“Bye, Poppy,” Esther called as they began to walk away. “Sorry the whole art thing didn’t work out.”
I stayed on my knees, not caring how badly it hurt, listening to their laughter and jeers getting quieter and quieter as they disappeared into the distance. Fat tears fell from my eyes onto the ground, so big I could see them leaving brief wet imprints on the ground. For a moment I considered curling up into a ball and staying where I was, hoping for a cold night that would kill me and get all of this over with.
But I lifted myself up, shakily. My knees were burning, and my tights had torn, creating ladders on both legs, but there was nothing I could do about that. I walked home slowly, taking my time both because of the pain and because I knew my family would be waiting for me well aware of what had happened.
I’ll spare you the details. But Mum and Dad were okay at first. They had received the phone call, obviously, but when they saw the state I was in when I got home they held back. Mum put me in the bath like I was six years old again with lots of bubbles and washed my hair and face and told me everything was going to be alright. Dad cooked a lasagne and we sat at the dinner table talking about anything except what had happened. Wendy was surprisingly quiet and well-behaved, which meant she must have known what had gone on.
It was after dinner when they finally sat me down, telling Wendy to do something in her room for an hour, and asked me to explain.
I told them it wasn’t me. That someone else had to have come in and messed with my painting deliberately. They listened and made all the right noises, but I could tell they didn’t really believe me. If they did, they would have contacted the school and tried to sort something.
I was too scared to tell them the truth. They’d think I was just pointing the blame at anyone, and I didn’t have any proof.
Wendy was the only person I wanted to tell. I was so close to doing it as well. When we went to our rooms for the night, just as I was about to write in here, she knocked on my door and came inside. She didn’t even say anything at first, just sat on my bed with me and hugged me tight.
We stayed like that for a long time.
“I love you, Poppy,” Wendy said eventually, releasing me. “You know that, right?”
Wendy hardly ever said that. Only when she was practically forced to. She knew how serious this was.
This wasn’t just a case of me failing my art exam because I wasn’t good enough. This was me deliberately flouting the rules and making a fool of myself, being stripped of my grade. Slade won’t even look twice at me now, not when they hear the reason why I’ve had to take another year. I’ll be stuck here. Alone. Again.
“I love you too,” I said.
“Things will get better,” she said. “I believe you when you say it wasn’t you.”
But I don’t think she did. She was just trying to comfort me.
No one truly understands how I feel. How could they?
The next time they’re all out I’m going to go downstairs and steal a kitchen knife. I know the exact one. Small, sharp, only used rarely and shoved right at the back of the cutlery tray underneath two spatulas. No one will miss it.
It’ll be easier to use than the mirror piece, the one I should never have thrown away. What was I thinking? Of course things weren’t going to work out for me. Not that I would want to use that now anyway, not after similar shards were used to destroy my painting.
I could focus on my old scars. Open them up again. But I think I’ll need more than just that. I need to feel something. Anything. As much as possible.
I’m not going to Slade. In the summer my application will update and it will tell me my offer conditions were not met, and my place has been withdrawn. All my plans, all my dreams, have disappeared in an instant, and it’s all their fault.
Those four.
Those bitches.
I hate them. I hate what they’ve done to me.
Thirty-Three
Annabel
May 22, 2023
“The art exam,” Poppy says. “I had to do this because of the art exam.”
I stand in the hut in absolute silence after Poppy’s retelling of what happened that day.
“I just don’t understand why,” she continues, shaking her head. “Why would you do that to me? None of you cared about art. It didn’t affect you at all.”
I open my mouth to say something, then close it again.
I was angry with Poppy. I’ll be honest. She looked so stunning that night, despite everything, and everyone was so interested in her. It wasn’t fair. I’d spent years trying to be popular, maintaining a certain image, but I was never met with that reception. I couldn’t afford to spend hundreds on that sixth form prom, so no one complimented my hair and outfit. I didn’t want the last impression of her to be better than mine.
Even Aidan, my own boyfriend, seemed to prefer Poppy to me that night, not to mention all the other boys too. Chloe’s boyfriend, Elliott. But Aidan was the worst. I can still remember the way he leaned over her, whispering in her ear, complimenting her, and then afterwards on the way to the party at Esther’s house doing nothing but talk about her. Why had I been so mean to her in the past? She was so hot. She really needed to come to more parties.
So maybe I snapped. I was a teenager, for Christ’s sake. She had been flirting with my boyfriend. Her! Of all people. I wasn’t about to lose my boyfriend to someone like her. She wasn’t about to upstage me at one of our final events of school and get away with it.
I know it sounds petty. And it was. But after all these years . . . why does it matter to her so much? Why is she so upset?
The day comes back to me so clearly. Sneaking into the art room (should I feel bad for still being proud of how we accomplished that, being able to get in there?), the four of us entering armed with as many rule-breaking items as possible. I came holding balloons and a box of needles, Chloe clutched bits of chicken skins we’d bought from KFC and even a couple of Capri-Sun pouches as a callback to when we first met Poppy, Esther had smashed a mirror and carried its broken pieces in a box, and Tanya had even gone to the trouble of collecting up some of her dog’s shit in a bag. It absolutely reeked. Even now, the smell of everything is what I think of first.
Chloe took out her phone, a Motorola Moto X that at the time was the coolest possible phone to have. Turning on the video camera, she waved it around at us all and turned it on herself, grinning, then set it up on one of the tables near Poppy’s project.
The whole room was full of exam pieces, but we knew which one was Poppy’s straight away. It was this absolutely huge canvas, painted in incredible detail. A self-portrait. For someone who was only seventeen, even we could see the genuine talent on display, but that just made us even more determined to spoil it.
She looked beautiful in the painting, practically like she did at prom.
Unacceptable.
“Let’s start with the balloons!” I said. “Poppy was trying to go for a sad celebration look, I reckon. Let’s each blow one up and pin it across the top, then burst them with these needles.”
Esther laughed. “Wait, I have a better idea. Let’s fill them with Capri-Sun first, then pop them. It’ll explode everywhere.”
“Oh yes, and that’ll look deliberate too,” Chloe said. “Those balloon-paint-popping pictures, like the ones Mia’s mum does on The Princess Diaries.”
We filled them and fastened them carefully to the painting in each of its four corners, and then threw a needle each at them. Chloe and Tanya took a couple of goes, but Esther and I got ours on the first try, the needles piercing the balloons and splattering Capri-Sun all over, its sticky orange residue creating a splash pattern that did look planned, as if Poppy had painted it on herself. The ones in the top corners dripped down the canvas, creating long marks that made the painting look like it was crying.
“This is so funny,” Chloe said. “Now let’s put loads of needles on the balloons, sticking out.”
“And hang the chicken skins off them!” Tanya suggested.
“That’s brilliant!” I said. “It’s starting to look like some horrible avant-garde experiment gone wrong.”
I brought out the mirror pieces, taking one and dragging it down the canvas so it tore, then stuck it in so it protruded dangerously, a sharp edge much bigger than the needles.
Chloe, Esther, and Tanya added their own pieces of mirror to the painting, sticking some with glue to lay them flat so we could see snippets of our reflections grinning at our efforts.
“Finally, the pièce de résistance,” I declared, taking the bag of dog shit. “Shall we smear it all over? God, it’s so disgusting! It stinks.”
“Not all over,” Esther said. “Look, where she’s painted shadows in—we could add it there.”