Girl A(97)

I was assigned two welcome buddies, girls from my class who accompanied me to lunch and between lessons, ensuring, at all times, that I had somebody to sit with; that the correct textbooks were in my bag; that I knew exactly where I was going. After the first week, I no longer required their services, and in time they peeled away and left me to navigate the corridors alone. The other students were pleasant enough, but in the evenings, I missed the slew of text messages that would form tomorrow’s gossip. After my first term, I wasn’t invited to many parties.

Still, then: friendship eluded me. I studied the students at lunchtime and in our breaks, trying to understand this particular form of magic. They laughed so easily – stupidly, really – about anything. None of them seemed as interesting as Ethan, or as bright as Evie.

‘It isn’t magic, Lex,’ Dr K had said. ‘You just have to’ – she shrugged – ‘put yourself out there.’

I imagined this: sidling up to a table of my peers and setting down my lunch tray beside them. ‘Which school were you at before here?’ somebody would ask, as they had done already, and I would shift forward in my chair: ‘Well—’

I raised an eyebrow, and Dr K started to laugh.

‘For what it’s worth,’ she said, ‘I never found it particularly easy myself.’

And I wasn’t unhappy. Each evening, at the dinner table, my parents were endlessly interested in my day. At night, I spoke to Evie, at first as if she was there, beside me in my new, clean bed, and later with my phone held to my ear, so that it was easier to believe. Nobody laughed when I responded to a question in class, or read my essay aloud. I was strange and tolerated. ‘I’m not lonely,’ I said, to Dr K, and that was the truth of it.

And there was the day when I ate Christmas.

My first December with the Jamesons. We had performed all of the traditions of a family. Tentatively wearing our new lives. We had walked to town to collect a tree, which smelt like the cold, and which was much, much too tall for the living room. ‘It will never fit,’ I said to Mum, waiting outside the garden centre for Dad to pay; this seemed like a waste of expenditure, and it concerned me.

‘I wouldn’t worry,’ Mum said. ‘This is an annual event.’

And when she saw that I was still frowning: ‘We’ll laugh about it later. I promise.’

I had a new range of Christmas paraphernalia: a CD of classic Christmas songs, and an advent calendar, and a jumper with penguins on it. To my scepticism, I had a stocking.

‘Santa Claus doesn’t exist,’ I said.

‘Well, yes,’ Dad said. ‘But presents do.’

We spent Christmas Eve finalizing our preparations. I wrapped presents at a glacial pace, with a stern eye for detail. ‘They don’t have to be that neat, Lex,’ Mum said, but I was determined that they would be. Carols pealed from the kitchen. Mum baked in a frenzy, so that every half an hour, the oven alarm signalled a new smell. We were summoned for strange, specific tasks: dressing the gingerbread men, or counting the cheeses.

In the night, the smells stirred all through the house. I lay in bed, glowing with the pleasures of the day, contemplating everything that we had made: the crimped crusts of the mince pies; the snap of each gingerbread man; the vat of custard, speckled with vanilla. My stomach churned, haunted with the ghosts of hunger past.

I lifted my arms over my head. Freedom.

First the stairs, and then the kitchen. The fridge bulged from the darkness, stuffed. Just one thing, I thought. Something small.

I heaved the cheeseboard from the top shelf, and set it on the kitchen counter. I unwrapped the first little paper parcel and tugged away a slab of Comté. My hands were shaking. The taste of it spread across my tongue. Already my fingers were unravelling the next wrapper. Please, I thought: stop. This is a terrible idea. I was eating faster, now, and the hunger demanded something new. In the first cupboard I tried was the Christmas cake, sealed in its special festive tin. That, then. The gingerbread men lay beside it, and I took them too.

For fifteen minutes, I feasted in the dark. A starved Christmas spirit, gorging at the family table. There was food on my chin, and beneath my nails. A dull, helpless horror had set across my limbs, weighing me to the table. By the time my parents reached the threshold, I was contemplating my next, grotesque course: the plump, pink turkey, or the dish of brandy butter in the fridge door.

In the kitchen light, I could see that it didn’t look good. The cake was a rubble of fruit. The gingerbread men were massacred. Cheese sweated across the table. The fridge door was still parted, and humming.

I swallowed.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t—’

‘God,’ Mum said. ‘It was meant to be perfect.’

There was a thing on her face which I hadn’t seen for a while. The wrinkle of it in her mouth and between her eyes. Dad saw it, too, and took her arm so hard that she yelped.

‘Don’t you—’ he said, and she turned to him. He said something too quiet for me to hear. He was still holding her arm. When she looked back to me, the ugliness had gone, and she was only incredulous. She was just about to laugh.

‘We thought that you would be looking for presents,’ she said, and instead of laughing, she turned into Dad’s chest, and started to cry.

The days were long, but weeks were passing. When I had last spoken to Ethan, he had been terse, and uninterested in how I was.