by Sara Barnard
As I took all of this in, I could see her eyes searching my face and then dropping to my plastered arm and leg as she ran the same checks on me. We stood in silence for at least a minute, just looking at each other, each of us half smiling in the sudden awkwardness of reunion.
“Last time I saw you, you had cuts all over your face,” Suzanne said.
“Last time I saw you . . .” I began, then stopped. What was the right way to end that sentence? She looked at me, waiting. For God’s sake. Not even two minutes in and I’d already shoved my foot right into my mouth.
“It’s okay,” she said finally, a small smile hovering on her face. “I know. Do you want to sit down?” She gestured to one of the sofas. “Can you sit down? With the leg, I mean.”
“Yeah, it’s fine,” I said, adjusting my hand on my crutch and then starting toward the sofa. “I’m used to it now.”
“How much longer will it be before you can walk properly again?” Suzanne asked. She sat down and then pulled her knees up to her chest, hugging them close with both arms.
“The cast will come off my leg in about a month,” I said, settling myself back against the sofa. “And then I’ll have physical therapy and stuff. But I get the one off my arm next week.” I smiled. “Progress!”
Suzanne rested her chin on her knees. “That’s great.”
I waited for her to say more, as she would have done before, but she just smiled a little at me, quiet. I felt a wave of nervous sadness I didn’t quite understand, remembering how she’d lifted the umbrella above her head and danced around on a roof, so dauntless and vibrant and bright. It was like I was remembering a different person entirely. I had never really been able to tell where the front ended and she began. Now that front was gone, and I wasn’t sure exactly who was left.
“Maybe by the time you come home I’ll be fine,” I said hopefully. At these words, her expression faltered slightly, so I added, “Do you know when that will be?” She didn’t reply, chewing her lip between her teeth. “We should plan something,” I said, trying to smile. “Me being mobile, you coming home.” She was still silent, so I picked up the bag I’d set on the floor and put it in front of her. “Here, I brought you stuff.”
“Caddy.” Suzanne opened her mouth, then closed it again slowly. I saw her teeth catch a hold of her tongue. “Caddy, I . . .”
There was something in her voice that stopped my breath.
“This isn’t why I asked you to come here,” Suzanne said, her voice shaky. She put her hands on the top of the bag without even looking inside it. “God, I’m sorry.” I watched her face crease as she lifted her sleeve to her eyes. “I’m so sorry, Caddy.”
“Stop it,” I said, my sudden, all-encompassing anxiety fraying my voice. “At least tell me why you need to be sorry before you say it.”
“I’m not coming home,” she said. “I’m not going to come back to Brighton.” Her eyes were steady on me, the handles of the bag twisted around her fingers. “I asked you to come here so I could tell you that. Not for presents, or anything like that. To say . . .” She hesitated. “To say good-bye properly. Obviously I’m going to be here for a while, but even after I leave, I won’t go back to Sarah’s.”
Something had stuck in my throat. I tried to swallow. “Why not?”
“I’m going to go into foster care,” she said carefully, like she was weighing out every word. “There are, like, specialist foster caregivers for teenagers like me, who have been in places like this but don’t have families to go home to.” She shrugged a little, but I could see the crease of pain on her forehead. “There’s a couple in Southampton who are going to take me. I’ve met them. They’re nice.”
“Southampton?” I repeated, understanding starting to seep in. Southampton was a two-hour drive from Brighton. “But that’s . . . that’s miles away.”
“I know,” she said, “but it’s good. They’ve taken in girls from Gwillim before, so they’ll know what they’re doing with me. Way more than Sarah did anyway. Nuru, one of my case workers, says she thinks they’ll be good for me. They—”
“But why Southampton?” I interrupted without thinking, seizing a glimmer of hope. “Don’t they have those kinds of foster caregivers in Brighton?” I had no idea how this kind of thing worked, but I ploughed on anyway. “Even if you don’t live with Sarah anymore, you can still come—”
“No.” She was shaking her head. “No, you don’t get it. I don’t want to go back to Brighton. Sarah was ready to give it another go, but not going back is my choice. I need a clean break, away. I need to start again.”
