CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sarah grabs me in the morning, tearing me from my sleep with a hand on my arm. "I'm ready to tell you now. I'm ready to tell you about the lie."
I look up at her wearily, not completing comprehending. Beside my bed, the clock reads 06:02. "Jesus, it's only six am. Go back to sleep."
"I've been sleeping since midday yesterday. I need to move. I need to speak." Her voice is overly loud in the quiet bedroom and I can practically feel the restless energy radiating off her skin. Still, I'm glad she's awake – glad she's okay.
"Sarah, please," I say. "Not now. I have school today. Don't make it harder than it already is by spilling all your secrets."
"But I have to tell you. You have to know."
I look at her then – really look at her. Her eyes are shadowed, her hair is mess, her bottom lip looks swollen from biting it too much. Her hands quiver and fidget around by her sides. How long has she been awake?
I exhale loudly. "You can tell me this– actually, no, you will tell me this afternoon, when school is done for the day. I can't deal with this right now."
She looks confused, maybe even angry. She leans back. "You've been bugging me for days about telling you and now that I'm finally ready you don't want to hear it? Don't you want to find out? What the hell happened?"
I sit up, knowing that I have no chance of getting back to sleep now. "You did, Sarah. You happened. My father happened. Caden happened."
"That's a lot of generalisation," she says.
"Yeah, well, I don't have the energy or the emotional capability right now to get into the details."
I sigh, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. I should want to know what she has to say – she did after all tell me that all I know about her is a lie – but suddenly I don't feel I can face up to it. We may not be on great terms as of now – what with the occasional arguing and uneasiness that hangs around our conversations – but I'm afraid that once she tells me the truth our friendship will fall apart entirely. At least now I can look at her in the eye, ignorant of the secrets she keeps locked up in her mind, and get on with life. What if once she's told me I don't want to speak to her anymore? What if these are the last friendly conversations we ever have?
"This afternoon," I repeat, following a minute of silence. "When I get back from school this afternoon, we'll speak, okay?"
"Okay," she says, nodding.
"Swear on it?" I ask. "That way neither of us can get out of it."
"I swear," she says, crossing her heart.
"I swear." There's silence for a moment. "How was your sleep, by the way?" I ask.
She looks at the floor, backing away from my bed and sitting down on her own. "Fine," she says, trying to act casual. Her eyes shift to the wall, then back to the ground, then to the left.
I take a deep breath, releasing it slowly. "I don't want to skirt around this," I say. "I'm sick of tip-toeing around tricky subjects. You fell unconscious because you were tired, and you were tired because your powers drained some of your life-force. As far as anyone knows, that only happens to people affected by the Limit – to Anarkks – but you say you're on our side. So what does that make you? Are you an Avexyr or an Anarkk?"
Sarah wraps her arms around her waist, tapping her foot slightly as she looks off to her right. When she does look back at me, she says only, "Come on, Melissa. It's six am."
I keep pushing. "Didn't bother you when you woke me up five minutes ago."
"Yeah, and you know what else happened five minutes ago? You told me you didn't want to get into any of this. You said you didn't have the energy or the 'emotional capability' to deal with it."
I go to reply but stop. She's got me there. "Okay, okay. Fine. I won't go into it now, but we will talk about this."
Sarah nods. "I wouldn't expect any less."
Something about her reply irks me but I let it go. Another look at the clock says its 6:10. I don't have to get up for another twenty minutes but I'm already awake.
"So, tutoring with Ethel today?" I ask as I slip out of bed and head for my closet.
"Not today. Ethel's busy."
I reach in to grab my new uniform, hanging from the rack. "What are you going to do then?"
"I don't know," she says as I bring the clothes back to my bed. "Might go see a movie. Might do nothing. Katherine's already bought all the textbooks I need for the subjects I've chosen, so she'll probably make me read some of them anyway."
"Sounds wonderfully boring."
Sarah breathes a laugh – short and airy. "It's better than actually going to school."
"Are you sure about that? At least you can make friends."
She looks down and mumbles something under her breath. She says, "Tell me, are you excited to make friends?"
I suffocate my automatic response, a sharp Of course not. Instead, I say, "I think it'll be nice to meet new people."
"It's only nice because you're faking. Because it's not you."
"Excuse me?" I say and stop what I'm doing, turning towards her.
"I'm just saying. If you looked like you used to – like me – then there'd be nothing nice about meeting new people."
I let out an exasperated sigh. "Come on, Sarah. No one would even recognise you. You've seen what swapping back did to the way we look."
"Would you bet on that?"
"Of course," I say, as if any other answer would be ridiculous.
She continues. "Would you rest your happiness, your future, on the sheer hope that no one sees a resemblance?"
No, I want to say. But I don't. "You make it sound as though hope is a bad thing."
