Chapter 14 #3
Alone in the corridor of changing rooms, she turned to a still-mortified Bella.
“Okay, I’m going to try on this purple monster, and you try on yours.
They should fit well, not too snug, not too loose, okay?
The panel in the middle should touch your breastbone, not pull away from it.
If it pulls away, you need a larger cup size. ”
Clearly that was TMI for Bella, for she wordlessly grabbed the boxes and disappeared into one of the stalls. Lucy glanced down at the purple bra and decided that she might as well try it on.
And actually, she decided a moment later, having never owned a push-up bra before, she could definitely see the appeal. She’d never looked so perky.
“How are you doing in there?” she called to Bella, and received a suffocated “Fine” in response.
A couple of minutes later they met back out in the corridor; Bella’s bras had been stuffed back into the boxes.
“Did you find one that fits?” Lucy asked, and she nodded and held out one of the boxes. “Great. I’ll go get a few in that size and you can take yourself off to another department if you want. Just in case the sales assistant feels like having a conversation about our purchases.”
With obvious relief Bella hightailed it out of the lingerie department.
Lucy found a couple of bras in the same size, in various colors, and brought them to the register.
The sales assistant engaged her in a detailed conversation about the escalator, which had been bought from the London Olympics for the impressive sum of four hundred thousand pounds.
It was, the woman told her proudly, Whitehaven’s only escalator.
“We had a little party when we opened it. Champers, even, and a Tom Cruise look-alike.”
“Wow, that sounds amazing,” Lucy told her, quite sincerely, and then, bag in hand, went to find Bella.
Bella was loitering by the cosmetics counters, reminding Lucy that she’d been wearing quite a lot of war paint yesterday. Somehow she doubted the girl had paid for all of it herself, and Alex didn’t seem like the kind of dad who shelled out for eyeliner and crimson lipstick.
“Hey.” Lucy joined her by a display of sparkly eye shadow in every color of the rainbow, the bras safely hidden in an opaque plastic shopping bag. She nodded towards the eye shadow. “What do you think? I’m fond of the purple, myself.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “It would match my new bra.”
Bella’s mouth quirked in a tiny smile—sort of like the way her dad’s did—before she turned away. “Who are you trying to impress?” she asked in a deliberately bored drawl. “My dad?”
Lucy hesitated, then decided for lightness. “Somehow I don’t think the eye shadow or the bra would impress your dad, Bella. But if you’re worried I’m trying to make a move on him, I promise you, I’m not.”
Bella turned back to her, eyes narrowed. “Why not?”
“What do you mean, why not?”
Bella shrugged. “He’s single. He’s not that old. You’re single, right?”
“Yes, but—”
“He’s okay looking, for a dad. So why aren’t you interested?” She subjected Lucy to a challenging stare, making her realize she wasn’t fooling anyone with her paltry promises.
“Well, I’m only here for four months, first of all,” she said after a moment.
“And yes, I’m single now, but I just got out of a long-term relationship and I’m not looking for another one quite so soon.
And your dad is okay looking, true, but you might have noticed he can be a little scary?
A little intimidating?” She tried to elicit a smile, but Bella just looked away.
“Whatever,” she said in a dismissive tone, making Lucy feel as if she rather than Bella had brought Alex into the conversation.
She decided to drop it. She really didn’t want to talk about Alex with Bella, and she definitely didn’t intend to trip all over herself trying to explain why she wasn’t interested.
Because she was afraid that wasn’t even true.
Sighing, she nodded towards the door. “How about we hit Boots for a mini shopping spree and then have a hot chocolate before we go home?”
Interest lit Bella’s eyes even though she still looked wary. “A mini shopping spree?”
“I think you could use a new lipstick,” Lucy said easily. And preferably not one she suspected Bella had shoplifted. “Maybe in a slightly more subtle shade, something your father wouldn’t mind you wearing out of the house?”
“He hates everything I wear,” Bella answered with a shrug. “Everything I do.”
Lucy chose to let that one go and they headed back out to Lowther Street.
She bought Bella a lip gloss in a neutral shade and some purple eye shadow, and then they headed over to a café that promised bowl-sized cups of hot chocolate with lashings of whipped cream.
Seated across from Bella as she slurped a spoonful of whipped cream, Lucy wondered what on earth they would talk about now.
Bella surprised her by asking her suddenly, “Why were you bullied in school?”
