Good Girls Don't Read online

  “That can’t be healthy,” she says as I help myself to a chocolate mousse.

  “Probably not,” I agree.

  “Aren’t you going to eat anything else?”

  “Well, I would be having ice cream, but you ate all of mine.”

  “Oh, don’t be so childish.”

  “Childish? Me? I’m not the one who’s still pathetically clingy at the age of twenty.”

  “I’m not clingy, Emily, I just enjoy spending time with my family. You’ll understand when you’re older,” she says condescendingly.

  “You’re three years older than me. Get over yourself,” I tell her.

  She just sighs and shakes her head in that I-know-better-than-you-but-I’m-going-to-be-mature-and-leave-it sort of way that she does so well.

  I want to pull her hair or slap her across the face, but I wisely decide not to. She’d fight back.

  She has a superiority complex because she’s incredibly smart. I really don’t think that’s enough of a reason to act like you’re better than everyone else, nor do I think the educational system is based on intelligence. It’s mostly based on an ability to learn off by heart and then regurgitate the information within a short space of time.

  I really dislike exams. Of course, I can’t ever express this dislike around her, because she’ll start talking about how everyone has to do them, and they test how much you know, and blah blah blah. Whenever she starts talking about any of her passions, I have to tune her out. It’s the only way to stay sane.

  Which is why I go and eat my incredibly healthy breakfast in front of the TV. I’m sure she’ll be in later to ask me why I waste my time staring at the idiot box, but for the moment, she’s leaving me alone, and it’s peaceful.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The phone is ringing. “Emily, it’s for you,” Janet calls from downstairs.

  I pause Amelie and go down to the hall, accepting the phone. “Hello?”

  “Hey, Em, it’s Lucy.”

  “Hey, how’s it going?”

  “Great, everything’s great. Did you get home okay last night?”

  “Yep, the taxi came after about twenty minutes.”

  “You seemed to be enjoying yourself,” she says. “You and Barry.”

  “Lucy, don’t start.”

  She laughs. “Okay, I won’t. Anyway, since I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to you last night, do you want to come over sometime today? I have pizza.”

  “Pizza, you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be there,” I laugh. “I’ll see you in a while, I just have to get dressed.”

  “Oh, don’t bother. Come naked,” she giggles.

  “Now there’s an idea.”

  “See you.”

  “Bye.”

  ***

  “Do you love him?” I asked her one day when it was just the two of us.

  She smiled. “Yeah. I really do.”

  ***

  “I’m pretty much grounded until after the Junior Cert,” I told her.

  She made a sad face, but I wondered if she really cared. “But that’s so unfair.”

  “Yeah, I know. But there’s not much I can do about it,” I said.

  “You can just not listen to your parents,” she said. “What can they really do to you, anyway?”

  “Lock me in my room? Stop feeding me? Kick me out of the house,” I suggested.

  “You could come live with me.” She smiled.

  “I’d get in the way,” I said in a very self-pitying sort of tone.

  “Of course you wouldn’t! You’re one of my best friends, Emily.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You are.” She kissed me lightly on the cheek, then the lips.

  I pushed her away. “Don’t touch me, Lucy.”

  She was taken aback. “What’s wrong with you? You know I’m always like this –”

  “Well, maybe you shouldn’t be,” I told her angrily. “I mean, you go around playing mind games with everyone and flirting with them, and you think it’s okay. Maybe it isn’t.”

  “Everyone knows I don’t mean it, Em,” she said softly. “No one takes it seriously.”

  “Right,” I muttered.

  She closed her eyes. “Oh, no.”

  “I have to go,” I told her.

  “Emily, I – I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I have to go,” I repeated, and walked out the door.

  ***

  She’s wearing jeans and a see-through shirt with just a black bra underneath it. On someone else it might look ridiculous or inappropriate for a Saturday afternoon. On her it just looks elegant.

  “Hey,” she says.

  “Hi,” I reply.

  “I have pizza, as promised, and I’ve tided my room just for you.”

  “Your room’s always tidy,” I point out.

  “Well, it’s especially tidy today,” she says as we go in. “See?”

  “You’re such a neat freak,” I tease.

  “I know. It lets me fool myself into thinking that my life’s okay. You know, if everything in my room’s in its rightful place, everything else is too.”

  “Is everything okay?” I ask her.

  “Yeah. Kind of.”

  “Kind of? How are things with Andrew?”

  “They’re . . . I don’t know. Confusing.”

  “Confusing in what way?” I ask.

  She shrugs. “I’ve been going out with him for two years now. That’s a long time. I mean, I hadn’t even turned sixteen when I started going out with him. And we were both really different people back then.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “And we’ve been through a lot together, you know? We started off as kids, and now we’re – well, not grown-ups, really, but getting there, closer than we were before. But we’ve both changed so much . . .” she trails off. “I’m not even sure what I’m trying to say here. I still love him, honestly. But I’ve been thinking about all this lately.”

  “It’s birthdays. They do that to you,” I say.

  “Do you think I’m too young to be tied down?”

