But you can’t talk about him because you love him.’

I glared at her and shook my head.

‘And that’s understandable; you’re happy to get rid of your feelings for Juliet because they’re a burden, but you hold on to your feelings for him because they’re what make you human. What make you more than Emily Koll the gangster’s daughter.’

I continued to shake my head as though if I did it enough, I’d shake her away.

‘He makes you want to be a better person but you don’t think you can be.’

I put my hands in my hair and pulled. ‘Stop!’

‘This is it, Emily,’ she told me. ‘This is the line. You have to follow me across it.’

‘Will you just go!’ I roared. ‘Get out!’

I didn’t think she would, but she stood up. Before she left, she reached into her bag and pulled out a piece of chalk. She held it up to me and I watched as she drew a line on the floor between my bed and the door.

‘When you’re ready,’ she said, closing the door behind her.

I’ve been crying since Doctor Gilyard left.

I can’t remember the last time I cried. I used to cry all the time – at films and those ads on the telly for animal shelters, the ones with the big-eyed, shivering dogs – but I didn’t think I
could
cry now, yet, as soon as Doctor Gilyard walked out, something in me buckled and I cried until I couldn’t breathe. Until I thought I was dying.

I don’t think I would have stopped if Naomi and Lily hadn’t tried to pull me out. I’d been crying for a day, a week, a year, I don’t know. I just remember hearing footsteps, then someone lying on my bed next to me. I knew it was Lily because the mattress barely registered the weight of her. Then Naomi climbed on top of me, like Olivia used to when we were at St Jude’s and she was trying to get me out of bed.

‘Get off!’ I barked.

Naomi buried her nose in my hair. ‘Not until you come for a fag.’

‘I don’t want a fag.’

‘Oh, my God. She’s dying! Nurse!’ She lifted her head and called out while Lily giggled next to me. ‘Nurse! Call an ambulance!’

‘Fuck off!’

‘Ladies don’t say fuck, they say pardon,’ she gasped.

She rolled off me giggling and I don’t know how the three of us fitted on my narrow bed, but we did. Good thing Lily takes up less space than my blanket.

‘What’s his name?’ Naomi asked when I rolled on to my back with a surly sigh.

‘Who’s name?’

Lily sat up. ‘Is it Sid?’

I stared at her. ‘What?’

‘Don’t wind her up, Lil!’ Naomi huffed. ‘She hasn’t had a cigarette for six hours.’

Lily gave me her best lost-little-girl look. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that you said his name the other day while you were sleeping so I thought he was the he.’

‘You been watching me sleep, Edward Cullen?’

‘Of course not! It was when you fell asleep while we were watching that episode of
Murder She Wrote
—’

‘Lily, stop talking,’ Naomi interrupted, rolling her eyes.

‘Yes, stop talking. Both of you. There’s no he.’

‘There’s always a he,’ Naomi told me with another sigh.

I scoffed. ‘So every time a girl falls apart, it’s because of a boy?’

Naomi raised an eyebrow at me and I huffed. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘You still love him!’ Lily gasped, all big eyes and hair.

‘I don’t.’

‘You do!’ they said in unison.

They’re turning into quite the double act.

‘I don’t! It was nothing. We didn’t even—’

I couldn’t finish the sentence, but I didn’t need to because Lily was already shaking her head. ‘That’s worse.’

‘How?’

‘Because you’ll never get over it.’

I laughed, but Naomi poked me in the side with her finger. ‘She’s right. You’ll never get over it because you won’t get it out of your system. It’s there for ever.’

I laughed again. ‘For ever? Stop being so melodramatic.’

‘I’m not! It’s like a dream. You never remember a dream if you dream it out, you only remember it if you’re interrupted, like if you wake up, or something. So if you let a relationship run its natural course, it will just fizzle out and die and you won’t give a shit. But if something happens, like the timing’s off or he’s with someone else, then it’s just on hold, like you’ve hit the pause button or something.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘It’s true.’ Lily nodded. ‘We did this poem at school and it said that only one type of love lasts – unrequited love.’

