I’m not so fortunate. You wouldn’t have known that a year ago. I didn’t know it a year ago. Anyway. The best thing is to think of other things. And the best thing right now is to think of Bavar. He’s like a murder mystery in boy form. I want to know who done it: Who made his eyes ache like that? Who made him hide in his collar? I want to know where they are, and why they did it.
Sometimes people don’t know they’re doing that kind of thing. Killing someone on the inside. My parents would have been horrified if they knew they were going to do that to me. Of course they didn’t mean to, but I’m not sure that helps. It makes it hard to be angry with them, and sometimes . . . sometimes I really need to be angry with them. They’re the villains of my murder mystery. They killed me on the inside when they died like that. It was them.
The nice people are called Pete and Mary. They wear bright stripy jumpers, and jeans with no shape, and they like gardening, and cups of tea, and cake. Their grownup children both live in America, and they’re very proud and they miss them very much, and I wonder – if it’s all so nice and happy, then why did they both go so far? If I’d grown up and they were still here, I’d never go. I’d never go all the way to America.
I shrug my shoulders, swallow more tears and think of Bavar again. Man, can he run. You can really see how tall he is when he runs like that. Taller than any grown man I’ve seen. About seven foot, I reckon. Or nearly, anyway.
I’m going to keep up with him tomorrow. I’m going to wear my trainers to school specially.
I’m not going to go into it. All there is to say is that I’m taking the basket to school. I’m going to have to lose it in the bike rack or something. Aoife and I fell out about it, and it’s the first time in a really long time that I’m angry about something. That I’ve felt anything about anything. It burns my cheeks and I notice I’m striding as I walk to school. So I slow down, and fold myself in a bit, and by the time I get there I’m feeling OK.
And then I realize, once I’m in the corridor, that I’ve still got the flipping basket. Nobody else notices, so that’s fine. But the new girl lights up when she sees me with it.
‘Ooh, what you got in there?’ she asks. ‘Strawberries and champagne? Some horses doofers?’
‘Horses . . . ?’
‘Hors d’oeuvres, they call them,’ she says, a flicker of something crossing her face. She shrugs. ‘Posh food.’
‘No. Nothing like that.’
I turn my back on her and busy myself hanging the thing up, and manage to cover it with my coat and I’m just about feeling normal again and I turn around and she’s still there.
‘Don’t look so afraid,’ she says. ‘I’m not after your lunch.’
I just look at her. And I try to work out what she’s doing here. Why she’s talking to me. Why I’m still standing here, even.
And then I walk away.
I do kind of like the way he refuses to say anything and then just walks off. It’s a bit like saying, ‘Whatever – I don’t have the time for this,’ without actually saying it.
I usually have to say these things out loud – for the satisfaction of it, if nothing else. Last night Nice Mary told me off for swearing. She called me a potty mouth! And I laughed, and she did not find it even remotely funny, so I had to spend some time in my room after dinner. Which was absolutely fine with me.
She tried to ‘talk’ to me after. About the thing that happened. I don’t know who needed it; I didn’t feel like it was me. So I didn’t oblige her. I kept it all inside.
Truthfully, I don’t know what I’d say. And I want to keep it all in anyway. It’s mine. It’s all I have left. So anyway, she sat next to me on the bed and I ignored her, concentrated instead on the flowers on the wallpaper, and remembered the way I could see Bavar’s spine through his white shirt. The way it curved.
‘Now, Angel, I know how hard this is for you,’ she started, putting her hand on the pale pink duvet cover. I looked down, and the old me flinched inside, because how could this be happening? How was it that this was the person with me, her broad hand next to mine, her whole self warm and real and alive and just so easily here. I stared at her hand, willing it to change; for the fingers to be longer, more slender, the skin paler. To be wearing the slim gold ring I now wear on my forefinger. That. That was the hand I wanted next to mine, not this clumsy great ham of a hand. A heaviness gathered in my throat and at the back of my eyes, and I thought if I had to sit there with her a moment longer I might have to scream and stab her with the pen I’d been using.
‘Do you?’ I asked, looking her straight in the eye. ‘Do you really know?’
And that shut her up.
I watch Bavar walk away from me now, into his form room. I know I’ll see him next period, in English, and the thought makes me smile.
English is a nightmare. She watches me the whole time and it makes my spine twitch. I try to concentrate on Lord of the Flies, but their madness is a pale thing compared to the heat of her eyes on my back. And after a while something inside me, something that’s curled up and hidden for so long, begins to stretch.
So I leave.
I just get up, in the middle of class, grabbing my bag and charging past the teacher, out through the door, down the corridor. I thought I liked school before. It was quiet, and safe. Nobody challenging me; nothing about to end the world. It felt normal – and me being here, I guess that made me feel normal. Just for a little bit.
I have no idea how I’m feeling right now.
‘Watch out!’ snaps a boy as I collide with him. He looks older than me – year ten maybe. His tie is deliberately crooked; his hair arranged in little spikes.
‘Sorry!’ I say, and my voice comes out a bit louder than I meant it to.
He looks up, and then up a bit more, and then he turns pale, a confused expression on his face.
People don’t normally really see me. It unsettles them. I can’t possibly be this tall, this big. That can’t be magic, spinning like dust in the air around me, because magic doesn’t really exist.
Only it does.
The boy takes a step back and raises his hands as if I’m going to hurt him. I don’t; I’ve never hurt anyone. I just stare at him until he runs away, nearly colliding with a bunch of kids coming the other way. They scatter, looking from him back to me. A couple of them frown as their minds fight with the sheer impossibility of me, and I sigh and shove my hands into my pockets, and concentrate on being small, unseen.
Normally, I don’t have to concentrate so hard. It was something my parents taught me on those rare occasions when we’d go into the town. Be quiet. Be small, they’d say. You’re incredible, a force of nature, but they won’t see that. They don’t see you the way we do. They’ll only see your differences. Use a little magic, feel it wind about you; it doesn’t take much. They don’t really want to see you anyway.
They were so proud of their differences. The power that rang in them, that made the rest of the world seem so slow and grey. Maybe I felt like that once, when I was a kid, but I got older, and they got brighter as their magic grew, and the brighter they were, the colder they were. And I hated that.