You Against Me

Statement: A girl and a boy jump into a river. The boy swims over to the girl and says, ‘God, it’s cold.’

Question: What’s the probability they will kiss?’

No, she mustn’t think of Mikey! She especially mustn’t think of kissing him yesterday – his kisses, soft and insubstantial at first, hardly there at all, and yet enough to make her blood leap. She mustn’t think of how the kisses built – becoming desperate, as if they were both searching for something.

She snapped her attention back to the classroom. Her plan was to work hard and make up for all the study sessions she’d missed, and there was no time in that regime for Mikey.

‘So,’ Ms Farish said, ‘let’s remind ourselves of different ways to represent data diagrammatically.’

Ellie wrote down, Horizontal axis, Vertical axis. She listened as Ms Farish described how to group data into classes. But when it came to drawing a graph, she drew a cottage instead, a fire, a boy, a zip. She wrote the words I’ve never felt this with anyone before. And bolded them, boxed them in. Wrote them again in capitals.

No one else seemed to be having trouble concentrating. She looked around at all the heads bent over tables, at all the pens feverishly scribbling. Statistically, there were kids in this room who cried themselves to sleep because of exams. They were exhausted, they had terrible headaches. They woke in the mornings feeling they’d had no sleep at all. Their eyes were itchy, their stomachs ached. These were her classmates, thirty of them, and she barely knew them at all.

What was it she’d said to her dad? None of us knows each other.

Question: If a room has thirty people in it, how many secrets are in the room?

Answer: Infinity.

She had a sudden and overwhelming desire to stand up and confess her own, like some kind of truth Tourette’s. She’d march up to the front of the class, knock Ms Farish out of the way of the interactive whiteboard and write: I made love with Mikey McKenzie in front of a roaring fire and I never imagined love could be so good. Inspired by her bravery, everyone would share their secrets. Ms Farish would tell them why she left her previous school, Joseph would show them the cuts on his arms and explain his compulsion, Alicia would give her reasons for spending every lunch break in the toilets. On and on, round the whole class. Maybe she’d even get a second turn. She’d write: My brother is guilty. Ellie wondered if you would use a bar chart, a pie chart or a histogram to describe the data you gathered.

Outside, spring clouds bowled along, the grass continued to wave, the river flowed as it always had. She wrote a poem: We are naked. You are tender. Your hands know exactly where to be. She ripped it from her notebook, crumpled it into a ball and put it in her pocket. Ms Farish came over and stood at her table.

‘Problems?’ she said.

Ellie shook her head. Ms Farish went away. She tried aversion therapy. Every time she thought of Mikey, she pinched the soft skin on the back of her hand. Concentrating on the whiteboard now, she wrote down the words dependent variable, independent variable as instructed, and began to draw a graph using the data supplied. Within five minutes her hand hurt so much from pinching that she had to stop drawing. She tried to think of horrible things about Mikey, but she couldn’t think of any, and in realizing there were none, she realized how much she wanted to see him again. But if she saw him, she’d have to do something about Karyn. She’d have to get a lawyer like Barry had suggested, make a new statement, get a new family to live with, because hers wouldn’t want her any more.

She drew a cold shower. A shoe. A car crash. She chewed the end of her pen for a minute, then started a new list, Being good. It entailed revision (a lot of it), not eating anything with sugar in it, being nice to her family, dressing virtuously and not contacting Mikey. This immediately made her think of all the opposites – no revision, undressing. Calling him…

Yesterday, on the rug in her grandparents’ cottage, she’d traced kisses along the base of Mikey’s spine and told him, ‘I’ll always have seen you naked.’

He’d turned over to smile at her, his eyes never leaving hers as he mapped a line from her belly to her breasts. He said, ‘I can feel your heart.’ His fingers marked her pulse. He said, ‘Now, now and now.’

How had she ever thought she’d be able to forget him?

She sank her head onto the desk. Images swam into her mind – her mum fanning herself at breakfast and saying I can’t breathe in this house, her dad’s weary smile and barely concealed irritation, the constant fear in Tom’s eyes, the way her mum wouldn’t meet her gaze in the car on the way to school when Ellie said, Shouldn’t we talk about what I said in the garden?, Mikey’s cigarette lighter hidden in her school bag, the knowledge of Karyn McKenzie wounded on a sofa…

‘Ellie?’ Ms Farish stood over the desk frowning. ‘You all right?’

She nodded, startled. Everyone around her was gathering their stuff together and heading out of the door.

Ms Farish said, ‘You can stay here if you want, Ellie, but I suggest you take the opportunity to get some fresh air and come back after lunch for part two.’

The corridors were crazy, as usual. At break time, the teachers disappeared into the staffroom for sugar and caffeine and left the kids to roam like wild buffalo. This was the time of day you were likely to get casually shoved against the lockers, to get your phone nicked, your bag rifled through, chewing gum chucked at you, your dinner money hijacked. The boys gave each other brutal and meaningless thumps. It was survival of the fittest, and the trick was to keep your head down, look no one in the eye and walk purposefully.

At least Ellie wasn’t the centre of attention any more, not since Keira in Year Ten had got pregnant and the gossip machine had turned its attention to who the dad was and if Keira was keeping the baby and why hadn’t she got the morning-after pill in the first place, blah, blah.

It was warm outside and quieter. Ellie walked the edge of the playground looking for somewhere to sit. Her favourite bench had been commandeered by Stacey ever since she realized it was the place Ellie liked to be. She waved at Ellie now, as she did every time she saw her.

‘Hey, bitch.’

‘Leave it, Stacey.’

‘You leave it.’

‘I’m not doing anything.’

‘So you say.’

It was ridiculous that they did this every day. Maybe they’d even miss it if one of them forgot. It was something they both understood, almost routine.

Ellie found a place to sit on the low wall by the fence and turned her face to the sun. Vitamin D was most easily absorbed through the eyelids and Vitamin D was the one that made you happy. She had forty-five minutes to get there.

Thirty-nine

Mikey opened one eye to Jacko, crunching across the gravel towards him. He had his arms up, palms flat, like he was surrendering. It wasn’t funny.

‘I’m sorry, man,’ he said when he got close. ‘About last night, I mean. Serious, I didn’t think it would blow up like that.’

Mikey shook his head and looked back down at the sand, at the boats marooned down there.

‘I had to tell Karyn before someone else did.’

‘Who are you kidding?’

‘It’s true. When I came to pick you up and saw you get on that bus, I knew I wouldn’t be the only one who clocked it. Imagine if some random stranger told her. Imagine how that would feel.’

Mikey glared at him. ‘I haven’t got time for this.’ He scrolled through the texts on his phone. Maybe he’d missed something from Ellie or Mum earlier. Nothing. He checked his voicemail. No new messages.

Jacko sat next to him on the bench. ‘Any news?’

‘Like you care.’

‘I do, actually.’