Beautiful Broken Things(Beautiful Broken Things #1)(12)
23.49: You just called me and hung up. Are you OK? Call me back plz xx
23.56: Cads? Pick up your phone xxxx
00.03: I never knew how hiliarous you are when your drunk OMG. You should get like this every weekend. CALL ME when you wake up so I can tell you all the stupid things you said. Love you to pieces, you drunkard.
I was so busy smiling at these texts that it took me a moment to realize there was another message from someone else waiting for me. I clicked on it, expecting Tarin, and saw Suzanne’s name. For a moment I was confused, and then realized that her message was a reply to one from me.
‘Shit,’ I whispered out loud. A big part of me wanted to delete both messages without even looking at them.
23.46: Why do you have to be soooo perfect?
I felt a flush of pure embarrassment so acute I actually lifted a hand and tugged at my hair. Oh God. I tried to tell myself it could have been worse. Somehow.
23.59: Um. Thanks? :/
I felt a little sick, and not just because I was hungover. My fingers hovered over the keypad, trying to figure out how to respond. I couldn’t just ignore it surely, much as I wanted to.
08.37: Oh God. I was drunk! I’m sorry, don’t even know what I was talking about.
Her reply didn’t come through for another couple of hours, when I was sitting in McDonald’s with Mishka and Kesh. I had to force myself to look.
10.59: Haha, no worries. One day you’ll get why I laughed so much when I saw it. Hope you’re not too hungover! See you later x
So she got to be magnanimous and mysterious, and I was the drunken embarrassment. Great. I pushed my phone back into my bag without replying and took a sip of milkshake, trying to bring back the feeling I’d had from the night before, that sense of possibility in myself. It didn’t work.
What I always thought of as the ‘real’ half-term – that is, the week that Rosie was also off school – was well underway when I stayed over at Rosie’s house. It was the Tuesday night, and it was just the two of us. Suzanne planned to meet us the following day, with some of their other friends from school.
Rosie was in the bathroom, getting ready for bed, and I had seized the opportunity to do some quality stalking. As I’d hoped, she’d left her Facebook logged in. Squashing any guilt, I typed Suzanne’s name into the search bar and then clicked on it when it appeared.
Her page unfolded before me, full of updates and pictures and messages. She’d changed her profile picture since I’d tried to look a few weeks ago; now it was just her, holding a dog. I scrolled down slowly, looking over the messages. Most were obviously from friends from her old school, because they were variants of ‘miss you!’ I noted that earlier that day Rosie had posted a photo of a rabbit wearing a pair of round sunglasses. For some reason Rosie had captioned this: ‘It’s you!’ Suzanne had written, ‘Oh, shush, you.’ Five people had ‘liked’ it.
Directly below the photo, a message caught my eye.
Ellie Lewis Zanne, have you been watching Corrie?
Suzanne Watts Yes :/
Ellie Lewis ? Are you OK? I can’t believe they didn’t put a trigger warning on it or something!
Suzanne Watts Yeah. I’ll call you, OK?
Ellie Lewis Oh yeah, sorry xxx
This was such an odd exchange that I read over it a couple of times. It made no sense to me, which was to be expected because I had no idea who Ellie was and I didn’t watch Coronation Street. Plus I didn’t know what trigger warnings were. I was about to click on Ellie’s name to take my creepy jealous-friend stalking to a new level when I heard the shower turn off.
I clicked back on to Rosie’s home screen and slumped back on the bed, pulling out my phone. I tapped ‘trigger warning’ into the search and scrolled through the results, which only confused me more. The top entry was, bewilderingly, something to do with feminism. A couple of entries below that, a Wikipedia entry for Trauma Triggers. I opened the page and scanned the first line.
‘What are you looking at?’ Rosie asked, coming out of the bathroom in her pyjamas, a towel wrapped around her head.
‘Just Facebook,’ I lied, turning my screen off. Trauma triggers: experiences that trigger traumatic memories. Trigger warnings: brief messages that appeared before content deemed to be potentially triggering.
I was turning these definitions over in my mind, trying to match them to what I knew of Suzanne, when Rosie flopped on to the bed next to me and grinned.
‘Stalking a certain Jonny?’
‘Guilty as charged,’ I said, even though I hadn’t thought about Jonny for days.
‘You can do better,’ she promised, which was nice if not exactly true. ‘Here,’ she said, pulling her laptop over and opening Facebook, ‘let me show you Liam.’ Her current crush, a football player from the year above who’d smiled at her during assembly.
I looked at the pictures and made all the right noises, but my mind was working overtime. Trauma. What kind of trauma? And what did it have to do with Suzanne? Surely finding out what was happening in Coronation Street would help me answer this, but when I tried quickly Googling it on my phone while I was meant to be brushing my teeth, the top results were all about an actor who’d just been arrested for drink driving. I couldn’t figure out how to ask Rosie without giving myself away, so I decided I’d wait for an opening in the conversation the following day, when there was group of us to hide in.