by Holly Bourne
Holdo didn’t “do” text-speak – considered it an aberration of the English language. He wrote everything out in full, with proper punctuation marks. Once, he’d forgotten to use a comma and Bree was subjected to a mammoth apology.
She fired back a response.
Sure. C U there.
She deliberately used the “C” and “U” to piss him off. She wasn’t sure why. Bree put on her school blazer and was about to run out of her bedroom door when last night’s list caught her eye.
She’d forgotten about it – it lay abandoned on the carpet. She made so many lists, it was hard to remember them all. She’d written this one on an adrenalin comedown. That familiar sensation of calm had reminded her that things weren’t that bad and so the list was meant to jog her memory for next time – hoping it may prevent a next time.
Reasons why I shouldn’t be so bloody miserable all the time
1. I live in a massive house, the kind that makes strangers jealous
2. I suppose, in their own sort of way, both of my parents love me
3. I could be pretty if I wanted…
4. I’m much smarter than most people
5. I know what I want to do with my life
6. I have Holdo
That was it. She’d wanted to list ten – because it just feels nicer, doesn’t it? But she couldn’t think of any more reasons. This, Bree supposed, could be the start of a whole other list.
Reasons to be bloody miserable all the time
1. My life is so crap that I can’t even think of ten stupid things that give me reason NOT to be miserable
But she didn’t have time for that list. Not now. She was late.
Bree ran down the stairs and into the kitchen. She ignored the bowl of muesli, fresh fruit and organic yogurt her mum had left her and took a Pop-Tart out of the cupboard instead. Strawberry. Just what she felt like. She shoved it into her mouth and held it there as she packed her school bag. Then she set the alarm and half-jogged out of the house.
As she waited for the security gate to open, she thought a bit more about her list. How stupid she could be sometimes – thinking her life wasn’t that miserable. Yes, she could list six reasons why things weren’t that bad. But those were just starting points for further elaboration. Elaboration that would ultimately collapse each point.
Take number one, for example.
I live in a massive house, the kind that makes strangers jealous
That, on the surface, was true as true could be. Her house was gigantic. And on a private road as well. Ashdown Drive was the sort of road poorer people deliberately detoured through so they could stare at the houses. Hers was one of the most impressive. It had a security gate with intercom to get through to the sweeping circular driveway. They didn’t have a garden as such – “grounds” was a more appropriate word. It took about five minutes to walk past the property. The outstretched dark-green-light-green-dark-green-light-green stripes of lawn were hidden by carefully manicured privacy hedges. It was the sort of house that everyone peers at, trying to get a glimpse of the lucky ones who live there, and thinks: Wow. Those people must have the most perfectly wonderful lives. I bet they don’t know what a problem looks like. If I lived there, everything would be okay. All the time.
The truth though? Bree hated the house. Nobody tells you that large houses have this horrible habit of making you feel utterly alone. Constantly. She could scream and nobody would hear her. She knew this, she’d tried once. (On a particularly low day.) And the only response had been her own yells echoing endlessly, bouncing around the marble entrance hall.
The security gate felt like a prison gate. She often wondered what it would be like not to be so rich and figured it would be a lot more fun.
“Shut up, Bree,” she told herself.
The gate closed behind her and she walked to meet Holdo. It was October and it was cold. She wished she’d doubled up on the bright tights today. Her mum always despaired of Bree’s fashion choices, which led her onto point two…
I suppose, in their own sort of way, both of my parents love me
It depends how you view love, doesn’t it? Bree had never wanted for anything. Did that mean she was loved? Her dad worked his arse off pretty much 24/7 so she could live in the aforementioned large prison house. He left home before she woke every morning, even Saturdays, and wasn’t usually back until after midnight. She wasn’t exactly sure what he did. In return, her dad barely knew how old she was. The extent of their communication went as follows:
Dad: (In rare moment they bump into each other on the stairs) You behaving yourself in school?
Bree: Yes.
Dad: Good.
Or, there was that time on Christmas day…
Dad: (Carving the turkey) Do you want leg or breast?
Bree: I’m a vegetarian, remember?
Dad: Don’t be so ridiculous. (Carves off a bit of leg and dumps it on her plate)
Then there was Mum. At least she was around – in physical manifestation anyway. Her mum was a full-time yummy mummy. That’s what she liked to call herself. In Bree’s unhumble opinion, the word “yummy” shouldn’t be associated with anyone over the age of forty.
