by Anna Wilson
‘No, I can’t do that,’ says Finn. ‘It’s weird. She might be in her underwear.’
‘I said CALL through the door,’ I shout. ‘You don’t have to go in.’
At this point Harris can be heard running back up the stairs.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ he says. ‘Let’s get your dad, Finn.’
‘NO!’ I yell.
‘Why is everyone outside the bathroom?’
Ah, thank goodness. It’s Mum.
‘Mum! It’s me, Skye,’ I say.
‘We know that,’ says Finn, sniggering.
‘SHUT UP!’ I say.
‘Skye, dear, that’s not very nice,’ says Mum. ‘Why don’t you come out instead of shouting at us through the door?’
‘I can’t! That’s the whole point,’ I say. ‘The bolt’s got jammed.’ My voice wobbles. I bite my lip.
Do. Not. Cry.
‘One of the screws has fallen on the floor,’ I say. ‘I’m stuck – can you get me out?’
Mum laughs. ‘You silly sausage!’ she says. ‘What were you doing, bolting yourself in there anyway?’
Mum’s laughter pushes a button inside me. The unshed tears are immediately replaced by a shot of pure, hot anger; my ears are ringing with it. How can she laugh at me in front of Finn?
‘What kind of a question is that?’ I shout. ‘I bolted the door because I didn’t want anyone to come in, of course. Just GET ME OUT, can’t you? And don’t call me a “silly sausage”,’ I add, my voice dropping to a sulk.
Finn, Mum and Harris are all laughing now. Then Finn says, ‘I think Harris is right – I should get Dad. He’s got a good toolkit.’
‘NO!’ I say.
They are not listening to me, of course. I hear Mum saying thank you to Finn and then their voices recede as they walk away.
I slide down on to the floor again and my phone beeps once more.
Another text from Aubrey:
BORED BORED BORED. Pleeeeeeease text me. I am soooooo sorry if I have upset you
It is such a relief to see my best friend’s name that I automatically text back without pausing to think.
My life WAY WORSE than yours. Am stuck in loo.
Aubrey replies straight away.
WHAT?
Thank goodness for my BFF.
I am soon engrossed in texting back and forth and telling Aubrey the whole sorry story. She is being really sympathetic and making me laugh with more emoticons and silly selfies. It feels good to be joking around with her again.
I have almost forgotten that I am stuck in the bathroom.
Until I hear voices again. A lot of voices. Oh my LIFE. They have brought Rob. I can hear his deep voice over everyone else’s.
This is it. I am going to have to face everyone laughing at me. May as well prepare myself.
I get up and put my phone on the shelf above the basin. I catch my reflection in the mirror and see I am looking stressed, so I rearrange my facial features into a suitably blank mask. Then I hear Rob saying he’ll soon have me out of there and there is some giggling and simpering, which must be Mum.
‘Hurray for Rob!’ shouts Harris.
Give me strength.
‘Stand back,’ Rob says in a fake action-hero-type voice. ‘We’re coming in.’
There is a rattle and a thud, followed by a loud grunt as Rob shoulders the door. It springs open with more speed than I am prepared for.
It all happens so fast, there is no time to think. No time to stop myself.
Rob hurtles towards me.
I cry out and topple backwards. I feel myself falling but I can’t stop the momentum. I am heading back towards the loo. I land on the seat with such force I fall back into it. Just my luck: the lid is up. I shriek as I feel my bottom sinks down. My arms flail up and my elbow catches on something painfully.
‘Ow!’
Before I know it, there is a flushing noise.
I have landed in the loo and flushed it at the same time. Genius. You couldn’t do it on purpose if you tried.
A crowd of laughing, grinning people bear down on me: Harris is holding his sides he is laughing so much; Finn is guffawing too, and stabbing at his phone; Rob is trying to look concerned, but his mouth is twitching and . . .
Aubrey’s here! Thank goodness. My best friend is here to save the day. She will make this all OK. She will give me a hug and we will get away from this nightmare.
Then I see she is frowning in concentration at her phone. She is not even looking at me.
