Beautiful Broken Things(Beautiful Broken Things #1)(82)

At her words, the memory swooped into my head, unbidden. The feeling of the world giving way underneath me. The sharp sting of shards of glass on my head. The flash of remembering must have shown on my face, because her expression immediately became anxious again. ‘Are you OK?’

I tried to nod, which was a mistake. ‘Yeah,’ I said instead. ‘Just . . . whoa. I feel really woozy.’

‘That’s probably the drugs. You must be on loads. I bet—’

‘Where’s Suzanne?’ I interrupted.

Rosie’s mouth snapped shut. She glanced towards the door, twisting her lip, as if she thought the answer might come through it. She looked back at me. ‘I don’t know. At home?’ There was an edge in her voice. Something cold.

‘Why isn’t she here?’ My heart gave a jump of fear. ‘Is she OK?’

Rosie’s eyebrows scrunched, then slowly rose. ‘Caddy, come on. You know why she isn’t here.’

‘She’s not in trouble, is she?’ The fuzziness in my head was making it hard to think. I tried to gather the snapshots of memory into something complete. The umbrella. Suzanne crying. Me hugging her, telling her she wouldn’t turn out bad.

‘Not in trouble?’ Rosie repeated. ‘Caddy, you almost died.’

‘That’s not her fault,’ I said. ‘We were both . . .’ More fog. ‘I mean, I was the one who . . .’

‘Of course it’s her fault,’ Rosie said, her voice tense. ‘After everything that’s happened, she did it again, she snuck out again, and made you go with her, again, and now look what’s happened.’

‘No,’ I said, trying to inject some strength into my voice. ‘That’s not right. Didn’t she tell you? I went to see her, not the other way around.’

Rosie’s expression faltered slightly and I watched her digest this information for about half a second. Then she regrouped. ‘You would never have snuck out of your house before you met her,’ she pointed out, which was true. ‘You’d never have done something so fucking stupid, Caddy. You were on a roof. In the middle of the night!’

‘We were going to watch the sunrise,’ I said, feeling tears begin to gather in the backs of my eyes. ‘How could we know this was going to happen?’

Her expression softened, but she still looked more exasperated than sympathetic. ‘Don’t cry. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have got arsey. But the thing is, you should have known that something like this could happen. Like, that’s pretty much exactly why people don’t do things like this. Because this happens.’

I felt the tears start making tracks down the sides of my face, prickly against my skin. I bit my tongue and tried to breathe in through my nose. The magnitude of what had happened was starting to hit me. And oh God.

‘You have to go and see Suze,’ I said, the tears making my voice shake. ‘You have to check she’s OK.’

‘She’s totally fine, Caddy,’ Rosie replied, the edge of impatience sharpening her words. ‘You’re the one with serious injuries. You’re the one who nearly died.’

‘But why isn’t she here?’ I was starting to feel panicky. ‘Didn’t she come here with me? Did someone make her leave?’

‘How would I know? I only found out when my mum called me at lunchtime. Which was the weirdest conversation of my life, by the way. First no Suzanne at school and then, “Don’t panic, Rosie, but Caddy’s in hospital because she fell through a skylight.” And of course I did panic.’

I was barely listening. ‘She told me some stuff about her family. It was awful.’

‘Hey,’ Rosie said, and the tone of her voice was so unfamiliar I jolted out of my own head and looked at her, ‘I’m right here, you know.’

Before I could reply, the door opened and we both jumped. Rosie’s mother had come into the room, holding a small bouquet of yellow flowers.

She smiled at me. ‘Hello, Caddy. You’re awake. How are you?’ She put the flowers on the table and a gentle hand on Rosie’s shoulder.

‘I’m OK,’ I said, because there’s no answer to that question that doesn’t sound sarcastic when your face is peppered with cuts and your leg’s in pieces.

‘We need to be getting going,’ Shell said to Rosie. ‘Caddy needs to spend time with her family.’

‘I’m family,’ Rosie said grumpily, but she was already starting to stand up. She turned to me. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow after school. And I’ll see if I can find out about Suze, OK?’

I felt a grin of relief and affection break out over my face. ‘You’re the best, Roz.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Rosie rolled her eyes, but she was smiling too. ‘And don’t you forget it.’ She folded her hand twice in a wave. ‘See you.’

For the rest of the evening my family dropped in and out of my room while I drifted in and out of drug-assisted sleep. Tarin painted my nails a hideous shade of luminous green – ‘Because you can’t stop me!’ – and told me stories about when she’d been hospitalized around the time of her diagnosis. Mum flapped and faffed and arranged the flowers she’d brought, talking mainly to herself about the dangers of inadequately protected buildings and teenagers with ‘absolutely no sense’. Dad stood for a while in the corner, studying my chart, glancing at the various machines around me, nodding every now and then to himself.