Lucy licked her spoon clean before stirring her hot chocolate with it. “Well, surprisingly, it also had to do with boobs. Well, boob singular, actually.”
Bella let out a snort of incredulous laughter. “What do you mean?”
“My mother is an artist. Modern stuff, very cutting-edge, or so everyone says. She made a giant sculpture of a boob and it was displayed in a public park in Boston. It was a huge deal, in the newspapers, everything. And on the first day of seventh grade I was nicknamed Boob Girl.”
Bella didn’t laugh, much to Lucy’s surprise. She’d been speaking lightly, inviting her to share the joke, even though the memory still stung, perhaps because her mother still had the power to make her life miserable.
“That sucks,” Bella said after a moment. She slurped a spoonful of whipped cream from her hot chocolate. “Didn’t she know how it would affect you?”
“I don’t really think she thought about it.”
“Did you tell her?”
“I tried. I asked to change schools actually, because you know, the damage had already been done. Even if the sculpture had been removed, which it was eventually, I’d still be called Boob Girl.”
Bella nodded wisely. “Yeah, you would have been.”
“So I thought changing schools might help, although in retrospect I don’t think it would have. Kids would have still known about the sculpture.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, my mother refused to let me change schools, because she said I shouldn’t care what small-minded people thought.” Bella rolled her eyes, and Lucy smiled. “I pretty much had the same reaction. And it did go away eventually. The sculpture as well as the teasing.”
“You mean people stopped calling you that?”
“Yes, after a while.”
Bella slowly stirred her drink. “Do you think people will stop teasing me?” she asked in a low voice, her head lowered.
Lucy had the sudden motherly urge to tuck her hair behind her ear.
Thank goodness she resisted. She didn’t want to care about this girl, didn’t want to care about whether Bella cared about her, but already she felt her resolve to stay disinterested and uninvolved slipping.
“Yes, definitely,” she said, “although I can’t promise it will happen tomorrow, or even next week. But bullies get tired of making the same lame joke over and over, trust me. And sadly, they usually just move on to someone else.”
“As long as it’s not me.”
“Well, you could stand up to them,” Lucy suggested.
“I know it’s not easy, but I realize now that bullies are actually secret cowards.
They can dish it out, but they can’t take it.
So if you act like you don’t care, like you think they’re the pathetic ones for making their lame jokes, you might be surprised at how they scurry back to their holes.
” She’d tried to act as if she hadn’t cared, had kept smiling even when everything inside her had heaved with misery.
And while they hadn’t precisely scurried, the bullies had left her alone eventually.
Bella didn’t seem to agree. She shook her head, licking whipped cream off her spoon. “I don’t think they would.”
“You don’t know unless you try. And if you’re already being bullied, it’s not like you have a lot to lose.”
Bella stared down at her hot chocolate again. “I wish I hadn’t been bullied in the first place,” she said in a low voice. “I wish my stupid mum had bought me a stupid bra.”
Unthinkingly, wanting only to comfort Bella when she was so obviously hurting, Lucy reached over and covered the girl’s hand with her own. After barely a second, Bella yanked her hand away. “I’m sorry,” Lucy said quietly. “You must miss your mum a lot.”
“What do you know about it?” Bella huffed, and Lucy didn’t answer. She didn’t know much about it at all. She didn’t miss her mother; she missed the mother she wished she’d had. But she couldn’t explain that to Bella.
They wandered around Whitehaven after they’d had their hot chocolates, looking at the shops and killing another hour.
Lucy tried to engage Bella in conversation, but each time Bella’s answers became more monosyllabic and unfriendly and finally she stopped speaking altogether, so Lucy stopped trying.
By the time they boarded the train back to Hartley-by-the-Sea, Lucy was feeling unaccountably tired. She was so weary of trying with people and feeling as if she were getting nowhere at all.
Just once she wanted someone to try with her. Too bad no one was lining up for that role, in any capacity.
The clouds had cleared and the sky was a lovely, deep blue as they headed down the high street to Alex’s house.
Lucy was a little curious as to where Alex lived; she certainly wasn’t expecting the tumbledown terraced Victorian with the crooked and cracked front steps, a wild, unmanageable garden, and a sharply peaked roof of weathered slate.
It was in need of a lot of love and DIY, but it was charming too, the kind of house that should have elves living at the bottom of the garden.