Undone by Cat Clarke
For Lauren
prologue
The boy next door.
It’s a terrible cliché, isn’t it? The one you eventually realize is The One after having your heart pulverized by an assortment of bad boys. We’ve all been there. Things were a little different for her though. She realized he was The One before she’d even met any bad boys, let alone had her heart pulverized by one. And in her case The One happened to be very much gay. That pretty much blows the cliché out of the water, don’t you think?
From the day his family moved into the house next door that was slightly nicer and slightly bigger than hers, he was the centre of all that she did. They were seven years old.
She was the one to make the first move – surprisingly forward for such a shy little creature. She’d been watching him for half an hour through a hole in the bottom of the fence, studying him to make sure he wasn’t the type of boy who pulled the wings off flies or anything like that. He wasn’t. He was the type of boy who would lie flat on his back in the middle of the lawn to make sure the sky above was still the same sky he’d left behind in Manchester. She didn’t know what he was doing at first, of course. In fact, she thought he might be dead. Just my luck, she thought. Emily’s moved to the other side of the world and a stupid boy moves into her house and goes and dies.
She briefly considered throwing a stone at his head to check his aliveness, but decided it was probably more sensible just to ask.
‘Excuse me?’ She was a very polite little girl because she’d been brought up by two very polite parents.
There was no response from the possibly dead boy, so she raised her voice. ‘EXCUSE ME! Are you dead?’
The boy slowly turned his head so he was looking straight at her face peering through the hole in the fence. His eyes were the same colour as the sky and his hair was golden like . . . gold.
The boy narrowed his eyes. ‘No, I’m Kai. Are you dead?’
The girl laughed. ‘Of course not!’
‘Good. We can be friends then.’
The girl liked the sound of that.
It was a good start. And the middle was good too. But the ending? Well, the ending left a lot to be desired. She would have written it differently, if she’d had a say in the matter. Every good story deserves a happy ending – it’s a basic rule of storytelling.
The boy next door certainly shouldn’t die.
part one
chapter one
I miss Kai more than I can say. It’s not something that can be put into words; it’s too big. There is a gaping black hole in my life and it’s all that I can do not to get sucked into it and disappear forever. He meant everything to me. It sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s really not. We took ‘inseparable’ to a whole new level. It wasn’t even a week before Kai’s dad took a couple of slats out of the fence so that we could wander between the gardens as we pleased.
Mum thought it was sweet at first – two peas in a pod, that’s what she called us. For the first few years we were actually three peas: Kai, me and his little sister, Louise. She was a gap-toothed, blonde-bunched little ray of sunshine – following us around everywhere whether we liked it or not.
There’s a really cute picture that must have been taken when Kai and I were about eight or nine. It was Halloween and Kai was supposed to have been dressing up as a wizard but he wanted to look the same as me. He made a better witch than I did. He had green face paint, warts made out of Rice Krispies and a robe that wasn’t made from a black bin liner. His dad had even made him a real, proper broomstick. Louise was dressed as the pinkest, sparkliest fairy you could ever imagine, brandishing a wand at Kai like she was trying to ward off his witchy evilness. That photo used to occupy the red frame on my bedside table, before I replaced it with one of just the two of us – Kai and me – a few years ago.
I wasn’t jealous that Kai managed to outshine me every single Halloween. I wasn’t jealous that people were drawn to him in a way they were never, ever drawn to me (or to Louise for that matter). I didn’t even know how to be jealous of Kai. I think I was a little bit in awe of everything he did.
Kai was clever and funny and kind. I was ten years old when I realized I wanted to marry him. My idea of married life might not have been entirely realistic, since it involved us living in adjacent houses. I didn’t get as far as picturing us having children, because where would they have lived?
I was devastated when Kai and his family moved house the day after my tenth birthday, even though the new house was only a four-minute walk away (four minutes and twenty-three seconds at normal walking pace, Kai proudly informed me the day after the move).
It wasn’t till I was eleven or so that Mum started to worry about me spending every second of every minute of every day with him. It was around then that she stopped us sleeping in the same bed (eliciting total outrage from me and mild indignation from Kai. He never really got outraged about anything). She wouldn’t tell me why it wasn’t OK for us to share a bed any more, and I was so cross I didn’t speak to her for three and a half hours (until she coaxed me downstairs with the promise of Nutella on toast).
‘Aren’t there any girls at school you’d like to invite round for a sleepover?’ Mum asked one day in the car on the way to the supermarket. She glanced at me quickly before returning her attention to the traffic.