And Luke … well, he’d seen me at my worst, with hair shaved and chopped off in clumps, scars on my head and on my face, a broken arm, a broken heart; none of that seemed to matter. I learned to accept the crescent scar on my cheek, and Luke did too, pressing his mouth along the curve of it in a dozen tiny kisses.
‘So,’ Savvy says now, finishing her mocha. ‘I was wondering … Did you hear about Lainey?’
‘What about her?’
Savvy and I see a lot of Erin and Yaz, but Lainey has dropped right off the radar since my recovery.
‘Is she OK?’ I ask. ‘I haven’t seen her at school this term … is she OK?’
Savvy shakes her head, sad-eyed. ‘No … she’s been ill, apparently. Or maybe just ashamed to show her face; it’s kind of sad.’
‘Have you tried to call her?’ I ask. ‘Has Yaz?’
‘We haven’t really kept in touch lately,’ Savvy shrugs. ‘C’mon, Alice, she brought all this on herself. All those lies, all that manipulation. I think Lainey must be a very unhappy person, inside.’
‘She is,’ I agree. ‘I think she always has been.’
And now it seems that Lainey has fallen down her own rabbit hole, into something that sounds an awful lot like depression.
The next day, I send her a postcard; a quirky-cool image of the Cheshire Cat sitting in a tree, with a scrawled message that I hoped she was doing OK.
There is no reply, and I wonder if she feels too guilty still, or if she is just lost in another world the way I had been after the fall. Like the Cheshire Cat, Lainey used to be all smiles; I never thought I’d see those smiles disappear, but they have.
In exchange, though, I’ve found mine.
45
Looking-Glass Girl
I stand in front of the looking glass in my bedroom, checking my reflection: the girl in the mirror is tall and slim, her light brown hair wavy, glossy and streaked with caramel highlights. It’s shoulder length, now, but it’s growing fast. Her blue eyes are bright and filled with laughter, and there’s just the faintest smudge of eyeliner above her darkened lashes, flicking out into a perfect cat’s-eye curve.
The girl in the mirror is cool and confident and beautiful; there’s something special about her: a shine, a sparkle, something you can’t quite put your finger on.
She’s a whole lot different from the girl I used to be.
I smile. Yes, I wear make-up these days, but the school turns a blind eye because it helps to disguise the scar. They’re very sympathetic about that, and besides, not long ago I landed the role of Macavity in the drama club’s summer production of Cats and snagged myself a mention in the local newspaper. Their reporter picked me out especially: ‘An astonishing performance from a teenage girl with talent to spare,’ he wrote. ‘Alice Beech is a name to watch.’ My mum cut out the review and got it framed. She says it is the first of many, and I hope she is right.
I straighten my skirt and tighten my tie and grab my blazer and satchel. The doorbell rings; three short rings, as always.
‘I’m off now, Mum,’ I call. ‘See you later! See you later, Nate!’
Both Mum and Nate hug me as I pass through the kitchen; as a family, we have learned that life is unpredictable, and that hugs help a lot. Even Dad has been known to ruffle my hair occasionally, in a gruff, no-nonsense kind of a way.
I open the door and Luke is on the doorstep, looking cooler than any boy has a right to look in his Ardenley Academy uniform. He slides an arm around my waist and we walk to school together, the way we do every morning. Sometimes we talk about drama club and run through lines with each other, sometimes we talk about friends, sometimes about school and homework and family stuff. We never run out of words, except when actions are needed. When we get to the school gates, we loiter for a while under the branches of the big sycamore tree. We hold hands and smile a lot and, if it’s quiet, we kiss. We have had a lot of practice with the kissing now, but I’m not sure anything will ever be better than that first time, on the tyre swing at Savvy’s sleepover.
It’s hard to get better than perfect.
Then Luke has to go; he has to catch a bus across town to the Academy. ‘See you tonight?’ he calls over his shoulder, and I laugh and nod and watch him walk away, feeling like the luckiest girl alive.
When Luke turns the corner, heading for the bus stop, I go into school. I’m not invisible any more; teachers smile and say hello, kids stop to chat, everybody has a smile or a greeting. Savvy waits for me by the cafeteria and we buy a breakfast smoothie and head for registration, arm in arm. We sit together in every class, pair up in PE; I’ve even got her to join the lunchtime drama group at school, and even Yaz and Erin have been known to turn up occasionally to paint scenery or help with costumes.
Today, though, there is no drama group, and after morning classes the four of us sit in the cafeteria eating salad and chips and talking about boys. Savvy has finished with Dex and is seeing a boy called Mark; Yaz is flirting on a daily basis with a friend of her brother’s, a boy called Ahmed; Erin says she is planning to join a nunnery or lead an all-woman team of scientific researchers through the Amazon rainforest. She says that boys are overrated, and her heart belongs to the Amazonian tree frog; the kind that swoops through the treetops in deepest Peru.
Across the room, Serena is sitting alone, eating a vegeburger and flicking through a maths textbook.
‘She went to your old dance school, didn’t she?’ I ask Savvy. ‘Serena. What was she like?’
‘I don’t really remember,’ Savvy says. ‘I think we were sort-of friends, ages ago, for a little while, but I’m not sure why …’
I remember the photo of Serena and Savvy pinned up on Savvy’s photo wall, and I smile.
