Let's Get Lost (33 page)

“Thank you for staying with her so she wasn’t alone,” he said so softly I had to strain my ears to catch the words. “She didn’t like being by herself.”

“She was always bugging me to do stuff with her when you weren’t here, and it used to really get on my nerves that she’d never give me any space, but now . . .” I started crying again, hopelessly, helplessly, because suddenly it hit me every bit as hard as that final slam into the back of the lorry that she was gone.

He didn’t say anything; just let me cry until my head felt like it had been packed in cotton wool and then when my throat was too sore to cry any longer, he put a finger to my lips. “If anything had happened to you tonight . . .” he began, then smiled wryly. “Anything worse than this . . . I wouldn’t have been able to live with losing both of you. Even when I’ve been so very angry with you, with the way you’ve acted as if her loss was this minor inconvenience, I love you too much, Belle, even when I don’t like you.”

“You want to send me away to some school where they’re going to make me pray all the time.” I sounded a bit like my old self. “I saw the brochures. I saw them!”

He met my accusatory stare without flinching. “I’ll admit, I’ve given it serious consideration. You didn’t seem to want to be here, and I can’t endure this situation any longer, Belle.”

“I don’t want to go, I want to stay here with you and Felix, but everything is so messed and I don’t know how to fix it. Not just Mum, everything, and I’m so unhappy,” I finished on this desperate wail, and I was gushing out saltwater again and had my good arm around his neck in this complete stranglehold.

He took it in very good humor, snagging a tissue from the box on the side table and telling me to blow my nose in a stern voice that shocked a giggle out of me.

“I will not lose you, Isabel,” he said gravely. “Not to car accidents or your self-destructive behavior.

We’ll sort things out, but I will not have a repeat of these last few months, do I make myself clear?”

I nodded. “I am sorry, Dad. I know it was my fault . . .”

“It wasn’t,” he insisted bleakly, choking on the words. “I needed . . . wanted to blame someone because if I hadn’t gone away, if I’d been here . . . and I’ve been trying to hold everything together, make us a family again, but I feel like I lost you as well as her.”

“No! You’re not to say that!” Now I was comforting him, planting millions of tiny kisses across his cheeks. “I did get lost but I wanted someone to find me, you know that, right?”

“I’m beginning to.” I reached out my hand so I could trace the lines etched around his eyes that never used to be there. He turned his head so he could kiss my fingers. “I think you’re responsible for some of those wrinkles and at least 75 percent of my gray hairs.”

“They make you look distinguished.” I frowned. “Kind of.”

“I love you very much, Isabel, even when you make me utterly furious,” he said.

I could feel my eyelids drooping and I yawned hard enough to dislocate my jaw. “Right back at you, Dad.”

“Bed,” he said firmly, helping me stand up, his arm around me for support as I staggered to the door.

“You must be exhausted.”

“I passed exhausted a few hours ago,” I said, yawning again and then I looked around. “Hey, where did Smith go?”

Dad coughed delicately. “He very diplomatically excused himself from the room when you started crying.

He seems . . . nice enough for someone who’s been leading you astray.”

“It was more like the other way around,” I said, and there he was sitting on the stairs with Felix as they both tucked into bowls of cereal.

They both looked up, and then Smith got to his feet, clutching his cornflakes and looking like it was his turn to burst into tears.

“It’s quite all right, Atticus,” my father demurred. “I don’t happen to have my shotgun at hand.”

The flush started at Smith’s hairline and if he hadn’t been wearing his Jack Purcells, I bet even his little toes would have been blushing. “Yeah . . . um . . . look, I’m sorry . . . I didn’t . . .” he stammered while Dad smiled faintly. He could be one scary fucker sometimes. “I’ll go, if that’s okay with you, sir?”

“Are you all right to drive? It’s very late and you’ve had rather a stressful night.”

I don’t think Smith could have got out of our house fast enough. “No, it’s cool. I might walk, clear my head.”

