Fragile Like Us

by Sara Barnard

  “So how do you like Brighton so far?” I asked, choosing the easiest question to start with and hoping it would be enough to fulfill my duty as friend of a friend.

  “It’s great,” Suzanne said, looking back at me and smiling. “I was saying to Roz, you’re both so lucky to have grown up here.”

  I registered the use of “Roz” and bit down on the inside of my lip to stop myself making a face.

  “I told her it’s overrated,” Rosie said.

  “You’ve got a beach!” Suzanne replied with a laugh.

  “A pebble beach!”

  “There are worse places to grow up,” I said. “You’re from Reading, right?”

  Suzanne raised her hand and wiggled it from side to side. “Sort of. From when I was eight.” Anticipating my next question, she added, “I was born in Manchester.”

  That explained the not-southern tinge to her accent.

  “So how come you moved here?” I asked. “Was it, like, a job thing?”

  Her brow crinkled in confusion.

  “I mean, did your parents get a new job or something?” I elaborated.

  “Oh.” She looked uncomfortable. “Actually it’s my aunt that I live with.”

  “Oh,” I said, not sure what to say next, apart from the obvious. I glanced at Rosie to see if this was news to her. Her unconcerned expression suggested not.

  Another silence. I waited, hoping she’d reveal a bit more, but she said nothing. Rosie, apparently enjoying watching the two of us fumble for conversation, raised her eyebrows at me. I could see the ghost of a grin on her face.

  “What does your aunt do?” I asked finally.

  “She’s a chef,” Suzanne said, brightening. “She owns one of the cafés on Queen’s Road. Muddles?”

  “Oh yeah. I know it.” I’d walked past it once with my parents and my mother had commented that Muddles was a stupid name for a café. Dad, in a jaunty mood, had said it was a cozy name. We hadn’t gone in.

  “What do your parents do?” Suzanne asked me.

  “My dad’s a doctor,” I said. “A consultant at the hospital. My mum’s a communications manager for the Samaritans.”

  Her eyebrows lifted, as people’s tended to do when I mentioned my parents’ respective careers. People assumed a lot when they heard “doctor” or “the Samaritans.” Words like “saint” and “hero” and “selfless” and “if only everyone was like them” tended to crop up.

  The truth was more along the lines of a distracted and rarely glimpsed father, and a world-weary, seen-it-all-before mother. From the evidence, they were great at their jobs. But that didn’t necessarily make them golden human beings.

  “What kind of consultant is your dad?” Suzanne asked, the kind of question people asked when they either couldn’t think of anything else to say or just wanted to be polite.

  “ER,” I said.

  She looked instantly impressed. “Wow.”

  “It’s not as interesting as it sounds,” I said.

  “All the best hospital shows are set in the ER,” Suzanne said knowledgeably. “He must have some great stories.”

  “If he does, I never hear them,” I said. “He works a lot. Like, night shifts and stuff? So I don’t really see him much.”

  Suzanne made a face, no doubt because she had no response to this as much as out of sympathy. There was another awkward pause, at which point Rosie finally took pity on us both and spoke up. “Caddy’s parents are great.” I looked at her, surprised. “You know those people and you’re like, oh yeah, you’ve got how to be human figured out.”

  I laughed. “Um, okay.”

  “Seriously.” Rosie raised her eyebrows at me. “I hope you’re grateful.” She turned to Suzanne. “When I was eleven, my baby sister Tansy died”—Suzanne’s eyes went wide at this—“and my mum had trouble coping, so I came to live with Caddy for a few weeks. So I know.”

  “Rosie,” I said, “that’s very heavy information to just drop into a sentence.” Suzanne was still looking stunned.

  “Your baby sister died?” she echoed. “That’s horrible.”

  “Yeah, it was,” Rosie said, and even though her voice was casual I saw her shoulders square and her jaw tighten. These are things you only notice on a best friend. “But the point of the story was Caddy’s parents.”

  “Roz,” I said.

  “That’s horrible,” Suzanne said again, her voice quiet. She was looking at the floor.