Her mum spent her time doing a variety of increasingly oddly-named exercise classes, getting facials, fillers and Botox done on her regular day trips to Harley Street, and reading about celebrities in garish magazines she left all over the house. She communicated her love to Bree with a constant stream of gift-wrapped packages left on Bree’s bed. Tiffany necklaces, Hollister jumpers – once Mum even got her some lingerie. Lucky, huh? But to Bree it was as welcome as a cat proudly leaving a beheaded mouse oozing blood on your doorstep. She knew people wouldn’t understand. Who wouldn’t want a mother who loaded you with gifts? Especially top-notch ones most girls her age could only fantasize about. But Bree didn’t want necklaces, overpriced knitwear or fancy knickers. She wanted a mother who helped her with her coursework. Someone who made her a cup of tea after school and asked her about what she’d learned, rather than grilling her about whether she’d made any new friends. All the time. Like being popular was the most important thing ever.
All she got was:
“Why aren’t you wearing that jumper I got you?”
Or:
“Is Holdo coming round again? Don’t you have any girlfriends?”
Or:
“You’re so pretty. Why don’t you just DO something with yourself? You’re putting yourself to waste.”
Which led Bree onto…
I could be pretty if I wanted
She could. Now. But she didn’t want to be. She’d tried to be pretty once before, on her first day at secondary school, in some deluded burst of naivety that it might change things. Still blubbery with puppy fat, she’d hoicked her skirt up, carefully painted darker stripes through her hair with a home-colouring kit, smothered her face with blue eyeshadow and pink lipstick and shoved two socks down her bra. The result was the worst first day of secondary school the world had ever known. Jassmine Dallington and her cronies had positively dribbled with delight when they saw her, spluttering on their laughter and rushing to lob new and nastier names at her.
She’d been so stupid to try. And now, puppy fat gone and her face fully grown into, she wouldn’t bother trying again.
What pretty person achieved anything of merit anyway? Who cares what a writer looks like as long as their words are beautiful?
So, much to her mother’s despair, Bree made herself as unattractive as possible.
If you control what they laugh at, invite them to dine out on you…well, then, Bree found they usually stop laughing.
She would wash her hair, on occasion. It was a lanky mouse shade at the moment but had been an array of absurd colours in the past – pink most recently, which still hadn’t quite washed out. She wore the clothes of a frumpy forty-year-old going through a mid-life crisis – all neon this, and novelty-hair-bobbles that. She ate what she wanted, meaning her skin had a near-cons
tant scattering of spots and her thighs rubbed together when she walked. And none of this mattered because…
I’m much smarter than most people
Being pretty was only important at school. And school wasn’t a part of Bree’s life she considered essential to her development. It was a time to endure before the beautiful world of adulthood opened its arms to give her a great big hug and a two-book publishing deal. School was a mere drop in the ocean of a human life. And for the pretty girls at school, their moment would soon be over. They were peaking in their happiness-levels much too early. Which is why Bree stayed ugly – to delay the peakage to a more useful age. Another reason why Bree was much smarter than most people.
She needed to hurry up though. Bree was smart but she wasn’t very punctual. Like, ever. While Holdo was quite the opposite. She wrapped her blazer tighter around her to keep out the cold, barely allowing herself to think about the penultimate entry on last night’s list.
I know what I want to do with my life
But what if it doesn’t want you? All she had ever wanted to do was write. Well, for the past four years anyway. To have people read her words. To leave a tiny imprint of herself on whoever read them. What better way to validate your existence – to prove you had one? But maybe it wasn’t to be.
She wasn’t quite ready to accept that yet.
Though, in the meantime, she had Holdo.
There he was, waiting for her, like he always did. His trademark yellow headphones cupped his ears, and he was wearing that Velvet Underground banana T-shirt over his school jumper – an essential wardrobe item for any wannabe-indie boy. Holdo spotted her, pulled down his headphones and tapped on his watch.
“You’re late again.”
“I’m always late.”
“It’s disrespectful, you know, to keep other people waiting.”
“It’s only been five minutes.”
They began walking towards school, each too stubborn to break the silence. Holdo, of course, broke it first. After a record holdout of five entire minutes.
“So what did you get up to last night?”