I rolled my eyes. ‘I love you, Lil. You don’t know who Hello Kitty is, but you can quote Somerset Maugham.’

‘Whatever.’ Naomi waved her hand. ‘If you ever want to get out of here, you need to talk about it. You can’t avoid Doctor G for ever.’

‘Says the girl who schizes out every time her boyfriend comes to visit.’

Naomi sat up. ‘At least I let myself feel something.
That
’s what you’re scared of, Emily.’ She pointed at me. ‘What all of us in here are scared of, of being happy. We haven’t felt it for so long, we wouldn’t know what to do with it.’

When I looked at Lily she was nodding and my heart clenched like a fist. This always happens to me, I look away for a moment and everyone grows up without me.

Doctor Gilyard didn’t look surprised when I asked to see her this morning.

‘Are you ready, Emily?’ she asked when I’d sat down.

‘No,’ I said, but she smiled and opened her notebook.

‘Tell me about Sid.’

As soon as she said his name, my heart started ringing like a bell.

It rang just now, when I wrote it down.

‘When did you meet him?’

I had to close my eyes for a second. Then I took a breath and brought my legs up and rested my chin on my knees. ‘That morning in English Lit, the morning after I dyed my hair.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing. He just walked in.’

He walked in and everyone looked up, because when Sid King walks into a room, you look up. Sometimes I wonder if time has softened his edges, if nostalgia has made his eyes darker, his skin a warmer shade of brown. But then I remember how every girl softened, how the boys sat a little straighter, their shoulders back as he walked across the classroom.

He was older than the rest of them, I knew – my age, at least. You could tell by the way he walked, by the way he didn’t care where he sat, he just headed for the first empty seat rather than looking around the classroom for someone he knew.

His hair was long then and that morning it fell in still-wet waves over his ears. ‘Sid plays with his hair a lot,’ I told Doctor Gilyard as I thought about how dark it was, how the too-white fluorescent lights hit it so I could see the threads of brown it would eventually dry to. ‘That’s kind of his thing. He plays with his hair. Juliet pulls the sleeves of her jumper over her hands because she’s always cold and I tug on my ear lobe when I lie.’

‘That’s good to know,’ she said with a smirk, writing it down.

‘He ran his hand through his hair twice before he even got to where we were sitting.’

‘What else did you notice?’

‘His tattoos, on his wrists:
sink
’ – I touched the inside of my right wrist with my finger, then my left one – ‘and
swim
. And he was wearing this black Sonic Youth T-shirt—’

Doctor Gilyard interrupted. ‘Why do you remember that?’

‘Because Juliet was reading a book about No Wave.’

‘New Wave?’

‘No Wave, y’know, post-punk, anti-new wave,’ I started to say but Doctor Gilyard looked bewildered so I gave up. ‘Never mind. It was just kind of perfect, that’s all.’

And it was. I don’t believe in fate – I don’t believe in much any more – but it’s those little things that make me think all of this was meant to happen.

I remember turning to look at Juliet to find her watching him too, her lips parted as he dropped his ink-stained backpack on to the desk in front of ours. Of all the desks. And that’s another of those things: would any of this have happened if he’d sat on the other side of the room? Maybe not. But he sat there, so close that I could smell the shampoo in his hair.

‘So what did you do?’ Doctor Gilyard asked and I smiled to myself.

‘I asked Juliet about her summer.’ She raised her eyebrow at me as if to say,
And
? ‘I called her Nancy. I made her name sound about a minute long.’

‘Were you trying to catch her off guard?’

I nodded. And it worked because Juliet shuddered like I’d just shaken her awake in the middle of the night.

‘What did Juliet say?’

‘That she’d moved in with her aunt and uncle.’ I remember how she said it, stiffly, as though she’d been practising it. She probably had.

