Beautiful Broken Things(Beautiful Broken Things #1)(11)

‘OK.’

The disappointment in her voice was a relief. I hadn’t been entirely replaced yet.





Despite what Tarin had said, Suzanne’s novelty showed no signs of wearing off for Rosie over the next few weeks and, to make things worse, Rosie seemed to be trying her hardest to push the two of us into friendship. On one of my rare afternoons with no after-school clubs or activities to endure, Rosie suggested we played badminton, and then blindsided me by bringing Suzanne with her. And, just to make things worse, they were late.

As if bringing a third person along for what was most definitely a two-player game wasn’t bad enough, it turned out Suzanne couldn’t even play. Rosie seemed oblivious to my annoyance, but Suzanne caught on almost immediately.

‘I can just watch,’ she offered, looking nervous. ‘Is there somewhere I can sit and watch?’

‘On badminton courts?’ I asked, hearing the snide tone in my voice, unfamiliar and unkind.

‘Don’t be silly,’ Rosie said easily. ‘We’ll teach you to play. It’s really easy, right, Cads?’ She smiled at me. ‘It’ll be fun to do something a bit different. It’ll be way better than just the two of us.’

She had taken to saying things like this a lot, and I wished she’d stop.

One particularly low point came in early October. I stayed after school until almost 6 p.m. working on the set design for the school production – My Fair Lady – with Mishka and a few other girls from my art class. Just before I left, I tripped over the stepladder and spilled paint down myself. When I got home, Mum shouted at me for being clumsy and careless, and I eventually ended up sulking in my bedroom. All of this aside, my real mistake was logging on to Facebook, where Suzanne had just tagged Rosie in a series of pictures with her and other classmates at the Globe theatre. They were decked out in full Shakespearean gear and they looked ridiculous, but utterly happy.

I was clicking through the pictures, my throat getting tighter on each, until I landed on one of Suzanne and Rosie, arms around each other, beaming. A gigantic turquoise hat with an unnecessarily large feather was balanced across their two heads, which were bent towards each other. Suzanne had tagged the photo ‘Lady Rosanna Caronforth and Lady Susannah Wattsimus’. Rosie had commented, ‘17th century besties.’ Suzanne added, ‘Innit. Forsooth.’

I bawled until I was hoarse.

Here’s the really stupid thing: I didn’t actually dislike Suzanne. In fact, I probably would have liked her if I wasn’t so terrified about losing my best friend to her. She was sarcastic and hilarious and fun to be around, but she was also friendly – far friendlier to me than I’d been to her, and probably friendlier than I deserved. I could see why Rosie wanted the three of us to be friends, but I resented her trying so hard.

And there was something else. For someone as extroverted and chatty as Suzanne, she was surprisingly reticent when it came to talking about herself. Or, more accurately, herself pre-Brighton. I still had no idea why she’d even moved here. Not that I was expecting her to offer this information to me – still a relative stranger – but I couldn’t even get it second-hand, because Rosie didn’t know either.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off, even though Rosie claimed not to care. Why did Suzanne live with her aunt, and why did she never mention the rest of her family? If the subject came up she’d answer whatever question it was so casually it was easy to miss – ‘Siblings? Yeah, a brother, he’s twenty.’ – and then change the subject or make a joke. It always took me at least a minute to catch up with what she’d just said, and by then it was too late to go back. It was the artful way she did this, so clearly practised and finely tuned, that really got to me. She had to be hiding something big, and what could be so bad that she couldn’t just tell us what it was?

Half-term seemed to come out of nowhere, like always. My two-week holiday felt long overdue, but I was still impatient for the first week to pass, so I could be joined by my non-private-school friends. The extra week off was definitely a perk, but sometimes I felt, like with so many perks of the private-school life, that it was wasted on me.

Towards the end of the first week of freedom I went to a party at Luca Michaelson’s house. He was one of the St Martin’s private-school boys everyone knew, and his parties were the stuff of adolescent legend. I’d never been to one, mainly because I’d never been invited, but this time Kesh practically forced me into a dress and dragged me along with her, Allison and Mishka. The really shocking thing in all of this was that I had a good time. I drank vodka and Coke and knocked back shots when they were handed to me. I kissed a skinny boy called Jonny who tasted of cigarettes but had told me I was pretty. I sat in the bathroom with Mishka while she sobbed about her ex and held back her hair when she threw up. I thought, in one of those moments of drunken clarity, Maybe I’m good enough by myself.

In the morning, waking up on Luca’s living-room floor with Kesh using my legs as a pillow, I tried to hang on to this feeling. I imagined cutting myself loose from Rosie, leaving her with Suzanne. I could add the prefix ‘best’ to my friendship with Mishka and Kesh, and even Allison. It would be easy.

But then I looked at my phone.

22.09: Hope your having a gd time! Take a pic so I can see the dress. Miss you x

22.11: Dont get toooo drunk, OK?