Relief Tears

It was in science that you first found out, do you remember? Double science, double boredom, double bubble over the Bunsen burner on a drizzling Tuesday morning. Your hair nearly set on fire like Lianne Swanson’s did that time as you leant in to hear me whisper that I had something to tell you, something mental about Sasha, something you couldn’t tell anyone. Your mouth was so wide open that I could totally see the pink Hubba Bubba smulched into your molars.

You kept kicking me under the table to tell you more, making my stool wobble, but I couldn’t right then with Mr Luxton glaring at me, so instead I concentrated really hard on holding the copper strip steady in the flame, watching it go black and trying to ignore you poking me in the side with your tongs.

As we stood in the queue at break I ran through how I might explain it to you while you chose between getting a hot bread roll or an iced bun, counting out 15 pence in your hand, which meant you'd chosen the bread roll. Mr Bouvier was in front of us so I didn’t take anything because staring at his hands left me feeling sick; thinking about where they had been. They looked like girls hands all small and smooth with perfectly manicured nails, way too long for a man. My own hands had nails chewed down to nothing and little scabs next to raw skin where I had bitten too hard. It made me so cross, because it was his fault I had gnawed my fingers to death, him with his pouffy hair and stubbly face, and all I wanted to do was tap him on the back, wave my hands in front of his eyes and shout at him 'are you pleased with yourself?'. But instead I just smiled when he said hello and looked down at my shoes until he went away - hoping he didn’t see how mad red I was.

As I was picking up a milk carton I decided I would tell you like it was no big thing, like I was telling you what happened in Party of Five last night, but by the time I got to the till I realised I’d built it up to much with science class and that you wouldn’t be satisfied with that. And anyway it wasn’t Bailey and it wasn’t Julia. It was Sasha and it was me and that made it different.

No big thing just wouldn’t have cut it anyway. I could tell by the way that you hurried us round the back of the canteen that you wanted to take all break time over it, squeeze out every last second of juicy gossip until the bell for lessons rang. You wanted me to make it worth the detention we’d just got in science because I fell off my stool when you nudged too hard then laughed too loud. And I wanted to make it worth the detention too, even though I knew I shouldn’t.

I knew I shouldn’t tell you how she broke it to me last summer, how we were in The Lion and Lamb and Danny had just bought us both drinks because we couldn’t get served and I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t get off with him because he was fit and obviously into her, and she took me outside and made me promise not to say anything and took a deep breath then blurted it out, as tears rolled down her face, relief tears at finally being able to tell someone, even though he’d told her not to, because what they had was special and no-one would understand. You see if I told you that, all that, you would have known too much and I would have betrayed her and I’d promised, made a best friend promise.

So when we sat down behind the wheelie bins I tried my hardest to keep it short and sweet, to stick to the bare bones while I prayed for the bell to ring. But it didn’t work because once I started I just couldn’t stop so you heard it all, every last thing, from that night at the Lion and Lamb to yesterday home time, when Sasha was jittery because he’d snuck out of class to meet her behind the Eliots and they nearly got caught. And I sat there and waited as you frothed with excitement, waited for my own relief tears so I could feel the pressure release like Sasha did. But they didn’t come.

They didn’t come.

Once you knew it was good for a while though, wasn’t it? I mean you were no Sasha – how could you be – but you did for then and there. It sort of made the whole thing a bit special, exciting, bearable. We’d talk about her, and about him and about whether anyone else had worked it out yet. We’d sman in French when he asked Lisa Rowe to say ‘I’d like to book a hotel for two nights’, because Sasha wasn’t in our set so we knew we could get away with it, and he wouldn’t notice anyway as all the girls giggled in his classes with him being hot and young and French and everything.

And then there were those times when I would call you late at night, sniffing as I wrapped the telephone cord around my toes. You were like a proper friend then. Mostly we’d be on the phone for hours not saying anything, just watching the same channel and laughing at the same time. Although if I needed to talk I could tell you were listening because of the little hmms and uh-huhs you put in between my words. It was like that when Sasha begged for the keys to the dance studio and I didn’t know what to do because if they got caught I’d lose my prefect privileges for sure and I’d only been given the keys to practice because Mrs Finchley thought I could be good enough to audition for the Royal Academy if I worked at it hard enough.

