فصل 78

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PART FOUR September

LENA

I thought I wouldn’t want to leave, but I can’t look at the river every day, cross it on my way to school. I don’t even want to swim in it anymore. It’s too cold now, in any case. We’re going to London tomorrow, I’m almost all packed.

The house will be rented out. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want people living in our rooms and filling up our spaces, but Jules said that if we didn’t we might get squatters, or things might start to fall apart and there would be no one there to pick up the pieces, and I didn’t like that idea either. So I agreed.

It’ll still be mine. Mum left it to me, so when I’m eighteen (or twenty-one, or something like that) it’ll be mine properly. And I will live here again. I know I will. I’ll come back when it doesn’t hurt so much and I don’t see her everywhere I look.

I’m scared about going to London, but I feel better about it than I did. Jules (not Julia) is really odd, she’s always going to be odd, she’s fucked up. But I’m a bit weird and fucked up, too, so maybe we’ll be fine. There are things I like about her. She cooks and fusses around me, she tells me off for smoking, she makes me tell her where I’m going and when I’ll be back. Like other people’s mums do.

In any case, I’m glad it’ll just be the two of us, no husband and I’m guessing no boyfriends or anything like that, and at least when I go to my new school no one will know who I am or anything about me. You can remake yourself, Jules said, which I thought was a bit off because, like, what’s wrong with me? But I know what she meant. I cut all my hair off and I look different now, and when I go to the new school in London, I won’t be the pretty girl that no one likes, I’ll just be ordinary.