I wriggle and try to get up while struggling to calm myself. Everyone is still laughing at me. I can’t speak. Thought after thought rushes into my head: Why isn’t Aubrey rushing to help me? Who is she texting now? It can’t be me. Why is she here? How did she even get here so fast if she was shopping?
And then a chilling thought rushes in to override all the others: Maybe she wasn’t shopping at all, in which case – has she been lying to me again?
Aubrey stuffs her phone in her pocket and makes a move towards me. As she does, I watch her rearrange her features into an exaggerated expression of pity.
‘Aww, poor you,’ she coos. ‘It must have been soooo traumatic, getting locked in!’ She offers me a hand. ‘Let me help you.’
She pulls me rather too hard and I topple forward, water dripping off me. My jeans are soaked.
‘Please,’ I whisper. ‘Get me out of here!’
Aubrey’s eyes narrow. ‘Not just yet,’ she says through her smile (which has soured considerably now that no one else can see her face).
She raises her voice for the benefit of everyone else: ‘Let me get you a towel,’ she says.
‘I – I’m fine,’ I gasp, pushing at her to let me go.
‘How did you know to come and help, Aubrey?’ Mum asks.
‘Oh, Skye texted me,’ Aubrey says, before I have a chance to speak.
Finn does his irritating-snigger thing that seems to be his default setting. ‘Texting from the toilet?’ he says. ‘Smooth.’
Aubrey rolls her eyes and gives Finn a sugary smile. ‘I know,’ she says.
Harris bellows with laughter. ‘She takes her phone EVERYWHERE!’ he says. ‘I bet she even texts while she is actually wiping her bum!’
Mum smirks and rearranges her features unconvincingly to say, ‘Harris, that’s not nice.’
I take in her pink-and-purple satin ballgown and matching tiara and a little part of me dies inside. This whole scene is like something out of a weird circus act, and Finn and Aubrey have ringside seats.
Any more mortifying moments you would like to throw at me, Universe? I think, as I watch them smirk and exchange knowing looks.
‘Great. The freak show is over, you can all go home,’ I mutter.
Mum clears her throat. ‘Skye, dear,’ she says, ‘you could at least say thank you to Rob – and Aubrey.’
‘Thank you, Rob,’ I say. I cannot bring myself to look at him. At anyone.
‘No worries,’ he says. ‘I – er – I’m really sorry you fell . . . I didn’t think the door would be that flimsy.’
‘You don’t know your own strength!’ Mum says, nudging Rob’s arm.
‘Yeah, Rob is really, really STRONG!’ Harris says. He bounces up and down in delight. ‘I reckon he could even lift you up, Mum. Like in those dances—’
Mum cuts him off with a fake laugh and says brightly, ‘Go and get changed, Skye. I’ll make everyone a nice cup of tea, shall I?’
Oh yes, great idea, I think, as I slip off to my room. Cos that’s what all normal people do when their daughter has just flushed herself down the loo in public: hold a tea party. Why don’t we crack open the bubbly while we’re at it and have a full-on celebration?
I want to stay in my room once I’m changed, but I know Mum will only come and find me and tell me off for being antisocial. Or worse, Aubrey will come and find me and have a go at me. She looked so angry when she ‘helped’ me to get up. I shall just have to keep my head down so that I don’t have to look
at anyone.
I sneak quietly into the kitchen while everyone is chatting. Mum is fussing with the kettle, mugs and tea bags and laughing and enjoying herself like a hostess at a ball. (She probably thinks she is at a ball, dressed like that.)
Why can’t everyone just leave?
Harris is so excited by the turn events have taken that he is now running round the table, still covered in silver foil, with Pongo, who has lost most of his foil by now.
Mum catches him as he goes past and says in a low voice, ‘That’s enough, sausage. And although your outfit is very – er – imaginative, can you take it off? It’s rather loud and rustly.’
Rob laughs. ‘What you are, Harris? A spaceman?’
That’s right, let’s all talk about Harris and then I can go back upstairs unnoticed and we can all forget about my latest performance on The Clumsy Klutz Show.
‘No, I’m a dancer,’ says Harris, beaming and giving a pirouette for good measure.
‘Ah,’ says Rob. ‘Nice one.’
Finn ruffles Harris’s hair. ‘Harris is dancing with his mum, aren’t you, mate?’
