Girl Unknown(90)

He wondered if Zo? had an eating disorder, she was so thin. A girl in the orchestra, a viola player named Claire Waters, had anorexia. Up close, you could see how papery the skin on her face was over the square bone of her jaw. Her skin was kind of hairy too, light blonde hair, like the hair on her stick-like arms. Robbie sat behind Claire with his cello, so he spent a lot of time staring at the side of her face. She’d dropped out of the orchestra before Easter and someone said she’d been hospitalized. Someone else said they’d seen her and her hair had fallen out – she was almost completely bald on one side of her head.

Zo?’s hair was glorious. He’d never use that word out loud to describe it, but privately that was what he thought. Glorious, luminous. The first time he’d met her, he’d felt an urge to touch it – not that he did. Eventually, a long time after that, he got to put his hand on her hair and he can remember the prickly feeling that shivered over the back of his scalp when he felt his hand sink into those soft curls.

‘What do you think?’ Holly had asked him.

It was late in the evening, both of them in his room. Downstairs their mum was tidying up. Dad was dropping Zo? home.

He shrugged. ‘She seemed okay.’

‘Really?’

He flicked the page of his magazine, said nothing.

‘I thought she was a bit full of herself.’

He let her talk for a while, zoning out. He was tired. It had been a weird day. The truth was, he didn’t know if he liked Zo?. Her manner had seemed polite, a little shy perhaps, but at one point she had caught him looking and smiled at him – a different kind of smile from the one she’d given the others. He’d seen the spark come into her eye, something conspiratorial about it, mischievous, drawing him in, making an ally of him. But he didn’t know if the sum of all these impressions amounted to liking her.

‘Want to see my room?’ he’d asked, the next Sunday she’d come over for lunch.

He’d never had a girl up to his room before. Several guys in his class had claimed they’d had sex with girls in their rooms. He wasn’t sure he believed them, although maybe one or two. Robbie himself had kissed only three girls – sweaty encounters on the dance-floor at Wesley that had never gone any further. He’d tried to get off with a girl in the orchestra at a party once but she’d laughed with surprise, afterwards telling him he was the kind of guy girls loved to have as a friend without the complications of sex. She’d meant to be kind but he’d burned with humiliation.

‘Cool!’ Zo? had said, when she’d seen the poster of Thin Lizzy on his wall – Phil Lynott’s giant head surrounded by a corona of psychedelic swirls. ‘You’re into his music?’

‘Yeah! Jailbreak is like my favourite album ever.’

‘Put it on,’ she said, and he scrolled through his iPod while she sat back on his bed, making herself comfortable among his pillows.

They talked about music for a while, then films. Her taste leaned towards the indie end of the spectrum but she admitted to a weakness for rom-coms. ‘You won’t tell anyone, will you?’ she had said, giving him that conspiratorial smile again. He noticed that her front teeth overlapped slightly.

He made some comment then about a Kate Hudson flick he’d read a review of, and she hooted with laughter. ‘You’re so funny, Robbie,’ she’d said. ‘You crack me up.’

He felt himself grinning foolishly. No one ever called him funny, especially not girls.

From then on she came up to his bedroom every Sunday once lunch had been cleared away. Flopping on to his bed with an air of exhaustion, like all the politeness downstairs had been a front but now, up in his room, she could be herself. The differences he’d been so hung up on at the start receded, replaced by the familiar. Downstairs, it was prickly with formality, none of them easy with her – particularly his mother and Holly. But up in his room, just him and Zo?, it was like they’d known each other for ever.

When all that stuff blew up in school over what he’d been doing to Miss Murphy, she was the only one who didn’t give him shit. Even Holly had gone all supercilious on him, calling him a delinquent. ‘You’re eleven!’ he had shouted after her, then slammed the door of his room. It made him so mad, being punished like that. Couldn’t any of them understand? Intimidating that teacher, pushing her to the ground, it was an honourable thing! Even his mother, who should have been grateful, kept giving him the thin-lipped look of disapproval he couldn’t stand, constantly watching him with anxious eyes. And as for his dad, Robbie thought, don’t get him started! They were so busy with their own jobs, his dad nearly having an aneurism over the professorship and whether or not he’d get it, his mum thinking she was Sheryl Sandberg all of a sudden with her power suits and her appointment diary and her client portfolio. Didn’t either of them realize they were lucky to have such a good kid? Compared to some of the morons and thugs in his year, Robbie was a goddamned saint!

‘Why should your mother be grateful for what you did?’ Zo? asked, in a ruminative kind of way. She was sitting on his bed, listening to a barrage of grievances that he’d stored up over the whole week of his confinement.

‘What?’

He had heard what she’d said, and he knew what she meant, but he wanted to buy himself a few seconds to think. She didn’t know about his mum. Could he tell her? Part of him knew that telling her would constitute a betrayal, but he was so angry with his mother right then. Fuck it, he thought.