"It is," she says. "It's nothing but a thin curtain obscuring the horrible, dark truth. And the thing about curtains is: they break."
"Not always," I murmur.
"Always," she says. "With time, hope always burns. And it burns you with it."
Something about the tone of her voice sends chills down my back and her shadowed eyes suddenly seem ten times darker. Since when is she this negative? This dark? Maybe she's always been this way and I just haven't noticed. Maybe this is the real Sarah, escaping out from under the mass of secrets she wears like a coat.
Hope always burns. And it burns you with it.
Her words terrify me. Sometimes, like now, hope is all I have. Hope that this isn't the real Sarah. Hope that she's not against us. Hope that the truth won't shatter our friendship for good.
If that burns, I'm afraid I'll have nothing left.
-:-:-:-:-
Later in the morning, Katherine drops Caden and I off just across the road from Ashwell College. I listen as her car fades into the distance, the noise of the morning quickly overwhelming the sound of the engine.
"This should be interesting," Caden says, starting across the road.
I walk with him through the gates, which is already accepting a sprinkling of other students, and tug on the sleeve of my navy blazer. When Katherine said Ashwell College, I pictured a perfectly average public school. Cheap-looking uniforms, middle-class students with a general disregard for rules – all housed in standard brick buildings built in the previous century. What she failed to mention until yesterday evening is that it's actually a Catholic institution, with snobby uniforms and probably even snobbier students. The school building looms over us, a three-floor monstrosity made of brown brick and dark green detailing, constructed in an elegant shape. Unless the council decided to start funding our lives, I sure as hell don't know where Katherine got the money to send us here.
We step through the massive front doors and head for the school office. After a brief welcome and induction, the office lady hands us our timetables and instructs us on where to go. She says, brown-red lips smacking up against each other, "For now, you just need to find your first class. After that, I'm sure you'll have plenty of friends to guide you to the rest." She smiles when she says it, and while I can see she does so good-naturedly, it feels as though she's making a jab at my previous friendship fails.
"Thank you," Caden says, and leads me away from the student enquiry desk. Around us, students in blazers and ties, kilts and pants walk purposefully down the halls, each one blending into the others. Their uniforms are impeccable and so is everything else about them: pleasant, smooth facial expressions; voices polite but posh; hair kept strict and neat. A girl dashes past, her blonde ponytail swinging as she moves. Her shoes are polished and smooth.
"Well." I say, finishing with an exhale.
Caden nods, as if I'd said something worth agreeing to. "Well," he says. "How long do you think it'll take for them to notice us?"
"I'd say everyone will probably know our names by lunch."
"I'd say that sounds very likely."
I turn to him. "What classes are you taking?"
He hands me his timetable and I quickly skim it side by side with my own. "They sure do offer a lot of classes," I mumble, looking at the diversity in our timetables. When Katherine asked me to select subjects, I just ticked the first ones to jump out at me, completely disregarding the course information. Besides – I can't imagine school will be a focus, not with all the other stuff I have to deal with.
"We have the same Biology class," I say eventually.
"Anything else?"
I shake my head. Then add, "Well, we do have homeroom together."
Caden sighs. "What have you got first?"
I wrinkle my nose. "Latin."
"You picked a language?" he exclaims, and his expression tells me I'm crazy.
"Hey! You're one to talk, Mister I'm-doing-all-the-sciences. Why you'd pick Physics is beyond me."
"I chose things that interested me. By the looks of your timetable, you probably pinned the list to a wall and threw darts."
"I did not!" I say in defence, but I'm not really angry. A smile breaks out on my face.
Caden laughs, his warm brown eyes on mine. He opens his mouth to say something else but the bell picks that very moment to start ringing, an electronic beeping that permeates the halls.
"I'll see you at recess," he says loudly in the sudden noise, the students around us having raised their voices in order to continue speaking over the bell.
I nod, trying not to let my sudden fear show on my face. There's a full two hours until recess and I'll be pushing through them alone, trapped in a foreign school and surrounded by posh students I want very little to do with. "See you then," I reply. "Have fun in..."
"Chemistry," he says. "I've got Chemistry."
I nod again, and this time he seems to notice the nerves on my face. "You'll be fine, Melissa. It's just school."
Just school. I could laugh. "Maybe try not using that name."
"You'll be fine," he repeats, seeing past my attempt to avoid the topic.
"I know," I say nonchalantly and put on a convincing smile.
He nods, beginning to turn away. "I'll see you later then."
"Yeah," I say, and he starts off down the hall. I turn for the stairs, and the instant I do, the smile falls off my face and onto the polished floor where it's trampled under my feet. Caden's words from earlier come back to me and press up against the back of my teeth.
Letting them out, I mumble, "This should be interesting."
Then I begin the climb to class.