‘Oh – look!’ Savvy says, grabbing my arm suddenly. ‘In the lunch queue! It’s Lainey – she’s back!’
‘She looks awful,’ Yaz says. ‘Well, no wonder!’
‘She’s really lost it,’ Erin agrees.
I say nothing, but as I watch Lainey pay for her lunch, pick up her tray and wander across the cafeteria, I have to admit my friends are right. Lainey’s hair is limp and dull, brown roots swamping what’s left of the faded blonde dye, her skin pale, her school uniform slightly crumpled. She looks lost and sad; the way I used to be.
I watch as she puts her tray down next to Serena; I notice Serena roll her eyes and say something sharp, pick up her bag and leave. When you are somewhere near the bottom of the food chain at school, the last thing you need is to be seen hanging out with someone even lower down the pecking order.
I can’t help feeling sorry for Lainey. She must be wondering how it all went wrong, how she lost her friends, her happiness; how guilt and regret poisoned things. She must be wondering how she ended up in the shadows, fading into invisibility.
The minute I started to get better, Savvy drew a line of loyalty in the dirt, and the others stepped over it without a backward glance; they were with me. Lainey was left to carry the blame.
Lainey hurt me in a million different ways over the years, but in the end she helped me, too. She went too far, and now she’s nobody and I am the rising star of the drama group, Savvy Hunter’s best friend, Luke Miller’s girlfriend. It’s funny how things turn out. I have a lot to thank her for, when you think about it.
Still, it’s not nice being on the outside looking in.
It’s not nice sitting alone at lunch, day after day, friendless, alone. I know, because I’ve been there.
I look at Lainey, her head bowed, her shoulders slumped, and my heart begins to thud. This is Lainey, the girl who’d squeezed my hand and told me I’d be awesome before the first performance of Alice in Wonderland back in Year Six; the girl who’d dried my tears in Year One the time I fell over in the playground and skinned my knees. I could list a hundred tiny kindnesses, acts of friendship over the years; had her jealousy and resentment wiped all those away?
I had no way of knowing.
Then again, Lainey had been the only
one who could see me in the hospital corridor back in the spring when my heart stopped and the doctors were trying to save me. Lainey was the one who reached out and took my hand, who told me she was sorry and asked me not to go.
And now she is the broken one, the one who needs a helping hand.
The realization sends a shiver down my spine.
I have changed, these last few months. I have changed a lot; but still, I don’t think I can turn my back on the girl who was once my best friend. Sometimes, you have to take a risk, offer a second chance – even to those who couldn’t do the same for you.
I raise my hand in a wave, flash a quick smile in Lainey’s direction and see her glance up, eyes hopeful.
‘Hey!’ I call over. ‘Lainey! Come and eat with us!’
Lainey looks around, as if I might be talking to someone else, as if there might be two girls called Lainey in the school cafeteria. She bites her lip and gets to her feet, gripping her tray of food a little too tightly, trying to smile. The attempt fails and she’s left looking scared, wary, uncertain. She walks towards us, wearing her panic like a cheap Halloween mask, and I think how much things can change.
Savvy rolls her eyes and Yaz takes a deep breath in. Always ready to speak her mind, Erin is the first to comment.
‘Are you crazy?’ she hisses. ‘After all that’s happened, Alice? Really?’
But I know from experience that second chances can change lives, and right now Lainey needs a lifeline.
‘Shhh,’ I whisper, fixing on a smile as Lainey approaches. ‘Chill. It’s just lunch, right?’ Savvy shakes her head, despairing, but there’s the faintest trace of a smile on her lips. I think maybe she understands.
Lainey sits down and the five of us chat a little in a halting, awkward kind of a way.
It’s not just lunch, not really; it’s a kind of forgiveness.
A playlist for Alice
1/ ‘Angels’ – Robbie Williams
2/ ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ – The Beatles
3/ ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ – The Velvet Underground
4/ ‘Alice (Underground)’ – Avril Lavigne
5/ ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’– The Smiths
6/ ‘Tyre Swing’ – Kimya Dawson
7/ ‘Catch’ – The Cure
8/ ‘Bright Eyes’ – Art Garfunkel
9/ ‘Painting Flowers’ – All Time Low
10/ ‘What You Waiting For?’ – Gwen Stefani
11/ ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’ – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
12/ ‘Sometimes I Feel Like Alice’ – Lisa Mitchell
13/ ‘C’mon’ – Panic! At the Disco
14/ ‘Heads Will Roll’ – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
15/ ‘White Rabbit’ – Jefferson Airplane
16/ ‘Wide Awake’ – Katy Perry
17/ ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’ – Jimmy Somerville
Ingredients
12 tsp jam (any flavour you like!)
28g sugar
255g plain flour
140g hard unsalted butter
6 tbsp cold water
Method
Preheat the oven to gas mark 5.
Sieve the flour into a mixing bowl and rub in the butter until it resembles fine breadcrumbs.
Add the water tablespoon by tablespoon until it is a moist dough.
Grease a cupcake tray and cut the pastry into rounds larger than the rounds of your cupcake tray using a large cookie cutter.
Press pastry rounds gently into the tray rounds.
Spoon a little jam into the pastry rounds and bake at gas mark 5 for 12–15 minutes.
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First published 2015
Text copyright © Cathy Cassidy, 2015
Illustrations copyright © Erin Keen, 2015
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-35784-3
Looking Glass Girl Page 14
