Wonderland (17 page)

There are five cottages now: the farmhouse in the middle and the others squeezed into the barns and outhouses around the yard. Seaview is on the end, part of the milking shed. Stella is right: there’s no way you can see the sea from there. Not unless you stand on the roof. Which we did, of course, before Dad screamed at us to get down and I swung around to see him and slipped anyway. Scraping my arms and legs on the tiles. But not falling. Because Stella held on to my arm. Dad said it was the gutter that did it, jamming my foot just in time. But I knew it was her.

There’s no car in the parking space. I look through the window and see rough burlap carpets, a white Shaker table and chairs, checkered cushions. Some London designer’s idea of beach-hut chic. Not like the homes in the village, all swirly carpets, brass fittings, and porcelain dairymaids on the mantelpiece.

I strain to see the detritus of life with Stella. Bottles of nail varnish, tops left off. Coke cans. Half-smoked cigarettes. But all I can see are empty coffee cups. A
Times.
And books. A John Grisham on the table, dog-eared halfway through. A Marian Keyes, glittery blue with pink lettering. So not Stella. No
On the Road
or
Prozac Nation.
No Shelley or Keats. I don’t bother to knock. I’ve seen enough to know that no one is home.

I’ll come again,
I think. Try later. Maybe they’re in town. Her dad’s exhibition must have started by now. So I’m walking away, past the wall, rough wood sanded now, the chalk lines that measured my upside-down handstand height painted over. And I think,
One last time.
No one around to see me now. I step forward, hands in front of me and push down.

That’s when she shows up. Walks into my sight line. Enter villainess, stage right, eating an ice-cream bar.

“Nice knickers. Bet Ed loves them.”

I drop down and turn to face her.

She picks off a piece of chocolate, licks vanilla ice cream off her fingers. “Want a bite?”

I wanted to hear her say it. Admit it. Needed to ask her. When. Why. But now that I’m here, the words won’t come out.

I shake my head.

“Suit yourself.” She shrugs. “Thought you were going to London.”

“Thought
you
were,” I counter.

Stella ignores me. “You and Ed fallen out? Did he pull your pigtails when you were playing chase-and-kiss?”

“We’re not kids.”

“Yeah, right.” She picks off another piece of chocolate. Puts it in her mouth, closing her lips over her fingers.

I think of her touching him. Doing the things I have done. And things I haven’t. Blood rushes to my head and I lurch against the wall.

Stella watches me with detached interest. “You need to stay off the drink.”

“You bitch.” The words are quiet. Deliberate.

“Pardon?”

“You heard me.”

Stella laughs. “Let me get this straight. Is this about me? Or Ed? Because, believe me, I didn’t have to try too hard.”

I put my hand out and clutch at the wall to stop myself from falling. Any hope that she would convince me somehow that I was wrong, that I was overreacting, was now gone.

“But why?” The words are barely audible. “You know how I feel about him.”

“You know why. I did it for you. Because if it weren’t me, it would have been some first-year undergrad. Then you’d have been stuck in London without either of us. Better to find out now.” She closes her mouth around the end of the vanilla. Sucks hard.

“You are unbelievable,” I manage to spit out.

“That’s why you love me.” She pouts.

I look at her, standing there in her secondhand sundress and Ray-Bans, wedge heels on her feet. And I think,
I did love you, at first. When you curled your finger and beckoned me out of the shell I had built around myself. When you made me stronger, brighter than I ever thought I could be. But now you’ve made me into this person, into this version of you, and you want to destroy it. Or keep it for yourself. So I don’t love you. Not anymore.

“I can’t do this,” I say out loud.

“What?” Stella frowns.

I drop my head, finding the strength, breathing the warm air in lungfuls. My heart pounding. Because this will be it. This will be the end of it all.

I look up. “Us,” I say.

She pauses, weighing the word up, eyes never moving from mine. Then she smiles. But it’s not happy. It’s not kind. It’s the smile of someone who knows they have already won. “But there is no me without you,” she says.

“Stella, I’m being serious.”

“So am I.”

I lose it. “I don’t need you anymore. Get it?”