The words died in my throat. “Oh.” A hollowness was starting to work its way from my stomach to my chest. “I . . . Oh.”
The tears that had been gathering in Suzanne’s eyes finally spilled. “I’m sorry, Cads. I know how that sounds. It’s not . . . it’s not you, or anything. You and Roz are the reasons I would want to go back, but deep down I know I need to do this. I need to try again, by myself, and I need to do that somewhere new, where there isn’t someone I’m already depending on. I use people, Caddy. I lean on them, way too much. And then I get so panicked that I’ll lose them that I make myself be what I think they want. I did it with you. I so wanted to be that person you thought I was. I tried so hard.” Her voice caught and hitched, and she pressed her sleeve to her mouth, like she was trying to hold something in.
She took a deep breath, shaky and jagged. “If I go back, I’m scared nothing will change. What if I just fall back into the same stupid habits, make the same mistakes? Even if it’s not straightaway, give it a few weeks and I’m crawling out of the window again. Going to you when I want to feel good, Dylan when I want to feel bad. It’s what I do, and it’s so destructive, and so painful, and then, one more year down the line, I’m swallowing pills again. I don’t want this to be the pattern of my life until one day there’s no one there to save me.” She looked at me, anxiety etched in every line on her face. “Do you know what I mean?” She was really asking me, I could tell. “Does any of this make sense? I’m trying to be sensible”—she tried to smile—“and you know that’s not exactly my default mode.”
I knew I was supposed to smile back, say something reassuring, let her know I understood. But my ears felt hot, my chest was pounding. This was all wrong. This wasn’t why I’d come here. She finally chose to be sensible and it was a decision that was going to effectively end our friendship? How was that fair? “I don’t get why any of this means you can’t come back home.”
Suzanne’s face dropped. “Because it’s not home,” she said. “I don’t have a home, Caddy. That’s the whole fucking problem.”
“I thought you liked Brighton.”
“It’s not about liking—” She stopped herself, letting out a frustrated breath. “God, Caddy. Are you really going to do this?”
“Do what?” I could feel tears building and I forced myself to hold them back. “Aren’t I allowed to talk about this with you?”
“No!” she burst out. “No, because it’s not fair. You’re talking about this like you know, like you’ve got the first fucking idea what any of it was like half the time. Do you still not get it?” It was almost a relief to see the anger spill. “Do you want me to spell out how much I hid from you? You think because you saw me freak out maybe two or three times that you saw me at my worst? That’s not even close. You want to hear about my birthday? My fucking sixteenth birthday, when my parents treated me like they didn’t even know me, and I couldn’t deal with it, so I had a meltdown and smashed up Sarah’s kitchen? And then, when Sarah tried to calm me down, I sliced my arm open with a broken plate?” Tears were streaming down her face, but I felt frozen. I couldn’t speak.
What was it Mum had said? She’s very sad. Overwhelmingly so.
“Twelve stitches in ER, Caddy. And did you have any idea? No. Because I hid it from you, like I hid most of the fucked-up things about me. Are you getting it now? And here. Seven weeks of therapy. Psychologists and nurses and being
under observation and taking fucking medication and everyone being all, ‘Listen to us, Suzanne, we’re trying to help.’ Do you know how long it’s taken me to get to a point where I finally accept that I have to do this?
“And then you come here, you, who’s supposed to be the good, unselfish one, and you’re making me doubt myself?”
I opened my mouth to speak—to defend myself or apologize, I wasn’t sure—but instead I burst into tears. The horrible, uncontrollable kind you have no hope of disguising or minimizing. In the seconds it took for the tears to steal my vision, I saw the part-horrified, part-enraged look on Suzanne’s face and I had the dim sense that I was doing exactly the wrong thing, exactly what she’d been afraid of. But this wasn’t how stories like this were meant to end. She was meant to get better and come home, not leave completely. Not after everything. I trusted in happy endings, and this felt too much like sadness, like something lost.
