What You Become Read online

  Seeing she was destined to be popular, Charlie immediately tried to take Ophelia under her wing, but Ophelia was too powerful. She burst straight through the feathers, and the two of them began their drama-filled friendship. I hated it when they fell out because Ophelia came to hang around with us; she spoke Italian to exclude me, and Ti stopped laughing at my silliest jokes, pretending to be mature and nonchalant like her sister.

  They both despised being referred to as the twins or being asked if they felt each other’s pain, but they had a strange power over each other, and almost psychic ways of communicating, and I was painfully jealous of their bond.

  Still, I never would have thought it would make us lose touch.

  Four

  Ti was in the middle of explaining what had happened in Chase’s garden to a disbelieving gaggle of classmates, when a smug-looking prefect called Ethan Crisp came for her. It was the end of Registration and Charlie Fielding and her horrible boyfriend Alex Riviere were thrilled, grinning and wiggling their eyebrows as she packed up her stuff.

  After abandoning Ti on Saturday night, all I wanted was a chance to explain, but she hadn’t let me. She’d talked on and on, and I couldn’t get a word in, so I knew her feelings were hurt. I hadn’t even been able to tell her I’d called her house first thing Sunday morning, before they all started work at the café, she was gabbing so much.

  Fab had hung up on me without saying anything, and when I called back Ophelia had said one word before doing the same.

  Coward.

  I hated to think what poison she’d have been spitting in Ti’s ears about me since then.

  Alisha Patel and Kiaru Aki gave me sympathetic looks as I blinked back tears, puzzling it over. Alisha was chubby, with a film-star-pretty face, and Kiaru was the only boy in our year with long hair that wasn’t to do with surfing; the only Japanese kid too. I’d started out in the same sets as them, but I couldn’t keep up, and though they rarely talked to me (too wrapped up in each other) I got the impression they were sympathetic.

  Walking alone down the drive after school, I begged the universe for Ti to be all right. To have been sent home for the day or, at worst, suspended, and for her dad to have gone easy on her. I walked slowly so I wouldn’t have to overtake Charlie and Alex and the Drama lot up ahead, but when they stopped to practise the cheesiest dance routine of all time I had no choice. Joey would be coming out of Fairfields Juniors any minute, and since that horrible Monday when Mum couldn’t make it, he got scared if nobody was there to pick him up.

  ‘Oh, wifey!’ Alex called as soon as he noticed me, his Nike rucksack slung over one of his broad shoulders. ‘Where’s your little wifey?’

  Flamethrowers lit up my cheeks, and I pretended to search in my bag for something to keep my face hidden, praying they wouldn’t notice my blush; that it wasn’t as dramatic-looking as it felt. Alex had been obsessed with Ophelia for years, before he got together with Charlie, and now he made a point of being awful to me and Ti, as though to prove his loyalty.

  Charlie laughed too loud when he did it, and the whole thing made me queasy. She flicked her blonde hair now, and covered her face to hide how hard she was faking.

  The main reason we had been friends in the first place was because our mums knew each other from university. They had played hockey together every Tuesday until September last year when Mum had cancelled because of what we thought then was flu. Sophie Fielding was the only one from the team who still called occasionally to ask if Mum was well enough for a game, and I loved her for it. Last week, Charlie had written a message in the get-well-soon card her mum sent, and my mum had almost cried she was so touched.

  ‘Aw, she’s blushing. It must be love!’ Charlie said now, and I gave her a baffled look because her behaviour made absolutely no sense to me.

  ‘She’s Rosie Bloooooooom,’ Alex said, and Mia Lewis and all the other Drama dimwits fell about laughing.

  The joke never got old because my cheeks never stopped providing the punchline. I’d googled how to change my name by deed poll, but couldn’t follow through because my parents thought it was perfect. They talked about nominative determinism and Dickens, and other academic stuff that went over my head, and I just didn’t have the stomach to break it to them, that since puberty they’d basically been in cahoots with my biggest detractors.

