Three Years, Five Months and Eleven Days

Chapter Thirty-One

     ‘Yeah obviously, that’s cause you’re the youngest in our year,’ Nerys said. ‘But you’re still fifteen. Loads of people do it at fifteen. If you don’t do it till you’re sixteen you’re waiting till it’s legal, and that’s so lame.’

     ‘If it was true love, they didn’t have to do it,’ Nora told her. Nora was always the naïve one, the one who believed in fairytale romances and love at first sight. ‘Was it?’

     ‘Was it what?’ I asked.

     ‘True love,’ she explained.

     ‘How am I supposed to know?’ I snapped, hating that I couldn’t answer her question, even if I had wanted to. ‘I’ve never been in love before, so I can’t be sure.’

     ‘When it’s true love you’re sure,’ she muttered, gaze lost in the distance, dreaming of her Prince Charming.

     ‘How come you’re not upset about it?’ Bronwyn piped up. This was the first thing she had asked since the interrogation started, before she had just been sitting there, a little crinkle of confusion between her eyebrows.

     This one stumped me. How do you reply to that? If I were to open up and tell them how much I missed him, how empty I felt inside, how much I wished I could see him, just a glimpse, they wouldn’t understand.

      How could they, when even I didn’t understand the pain?

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     The girls forgot quickly about Michael; they had their own fascinating lives to live and my fling was over and in the past. I stuck with Isha in school, and I told her everything that was on my mind. I spent my weekend walking up and down the coast, past the beaches I knew so well, as far down the coastal path as I could go with time enough to get home. I would stop sometimes, close my eyes, and try to imagine that Michael was still there and that any second now he would come up behind me and say something.

     The weekend came and went, and then I had to go back to school again. The routine that made up my whole life was so different without Beth: instead of going to her house after school and spending hours there, I would stay at mine, or go to Isha’s occasionally.

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     On Wednesday night I heard news of Beth for the first time since my birthday two weeks ago. I had been at Isha’s and arrived home to find my mum looking very grave.

     ‘Hey,’ I greeted her. ‘What’s up?’

     ‘Beth called,’ she said.

     ‘Oh god,’ I sighed. ‘Did she tell you what happened between us? I wanted to keep it to myself because I wanted to forget about it.’

     ‘No, nothing like that,’ she told me. ‘Her dad died today. They’re coming back to St. David’s on Friday.’

     I had to sit down for a second, digesting this piece of news. ‘But- how?’ I asked dumbly.

     ‘He had cancer Debby,’ Mum said gently. ‘They knew he was going to die.’

     ‘I know,’ I whispered. ‘But- just…’ I didn’t know how to finish. It had been over a month since Beth had found out about her dad and left St. David’s, at the time it had seemed massive and significant, but it had been so long now, I had stopped believing that he was ever actually going to die.