I wait a few moments longer, but it’s freezing cold, and—with contact firmly established—I feel confident enough to slink back into the night.
Twelve
I always hate itwhen people reminisce about school as though it was the high point of their otherwise insipid lives. These are the people who enjoyed the fishbowl, the enforced hierarchy, the artificial semblance of power based not on merit but on those who fitted into the stringent parameters of what was deemed acceptable—and those who didn’t. These are the people who look at their lives and wonder where it all went wrong. It’s not rocket science. They peaked too early.
I have no doubt Marcie would have been one of these people. When I refused to tell Mum and Dad that my encounter with the cowpat was accidental, her punishment was swift and absolute. By the time we started upper school, she was my sister in name alone. I was responsible for a blemish on her character. For that, she could not forgive me.
Our first day at St. John’s—a small Catholic senior school that achieved a high Ofsted rating—couldn’t have been more different from my experience with primary school. Marcie didn’t slip her hand into mine. She walked three paces ahead of me and didn’t acknowledge me at all.
This time, I trailed behind her into the classroom and watched her work her magic from afar. She was charming. She was beautiful. She adapted herself to whomever she was speaking with: a sympathetichand on the arm if someone was sad, a witty remark to a boy who was already half in love with her. She blew into that school like a tornado, and—from the moment her dainty foot hit its hallowed hallways—Marcie Jones was worshipped like a deity.
By comparison, I shrank into myself and was largely ignored. Without Marcie to hold my hand, I quickly sank into oblivion. I spent a lot of time in the girls’ bathroom, close to the sinks, scrubbing at the skin on my hands with the same vigor I used in the shower that day at the farm. I hadn’t felt clean since.
On that first day, I walked into lunch alone. My skin crawled as I clocked the queue of people: the way they helped themselves to food with their bare hands, how they swiped at their running noses before handling serving spoons. I thought of the billions of bacteria that would have bred and multiplied by the time it was my turn and felt bile rise in my throat. But people had joined the queue behind me, and I didn’t want to make a spectacle of myself. So I waited and watched as we inched closer to the food. The bread rolls were a no-go. People were handling those with their bare hands. The salad seemed like a safe option until I watched a boy cough as he was helping himself. By the time I reached the front, I had decided: I would stick with fruit I could peel.
I didn’t bother to take a tray. I took an orange and a banana and considered ducking my head and eating in the safety of the bathroom. But no. I could do this. I scanned the seats available. Most people had found someone to sit with already. In the corner, Marcie sat at the center of a large group, and I considered going over there, cashing in on our kinship, even if she was determined to ignore me. But as I started toward her, I noticed she was acting something out. She was holding her hands out in front of her, wringing them together and wrinkling her nose in an expression of exaggerated panic and disgust, before collapsing into giggles. She clocked me, clutching my orange and banana, and pointed. Several people turned to look. I felt my face burn.
I found a seat at a table with only one other person sitting at it. She was small, with glasses, and she looked as out of place as I felt. I nodded to her, then focused on ensuring neither my skin nor the fruit touched the table. I peeled the orange carefully, savoring each segment.
“Hey, are you Marcie’s sister?”
I looked at her. She was staring at me, wide-eyed, and I wondered if perhaps I’d be all right. Maybe I didn’t need Marcie. I straightened myself, looked at her properly, smiled. She was nice-looking, in a nerdy sort of way. I could see myself being friends with her. I could see myself being friends with anyone, at this point.
“Are you the one that fell in the cowpat? Did it really go in your mouth?” She leaned forward, her expression one of fascinated disgust. I could only stare at her as Marcie’s betrayal pulsed through me. I knew she’d intended to ignore me. I didn’t know she wanted to ensure my total annihilation.
“It was her fault,” I said, and I meant it to sound nonchalant, as though the memory didn’t make my stomach curl in on itself, but there was a plaintive, whiny edge to it. “She pushed me.”
The girl shrugged. “Still gross.”
My appetite was gone. I stood abruptly, mumbled something about forgetting my bag, and stumbled out of the dining hall.
Mum was waiting by the gates that evening. As soon as she saw her, Marcie was by my side, linking her arm through mine, playing her role to perfection. I resisted the urge to pull away from her: Mum would see and accuse me of being difficult.
“Well?” Mum said as we began the walk home. “How was it?”
“So great, Mama,” Marcie gushed. “We made loads of new friends, didn’t we, Iris?”
I wondered what would happen if I told the truth. If I told Mum how I’d slumped by the sinks at lunchtime and eaten my fruit alone. If I told her how her favorite daughter had made my first day a misery. Marciewas looking at me as though she could read my mind. She raised an eyebrow, and I knew what it meant. That she could make my life a whole lot worse if she really wanted to. So I gritted my teeth and smiled.
“Really great,” I echoed.
—
A new orderwas established. Marcie largely ignored me at school, and I grew used to a solitary existence. The teasing stopped after a while, when someone made a fool of themselves at a party, and I was grateful. Meanwhile, Marcie continued to collect friends like a politician running for the top job.
Now that she’d established herself at school, something odd was happening at home. She was still horribly saccharine toward me when our parents were around, but in private—where she’d once sneered and griped and glared—she began to confide in me, like I was some empty vessel in which to keep all her secrets. I suppose, in a way, I was. If I ever told anyone what she’d told me, she had the power to ruin me.
I was now forced to endure nightly debriefs of her day. Whom she hated, who annoyed her, whom she fancied. This latter was something that gradually began to consume all her waking hours. Marcie, I was beginning to understand, was aggressively heteronormative and fancied practically every single boy who crossed her path. Maddeningly, the boys who crossed her path almost always felt the same way about her.
She preened in front of the mirror as she spoke, pushing out her budding breasts, cocking her head, testing out a coquettish smile. And then she began buying magazines. She read article after article out loud, pausing every so often to look at me. “You should listen to this bit, Iris. It might help you get a boyfriend.” Always said with a tone of voice that made it clear she thought the prospect impossible, irrespective of the advice. And though I hated myself for it, though I pretended with all my might to be disinterested, I listened as though she was divulging thesecret to eternal life. I saw the way those boys looked at her—as though she was some rare new species, the only one of her kind—and I wanted that for myself. And when she left the room, I pored over those magazines and committed every word of advice to memory.
At first, the changes in Marcie were all physical. She said goodbye to her natural hair and dyed it a peroxide blond, because—according to one magazine—“boys love a blonde.” She began wearing push-up bras. She went to the gym frequently and became slim enough to squeeze into the tightest of jeans. She wore crop tops that showed off her toned abdominals. She smiled with her tongue pressed against the roof of her mouth to define her jawline. She began chewing gum for the same reason.
And then, scarier still, she began to try on new personality traits. She learned how to dart glances across the classroom, with just enough frequency to indicate her interest. She learned how to master looking a little bit pathetic, which allowed the boys to step into the role of the hero. She would pretend to lose something, and they would scramble to help her find it. Once, she even used the bracelet.
She learned how to be confident around men, how to get what she wanted, how to ask them out. She developed new interests depending on whom she was seeing at the time. It worked better than either of us could have anticipated. She was universally adored, by both boys and girls. The girls forgave her for stealing boys out from under them. The boys followed her with lovesick expressions. I never got the sense she truly liked any of them. What she craved was the attention, that feeling of being desired. It was a feeling I had never experienced.
But I gritted my teeth and said nothing as she emerged from each new relationship slightly altered. With each new skin, she was becoming someone I recognized less and less. It wasn’t long before I realized I couldn’t remember who she was underneath each of these different personalities.
