Looking Glass Girl

by Cathy Cassidy

  ‘Get off me!’ I yelled.

  It happened so quickly. Lainey’s hand dug so hard into my arm that I winced in pain, and her breath was hot in my ear. ‘Go home, Alice,’ she whispered. ‘Get out of here and don’t come back. I don’t care if you get murdered walking home; I don’t care if you walk under a car – I don’t care about you at all. I hate you, Alice Beech. I hate you and I don’t want you here. Stay away from me and stay away from Savvy and stay away from Luke Miller!’

  I jerked away from her, but as I twisted out of her grip I stumbled in the dark, dropped my bag and tripped. Suddenly I was falling, falling, falling into the darkness.

  39

  ICU, Ardenley General Hospital

  ‘I’m sorry, Alice,’ Lainey says. ‘I’m really sorry it had to turn out this way. We used to be friends; best friends, do you remember? We did everything together. We shared secrets, hopes, dreams … all that stuff. Remember?’

  She sits down on the edge of the bed, smiling.

  ‘Then we grew up, and I suppose we grew apart; the magazines say it happens a lot, right? I feel a bit mean saying it, Alice, but – well, you started to get on my nerves. You were so full of yourself; too keen, too chirpy. You tried too hard … Miss Goody Two-Shoes. I’m only saying what I thought back then, Alice. No offence. You got too big for your boots … all that drama stuff went to your head.’

  Lainey sighs, smoothing down the bedcover, straightening the sheet.

  ‘All that chat about Luke. Every day, over and over; Luke said this, Luke said that … like he was some kind of dream boy. You knew I liked Luke, Alice. I’d liked him for years; it was one of those secrets we shared. We promised we’d never let a boy come between us, but your promise didn’t mean a thing, did it, Alice? You barely noticed he was alive for most of primary school, and then, the minute you were in that stupid play together, that was that. You forgot your promises; you forgot me.’

  Lainey laughs. ‘It’s not that I bear a grudge,’ she says. ‘I just find it hard to forgive, sometimes, you know? Besides, you were a bit of a pathetic friend. I can’t say I missed you when we stopped hanging out; Yaz was always more fun and Savvy and Erin were awesome. I was happy. And then you messed it up all over again …’

  Lainey edges a little closer, her voice cold.

  ‘When we met Luke and Dex by accident I knew that was my chance to make Luke notice me. We talked and talked, but all he wanted to know about was you. What were you doing; why didn’t you do drama any more; did you have a boyfriend. It made me sick, Alice. Seriously. And then Savvy had her bright idea of asking you to the sleepover and this whole stupid nightmare began.

  ‘You can’t help it, can you? You just have to take the things I want away from me. The lead role in the school play, the boy I’ve been crushing on since I was nine years old, even Savvy. Did I tell you she’s gone into some kind of meltdown about all this? She’s all eaten up with guilt and fear, not like herself at all, and that’s your fault, Alice Beech. You wanted everything I had, didn’t you? It’s just the way you work. Do you want to know the truth? I’m not sorry I shut you in the cellar. You made me so mad, so angry. You’re so stupid you couldn’t even tell when you weren’t wanted; you couldn’t go quietly. You had to make a fuss and argue, and you had to go and fall. You ruined everything for everybody, and yet you’re the one getting all the sympathy. So typical!’

  Lainey bites her lip and takes in a ragged breath. Her eyes well with tears that spill over and roll down her cheeks relentlessly, and when she speaks again, her voice is shaking.

  ‘He came to see you again, didn’t he?’ she asks. ‘Luke, I mean. Your gran said. He’s not going to hang around and wait for you forever, you know. Nobody would expect him to do that.

  ‘I don’t even think you can hear me, can you? What’s the point of telling you any of this? You’re just hanging on, being kept alive by the doctors and these stupid machines. Your family might be kidding themselves you’ll get better, but I think they’re wrong. I don’t think you’d want to be like this, Alice – useless, out of it, like … like some kind of vegetable. It’s just cruel, wrong.’