Sasha didn’t want the keys to practice.

You thought about it overnight – I could tell because you looked tired – and at break time we shared your hula hoops and you said I should just do it because if they got caught the last thing anyone would be worrying about was how they got in there. Then you laughed at how my eyebrows met in the middle when we imagined them with mirrors all around, his dark, hairy back glistening with sweat under the fluorescent lights. It made my nose wrinkle wondering what he looked like naked, which made you laugh more, which made me laugh.

Laughing felt good I suppose.

So I let Sasha have the keys and I let her confide in me some more about how it was, with him. She used the word fuck when she talked about it, which made me feel sick because it was like suddenly she thought she was grown up or something. I didn’t let her see my nose wrinkling then, I just acted excited for her and sometimes said fuck too and tried not to think about his wife and his new baby meeting him at the gates every day after school.

You made it difficult when you didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Clamming up and trying to make us do other stuff was annoying, the way you would purse your lips and flick through the TV channels with that bored look on your face. You didn’t put the uh-huhs between my words as I tried to tell you how Sasha went round to his house, his house, the night before. You didn’t listen to me.

Then that stuff with Tony Lamb, well that’s what made it all happen really. I felt worse about his accident than anyone in our year because he used to come round mine after school and play with Andy on the SEGA, so when Andy spazzed out and drank a whole bottle of vodka then had to have his stomach pumped before the funeral I was a mess. I kept thinking about how I had hated him so much for treating me like a baby and how I was never nice to him and never could be now. I tried phoning Sasha first but she didn’t come to the phone so I called you instead and all you talked about was how it wasn’t fair of Sasha and that she was using me and that it shouldn’t just be ‘one way traffic’. You didn’t even care about Tony.

Then you threatened to tell on her, to ‘get it all out in the open’. You said Mr Bouvier was taking advantage and that it was disgusting, that she was just a kid, which I said wasn’t true because we were all sixteen and maybe you were just jealous. That got you really mad and you started shouting at me to stop being a mug. Which hurt.

Sasha would never have done any of that, never have made me feel small and pathetic and hollow. You made me cry painful throat aching tears and chew my fingers until my nails were red, red raw. My pillow got soaked through that night and you were to blame.

You got me scared you see, frightened of what you might do, I lay awake worrying and worrying, because the thing was if you told on her, it would be the end of us, of Sasha and me, of best friendship. It wasn’t fair that this was happening, all I wanted was for everything to go back to the way it was with sleepovers, and Going Live and Smash Hits, and no ‘fuck’ and no Mr Bouvier, and no you. No you.

So it was just a little lie, not hard really, a few words to push out from behind my teeth. When Mrs Finchley came in to the dance studio that morning to see how I was getting on she knew something was up, she saw my raw fingers and my baggy eyes and my lip wobbling and asked me what was wrong, and I thought about ‘wrong’, and what was ‘wrong’ in my life and I looked at myself in the mirrors then back at her and it made sense. Right there in the studio, it honestly felt like the truth.

I only had to say one sentence, to mutter it under my breath, just swap Sasha’s name for yours and the rest came easy.

Mrs Finchley’s mouth dropped open when I told her, but there was no pink smulch in her teeth because this was too serious for Hubba Bubba, because she wasn’t one of us, because telling her changed everything. She put her arm around me and called me ‘a poor girl,’ and sat me down with my back against the mirror and brought me hot chocolate from the vending machine outside which was too hot to hold so I wrapped my sleeve around the cup and blew on it while she comforted me: ‘let it all out, just let it all out’ so I did and it came and it came so easily, because it was all real and it had all happened, and it was all wrong, everything was so wrong that it just felt right.

And I cried. I cried for you. And for me. And for all of us. I cried rivers of inky black relief until my jaw hurt because for those few minutes before the bell it was all over, none of us had to pretend anymore, and soon we would all be feeling freedom wet against our faces.