She takes the ice cream out of her mouth. Looks at me hard. “God, you’re an ungrateful little cow.”

“Ungrateful?” The word hits me like a sucker punch. “What have you done for me? Except dye my hair and steal my boyfriend.”

“Yeah? Before me you were nobody. Jude the Obscure. You looked like a loser. And acted like one. Christ, you were still doing handstands and playing board games with your little brother on Saturday nights.” She drops the ice cream on the ground.

I feel my fists clench and my eyes sting with salt water and truth. “So why’d you pick me, then? Some kind of charity project?”

“Something like that.” She pulls a pack of cigarettes from under her bra strap. Lights one. The smell of her lighter turns my stomach.

“Yeah? Well, I didn’t need it.”

Stella blows a smoke ring. Watches it expand and disappear against the blue sky. Snaps the lighter shut and looks at me again. For the first time I see pity in her eyes. Disgust.

“I gave you an identity,” she says.

“Yeah, whose? You turned me into someone else.”

She shakes her head. “I turned you into who you wanted to be.”

“What, you?”

“Yeah. And don’t pretend you didn’t love it.” Her eyes narrow. “Why do you think Ed wanted you all of a sudden?”

“That’s not true.”

“Whatever.” She folds her arms.

Tears run down my face. I wipe them away. “I don’t know who I am anymore, Stella. I don’t even know who you are. I mean, who are you? You disappear. You’re not living in Seaview — unless you’ve turned into some thirty-something chick-lit fan.”

Stella is silent, never one to miss a chance to milk a dramatic pause. Then she drops the cigarette, watches it smolder on the burned, yellowed grass. “You know who I am.” She pauses. Then she looks me straight in the eyes. “I’m you, Jude.”

“What?” I stare at her, not understanding.

“I’m you,” Stella repeats slowly. “We’re the same person. See?”

She takes my hand and puts it on her face. I can feel her, but it’s not like when I touch Ed or he touches me. It’s as if I’m touching myself. I can feel the hand and the cheek. I am entranced. Lost in the surreality. Then she smiles. The smile is mine.

I snatch my hand away. My chest constricts and I struggle to speak. “You’re lying.”

“Really? So it wasn’t you who took money out of the till to pay for that dress?”

I shake my head. This is a mass-market paperback plot line. Some big-money Hollywood thriller. This isn’t real. It isn’t happening.

“No? What about the audition, then? That photo. It was taken inside the audition room, Jude. Inside it. Because it wasn’t someone else in there. It was you.”

“But . . . you’re here. Standing in front of me. I’m talking to you.”

“Everyone talks to themselves. You get an answer back as well. Double the fun.”

“No.” I shake my head.

“Yes.” Stella grabs my hand again. Holds it down on her cheek. On my cheek. “I am you. I look how you want to look. I talk how you want to talk. All the ways you wish you could be, that’s me.”

I recognize that line. And I feel nausea rise again. Because I realize what she’s done. What I’ve done. And my head is full of images. Stella at the beach that first day back. Stella in my bedroom. Stella on the field at school, fiddling with her bra in front of Hughsie. Oh, God, Hughsie. I hold the wall. It wasn’t Stella at the beach, kissing him, putting his hand on her. It was me. And the guy on the train. In the bathroom. And that night, Matt’s party . . .

I turn to her. “Blair?”

Stella nods.

And I am back there. In Matt’s room. Lying on the bed. I feel him again. Pushing inside me. And I remember the dull ache. The sting. The blood the next day. And I can’t stop it then. I throw up, yellow spattering the wall. But it’s not fear. Not vodka, or low blood sugar or shock or any other excuse I’ve passed off for the last week. I’m pregnant. And it’s not Ed’s. We’ve been too careful. It’s Blair’s.

She knows what I’m thinking. Of course she does. She is me. She’s thinking it too.

“I did it for you, Jude. Because of Emily. I couldn’t let her treat you like that. We couldn’t . . .”

I crouch down, one hand on my belly, trying to feel it inside me. This alien. I feel dirty. How could she? How could I? How could I do this to me, to Ed?