  “Lucy, you’re asking the wrong person here,” I tell her. “Do you really feel ‘tied down’, though, or just committed?”

  “I don’t know,” she sighs. “Emily, help! You’re good at this stuff. Tell me what I’m feeling.”

  I laugh. “You’re having a coming-of-age crisis.”

  She smiles. “That must be it.”

  We sit in silence for a moment before she asks, “So, what’s going on between you and Declan?”

  Chapter Thirty

  Third Year, a Saturday night a couple of weeks before the mocks. Declan and I were talking and out of the corner of my eye I was watching Lucy and Andrew. They were intensely engrossed in conversation, and every so often they’d stroke the other’s cheek, or kiss their neck. I’d never seen two people more in love.

  I wanted to go over there and tear them apart and tell them to stop acting so intimate because it was sickening, and because every time they touched one another, I wanted to cry.

  “If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?” Declan asked me.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Pills, I suppose.”

  “Yeah, me too. Although there’s always hanging yourself.”

  “Or slashing your wrists.”

  “Do you know the right way?”

  “There’s a right way?”

  “Yeah,” he said, eager to impart this information to me. “See, most people, when they’re doing it, slash across.”

  “And that’s wrong?”

  “Yeah, you’re supposed to go along the vein. Lengthways,” he said, turning my hand over and dragging his fingernails lightly down my wrist. “Then you’re supposed to make a couple of little gashes across, so that it can’t be stitched up quickly.”

  I nodded. “I see,” I said, recording the information in my mind. I had no intention of ever making use of it – I hoped – but even having thi
s knowledge seemed to give me a power. The power to say, “Hey, I know how to kill myself properly. I’ve thought about this. Does that scare you? Does it?”

  “Do you think about it much?” he asked me.

  “Not much,” I said, but not elaborating. What I meant was, not ever, but somehow I got the feeling he’d think less of me if I said that. “How about you?”

  “Every day,” he answered.

  “Haven’t you thought about getting help?”

  “Help?” he said scornfully.

  “Yeah, like counselling, or something.”

  “That’s not going to help me,” he said dismissively. “Besides, I don’t need it. It’s sort of pathetic, don’t you think? Talking to a complete stranger about your problems? And it’s not like they really care, anyway. They’re just listening because they’re being paid for it. The whole idea of therapy is stupid. It’s just a way for people to make money. It’s sad, that’s what it is.”

  “Yeah” was the only thing I could think of to say. I’d never really looked at it that way before. Declan was always thinking about these things. He had all these opinions on things I’d always taken for granted without questioning them.

  “It’s something that’s become really popular because everyone thinks they have problems and need to see a shrink,” he continued. “And most of the time they don’t, they just think they do. Take the girls in your school, for example. They have, like, perfect lives, but I bet they think that their lives are so awful when they can’t find anything to wear or someone doesn’t like them or something stupid like that.”

  “Yeah, they’re so superficial,” I agreed.

  “People like you and me, Emily – we understand what’s really important.”

  I nodded, even though I didn’t really get what he meant at that stage. But I wanted to be a part of it. I liked what he was saying.

  “We see the world for what it really is, and they’re stuck in their little bubbles, protected from everything,” he said.

  “They’re children,” I said. “They’re never going to grow up and realise what life’s really about. They’re just going to stay like that in their fantasy world forever.”

  He looked at me, impressed. “Yeah, exactly.”

  ***

  Ah, the joys of being a pretentious pseudo-intellectual fifteen-year-old.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “I’m going to do it tonight,” he told me.

  “No, Declan, don’t.”

  He stared at me. “There’s nothing you can say to make everything better, so don’t even try.”

  “I have to try. You’re my friend.”

  “You don’t really care about me.”

  “Of course I do. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? That’s why I’m talking to you, trying to make you realise what you’re doing.”

  “It’s just so you won’t feel guilty when I go through with it.”

  “No, it isn’t. Don’t, please. Look, I’ll stay here tonight, we’ll watch a movie or something, we’ll listen to music, we’ll have fun.”

  “Fine,” he conceded. “But I don’t know why you think it’ll make a difference.”

  I wanted to snap at him and tell him that I was trying to help him and be his friend and be there for him, and that maybe, instead of being mean, he should be grateful. But I was scared of setting him off, so I said nothing.

  ***

  My phone was ringing, and I sleepily reached for it, chastising myself for not turning it off before I went to bed. But then again, what if someone – like Declan, whose caller ID was coming up on the screen – needed to talk to me? So I had left it on.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hello,” he said, sounding distant.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked.

  “I just wanted to say goodbye,” he said in that same distant tone.

  “Oh, Declan. No. You haven’t done anything stupid, have you?”

  “I have to do it, Emily,” he said.

  I breathed a sigh of relief that he hadn’t actually done anything yet.

  “No, you don’t. Think of everything you’ve got going for you. You’re smart, you’re attractive, you’re interesting –”

  “Don’t lie just to try to keep me alive.”

  “I’m not lying, don’t be silly. Would I lie to you?”

  “You might, if you thought it would do any good.”

