“Mmmm.”
“What does that mean? You don’t think I should?”
“I absolutely think you should. You can be quite a…”
“Quite a what, Charlie?”
In the mirror, his reflection chooses his words carefully. “Challenge. I was going to say, challenge.”
“Right.”
“It’s not always easy to live with, you know. So yes, if you think he’s…going to be around for a while…then he should know what he’s getting into.”
I stare at him in the mirror. “But he’s leaving. He’s not going to be around at all, is he?”
“There’s leaving, and there’s leaving,” says my utterly infuriating brother.
“But his dad, and…” I run out of oxygen. The tiny flame flickering in my heart has used it all up, burning brighter by the second. “I’ll never see him again after this.”
Charlie mutters something under his breath, something I don’t quite catch. It could be “I doubt that”, but maybe that’s just what I want to hear.
Either way, as he picks up my slightly crumpled (but mostly clean) hoodie from the floor and hands it to me, he looks at me kindly. “Well, if that’s true, you don’t have anything to lose, do you?”
He turns to go.
“Charlie!”
My brother stops when I call him and looks back around.
“What if…” I drop my voice to a whisper – the house is small and Hal is right downstairs. “What if he really does just think I’m crazy? Properly crazy.” I wait for Charlie to say something comforting. He doesn’t. “Does he think I’m crazy?”
“He thinks you’re you. Whatever label you go and stick on yourself.” Charlie moves back towards the door – but before he walks out of it, he turns back with one last parting shot. “Does it occur to you that he might actually like you for who that is?”
The stairs creak under his feet as he goes back down, leaving me alone with that thought.
I’ve been so afraid that Hal would see the parts of me that I try to hide from the world, the parts I try to brush over and camouflage, the imperfections I can never change or mend – but maybe he saw them anyway. Maybe he just saw them as being part of the grand Flora experience and…maybe he didn’t think it was weird. Maybe to him, it’s just…me.
He might actually like you for who that is…
I guess there’s only one way to find out.
Taking one last (hopeless) look in the mirror, I venture out onto the landing, pulling my hood close around my neck. It’s not that I’m cold, exactly – the weather’s too warm for that – but I feel somehow exposed, like a layer of skin has been peeled away. When I peer around the banister at the top of the stairs, I can only see the top of his head, his hair glinting copper in the front room as he talks to Felix about something. Their voices are too low for me to hear anything more than a soft mumble – of course, they’re talking quietly so they don’t disturb me, aren’t they? Charlie’s gone out through the kitchen, and there’s a clattering sound from beyond the back door. There’s birdsong and sunshine out there, and somehow that makes it feel like completely the wrong day to talk about a nervous breakdown.
It’s never the right day to talk about a nervous breakdown. And anyway, we’re not talking about a nervous breakdown. We’re talking about me.
I look at the back of Hal’s head, nodding at something Felix has said.
Me. A walking, talking nervous breakdown.
An overfull ford that floods the engine, and my brother has come and towed me out.
He thinks you’re you.
He might actually like you for who that is…
I lean further out, putting too much weight on the rail, and it squeaks. Below me on the sofa, Felix’s head moves just a little, because he recognizes the sound even if Hal doesn’t. There’s a pause, then he says something to Hal before getting up and pushing his sleeves to his elbows. He makes it to the front door, which is already standing open to let in the warm air from outside, before he glances back across the room and up at the top of the stairs. At me.
And just before he steps out through the door, he winks.
I step down onto the next stair, hoping it will creak and Hal will know I’m there, and I won’t have to announce myself – but just for once, the stairs are completely silent. So I give up and clear my throat quietly.
“Hal?”
He turns and sees me.
What does he see? Who?
His face lights up and he jumps to his feet, almost tripping over Felix’s stacked tool catalogues as he tries to edge around the sofa, his eyes never leaving me.
“You’re up!”
“Charlie says you’ve been waiting.” I pick at an imaginary scratch on the banister with my fingernail. “You didn’t have to…”
“I wanted to make sure you were okay. I was worried.”
“Worried? About me?”
“Well, yeah. That Albie…that what we’d read had upset you. Or maybe it was about the party, or…”
He stops again and runs a hand through his hair, brushing it out of his eyes. His cheeks, meanwhile, turn a furious shade of red. Hal has absolutely no filter when it comes to his feelings – or does he? Because when I remember how he stared down his father, remember the way Hal slapped his hand away, I wonder whether that’s strictly true.
Maybe it’s just when it comes to his feelings for me…?
“It’s not about you going,” I mumble, and a frown flickers across his forehead. Just for a second.
“Oh. Right. Well, good. That’s good. I’m…” He shakes his head and lets out something like a growl. “But, you know, way to make a guy feel special.”
“I mean, it is, yes, obviously it’s that too, but…there’s more to it than that.” I stop picking at the banister. “It’s complicated.”
The stairs have never felt so long, so steep. There are so many things I need to say, but all I want to do is feel his arms wrap around me and to rest my head on his shoulder.
The clattering outside the back door gets louder. Charlie starts singing what I think might be a song from Moana, louder than he probably means to. I cannot have this conversation to a soundtrack of Disney classics – least of all one performed by my big brother.
“Sorry. It’s his favourite. Do you maybe want to come up?” I jerk my head back towards my room.
Through the kitchen, Charlie goes for a high note and misses by a full nautical mile.
“I’ll come up,” says Hal.
Whatever he thinks when he walks into my room, Hal’s face carefully doesn’t show any of it. I see him take in the open window – the mirror of the one in the attic, now I think about it, facing back towards the house – and the beams. The wonky walls with their old white paint and my battered posters. The narrow bed with its white metal frame, tucked under the eaves; the beams that criss-cross the ceiling. I spot the small heap of clothes next to my wardrobe – the ones that haven’t made it to the laundry basket yet – and wonder whether I can somehow position myself in front of it, or steer him around the room so he can’t see it…And right in the middle of me thinking all this, his eyes sweep across the room and he looks right at my dress from the party, its hanger hooked over a nail that sticks out of one of the beams.