The Woods, page 7
“Watch out,” I mutter, scooping up the pages of my essay she’s lying on. “I’ve been working all bloody week on this coursework.”
She nudges me and grins. “Guess what, guess what, guess what?”
“What?” I say, tucking the crumpled pages inside my textbook.
She sits up. “They’ve moved in.”
“Who’s moved into where?”
She rolls her eyes. “The new family—into Dean House.”
I turn away to put the book back in my bag, letting my hair fall over my face. I can see dirt under my nails, still there from gardening at Dean House over the weekend, no matter how much I’ve scrubbed them. That’s it then. No more secret garden.
“Oh, right—the Insanely-Hots.”
“There’s actually three kids—the two boys and a sweet little girl. The boys go to private school.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw them in the village, practically stopping traffic, so I asked Mrs. Wilson about them.”
Of course Mrs. Wilson would know everything. I doubt she let them buy anything in her shop until they’d answered twenty questions.
“Apparently they go to boarding school somewhere near Oxford. How cool is that?”
“I can’t imagine all boarding schools are like Malory Towers.” I laugh at her. She sounds like she’s eight again, pleading with Mum and Dad to send us away to school for midnight feasts and lacrosse matches.
“God, I know that, but I bet it’s better than our crappy school and they are certainly better than the juvenile idiots we have to put up with.”
I don’t care. The boys at our school are all obnoxious and poisonous, but I’m not boy-obsessed like Bella, like she has been pretty much since she started at secondary school. But then, she’s gorgeous, whereas I get called Colossal Cooper and Tessie the Elephant every time the boys see me lumbering round the netball court. Not that Bella knows that.
I stand up and stretch. I’ve been hunched over that history essay for hours. “Want to go to the woods?” I ask, pulling the curtains wider. The sun shines in, lighting up Bella’s blond hair, making her face glow. It’s the perfect Indian summer day and, outside, the woods look lovely and cool and dark.
She shields her eyes and shakes her head. “We can’t,” she says. “The new family is throwing an impromptu barbecue—they’ve put out an open invite for the whole village.”
An hour later, Bella’s thrown on jeans and a T-shirt and looks stunning, her hair tousled, scuffed Converse on her feet. Whereas I’ve been primping for ages and still hate what the mirror tells me. I’ve spent too much time outside and my cheeks are red, my nose burnt. My hair’s a nightmare and my jeans are too tight. I’ve put on a baggy T-shirt to cover the bulges but it just makes me look fatter.
Dad’s waiting downstairs with a bottle of wine and a cake he bought from the shop to take as housewarming presents. He looks like he wants to go as much as I do, uncomfortable in a jacket and jeans, a silly grown-up weekend look that’s just plain weird on him. He doesn’t go out anymore, not since Mum died. It’s been me and him, home every night and weekend, reading our books, watching rubbish on TV, driving Bella mad as she paces about, swept along by a restless breeze we don’t even feel.
Dean House looks different from the front. I never went in that way when I was gardening there—I’ve always gone through the side gate, approaching from the woods, stealth spy style. From the front, it’s a dump, always has been, but now there’s scaffolding up, new tiles shining on the roof, new windows replacing the rotting wooden framed ones that used to be there.
A man and a woman greet us as we walk up the path. The Insanely-Hots indeed—they don’t look like the parents of my friends. For one thing, they’re too young. The man, who introduces himself to us as Greg Lewis, with his shiny hair and wide smile, looks so much younger than Dad that he could pass as his son. And his wife, Julia, has red hair and a big laugh. She’s not supermodel pretty, but her smile lights up the world. Neither of them looks old enough to have teenage sons. Julia’s carrying a wriggling toddler, a little girl with blond wavy hair who totters over to us when her mother puts her down and shows us the doll she’s holding, a battered naked Barbie with wild frizzy brown hair.
“She looks like you,” the little girl says, holding the doll up to me.
Everyone laughs and I blush as everyone looks from the doll to my own wild curls. Great. Bloody great.
