The Bone Dragon (18 page)

It’s the perfect opportunity to focus on how much I hate him: it’s probably the one time when no one would fault me for thinking of nothing else. But for some reason even
I
can’t put my finger on, I am not cooperating with Amy’s attempts to make his life as miserable as possible.

I try to concentrate on making out Mrs Henderson’s voice from behind the office door, but there are too many other people talking out there and, in any case, I don’t really care what she’s got to say. Paul shifts with a sigh and rubs at the bridge of his nose. Amy glares at him, then sets about arranging her skirt over her knees in little pleats. Paul heaves in a deep breath as if he’s going to sigh again, then makes a face and lets his breath out silently.

Amy, Paul and I are fed up with each other. Amy wants to show me that they’re ready to stick up for me and not let anyone else get away with hurting me. I get it. I really do. And I appreciate it. I really, really do, but . . . But I’m not quite sure what. Just
but
. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that it’s Amy who’s baying for blood, while Paul seems oddly unwilling to rock the boat at school by bringing in the police or lawyers. So Amy’s cross with Paul, while I’m openly cross with Amy for pushing and less openly cross with Paul because he’s not.

I’m actually looking forward to talking it over tonight with Ms Winters: maybe she’ll be able to help me figure it out, provided she’s done apologising, that is. She came over the day after the thing at the pool, all distraught that she’d somehow ignored hints that something like this would happen . . . But I was so matter-of-fact about how even I hadn’t ever expected Sonny Rawlins to do more than pinch me in the corridor that the weird spots of colour in her cheeks faded away and she went all normal again. Then Amy made us each a huge mug of hot chocolate and she stayed to play Cluedo with us for an hour.

But I was being funny about the whole thing even then: when Ms Winters swore she would make sure Mrs Henderson understood that the thing at the pool wasn’t a one-off, I told her not to. She thought it was because I didn’t want her to say anything about what we talk about together, but that’s not it. Or not really. It’s all part of how upside-down I am – how upside-down we all are – about what happened.

I mean, I get that this thing about Sonny Rawlins is all mixed up in my mind with Fiona and her parents, not just for me but for Amy and Paul too. I get it, but I don’t get quite why I don’t want there to be a big fuss about what Sonny Rawlins did. Maybe it’s partly because the whispering that follows me about school is bad enough already, let alone the fact that people from other years have started coming up to ask me whether Sonny Rawlins has been arrested and whether I’m going to testify at the trial. But that’s not really it.

Amy said we should go to the police and press charges and everything. Not that Sonny Rawlins would go to prison or anything, but it still wouldn’t be much fun for him. Only I hate talking to the police. I get all the stuff Uncle Ben told me about the fact that it’s their job to explore whether what you say will hold up in court, but they’re not very nice about it. The woman who took my statement about Fiona and her parents was awful. I hate her ten times more than I could ever hate Sonny Rawlins. She wouldn’t let me talk around things. And then she wrote up everything I said with about seven billion spelling mistakes and no grammar. All those things she’d made me say that I’d never said out loud before . . . that I never would have said out loud, not to anyone, ever . . . and she wrote them all up with spelling mistakes.

The door clicks open and as Mrs Henderson comes in, crossing to sit behind her desk, I turn my thoughts gratefully from the memories.

Mrs Henderson leans casually back, propping her elbows on the arms of her chair and steepling her fingers together. ‘Sorry about that,’ she says, smiling, but her fingers collapse down into a white-knuckled grip. I miss what she says next in the hope that she’ll turn her hands over and do ‘and here’s all the people’, fingers waving like centipede legs when you accidentally tip one over lifting a garden stone to see what’s lurking underneath.

‘Evie?’ Amy prompts, and I realise they’re all waiting for a response to a question I didn’t hear.

Mrs Henderson sighs, pushing her hands back into the steeple position, and I wonder if this is an unconscious attempt to pray for patience. ‘What do you think we should do, Evie?’

What does she expect me to say? ‘Please could you boil him in oil?’ Perhaps they think they’re giving me an opportunity to get it out of my system, but I don’t want to get angry if all they’re going to do is
listen
. And I’m not going to give them the chance to try to talk me round to whatever it is they’ve already decided to do.

