Unbelievable, Chapter Three

Chapter Three: Awakening

By the end of the week, I was solidly ensconced in my group of ‘sciencey’ friends. It was almost becoming enjoyable; I was almost living. Change of scene… yes, it really had worked its magic. At least I had been right; I felt justified now, plotting my break for freedom, all those dark, cold days lurking like a ghost in the corridors of my old school, while pretending to still inhabit my old life. Even before Mum had checked herself out with a ticket to ride all the way to…never mind - I’m not sure it’s the time.

Elyssa had imprinted herself even more indelibly on my conscious by practically breaking the wrist of a cheeky Year Eleven boy who had grabbed her bottom in the corridor, hissing ‘Think you can touch me? You think I let boys like you touch me?’ Yes, I was in awe of her. Partly because she looked so fragile but was clearly quite a lot stronger; partly because nobody would think to bother touching me, mousy-brown and quiet as I was, wrapped, genderless, inside the folds of my hoodie, crushed inside my fitted new coat. Maggie was determined to drag me shopping on Saturday to ‘dress me appropriately, or at least with some sort of ‘nod to fashion’. I dreaded it, hence the need to seek out alternative entertainment, provided by my newfound friends and/or acquaintances.

I listened attentively to every conversation, in case the word ‘weekend’ appeared. Where could I tag along, where could I slide myself in, unobtrusively? I had started to slowly work out where everybody stood in relation to everyone else, figure out the social nuances of the group. I had been a loner, isolating myself, and now it was as if I was learning how to interact as a human teenager again, almost as if I was an alien infiltrating another planet’s culture.

Eric and Josh were best mates and had been since they met in primary school. Shannon attempted to be ‘one of the boys’, but it was clear she was secretly storing up the courage to ask out Josh. Tom was the geekiest, and quite obviously smitten with Tienna, who would eat him alive if she could be bothered. Tienna was the social butterfly, flitting easily between different groups, refusing to be rooted anywhere. And who was I?

Elyssa drifted in and out of school as if she owned the place. She always vanished after English lessons, reappearing for the next session as if she had never been gone. Occasionally I’d see her in the corridors on the way to class, but at lunch she was invisible, and at the end of the day just not there. Friday was what I was waiting for; English was last lesson, so theoretically she would be traceable…

The blond boy had not been back. Frankenstein progressed without him, and I absorbed myself in Victor’s tortured, irresponsible psyche, aligning my sympathies with the ‘monster’ of his creation, the social outcast echoed in the book I held before me. Yes, I knew how he felt, learning how to interact, testing it out.

I was lost in the monster’s narrative as I waited for the class to begin, early, having cut lunch short. I had two options now: lunch and cinema with the girls, Tienna and her mates, a giggling gaggle of mostly blondes whose names I could neither remember or keep straight, or study group with ‘the boys’, a group in which Shannon’s femininity was lost, much to her chagrin. I hoped they thought of me as somehow sexless, as it was clear the blondies did; the looks they had scanned me with had left me with no doubt on that score: not femininely pretty enough to worry about and not masculine enough to fancy.

‘Humans cannot get past aesthetics, it’s why they will never be truly happy,’ intoned a droll voice, and the tall, silent blond one slid into the seat beside me.

I glanced around, but the classroom was empty. He slung a too-familiar hand across the back of my chair, and I felt uneasy, trapped; he had positioned himself between me and the door.

‘But don’t you think that looks play a part in choosing friends and sexual partners?’ I shot back, defensively.

He grinned, slyly. ‘But looks can be so deceiving, can’t they?’ He reached a languid finger out and traced it down my face.

I flinched back from his cool touch, slightly aghast that he had dared to touch me. If only I was Elyssa, capable of breaking his finger off if he tried it again.

Unperturbed by my reaction, he spoke again, leaning his face towards mine so that he spoke softly, almost whispering in my ear.

‘How long has it been since you bothered with makeup, for instance?’

The question was like a slap in the face. My jaw dropped. I gathered myself.

‘And what makes you think I’ve ever worn makeup?’ I demanded, leaning away from him.

‘You’re a seventeen-year-old-girl,’ he smiled, drawing away. ‘Of course you’ve worn makeup.’

‘Isn’t that a bit of a gender stereotype?’ I snorted, derisively.

‘Not really, in this day and age. I have.’ And that grin again, teasing me.

‘Books and covers,’ I muttered.

‘And your cover is particularly interesting, isn’t it, Neona?’ he bit his lip, as if debating whether to continue. Cold blue eyes met mine. Blue into blue, we stared, locked together, trance-like. If I had hackles, they would be rising.

‘My cover?’ I played it cool, holding the gaze.

‘This,’ he plucked at my hoodie, ‘and these’, he indicated the baggily-cut jeans. ‘Your hair, your face…’

This was becoming creepy. My hair? Yes, I had let it grow over the past months, no longer bothering with the hairdresser and her bangs and layers, her subtle golden highlights to alleviate the mousiness. My makeup bag sat, mustering mouldily in a drawer, unpacked and still unused, untouched. But how did he know that I used to be…

‘Different?’

His voice stopped the blood flowing in my veins.

‘What do you want?’ I hissed, longing for the bell to save me, like it did n films and television shows. I had been earlier than I anticipated, or time had slowed, I wasn’t sure which.

