by Sara Barnard
L for ‘lungs’. I look at the diagrams, the sideways arrows. I write in the answers to the four questions in the section, but my hand is trembling slightly and my chest feels so tight it’s painful.
I move on to the next question. I can’t answer it. Next question. Guess. Next question. God, I’m so stupid. Can’t even answer questions on a Foundation Biology paper.
‘You’re not stupid, Eden; don’t say that.’
Shut up, Bonnie. You’re not even here.
All around me my classmates are scribbling away, looks of intense concentration on their faces. Everyone, even the friends I’d joked around with during class instead of working, is fully in exam mode. I can see the back of Connor’s head bent over his paper. I try and think of his smiling face.
Half an hour passes and my heart is fluttering with panic. It’s not just that I’m not going to do well on this paper. I might not even pass. I’m thinking of myself on results day, looking at my letter, seeing a big fat F next to Biology. F for ‘Foundation’. F for ‘Failure’. I imagine Bonnie giving me a hug, telling me it doesn’t matter.
Will Bonnie even be back by then?
Will she have any results to collect?
Stop thinking about Bonnie.
A question comes up about compost, and it’s finally something I know. I answer four questions in a row – correctly, I’m pretty sure – and the relief must be too much for my frazzled, panicking brain because to my absolute horror I realize there are tears spilling from eyes and trailing down my cheeks. I am crying. In school. Two years ago I fell down half a flight of stairs going into the canteen and broke my ankle, and I swear not a single tear escaped.
But now I’m crying in the middle of the gym and apparently there’s nothing I can do about it, because I don’t stop for the rest of the exam. I cry through all the questions I can’t answer and all the questions I can. I cry through the extra time I get allotted because of my dyslexia. I cry while the papers are collected, while everyone starts to file out row by row. I cry when Mrs Berwick touches my arm as she walks past me.
When I walk out of the gym, I don’t stop to talk to anyone, obviously. I go straight to the toilets, lock myself in a cubicle and wait for fifteen minutes, which I’m sure will be enough for even the nosiest of my classmates to get bored of waiting for me.
When I venture out, I see Connor sitting alone on the bench by the door, a paperback open in his hand, brow furrowed in concentration. I go to sit next to him and he reaches out an arm to me without a word. I lean into him and he hugs me, warm and close, and I feel the tension in my chest relax, my shoulders loosen.
‘Ah, Eden.’ It’s Mrs Berwick, appearing around the corner.
‘Ah, shit,’ I mutter.
‘Hi, Mrs Berwick,’ Connor says loudly.
‘Are you feeling OK, Eden?’ Mrs Berwick asks me. ‘You seemed very upset during the exam.’
‘I’m fine,’ I say, a clear lie.
‘If you’re about to leave,’ she says, ‘I suggest going across the playing field instead of the car park. We’ve opened the gate at the back so students can avoid the journalists.’
‘Thanks, miss,’ Connor says. He squeezes my wrist. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Is it true, what Mr Cohn’s ex-girlfriend said?’ I ask.
Mrs Berwick’s whole face tightens. I watch her press her lips together, but she doesn’t answer me. It is true. And I bet she was the one who made the call about not following it up.
‘So you could have stopped this?’ I press. ‘All of you. You could have stopped him.’
‘This isn’t appropriate, Eden,’ Mrs Berwick says.
‘Who cares about what’s appropriate?’ I demand, my voice coming out all shrill. I can’t bloody believe this place. ‘They’re gone.’
Connor has taken hold of my arm and is steering me towards the exit. ‘Bye, Mrs Berwick,’ he calls.
When we’re outside, I shake him off irritably. ‘For God’s sake, Connor. You’re such a suck-up.’
‘Why bother yelling at Mrs Berwick?’ he asks. ‘You think that’s going to bring Bonnie back?’ I glare at him and he grins, crossing his two forefingers against each other in the air. ‘Hashtag!’
I try not to laugh. ‘You suck.’
‘Made you smile, though,’ he points out, pleased with himself.
