“Are you sad because I’m going to get a new best friend?” asked Linda. That was sort of why, but I didn’t want her to know, so I shook my head. When she realized I wasn’t going to stop crying she took another step toward the stairs. “I’m going home now,” she said. “I’m going to tell my mammy what you did.”
“Wait,” I said. I lifted up the skirt of my dress and used it to wipe my face, then reached into the pocket, took out Da’s marble, and pushed it toward her. The sunlight made it glint as it rolled across the floor. All the colors in the world.
“Are you giving it me?” she asked, picking it up.
“Yeah,” I said.
“But it’s your marble. Your da gave it you. It’s your best thing.”
“I want you to have it.”
“Why?”
I want you to remember me. I want you to remember to be my best friend. I want you to remember that you have to like me, that it’s your job to like me, because you’re the only one in the whole wide world who does.
“I just do,” I said.
“Okay,” she said, and dropped it into her pocket. She walked round the edge of the room, as far away from me as possible, her eyes still stuck to mine. When she got to the top of the stairs she paused and swayed on the spot. She raised her hand and fluttered her fingers in a little wave, and I waved back. Then she picked her way down the stairs and out of sight. I heard her shoes crunch across the glass and grime of the downstairs room, the slap-slap sound as she ran toward the streets. When she had been sitting in the corner I had noticed that one of her laces was undone. She wouldn’t be able to retie it by herself. I hoped she wouldn’t trip.
The upstairs room was quiet with Linda gone and Ruthie dead. All my different types of fizzing had fizzled away: the sherbet type and the lava type and the spooning-out-my-insides type. They were all gone. I felt full of broken glass instead. I thought perhaps that was why if Mam ever had to touch me, she looked like she was being sliced by something sharp. Because she saw what Da and Linda didn’t see: that I was broken-glass girl. I hurt other people just by being me. There was a sicky, sour taste in my mouth, and I ran my tongue around my teeth to try to get rid of it. When I got to the rotten one I pushed hard. It came out of its socket with a squelch and a shock of pain. I spat it onto my palm. It was brown and crumbly, and my mouth felt empty without it. I wondered whether the rotten tooth had all my badness in it, whether that was why I had always been bad, whether now it was gone I might be good. I hoped so. I was getting lonely with being so bad. I wiped it on my dress, peeled open Ruthie’s hand, and tucked it inside. Her fingers were already starting to go cold.
The light coming into the room was still piercing, the blue still bright enough to make my eyes ache. It bounced off the shiny backs of the wood lice in twinkling sparks. The sun crept into the middle of the hole and beamed straight down onto Ruthie. I looked at her, lying stiff as a baby doll in the middle of the sunlit circle. My hands were tired. My eyes were tired. My heart was tired. Ruthie was never coming back. I shuffled forward on my bottom and lay down next to her, flat and quiet. I wanted my mam. I wanted to put my head on her chest like I had done in the hospital, press her hand to my cheek and feel the lines of her palm on my skin. I didn’t know why. I just wanted it. I thought perhaps it was because I felt a bit frightened. It was horrid, feeling frightened. I put my fingers around Ruthie’s and my tongue in the gap where there was no more rotten tooth. Waited for the scream of sirens. Waited for the police to come and take me to prison for the rest of my life. Me and Ruthie lay and waited together, under the hole in the sky.
Julia
There were no blue lights or sirens at the station, no police cars parked outside. There was just an old man sitting at a table in Choo-Choo’s, reading a paper and drinking a cup of tea.
We walked onto the street and I looked around. There was no one waiting to pounce. I knew I should be happy—I should seize Molly under the arms, pick her up, swing her round—but I felt coldly frightened. In my mind, the police had been going to bundle me into one car and Molly into another, drive me to prison and her to new parents. I was going to be empty and broken and relieved, because I wasn’t going to be in charge anymore. Proper grown-ups were going to look after Molly and prison was going to look after me, and giving up the burden of looking after two whole people was going to feel like taking off a bodysuit of lead.
“Come on,” said Molly. She pulled me toward the high street. The sea loomed up in the distance, gray behind the colors of the funfair.
“Do you want to go there?” I asked.
“The fair?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
She clapped and bounced on the balls of her feet. “Yes! I want