  I caught Charlie’s eye as I passed, hoping her grin might slip, and it did. Mum was always trying to convince me that she was insecure, and I should feel sorry for her, and it was difficult because she was so pretty and rich, but in that second, for the first time, I almost managed it.

  Five

  Joey belted out of the classroom with the hood of his blue coat draped over his head and my mood lifted completely. He knocked other kids out of the way, making machine-gun noises, and I felt the tangle of humiliation and anxiety in my stomach unravelling.

  Girls and boys smiled as he passed, calling out to him as though they liked using his name. A skinny ginger girl called Lara couldn’t take her eyes off him. She called bye repeatedly in a soft, eager little voice that he didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Rosie!’ he shouted, launching himself at my belly for a hug.

  His head bobbed at my waist as he grinned up at me, purple ink on one cheek, beginning a monologue about the games he’d played at break time and how Lara wrote in his spelling book by mistake, which was really annoying because he was hoping to finish Year Four without any writing in it at all.

  ‘You know what, Joe?’ I told him sincerely. ‘You’re already cooler than me.’

  At home I made him a cucumber sandwich, and took Mum’s tea and toast up in record speed so that I could ring Ti. Fab answered again, and I begged him not to hang up.

  ‘She doesn’t talk on the phone any more,’ he said in his booming Italian-tinged way. Ti and Ophelia had lost their accents, but for Fab almost every word still ended with a vowel. ‘Or go out. Or have friends. So you’d better just forget her.’

  He hung up, and my stomach turned with nerves. Fab got angry fast, but it passed quickly too, like a jet: big noise then nothing. Was it that bad what had happened? I couldn’t cope with Ti being mad at me for long.

  Watching telly in the living room, I couldn’t follow the show. Sometimes Ti could sneak a call, if her parents were busy with washing tablecloths or preparing dishes for the café the next day. If not she had to wait until they had gone to bed, and then Dad got mad about her ringing late and waking Mum, which was completely unfair because what else could she do? A queasy feeling told me she didn’t want to call at all.

  Dad got home around ten, out of breath and gasping for a drink of water. He had biro notes scribbled all over his hands, and a smudge of ink on his nose, and he hugged me when I opened the oven and took out a jacket potato for him. His hair was completely grey, but he still wore it long and in a side parting, like his and Mum’s music heroes.

  ‘I’ve been on the phone all day,’ he said, chugging from the tap before going into one of his speeches about the indignity of begging for money at his age. I wasn’t entirely sure what his current campaign was, something about greedy landlords and second homes, but I hoped he might notice something was the matter with me and ask if I wanted to talk, like he did when Joey was quiet, but he just set about buttering his potato, unloading the dryer between mouthfuls, and then making up Mum’s night-time tray, and I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt.

  It had been six months now without a diagnosis. An invisible disease that meant headaches and sleep that didn’t refresh and, for me and Joe, endlessly being told to shhhhh. Mum used to teach Psychology at the university and make salsa verde and tuna steak, and go for runs around the castle. Now she rarely got out of bed. Dad and me shared the chores we couldn’t avoid between us, while Joey simply made more for us to do.

  Mum had loads of visitors at first, but people stopped coming round when it didn’t seem like she was getting better. She said she didn’t mind, that she was worn out with everybody joki
ng how they could do with a few weeks in bed, or saying how their colleague claimed to have the same thing, except they were just lazy.

  ‘I bet they say the same about me,’ she would say after they’d gone. ‘Stupid invisible illness!’

  She would roll over then, exhausted by the interaction and fall into a deep and sudden sleep, as if to prove she for one wasn’t faking. Her eyes looked bruised with shadow, and I couldn’t imagine her laughing, and I missed her. Dad was great, but he didn’t know what being a teenage girl was like. When I finally got my period over Christmas, he sent me in to the Co-op to buy my first box of tampons for myself, even though Charlie’s handsome older brother Will was working the till, and would know for certain I had a vagina.