‘I think Sonny Rawlins is a rotten bully, but he probably did just mean to push me in, like you’d push anyone else. And he might have known it would hurt me a bit more, but I don’t think he realised what would happen,’ I say, though I don’t understand why. I’d quite like Sonny Rawlins to drop dead in a ditch after all.

‘Well, Evie, that’s a very mature perspective on things,’ Mrs Henderson says. The long, polished nails on her right hand slide under the long, polished nails on her left.

‘We all know Evie’s very mature,’ Amy snaps. Paul leans over, as if to take one of her hands, but she shifts away from him, shoving them into her pockets.

‘I’m very pleased to see that you understand Sonny’s motivation, Evie,’ Mrs Henderson says quickly, and slightly too loudly, ‘but you didn’t tell me what you thought about his punishment.’

I shrug, keeping my gaze fixed on her hands. Her fingers have been scratching reflexively at a mark on her folder. Now a little piece of polish flakes away. The muscles in her cheek work as she glares down at the ragged patch of yellow showing through the white polish painted on to the tip of the nail.

I feel my lip curve with the urge to sneer, but manage to keep my voice neutral. ‘Amy and Paul said that because the thing at the pool didn’t happen in school time, it’s difficult for you to punish him for it directly so you have to treat it in terms of ongoing bullying at school that’s spilled over. They said you
can
suspend him for two weeks for that at least.’

‘And you think that’s a good idea.’ A statement, not a question.

Which is just as well, as I’m not at all sure what I think. It’ll make everyone talk at school and of course some people are already saying that it’s not Sonny Rawlins’s fault that I’m such a wimp, while others think I was just making a fuss to get attention. The last thing I need is for Sonny Rawlins or his horrid little friends to take to shoving me in the school corridors every chance they get: the thing at the pool was humiliation enough for a couple of lifetimes. I don’t need to do an encore performance of passing out in the hall with the whole school looking on.

When I see her later, Ms Winters will probably ask me if I’m afraid of Sonny Rawlins now. And I want to say no but it’s not that simple. I’m not afraid of him in the sense that I know he can’t get away with seriously hurting me – isn’t getting away with it, at least not completely, even now – and he won’t bother to try unless he thinks it won’t come back on him. But he could still make my life miserable.

No, the thing I’m afraid of is something to do with wanting him to be at least as miserable as he’s made me and, ideally, more. That’s part of it. But it’s also something to do with wanting him to be afraid of me: something to do with how unfair it is that the only payback I’m allowed is this stupid suspension or making myself miserable by going back to the police.

It’s all bound up with how angry, angry, angry I am that I never get to hurt anyone half as much as they hurt me. Except just that once. The tang of the memory warms me from the inside out, like heat in my veins. It was nice to be powerful. About the nicest thing I’ve ever felt. How I’d love to show Sonny Rawlins just how powerful I can be.

‘Will a suspension make any difference to him later on?’ I ask. ‘Like for applying to uni?’

‘Well, these things never look good,’ Mrs Henderson says, but her eyes move past me and she doesn’t look at Amy at all.

‘They most certainly wouldn’t if we decided to pursue things via the police,’ Amy says.

Mrs Henderson’s lips thin into an apologetic line. ‘Yes, I can see that might be an attractive option, but I doubt it will make any great difference in the end, juvenile records being treated in much the same way as school ones in these regards. I’m not sure the trauma of going down that route . . .’

‘As opposed to the trauma of letting the boy who tried to drown my daughter come back to class with her?’ Usually Amy gets loud when she’s angry, but today she’s quiet. Quiet and cold.

‘He didn’t try to drown me,’ I say. ‘He’s horrible, but he’s just normal horrible, Amy.’

Amy’s gaze is anguished. ‘It’s not right,’ she says and there’s a quiver in her voice.

‘I’m sure that what your husband proposed the other evening about getting Sonny’s parents to arrange some counselling involving anger management therapy would be a far more productive avenue to pursue.’

‘And less messy,’ Amy adds acidly.

