Wonderland

August

BE YOURSELF,
they say. Be whoever you want to be. Dad, Ed, Mr. Hughes, Oprah bloody Winfrey. Like some crappy mantra.

But they’re not the same thing. Not the same thing at all.

I look at my reflection in the rearview mirror. My hair bottle-bleached and salt-dirty, my eyes ringed in black, lips stained red. My hands on the steering wheel, knuckles white, the nail varnish chipped, weeks old. Then I look at the Point, falling away in front of us. The wooden fence, broken from where we’ve climbed over it so many times. The ledge below, cigarette-strewn and soaked in lager. And the sea below that. A swirling, monstrous, beautiful thing. Alive.

Nausea rises in me again, bubbling up, insistent. I breathe in, pushing it, willing it back down again. I don’t know how we got here. How I got here. I don’t mean how I got to this place, the Point, but how I became the girl in the mirror. I don’t recognize myself. What I look like. What I’m doing.

I used to know who I was. Jude. Named after a song in the hope that I’d stand out and shine. But I didn’t. Jude the Invisible. Jude the Obscure. Everything about me unremarkable. Nothing beautiful or striking, to make people say, “You know, the girl with that hair,” or those eyes. I was just the girl from the farm. The one with no mum. I knew what would happen when I woke up, when I went to school, when I came home. Who would talk to me. Who wouldn’t.

Until Stella. Now when I look in the mirror, I see someone else staring back. I can’t see where I stop and Stella begins.

“We’ll be legend,” I say.

I watch Stella as she lights up a cigarette and drops the Zippo on the dash.

“Like Thelma and Louise,” she drawls. She takes a drag, then passes it to me. “But without the head scarves or Brad Pitt or the heart-of-gold cop watching us die.”

And then I know she knows. And I know she won’t stop me. Because this is the only way.

“It’ll be very,” she says.

I take a long drag on the cigarette and, still watching myself in the mirror, exhale slowly.
Shouldn’t be smoking,
I think. But what difference does it make now? I pass it back to Stella. Then I let the hand brake off and the car rolls forward.

May

I’M SITTING
in my bedroom, looking in the mirror. Her mirror. The wood scratched, glass flyblown. In front of it, a bottle of Chanel No. 5, the perfume evaporated to a dark amber, the label yellowed, peeling now. I hear Dad and Alfie downstairs, clattering in the kitchen. Alfie asking for Coco Pops and Dad saying no. Like it’s any other morning. But it’s not.

I’m wondering what she’d look like today. Her thirty-sixth birthday. I think of Ed’s mum, Mrs. Hickman. Working in the post office with Dad. Her hair graying, clothes shapeless, in every shade of beige. Or Mrs. Applegate. Red-faced, rolls of fat bulging under her rugby top. Soft-focus, blurry versions of who they once were. But Mum never changes. Twenty-eight forever. Model looks, she still went up to London for shoots. But it’s here I picture her. Sundress hitched up around her legs, hair this wild gold, curls whipping around her shoulders in the sea wind, the silver of her hooped earrings catching in the sunlight. Laughing as we rolled down the dunes, sand in our eyes and shoes and knickers. She shone. Bright and sure. Even at the end. She still eclipsed us all.

They say I look like her. Gran, Mrs. Hickman, even that woman in the pub. I remember she was watching the deliverymen roll the beer barrels off the lorry. My hand felt small in Dad’s rough heavy grip as he pulled me up the hill toward home. I held him back, straining to peer into the cellar, wondering what ghosts and creatures hid there in the damp darkness. I felt the words almost before I heard them. Shooting through him, his hand stiffening on mine. “Hasn’t she got Charlie’s eyes?”

She meant nothing. Trying to be nice. Or just remembering. But he didn’t want to remember. He pulled me away up the hill. Me apologizing for her. “Sorry, Dad.” Like I could make her take the words back. Make them evaporate. And take the memory with them.