We head across the playing field together and out the open back gate, which feels very weird to me. This is meant to be the secret smoking spot, not an authorized exit. It’s where you go if you’re bunking off a lesson or something. In all my years at Kett, including all the times it’s been me hiding out here, I’ve never seen the gate open. Everything is wrong.
‘Do you have to go straight home?’ I ask Connor as we walk out into the street.
Connor nods. ‘Yeah, sorry. I can walk you partway, though?’
This is better than nothing, so I take the hand he’s holding out to me and let him lead the way.
‘Do you want to talk about the exam?’ Connor asks.
‘Nope.’
‘Was it, um . . . why you were crying? Or was that a Bonnie thing?’
I lift my shoulders in a shrug, because I don’t even know what the answer is. Probably a bit of both.
‘I’ve never seen you cry before,’ he says.
The words are such a surprise that I find myself shaking my head. ‘That’s not true,’ I say. ‘You must’ve.’ We’ve been together for over a year. There’s no way he hasn’t seen me cry in that whole time. That would be weird, right?
‘No, really,’ he says. ‘I would’ve remembered.’
I frown at a passing cat. How can I not have cried in front of my boyfriend? What’s wrong with me? ‘I’m not much of a crier,’ I say finally, which is true. In fact, now I think about it, I can’t remember the last time I cried at something. Oh wait, yes I can. It was in March. Daisy was ill with some kind of virus and it had made her all droopy and sad, and we watched A Little Princess together. You just try and watch a film like that with the little sister you got adopted with while she’s cuddled up close, sniffling on to your T-shirt, and not cry. It’s impossible.
‘Are you feeling better now?’ Connor asks. ‘I feel like I should be doing something to make you feel better.’
I smile. ‘You are. Anyway, I’m fine. Really. Totally fine. See?’ I point at my face. ‘No more crying.’
When I let myself into the house, I hear Carolyn come hurrying through the kitchen to greet me. I close the door behind me and turn in time to see that she’s all smiles.
‘How did it go?’ she asks.
‘And I burst into tears.
‘Oh, Eden!’ she gasps, horrified. She reaches for me, taking hold of both my hands. ‘What’s wrong, darling?’
There are a lot of responses I could give to this question, considering I just failed my first GCSE and I actually care even though I always thought I didn’t and my best friend is shacking up with her music teacher and I’m the only one who knows where they are.
What I say, through sobs, is: ‘Bonnie wasn’t there.’
‘Oh no,’ Carolyn says, a soft murmur. ‘Did you think she would be?’
I shake my head and nod at the same time, because I know it’s stupid and senseless, but somewhere in me I really had been thinking that she’d be there, because the Bonnie I know wouldn’t miss her GCSEs. But she has, and that means I don’t really know her at all, and maybe I never did. And that hurts.
‘Let’s go and sit in the living room,’ Carolyn says, guiding me.
‘I’ll make some tea,’ Valerie says. When did she turn up? I blink through my tears and see that she’s standing behind Carolyn, a sympathetic half-smile on her face.
‘I don’t want tea,’ I growl, dashing the tears from my eyes with my sleeve.
‘Gin?’ Valerie offers.
‘Valerie!’ Carolyn scolds.
In the living room, Carolyn sits me on the sofa and fusses with a blanket, and I somehow manage to feel both smothered by
her attention and needy for more of it. She sits next to me and takes my hand. ‘Let’s get the exam out of the way first. How did it go?’
‘Awful,’ I say. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘That’s fine; I understand. But just tell me, was it actually awful, or do you think you might be making it worse in your head?’
‘I didn’t even answer half the questions.’
I hear a very soft ‘Oh’ and I look over in time to see Carolyn paste an encouraging smile over her worried face. ‘It’s just one exam,’ she says, most likely talking to herself as much as to me. ‘You’ve got a lot going on, and it’s just one exam.’
There’s a silence. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘Oh, no, Eden, you don’t need to be sorry.’ She squeezes my hand, tight and sudden. ‘I’m not going to love you any less because you didn’t get an A on one Biology exam.’
She says this as Valerie walks into the room, carefully holding on to three mugs of tea. Valerie, who got As in every single one of her exams. I see something unreadable flash across her face. Our eyes meet, and then she looks away.