  Lainey wipes her eyes, tries to smile.

  ‘I don’t even know what these things are doing: all these wires, all this buzzing and bleeping. Doesn’t it get on your nerves? Doesn’t it bug you? It would me. Sometimes the best, kindest thing to do is to just let go. I’m telling you this as a friend, Alice, for old times’ sake …’

  Lainey’s fingers reach out towards the wires connecting the nearest monitor to Alice’s chest, as if she might grab them and tear them away; but her hands are trembling so much she cannot make the connection and abruptly she steps back, sobbing harder, as if shocked at what she has almost done.

  ‘I wouldn’t, Alice,’ she gasps. ‘You know that, right? I can’t bear seeing you like this, but I wouldn’t hurt you. I didn’t mean you to fall; it’s just that I was angry and you were too, and it was dark. Is it too late, Alice? Do you ever wish you could just go back and do things differently?’

  Without warning, the nearest monitor begins to emit a high-pitched shrieking sound, and the electronic trace flatlines.

  Lainey screams.

  40

  Alice

  ‘Help!’ Lainey screeches, her voice rising above the shriek of the monitor. ‘Help, somebody! Quick!’

  When the memories come back, they come back in such a flood that I think my head will explode, my heart break.

  ‘You have to remember if you want to find your way back,’ the Hatter had said, but he didn’t tell me that remembering would bring such pain. Every bit of me hurts, and above me – high up in the tree – the Cheshire Cat is laughing. It’s a cruel kind of laugh; I know that now.

  ‘Be careful, Alice,’ it taunts. ‘You might not like what you find on the other side …’

  Even so, I need to get home.

  I push against the looking glass again and this time the surface is soft beneath my palm, like gauze. At my touch, the glass melts into a kind of silvery mist and I take a deep breath and push through.

  It’s chaos. I am in a small white room, brightly lit and filled with machines that bleep and buzz and screech. I don’t know why I am here or what is happening or why Lainey is there, why she is screaming. My body is roaring, railing, raw with pain, and then suddenly the pain drops away completely and I feel myself slide effortlessly free.

  I am lighter than air, floating high above the madness, invisible.

  I watch as Lainey runs into the hallway, yelling hysterically, as two nurses and a doctor run into the room and gather round the broken girl on the bed. It takes me a moment to understand that the girl is me; she seems so small, so pale, so lifeless. I feel curiously detached as I watch the medics work on her, yelling instructions and moving swiftly and expertly to stabilize her.

  ‘Come on,’ the doctor says. ‘Stay with me, Alice!’

  I’ve been lost in a dark, surreal world of dreams and half-formed memories, and I think I stayed too long in Wonderland; I stepped through the looking glass, but I can’t come back, no matter what. There is nothing to come back to. The girl I used to be is broken beyond repair.

  I move between the medics, trail a finger along the cheek of the girl in the bed. Six days ago I looked at the world through her blue eyes, felt my heart flutter and race with excitement, my cheeks blush darkly when the coolest boy I knew looked my way. Six days ago my lips learned what it was like to be kissed and my hands found out what it was like to be wrapped tightly around the hands of another.

  Will I leave all that behind me now? I know it ought to matter, but it feels trivial, unimportant somehow. It’s not enough to make me stay.

  ‘Please be all right, please be all right, please be all right,’ Lainey repeats, outside in the corridor now, her face pressed against the cold glass of the viewing window. I drift out to join her and lean against her, reach up a hand to wipe away her tears, but she shivers violently and pulls away.

>   ‘Lainey?’ I whisper, and her eyes open wide with terror. For a moment, I think she can see me, but she shakes her head and looks right through me as though I’m not here at all.

  Maybe I’m not.

  In the distance I see my grandmother walking along the corridor, returning from the family room with a cup of tea and her knitting bag. She seems older than I remember; she limps a little and her shoulders are hunched as if she’s carrying something sad, something heavy.

