Primperfect (24 page)

I hate CSPE. It seems like a doss subject, but then it isn't and so you only do half-assed work for it and find yourself struggling during revision week because everything that was said in class got filtered out.

I could impress Robb by:

Trolling him with animal facts.

Kissing him and smelling his neck.

Offering to sleep with him.

Solving a notable mystery.

Being a boarding school.

Numbers one and two are the easiest. I think a combo of them and number four would be amazing. I know he likes me fine right now and that is positive. And it isn't that I want to marry him or anything, I'm just worried he'll find out the kind of person I am and change his mind. Because people do change their minds all the time in relationships.

Caroline was asking me about the party. She got me to tell it to her, and I had to go back through everything again, only with me playing the Steve role, because I don't want to be, like, committed or anything. I wonder can a therapist have someone committed? She is a doctor as well as a cognitive behavioural therapist. I mean, she has her medical degree up on her wall. I can see the grain of the paper and I think it is unlikely that she just printed up a fake one off the Internet to impress her patients. I don't think it'd be legal for one thing. So maybe Caroline could have me committed if she wanted to. I wonder what it would take. Like, a suicide attempt? Or maybe hearing voices? People with schizophrenia do that sometimes. Hear things that aren't really there. Only they sound as if they are there, right in their ear. Telling them things. And when something seems that real, it's hard to know who to listen to. Sometimes I worry about my brain. All the stuff I've gone through since Mum's death has made me aware of all that can go wrong.

Before Mum died, I thought of illness as a body thing. Like cancer or pneumonia or a broken leg. Some of them kill you, some of them get cured. But now there's this whole other side. Your brain can get broken and if it's only cracked a little, you can try to fix it yourself. But you mightn't have the tools to do that or, because there is a crack in your brain, you mightn't be able to recognise what the tools you should be using are. And so you try things that aren't helpful. Like I did with the cutting. Some people make themselves sick or don't eat or take drugs or have ill-advised sex in nightclub toilets.

There is a whole slew of things you can do to try to fix yourself that actually sand the edges of the crack, so it feels less broken, smoother but actually it's getting bigger, bigger all the time, and if it gets too big you might die from how big it is, how insurmountable the space between one side of the crack and the other has become. If the crack is big, you mightn't be able to help doing dangerous things. They might seem increasingly sensible, given the circumstances. People kill themselves. They are alive and then they aren't any more, and that's a choice they've made, a desperate lonely choice. To destroy themselves because it genuinely seems like the most sensible option, given how unfixable things have become; how full of sad or angry or both they are.

I think it is yourself that makes you decide to kill yourself. Because not everybody likes themselves, but some people actually hate themselves, hate themselves the way I hate Karen, or the drunk man who killed Mum. More even. I don't want either of them dead. I just don't want them near me. But if you hate you that much, and have to be near yourself all the time, then maybe you would start to hate yourself more and even more until you'd kill yourself.

I think about it sometimes. I used to do way more. But I don't hate myself enough, I think. There's always, like, this little chink of hope. I'm never empty. Mostly I was just tired. I wanted a break from all the life I had. Because it is exhausting, living when you're sad all the time. You get so little out of it. I'm glad I'm better now. I mean, I still have my moments. But they don't expand and bleed into the other moments, until it's rarer to be happy than sad. Sad is not my normal now. And I don't think that's completely because of Caroline. A lot of it's to do with me, and growing up and getting used to things. Things like hormones. And mothers being dead.

Not that, were she around, she'd have fixed everything. But I wonder how much of it would have been broken to begin with. Caroline makes me think things sometimes. After I leave her office, I get all introspective and walk around, listening to music and formulating thoughts like they were potions. Trying to decide what I think. Because a lot of the time I don't know. She said I could always just drink Diet Coke and say that it was vodka and Diet Coke, if I felt weird about not drinking. I kind of don't, though. That's not what it was. I'm comfortable enough to say no to things, but I might have forgotten to be for a while. Or just forgotten that drinks weren't sweets, that you can't gorge on them and know that it's unhealthy but think that they have no real side-effects.

I have to make a list of things I do. Like, activities each day. She wants my weekly leisure time-table to analyse. Or written out, for me to analyse myself while she listens and judges in a way that seems like she isn't judging. But she is, she totally is. I mean, everyone makes judgements about everyone else all the time. We can't help it. We're human. It's our thing.

I have a funny feeling about this holiday. Like somehow there is something more to it. I don't think he has cancer, but I've got the weirdest niggle, not in the pit of my stomach but kind of in the corner of the pit. And the niggle is telling me that Dad is, if not up to something, at least not telling me the full story. But it's a week in London, so what mystery can there be, really?

I already know he'll have to work for some of it, so that's out there. I don't know. I'm probably being over-analytical. The scar where my brain-crack used to be sometimes lets a bit (or a lot) of negative spill out all over a day or a person or an interaction.

But what's the deal with London? We're leaving in three days. It seems quite sudden. My pit-niggle is shaped like a question mark but there's very little I can do about it.

I wonder if I'll get to see Robb before I leave. I've been turning it over in my mind. The night of the party. When he didn't want to kiss Ciara. Just me. His pillow-mouth. His eyes. I think I'd like to. I think looking at him might make things in my head stay put or fall apart, like sexual attraction Jenga.