  “I just don’t want you to waste so much potential,” I said. “You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. The whole summer, even. No school for months – tell me that isn’t a cheerful thought.”

  “It just means I’ve more time to be bored and think about things,” he said miserably. “Do you want to do something tomorrow?”

  “I can’t, I have my maths exam.”

  “Your exam?”

  “My Junior Cert, Declan?”

  “Oh, right.” He paused. “You should really get some sleep.”

  “Yeah, I hear that’s a good thing to do.”

  “Goodnight, then.”

  “Night,” I said, throwing the phone across the room and burying my head in my pillow in an attempt to speed up the process of falling asleep.

  ***

  “Everything in life is so futile,” he said. “You’re born, you go to school, you work, you get married, you die. You’re just going through the motions. It’s such a waste.”

  “That’s a pretty pessimistic view, Declan,” I said.

  “It’s realistic,” he said glumly. “Take you and Natasha, for example.”

  “What about me and Natasha?” I said warily.

  “Well, you’ve said yourself that you know it’s not going to last. If that’s the case, then why bother? What’s the point in wasting your time?”

  “It’s fun,” I shrugged. “I like being around her. Even if it’s not going to last forever, it’s what’s making me happy at the moment.”

  “It must be nice to be happy,” he said.

  ***

  I’d known him for a year. I’d seen him happy before. Often it was due to being under the influence of various substances, but other times I’d seen him smile and look content, and then hide it, as if it was afraid someone would see and realise that there was more to him than being depressed.

  It was the attitude that a lot of that crowd shared, this need to be permanently down and dour. Once I’d stepped back from it, I’d started to see them for what they really were. Apart from Lucy, Andrew and Declan I wasn’t really friendly with any of them anymore. I’d made a couple of new friends in school since September. It was Transition Year, which seemed to be consisting mostly of time-wasting and gloriously non-academic activities, so there was plenty of time to get to know people that I hadn’t really talked to before. There was this girl Roisín who I’d always pegged as one of the serious academic types – the sort that I avoided like the plague after having Janet as an older sister – but once we’d got talking, we seemed to agree on a lot of things. She was sort of sheltered, but I thought it was endearing in a way. It certainly made a difference from the cynicism and the jadedness of Lucy’s friends.

  She didn’t strike me as the sort of person who thought the world was such a terrible place that the only way of dealing with it would be to remove yourself from it completely.

  But I couldn’t just ignore Declan. I couldn’t take the risk that one day he’d actually follow through on his promises.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “Well,” I begin. “I want to strangle him. So the usual, really.”

  “He is a bit of a pain, isn’t he?” Lucy sighs. “The poor guy, though, he’s got so many problems.”

  “He creates them for himself,” I say bluntly.

  “That’s a bit harsh.”

  “And I’m tired of being nice,” I sigh.

  She strokes my hair. “He’ll grow out of it. Eventually.”

  “Is that a guarantee?” I ask.

  “Or your money back.” She laughs.

  I
look at her now and she really hasn’t changed much since the first day I met her, two and a half years ago. She’s a little bit prettier, and she’s replaced her cute-sexy-schoolgirl look with a sophisticated-almost-college-student look, but she looks basically the same.

  The real change was inward, although to anyone who really knows her, the change isn’t as drastic as you might think. Lucy at eighteen is still a flirt, still fun to be around, still giggly. A lot more responsible than she used to be, I suppose, but that happens to everyone.

  It was two years ago, during the Easter holidays, so I was allowed out. My schoolbooks had been put aside for the two weeks and I was ready to enjoy myself, only I’d realised that my world had become a lot smaller in the last couple of months. I’d alienated most of the girls in my class during my days of hanging around with Lucy and her friends, and now that I no longer had them in my life, there were very people that I was close to.

  Not that I’d ever really been close to any of them. I still had Barry and Hugh, and they were all I needed, even if I missed Lucy. We talked on the phone occasionally but this was usually when she was drunk and she ended up rambling on and never making much sense. I daydreamed about her in school when I was supposed to be listening to the teacher, and then I’d snap out of it, worried that people would somehow be able to see what I was imagining.

  Three days into the Easter holidays, she rang me.

  ***

  “Emily? Emily, are you there?” She sounded panicked.

  “Lucy, is that you?”

  “Yeah, it’s me,” she said. “Emily, I’m in serious trouble. I don’t know what to do.”

  “What’s wrong? Lucy, tell me, what happened?”

  “I’m so stupid! I should have thought!”

  “What did you do?” I asked her, my heart pounding.

  “I think I’m pregnant,” she whispered. “Emily, I’m so scared, I don’t know what to do. If my mum finds out, she’ll kill me.”

  “Have you done a test or anything?” I asked.

  “No, not yet. I don’t even know where you’d get one,” she said.

  “Boots would have them.”

  “They’ll look at me,” she said hysterically. “They’ll look at me and they’ll know, and they’ll think, ‘what a stupid slut’ and they’ll be right, I am, and I’m going to be just another statistic and I’m going to have my whole life ruined and oh, God, Emily, I’m scared.”