Chapter Two

Michael was my first proper boyfriend. I was sixteen when we met, a few months away from doing my GCSE exams, stressed and comfort-eating chocolate in the library as I struggled to revise for Maths. Michael was in the sixth form, with a crooked smile and floppy hair. He had asked me nervously which one I was.

“Megan. Sorry.”

“I’d hoped so,” he had replied as he slid into the chair opposite me.

From then on, we had been inseparable. I was infatuated by this boy who had finally chosen me. Who had looked at me and my twin and decided I was the one he wanted. Up until then, I had only ever been considered the consolation prize by the boys Leah rejected.

Michael and I waited until after my exams were over. Mum was working that special evening, pulling an extra shift at the care home because Dad had messed her support check up again and we were in danger of slipping behind on the rent. Leah had agreed to go out and leave us to it. When I’d told her the previous week that I wanted to finally “do it,” it had felt like the old times again, lying side by side on one of the beds in our room, sharing secrets into the darkness as we waited for the sound of Mum’s key in the lock to mark her return home. I had told Leah I was scared. Worried that I wouldn’t know what I was doing and that he’d laugh at me. Or, worse, that he would tell everyone at school and they would laugh at me. She’d soothed my fears, told me that as it was his first time too, he’d be worried about the same things.

But on the evening of the “deed”—as my year had come to call it, assuming our parents would have no idea what we were up to as long as we were at least a little oblique about it—I had to deal with a crisis at work. I had a job at a restaurant in town, working the swing shift to make sure that everything ran smoothly as we transitioned from serving afternoon teas to evening dinner. I had to wait for one of the other waitresses—some girl who Leah knew from theater club—to finally turn up. She was almost an hour late and I was frantic. I had told Michael to meet me at my house at seven, but my phone battery was dead, and I couldn’t tell him I’d be late. Just after eight, I let myself into the house and ran up the stairs two at a time to find my charger and plug my phone in to call him. He was already in my room. In my bed. In my sister, as he whispered my name in her ear.

She stole my first time with the boy I loved. I had wanted to kill her that night, to drag her out of the bed and scream in her face and smash her head against the floor.