Would anyone but Rosie have known how much the beach meant to Suzanne? I thought I did, but it hadn’t occurred to me that that was where she would choose to die, which was why I couldn’t shake the queasiness of knowing how easily things could have been different. If I hadn’t woken up. If I hadn’t got my dad. If I hadn’t made him call Shell to get Sarah’s number. If Shell hadn’t woken Rosie. If any of these steps hadn’t happened, who would have been there to save her? No one.
We found her, Dad said, and in a way it was true. But it wasn’t a reassuring sequence of events, not a montage-worthy pulling together of heroes, racing against the clock to find Suzanne in time. It was just a couple of lucky phone calls, and a girl who knew her friend.
After the drama came the anticlimax. I felt as if I’d spent the last few months being swept along a river and now, suddenly, there I was, dropped over the waterfall into the sudden calm of a plunge pool. The noise and motion and panic were gone. Everything was still. It was disorientating.
I wasn’t allowed to see Suzanne, who’d been brought to the same hospital I was in but was, apparently, in no state to see anyone who wasn’t a medical professional or family. I worried about her, of course, but it was a different kind of worry than before. Now at least I knew she was in safe hands. The hardest part was over, the worst had happened; it was surely all good things from here. And that was, at least in part, because of me. I’d saved her, just as I’d been so scared I’d lose her. It wasn’t just relief I was feeling, it was pride.
I left the hospital four days after my fall, my leg and arm in plaster and stitches twinging in the side of my face. ‘It might scar,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s too early to tell.’ Secretly I hoped it would. A small scar by my hairline, between my cheekbone and my ear, seemed like the kind of souvenir I was owed after everything that had happened.
I was given only the barest details about Suzanne, even after I was settled at home. I knew that they’d got her to the hospital quickly enough after she’d taken the pills that there would be no lasting physical damage, but that her mental state, not so easily measured with monitors or fixed with drips, was the biggest concern.
‘Is it like a breakdown?’ I asked my mother.
‘We don’t really say breakdown any more,’ she said.
I took this to mean yes.
One week after the overdose, Suzanne was transferred to an in-patient CAMHS unit in Hampshire called Gwillim House, a specialist facility for teenagers with serious mental-health problems. It was the best thing for her, I was told, and way overdue. A safe environment with trained professionals and no expectations of her except that she could be helped. As much as I knew this was true, and as glad as I was that it was finally happening, it made me feel strange to think of Suzanne being labelled as having ‘serious mental-health problems’. Technically I knew it was correct, but it wasn’t her. The four words seemed so scary and huge, painting the image I had of my friend in colours I didn’t recognize or understand.
‘Yeah, it’s almost like having mental-health problems doesn’t actually change your personality or something,’ Tarin said sarcastically when I tried to talk about it with her. ‘Ye gads! A clinical diagnosis! She is an entirely different person now.’
‘That’s not very helpful, Tarin,’ Mum said drily.
‘Try me tomorrow,’ Tarin said. ‘I’ll probably have changed my mind by then, what with being bipolar and everything.’
‘All right, I get it,’ I said, rolling my eyes. ‘Stereotypes are bad. Mental health is complicated. You can stop now.’
I had my own physical recovery to deal with, which at the very least was a useful distraction from worrying about Suzanne’s emotional one. I was out of school for two weeks after the accident, resting my head and learning how to navigate my surroundings with two of my four limbs out of action. By the time I returned to Esther’s and something like normality, I felt like a different girl than the one who had last walked through the school gates. No one noticed.
For the next few weeks I waited to hear from Suzanne, convinced at first that it would just be a matter of days and then revising that estimate as time went on. But before I knew it April had turned into May and brought with it exams. Having been all but bed-bound for so many weeks, I’d had plenty of time to revise and had also developed a healthy dose of perspective. I went into my exams with a new kind of confidence I’d never before experienced; I knew I would do well, but if I didn’t, that was fine too.
‘That’s all right for you, Miss Private School,’ Rosie said over the phone, our primary method of contact during her self-enforced revision exile. ‘Want to swap brains for a while?’