‘Yes,’ Mrs Henderson says, suddenly sharp. ‘It would be
much
less messy. For everyone. You won’t get anywhere with the police. Which is not to say that I don’t see where you’re coming from,’ she adds quickly, holding up a hand, though Amy hasn’t made any move to interrupt, ‘or that I won’t push as much as I can with Sonny’s parents. They will, I am sure, be
most
unhappy to realise that the agreement the four of us reach here is not open for debate. Not unless they want to test my willingness to consider something more serious than a short suspension. And that’s not the sort of trouble they’ll want to invite.’ Mrs Henderson is looking at me, and I’m surprised by what I see in her gaze now. ‘It’s better than nothing,’ she tells me. And this time the apology is sincere.

And so is my smile. I like the idea of Mrs Henderson blackmailing Sonny Rawlins and his parents because I know that making Sonny Rawlins pay – really pay – will ruin things, even though it’s wrong that that’s the way things are. It’s wrong that some people get away with things and other people have to hold themselves in because they know they won’t.

But even though I’ve got Amy and Paul and Uncle Ben now, and that’s too much to risk losing, I’m afraid that one day all that unfairness will spill over, spill out and all I’ll be able to think of is how the things I’ve got to lose stop me being free. Stop me being powerful. Stop me
making
things fair.

Usually Amy would tell me stuff about ‘an eye for an eye making us all blind’ and I know Gandhi said it and it was a smart thing to say if we want the world to be a good place. Only it doesn’t feel like that. And the worst bit is that I know that if I
did
make Sonny Rawlins pay, he’d never dare to even
look
at me wrong again. It wouldn’t be like the time with the flowers, or the cigarettes, or every other little thing since, when my pushing back against his attempts to hurt me have only made him try harder. It wouldn’t just be a little victory in the moment, making sure his hatefulness backfires –
Yes, I know what these flowers are called
. No, if I ever really made him pay, that would be the end of it.

‘Ms Winters has volunteered to keep a particularly close eye on things when Sonny comes back to school, so hopefully that will help Evie feel more secure,’ Mrs Henderson is saying when I tune back into the conversation, ‘and I have every confidence that that will do the trick to keep him in line. Now, was there anything else you wanted to discuss, Evie?’

Paul puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes, but when I turn to Amy, her face is still full of anger and frustration.

‘No,’ I say. ‘There’s nothing else.’ I don’t listen to Mrs Henderson’s parting words.

By then it’s the end of the day so, after passing by the classroom to pick up my stuff, we head home. In the car, Amy glares into the window, while Paul’s fingers jitter and drum against the wheel.

Amy is out of the car as soon as Paul parks. He pulls a face and sighs.

When we sidle into the kitchen together, Amy is slamming cupboards open, wrenching the drawers out so roughly that the cutlery jangles discordantly. A fork falls, hits the floor at a strange angle and ricochets back into the air, then clatters a drumroll against the tiles as if fighting to stay airborne. When it has stilled, I look up to find Amy standing braced over the sink.

‘I’m sorry, Evie.’ Her voice is hoarse.

‘It’s OK,’ I whisper. I swallow and try again, louder. ‘It’s OK.’

Amy shakes her head, but doesn’t turn.

Paul moves to touch her arm, but she steps away from him, hands raking through her hair. ‘I know you think I’m not pushing,’ Paul says, his voice tight, ‘but Evie’s got enough to deal with without a pointless battle.’

‘It’s not pointless, Paul,’ Amy hisses, still not looking at either of us.

‘Yes,’ Paul says as I take a quiet step towards the door, ‘it is.’

‘It’s not pointless just because we can’t win,’ Amy whispers. I take another step. ‘Sometimes people need to fight, Paul. We can’t always just give in.’

‘And which battle should we fight?’ Paul demands suddenly. ‘The little one we can’t win or the big one? Which unwinnable battle should we make Evie fight, given that she’ll have to do most of the work? What type of losing is going to make her feel better?’

I turn and leave them to it, though they fall silent as I make my way upstairs.

‘There are better things to spend our energies on,’ I hear Paul say as I reach the top of the steps. ‘There’s more than one way to get where we need to be, Amy.’

I curl up in bed with a book, but I don’t even manage to turn one page before Amy, eyes rather red, comes to fetch me for dinner an hour later. It’s a quiet meal, though the tension that has haunted the week seems to have gone for now.

Amy goes to bed early, while Paul and I stay up to watch a movie. Only neither of us watches. Instead, I watch Paul as he stares blankly at the TV, wondering if we’re both thinking about the same thing: other ways of getting even and those night-time adventures he keeps having with Uncle Ben.