“It was some weird account” is all Olive says.
“What kind ofweird 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 easierto 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.”
