Chapter 32 #2
It’s a pathetic attempt to lighten the mood, and she doesn’t seem to appreciate my sense of humor.
She shakes her head gently, but then, eyes still sparkling, she whispers, “Get tae fuck, Fantino,” which might just have taken on a different meaning, these days, then walks past me into the dining room.
It takes me a second or two to follow, because I need time to process what just happened. She hugged me, but I’m not naive enough to think that makes everything fine between us again. No way.
Olive sits as far from me as she can at breakfast, but she keeps glancing at my plate. She only starts to look moderately reassured once I’ve eaten. After that, we ignore each other for another six hours. This is exhausting, and I’m through with it.
Olive is finding it exhausting too. I can see the tension in her face. She looks tired. And desperate. I hate being the reason for that. We sit in classrooms, sneak glances, immediately turning away when the other notices.
And then the last class is over. Everyone else hurries out of the room into the bit of free time before study hour, and Olive slowly packs her bag.
It’s probably presumptuous to interpret that as a sign she’s ready for a conversation.
But I have to speak to her. I can’t bear this silence between us any longer.
She looks up as I shut the classroom door once the group has vanished through it. “What’s the matter, Colin?” She sounds tired and resigned. And she says “Colin” because she’s not in the mood for games. I know that much, these days.
I walk over to her. “I have to talk to you.”
For a moment, I’m certain she’ll laugh, throw her dark-blue bag over her shoulder, and walk past me, out of the room. But she doesn’t. She just crosses her arms over her chest and perches on the edge of the desk behind her chair.
“Fine.” There are two desks between us, which apparently makes her feel safe enough to give me a challenging nod. “Talk.”
Yes . . . talk. But that means knowing what I need to say to her. And beyond I’m sorry, there isn’t much. “Are we still fighting?” I ask instead.
Olive looks at me and I can’t read her expression. “We aren’t fighting, Colin. This is worse.”
Ouch. “I know.” I could cry. “And I didn’t want to keep secrets from you. I wanted to put it all behind me. I didn’t think it would matter here. I didn’t know . . .”
“It doesn’t matter here, because you’re not to blame for what happened at this school,” she says to my surprise. “But what does matter is that you didn’t tell me the truth.”
“I know,” I repeat. What else can I say?
“Why?” she asks. “Why didn’t you say anything? I told you everything. I undressed in front of you—I had a bloody panic attack, Colin. You didn’t say anything. You just walked out. That would’ve been the time when you could’ve told me, wouldn’t it?”
It’s not like I didn’t know all this only too well, but hearing again everything I’ve done wrong, from Olive this time, is painful.
“I was scared.” I keep talking. “I didn’t want all this.
I didn’t want to be at this school, and I certainly didn’t want to fall in love.
But you left me no choice, and by the time I realized that, I also knew that there was no way to be together with you and to tell you the truth without hurting you. ”
“And keeping secrets from me seemed like a sensible solution?”
I can’t look at her. “No.”
“But you did it anyway?”
“Yes, I did, because it’s clearly my fucking destiny in life to always get everything wrong.” I’d told myself I wouldn’t shout, but I’m already failing at that.
“You could stop using that belief as an excuse for every situation where you wimp out and take the easy option.”
“Easy? You think this is easy for me?”
“I don’t know, Colin! I really don’t know, because I’m starting to get the feeling I don’t know you one tiny bit.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it.”
“I don’t know anything. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know how much I can believe you about what really happened, how much of what you told me is true. I don’t even know if I’d ever have found out if I hadn’t got those messages.”
“Wait, who even sent you those?” I interrupt.
“Not a clue. And does it matter?”
“Not really, but I’d still like to know.”
“It was some weird account” is all Olive says.
“What kind of weird account?”
She laughs. “A One Direction fan page, them and this other band.”
My blood runs cold. “What?”
Olive eyes me skeptically. “I showed you.”
That may well be, but I wasn’t exactly taking in the details when she shoved her phone in my face.
“What’s the account called?” I ask tonelessly. I have an inkling, obviously, but I don’t want it to be true. Olive pulls her phone from her pocket and shows me again. My thoughts narrow to one single plea: No. No, no, no, no. That’s impossible. She can’t have done that.
“What’s wrong?” Olive asked insistently. “Colin?”
“Nothing. I . . .”
“Who is it?” She stresses every word.
And then I blurt it out: “Cleo.”
“Your sister?” Olive’s voice squeaks unexpectedly.
I shrug.
“But why would Cleo do a thing like that?”
Yeah, why would she? In a matter of seconds, dozens of scenarios shoot through my head.
Someone’s hacked Cleo’s phone (come on), Mom told her stuff that made her want to hassle me (more likely), mistake (yeah, right), or sadly, the most probable version.
Cleo panicked because she picked up that I was falling in love with a girl on another continent.
But even so, I can’t for the life of me imagine my kid sister trying to split me and Olive up, so I shrug yet again.
“I don’t know.”
“I thought it might be someone from your old school,” Olive says.
“Yeah.”
“I guess I should thank her. After all, unless I’m very much mistaken, I’d never have heard it from you.”
“You don’t understand,” I snap at her.
“No, Colin.” She steps menacingly toward me. “I really don’t understand. I have no bloody idea how you could go through with a secret like that. But at least now I understand why you wanted to get expelled from Dunbridge as soon as possible.”
“I didn’t know all that back then,” I say in self-defense. “That there was a fire here. That you—” I stop.
“Aye, just say it.” Olive’s eyes spray sparks. “That I nearly died. But hey, I got seriously lucky compared to that firefighter.”
I grind my teeth and feel the tears stinging my eyes. “Stop it.”
“What? Stop what, Colin, huh? Telling the truth? Just because you’re too chicken to admit to what happened? It’s so much easier to act like it was nothing when you’re thousands of miles away. It must be dead easy when not a single thing happened to you.”
“You think I wanted this? It wasn’t my choice to come to this school.”
“But you don’t seem to have fought back.”
“You don’t have a fucking clue what it’s like to make one mistake, something so awful you don’t know how to go on living with it,” I blurt.
“No,” Olive hisses back. “But I know what it’s like to have no idea what caused an accident that almost killed you.
What it’s like when people only ever say they can’t be certain how it happened.
Who’s responsible. How d’you think you can ever move on from a thing like that when you’re left with thousands of questions? ”
Her words are like daggers in my chest. “I don’t know.
I only know that my life’s gone down the shitter since I made a goddamn mistake.
No, two mistakes, actually. The first was that I took my lighter out at school and got careless.
But the second, which was maybe way worse, was then to go to my mother rather than straight to the cops.
To let her persuade me not to do anything because she’d take care of it.
I thought she’d call a lawyer, but she packed me off to Europe and kept my name out of the inquiry.
And I was too shocked to stop her.” I shut my eyes in torment.
“And yeah, maybe it was kind of a relief too, and I despise myself for it.”
Olive seems not to have been expecting that. “Hold the bus,” she says. “She—she did what?”
I just nod.
“But . . .”
“Yeah.”
“OK. Have I got this straight? She wanted to cover up the truth?” I nod mechanically. Olive stares hard at me. “Do you want everyone to know what really happened?”
Part of me wants to say no. That’s the part that’s scared of what will happen.
Scared that Mom’s right and I should trust her.
But a larger, more desperate part of me knows I can no longer live with the knowledge that I made a mistake and have been keeping my game face on ever since.
I can’t keep it up. It’s time to take responsibility. “Yes.”
“Good.” Olive falls silent for a moment. “Then I’ll help you.”