by CJ Bridgeman
Hollie emitted an embarrassed groan. “What do you want?” she asked impatiently.
His smile faded. “Oh, um... the usual.” He paused. “You know,” he added with emphasis.
Realisation dawned and Hollie’s expression changed dramatically. When she spoke her voice was quieter; it was very different to the character she had shown to Felicity all day. Suddenly, she was much more withdrawn and anxious. “Go on then. What is it this time?”
“Dad wanted me to tell you to tell Mum that -” He stopped and looked up, his expression showing concentration as he tried to remember the message. At last he sighed and reached inside his blazer pocket. “I wrote it down this time. You know how he rambles.”
Hollie nodded miserably.
“Ah, here it is.” Jamie unfolded a scrap of paper. “Uh... profanities aside, of course, our father would like to convey to our mother his disappointment that she has not yet forwarded your school report to him.”
Hollie sighed in exasperation. “She told me she’d posted it to him in the summer holidays!”
“Yes, well... he says he doesn’t have it. If Mum doesn’t send it soon, he says he’ll... well, we’ll skip that part.” He put the paper away and looked at his sister apologetically.
“I’ll bring it in to school tomorrow,” Hollie said, shaking her head. “Was there anything else?”
“No, no, nothing else.” He glanced at Felicity. “Nice to meet you - uh?”
“Felicity,” Hollie said deliberately. “And she has absolutely no interest in speaking to you ever again.”
With the mood lightened, Jamie laughed. “I’ll be seeing you,” he said, and then he disappeared into the lunchtime crowds.
Hollie turned back to the table. “Our parents are divorced,” she said, as if that explained everything. “And my brother is the biggest geek in the entire school. Stupidly clever, but somehow that makes him even more popular. Not as popular as me, but pretty popular all the same.” She sighed. “Still, I blame myself. I did style him back in year eight. The bigger kids were picking on him and I knew the only way he would survive was if he pulled the buttons off his blazer and did something with that floppy mess on his head. He’s not exactly stuck with everything I taught him, but somehow he’s still doing well for himself.
“Anyway!” Hollie turned to Felicity, flashing her bright smile. “I feel as though I’ve spent the entire day talking about me. I just have to know all that there is to know about you, Fliss, if we’re going to be BFFs.”
Felicity wasn’t entirely sure that she knew what a BFF was, but it was clearly supposed to be a good thing. Still, she wasn’t willing to share many details about her home life; hiding things was going to be a struggle, especially when faced with a challenge like Hollie. Still, she ought to have known that these questions would come up sooner or later.
“So like, where did you used to go to school?” Hollie asked.
Felicity’s mind was thrown back in time to days that she had tried to forget. Every day and every night she had spent alone in the boarding school she had wished to be somewhere else. Not even at home, because she might as well have been on her own there, too. Even in the lunch hall, the classrooms and in the middle of a thousand girls seated in morning assembly, she had been by herself.
“I uh, I used to go to boarding school,” she answered eventually, aware that Hollie was staring at her expectantly. “In the countryside.”
“Boarding school!” Hollie declared. “That must have been ace! Were there parties? Did you all have to share a room - no, what’s the word - a dorm? I bet you had the most fantastic time! Oh, I’d love to go to boarding school. It’d be like St Trinian’s... or Harry Potter! But without all the magic, of course.”
“Yeah,” Felicity muttered. “Just like that.”
“So you must be pretty rich then,” Hollie continued. “Because only rich people go to boarding school. How did you end up here?”
Felicity averted her eyes. “I moved in with my dad.”
“Your parents are divorced too, huh?” There was a look of sincere sympathy on Hollie’s face, but it was clear that she didn’t want to talk about the topic any further, which was a relief to Felicity. Grateful for a close to the conversation, she deliberately neglected to put Hollie straight on her incorrect assumption. But the mood didn’t last for long, as Hollie suddenly grabbed Felicity’s hands, making her jump, and her understanding gaze vanished to be replaced with a keen grin. Felicity had come to expect this kind of instant switch between topics and feelings. “Hey, I know what we should do!”
Felicity stared.
“We should go out!” Hollie said excitedly. “There’s a club in town, the Talk. The first Thursday of every month they do a 14 to 17 year olds night. A Snap Night, they call it. Me and my friends are going - well, we always go, actually - and you have to join us!”
“Uh...”
“Oh come on, Fliss! You just have to!” Hollie continued. “It’d be the perfect way for you to get know people, and for people to get to know you. You’ll be as popular as me in no time!” Then she laughed. “Well, almost.”
Felicity pulled her hands away. “Sorry, I can’t,” she said, somewhat forcefully. “I - I have to help my dad. We’ve only just moved in and - and there’s still so much to do.”
Hollie nodded. “That’s a real shame, but I understand. I bet you have a lot to think about right now. Still, if you change your mind...” She reached into her handbag and pulled out a flyer. “It’s tomorrow night.”
The bell rang, signalling the end of lunchtime, and Felicity breathed a sigh of intense relief.
The flat was empty when Felicity returned after her first day of school. It would have been quiet, had it not been for the constant stream of traffic passing by, but she didn’t mind. She was finally by herself, away from the mad crowds of high school students; finally alone, as she had always been.