‘Yeah!’ says Harris. ‘Mum’s entering a competition and I’ve said I will help.’ He peels off a strip of silver foil and says, ‘I need to think about the music she will use. Can you help me choose, Finn?’
‘I’m sure Finn would be great at that,’ says Aubrey. She does the whole dipping-head-fluttering-eyelashes routine. ‘He’s an awesome musician.’
Finn frowns. ‘Nah. Not really.’
‘Don’t be so modest, Finn,’ says Rob. ‘Finn’s learning the drums,’ he says to Mum. ‘Hopefully you won’t be disturbed for long,’ he adds hastily. ‘I’m soundproofing the garage, but the drums are in the back room for now.’
‘Amazing!’ says Mum. She looks as thrilled as if Rob has announced that he has found a cure for cancer.
Rob is blushing now. ‘Not really. I’m a builder by trade, you see. Well, more of a site manager these days. That is why we moved here – new job, you see.’
Great. So we are all going to drink tea and make small talk while I die of embarrassment and my brother prances around dressed in tinfoil.
I try to catch Aubrey’s eye but she is too busy staring at Finn while he wrestles with Harris and Pongo. Surely she can see this is all a nightmare? Has she changed that much that she would rather watch a boy she doesn’t know roll around with my brother than talk to me, her best friend?
I sidle up to her. She pretends she hasn’t noticed and sips her tea, keeping her eyes averted from mine.
‘So,’ I say quietly. ‘I, er, I thought you were out shopping with Cora and your mum today?’ Great opening line, Skye.
‘Yes,’ says Aubrey. She puts a lot of meaning into that one small word. ‘I bet you did,’ she says, through gritted teeth. ‘Which is why you have him round –’ she nods her head at Finn – ‘without telling me!’
‘What?’ A fluttering starts up in my chest. ‘You don’t think – surely you don’t think I asked him round?’
She turns and looks at me, one eyebrow arched. ‘All I know is, you are always making promises you don’t keep,’ she says.
‘So,’ says Mum, clapping her hands together. ‘Seeing as we’re getting along so well, how about I make us all some lunch?’
Aubrey sends me a barrage of texts after she leaves while I remain hunkered down in my room. Most of them are along the lines of:
Can’t BELIEVE you had Finn round for AN HOUR without telling me.
I asked you to get me round to see him!!!!
Y R U keeping him all to urself?
And so on and so on.
I start by trying to tell her that things are not as they seem. This doesn’t make any difference so I give up trying to explain. It is hopeless by text, in any case. Aubrey only sends back more and more angry emoticons in reply, including the red-faced devil cat ones and black clouds and bolts of thunder and lightning.
In the end she gives up on words altogether, so I ask her back round on Sunday, saying that we need to talk. She doesn’t text back for ages and in the end I get one word: ‘Busy’. And that is the last I hear from her until Monday at school.
I woke up this morning feeling sick to the pit of my stomach. It was the first day that the bus was running again because the roadworks in town have finished. I am on the bus now, keeping my head down and writing in my journal, not daring to look up. I managed to sprint to the bus stop and get on without seeing Finn, but what will I do if he has got on behind me and decides to tell everyone about the Loo Incident? What if Aubrey does? She really hates me now, I know she does. Those texts made it pretty clear.
How am I going to survive life at school without Aubrey? I don’t know what to do without her. It is all very well when I am choosing to be alone, sitting in the library at lunch and break, but now that she doesn’t want to speak to me at all, I feel like I will be on my own forever.
I have switched my phone off. There is no point in having it on: Aubrey was the only one who ever texted me and I don’t want to be checking it all the time just to see that I (a) have more nasty messages from her, or (b) have no messages at all.
I don’t know which is worse. We’re at school already, so I’m going to have to stop writing.
I walk into the locker area, still hiding behind my fringe, and open my locker door fast so that I can hide behind that as well.
Someone comes up behind me and taps me on the shoulder as I am getting out the books I need for my first class. I turn round and come face to face with Aubrey, smiling at me. For a microsecond I think everything’s going to be OK and I open my mouth to say something. Then the VTs appear on either side of her, like two pieces of rank burnt toast, popping out of a toaster.