  “Do you have any horrible life stories to tell?” Rosie asked. Her voice was cheerful, but it had a definite edge. For all her deliberate nonchalance, I knew she didn’t like talking about Tansy. “Caddy calls them Significant Life Events.”

  “Roz.” My voice was sharper this time. She looked at me, pulling a deliberate innocent face. Sometimes I felt like I was her parent. Reining in Rosie.

  Suzanne looked from me to Rosie, clearly wondering if she should speak. Finally she said, “What counts as significant?”

  “Moving house probably counts,” I said, trying to be generous. “Nothing significant has ever happened to me. I’m dull.”

  Suzanne looked at me a little oddly, and I realized too late that describing myself as dull on first meeting probably wasn’t a good way to make friends. I opened my mouth to try to redeem myself, but my mind had gone blank. Oh well, I thought, resigning myself to her inevitable opinion of me. She’s only Rosie’s school friend. Who cares what she thinks?

  4

  “SO. GOT A BOYFRIEND YET?”

  Tarin arrived home on Sunday evening, tanned and beaming, sporting presents and a new tattoo (three birds in flight on the side of her left wrist). She’d been on a last-minute holiday with her own boyfriend, Adam, in Turkey and so had missed both my birthday and my first week of school.

  “No,” I said flatly. “I promise that I will text you if that happens.”

  “When,” Tarin corrected promptly. “When it happens.”

  I rolled my eyes, but I was smiling. It was hard not to smile around my sister when she was in a good mood. Erratic and vibrant, Tarin filled any room she was in. My most vivid memories of her from my childhood were whirlwinds of color and excitement, punctured by impenetrable clouds of darkness, when nothing would bring her out of herself. She was calmer and more stable now, six years on from her diagnosis, but she was still Tarin, sister extraordinaire.

  “Here,” she said, holding out a bag to me. “It’s not wrapped. Sorry. Happy birthday.”

  The bag contained a scarf: purple and silver, soft, beautiful. I pulled the material gently through my fingers. “It’s gorgeous. Thanks.” I lifted the scarf to my neck and tried to figure out how to wind it the way she always wore hers.

  “Sixteen’s a big one,” Tarin said. “I can’t believe you’re sixteen. In my head you’re still five years old.”

  “Oh, great. Thanks.” I had no idea what I was doing with the scarf. I leaned back to check my reflection to see if my attempt looked as stupid as it felt. My whole head seemed to have suddenly ballooned as my hair—a constant source of frustration—had bunched up underneath it. Said hair, of the slightly bushy variety, was artificially brightened with highlights, from the mousy color it had dulled to from the blond I was born with. No length seemed to distract from the bushiness: short made me look like I had a mane (and not in a good way), while long just gave me more to try and tame. As with so much else in my life, I’d settled for the that’ll-do end of the spectrum and kept it shoulder-length. Usually I tied it back from my face and tried to forget about it.

  I sighed. After I’d pulled my hair from under it, the scarf had become lopsided. I flicked it in annoyance and Tarin leaned across to adjust it for me. Tarin had a tendency to act more like a parent than a sister, given the eight-year age difference and my general lack of worldliness.

  “Has Rosie got a boyfriend?”

  “Not a proper one. She had a thing with some guy in her year, but that was only a few weeks.”

  “I guess she’s got more options tha
n you.” She made a mock-sympathetic face. “You poor thing, all cooped up in that estrogen prison.”

  I laughed. “It’s not that bad.”

  “You’re being deprived. It’s an outrage. I told Mum and Dad, I said to them, ‘Don’t make Caddy grow up without boys. It’s a cruelty.’ But did they listen? Noooo.”

  Tarin had gone to normal school, and by normal I mean neither single-sex nor private. Nobody had made Tarin wear a bright green blazer and knee-high socks. She’d been free to wear too much makeup and thread ribbons through her hair.

  “I’ve decided that I’m definitely going to get one this year though,” I said, hoping that saying it out loud would somehow make it happen. “A boyfriend.”

  “Oh yeah?” Tarin’s face broke into a grin. “You’ve decided?”

  I nodded. “That’s my goal for the year. And I’m going to have sex. And do something significant.”

