All That Glitters (44 page)

stare at the box in my lap.

Oh, you thought I meant I carry the past around with me
metaphorically
?

No, I meant literally.

At the bottom of my satchel, under all my schoolbooks and fact books and dictionaries and thesauruses, so I know it’s there.

I don’t always tell you everything, you know.

I’m an unreliable narrator. We all are.

We don’t unfold ourselves like pieces of paper for everyone to see: that’s not how humans work. There are always parts of us we shut away or hide. Bits of ourselves we can’t touch because they’re too precious and buried too deep.

Fragments of truth we barely admit to ourselves.

Because sometimes editing our own story is the only way to get through it.

So here are the three facts you didn’t know.

Fact 1

My letters were going abroad, but they weren’t going to Australia. They were going to a little village in Brazil, so that Bunty could look after them.

“Darling,” she said when I rang her in tears from my bedroom in Greenway, New York, five weeks ago. “Sometimes all you need is a good cry and an even better pen. Write it all down and send it to me, and I’ll keep it safe for you.”

So that’s what I did.

When I couldn’t hold it in any more, I pulled my heartbreak out like a splinter and sent it to my grandmother to look after. Because it helped, somehow: knowing she would protect the parts of me I couldn’t hang on to any longer.

It made me lighter.

Fact 2

What happened on Brooklyn Bridge didn’t stop being true, just because it hurt.

Nick and I had three choices.

a) He could carry on living a life he didn’t enjoy just to see me: doing a job he hated, putting his future on hold, flying to and fro across the world for a few grabbed moments together. I could watch him grow increasingly lost, unanchored and unhappy: divided between a real life and a girl he loved.

b) We could stay together, seven thousand miles apart, and watch as our connection slowly shattered every day: until the awkward silences lengthened, the frozen moments expanded, the distances pulled at us, until finally all we had left were memories and stars.

Or c) I could force Nick to move on.

Instead of tearing him to pieces so I could keep a few bits for myself, I could make him take all of it with him. To live wholeheartedly without me in a way that would, eventually, make him happier.

Which is – I think, from his voice on that video – what he’s started doing.

Because …

Fact 3

I got Nick’s letter six days before I left New York.

I’ve had it all along.

So he didn’t reply to my letters because he didn’t get them. He doesn’t know how much I miss him because I haven’t told him. And he doesn’t know why I broke his heart because I couldn’t let him know mine was broken too.

Over the last year, Nick has made so many sacrifices for me. He has been there when I needed him, gone when I didn’t: appeared and reappeared and disappeared, entirely for my sake. He has adored every bit of me, without question and without judgement.

He has given me the kind of romance some people never get in an entire lifetime.

And I’ll be honest: if he’d tried one more time – one more letter, one text, one single flower – I’d have crumbled and changed my mind: it would have been impossible not to. So I guess the lonelier I got, the more I waited and hoped for it as hard as I could.

But he didn’t. Instead, he grabbed happiness and started moving forward again.

Which means I finally know I made the right decision.

I may not be the girl Nick thinks I am.

Over the last month, I’ve been lost, scared, weak, unhappy and – at points – quite shockingly stupid. I’ve lost my best friends, clung to the wrong people for the wrong reasons and done a whole lot of things I’m not proud of.

But this is not one of them.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that
love
is both a noun and a verb. And – because of Nick – I know now what I didn’t know a year ago.

It’s not enough to say it; it’s not even enough to feel it.

Love is a
doing
word: an action you have to complete continuously, every day, however much it hurts. Whatever it ends up costing you. And this time loving Nick properly means letting him go.

After all, he has saved me, over and over again.

It’s my turn now to save him back.

Even if it means being on my own.

uffice to say, the letter isn’t clean and smooth any more.

Two teardrops have hit the page, and are now making their slow, wobbly way downward: smudging the pen like little blue snail trails.

Which doesn’t really matter, to be honest.

I know every word so off by heart they might as well be engraved there.

Patiently, I wait until the tears drop off the bottom of the paper. Then I give my letter a gentle kiss, fold it in half again and put it back in my Nick Box. Followed by the yen note, the T-rex, the Lemsip and tissue, the toy lion, the advert, the ticket. I take the planets necklace off carefully and put it on top, straightening it out so it doesn’t get tangled.

Then I grab the lid.

“Harriet?”

Quick as a flash, I wipe a hand across my eyes, slam the lid on top of the box and cram it back into my satchel.

Should have locked the front door.
Idiot.

“Mmmm?”

“Are you OK?”

I turn with wet eyes to the doorway, and through the sparkling shine in my eyes all I can see is purple.

“Absolutely,” I manage, nodding. “Fine. Superb. Coolioko. Why wouldn’t I be?”

India walks across the room quietly and then sits down next to me with her hair gleaming like ink.

“First of all,” she says, “because that was officially the most hideous party anyone has ever thrown in the history of parties, ever. For future generations, that party will be the one parents tell their children about to dissuade them from ever throwing parties.”

I nod. To say the least. “I know.”

“Second of all, because you’re sitting on the floor crying into a sock.”

I blink at Nick’s blue sock, still in my hand.

I thought I’d put it back in the box. Apparently I’m still clutching it to my face like a toddler with a tiny, faceless teddy bear.

“Ah.” Flushing, I shove it back in my satchel. “And third of all I just said
coolioko
and that’s a made-up word?”

“Nope,” India says, pointing at the ceiling. “Indus. Pavo. Carina. Mensa. Volans. Chamaeleon. Reticulum. Octans. They’re constellations in the southern hemisphere. You’ve stuck the sky on the wrong way up.”

uthenticity.

Spiritual awareness, truth, vision.

These are just a few of the psychological qualities we associate with purple, as I discovered when I was researching my immortal duck outfit.

It’s also the traditional colour of royalty.

This is because the original purple dye required 250,000 individual
purpura
shellfish – hence
purple –
to extract enough to make one single ounce. By the third century BC, Tyrian purple dye cost more than gold and wearing it was a sign that you were really worth something.

As I stare at India’s bright purple hair and cool but unshakeable expression, I’m starting to realise that maybe her hair colour is perfect for her in more ways than one.

“You came back.”

She grabs another sandwich from the table. “I like these,” she says, stuffing it in her mouth. Then she swallows. “Obviously I came back. I only left to tell Ananya she could walk home and then push her into a bush.” She points at a pink scratch glowing on the right side of her temple and another on her upper lip. “Sadly I ended up in it too. She’s always been a bit scrappy.”

I blink at her. “Always?”

“Yeah. Grandad was worried she’d got in with a bad crowd, so when we moved here I promised to pry her back out again.”

All known mammals have tongues.

In which case I’ve no idea what I’ve just turned into: all I can do is stare at India in total silence.

“You didn’t know Ananya was my cousin?” India says, black eyebrows creasing back into essay ticks. “We’ve got the same
surname
, Harriet. Didn’t you think that was a bit of a coincidence?”