  ‘There’s absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about,’ Dad had said, his ears bright red, as I jumped in the car with the offending article and ordered him to drive, for god’s sake, drive. Mum didn’t get embarrassed about anything. The flamethrowers were definitely a gift from Dad.

  Mum’s illness was the main reason that on Sunday morning, after nightmares about crashing in a police car Ti was driving, I’d woken in a blind panic. The illness fed on effort and stress. It was sinister and unpredictable, and it liked to punish Mum when she tried to defeat it. Like on my birthday, when she’d seemed better, and asked if I wanted to go into town to choose a gift.

  It was like old times – walking down the high street together, breathing out mist as we talked about what to get Dad and Joey for Christmas. Her hair was the colour of horse chestnuts, same as mine, and it looked so pretty against her cream woolly hat that I decided to grow my hair super long too. It had just passed my shoulders for the first time since I was a little kid.

  We drank mochas at The Jam because the music’s always good there, and everything was fine until Mum fainted at WHSmith while I was choosing a new album. Dad had to come home from university to pick us up, and when she was safely back in bed he told me I should have known better.

  ‘We can’t be selfish, Rosie; we’ve got to be a team. I need you on my side, because at the moment, I’m afraid your mum doesn’t know what’s best for her.’

  The whole fortnight after, she didn’t make it out of bed once. What if I’d been brought home by the police? I had to be more careful. No more silly risk-taking. I picked flowers from the garden, then dug out my art box so Joey could make a get-well card. She mustn’t think we’d given up on her too.

  At half past ten Dad insisted I go up to bed as usual, because it was a school night, he said, but really it was so he could use the internet uninterrupted. He was addicted to ranting in forums, though he claimed it was an important part of his activism.

  ‘Can I stay up a bit longer?’ I said. ‘Ti’s going to call.’

  ‘What can you possibly have left to say to each other? You’ve been together all day.’

  This was his usual grumble, and I wanted to tell him he was wrong, that we hadn’t been together all day – that was the problem – but I wasn’t keen to let on that Ti was in trouble again if I didn’t have to. Mum and Dad already had their doubts about our friendship.

  ‘Bed,’ he snapped, running out of patience without warning, like he did sometimes lately, but there was no way I would get to sleep if I didn’t know how Ti was, so I lay on the landing instead, looking up at the paper moon lightshade, willing the phone to ring.

  ‘Swings, midnight,’ Ti’s voice whispered when it finally did, and I was so relieved to hear her and know she wasn’t mad with me that I forgot all about my promise to be more careful, and after setting my alarm for fifty-five minutes’ time, I fell into a deep and peaceful sleep.

  Six

  The Beacon was at the top of a hill precisely between my terrace and Ti’s estate, and we often met there at midnight. Ti’s parents were unconscious then, which meant she had more freedom. Her family were even more demanding than mine, and when she wasn’t at school they had her polishing cutlery or straining tomato sauce or laminating new menus for the café.

  Ti was there already, sitting on top of the slide, in her black jeans and dolphin top, looking out at the view. She’d taken her make-up off, and let her hair down from the teddy-bear buns it had been in when I’d seen her briefly at school, and she looked younger without the usual trimmings.

  Seeing me, she bowed her head, and my stomach churned. I scrambled up the red climbing net to where she sat, cross-legged, picking at what was left of her nail varnish.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, but she didn’t smile or hug me as usual, and she seemed to be in her own world more than mine. She shoved a chunk of her thick curly hair behind an ear, and stared at the little black spots of varnish on her fingernails, and I waited.

  From the top of the slide at the Beacon, you had the best view in town. You could see where the river met the sea, and the boats swayed in the harbour, as well as the cranes in the docks just round the headland. I had more pictures of this view at sunset than I knew what to do with, but I couldn’t stop taking them.

