Another Life Altogether: A Novel - By Elaine Beale Page 0,158

the preparations for the wedding, she might be delirious, ridiculous, and completely distracted, but she was absolutely herself.

“See you tonight, then, Jesse,” my father said as he pulled up outside the school.

The exterior was quiet, and, apart from a couple of other stragglers plodding toward the main entrance, there was no one else around. As soon as I walked inside, however, I entered another world.

By the notice board outside the cloakrooms there was a huge milling crowd. At least four deep, they pressed against one another in a scramble to see some new notice that was apparently pinned up there. Despite my urgency to find my satchel, everyone seemed so excited that I felt myself drawn to find out what all the fuss was about.

As I approached, I saw a girl from my class standing on the edge of the crowd. When I caught her eyes, they widened and she sputtered a giggle into her hand. Within moments I heard the whispers, spreading around me as if those voices were a ripple and I was a stone dropped into a pond. Then, as I stepped closer, the crowd quieted and began to part. I walked through the silence, past the grinning faces, all those shoes shuffling to make way.

I knew what was coming, the same way I had known that something dreadful had happened to my mother when we lived in Hull and I found that gathering of neighbors outside our house. In that awful hush, pregnant with held breaths and stifled laughs, it was a certainty that gripped me, a fist clenched around my heart. I was moving again, steadily, toward disaster, unable to turn around or stop.

“Lezzie!” Tracey said the word before I had made my way past the assembled group. “Lezzie!” she yelled again, standing triumphant in front of the notice board as I looked at the several sheets of paper pinned up there. “Lezzie!” she screamed as I looked at the familiar writing on those pages. I took in only the words “Dear Amanda,” then I spun around and hurled my way back through the jostling, jeering crowd.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I DIDN’T CRY WHILE I TRUDGED THE SIX MILES FROM LISTON TO MIDHAM. I didn’t shed a single tear. There was no reason to cry, because I was a shell holding only humiliation. I had nothing now. No friends and no protection. The worst thing I could imagine had happened, and all I could do was put one foot in front of the other and make my way home.

By the time I arrived at the top of our driveway, the weather had become bleaker. A cold wind had risen to make the branches of the trees by our house sweep and thrash. As I traipsed up the driveway, a scrap of pink fabric danced through the air toward me.

“Grab it, Jesse!” my mother yelled, careening down the path. “Grab it—that’s one of the wedding serviettes!”

I halted to watch it flutter like a pink butterfly, sail upward, dip so that it almost brushed my head, then soar up and away again.

“I told you to grab it!” she screamed, crashing into me so that I staggered back. “What the hell is wrong with you?” Her astoundingly orange face leaned into mine. I caught the scent of her breath, warm and yeasty, before she pulled away. Then she continued onward, chasing the serviette as it swooped low, then was pulled high into the air yet again.

For some reason, she was wearing her new yellow wedding outfit, apparently not quite finished, as the hem was frayed and slightly jagged, and one of the sleeves of her bolero jacket hung loose. Since I had seen her earlier that morning, she had dyed her hair, transforming herself into a tufty-headed platinum blonde. She was bare-legged in her slippers and, because she hadn’t put any Tanfastic on her legs they were a ghostly white in contrast to her arms and face.

As I watched her, I felt strangely mesmerized, taking in the stark contrast of all that color—the vivid pink, the blazing yellow, the streaky orange flesh—against the inky sky. I was filled with complete indifference, as if I were watching something on the television, as if this were not my life. I simply no longer had it in me to care about anything—not my mother or this stupid wedding, not even Amanda, and certainly not myself.

My mother ran down the driveway, the serviette just out of her grasp until, as if the wind had finally