‘I . . .’
‘Luke? Where are you?’ That voice again, shrill, shouting above the music and into the night. Queen Amy.
I cross my fingers and toes, secretly hope he’ll ignore her and stay here a little longer.
‘I guess I better go. Goodnight, Norah.’
And then he’s gone. I try but fail to count the steps I hear him take as he walks away.
I feel cold.
It starts the second I begin the Green Mile trudge back to my bedroom; so many thoughts, wrapped around my body like iron chains. I have to use the banister to pull myself up the stairs.
Musings, meanderings, conversations that haven’t even happened run in one continuous loop around my head. With a texture like smashed glass, they’re tearing my brain to pieces.
I stop in the hall and study my gangly reflection in the floor-length mirror. I want to see a svelte blonde with big blue eyes. I want to see that girl in my social media selfies, the one that smiles and never has to live up to anyone’s expectations or explain why she is the way she is. But all I see in my real-life reflection are blunt smudges of shadow. Fragile. Upset. Weak. Thin. Afraid. Failing. And tired. Above everything else, tired of battling with my own mind.
They – the geeks that deal in brain stuff – call what I have an invisible illness, but I often wonder if they’re really looking. Beyond the science stuff. It doesn’t bleed or swell, itch or crack, but I see it, right there on my face. It’s like decay, this icky green colour, as if my life were being filmed through a grey filter. I lack light, am an entire surface area that the sun can’t touch.
Luke can’t come back tomorrow.
I’ve done a total 180. This is not uncommon. Especially when I’m given some time to think, to blink away the rose-coloured tint from my eyes.
I force a smile, think of Luke, think of cheesy ballads and toe-curling poetry. It was nice for a second. He made the crazy feel small enough to stamp on, but that’s not enough. That is a fleeting feeling, easy to latch on to from behind a locked door. Unfortunately, I’m realistic. And I’m no James Bond. Eventually, he will want to step beyond the door or, worse, he’ll want me to step beyond it. Or maybe he won’t. Maybe Queen Amy will meet all his expectations, and then maybe he will forget about the weird girl that writes on windows and sits by her front door at the crack of dawn for no other reason than to watch the sky. If he comes back, if I let him in, as hard as I try, I won’t be able to hide all the madness from him.
My body drops down on to my bed, the frame squeaks, and I wonder for a second if it’s going to collapse. It holds out, and I pat my mattress like it’s done me a favour.
My head is a ball of wool after it’s been mauled by a kitten.
On the backs of my eyelids, every time I blink, I see me telling Luke about my weird rituals, my routines, my intense thought processes, and then I watch him recoil like I have the plague or some sort of tropical disease that no one can pronounce. Uncertainty and caution is how you’re supposed to respond to things you don’t understand.
After some intense internal debate, I decide that his recoiling is something I think I could manage. But then there’s the laughing. I mean, he can laugh. I laugh. My mind is ridiculous. The way it works. Like on the days I wake up and can’t touch things with my hands because I happened upon news of a measles outbreak in the deepest, darkest regions of Outer Mongolia. Those are the days I have to use my feet to open doors and pick things up off the floor. It’s humour that you’ll never really be able to appreciate until you’ve spent an hour chasing a pen across the floor with pincer toes. But it is funny, the if-I-don’t-laugh-I’ll-cry kind of funny. It’s the cruel laughing, the vicious-playground stuff I won’t – can’t – cope with. Like, what if he mocks me? I can imagine it, vividly, in glorious technicolour, like the way it happens in films, with all the pointing and name-calling to boot. If that were to happen, I think maybe all my pieces would come unstuck and I’d be broken beyond repair.
Idon’t know when night turns into day. My room is still a fortress, light banished, all cracks concealed. I’m one Elizabethan gown away from being that princess trapped in a forgotten tower. There’s something about the dark space that reeks of smug. It reminds me for the ten-thousandth time that letting my heart direct my head has amounted to an almost total loss of control. Or, in average-teenager terms, I left my room last night, and now Luke is coming by to loan me movies I’m not even sure I want to watch. I make a mental note: this is not a mistake I will make twice. Next time, I stick with the routine.