  “Don’t all three of those count as the same goal?” she asked. “Three birds, one stone? One boy to unlock the set of achievements? With his penis of significance?”

  “You’re teasing me.”

  “I am. Well spotted.” She gave my hair an affectionate tug. “So what are you going to do to make this happen?”

  I paused.

  “Because it’s great that you’ve decided that that’s what you want, but you should be trying to make it happen as well.” This was easy for her to say. Tarin never had to try to make anything happen.

  “Mmm,” I said, starting to regret bringing it up.

  “Not that I think you’ll have any trouble,” she added quickly. “Look, maybe you should do more out-of-school stuff. Meet new people.”

  “Speaking of new people,” I said, seeing my opportunity to change the subject and taking it, “there’s a new girl at Rosie’s school.”

  “Yeah?” Tarin had taken my scarf and wound it around her own neck, fluffing out her light brown hair over it. It suited her far better than it did me.

  “Rosie loves her,” I said.

  “Does she?” She gave me a look, a small, knowing smile dancing on her face. “Are you jealous?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  She laughed. “No, but I know you. You and Rosie are as inseparable as it is possible to be, and you managed it being in different schools for ten years. Now a new girl arrives right near the end of your educational chapter and Rosie likes her?” She made an exaggerated “oh dear” face, then grinned. “New people are always exciting. I wouldn’t worry. It’s the novelty, you know? Have you met her?”

  “Yeah, on Friday.”

  “What’s she like?”

  I hesitated. “Nice.”

  She made an incorrect buzzer noise. “Try again with a word that means something.”

  “She’s very confident. But in a relaxed kind of way, not in a showy way.” I realized as I was speaking that this was close to identical to how Rosie had first described her over the phone. “And funny. Sarcastic kind of funny. Oh, and she’s really pretty.”

  “Sounds unbearable.”

  I had to laugh. “She is much cooler than me.”

  Tarin slapped my arm. “Don’t say things like that! As if cool matters.” Only people to whom cool comes easy, like Tarin herself, ever say things like this. “Did you like her?”

  I thought about it. “I didn’t not like her.”

  “Did you want to like her?”

  “Not really.”

  “Maybe give her a chance at least? If Rosie likes her, she must be all right. And remember, it’s only one week into the school year. They might not even be talking in a few weeks’ time.”

  I tried to remind myself of this later that evening, when I clicked on to Facebook and rolled my finger over my laptop’s touchpad to look at my feed. I let my eyes follow the updates without really taking them in until they snagged on one. Rosie Caron became friends with Suzanne Watts.

  My chest gave a kick of completely irrational jealousy. Of course they’d be friends on Facebook. In fact it was kind of a surprise that it had taken this long. But still. I moved the cursor to hover over Suzanne’s name, hesitated, and then clicked. This turned out to be pointless, as I could see absolutely nothing of her information, except her profile picture. I leaned forward to look at it more closely. She was with a girl and a boy, all of them dressed in an unfamiliar school uniform, and they were clinging to one another in an overly exaggerated embrace. The photo had captured them mid-laugh.

  I clicked back to Rosie’s page and saw that Suzanne had posted a video on her wall. Feeling ridiculously nervous, I clicked on it. It was a puppy trying to get out of a tent, defeated by its own short legs. It was a cute video, but it made me relax because I knew—and Suzanne clearly didn’t know—that Rosie didn’t really like dogs. She should have chosen a video of a cat.

  Feeling brighter, I shut my laptop and went to the bathroom to brush my teeth. I had ten years on this girl, and however interesting or cool she was, time was surely the biggest upper hand of them all.

  5

  BY WEDNESDAY, IT WAS LIKE the summer holidays had never happened. Daily life at Esther’s was back in full swing and my homework schedule was already suffocatingly full. My supposedly optional after-school activities had once again taken over my free time. The old allegiances and grudges, built up over the last four years and sometimes even longer, had been reinstated.

