Blame It on the Bikini - By Natalie Anderson Page 0,33
other, with guest rooms and bathrooms in between. The physical distance was nothing on the emotional distance between the entire family. And though he and Lauren had grown a little closer as adults, the gap between parents and children had only widened.
His mother had read a home-organisation book at some point in one of her obsessive phases, and all their personal things were stored in crates, neatly stacked and labelled in the back of their wardrobes. Schoolwork from decades ago. When was he ever going to go through that? When would anyone? But it wasn’t his room that he’d come to grab stuff from. It was Lauren’s.
Because that photo of Mya at her parents’ house had reminded Brad that, at one stage in her turbulent teen years, Lauren had taken hundreds of photos. For a long time she’d preferred the magic of the old-style camera before messing around with digital. The old playroom had been converted into a darkroom for her, their parents eager to do anything that might hold Lauren’s interest in a topic that was actually palatable to them—not like boys and underage clubbing. It had long since been converted back into a study but the boxes of prints remained in Lauren’s wardrobe.
He sat on her bedroom floor and flicked through them, his heart thudding harder and harder as he worked through the piles. Lauren’s best friend, the natural model for Lauren’s photographic phase. It had been the two of them against the world, right? The rebel and the reject—the kid who’d not been included by anyone at the hellish, snobby school they’d gone to. Except for Lauren.
Though it was subtle, Mya had changed. The planes of her face had sharpened, those high cheekbones, the big green eyes were able to hold secrets now. In her teen years the attitude was obvious. The resentment, the defensiveness. But so was the joy, effortlessly captured in every other photo—that pixie smile, the gleam in her eyes.
Often she had a battered library book in her hand. Every other photo it seemed Lauren had snapped while Mya was unaware—and she was so pretty. The ones where she was aware were funny. The madness of some of the pictures made him laugh—terrifying teen girls.
He’d gone to university as soon as he turned seventeen and missed much of this part of Lauren’s life. It had been a relief to get out of the house. At the time he’d been too selfish to think of his sister. He’d thought she hadn’t known but of course she had. He’d discovered that in their tennis sessions. It was the great unacknowledged truth, how unhappy and dysfunctional their perfect family unit really was. The affairs of his father, the obsessive illness of his mother. They all retreated behind the façades they’d chosen for themselves. His father the distant workaholic, his mother the busy do-good wealthy woman, his sister the tearaway who acted out for any kind of attention. What was left for him but the playboy role?
He paused over one photo. Mya in that prom dress. He should have taken a better look at her in it back then. Then again it was probably better that he hadn’t.
She was leaning against the wheel of a car, parked on a lawn that looked as if it hadn’t seen a mower in a few months with ratty weeds. With broken headlights and the weeds around the wheel, that car was going absolutely nowhere any time soon. Yeah, that’d be the car she hadn’t learnt to drive in.
Brad put that picture to the side and shuffled through some more. He thought about taking the whole box home to look through at leisure but that was a step too far into stalker territory. He flicked through the pile more quickly—Mya wearing some mad hat, Mya draped in what looked like an old curtain. Mya in another dress apparently butchered and sewn together. He looked at the commonality in the pictures. Lauren’s pictures of Mya in Mya’s crazy—brilliant—creations. So many different things and so out there.
He flipped through them, faster and faster. She’d not always worn black. She’d always worn outrageous. Uncaring of what society might think. She’d made them herself, made that massive statement—‘here I am, look at me …’
Where had that fearless girl gone?
Why had she turned herself into a shadow? Now in nothing but black, slinking round as if she hoped she couldn’t be seen. Why didn’t she want to be seen? Where had the crazy fun gone? She’d grown