“Tess likes the outdoors and getting her hands dirty too much to worry about her hair,” Dad says, and Greg Lewis turns to smile at me.
“So you’re a gardener? You’ll have to come over and help me with mine.”
I can feel my cheeks get even hotter and I stuff my hands in my pockets like he might see the dirt under my nails and know what I’ve been doing. “Um, yeah, I guess I could…”
But he’s already turned away, laughing now with Dad, and I feel stupid. God, Tess, he was just being polite, it wasn’t a real invitation.
I look around and spot the boys right away, two strangers standing apart from a sea of familiar faces. I see Nicole and Bella’s other friends have already found them, though, all hovering with adoring smiles. Bella was right—they are both so good-looking; shiny and different. The boys have darker hair than their kid sister, but all together they could be a family straight out of a fairy tale, too pretty to be real. The older one is smiling, but the younger one looks like he might bite.
“Let’s say hello,” Bella says, hooking her arm through mine.
I pull away from her and step backward. “No thanks,” I say, moving into the shadows. “I don’t like the look of them. But you go ahead.”
She shrugs and saunters off to join her friends. Nicole waves to her. She looks over at me for a second, then smiles and leans in to whisper something to the boys. They glance over at me. The younger one doesn’t smile, just stares, but the older one laughs. My face goes hot imagining all the horrible things Nicole could have said.
“Why don’t you go and join them?” Julia says with her dazzling smile.
“Or you could play Barbies with me,” the little girl says, brandishing the naked Tess-doll.
I look to my dad for rescue, but he’s been led off by Greg to a crowd of men holding bottles of beer.
“She doesn’t want to play with your dolls, sweetie. I’ll just get the boys to…Jack? Sean? Come over and say hello to Tess,” she calls.
Oh no. Oh please.
They walk over, the older one still grinning.
“Boys—this is Tess, one of our neighbors. Why don’t you take her to hang out with you?”
The younger one is still staring at me, unsmiling, and my face is getting hotter.
“No,” I say, too loudly. “I want to play Barbies.”
The older one—Jack—laughs again. “Of course you do.”
Three weeks later, one chilly, bright Saturday morning at the start of half-term, Julia Lewis pays us a visit. It is the day after Ben Matthews kissed me at school. He walked back to his gang of friends afterward and I heard one of them ask him how it was and he said, “She tasted fat.” It was my first kiss and it was coated in humiliation.
Julia brings more than her three kids. She brings Max and Lena, the children of her best friends. “They work abroad,” I hear her say to Dad in a hushed voice. “Poor things—they hardly see their parents.”
My plan to stay with the adults and keep little Ellie company is stalled by the sight of the boy, Max. Forget the Insanely-Hots, he’s the handsome prince, the white knight, the happy-ever-after; he’s all of them. He smiles at me and it melts away the humiliation, it melts away the elephantine layer of imaginary fat that has settled on me like a real weight. His smile makes me feel I can stand next to Bella and not in her shadow.
Then the spell is broken as Bella bounds up. “Come on,” she says. “We’ll show you the woods.”
Bella leads us through the woods to the fallen tree at the top of the embankment by the stream. “Look,” she says, laughing, pointing to our names carved into the wood. “We did this last year, made it our tree.” She pulls a penknife out of her jeans pocket and holds it out to Max. “Want to sign?”
I frown. It’s supposed to be our tree. Our woods. Our place. I want to snatch the penknife out of Max’s hand, but…But. I also want Max to carve his initials next to mine. I’d have added a love heart around them in my imagination. Tess and Max, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g.
But it’s Bella’s name he carves his own next to and Lena adds hers on the other side, so the three of them are huddled together, not enough space between them so it’s like one name—MaxBellaLena—a solitary, wobbly-lettered Tess alone three inches away.
“You too,” Bella says to Jack and Sean, holding the knife out. “You’ve got to add your names too.”
The magic of the woods is receding; instead I smell the dankness of the stream and wet leaves, feel sharp twigs and damp mud under my feet. I hear the trees rustling—whispering, feel the breeze get colder on my cheeks.