The day had been exhausting. Hollie was a thoroughly pleasant girl and Felicity recognised how much kindness she had shown to her, but simply listening to her talk was draining. Felicity wasn’t a people person. She had never had friends. It had always been just her and her mother, but even then they had led completely separate lives. Felicity couldn’t even describe what her mother’s occupation had been before she died; all she knew was that it involved a lot of travelling and a lot of being away from the home they shared for less than six months a year.
She didn’t miss it, she realised as she wandered through to her bedroom and collapsed on the bed. The house had a lot of history and was certainly worth a lot of money, but it wasn’t a home. It never had been. It was simply a place where she and her mother had lived, a place to sleep when she wasn’t at boarding school - a place to exist. With that thought in mind, Felicity wondered where her home truly was and quickly realised that she didn’t have one.
She didn’t know how she was going to get through the rest of the school year. If this one day tired her this much, how would she cope with the rest of them? Still, she didn’t have much of a choice. Plenty of the students at Greenfields skived off many of their lessons, but that was the kind of behaviour that attracted attention, which was exactly what Felicity wanted to avoid. In two years she would be done with school - and then what? She supposed she would have to get a job and find somewhere to live; her father was bound to want her out of his flat as soon as she had enough money to stand on her own two feet. She sighed and closed her eyes, wondering what the future had in store for her.
She must have fallen asleep then, because the next thing she knew her father was calling her into the dining area for dinner. Through bleary eyes she saw that he had laid the table, something that he had not done since she had moved in; the usual practice was for her father to sit in front of the television with his food on his knees, whilst his daughter disappeared into her bedroom. Clearly the first day of school was some kind of special occasion.
“I didn’t want to wake you,” her father said when he saw her, and t
hen he gestured to the table. “I thought we could sit together. You know... talk about your first day.”
Felicity sat at the table somewhat warily; change unnerved her. Her father placed a plate of food in front of her and then sat opposite her. “So? How did it go?”
Felicity shrugged as she picked up her knife and fork. “It was okay.”
“Did you get any homework?”
“No.”
“Did you make any friends?”
She looked at him. “I think so.”
“Good, good. That’s... good.”
Silence reclaimed the table after its momentary absence. Felicity pushed her carrots around on her plate with her fork. “I got invited out somewhere,” she said hesitantly.
Her father raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Really? Where?”
“A club,” Felicity replied. “The Talk.”
He frowned. “Yeah, I’ve heard of it. I’d, uh, I’d rather you didn’t go there.”
Felicity shrugged her shoulders.
Dinner was concluded not long after. As her father cleared the table and started the washing up, he said one last thing to her before she retreated to her bedroom.
“There’s a package on the sofa for you. I collected it from the police. It’s, uh... your mum’s things. The things she had on her when...” He stopped. “Anyway... they’re yours now.”
Felicity had frozen as soon as the word ‘police’ was mentioned, for she knew what he was going to say. Her mother’s belongings had been kept at the station ever since the car accident. She had been told they were evidence to be used whilst the police investigated the incident. She didn’t really know why they needed to look into it at all - a car accident was a car accident, as far as she understood it.
Her heart thudded in her chest as she gripped the paper package and took it into her room, unaware of her father’s gaze on her as she did so.
Felicity leaned on the door as soon as she had closed it, letting out a long breath. She clutched the package close to her chest, hearing the crinkling of the paper and the bubble wrap beneath. Why did she feel so anxious? It was just a bunch of old things that belonged to her mother, a woman who had never placed sentimental value on anything.
She held the package in front of her, staring at the letters of her name written clearly in bold, black marker pen. She turned it over and over in her hands, slowly, as if inspecting every crease in the well handled paper. She knew she was only delaying the inevitable. In spite of her hesitation, she was going to open the package. But she was afraid of how this act would make her feel. Upon opening the package, would she just see... things? Items of no significance, just trinkets that her mother happened to have had on her when she died? Would Felicity be indifferent to them, proving that she had never really known or even loved the woman who had given birth to her?
And then there was the alternative. Instead of meaningless things, would she see precious items that clearly meant something? Would she become overwhelmed and finally cry the tears that she had been so far unable to muster? To feel close to her mother only after her death didn’t seem like a good option, either; she didn’t know how she would handle it.
At long last, Felicity sat on the floor and tore open the package, tipping the contents into a pile on the floor.
She inspected them carefully. First, there was a small diary. It was very simple, with a black cover and the numbers ‘2013’ printed in gold in the top right corner. It wasn’t the kind of diary that one would write in detail the events of their life, but rather the kind that contained notes about meetings, appointments and special days. Upon flicking through it Felicity found that her mother had written very little in it at all. She hadn’t even bothered to fill in her personal details on the first page - or Felicity’s birthday.
Putting the diary aside, Felicity picked up the second item. It was a silver watch. The circular clock face was made from mother of pearl, giving it a pale pink tint. The bracelet was delicate and light; the watch was very feminine, and Felicity thought it quite pretty. She put it around her wrist, but it was clearly too loose and it slipped straight off again.