‘Do you want to talk about Bonnie?’ Carolyn asks, reaching out with a smile to take one of the mugs.
I shrug, but it’s half-hearted. ‘What’s there to say?’
‘Tell me why you’re so upset,’ she says. ‘Let’s start there.’
Valerie sinks down on to the carpet beside the sofa, curling her legs up underneath her.
‘I don’t understand how she can be doing this,’ I say finally. I can feel fresh tears starting to build at the corners of my eyes. ‘How she can ruin her life like this. I’m trying to understand why she’d run off with Mr Cohn –’ at his name, my voice breaks a little, and the tears blink down on to my cheeks – ‘when that’s such a crazy thing to do and he’s so old and she’s so . . . She’s meant to be the sensible one.’
‘It’s a lot to try and understand,’ Carolyn says. ‘I don’t think any of us understand, not really.’
‘But why didn’t she tell me?’ I ask. My voice is hoarse through my tears; I hate how raw I sound. And feel.
Carolyn is silent for a while, stroking my hair. ‘Most likely she knew it was wrong,’ she says finally, ‘and telling you would mean having to face that. And I wouldn’t discount the possibility that Mr Cohn made sure she kept it all quiet. He has the most to lose, of course. And it’s very easy to convince someone besotted to do what you say, even if that means lying to their best friends, or their family.’
I don’t say anything, because what I’m thinking is that if Bonnie didn’t tell me because she knew it was wrong, why did she decide to tell me she was running away with him? That’s surely a lot worse than a secret affair. None of this makes any sense.
‘Why did she go now?’ I ask. Now I’m talking, all the whirling worries I’ve been having are coming out. ‘Why now? She’s been so obsessed with exams and qualifications for so long. Why go just when they’re about to start?’
‘Probably for that reason,’ Valerie says. ‘She was under so much pressure that she just broke under it and gave up completely. That happens.’
I frown. ‘Bonnie’s not the kind of person who gives up.’
‘She is now. She’s run away, Eeds.’
‘Yeah, but with Mr Cohn.’
‘People don’t just run to things,’ Valerie says. ‘It’s called running away for a reason. I don’t think she’s chosen Jack Cohn over her GCSEs, if that’s what you’re saying. I think she was escaping them.’
‘Why would she need to escape them? She’s so smart. It’s what she’s been working for. It’d be like training for a marathon and then just not running it. It would make no sense.’
‘If you really want to understand why she’s done this,’ Valerie says, ‘you should try to have a bit more empathy for her reality. Being so young and being under so much pressure. That’s hard.’
‘But she wanted it,’ I say, my voice coming out harsher than I’d intended. ‘You’re making out like it was all put on her, but it wasn’t. She was the one who was obsessed with being top and getting the grades. No one made her be such an overachiever.’
‘You think it counts any less when the person is putting pressure on themselves?’
‘Well, yeah. I told her she should calm down and stop stressing herself out so much. But she never listened to me, and now suddenly she’s gone, and I’m meant to feel bad for not seeing it coming?’
‘What?’ Valerie is shaking her head. ‘No one said anything about whether you should feel bad. This isn’t about you, Eden.’
‘Great, thanks,’ I snap. Bloody perfect Valerie and her sodding answer for fucking everything. ‘It’s more about me than you. Why are you even here?’
‘Eden,’ Carolyn says, her hand on my wrist.
‘I’m here for you,’ Valerie says. Her face is flushed. ‘So don’t fucking talk to me like that, OK?’
‘Girls.’ Carolyn says it like a plea. ‘Don’t fight.’
I know I should apologize, but I don’t want to, so I don’t. I bite down on my lip and swallow and look down at the tea Valerie made for me. The silence stretches on. I can feel Carolyn and Valerie making eyes at each other, a whole voiceless conversation going on right over my head.
‘I’m going to go out for a bit,’ Valerie says finally, getting to her feet. ‘See you later.’
Sometimes I’m not a very nice person.
‘Do you want some company?’ Carolyn asks her.
‘No, I’m fine.’