Bree stared at the pavement. “I got another rejection letter. It was waiting for me on the doormat when I got home.”
She could see Holdo forgive her lateness as his eyes melted instantly. He never stayed mad at her for long.
“I’m sorry, Bree. I don’t understand it. You’re so talented.”
“I know,” she said, giving him a wry smile as an apology. “I don’t get it either.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not really.” Not with Holdo anyway. When she was this upset, she always found his well-intentioned advice grated rather than helped.
The fallen autumn leaves crunched under her Dr Martens and she stamped to make the crunch louder.
“So what did you get up to last night?” she asked, kicking up a pile of yellow and orange ones and watching them float back down to the pavement. They didn’t have fallen leaves on her road. The handyman jointly hired by the residents blew them away every morning with a special reverse-vacuum machine.
“I watched Apocalypse Now Redux. The three-hour version. It’s so enthralling. Have you seen it?”
“Of course.”
“But have you seen the extended rough-cut?”
“Yes.” She was lying. Bree had only watched the regular cinema version and found the film more puzzling than enthralling. She would never tell Holdo that though. (She’d rather die.)
“Well, we’re in the minority. Most people struggle with the regular one just because it’s over ninety minutes long. Honestly, the attention span of cinema audiences these days is insane. If there isn’t a massive explosion, or a gratuitous sex scene every five seconds, people just don’t want to know…”
Bree let Holdo’s well-exercised rant wash over her. She’d heard it at least twenty times. It was one of his favourites. Along with the ones about how reality TV was destroying the music industry, how Dan Brown should be hanged, drawn and quartered for his Da-Vinci-Code-shaped crimes against literature, and how the film industry had no original screenwriters any more as they spent all their time adapting bestselling novels rather than investing in raw talent.
She sighed. Holdo was her best friend. Her only friend, if she was being honest. Bree knew she wasn’t a very likeable person, but it didn’t bother her mostly. Yes, of course there were moments of crippling loneliness. And, yeah, it would be nice to have a girl to talk to from time to time. But generally she was happy with Holdo.
“…and it just makes me so angry that the Vietnam War was ever allowed to happen, you know? It was just so completely immoral and it’s not like America has learned from it, have they? You’d think they would—”
Ahh. The war. She’d wondered when he would start ranting about the war.
Holdo was your stereotypical rich-kid-rejecting-his-upbringing. The indie sort that honestly believed, if he and Morrissey were to meet, they would become the best of friends. His real name wasn’t Holdo – it was Jeremy Smythe. He’d renamed himself – yes – after Holden in The Catcher In The Rye (although the “o” on the end apparently made it “more original”). But Bree loved Holdo (in a strictly friendship way). He was the only person around who shared her intellect levels and desires to DO something with their privilege instead of resting on the laurels of wealth. Holdo was designing a computer game – he actually knew how to write code for it and everything. It was a cross between Grand Theft Auto and Bugsy Malone. As Bree understood it, the game involved a bullied geek running amok at school with a splurge gun, squirting bullies with cream. Holdo was eventually going to be a self-made millionaire. Bless him – he just needed to get through school first.
She interrupted his war monologue.
“Holdo?”
He stuttered to a stop. “What?”
“I’m a good writer, aren’t I?”
She knew she was. Of course she was. But she could do with some reassurance.
Holdo reached out and squeezed her hand. “Of course you are. I read everything you write and love every word.”
She looked at his hand, wondering how quickly she could detach herself. That was the thing with Holdo: strictly-friends-only wasn’t an opinion he shared.
“Thanks.” She dropped his hand and tucked hers safely back in her pocket.
“Why don’t you talk to Mr Fellows about it?”
She’d already planned to. Mr Fellows was her English teacher and the only adult in existence who noticed her.
“I’ve got English today. I could do.”
“He always seems to cheer you up.”
Bree smiled to herself.
Holdo had no idea.
First published in the UK in 2016 by Usborne Publishing Ltd., Usborne House, 83-85 Saffron Hill, London EC1N 8RT, England. www.usborne.com
Text © Holly Bourne, 2016
Author photo © Dannie Price, 2016
The right of Holly Bourne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
The name Usborne and the devices are Trade Marks of Usborne Publishing Ltd.
All rights reserved. This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or used in any way except as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or loaned or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ePub ISBN 9781474919364
Batch no. 03983/2
Printed in the UK.
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