They’re all looking at Bella as Jack takes the knife. It’s like I’m not even there and I pinch myself to make sure I exist.
Worst of all, Max is looking at Bella and all of a sudden I realize his smile is just for her. It was always for her.
December 2006
“Tess? Will you babysit Ellie tonight? Greg and Julia want me to go to the pub with them.”
I look up from my homework. Again? It’s the third time this month. I guess I don’t mind that much—I’m not doing anything else and they pay me to do it. But it stings a bit that they always ask me and not Bella. Because they know I’m always available and they know Bella is always out. It’s the Christmas holidays—why can’t Jack or Sean babysit their own bloody sister?
Oh right. Because they also have a social life. Even though they’ve been away at boarding school, they still came home to a ton of Christmas and New Year’s party invitations. I know this because Bella told me. Because she’s been invited to all the same parties and I haven’t been invited to any.
“Or…” Dad’s still hovering. “If they can find someone else, you could come to the pub with us, if you like? You’ve barely left the house this holiday.”
Yes, that’s it, Dad. Rub it in that you have a better social life than me. Pity me enough to take me to the pub with a bunch of forty-year-olds where I’ll sit in the corner with a Coke and a bag of chips while you all get drunk.
“No thanks,” I say, slamming my book shut. “I’d rather babysit.”
“Tess—don’t be like that.”
“Like what? I’ve said I’ll do it, haven’t I? Go and get wasted with your new friends.”
I stomp up the stairs, the guilt kicking in before I’m halfway up. Jeez—I should be pleased Dad’s getting out there, not crying at home about Mum more than two years after she died.
It’s just…I throw myself onto my bed and stare up at the ceiling. It’s just it’s not only Dad who’s been sucked into the glamorous lives of our new neighbors. It’s Bella as well—all excited by the new boys in town, who only appear with their private school accents on school holidays or for the odd weekend, exotic and rare enough to never get boring. Between them going back after half-term and breaking up for Christmas, all I’ve bloody heard is Bella and her mates going on and on about them, obsessively stalking them on Facebook. Bella was round there the day they came home for the holidays. Her and Nicole and Caitlin swooping down on the boys, dragging them out. Jack’s nearly eighteen now, he gets served in the pubs, sneaks drinks to the others while the barman turns a blind eye. Max and Lena were there as well—their mum and dad aren’t coming home for Christmas. Bella told me all this and I spent a couple of days hoping Max might come over to see me.
Bella and I never go to the woods anymore. Or even to the beach. I like the beach better in the winter. All wrapped up in layers and hats and scarves, we sometimes have the whole place to ourselves. But now, she’s out most nights with her friends and Jack and Sean, sneaking in at eleven, smelling of booze and cigarettes, falling into my room to tell tales of who’s hooked up with whom and more. Me holding my breath, hoping she won’t tell me Max has got off with one of her friends.
Like Dad, she took pity on me the first time. Begged me to come along. But then we got there and Nicole loudly said, Christ, we’ll never get served with her tagging along. And it was true—the barman’s blind eye wasn’t quite blind enough with me there and he refused to serve alcohol to anyone.
None of them spoke to me except Bella. Did Max even notice I was there? None of them noticed when I slunk off home after half an hour. Not even Bella.
She hasn’t asked me since.
So yes, Dad, I’ll babysit. Why the bloody hell not? What the bloody hell else am I going to do? I roll over and punch the pillow. Maybe Bella will end up spending so much time with them, she’ll realize what idiots they are and I’ll get my sister back.
I’m making hot chocolate for Ellie, testing to make sure it’s not too hot before adding mini marshmallows. Bella is helping her change into her pajamas so when Julia and Greg pick her up, they can carry her from our house to the car and then straight to bed at their house.
“Read,” Ellie says, tottering into the room in her Peppa Pig jammies, weighed down by a heavy hardbacked book, Bella walking behind her.
I frown as Ellie drops the book on my lap. “Why did you give her this?” I say to Bella, who shrugs and doesn’t look up from her phone.
“It’s a kid’s book, isn’t it?”
