Chapter Nineteen
Nineteen
Just like that, Billy consumed my every conscious thought, and even many of my unconscious ones.
I’d been waiting for this moment for years—that special connection so often chronicled in novels and films. That connection Marcie claimed to have with every boy who crossed her path. Now, age sixteen, here was my very own.
He was perfect. Tall and handsome, he had what Mum would call presence. The type of person who instantly draws all eyes in the room, whether they mean to or not. I had never wanted anything so badly in my life.
And so what had promised to be the start of yet another boring school year gained a different focus altogether.
I watched Billy at every opportunity—in class, and at sports, and in the library, and at lunch—and I grew to learn his routine.
Without ever talking to him, I learned he preferred brown bread over white, blue Biro over black, football over athletics, white coffee over black.
I learned—by eavesdropping on idle gossip—that he thought school was a waste of time, that he only came to use the art facilities.
I learned that he felt painting was a form of self-expression, and I spent hours in the art block, poring over his creations in the hope of gleaning some small, secret nugget that would suggest he felt the same way about me. If it was there, I couldn’t find it.
In fact—despite our best efforts—Billy didn’t seem to take notice of any of the girls.
He drifted between classes with the tortured, faraway expression of a misunderstood artist. So wrapped up in his own creative sphere, he failed to lift his head and take note of the twenty potential muses lining up for the privilege of dating him.
For the first time in my life, I was gunning to be number one.
And yet, whenever I was around him—whenever I engineered an opportunity to talk to him—I found the words wouldn’t come.
My newfound confidence in the face of Marcie’s strange subservience vanished whenever I opened my mouth.
My body began to betray me: hot red flushes that rose in my cheeks, trembling hands, forehead dotted with sweat.
None of these highly embarrassing symptoms had been in Marcie’s magazines.
Since I lost the power of speech whenever I was in his vicinity, I realized I’d have to find another way.
And then it came to me: my own art. But my drawings were rudimentary at best. I had a lot of work to do.
And so I threw myself into my drawing with the sort of feverish passion you only read of in articles about child prodigies.
I used every waking hour testing out new techniques, spent everything I had on supplies, new pencils, different paper types.
I stopped following Billy to the library and went straight home instead, where I hunched over our small single desk as I drew and drew and drew.
I took my eye off the ball. I can admit it now. What happened next was, in part, due to my own negligence. I won’t ever let it happen again.
For the best part of a year, Marcie had been a model student, a model daughter, a model classmate.
She kept her head down, worked hard, and kept a close group of sensible friends who preferred coffee dates to seedy warehouse raves.
I thought she’d changed. It had been so long since I saw the “real” Marcie that I became complacent.
I thought this quieter, nicer, smarter, more natural (yet still astonishingly beautiful) version was who she was at her core.
I forgot her moods. I pushed the incident at the farm far to the back of my mind. It was years ago now.
I’ve thought a lot about what must have been going on in Marcie’s head during this fallow period.
And the conclusion I’ve come to is this: Marcie understood better than I ever did that it takes twenty years to build a reputation, and only one misdeed to ruin it.
So when Mum and Dad pulled her to the side that evening and told her what I’d told them, she realized she was being talked about in all the wrong ways.
She liked the attention, yes, but it had to be the right kind.
She realized that the empire she’d painstakingly built up was beginning to crumble around her. People didn’t know who she was anymore.
Marcie’s reputation was the most precious thing she had.
And so she rose like a phoenix from the ashes and set about trying to rectify her mistakes, and it worked.
She was the exception to the rule. When she was spoken about now, the talk focused on her achievements, her kindness, her studiousness.
Marcie defied all the odds. She rebuilt her reputation in a year alone.
She no longer actively ignored me, but nor did she pull me close.
She seemed, on the whole, entirely indifferent to me, even at home.
It suited me just fine. I had bigger fish to fry.
