‘Bell!’ I snap. I know this won’t help anything, but I can’t help it. My nerves have clocked on to the situation and are sending ‘PANIC!’ signals across my whole body. I wrench open her fingers and a bright yellow bottle cap falls out. ‘Oh, Bell, for God’s sake!’
There’s a hand on my back, and then Tem is squatting beside us both. She keeps one hand on me as she touches her other to Bell’s face, gentle and calm. ‘You’re all right, Bell,’ she says softly. ‘You’ve just had a bit of a bang, that’s all. Steffi’s going to give your mum a ring so she can come and give you a cuddle. OK?’
Bell lets out a wrenching, hiccupy sob, then nods.
‘Don’t we need to go to hospital?’ I ask. ‘Look at her lip. Won’t it need stitches?’
This is the wrong thing to say, because Bell’s face scrunches in fresh horror. ‘Stitches?!’ she wails, her voice distorted by the shock and the blood. And the mutilated lip.
Tem gives me a look and I baulk. ‘Steffi’s going to give your mum a ring,’ she repeats to Bell, her voice even more deliberate this time.
‘Yes,’ I say, scrabbling for my phone. ‘Yes, she is. See, Belly? I’m calling Mum.’
Bell looks at me, tears dribbling down her face. She looks so sad and pathetic I almost start crying myself, but Tem gives me a surreptitious shove and I leap to my feet, tapping my phone to unlock the screen and make the call every older sibling dreads.
‘Mum? It’s me. Look, don’t panic, but something’s happened to Bell . . .’
In the end, Bell only needs a couple of butterfly stitches, but the way Mum goes on you’d think she’s going to be scarred for life.
‘She might be traumatized,’ she frets.
‘She’s clearly not traumatized,’ I say impatiently. If anything, Bell just seems thrilled that she’s allowed to eat ice cream for dinner. The only person really bothered about the hole where her teeth should be is Mum.
I end up going back to Dad’s house earlier than usual, blaming it on coursework but mainly wanting to get away from all Mum’s fussing. Rita is beside herself, leaping all over me as I drag my suitcase through the hall.
‘Happy New Year,’ Dad says, giving me a huge hug. ‘And welcome home.’
I grin, hugging him back. Dad isn’t really supposed to say things like that to me, but I don’t mind. His house always feels more like home to me than Mum’s, anyway, and I’ve missed him and Lucy over Christmas.
The three of us celebrate my homecoming with a curry made from leftover Christmas turkey and vegetables and then have a quiet evening in watching Pixar films. We don’t talk about Clark, but he’s all I can think about, and I can tell he’s on their minds too. It’s like the polar opposite of how the last few days have been with Mum, Keir and Bell. Midway through Cars, I fall asleep.
By the time I see Rhys again, we’ve been apart for over an entire week and I’ve missed him more than I ever thought I could miss someone. He comes over to pick me up and I’m giddy just waiting in the hallway, listening for his car. When I open the door I actually leap at him, throwing my arms round his neck like some kind of period-drama damsel. He hugs me back just as tight; his grin is just as wide, and it feels like something has changed. The word ‘love’ hovers. It waits.
But not yet. Not quite yet.
School starts up again and with it normality. It’s Friday and I’m sitting in English, the last lesson of the day before we’re all released back into freedom and the weekend. Everyone is a little bit restless, watching the clock and letting out audible, periodic sighs that Mrs Baxter studiously ignores.
‘I want us to think about women and girls,’ she says, her back to us as she writes on the board. I think, as I always do now, about Rhys and his lip-reading. If he was here, he’d be lost right now. ‘How are women represented in Atonement?’
I knit my fingers together over my copy of the book and rest my chin on the ridges, listening as Cassidy King starts in on a rant about passive women in books written by men. If I were a talker, I might challenge her on this, but I’m not, so I don’t.
‘Are they passive?’ Mrs Baxter asks in a voice that gives away nothing of her own opinion. ‘Wouldn’t you say they are the impetus for the narrative?’
‘That doesn’t make them active participants in it,’ Cassidy says. ‘The story happens to the men.’
‘Only if by “story” you mean “war”,’ Anthony Mitchell says.
I write ‘passive?’ on my notepad, then add a few more question marks for good measure. Anthony and Cassidy – who have been on-again off-again for the last three years – start arguing about strong female characters, so I doodle a caterpillar wearing fluffy slippers from one end of my page to the other.
‘Let’s bring in some more people on this,’ Mrs Baxter says, her voice cutting through Cassidy’s increasingly shrill tone. Something tells me she and Anthony are off again. Again. ‘Kasia, what do you think makes a strong female character?’
‘Not needing a man,’ Kasia suggests. ‘Like, fighting her own battles.’
‘Literal battles?’ Mrs Baxter asks.
‘Those too.’