“Miss King said it was the best in the class,” she said. “She’s so nice, isn’t she?”
“Angelic,” I said.
It was difficult to imagine a flower crown worse than the one on Molly’s bedroom shelf. I thought perhaps some kids had just stuck paper straight onto their faces.
“If it’s the first day of spring does that mean it’ll get warmer now?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. The wind coming off the sea was so biting I couldn’t imagine it ever being warm again. Molly scuffed her shoes on the ground and sighed.
“I’ll ask Miss King,” she said. “She’ll know. She knows everything. She’s so clever, isn’t she?”
“A genius,” I said.
I pressed my fingers to my eyelids. They felt like flower petals: soft, furred, slightly swollen. The pain had roiled up as we had watched the other-kid walk along the wall, pouring to the front of my face like heated engine oil, and it wasn’t shifting. High-pitched, humming pain. I kneaded the tops of my cheekbones until all I could feel was pressure.
“Can we go arcade after school?” Molly asked. She was looking past me, past the row of burger vans and the shut-up funfair. Slot machine noise trickled down to meet us—the rattle of money being sucked away.
“Can we go to the arcade,” I said.
“I asked you that,” she said. “Can we? I’ve got coins.” She took four pennies and a tiddlywink from her pocket and shook them at me.
“No,” I said. “Hurry up. We’re going to be late.”
We weren’t going to be late. We were never late. We left the apartment at eight o’clock every morning and got to school at eight fifteen, before most kids had finished breakfast. If we had left later we would have risked seeing other-mothers on the journey, bleating and tutting and letting their other-kids walk on walls. I couldn’t protect us from everything, but I could protect us from that.
By eight twenty we were at the school entrance, huddling under the WELCOME plaque. As we waited, an unwelcoming receptionist clopped up to the side gate, unlocked it, and slipped through.
“We’re very early this morning,” I said, loud enough to carry across to her. “Much earlier than usual,” I nearly shouted. Molly looked at me with something like pity, then pushed herself against the fence, patterning her forehead with a grid of grooves.
“That’s breakfast club,” she said. She pointed to the dining hall, which was oozing the clink and chatter of spoons and kids.
“You’ve had breakfast,” I said. The receptionist had disappeared into the building, but I still said it loudly. “You had breakfast before we left.”
“I could have more breakfast.”
“Are you still hungry? Do you need something else to eat?”
“Not really.”
By the time the caretaker ambled up to unlock the gates, we had been joined by the army of other-mothers and other-kids, and I had been reminded of why the other-mother avoidance plan was in place. They grouped in huddles, talking at whiplash speed, breaking into laughter that made my ears ring. I always had the same feeling when they engulfed me: that I was in disguise as a member of another species. The way they circled and cooed reminded me of pigeons, so that was what they became—a gaggle of birds—and I was a person with feathers stuck to my clothes. They looked at me and looked away, embarrassed by my big, stark sticking-out. When Abigail arrived Molly ran to meet her, and I felt naked without my little shield. Abigail had brick-colored hair and tiny gold studs in her ears. I watched the two girls together, coiling around each other, breathing in each other’s air. I felt their closeness as an ache, but I didn’t know what I ached for—to have Molly all to myself, or a friend to coil around.
By nine o’clock the playground was a sea of ankle socks and polyester. Around us, other-mothers began plastering other-kids in kisses and high-pitched exclamations.
“Have a lovely day, sweetie!”
“I can’t wait to see you later, precious!”
“I love you so much, angel!”
When the bell rang the other-kids tottered into lines and the other-mothers tottered home to do the laundry. I waited until Miss King saw me, then called Molly over. I gave her the book bag, the PE kit, the plastic pot of peeled-and-cut-up apple, and she went to Miss King like an iron filing to a magnet. She didn’t turn to smile or wave. Across the playground, an other-kid had attached himself to an other-mother’s waist and was refusing to let go. I felt for him: it was what I wanted to do to Molly each morning, before she could go to Miss King. I wanted to cling to her, and when her teacher tried to peel us apart I wanted to say, “But we are made of each other. We are parts of the same whole. Don’t you know she grew inside me, like one of my organs?” It seemed extravagantly cruel that there was no biological system for keeping Molly with me always, no way of carrying her around in a pouch above my pelvis like a joey.
• • •
The phone in the apartment started ringing as I fumbled with my keys outside. Behind me I could feel people bustling and buses passing, stuffed with hot breath and bored faces. None of them seemed to mind the noise, but it made me want to sink onto the ground. I wanted to crouch, then kneel, then rest my forehead on the concrete. Dry headache boiled in the space behind my eyes, and the pavement looked quenching.
I hadn’t known what the apartment phone sounded like until Saturday morning. The shrieking had split the air and I had looked at the hob, at the oven, at the radiators. I had sniffed for smoke. Molly got up from the couch without shifting her eyes from the telly and reached for where the phone was mounted on the wall. I connected the sight and the sound slowly, clunkily, and