  My own friendship group had remained pretty much the same since year seven, a somewhat disparate group of girls who didn’t quite belong to any of the cliques. This suited me perfectly, because I already had Rosie, and all I really wanted was a group I could fade comfortably into during school hours. Mishka, Allison, Kesh, and I had formed our friendship in the first few days of year seven and had clung to one another ever since.

  “The thing that you want to think about,” Kesh was saying as we waited in line at the canteen, “is whether he’s actually better than any of the other guys out there. And if he’s not, what’s the point?”

  “That’s irrelevant,” Mishka said. “Other guys, whether they’re ‘better’ or not—and what does that even mean?—aren’t viable options.”

  “Why not?” Kesh demanded.

  “Because they’re not interested?” Mishka said, like it was obvious. We were talking about Ty, the boyfriend she’d spent most of her summer with despite the fact that he sounded like a bit of a prick.

  “I’m sorry?” Allison said, her eyebrows raised. “Are you actually saying that the only reason you’re with him is because there’s no one else?”

  “Obviously,” Mishka said flatly, and I laughed.

  “Don’t you like him at all?” Allison pressed.

  Mishka shrugged. “He’s not bad. But I mean, I’m not going to marry him or anything. Caddy, can you pass me that chicken-salad wrap?”

  I leaned over, grabbed the last wrap and handed it to her. A girl behind us let out a groan.

  “It makes sense to me,” I said.

  “Oh, not you too.” Kesh looked disappointed. “You’re supposed to have standards and force them on the rest of us.”

  I rolled my eyes. Two years ago I’d refused the pot offered to me at Kesh’s birthday party and had made sure none of my other friends smoked any. That had been during my pious phase and I probably wouldn’t say no now, but none of them had ever let me forget it. I had become the moral one, and it was a reputation I couldn’t figure out how to shake off.

  “I’d take anyone who showed any interest in me,” I said. “I’ll start having standards when I’m lucky enough to have choices.”

  “Exactly,” Mishka said. “Thank you, Caddy.”

  “You’re all crazy,” Kesh declared.

  “Excuse me, I’m not crazy,” Allison said. She’d been with her boyfriend for almost two years, and usually listened to these kinds of conversations with an annoying smile on her face.

  “Well, can you tell Mish that she shouldn’t waste time on little boys like Ty?” Kesh said, taking a bottle of wa
ter from the cabinet.

  “Is that all you’re having for lunch?” Allison asked instead, pointing at the side salad, which was the only other thing on her tray.

  “You know what,” Mishka said quickly, when Kesh’s face dropped ominously, “you’re probably right. Maybe Ty is a waste of time. But that’s fine with me for now, okay?”

  “Speaking of wasting time,” Allison said brightly, “do you guys have plans this Friday? We could go to the movies.”

  “I’m seeing Rosie,” I said.

  “Of course you are.” Allison made a face. “What about you two?”

  They made plans together as I dug my fork into my spaghetti. I’d never felt much like I was missing out when they spent social time together without me. Rosie had been around long before they’d entered my life, and I knew she’d be there after they’d left it. That was the security of a best friend, and that meant everything.

  * * *

  On Thursday, ten minutes before her nine p.m. phone curfew, Rosie called. “Hey!” she said when I took the phone from my mother. “Just a quick one.”

  “Hey,” I said. “How are—”

  “Can’t talk long,” Rosie interrupted. “Just wanted to tell you there’s a change of plans for tomorrow night. Luke’s parents are away for the weekend so he’s having a party. Me and Suze are going, and she’s going to stay at mine after.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I’ll see you on Saturday evening maybe? Or Sunday?”

  “Okay. Um, who’s Luke?”

  “From our year. His brother is in year twelve, so it should be amazing.” She sounded giddy.

  “I thought you hated those kinds of things.”

  “No, you’re thinking of you.” Ouch. “There’ll be alcohol, so it’ll be fine. Hey, you want to come? You should come!”

  “I won’t know anyone.” I’d tried going to parties with Rosie’s friends in the past, and it hadn’t exactly gone well. I was too anxious and awkward around people I didn’t know, and so usually ended up trailing after Rosie for the whole night. It was not fun for either of us. She hardly ever asked me anymore.