“Well, fuck you, Arabella Cooper. Just fuck off with your friends. Pretend you don’t know me and then maybe I won’t embarrass you anymore.” I swing the carrier bag and smack her in the arm with it before walking away again, fast enough that I’m out of breath in a minute.

I don’t look back to see if she’s following. I know she won’t be.

Bella comes into my room later that night.

“You awake?”

I close my eyes and stay huddled on my side. She sighs and lies on the bed next to me, on top of the covers. She smells of cigarette smoke and the woods.

“I’m so sorry, baby sis. I was a total bitch. I should have said something. I should have told them to shut up.”

“Why didn’t you?” I say, turning to face her.

“Because…I don’t know. There are no excuses, are there?”

“I wish you didn’t care so much about what they think. They’re so horrible—nasty, horrible girls.”

“They’re not all bad,” she says. “Nic’s really funny and Caitlin can be, like, really kind sometimes.”

“Huh. I’ve never seen that.”

“It was just teasing, you know. They do it to everyone, not just you.” She pauses and a gurgle of laughter escapes her. “And Tess—seriously—when you came round the corner. You really did look like you’d crawled out of the hedge. You were covered in mud—it was all over your face. And there were leaves in your hair. It was like some wild woman had jumped out at us.”

There’s no cruelty in her laughter and reluctantly I smile. “Yeah, hardly catwalk-ready.”

She laughs again and I shush her, aware of Dad sleeping across the landing.

“I really am sorry, though,” she says. “I wish I could be more like you sometimes. You really don’t care what you look like or what people think.”

I think of the half hour I spent sobbing when I got back to the house, how I wanted to smash every mirror. My eyes still feel swollen and sore.

“What were you doing, anyway?” she asks. “Mud-wrestling?”

I hesitate. Should I tell her? About the garden? I imagine showing her. I imagine it becoming our place, not just mine. But, oh yeah, it’s not mine anymore, is it? Bella’s pretty boys are moving in.

“Nothing. Just crawling through hedges. As you do.”

She laughs again, softly, reaches out to tug on one of my curls. “You’re mad, baby sis. Totally nuts. Don’t ever change.”

“You neither.”

She yawns. “Can I sleep in here tonight?”

It’s only a single bed and Bella’s a quilt-hogger, but I move over anyway, closer to the wall. “Course you can.”

I close my eyes and drift off to the sound of my sister’s soft breathing.

NOW

Chapter 6

ANOTHER SUMMER OF DEATH?