“Thanks for everything,” I said, and it seemed so lame after he’d been all rocklike in the face of everything I’d thrown at him. “Sorry for being . . . well, sorry for everything.”

And even though I was leaning against Dad, Smith walked away from the door so he could find the one unmarked spot on my face and press his lips to it. “Don’t mention it.” He smiled. “Remember not to get your cast wet.”

“I think we have it covered,” Dad said silkily, putting his hand on Smith’s shoulder and flexing his fingers ever so slightly. “And you should stop for tea when you come around to collect your car.”

“There might be cake,” Felix chimed in hopefully.

Smith edged toward the door with one wary eye on Dad, like he expected him to break out the horsewhip and/or shotgun. Then he was giving me a halfhearted little wave and a lopsided smile before Dad shut the door behind him.

“He’s been really good to me,” I offered, but he shook his head.

“It can all wait until you’ve had some sleep.”

“So should I go to bed or shall I just stay up because cartoons will be on soon?” Felix asked as we shuffled up the stairs.

“We’re all going to bed,” Dad said firmly. “And we’re going to sleep until at least lunchtime.”

My leg gave out before we reached the top and he swung me up in his arms. “What if I can’t sleep?” I whispered. “What if tomorrow just keeps on sucking?”

He nudged open the door of my room with his foot and placed me gently on the bed. “One day it won’t,”

he said, tugging at the laces of my sneakers. “One day you’ll wake up and find that the pain’s still there but it doesn’t hurt quite so much.”

I shrugged out of my borrowed jacket and decided that if I was going to sleep it might as well be fully clothed. “But it doesn’t ever really go away, does it?”

He tucked the quilt around me, nice and tight, and then straightened up. “No,” he said, eyes shadowed.

“It doesn’t ever really go away.”

“Good,” I muttered, and I was asleep before he’d even switched off the light.

SPEAK

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Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in Great Britain by Hodder Children’s Books, London, 2006

First published in the United States of America by Dutton Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2006

Published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2008

Copyright © Sarra Manning, 2006

All rights reserved

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE DUTTON EDITION AS FOLLOWS: Manning, Sarra.

Let’s get lost / by Sarra Manning.

p. cm.

Summary: As she acts out the role of “Mean Girl”—at school, with her father and brother, and even with her new boyfriend—sixteen-year-old Isabel comes to a dead end and finally confronts issues related to her mother’s death.

eISBN : 978-1-436-24252-3

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

http://us.penguingroup.com

Dedicated to my mother, Regina Shaw

The memory of you emerges from the night around me.

—“A Song of Despair”

Pablo Neruda

With love and thanks to Jane Davitt

for cheerleading and beta-reading,

Sarah Bailey for never doubting me,

and Annakovsky for the name.

How does Isabel Clark rule the school?

The way I see it, school is like one of those documentaries about big cats on the Discovery Channel. It’s maul or be mauled. It’s not fair. It’s not right. It just is what it is. I spent two years of middle school having my lunch money stolen and my clothes, hair, and teeny, tiny, almost unnoticeable lisp mocked by a bunch of girls who were bigger and uglier than me. So when I got to senior school, it was beyond time to reinvent myself.

I’m the queen of the rumor. Of the veiled insult. Of the nudge and a wink and a smirk. And that’s how I rule the school. I have my three little minions. I decide who’s on the shit list for that week, and they make that poor girl’s life misery, and the rest of the school follows suit. Maybe they’re not big cats, but stupid, mindless sheep.

It’s not like I enjoy it. It’s just what I do to get myself through school. My whole queen of the mean shtick is exhausting. I can’t let my guard slip or show my true face for even a second. And I’ve paid such a high price for my status that I wonder whether it’s really worth it.

But then I remember how it feels to sit at the loser table in the canteen. Or what it’s like to have to skulk in the cloakrooms until everyone’s gone home in the faint hope that this won’t be the afternoon that I get chased through the streets. How it feels to have someone shove your head down a toilet and then pull the chain—not that I’d ever go to those kinds of extremes—and so I do what I have to do.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28