My hand squeezes the carrier bag. I want to get out the clippers and hack off their stupid flicky hair, silence their mocking words with a trowel in the face. Instead, I keep walking, head down, shoving Nicole with my shoulder as I march past.
My eyes are swimming with hot tears as I round the corner.
“Tess—wait.”
I can hear Bella running up behind me, but I don’t slow down.
“Hey,” she says, stopping me with a hand on my shoulder. “You okay?”
“Am I okay?” I turn to face her, letting her see the tears.
“Look—I’m sorry, okay?”
“Why didn’t you say anything? Why do you let them be such cows to me?”
She raises her hands and lets them drop. “I…I don’t know. But Tess, come on. You don’t help yourself, you know. Look at the state of you—you’re not eight anymore, a chubby tomboy in dungarees.”
Chubby. She actually said chubby. Yes, I know I’m a state—my T-shirt’s too tight and my jeans are filthy. No makeup, hair a halo of frizz. But I’ve been bloody gardening, not going to a goddamn nightclub.
“You’re embarrassed by me,” I say, my voice flat.
“No—of course not,” she says, but there’s a pause before she says it and no conviction in her voice.
“Well, fuck you, Arabella Cooper. Just fuck off with your friends. Pretend you don’t know me and then maybe I won’t embarrass you anymore.” I swing the carrier bag and smack her in the arm with it before walking away again, fast enough that I’m out of breath in a minute.
I don’t look back to see if she’s following. I know she won’t be.
Bella comes into my room later that night.
“You awake?”
I close my eyes and stay huddled on my side. She sighs and lies on the bed next to me, on top of the covers. She smells of cigarette smoke and the woods.
“I’m so sorry, baby sis. I was a total bitch. I should have said something. I should have told them to shut up.”
“Why didn’t you?” I say, turning to face her.
“Because…I don’t know. There are no excuses, are there?”
“I wish you didn’t care so much about what they think. They’re so horrible—nasty, horrible girls.”
“They’re not all bad,” she says. “Nic’s really funny and Caitlin can be, like, really kind sometimes.”
“Huh. I’ve never seen that.”
“It was just teasing, you know. They do it to everyone, not just you.” She pauses and a gurgle of laughter escapes her. “And Tess—seriously—when you came round the corner. You really did look like you’d crawled out of the hedge. You were covered in mud—it was all over your face. And there were leaves in your hair. It was like some wild woman had jumped out at us.”
There’s no cruelty in her laughter and reluctantly I smile. “Yeah, hardly catwalk-ready.”
She laughs again and I shush her, aware of Dad sleeping across the landing.
“I really am sorry, though,” she says. “I wish I could be more like you sometimes. You really don’t care what you look like or what people think.”
I think of the half hour I spent sobbing when I got back to the house, how I wanted to smash every mirror. My eyes still feel swollen and sore.
“What were you doing, anyway?” she asks. “Mud-wrestling?”
I hesitate. Should I tell her? About the garden? I imagine showing her. I imagine it becoming our place, not just mine. But, oh yeah, it’s not mine anymore, is it? Bella’s pretty boys are moving in.
“Nothing. Just crawling through hedges. As you do.”
She laughs again, softly, reaches out to tug on one of my curls. “You’re mad, baby sis. Totally nuts. Don’t ever change.”
“You neither.”
She yawns. “Can I sleep in here tonight?”
It’s only a single bed and Bella’s a quilt-hogger, but I move over anyway, closer to the wall. “Course you can.”
I close my eyes and drift off to the sound of my sister’s soft breathing.
NOW
Chapter 6
ANOTHER SUMMER OF DEATH?
Body found in the woods
Police have confirmed that on August 23, 2008, a body was recovered from woods near West Dean in the Vale of Glamorgan and that another person has been taken to the hospital, where they are reported to be in a stable condition. No identities have been revealed.
IS THIS THE WORK OF A SERIAL KILLER?
Police have revealed the identity of the dead body discovered in the woods near West Dean as that of Arabella Cooper, aged eighteen. It is believed her sixteen-year-old sister was discovered unconscious nearby. Officers have not yet revealed if they are treating the death as suspicious, but after the murders of seventeen-year-old Nicole Wallace and nineteen-year-old Annie Weston, and with Rachel Wells still missing, fears are growing that a serial killer is preying on the teenage girls of this area.
COOPER DEATH “A TRAGIC ACCIDENT”
An inquest has ruled the death of Arabella Cooper a tragic accident, stating that the embankment was unsafe due to an earlier storm and that, under the influence of alcohol, the girls fell. Arabella Cooper’s death was caused by a “fatal head injury” from rocks at the base of the embankment. Evidence shows that the severe storm that heralded the end of a three-week heatwave caused part of the embankment to give way, causing the girl’s fall.
I keep all these newspaper reports in a box under my bed. I’ve carried this box everywhere I’ve lived in the last ten years. Dad doesn’t know. He never knew I pulled the papers out of the bin after he threw them away without showing them to me. He never knew I carefully cut out each story and put it in a box. He never knew I’d lie awake at night crying over the things I overheard in the village said about my sister, all those gossips whispering in hushed voices about Bella being a troublemaker, some drunken hell-raiser.
I took the box to the police station once. Dad doesn’t know that, either. I tracked down the detective who’d questioned me in my hospital room, and a week after the inquest ruled Bella’s death an accident, I waved in front of him the stories that talked about a serial killer and screamed at him to do something, to find out the truth. Because, awful though the idea would be, I wanted to stop all that gleeful gossip, I wanted there to be some other explanation than a drunken accident in the woods.
I remember the pity on his face. He picked up all those newspaper cuttings from the floor after I’d let them drop and he smoothed them all out before putting them back in the box carefully and neatly. He was kind, I remember, but kind in the way you are to a distraught child, or a doddery old woman who’s forgotten where she lives.
The inquest said it was an accident so an accident it was. Case closed. He put the lid on the box and sent me away, and I don’t think I’ve opened the box since. As my grief grew less sharp edged, I burned with humiliation and tucked the box farther away under the bed to gather more dust, telling myself he was right, the inquest findings were right, everyone was right. It was an accident.