Good Girl, Bad Girl(2)

“Do you feel bad about that?” asks Guthrie.

“Not really.”

“He had to have metal plates put in his head.”

“Yeah, but he had insurance and he got compensation. My ma had to pay a fine. Way I see it, the dickhead made money.”

Guthrie starts to argue but changes his mind, perhaps recognizing the futility.

The teddy bear is passed on to Reebah from Nottingham, who is painfully thin and who sewed her lips together because her father tried to make her eat.

“What did he make you eat?” asks another of the girls, who is so fat that her thighs are forcing her knees apart.

“Food.”

“What sort of food?”

“Birthday cake.”

“You’re an idiot.”

Guthrie interrupts, “Please don’t make critical comments, Cordelia. You can only speak if you have the bear.”

“Give it to me, then,” she says, snatching the bear from Reebah’s lap.

“Hey! I wasn’t finished.”

The girls wrestle for a moment until Guthrie intervenes, but Reebah has forgotten what she wanted to say.

The bear is in a new lap. “My name is Cordelia and I’m from Leeds and when someone pisses me off, I fight them, you know. I make ’em pay.”

“You get angry?” asks Guthrie.

“Yeah.”

“What sort of things make you angry?”

“When people call me fat.”

“You are fat,” says Evie.

“Shut the fuck up!” yells Cordelia, jumping to her feet. She’s twice Evie’s size. “Say that again and I’ll fuckin’ batter you.”

Guthrie has put himself between them. “Apologies, Evie.”

Evie smiles sweetly. “I’m sorry for calling you fat, Cordelia. I think you’ve lost weight. You look positively svelte.”

“What’s that mean?” she asks.

“Skinny.”

“Fuck off!”

“OK, let’s all settle down,” says Guthrie. “Cordelia, why are you here?”

“I grew up too soon,” she replies. “I lost my virginity at, like, eleven. I slept with guys and slept with girls and smoked a lot of pot. I tried heroin at twelve and ice when I was thirteen.”

Evie rolls her eyes.

Cordelia glares at her. “My mum called the police on me, so I tried to poison her with floor cleaner.”

“To punish her?” asks Guthrie.

“Maybe,” says Cordelia. “It was like an experiment, you know. I wanted to, like, see what would happen.”

“Did it work?” asks Nat.

“Nah,” replies Cordelia. “She said the soup tasted funny and didn’t finish the bowl. Made her vomit, that’s all.”

“You should have used wolfsbane,” says Nat.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a plant. I heard about this gardener who died when he touched the leaves.”

“My mum doesn’t like gardening,” says Cordelia, missing the point.

Guthrie passes the teddy bear to Evie. “Your turn.”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“The details of my life are inconsequential.”

“That’s not true.”

Evie sighs and leans forward, resting her forearms on her knees, squeezing the bear with both hands. Her accent changes.

“My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low-grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen-year-old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet . . .”

I laugh. Everybody looks at me.

“It’s from Austin Powers,” I explain.

More blank stares.

“The movie . . . Mike Myers . . . Dr. Evil.”

Still nothing.

Evie puts on a gruff Scottish accent. “First things first. Where’s your shitter? I’ve got a turtle head poking out.”

“Fat Bastard,” I say.

Evie smiles. Guthrie is annoyed with me, as though I’m fomenting unrest.

He calls on another teenager, who has a blue streak in her hair and piercings in her ears, eyebrows, and nose.

“What brings you here, Serena?”

“Well, it’s a long story.”

Groans all round.

Serena recounts an episode from her life when she went to America as an exchange student at sixteen and lived with a family in Ohio, whose son was in prison for murder. Every fortnight they insisted Serena visit him, making her wear her sexiest clothes. Short dresses. Low-cut tops.

“He was on the other side of the glass and his father kept telling me to lean closer and show him my tits.”

Evie sneezes into the crook of her arm in a short, sharp exhalation that sounds a lot like “Bullshit!”

Serena glares at her but goes on with her story. “That night, when I was sleeping, the father came into my room and raped me. I was too frightened to tell my parents or call the police. I was alone in a foreign country, thousands of miles from home.” She looks around the group, hoping for sympathy.

Evie sneezes again—making the same sound.

Serena tries to ignore her.

“Back home, I started having problems—drinking and cutting myself. My parents sent me to see a therapist, who seemed really nice at the beginning until he tried to rape me.”