I know he sees her when he looks at me. Sees that day. Me jumping up and down on the bed like it’s a trampoline, shouting at her, “Get up, get up, get up!” Her lying on her side. Saying she just needs another hour. Dad dragging me off, telling me to leave her alone. That she’s too tired. That we’re wearing her out, me and Alfie.

That was the last time I saw her.

I look at my reflection again, turn my head. Trying to see what they see: her eyes, her smile. But it’s just me. Brown eyes. Straight hair, a nothing color. Nose too big. I am the blurry one. The faded version.

I know why she did it. It wasn’t me. Not just me, anyway. It was this place. The people. All of it. She thought it would be her escape. Her wilderness. Her Happy Valley. But it suffocated her. And I can feel it taking me too. The memory of her weighs down on me, squeezing the breath out of my lungs. I gasp and brace myself against the dresser. My right hand slips on something. I look down, and the weight lifts. I pick the envelope up and read the address again. My handwriting, deliberate, practiced. Like my letters to Santa Claus when I was six years old. It cannot get lost; its contents are too precious. Inside is my golden ticket. My escape from this life. An application form for drama school three hundred miles away in London. Because there I might shine. There I can be somebody else.

Then I see it. A flash of green flickering across the mirror. I look up and she is standing there. Back against the wall, hair pinned up. Her dress a shiny emerald, like the carapace of a beetle. She smiles. And though I know what will happen, what always happens, I turn. And she is gone. And I hear Dad shout up the stairs. “Jude. Bus. Now.”

I pick the envelope up off the dresser and put it in my bag, hiding it among the books. I’ll post it later, I think. In town. Not here. Someone will see it. He’ll see it. Recognize the writing. Nothing stays secret for long in a place like this.

But as I walk down the stairs, my school shoes clopping on the bare boards, I can feel the letter burning, screaming its presence. Like she did. Like I wish I could. And I wonder if today I’ll dare to post it. Or if I’ll bury it at the bottom of my drawer again. Lost for another month under my primary-school coloring books and swimming certificates. And I know the answer. And I hate myself.

THE BUS
takes half an hour to make the six miles from Churchtown to Porth. I sit alone at the back, slumped against the window in the dull, heavy heat as we trail a tractor out of the village. Listening to the tinny chat of the driver’s radio crackle into our world, out of place against the high-hedged lanes. The DJ talking about his night out in London, about places and people three hundred miles away. About a rush hour that doesn’t move. Cabs and cars jammed into the buzzing streets.

We pull out onto the roundabout and join the pitiful queue of cars making their way toward the few chain shops and offices that pass for a town. And I listen to the radio and wish I were in that world, not this.

Royal Duchy Girls’ School is where weekenders and rich locals send their kids, thinking it’s going to be all Enid Blyton with sea air, outdoor pursuits, and bread and jam for tea. What it doesn’t say in the glossy prospectus is that outdoor pursuits means burying bottles of vodka in the dunes to dig up later or shagging sixth-formers from County Boys’ on the hockey pitch. Or that, forget bread and jam, the upper-school dorms are redolent with the acid waft of bulimic vomit — this year’s bikini diet of choice — and that half of Year Eleven are regularly in the Priory for rehab. I loathe school. And it loathes me. Four hundred overachievers, toxic anorexics, and It Girl wannabes, all crammed into a Victorian Gothic horror house on a hill.

And as if that weren’t bad enough, there’s Emily Applegate. My own personal rich-kid nightmare. If you just heard her name, you’d think she was all rosy cheeks and white lace, like some Jane Austen heroine, or a nice-as-pie vicar’s daughter. She’s not. She’s a grade-A bitch who only exists to torment and torture lesser beings. Like me. And, like every supervillain, she has minions. Three of them. The Plastics, Ed calls them. Holly Scott, Holly Harker, and Claudia Dawson. Dawce. All blond hair and trust funds and weekend coke habits.