Entangled (5 page)

day 13

So last night was weird. Yet another dream about Ethan. He was my doctor and he was examining me as I lay on a hospital bed. He listened to my heartbeat with a stethoscope, looking worried. Then he shone a light in my eyes and shook his head. And then I woke up. My leg must have kicked out, and my foot touched something that was definitely not bed.

Ethan was sitting at the end of the bed, watching me. I freaked out.

‘What the hell are you doing?! You need to watch me sleep now? Jesus! What is
wrong
with you?’ I grabbed the duvet and cocooned myself in the corner of the bed, as far away from him as I could get. Ethan just looked at me, cool as you like. His face was half lit by the light streaming in through the open door. The open door! Maybe this was my chance to get out of here. I had to think fast. First of all, I had to try not to look at the doorway. I didn’t want Ethan realizing his mistake until it was too late. I had to calm down. My heart was drum-drum-drumming loud as anything.

We sat in silence for a little while. I got a chance to look at him properly, while doing my very best to ignore my escape route. He looked different. Not only was he wearing a proper colour for the first time, he was wearing
my
colour – my favourite green. It was a fitted shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. The top three buttons were undone, and I could see his pale smooth chest. I wondered if he knew it was my favourite colour. Of course not. How could he? He was wearing his usual jeans – frayed and faded, and his feet were bare.
Aha!
That could be a considerable advantage, if there was going to be some kind of chase scenario. Until I remembered I was in bed, and definitely not wearing a pair of super-fast running shoes.
Idiot
.

‘Were you dreaming, Grace?’ he asked.

‘What’s it to you?’

‘You looked like you were dreaming.’

‘I don’t remember.’ I didn’t want him to know that I’d been dreaming about him. And had been doing so A LOT over the past few days.

He sighed. ‘I like dreaming. It’s my favourite part of the day. Have you ever noticed that dreams can change the way you feel?’

I just looked at him, saying nothing. If he wanted to go off on one, he was welcome to. I was still trying to work out how to make a run for it.

‘Well, you might think one way about something, or someone, and then you dream about it. And it’s completely different to the way you thought it would be. You wake up, and everything has changed.’ I had no clue what he was going on about.

His eyes were intense, darker than usual. ‘The door is open, Grace. The door is always open.’ I turned my head towards the door, but it was closed. And it was dark. And Ethan wasn’t there. The old dream-within-a-dream situation.
Bastard. WAKE UP!

I got up and padded quietly towards the door. It was locked. Of course it was locked. I started to cry.

I need to not be here.

I need to see the sky.

I need to run.

Ethan brought me an early breakfast. At least I
think
it was an early breakfast. There’s really no way of knowing. All I know is that I was still snivelling after that dream. It felt early though, like no one else in the world was awake yet. Ethan was not wearing green. He was wearing a black T-shirt and grey jeans. He looks exhausted today. It’s the first time he’s looked slightly less than perfect since I’ve been here. Maybe his conscience is keeping him awake at night.

He asked me if I had slept well. Not particularly, I said. I told him he looked tired and then mentally kicked myself – I didn’t want him thinking that I cared.

He seemed a bit startled that I had noticed. He paused and said, ‘It’s not easy, is it, Grace?’ I shook my head, not quite understanding. He smiled a cute, sad little smile at me and left the room.

I jumped in the shower straight after breakfast. I like the water to be almost scalding – it clears the fuzz out of my brain. I stood there for some time with the water streaming down my shoulders. I held my arms out in front of me; the scars stood out against the rest of my ruddy skin. I scratched my fingernail down my left forearm. Again and again. Harder and harder. I couldn’t make it bleed, but the pain felt good. I felt more awake. More alive.

Now my arm is covered in ugly red scratches. Never mind.

But I don’t want Ethan to see. I don’t think he’d like it.

Sal was pregnant. That was the turning point – when everything turned to shit.

It didn’t happen straight away. Everything was
kind of
OK (in an awful sort of way) for a while. Of course, Sal was devastated. There were a lot of tears and late-night phone calls, but somehow the two of us managed to stumble through our exams without screwing up. Sal had to run out of an English Lit. exam to be sick, but she’d already finished the paper so it was no big deal. She blamed it on food poisoning from Gino’s. Not exactly fair on Gino.