  How will she look when she sees what’s happening? Will I have to watch her talking to Mum and Dad and Nathan, see them all hanging on to each other, trying to make sense of it all? That doesn’t seem right. Will I be able to stay for long enough to watch my own funeral, see my family dressed in black, see which pupils and teachers from school turn up? Will Savvy? Will Lainey? Will Luke?

  And what happens then?

  I can’t even begin to think about that.

  Out of nowhere, a hand closes over mine; Lainey’s.

  ‘I’m sorry, Alice,’ she says. ‘Please don’t go …’

  Abruptly there is a commotion inside the room; one of the nurses puts a hand over her mouth, tilts her head back and laughs with relief. The machines and monitors begin to bleep and buzz again, their neat electronic patterns resuming a regular pattern.

  I’m not with Lainey any more; I can’t see Gran or watch what’s happening in the little hospital room, because I am back in my body and all of this is happening to me.

  ‘We have a heartbeat,’ the doctor is saying. ‘Strong and steady. But something’s going on, I think …’

  ‘She’s responding,’ one of the nurses says. ‘I’m almost sure …’

  And then I open my eyes for the first time in six days.

  41

  Falling

  When I look back at it all, I remember everything in slow motion.

  I fell head over heels, tumbling, my body tucked into a ball, my knees and elbows and curving back, scraping and thumping against each step. It was dark, and that feeling of falling was more terrifying than anything I’d ever known in my life, so when the scream filled my ears I thought it must be me.

  It wasn’t, though; I think it was probably Savvy.

  I bumped and crashed my way to the bottom of the stairs, and at the bottom I fell against the hall table and brought the antique mirror crashing down on me. Everything fell, everything smashed – even the glass vase of red and white roses that was on the hall table. Water and roses and broken glass and shards of mirror were scattered everywhere.

  My head hit the tiled floor and everything vanished – including me.

  42

  Fallen

  My last memory from the night of the fall was looking down on myself as I lay crumpled and unconscious in the hallway, after Savvy had run down to the cellar to switch the lights back on. The girls had sobbed and argued and finally lifted the big antique mirror off me, leaning what was left of it against the far wall. It was ruined – exploded – as if I had dived through its glassy surface mistaking it for water; the evidence of the splash was everywhere. I had dived right through its surface to the other side, and I was lost.

  Once they had moved the mirror, the girls gathered round me; shocked, tearful, debating what to do and who should call the emergency services, but I was above it all, impassive, looking down.

  I looked like a broken doll. My arms and legs were flung out at slightly improbable angles and my hair was spread out around my head like a crimped, golden brown halo. My eyes were closed as if I were sleeping, but the left side of my face was covered in blood where the broken vase had sliced into my cheek. My skirt had rucked up a little, showing layers of lace and net petticoats, and the red and white roses had fallen across my body like funeral flowers.

  Everywhere, glinting like diamonds in the light, were jagged shards of mirror glass. Some were tiny, sprinkled across my dress like a scattering of stars. It looked like someone had sewn them on to the blue, but if you looked carefully you could see the same tiny mirror glass diamonds like dust on my skin, in my hair, on the tiled floor all around me. Some of the shards were huge, like daggers, and these were everywhere too.

  Don’t touch, the glass shards warned. Don’t touch, or I will hurt you the way you’ve hurt me.

  43

  Alice

  I open my eyes to see doctors and nurses crowding in on me; to smiles, laughter, relief. Then Gran is there, her arms around me, and I drift back to life within her warm, soft, talcum-powder embrace. I see Lainey lurking uncertainly in the doorway and I want to thank her for taking my hand and asking me to stay, but my tongue is as dry as sawdust and as stiff as old shoe leather in my parched throat, and she slips away quietly before I can say anything at all.

  Then Mum and Dad are here, and Nate; he curls up beside me on the coverlet, holding my hand, and even though this is against the rules the nurses don’t say a thing.

  I am still ill and exhausted, sleeping a lot and crying a lot, too. Once when I wake up briefly, Luke is there; in my half-asleep state I mistake him for the Hatter, his wavy hair unruly, his grin bright enough to light up the dark.

  He ducks down to drop a kiss at the corner of my mouth, and it feels softer than butterfly wings.