“Caddy,” Suzanne said, her voice tense.
My name resounded in my head. Caddy, I thought, this is not about you.
“I’m sorry,” I managed. I pushed my hands up against my face, forcing myself to calm down. I drew in a sharp breath, then let it out slowly, closing my eyes. When I opened them again, Suzanne’s head was tilted slightly, her eyes trained on me.
“Do you understand now why I need to do this?” she asked, her voice suddenly steady and quiet again.
I took a deep breath. “I don’t want to.”
“But do you?”
I nodded. I knew that I had to turn this around. If I couldn’t pull this back, something would be lost. “Fuck your life,” I said.
It worked. For a split second she looked startled, then her face changed and she laughed out loud. “I know, right?” she said. The smile disappeared almost as soon as it had arrived, her face falling sad and flat again. She twisted the bag handles in her fingers, letting out a sigh. “God, this is hard.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again. Her words had started to register and now I had guilt flooding into my head as well as everything else. The last thing I wanted to do was make her question seven weeks’ worth of progress.
“What for?”
“Everything.” I wiped my eyes with my sleeve, wishing I was better at this. “For being so useless.”
“No, Caddy. No. You’re the best person I know.” She dropped the gift bag’s handles and took a hold of both my hands, squeezing for emphasis. The gesture was so adult-like, but also somehow so her, it brought on a fresh wave of tears. “The best. Okay? I don’t think you’ll ever know what you’ve done for me, and how much it means that someone like you would care so much about someone like me.”
“Someone like you is brilliant and amazing,” I said. “Why can’t you see that in yourself?” The unfairness of it was starting to sink in. If she could only see herself like I did, there wouldn’t be a problem. But she didn’t, and she never would, and that was so many levels of wrong and unfair I almost couldn’t comprehend it.
Suzanne’s chin quivered slightly and I saw her bite down on her tongue again. “You know why,” she said softly. “Please. Don’t do this.” She let go of my hands and sat back slightly, letting out a breath. “Look . . . Knowing that you see that is everything. Really.” She chanced a smile, shaky but there. “And I can take that with me, you know? To Southampton and wherever else I go. I know that there are good people and that they can be good to me. I just have to find them. And, you know, not take them on midnight walkabouts and up onto roofs of abandoned buildings.” She looked guilty and I got the sense that this was probably an area she’d covered multiple times with the therapists.
“But I had more fun doing those things with you than I’ve basically had ever,” I said. “Doesn’t that matter?”
She made a face. “That’s kind of my point. People said I was a bad influence on you, and I was. But I didn’t mean to be. I didn’t want to be. But just because I didn’t want it and you didn’t see it, doesn’t mean it wasn’t true. You know? And I really, really don’t want to be that kind of person. Which is why I need to do this, like I said. Start over, but properly this time. Find out who I want to be, find good people to be it with, yeah?”
I looked at her, my brilliant, beautiful, battle-scarred friend. So recently a stranger. So almost a ghost. You can be it with me, I wanted to say. I could convince her, if I tried. I knew she trusted me, that she’d listen, if I pushed this.
“Anyone you meet will be lucky to know you,” I said instead.
A smile broke out over her face, sweet and soft and genuine. “Thanks.”
“I’ll miss you.” Three inadequate words.
“I’ll miss you.”
“Will you come back and visit?” I asked.
Suzanne hesitated. “Maybe one day. But not for a while, okay?”
“Well, maybe me and Roz can visit you,” I said. “In Southampton.”
She was silent for a while, but I could see the truth on her face and I could feel it in the space between us. There was no need to make her say it, so I didn’t.
“Are you going to see Rosie? Or do you want me to tell her about . . . all this?”