‘Thanks for the tea,’ I mumble.
Valerie pauses slightly on her way out of the living room. She glances at me. ‘No problem,’ she says, then leaves.
I stare down at my lap, not wanting to see the look on Carolyn’s face, until I hear the front door close, a car door opening, the engine starting. ‘Sorry,’ I mutter.
‘She wants to be closer to you,’ Carolyn says, which makes me feel worse because I already know this. ‘Maybe you could be a little . . . gentler with her.’
Why would she want to be closer to me when I’m such a bitch? I wonder. I’ve never made things easy for Valerie, and the fact that she carries on trying regardless just makes it clearer that she’s a better person than me. Like that wasn’t obvious anyway.
‘I’m just worried about Bonnie,’ I say.
‘I know, love.’
‘If she didn’t come back for this, what will she come back for?’
‘There are an awful lot more reasons to come back to Larking than exams,’ Carolyn says. ‘Her family. Her home. You.’
‘So you think she will come back?’ I ask.
‘Yes, I do,’ she says, surprising me with how fast she responds. ‘True, I don’t know if that will be of her own volition, but the police will find them eventually.’
‘How?’
‘Oh, they’ll track them down somehow. Bonnie or Mr Cohn will talk to someone they shouldn’t, or someone here who knows something will slip up. No one stays hidden forever.’
‘Even if they want to?’
‘Especially if they want to.’
‘OK,’ I say. My voice sounds so small. I’m not sure whether the idea of Bonnie being brought back against her will is that much better than her not coming back at all.
‘Oh, Eden,’ Carolyn says, putting her arm around me again and squeezing me in for a hug. ‘I’m sorry this is such a hard time for you. Look, maybe we should go away this weekend. Get you far from this . . . this circus. Clear your head.’
‘Go where?’ I ask. I don’t want to be anywhere else but here at home, not until Bonnie gets back. What if they find her while I’m off somewhere else?
‘We could always take a drive to Norfolk, see Bob’s parents,’ she suggests.
‘Mmm,’ I say, unenthusiastic. I like Bob’s parents, but I can’t imagine having to put on my best adopted-granddaughter face right now.
‘Maybe have a think about it,’ Carolyn says. ‘I really think a break could do yo
u good.’
The only break that would do me good, I think but can’t say, is one to Yorkshire to see Bonnie, if that’s even where she still is. That would be a trip worth taking. Something in the back of my mind gives a little click at this; the start of an idea. Thought-kindling.
‘I’ll think about it,’ I say.
15
I go up to my room and sit on my bed for a while, turning my phone over in my fingers, trying not to think about Bonnie. Her absence and silence today is, in a weird kind of way, more unsettling than anything that’s happened so far this week, and thinking about it makes me feel nauseous. She’s not just physically gone any more. Something else feels lost, something I don’t understand. Something that might not come back, even if she does. When she does.
I flop on to my back and stare at the ceiling, wondering despite myself whether Valerie was right about the whole Bonnie-putting-herself-under-pressure thing. I don’t want Valerie to be right about this, but then again, she’s right about everything else, so why should this be any different?
And then, of course, my phone buzzes with a message from Bonnie. Hi! How was the exam? :)
It’s the smiley face that does it. Do you even care?
Ivy
?! Of course I care!
Me
The exam was ages ago.
Are you cross? What’s the matter?
Nothing. The exam was shit. How’s Yorkshire?
Ivy
We’re not in Yorkshire any more!
The ‘. . .’ of an incoming message appears onscreen, so I know she’s elaborating, but I toss my phone to the other side of the bed and sink, face down, against my sheets. I can’t keep up with this any more. I’m not even sure I want to. It’s just all so tiring. For a few moments I imagine taking the phone downstairs and presenting the messages to Carolyn. I wouldn’t even have to say anything. Show, not tell.
I let out a sigh-groan and sit up, reaching for my phone again. I know I can’t do that. Even if I was prepared to betray Bonnie – which I’m not, however annoyed I am – I’ve lied too much to be able to do it now. If I sell her down the river, I’ll get dragged in too.