  ‘You made it back, then,’ he grins.

  I stay in the hospital for another three weeks. Recovering from a head injury takes time; there are scans and tests for everything under the sun, but it seems there is no lasting damage. The doctors conclude that my body created a state of coma to protect it from the pain of my injuries; a prolonged period of rest and healing. The doctors have no logical explanation though for why the machines went haywire and my heart stopped, other than to say that the body sometimes reacts in strange and unexpected ways. I am left to draw my own conclusions.

  I don’t try to work it out in scientific terms. I think maybe I just fell down a rabbit hole into a different world; a place that was calmer and safer than the one I’d left. Being there was fine for a while, but finding my way out of there, finding myself again, wasn’t quite so easy.

  It took a while, because I didn’t want to go back to the way things had been.

  It hadn’t been much of a life; it was miserable. I’d been the girl nobody noticed; the girl nobody wanted. I’d been the girl whose shoes went missing after gym, who found raw eggs smashed inside her schoolbag, whose homework jotter vanished and turned up in the playground bin. I’d been the girl who hid away in drama club so she didn’t have to sit alone at lunchtimes. I’d been the girl who sat alone at home every night, every weekend, who pretended that she had friends at school and pretended not to notice the pity in her mum’s eyes; the girl who’d cried herself to sleep.

  I wanted more than that. I wanted a whole life; a vivid, technicolour one, not the watered-down grey version I’d been living. And then I began to remember, and the shock of it jolted me out of that nowhere-world for good.

  For a few split seconds I was floating, free; then I was back in my own body, opening my eyes, pulling in big lungfuls of air.

  So yes, as Luke says, I’ve made it back.

  I’ve made it back – but things are going to be different.

  44

  Now

  Six months on, I sometimes forget about what happened, about the sleepover, the fall, the coma. It seems like it all happened to a different girl, and in a way I suppose it did.

  ‘It’s funny how things work out,’ Savvy says, lounging across my bed, sipping her mocha and flicking carelessly through her science homework. ‘Six months ago I didn’t know you at all … and now we’re best friends. Who’d have thought it?’

  Who indeed?

  Savvy and Luke visited me in hospital every day. It was Savvy who told me that the police and social work departments had been doing some follow-up work; a routine hospital blood test taken just after the accident had shown traces of alcohol. Mum and Dad hadn’t registered this to start with, but once I was on the mend again they began to ask questions, and
the whole sorry tale came out.

  Savvy came clean about the homemade cocktails. She told the police and the social workers that Carina had been out all evening, that we’d played a series of dare games including one that involved blacking out the whole house and locking me in the cellar. She pretended it was her idea at first, but when Lainey was interviewed she told the truth, admitted she’d taken things too far and took the blame.

  I’d told the police that we’d all tried the rum punch, but that it wasn’t very strong and nobody got tipsy. I told them the dare games had just been light-hearted fun, that Lainey had been trying to stop me leaving when I tripped and fell. ‘Why were you trying to leave the sleepover at one in the morning, if it was all just light-hearted fun?’ one of the police officers asked. I told them I was homesick.

  The police and social work departments closed the case not long afterwards; the law is hazy on whether groups of teenagers should be left at home alone, but it was clear that Mr and Mrs Hunter had had no idea there was a full-on party planned, let alone how it would all pan out. The drink, the dares, the accident – they were unfortunate, and there were lessons to be learned from it all, but it really wasn’t a police matter.

  Everyone stopped blaming everyone else; we let go of the past and moved on, and in a funny way the crisis seemed to have brought us together.

  I didn’t go back to school until after the summer holidays; it took that long for my injuries to heal, for the scar on my face to fade, my hair to grow back. By then, I was pretty close to Savvy. A friendship had grown between us: a real, honest friendship, the kind that could survive earthquakes, alien invasion, even turning up at school in the same pair of patent leather ballet flats. Although that would never happen, because once school started again Savvy called me every evening to talk about the day just gone and the one still ahead and to plan out our clothes, our homework, everything.