Suzanne brushed her hair back from her forehead, a wobbly smile chancing on her face. “Rosie already knows.”
“What? How?”
“I e-mailed her a few days ago. I wanted to talk to her before I talked to you. Plus I had a lot I wanted to say to her that I wanted to get right, and with e-mail I got the chance to think everything through.”
“She didn’t tell me.”
“I asked her not to.”
Rosie had said, Just go and see how things are. Oh, God. More tears.
“Things with Roz . . . ,” Suzanne continued, then hesitated. “I felt like she was one of the people I’d messed things up with the most. We had so many stupid fights near the end. But the thing with her is that she always kind of . . . got me. Like, she understood the crappy side of me and she’d call me out on it every time, and it was kind of tough to deal with sometimes, but it was the right thing for her to do, especially when it came to you. She used to tell me that she couldn’t stop me fucking up my own life, but I couldn’t drag you down with me.” She shook her head. “I hated that she was so right. And I think I was jealous of what you two had, if I’m really honest. I wanted friends like that.”
“You do have friends like that,” I said. “You have us.”
“That’s exactly what Rosie said.” For a second I thought she was going to start crying again, but she sighed instead. “God, the two of you.” She almost laughed. “I don’t think I even knew what ‘best’ meant until I met you both.”
“How come Rosie isn’t here?” I asked. It had been bothering me. “How come you just wanted to see me?”
“Because . . .” She paused, chewing on her top lip. “I didn’t need to see Rosie to say all of this, and she didn’t need to see me. We kind of understand each other in that way. We’ve been e-mailing a lot, and her e-mails are brilliant. Like, they actually make me laugh, and I haven’t been doing much of that recently. But we talked about it, and she was the one who said I had to see you in person to explain, because it was going to hit you hard. I told her she could come too, but she said this kind of thing would be better one on one.” She looked at me. “She’s not one to say it, but you know how much she cares, right? She really loves you.”
The tears had clogged up my throat, so I just nodded. Rosie. When I got home and saw her I would tackle her with a hug, whether she wanted it or not.
“And I do too,” Suzanne added, smiling a smile that was as happy as it was sad. “Just so you know.”
“I love you,” I choked out. “And I—” I stopped, trying to find the words that could explain to her how much she meant to me, how she’d brought sparks and surprise and light and layers to my life, how every broken bone and all the tears had been worth it, for her. “You’re just the best . . . my best . . .”
She interrupted me by leaning over, putt
ing her arms around my shoulders and hugging me. I let my forehead rest against her shoulder, her familiar blond hair bunching against my face. I wondered how many times we’d hugged in the short time we’d been friends. How many times we’d hug in the future.
“Hey,” she said. “Talk about significant life events, right?”
I smiled, trying to regain my composure. “Oh, God—that feels like a million years ago.” I thought of my former self, limbs intact, wishing for significant things. A year earlier I’d been planning my sixteenth birthday and playing “where will I be when” with Rosie, entirely oblivious of what was to come. So much of what I had thought would be important then had turned out not to matter. Here I was, weeks from my seventeenth, still boyfriendless and in full possession of my virginity, and I didn’t even care.
“Oh,” I said, suddenly remembering. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the small box I’d been carrying her necklace in. “I brought this back for you.”
The dove at the end of the chain dangled between us. She looked at it, her brow furrowing. “I gave it to you,” she said after a pause.
“But it’s yours,” I replied. “I can’t keep it.”
“What if I want you to?”
“What if I don’t?”
We looked at each other, stalemated.
“You said it was like a promise,” I reminded her, as if she’d have forgotten.
“A broken promise,” she said, and something in her face cracked. “It hurts to look at it.” She looked at me. “You have it, Cads, please?”
“How about this?” I said with a flash of inspiration. “We’ll share it. You take it now, and next time I see you, you can give it back.”
She was silent for a while, her eyes moving from the necklace to my face.
