Beautiful Broken Things(Beautiful Broken Things #1)(17)

We worked our way through the food, which all tasted amazing, talking about not much at all. It felt like the perfect way to spend the last day of half-term, even though the sky threatened rain and the wind was cold.

‘The rest of the term’s going to be brutal,’ Rosie was saying dolefully, teasing the layer of chocolate off a Jaffa cake with her tongue. ‘So many deadlines. So much coursework.’

‘Same,’ I said, restraining myself from making a self-pitying comment about my private school workload.

‘How did you get on with the English essay?’ Rosie asked Suzanne. ‘How long is yours? I went over the word limit by about three hundred words, but she won’t notice, right?’

‘Probably not. I haven’t finished mine.’

Rosie’s eyebrows scrunched. ‘You haven’t finished? You do know it’s due tomorrow?’

‘Yeah, but it’s fine. I’ll do it tonight.’

‘So you’re nearly done?’

Suzanne shrugged. ‘Halfway, maybe?’

‘Suze!’ Rosie looked horrified. ‘This is coursework!’

‘I know.’ Suzanne looked completely unbothered by this information.

‘Don’t you care?’

‘Not really.’

Rosie looked at me, as if for help, but I had nothing to add to this conversation. I’d had my own deadlines, of course, and I’d got everything done in the first few days of the holiday. I was far away from being the type of person who could leave half an essay to the day before it was due, let alone be so blasé about it.

‘I just think homework is kind of pointless,’ Suzanne elaborated when neither of us spoke.

‘But it’s not pointless,’ Rosie said slowly, as if talking to an idiot. ‘You get that, right? Even if you can’t be bothered, it still counts.’

‘It’s not that I can’t be bothered. It’s just the pointlessness of it kind of gets to me sometimes. I know it sounds stupid.’ Her casual tone had hardened slightly with defensiveness. ‘You know, when I was younger I used to do all my homework, all the time, right on time. And I’d get good marks, and the teachers said I was good, and it didn’t make the slightest bit of difference at home, where it mattered. So I kind of stopped trying so hard, maybe a couple of years ago now, and you know what? Nothing changed. So homework? Pointless.’

Her face had reddened as she spoke, and when she finished she looked slightly dazed, as if she wasn’t sure where the outburst had come from. She bit her lip, looking away from us, then let out a shaky, embarrassed laugh. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry. Let’s talk about something else.’

‘We can talk about it more if you want to,’ I said, a little nervously.

‘No, no.’ She shook her head emphatically. ‘I don’t usually talk about it. And that’s fine – I don’t want to.’

We all knew what the ‘it’ referred to. Rosie’s eyes were wide and keen; clearly she had the same morbid curiosity I did.

‘Maybe it would help?’ Rosie suggested, transparently.

‘Sarah says that all the time, and it doesn’t. Help.’

‘What does help?’ I asked.

Suzanne smiled, but it looked a little forced, and gestured around her with a now-empty container.

‘This.’

There was no magic moment when I started thinking of Suzanne as a real friend. Even accepting the friend request on Facebook had felt more like a relief than any confirmation of a real bond. In those first few weeks after the diner, she was still, in my mind at least, Rosie’s friend.

That’s not to say that we weren’t both trying. We were. Whenever she made plans, like the beach picnic, she made sure to send us both a message. I did the same, gradually getting into the habit of waiting for two replies to my texts. I assumed at the time that her allowances to my existence as Rosie’s best friend were as perfunctory as mine were of her. It wasn’t until much later, when she’d refer to these early days of our friendship, that I realized I’d been wrong.

Rosie and I had been friends for so long that we had the luxury of not remembering the time before we knew everything about each other. Most of our best anecdotes were mutual; it had been in my garden that she’d broken her arm; her mum’s wardrobe where we’d pretended to find Narnia.

Suzanne was brand new in this sense, and in contrast to Rosie’s total familiarity, this was at times exciting and terrifying. It was so easy to say the wrong thing without realizing, particularly bearing in mind her fractured past. She was like a puzzle I was trying to solve, but the surprisingly complicated kind that looks shinier and easier on the box than it really is.

Not long after half term, she sent me a message on a rainy Wednesday, asking if I wanted to go to her house for dinner with Rosie. It turned out that Rosie hadn’t been to Suzanne’s house before either, and it wasn’t a house, but a basement flat. It was on one of the steep roads that we used to sled down as kids in the winter.

‘Careful on the stairs,’ Suzanne said as we started down them, keys already in hand. The rain had been relentless all week and the stone steps leading down to the door were slippery.

The flat was large on the inside, stretching further back than the outside had suggested and containing a decent-sized living room and gigantic kitchen. We passed Sarah’s room, which was towards the front of the flat, and walked the full length of the hall to Suzanne’s, which was tucked away like an afterthought next to the bathroom.