  Mum had made me sign four before she had them framed and hung them on the stairs to their bedroom in the attic. Walking up there I felt proud, like I was already a famous photographer.

  ‘What happened?’ I managed eventually, and Ti shook her head, and took a breath.

  ‘I’m out. Chase told Kes that I threatened her.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘The police gave me a warning, and Dad’s not talking to me.’

  ‘Oh, Ti.’

  ‘I feel so stupid. I was so mad about them getting rid of Ophelia, and now I’ve gone and got myself chucked out too.’

  Ti breathed out her nose in a disheartened way, and I held her hand, and picked at the black speck of nail varnish at the centre of her thumbnail because I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘So what happened? Exactly.’

  ‘Chase was in Kes’s office when I got there, sitting on a seat behind his desk with him – in case I didn’t already know it was two against one – and he started talking about how seriously Fairfields takes the safety of its teachers and students, and how there’s zero tolerance to violence or the threat of violence at this school . . .’

  ‘And what was Chase doing?’

  ‘I don’t know. I daren’t look at her. It was so embarrassing. I thought they might have found the poo, and that I was going to have to explain it. I didn’t dare look at anyone, I just stared at my lap the whole time.

  ‘And then Kes brought up the police, and the seriousness of trespassing on people’s private property, and I felt like a really creepy stalker, but I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t make things worse. I couldn’t think of anything that would explain it, because how could I explain about nightwandering?’

  I squeezed her hand, wanting to make her feel better, and like I definitely wasn’t thinking I told you so because I’d warned her not to go near the house, and she hadn’t listened to me, and now here we were.

  ‘The way Kes told it, I was in Chase’s garden to intimidate her. That’s why I went there. But we were just messing around! I was laughing the whole time, wasn’t I?’

  ‘And she said you threatened her? What did she say you said?’

  Ti nodded sadly, watching my hands as I turned hers over, looking for more varnish to pick. ‘I can’t remember. It was like having an out-of-body experience. Like, all this time I’ve been determined to make it through to the end of school, but underneath I’d known really that I wouldn’t, that there’d be something, and it was so weird. I felt like I was watching myself on telly.’

  I was just holding her hand now, and our palms were sweating, but I didn’t want to let go.

  ‘It’s because of Ophelia. They think I’m the same as her. I wish she wasn’t my sister sometimes, I really do. She ruins everything.’

  I kept my mouth firmly shut.

  Ophelia had been expelled a week ago after a culmination of things, but the first big one was an incident last month at the Grease rehearsals when Charlie
ended up with a split lip. Ophelia said it was an accident, that she’d lost her footing in the dance they were learning, and that she hadn’t meant to knock anyone off the stage, but Charlie was having none of it, and, in the end, the tension got so bad that Chase told Ophelia she didn’t have the right attitude required to put on a production.

  ‘Honestly, Rosie, it was so odd. I didn’t realize what was going on. I mean, I still thought I was just being told off. I was waiting for the punishment, but Kes was talking about my general attitude, and lateness. My marks. That I’ve not written a single word in my Geography workbook.

  ‘He had to really spell it out to me. “So, I’m going to have to ask you to leave, Titania.” And I was like, Okay, phew! And I jumped out my seat, thinking of coming to find you in English, and he must have known I didn’t understand, because he said it again really slowly: “I’m going to have to ask you to leave school property. We think The Bridge might be a better fit.”

  ‘And it was really sad because I’d always thought he liked me. He gave me bourbons if I got sent to him, and let me chat about stuff instead of doing whatever boring work I’d been given . . .’

  The Bridge was where they sent kids that couldn’t get on with the rules and regulations of normal school. The idea was that once you’d improved a bit you could return to a conventional school, if you could find one that would take you, but all the kids there were such troublemakers that hardly anyone got the chance. Ophelia had lasted three days before she’d begged her mum and dad to let her be ‘home-schooled’, i.e. work full time in the café.

  ‘Kes actually came with me, you know. He escorted me off the property, like I was dangerous.’