‘Hi, Skye,’ says Livvy, flicking her long ponytail over her shoulder. Then she makes a big show of pulling a face and flapping her hand under her nose. ‘Eeuw!’ she cries. ‘Anyone else smell that?’
‘Urgh, yes!’ says Izzy. ‘It’s like – there’s a whiff of public loos or something.’
I turn back to hide in my locker.
‘So, Skye. Been swimming in any more toilets recently?’ Izzy says.
‘Yeah. Called any knights in shining armour to rescue you?’ I hear Aubrey add. Her tone of voice is almost identical to the twins’.
The VTs laugh, no doubt approving of Aubrey’s oh-so-witty comment.
I feel my face flare and will my brain to come up with something clever and witty in reply, but all I can think is: Aubrey’s not wearing her friendship bracelet.
I turn to look back at her and check both her wrists just to make sure. No, she has definitely taken it off.
‘Your face!’ crows Livvy. ‘I don’t know about Skye Green – you look more like Skye Red today.’
‘Ha ha!’ sneers Izzy. ‘You know what they say about “red sky in the morning”? “That’s a warning.” Better stay out of her way before she explodes!’
I plead with Aubrey with my eyes to leave this evil pair and come back to me. There was a time not so long ago when a glance like this would have had Aubrey rushing to my side: she would have known exactly what I was thinking without me having to say a word. Like I say, we have always been able to read each other like a book.
Sadly, it turns out that today Aubrey is reading me completely wrong: instead of the Best Friends Make Up and Everyone Lives Happily Ever After story that I have in mind, she sticks her chin in the air, links arms with the VTs and says:
‘I don’t know what’s happened to you these days, Skye. I think you need to get a life and grow up.’
This is what happens when you take off a friendship bracelet you have been wearing for nearly three years. You lose the power to read your best friend’s mind.
I try one last attempt to get her to understand what happened at the weekend. ‘Aubrey, it was not my fault about Finn. He came round to see Harris—’
‘Oh, of course. Fit Finn Parker came round to play with your little squirt
of a brother.’ Aubrey snorts. ‘I bet he did.’
I gasp. She has never said anything so mean about Harris before.
‘You know what you’ve done, don’t you?’ says Livvy.
I say nothing. I have a feeling they are going to tell me the answer to this question, and I am not disappointed.
‘You broke The Friendship Code, Skye Green,’ says Izzy.
‘Yeah,’ says Aubrey, holding up her wrist to show me what I have already noticed. ‘You broke the code, and I have broken the bracelet.’
And our friendship, I think.
I can’t make myself say it aloud, though. I beg my brain to think of something to say. Nothing happens. I feel numb. I turn my back on their laughter, praying that the bell will go and that I can leave it until the last minute to slink into class. I don’t know where I am going to sit. I know one thing for certain, though: it won’t be next to Aubrey, where I have sat ever since my first day at school.
The days of Aubrey and Skye are well and truly over.
Things got worse as the day went on. I should have seen it coming: turns out ‘someone’ managed to film the Bathroom Incident. It will have been Finn, of course. That must have been what he was doing with his phone while he was laughing at me. He probably even sent it to Aubrey straight away which is why she was checking her phone too. Or maybe it was the other way around and she sent it to him? Anyway, who cares which one of them did it? The VTs have already made sure it was posted in time for everyone to see it by lunchtime.
Everywhere I went people jumped out at me or crept up behind me and made flushing noises or shouted ‘Boo!’ and then said, ‘Oh, sorry – didn’t mean to make you wet yourself!’ One clever person even went so far as to fill my locker with loo rolls so that when I opened the door at the end of the day, the whole lot fell on top of me. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was caught on camera as well.
The only way I am going to survive at school from now on is by using the library as my safe haven. Mrs Ball keeps an eagle eye on anyone who goes in there. She has a zero tolerance policy on bullying. She has a superb tactic for keeping people in line: she eyeballs anyone misbehaving and talks them into signing up for The Summer Reading Challenge. Not a punishment for someone like me, of course, but the people who used to come into the library looking for trouble now know it is not going to work out in their favour, so they are staying away.
