Oh, God...Tell him.You can’t deny it.Just do the right thing.Just for once, do the right thing.
“Sir?Are you still...?”
Panic breaks over me like a wave of icy water.
I hang up, take three steps backward.I turn away and start to run.
1
Olive
“Take it slowly, pet.”
I bite back the snappy answer that’s on the tip of my tongue and force myself to take a deep breath.It’s costing every last scrap of my self-control to ignore the sharp stabbing in my right shoulder.It brings the tears to my eyes—annoyingly, I only took my last painkillers a couple of minutes ago.They don’t kick in right away, and I had no way of knowing that Mum and Dad would get here so soon, be standing in my room ready to take me home from hospital.I’ve been here weeks, which seems like a lifetime, and now everything’s going too fast.
“Let me take that,” says Mum, reaching for my bag.There are a few clothes, some wash stuff, books, and cushions, mostly brand new because I couldn’t stand the smell of smoke ingrained in the things they were able to save from my room after the fire at Dunbridge Academy in early July.The flames didn’t reach the girls’ bedrooms on the third floor of the west wing, but the fire raged in the stairwell and almost completely destroyed the lower half of the building.Nobody could tell how bad the damagewas for several days.Not till the police and insurance experts combed through the charred remains and collapsed beams—by which time I was in intensive care.It’s not like I knew anything about it.Why would I?I’d spent almost two weeks intubated on a ventilator, because if I’d been awake, the pain from the burns would have driven me insane.It was still unbearable when they eventually brought me around.It still is, especially around my right shoulder, where they had to do a graft, covering it with skin from my thigh so that the wounds could heal.Expressions like “autologous,” “split-thickness,” and “mesh graft” are part of my everyday vocabulary, because this is my life now.And I hate it.
“I’ll help you, pet,” says Dad the moment we’re outside and I’m reaching for the handle on the back door of his car.He opens it for me, like I hadn’t spent weeks in physio relearning every stupid movement and continually failing at the easiest tasks.Standing up for a while.Putting on a T-shirt.Doing my hair in a ponytail, for fuck’s sake, like I did every time I walked from the school to the pool, though I won’t be doing that again anytime soon, won’t be training again in the near future.I’m not being pathetic or melodramatic.The doctors said so—repeatedly, when I couldn’t take it in—and yeah, they’re just as insensitive as people say.Dad’s the exception, maybe.
I can do it myself.I don’t need your help.It’s hard not to say those words.But it’s more than I can manage to say thank you to him instead as I slip onto the back seat.I avoid his eyes, and after a moment, he shuts the door.Our gaze meets again in the rearview mirror as he glances at me once he’s sat in the driver’s seat, next to Mum.
My parents don’t deserve my rage.What happened isn’t their fault.It’s nobody’s fault.Except for the bastards who were smoking in the Dungeon on that July night.During their investigations, the police found a cigarette stub in what remained of the upper sixth’s party cellar.Dozens of people were there, but apparently nobody saw a thing.They’ve closed the case now.Accident, not arson.A tragedy, a misfortune.But the good luck amid the bad is that nobody died.Apart from my dreams, but hey, I’m supposed to be grateful.
You were seriously lucky.If that burning beam had fallen just a tiny bit differently, it wouldn’t just have caught my shoulder; it would most probably have killed me.And maybe I’d have been better off if it had, but saying that out loud would just make Mum and Dad do a U-turn and deliver me straight back to the hospital.So I sit in silence in our car with my silent parents, who are getting a divorce.It’s just a matter of time: Mum with her guilty conscience over the affair I caught her out in months ago in Ebrington, Dad still with no clue.I want to cry but I can’t.I’m here; I survived.I will keep on surviving.
It’s not even that hard if you just get a fucking grip.
Come on, Olive.Keep it cold, live up to your reputation.Be your old self.
Except I’m not my old self.Everything’s changed.
Don’t forget your friends.Don’t forget that you finally get to see them again tomorrow.At school, not in hospital, where they all came to visit as soon as I was well enough.They couldn’t come so often once term started, though, and I get that.They’re in the upper sixth now.Without me.
