...And then I caught myself. I noticed my thoughts spiraling and my breath catching, and noticing was the most important step. They’d told me that in therapy. I patted my own chest to comfort myself.
I recognize I’m thinking about killing myself again, I told myself.
I notice that I’m assuming the worst.
I’m underestimating my ability to cope and overestimating how hard the world can be.
And, because I was, at that point, still highly medicated, I rubbed my heart through my jumper until my fingers were full of static, and it worked. I managed to short-circuit the path to oblivion.
Just in time, because, as I wandered around the corner, I found Kim waiting with Amy.
“Oh my God, Fern, aren’t you boiling?” Kim grasped me in a friendly hug she definitely didn’t mean. “I can’t believe you’re wearing your jumper. It’s, like, a trillion degrees today. It’s so shit it’s finally boiling on the first day back.”
“I’m fine. I’m not hot,” I lied.
Amy and I hugged while Kim watched on anxiously. As we started the familiar path to school, none of us mentioned Kim’s presence. She lived twenty minutes in the opposite direction. I sneaked a sideways look at her, noting Kim’s brand-new fringe, and raised my eyebrows. They both were wearing their hair in scraped-back ponytails—cemented with gel to their scalps, with only their wispy fringes left out to oxygenate. “Nice fringe,” I said.
Kim held it between her fingers. “Aww thank you. You think it’s OK? It’s not too short? I got it done yesterday.”
“It’s lovely. Just like Amy’s new one.”
They both erupted into giggles.
“We’re basically twins,” Amy confirmed, apparently unbothered that her fringe needed patenting. “We even bought the same purple shrug from Topshop the other day, without knowing the other had got it.”
“It’s ridiculous,” Kim said. “Someone in McDonald’s the other day even asked if we were sisters.”
“Wow.”
“I know, right? Ever since Tenerife, we’ve basically become the same person.”
I grimaced and looked down at my shiny black Kickers. It had been less than two minutes before Kim brought up their holiday to Tenerife. You’d have thought the two had been to WAR together. I reminded myself Amy was my best friend and had been my best friend since Year Seven. She was just tolerating Kim out of sympathy because she was needy since her parents got divorced. Nonetheless, I watched Kim thread her arm through Amy’s, so I pulled down my sleeve and threaded it through Amy’s other arm—our chain taking up the whole pavement.
“So, oh my God, Amy, do you remember Chris from Tenerife?” Kim started. “He was so fit. I can’t believe he thought it was weird that I smelled him in the queue for the breakfast buffet. It was so embarrassing...and that night with the karaoke! I was so drunk from that Bacardi Breezer Mum got us.”
Amy shrieked with cliquey nostalgia, while Kim watched her every reaction. It occurred to me both of us had been counting down to this day. Me, to find out if I could manage school without suicide ideation. And Kim, wondering if she’d be demoted to “spare wheel friend” once more. I was still reeling from the fact that I’d wanted to die only ten minutes previously. Now I was contemplating if it was worse to a) die, or b) not have Amy as my best friend anymore.
I slowed a bit as we turned onto our school’s road. “How are you feeling?” Amy asked. “Are you scared?”
“I’m OK. I just don’t want everyone to stare at me.”
“They won’t,” Kim barged in. “I reckon everyone’s forgotten about it over summer.”
I was unconvinced. “Hmm.”
Amy patted my back. “You have us by your side, remember? I will literally fight anyone who dares stare at you. Unless they’re staring at how fit you got over summer, of course.”
I laughed. “Unlikely.”
“Definitely. Your hair’s grown so long. It looks gorgeous.” She pulled out a long strand of strawberry blonde, holding it up like a mustache, and I giggled.
That was how reassurance between girls worked, aged thirteen onward—when a friend’s troubles were too huge, you offered up a compliment about their appearance as a distraction.
Kim heaved a sigh. “I hope Matt stares at me and thinks how fit I am this term. Did I tell you he said hello to me on MSN the other day?”
I caught Amy’s eye for the tiniest moment and we shared a silent decision to entertain Kim’s desperately fruitless crush. She’d been obsessed with Matt since he got overnight fit in Year Eight. Through osmosis, after many conversations, I knew Matt’s star sign (Aries), his favorite color (blue), his previous relationship history (he went out with Karly for two days in Year Seven, and kissed Gail at the Year Nine disco, but told her he wasn’t ready for a relationship), and his GCSE options. Yet Matt remained totally oblivious to Kim’s adoration, which was impressive naivety, considering last year she took to full-blown stalking him (“I just happened to be walking the same way as him and accidentally found out where he lived”).
“What happened?” Amy asked. “Did he write anything else?”
“Well, I asked him how he was, and he didn’t reply. So I logged out and logged in again, but he didn’t say hi again.”
As Kim spouted on about Matt’s bone structure, I realized I found it all quite relaxing. The banality of it—as if the last six months hadn’t happened. I caught Amy’s eye again and we shared a secret smile. The conspiracy of it glowed warm in my stomach.
“You OK?” Amy asked again when we reached the school gates.
“Remember, Fern,” Kim added, “we are here for you. If anyone says anything, tell us, right? We are your guardians.”
That was two uses of the word we for her and Amy. Kim’s battle lines really had been drawn. I stretched my arms up into a yawn, and the synthetic fabric pulled under my already sweaty armpits. I felt incredibly tired all of a sudden. I didn’t have the energy to fight for my best friend. Not right now. I just wanted to survive the next two years of school. Staying alive came first, friendships second.
I was yet to discover how much the two were entwined.
* * *
School smelled exactly the same. That was the first thing I noticed. The acrid itch tickled the back of my throat as we merged into a homogenous blob of uniformed students, waiting to get through the main doors. It smelled of BO masked with Lynx Africa. As we pushed into the Year Ten corridor, too much school came at me way too fast. The dull banging of locker doors shutting. The colony of fellow teenagers buzzing with first day back energy. The frenzied catching-upness and showing-offness before the bell rang. Everyone figuring out who’d got hot over the summer, or lost their virginity, or both. Everyone stared as I passed, their eyes glancing toward my long sleeves.