It’s more than a kid’s book. It’s the book our mother used to read to us, full of creepy fairy tales that started giving me nightmares after she died. I kept it hidden after that because I didn’t want to look at it, but I also kept it treasured because it was something precious to Mum. It isn’t something a four-year-old with sticky fingers and a penchant for scribbling on any paper she finds should have.
“I tell you what,” I say to Ellie with a big smile. “We can read later but let’s play Barbies now, okay?”
It’s easy to distract her with dolls.
Bella sinks down on the sofa next to me. “Do you think he likes me?” she says, picking up a Barbie in a wedding dress.
“Who?”
Not Max. Please don’t say Max. My heart still flutters when I see him. Max is the reason I said yes to that disastrous night at the pub, even though I knew Bella’s friends and Jack and Sean would be there.
Bella drops the doll when her phone beeps and she picks it up with a smile. “Never mind,” she says. “I’m just popping out for a bit. Cover for me if Dad comes back, okay?”
“Bella?” I call after her as she shrugs into her jacket. “Do you want to do something tomorrow? Just us two?”
She hesitates and opens her mouth to answer but then her phone pings again and she’s distracted, staring down at the screen. “Sure,” she says, hand on the door. “If I have time.”
“It’s okay,” Ellie says after Bella slams the front door behind her. She pats my hand. “I’ll still play with you.”
I laugh and pick up another doll. “Thanks, Ellie—we’ll have way more fun, won’t we?”
“I wish I had sisters,” she says, struggling to push a doll’s foot into a pink boot. “I wish you were my sister.”
I hug her and kiss her blond curls. She smells of chocolate and strawberry shampoo. “You can be my secret baby sister,” I say.
There’s a tap on the front door as I’m covering Ellie with a blanket. She crashed out on the sofa just before nine after an epic Barbie session consisting of four weddings and two parties.
I hurry to the door, not wanting Ellie to wake up cranky and tired. I step back in shock when I see Sean on the doorstep.
“Hey,” he says with a half-smile as I just stare at him. “Thought I’d come and pick Ellie up—relieve you of your babysitting duties.”
“I thought you were out with the others.” Who’s Bella with if not Jack and Sean?
He shrugs. “I wasn’t in the mood for the pub tonight.”
“Um…okay. Ellie’s just fallen asleep.”
“Right,” he says, staring at me. “Can I come in anyway? It’s freezing out here.”
I notice he’s only wearing a thin, long-sleeved T-shirt and no coat. How’s he supposed to get Ellie home? Carry her two miles in her Peppa Pig pajamas? “Oh. Yeah. Yes, of course. Sorry.”
“Looks like she’s had fun,” he says, looking at the scattered dolls all over the floor.
I lean to start picking them up, stacking them in the toy box she brought with her. I never babysit at their house—they always bring her here. I don’t know why.
“I think she likes having another girl to play with,” I say.
Sean smiles. We’re talking in low voices, little more than a whisper so as not to wake Ellie. “Yeah—she’s never impressed when me and Jack play.”
“You and Jack play with dolls?” I can’t imagine it. Not in a million years. Cutting the heads off the dolls—yes. That I can imagine. And the two of them telling Ellie to leave them alone, that I can also imagine.
Sean’s staring at me. “You don’t like us very much, do you?”
I gape, not knowing what to say. “I don’t…it’s just…”
“You never say a word to me or Jack. You hang around like a timid little mouse. You don’t know us at all, so how come you have this permanent sneer on your face when you look at us? You did it just then. She’s our kid sister—do you think we never get roped into playing with her or looking after her?”
I back away from his fierce rant. No—he’s the one with the sneer, the attitude, him and his brother with that mocking smile, always looking like he’s laughing at me.
“If I’m a mouse, it’s because of you. No one’s ever bothered trying to talk to me—I’m just Bella’s frumpy bloody sister. And maybe I don’t want to be patronized and treated like I’m Ellie’s age, so that’s why I don’t want to hang out with a bunch of…a bunch of knobs who think they’re God’s gift.”