I completed the drawing after six long weeks of working on it. I was thrilled: It captured him at his best. I’d pinpointed that often-dreamy expression he wore, the slight pout, the rumpled hair. He would have to notice me now.
Giving it to him was another matter altogether.
I was not nervous per se, but I knew I had to get it right, this first moment of contact.
I practiced what I’d say in the mirror: “Hi, Billy, I’m Iris.
I thought you made an interesting subject, so I drew this of you.
Hope you like it.” I perfected the casual tone, as though drawing pictures of people without their knowing was something I did every day.
But every time the opportunity arose to give it to him, I faltered, the words dying in my throat.
I stowed the drawing in my bag each morning with a renewed sense of determination, but each evening, after another failed attempt, I concealed it back under the pile of books on the desk Marcie never used.
Eventually, one night, desperation prevailed. I turned to Marcie as we lay in the dark.
“If you wanted to give a boy you like a present, how would you do it?”
The words sounded too loud in the quiet room. We rarely spoke beyond over-polite, forced conversation at the dinner table.
She was so quiet I thought she’d fallen asleep.
Then, “Who are you talking about? Who do you like?”
I should have foreseen this. “No one,” I replied quickly. “Hypothetically.”
“There’s got to be someone. Otherwise you wouldn’t ask the question.”
“It’s for a friend.”
She was quiet again. I knew what she was thinking. I didn’t have any friends. Not good ones. “I’d probably,” she said after a long pause, “just go up to him and do it. It’s not hard.”
I lay for a long time staring into the dark. To me, it was the hardest thing in the world.
The next morning I dressed quickly and left the room before Marcie woke.
I didn’t want to see her, filled as I was with the horrible sense that my question last night had made me vulnerable.
It was only as we were halfway to school, bags slung over our shoulders, that I realized I had forgotten to pick up Billy’s drawing.
I thought about going back for it, but Marcie was in a good mood and I didn’t want to sour it.
She didn’t bring up my question at all on the walk, and I wondered if this was yet another example of her growth.
Her newfound maturity. I see now how wrong I was.
Her big move came after lunch. I sat in the corner of the schoolyard as I usually did and watched Marcie break away from her gaggle of friends.
She straightened her spine in a way I hadn’t seen her do in months.
In a way that always suggested she had her sights set on someone.
And then—with a bolt of horror—I saw who she was making her way toward.
Billy was sitting alone, just like me, except he never made it look awkward or uncomfortable.
He looked up as she approached. Marcie swung her golden hair over her shoulder and sat down next to him. Within two seconds, she had achieved what the rest of us could not. He laughed.
Then she reached down, extracted a roll of paper from her schoolbag. I knew what it was instantly, and the bottom of my stomach dropped out as Billy unrolled it. His eyes widened. He stared at it for a long time. His face split with a smile.
He pointed at her and there was a question in his gaze.
She nodded modestly, tucked her hair behind her ear, and, in that moment, I knew she’d passed my work off as her own.
Knew she was reaping my reward. And as she shuffled closer to him, arm brushing his, the dislike that always simmered in the pit of my stomach calcified into something darker.
The relationship developed fast after that. They became the most talked-about couple at school. They were all over each other like a rash. Like an infectious fungus.
“We’re taking it slow,” I heard Marcie preach to a friend one break time. “But”—she glanced at me, sitting in my usual spot in the corner of the yard—“I think I might love him.”
I knew this was false. I waited for her to slip up like she had last time.
To discard Billy like an empty crisp packet just as she’d done with all the other boys.
I readied myself to collect the fragments of his broken heart.
But the months dragged on, and they showed no sign of slowing down.
I began to lose hope, hating her more with each passing day.
And, nine months after Marcie’s big move, as though they could sense the growing discord between us, my parents suggested the trip to Cornwall.
I think they thought it might bridge the gap between us.
All I could think was that it was a whole week when we’d have nothing to do except stew in our mutual dislike.