It was a bad time for Sal, but there was something about it that made me feel sort of good. That sounds awful. But for maybe the first time in my life, I felt useful and … I don’t know … needed? My best friend was going through the worst thing imaginable, and I was, in some strange, perverse way,
enjoying
myself. How bad is that? I dunno, maybe ‘enjoying’ is not quite the right word, but there
was
a certain amount of excitement from the drama of it all. I felt beyond awful for Sal, and I truly would have done anything in my power to change the situation. But all I could do was help her through it the best I could – be the sort of best friend she deserved. And that’s what I tried to do.

I covered for her with her parents, as and when it was called for. When Devon came sniffing around because he’d ‘sensed’ something was wrong, I put him off the scent. I went with her to the doctor’s – it had taken weeks for me to persuade her to go. Sal maintained that she wanted to get her exams out of the way first. I pestered her and pestered her, but she wouldn’t budge.

Of course there was no question what Sal was going to do: there was no way she could keep the baby. We didn’t even discuss it as an option. Nothing like those cheesy TV programmes where there’s a lot of angsty decision-making, and heart-to-hearts about how it might be OK for a schoolgirl to raise a baby on her own. And how the baby was a part of her now and blah blah blah blah. Nope. Sal didn’t want the baby, and that was that.

I still wanted to know who she’d had sex with. As far as I was concerned, she simply wasn’t playing fair. It should be tit for tat (I’ll tell you mine if you’ll tell me yours). Still, I tried my best to ignore the resentment that was starting to fester inside me.

Sal didn’t actually want me to go with her to the doc’s, but I insisted. It’s not that I didn’t trust her to go on her own – I just felt I should be there. The doctor talked Sal through her options, but I could tell she wasn’t listening. When the doc had finished, Sal calmly explained that she’d already considered all her options in great detail (lie), and that she wasn’t stupid (truth) and knew that she wasn’t ready for the responsibility (also truth). She was eerily composed. It was almost like she wasn’t quite there, or like she was watching the whole thing happen through a pane of glass. An opaque pane of glass.

The bad news was that we shouldn’t have waited those extra couple of weeks. If Sal had gone to the doctor’s sooner, she would have been given some pills to take to terminate the pregnancy. It wouldn’t have been pleasant, but she wouldn’t have had to go through the trauma of going to a clinic. I felt like I’d let Sal down. I should have made her listen. Should have
forced
her to see a doctor sooner. Maybe I’d been too busy relishing the drama of it all.
Maybe
.

It was strange; we’d both accepted the idea of an abortion until we found out that she shouldn’t have needed one in the first place. I don’t know why, but having to have an actual operation seemed way worse than taking some pills, even if the end result was the same.

Something changed in Sal then, I think. We left the surgery, having made an appointment for her to go to the clinic the following week. I suggested we head to a greasy spoon I knew for a cup of tea.

We sat opposite each other at the back of the cafe. The table had more chips on it than the menu did. The tea was bitter and strong. Sal was distracted, but that was hardly surprising. I was yabbering on about how it was all going to be OK, and that she’d soon be able to put it all behind her and hadn’t the doctor been nice?

Sal interrupted. ‘Grace, can you just stop please?’

‘Stop what?’

Sal looked at me like I was being particularly dense. ‘Can we just …? I can’t do this right now. I have to go.’ She pushed back her chair. It made a horrible scraping noise on the lino.

‘Where are you going? What’s up?’ I was baffled. I knew she was upset – but she was supposed to want to be upset
with
me, not off by herself somewhere. This wasn’t the way it was meant to go.

Sal had tears in her eyes and her voice was shaky when she said, ‘Just … nothing. I have to go home.’ Then she legged it out of the cafe before I even knew what was happening. Leaving me to pick up the bill.
Nice
.

I paid and rushed outside to catch up with her. I figured she’d be just around the corner, ready to apologize for being such a drama queen. She wasn’t, so I called her. Her phone went straight to voicemail.
Odd
. Sal never turned off her phone. Never ever. We’d made a deal.

The scratches on my arm are fading.

A broken biro works better than fingernails.

Blood on my pyjamas.

Red. White.

Another visit from Ethan. The real one, not the dream one – I think. He saw the blood straight away, probably because I didn’t try to hide it. ‘Give me your hand,’ he said, so softly I wasn’t even sure he’d said it out loud. He gently prised the broken biro from my hand and put it in the pocket of his jeans. ‘I’ll get you some clean clothes.’

A couple of minutes later he was back with another set of pyjamas, identical to the ones I was wearing. ‘Do you want me to help with that?’ He nodded towards my bloody arms. I shook my head, which felt all woolly and slow.