“You’re only a few weeks in. You can have an abortion.” She crouches down next to me. Puts her hand on my arm. “We’ll be fine.”

“We?”

“Yeah. I’ll come with you. Hold your hand.”

“No.” I throw her arm off. She staggers backward. “Don’t you get it? You have to go now. This has to stop.”

“Just like that?”

“Yes.” I nod.

Stella laughs. “But I can’t.”

“You can. Go . . . please,” I beg. “Leave me alone.”

“I’m not real, though, am I? You made me. I can’t just walk away.”

I shut my eyes. If she’s just in my head, I can make her disappear. Can’t I?

I open my eyes. She’s still there, watching me crouched in my own vomit. She smiles. Holds out her hand to pull me up. My fairy godmother. “I’m everything you want to be. You said it yourself.”

I look at her hand. Candy-pink nail varnish. Costume rings, my mum’s, on the fingers. My hand. But this time I don’t take it. I push myself up. And walk past her, back along the path. Home. And not once do I look back.

IT’S TWO
in the morning. I’m lying in bed. Alone. Well, almost. Me and the thing inside me. I can’t sleep. Not with it there. Part of me. And of him. I cringe as I see his face. At the fridge, his eyes following the trickle of water as it ran down my chest. Then again as he stared at me with Ed. Just days after I’d slept with him. I hear Blair saying my name. Not Stella. Jude.

I know now it was me and that Stella is just someone I’ve created, conjured up. My Frankenstein’s monster. I go back over conversation after conversation, taking Stella out of the picture, making her words come out of my mouth. And she’s right. It’s me asking Emily what’s her damage. Telling her she’s got a fat girl’s name. Lines from films. Ones I watched with Mum when she was too tired to take me to the beach. To school. That’s where they all come from, Stella’s put-downs. Mum’s old videos.
Heathers,
The Breakfast Club,
Pretty in Pink.
American high-school stuff. The kind Dad hated. Because the teenagers were smart-mouthed.

Me telling Ed he’s a lucky guy, touching him under the table. Him blushing, saying, “Not now.” To me. Not to her. I feel relief for a brief second. That he didn’t betray me. Then the horror seeps back in.

It all works. She was never there. It’s like I’ve solved a Rubik’s Cube. Or a Chinese puzzle from a Christmas cracker. Something has clicked into place, and now that it’s there, it’s so obvious. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.

I think back to when Mum died. When Stella first came to me. Or I invented her. Whatever. It doesn’t matter now. She showed up at school, in uniform. Yet she never took classes. Her name was never on the register.

And she waltzed into that game — Handstand Wonderland — the way I had wanted to for months, the way Mum had told me to, showing them that I was as good as they were. Better than them, because I practiced every afternoon after school against the barn. Every night against the bedroom wall. It was me the boys were watching, doing scissors and splits. No wonder Emily hated me. I took her place. Until Stella left and Emily was Queen Bee again.

Stella left. She left. But I don’t know how. Or why. Maybe I had pills. Like Dad. Prozac or something. But I guess that’s not the point. Because she came back. Because whatever drugs I take, she’ll still be there, somewhere. Buried inside me. Forever.

Sometime around five I must have fallen asleep. It was getting light. I remember birds. Seagulls outside screeching their presence. I dreamed of horrible things. Babies with two heads. Siamese twins. A girl being sawn in two, each half a living thing on its own. B-movie schlock horror. Victorian freak-show stuff. I run to the bathroom. Morning sickness.

It’s nine now. I can hear Dad and Alfie downstairs, Mrs. Hickman asking who used up the tea bags and telling Alfie to get some off the shelf. The sound of normal life. The sound of people who don’t know there’s a monster in the attic. Who think I’ve just had a row with my boyfriend, and it will all be all right in the morning. Well, it isn’t.

I flush the toilet and look at myself in the mirror. Looking for signs of her. That she’s in there somewhere. And there’s nothing weird. No horns. No rolling eyes. But I can see what she’s done to me, what I’ve done to myself, trying to be her. I touch my stomach again. And I know she hasn’t gone. She is hiding, waiting.