“What do you mean?”
She leans in. I can smell cigarette smoke in her hair. I can hear her breathing, her breath overlapping mine. “Is that why you can’t sleep now?”
I exhale, release it and reach out a hand, wishing I could touch her. It’s Dad’s phone call doing this. Calling me home. Making me remember.
I don’t want to remember.
“You never came home,” I say. “I waited and waited but you never came home. You know I can’t sleep until you come home.” Stupid tears won’t stop now; they’re filling my eyes so I can’t see her properly. There are smudges on her tank top, dark mud on the knees of her torn jeans. They weren’t there a minute ago. Her hair looks less smooth, it’s tangled, leaves caught in it. A drop of blood trickles down her cheek. Wrong. I close my eyes and shake my head. I don’t want to see her like this—I’ve spent years trying to erase that image. This is the way I last saw her, but I don’t want to remember her like this. I open my eyes and she’s bright, shining Bella again; beautiful, eighteen-year-old Bella.
“I’m sorry I died,” she says. “I’m sorry I never came home.”
I rub my eyes and press my hands to my aching head, touching the old scar on my forehead. She’ll disappear again in a minute, fade away like she always does in dreams. “You never came home. How am I supposed to ever get to sleep again?”
“You can’t,” she says. “Not yet. Promises to keep, miles to go—like that poem, remember?” She steps closer and whispers her next words. “And Tess? Remember this as well. It wasn’t an accident.”
I wake with a gasp and sit bolt upright. My hand flies to my wrist, expecting the sting of a burn. I sniff the air and, for a second, swear I can smell cigarette smoke. I lurch out of bed, looking at the clock. It’s two—same time as in the dream. There’s no Bella in my flat, not even a sense of her. I shake myself. Of course there isn’t.
I falter, though, when I go through to the kitchen to get a glass of water. There’s a mug on the side, half-full of tea. When I touch it, it’s warm and my wrist throbs with a remembered sting.
Not real, of course it wasn’t real. But…it was so vivid. Was I sleepwalking? Talking out loud to a dream of my sister’s ghost? I must have been.
I shiver, remembering her words. It wasn’t an accident.
Why am I doing this to myself? Talking to Dad, thinking about the others, it’s made me remember the aftermath of Bella’s death, how I insisted something sinister must have happened, that it would take more than a stupid accident to kill my sister. Months of denial right up until the inquest findings. I’ve projected my own long-buried fears onto a figment of my imagination. Of course it was an accident. Of course it was.
Chapter 4
“Right—let’s get straight on with it. Poetry today.” I turn the pages in my poetry book to the page I’ve bookmarked. “This poem is called ‘Sold,’ by Paul Henry.”
Someone in the front row actually yawns and I grip the book harder to resist the urge to chuck the damned thing at him. I barely slept after last night’s dream, or hallucination, or whatever it was. And now I’m supposed to enthuse this eleventh-grade class about poetry?
I start reading the short poem and my throat gets tight halfway through. I’ve read this poem before, taught classes extracting every meaning and emotion from the poignant lines about a life embedded in the walls of a house, but today in my exhausted state the words stir up too many memories and thoughts of home, of Bella. My eyes are burning and I blink. When I look up, my voice trails off completely and I wonder if I’m so tired I’ve actually drifted into sleep, because for a split second the yawning boy turns into Bella sitting at the front of the class, leaves and twigs from the woods on the desk and an open poetry book in front of her. Come home, Tess, her voice whispers in my mind. I’ll wait for you in the woods. I rub my eyes and shake my head but she won’t stop. She won’t shut up.
It wasn’t an accident, she says. Over and over. The world spins and I lean forward, elbows on my desk, head in my hands.
“Um…Miss? Miss Cooper?”
I open my eyes and Bella’s gone. Someone in the class giggles, someone else is on their feet.
“Are you okay, Miss?” It’s Rebecca Martin asking, and there’s laughter in her voice, a hint of glee as her teacher goes gaga. Don’t they all long for this, some sign of weakness they can get their hooks into? Rebecca most of all.
I grit my teeth. “Sorry, I just…lost my train of thought for a second.”
Rebecca laughs again, loud, derisive, joined by more of the class this time. Gotcha, her laughter says. “A second? You’ve been sitting with your head in your hands for, like, ages.”
I stare at her, paralyzed. It would be Rebecca Martin, of course, with her sly smile, the whole class laughing now as she sets off again.
“Think you need a break, Miss—get yourself a Red Bull. Had a few too many last night, did you? Or was it this morning even?” Laugher rolls again through the classroom.
Suddenly, she’s not Rebecca Martin and I’m not Miss Cooper, she’s Lena and Nicole, she’s every one of Bella’s bitchy friends who’d laugh at me, make her embarrassed by me; all those girls who made my sister a stranger. I’m sixteen again, too fat in my school uniform, and there is Bella, dripping blood on her desk. I’m not going to let them do this to me again. I will not sit by quietly this time.
“Why don’t you shut the fuck up?” I say to Rebecca/Lena/Nicole.
There’s a gasp from someone.
“Excuse me?” Rebecca says half laughing, half shocked. I can only partly hear her through the buzzing in my head.
“Shut the fuck up, I said.” I get up, my chair scraping across the floor. My head spins and I can feel Bella urging me on. Go on, Tess, show them. Tell them. “You have no idea what’s going on in my life and you don’t even care, do you? All I want is for you to give me a break and do your bloody work. And maybe, for once—just shut your damned mouth.”
There’s total silence now. I look down at the poetry book in my shaking hand but then Rebecca fucking Martin laughs again and my control snaps.
I march over to her desk and she gets up, as tall as me, taller than I was at sixteen. But her bravado is all fake as I grab hold of her stupid short tie and pull her forward until our foreheads are nearly touching.
“Seriously? You’re still laughing? Will you still be laughing if I throw you through the fucking window?” I shove her backward and she falls, her chair clattering to the floor.
The silence is broken by someone shouting, “Miss has gone rabid!” It’s a boy’s voice, jubilant and scared all at once and it brings me back and Rebecca Martin isn’t Lena or Nicole anymore, she’s a scared-looking kid with tears in her eyes sprawled on the floor. Bella is gone from the desk next to her. Of course she is. She was never bloody there.
The door flies open and Sophie runs in, white-faced as she takes in the scene.
She puts her hand on my shoulder. “Tess?”
I reach out a hand to help Rebecca up, but she scrabbles away from me, fury and fear on her face, her cheeks burning red.