Damn tears.I blink.
“Are you OK, darling?”
“Yes.”I gulp and lean back on the headrest.Dad’s heading for Stockbridge, our part of Edinburgh.I feel it every single time he glances at me in the mirror: He doesn’t believe me.Because he knows me.
Nothing is OK.I’m tired—knackered, actually—I’m in pain, and there’s so much rage inside me that I want to scream.The anger was there even before the summer, but for different reasons.It’s been almost a year now.Since everything’s been going downhill and I’ve been feeling like I’ve lost control of my life.
Why did it happen to me?Why did I have to be the one who headed back to school early on that shitty July night?Why didn’t I say “fuck getting eight hours’ sleep” ahead of the swimming meet the next day and spend the evening with my friends at the summer festival in Ebrington?All for a bloody competition I didn’t even take part in because I was in a coma, hooked up to the machines in intensive care.
That was nine weeks ago, and at first, nobody was certain that I’d ever wake up again.It wasn’t just my lungs that were damaged by the heat of the fire and the toxic soot; a burning beam fell on me on the stairs long after I’d blacked out.The biting smoke, my racing heart as I ran for my life down the west-wing stairs.I can’t remember exactly where I lost consciousness.I only remember how incredibly loud the flames were.And how dark it was.Black, hot, panic, panic, panic.And then, what felt like just seconds later, white, beeping, pain.Hospital.Still panic, panic, panic.The same fucking panic even now, like my brain can’t graspthat I’m safe.That it was bad but I’m apparently made to survive bad stuff.What choice do I have?
Lucky.I was lucky.I have to tell myself so again and again.What an incredible stroke of luck that I was the only person to get so seriously injured in the fire.I wouldn’t wish it on anyone else.Not even my worst enemies.Not, incidentally, that I have any.Not even my mother and the man who decided to smash up our family with her.I wouldn’t wish a thing like this even on them.Not on anybody.But I wouldn’t wish it on myself either.Unfortunately, what you wish for and what you get are two very different things.
Everyone on my floor had gone down to the festival in Ebrington.It wasn’t so far for the younger kids on the ground floor and the first floor to get out, away from the flames.So the stairs were empty as I ran down toward the flames, through the smoke, which was already so thick I couldn’t breathe, even holding my pajama sleeve over my mouth.
I jump as Dad brakes sharply, swearing under his breath.The seat belt cuts into my shoulder.I grit my teeth with pain but don’t make a sound.Dad has to believe I’m fine.Otherwise, I can forget our deal.It took hours of arguing and tears of desperation before he and Mum finally agreed that I can do the rest of my physio as an outpatient and go back to school next week.
It’s bad enough that Dad can hardly look at me.He’s really trying to hide it behind his professionalism, but whenever he’s with me, it’s totally obvious.My own father, a doctor, can’t bear to see me like this.Even though it’s his vocation to help the sick.That clearly doesn’t apply to his daughter, and I’m not naiveenough to think it’s because I don’t matter to him.Quite the contrary, and that’s the whole problem.Mum and I are everything to him.My dad’s a loving man, and the fear of losing me almost destroyed him.I know that.Mum knows that.
Livy, sweetie, promise me.Her piercing eyes, her hands on my arms when she caught up with me in Ebrington that time, months before the fire, back when I didn’t know what real problems were.Looking around frantically, voice low.Promise me that you won’t tell your father.It would break his heart, Olive.
We’re approaching our house.Mum glances over her shoulder at me.I immediately look away.The sight of our drive and the dark-stone facade of the three-story townhouse doesn’t exactly help.I’ve never spent less time here than in the last few months.And that’s saying something, given that I’m at boarding school and only home for occasional weekends in term-time.
I feel like an intruder into the marriage of convenience that used to be my family.Dad’s carrying my stuff; Mum’s eyes are just as laden with expectation.You won’t say anything, will you, my darling?I can see it on her face.Every single time I’ve looked at her since that evening over a year ago.But I can’t worry about it now.