The third and penultimate item was a black stone. It had three sides; one of them was curved, whilst the other two were flat. It was similar in size and shape to a segment of orange. The flat sides were smooth and shiny whilst the curved side had lines and patterns of some kind etched into it. Felicity had no idea what it was.
Then she came to the last item - a gold ring. It was nothing like anything Felicity had seen in jewellery shops. It had quite a wide band that had many intricate engravings all along its length. In the centre there was a jewel of some kind, pale blue in colour; Felicity suspected it was a sapphire. She slipped the ring on her finger and was surprised to find that it was a perfect fit.
As she looked at the ring, it occurred to Felicity that she had seen none of these items before. In fact, she couldn’t remember any of her mother’s pieces of jewellery. She never dared to trespass into her mother’s bedroom, and most of the time she was away at boarding school anyway so never had the chance. But her mother had never shared anything with her, or given her anything apart from Christmas and birthday presents, and even those had stopped several years ago, when her mother deemed her too old for such childish fancies. Felicity had no idea what had been important to her mother, and now she would never find out.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the loose floorboard that she had tripped over so many times. Her father had promised to fix it, but so far he hadn’t found the time. Felicity didn’t give it much thought; it was his home, not hers, so he could either fix things or not fix things at his own leisure. The floorboard stuck out awkwardly, goading her to walk in its direction and catch her toe on its protruding edge.
Felicity didn’t know what compelled her to do what she did next. Perhaps it was because she didn’t know her father very well, or perhaps it was the unsavoury nature of the neighbourhood and the flat’s exceedingly poor security. Whatever it was, she felt a sudden urge to pull up the floorboard and see how good a hiding place it was - and that was exactly what she did.
The space beneath was dark and airy. In the dust and dirt that had settled there, Felicity found a five pence piece and a few scraps of paper, their writings long since faded. As she peered into the gloom, she saw that there was just enough space between the joists to place the padded envelope and its precious contents. She did so carefully, and when she was done she slid the board back into place.
3.
School was somehow easier the next day. Felicity suspected that overnight, her mind had had time to process the vast menu of information that Hollie had fed her the previous day. A good night’s sleep had rejuvenated her. She was hoping that the ‘new girl’ novelty would wear off and that she would cease to be the centre of attention, but Hollie had been quite keen to become friends. Felicity, on the other hand, didn’t think she really knew how to be friends, for no one had taught her.
The first lesson of the day was Science, and it appeared that Hollie was still excited about Felicity, for now at least. The two of them shuffled together to begin an experiment involving Bunsen burners but before Hollie could call to two of her regular companions, Jamie and another boy sailed over to them.
“And that makes a group of four,” Jamie said somewhat triumphantly.
“Are you serious?” Hollie exclaimed. “No way! Find your own loser friends to play scientist with.”
“I would, but alas, it seems as though every group is full,” Jamie said with a smile. “Plus it looks as though your little posse has banded together without you.”
Hollie turned; it was true. Her friends had made groups of their own, and the teacher’s instructions had said only four to each group.
“Well... I’ll do you a favour this time,” she muttered, defeated, and then she turned her attention to Jamie’s companion. “And who’s this? I’ve never seen you before. Are you that new guy?”
“Indeed,” J
amie said with a nod. “Looks like I got myself a buddy, too. This is Oliver. It’s his first day here.”
Oliver nodded to the two girls, but he didn’t smile and he said nothing. These actions clearly impressed Hollie, who regarded him with an overly keen interest that manifested itself in her smile.
She leaned over to Felicity. “Oh em gee,” she whispered. “He’s an absolute dream, don’t you think?”
Felicity looked at Oliver. His skin was quite pale, his dark hair hung around his face, and his eyes were brown. Beyond that, she couldn’t really see much, and had no idea what qualified as a ‘dream’.
Not knowing how to respond, she shrugged awkwardly. “Yeah, I suppose...”
“You don’t think so?” Hollie asked, surprised. “He’s gorge. And so... mysterious. Well, if you’re not interested, you’ll leave him for me, right?”
“Uh... yeah.”
“Thanks, Fliss,” Hollie replied with genuine gratitude, and then she stood, picked up her stool and moved it beside Oliver, introducing herself immediately.
“So Fliss,” Jamie said to Felicity as he struck a match to light the Bunsen burner. “How was your first day? I hope my sister didn’t bore you to death with her incessant rambling.”
Felicity glanced over at Hollie. She had managed to use her charm on the unsuspecting new boy and the two of them were fully immersed in the Science textbook in front of them - or at least, that was how it looked. Hollie clearly had some flirtatious plan in mind.
“It was fine,” she replied as she handled the chemicals for the experiment.
“Oh come on, be honest,” Jamie said. “Hollie told me you used to go to boarding school.”
Felicity was surprised. “Hollie told you?”
“That’s right.” Jamie looked at his sister. “Social etiquette doesn’t permit her to be too nice to me in public, but outside school she’s as nice as anything. Both our parents would kill her otherwise. But don’t worry,” he added with a laugh. “I’m fine with it. Nothing Hollie could possibly say could do me any damage.”