‘What did you say then?’ Doctor Gilyard pushed.

‘I asked her why.’

‘How did she react?’

I shrugged. ‘She looked at me like I’d betrayed her. She hadn’t asked me anything about myself, so I guess she didn’t think I’d ask her anything.’

That’s the thing with not wanting to answer questions, you have to stop asking them.

‘What did she say?’

‘She told me that her parents had died the month before.’

‘How did she say it?’

‘Quickly, like she was trying to run away from it.’

I remember how Juliet looked at me after she’d said it; it was a look that said,
Enough
. I think she thought that would be it, that I’d leave her alone.

‘How did you react, Emily?’

‘I didn’t feign horror or offer her a useless condolence, I just asked her how.’

‘What did she say?’

‘That they were killed in a house fire. That’s when Sid interrupted.’

‘What did he say?’

I sniggered. ‘Shit.’

‘Did you know he was listening?’

‘No.’

‘So you weren’t trying to embarrass her in front of him?’

I frowned. ‘I was goading her, but it was nothing to do with him.’

‘Okay,’ Doctor Gilyard nodded, ‘so what happened then?’

‘He looked mortified – I don’t think he realised he’d said it out loud.’

‘Did he apologise?’

I sniggered again. ‘Yeah. He said he was saying shit about something he heard the day before. Then he flashed us a smile that would make girls lose their balance.’

‘Did you lose your balance, Emily?’

‘No.’

‘So you weren’t attracted to him immediately?’

I shrugged. ‘I thought he was good looking.’

‘Just good looking?’

‘Yeah. He’s my type: tall, dark, artfully untidy.’

‘So you were attracted to him?’

I got what she was poking at and sighed.

Doctor Gilyard took off her glasses and looked at me. ‘What, Emily?’

‘So I did all of this because I fancied a boy?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘No, but that’s what you’re implying.’

‘I’m not implying anything, Emily. I asked you a question: were you attracted to him when you first met him?’

‘Why does that matter?’

‘Why are you finding it so difficult to answer the question?’

‘I know what you’re doing,’ I told her, shaking my head.

‘What am I doing, Emily?’

‘You’re trying to work out what came first, the chicken or the
egg: did I fancy him all along or did I fall for him after I used him to get back at Juliet.’

‘Which is it?’

‘I did it for Juliet!’ I hissed, holding on to the arms of the chair and sitting forward. ‘Everything I did was to fuck her over! That’s why I was glad that day, when they met.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I knew she liked him. He made his joke then he smiled at her – just at her, this slow, secret smile – and that was it, I wasn’t in the room any more.’

‘How did that make you feel, Emily?’

‘Happy,’ I said, my nails digging on to the arms of the chair.

‘Really? It was the first time since she stabbed your father that you could get near her and suddenly this boy was between you.’

I shook my head. ‘Do you wanna know why I didn’t kill her?’ I asked with a smug smile. ‘Why I didn’t just stick a knife in her heart and be done with it?’

‘Why, Emily?’

‘Because she was already dead.’

The words seemed to bounce off every wall. I imagined them rolling under the door towards the TV Room like marbles.

She frowned. ‘Dead? How so?’

‘Her mother died of breast cancer when she was four and she’d survived that, but then she stabbed Dad and she lost everything.
Everything
. Her father, her house, her school, her friends. There was no joy in killing her. No release. She had nothing to fight for.’

‘Then she did,’ Doctor Gilyard said and my smile widened.

It happened so quietly, her and Sid. It wasn’t one of those stories they’d tell their children. There was no rain, no chance encounter. Sid didn’t pull her out of the way before she stumbled into the path of a bus. But I felt the classroom hum with it. The floor shivered. Pens rolled off desks. Books fluttered off shelves like broken birds.

‘I knew then that she had a life,’ I told Doctor Gilyard. ‘A future.’