All the Little Things Sarah Lawton (red white royal blue TXT) 📖

in its own place. She always told me mess hurt her head. I hated the dull grey walls, which I had let her choose despite my own preference for rich colours: plums, currants, blues and deep elf-forest greens. But grey it was. Cold grey walls and a colder grey carpet, with white furniture.

There weren’t any curtains at the window. She refused to have them, would never shut them even if I had hung some, preferring to be able to see the outside. There hadn’t been any windows in the hospital, curtained or otherwise. I always wondered if that had something to do with the almost pathological desire she had developed to have a clear route out of anywhere whenever she wanted to.

Her little black suitcase was open on the bed. A quick sift through told me that she just needed to add in her many toiletries and chargers and we would be good to go. I turned to leave, and caught myself painfully on the edge of her desk. I stopped and rubbed my leg where I’d caught it, looking down at her stuff. Everything on it was arranged with military precision, angled just so, piled in size order. When a place is so irredeemably neat, it’s easy to spot when something is out of place, and I noticed a piece of sketching paper: the familiar texture caught my eye. It was tucked into a copy of Jane Eyre. All I could see of it was a small part of the torn edge peeping out from between the pages, rumpling them slightly, and even as a needle of guilt stabbed at me for invading her privacy I slid it out from between them.

I breathed in, but no air reached my lungs, only shock. It was a nude sketch of a girl, laying prostrate on a blanket underneath a tree. She was on her back, slender arms raised above her head, knees up and apart, toes pointed like a dancer. A scribbling scratched nest of lines joined the top of her thighs, almost ripping the paper. It was chilling – the girl didn’t have any features at all on her face, despite the careful details everywhere else. It gave her a blank, haunting appeal. I traced my finger over the collarbones, the slim shoulders. I knew the considered, precise lines of that body as well as I knew my own, as well as I knew who had drawn this.

It was Vivian.

Vivian

I had such a bad headache on the way to school this morning. I couldn’t sleep last night. My room was so hot I just sweated, trying to lie spread out on my bed so no bits of skin touched any other bits. The weather is heavy and almost crackling today, it lifts the little hairs on my arms and tickles the back of my neck. There’s a storm coming.

Alex has been texting and calling me, but I’ve been ignoring him. He thinks he can have sex with me and then go missing for nearly a whole week? He said he had to go back to London to see his granddad and forgot his phone or some such bullshit, but I’m pretty sure the internet works up there just as well as it works here. He could have tracked me down. He thinks he can make it up to me with stupid gifts – a bloody drawing of all things. I didn’t know he could draw, but he’s nearly as good as my mum.

He doesn’t know that I know that he knows her somehow. I haven’t figured out what his game is yet, but I’m on to him. Finding that sketch of him in my mum’s studio was so weird. It was definitely him as the faery prince with black raven wings. She always uses people she knows in her illustrations. Steve was on the last book cover she did, much to his eternal delight – he was showing off a copy to everyone that came in the pub for months.

Why would he have met her and not told me, though? And where? Unless she just saw him in the street and decided she liked his face. That’s entirely possible here – it’s a small place. And he is so ridiculously beautiful.

I decide to tell him I don’t want to see him, and that we are going away after school, anyway. He replies straight away, and asks me to bunk off the afternoon and meet him at the gates in his car. He’s never mentioned a car before. Another thing I didn’t know about him – the things we could do with a car! More secrets. I know I shouldn’t really fall for this, that if I go and see him now then he wins, but I am intrigued.

I also really want to have sex with him again. He needs to realise that he’s mine. You don’t just leave me; I’m the one who decides when things are over. Maybe sex is the way to teach him that, or maybe it isn’t. Do I withhold it, or use more of it? We’ll see. This isn’t really something I’ve thought about before: the idea of it always repulsed me until I found out what it was like. Being wanted like that. When you’re small and weedy you need all the power you can get, and he needs to be taught a lesson.

On the last day of term, there’s always this restless, antsy feeling around, like everyone is holding their breath. It feels like we’re all being squeezed in a fist. Serena and Tilly are still angry because I told them Molly had emailed me, when they haven’t heard from her. I don’t know what they expect, really. They haven’t spoken to me all week since she’s been gone, since they decided to act like six-year-olds and move fucking desks like I have leprosy or something. Did they ever even like me? Did they just pretend to because Molly did? I wonder