‘To know what you’re running from. To understand you. Neona is the rarest name…I know who you are, you know.’ And he leant back with a satisfied smirk, mission accomplished.

‘And what of it?’ I sniffed, refusing to break.

‘How did you do it?’ He leapt forwards, suddenly, pinning me back against the chair with a long, pale arm, shirt cuff pushed up to reveal blond hair and freckles. ‘You should be dead, you know that?’

‘I know,’ I choked on the words, catching my breath. ‘I know what should be, but I don’t know why it is; I only know that it is, that I’m not dead.’

He frowned, disbelievingly, but the spell was broken as the bell screamed across my consciousness like a cold, welcome wind, and he released me from his hold with a regretful last sigh.

‘He speaks to strangers!’ exclaimed Elyssa, appearing through the door in her whirlwind fashion, skittling across the still-empty classroom and landing heavily on the other side of me. ‘What did you do, offer him sweets?’ she laughed, pulling a face at… I still did not know his name.

I turned to him, but he was flicking through his folder, searching for his homework, his arm no longer across the back of my chair, his body posture indicating that touching me was the furthest thing from his mind, with no hint that seconds before, we had been having an intense, mystifying conversation.

How did he know who I was? Did he really, or was he just pushing me into telling him, cleverly playing with my mind? He really didn’t look the type – but then, he really didn’t look like any type…

I was halfway through the essay the teacher had set us for the lesson, when a piece of folded paper was slid under my hand. I glanced to my right, under my grown-out fringe, but his face was impassive, his hand retracting as I studied him, my nameless tormentor. Curiously, I unfolded the paper.

‘Miracle girl escapes unhurt from fatal collision’ rang the familiar headline, searing across my eyes like a bright light, like headlights cutting through the darkness.

And there it was; the full-colour evidence that I had once looked quite different. It was my school photograph, the one where I was smiling happily in Year Eleven, before the studying and the exams and the post-exam parties and the endless summer that had stretched, lively and happy and full, right up until the end of August…

My fringe was short, my hair lightened, my eyes heavily ringed with eyeliner, my cheeks carefully tinted: a normal seventeen-year-old-girl trying too hard to be pretty as a picture. The caption captivated me, as it always had done: ‘Neona White, the only survivor of the wreckage’.

And there is was, the image that haunted me, palely hovering on the edge of every dream, suppressed and locked away, smothered with the emotion I couldn’t quite connect with: twisted red metal, blackened and burnt. After they had removed the bodies, of course: it really wouldn’t do to upset the sensibilities of the readers of the local rag by showing them the car wreck while the burnt, unrecognisable corpses still inhabited it.

The sun had burned through the windscreen, showing the dust particles as we sang, sang along to the Killers of all things. Mr Brightside. ‘It started out with a kiss, how did it end up like this? It was only a kiss, it was only a kiss,’ I whispered, tracing the photograph, tracing the shape of his car. ‘I just can’t look, it’s killing me…’ I choked, as the three in the back swayed in time to the music, and he swerved the wheel slightly from side to side, rocking us backwards and forwards across the deserted road in time to the music. At the top of our lungs, we belted out the familiar words, as the summer roared in through the open windows and blew our hair across our faces.

He turned to grin at me, and I caught his smile, infectious, spreading. I reached out to touch his lips, and then Phoebe screamed, breaking the moment, as the tractor came round the corner. His hands gripped the wheel, ghostlike, a precedent, and the sunlight blinded me as we shot off the road into the ditch, flipping over, obliterating ourselves against the tree.

And there I was, crawling out of the wreckage, disoriented and unaware, the weight of death rising to meet me, pressing me down into the road. Hot tarmac against my cheek, as the hiss and snarl of the engine catching and the heavy silence beyond it that crushed me. It must have been the farmer that pulled me to safety, out of reach of the explosion that followed, the explosion that would have killed my boyfriend, his sister, my best friend and her brother, if they hadn’t been dead already. I did not know for sure; they wouldn’t tell me the details. Protection misguided but well intentioned.

‘Neona!’ finally, Elyssa broke across my consciousness. I did not know that I had started to scream. The room erupted around me, and as I slipped into and out of blackness, Friday afternoon became Saturday morning, sedated in a hospital bed, shaking as the emotion racked through me. Like seaweed caught in a rolling swell, I drifted and plunged, drifted and plunged through the highs and lows, as wave after wave crashed over me.

Maggie sat there and watched me, unobtrusive, a stab of shocking blood-red colour inside the whiteness of the room. She did not try to speak, just guarded, like a restful angel, a faint smile playing about her lips as I tried to focus in between the dips. By evening, I was able to sit up and speak, and they dialled back the drugs enough to let me eat something. I swallowed buttery toast, what felt like one crumb at a time. It was difficult not to choke on it, for every time I swallowed, new tears blocked my throat, rising to encompass me.

They released me on Sunday, tottering out into the world like an invalid, once more ensconced in my familiar hoodie and jeans. The hospital robe had not been becoming. I felt like a newborn foal, teetering on unsteady legs, gripping Maggie’s arm as a crutch. She took me home and fed me soup and tea, understanding in the way the nurses hadn’t that liquids were all that I could manage. I sat in the kitchen, fingers entwined around a cup, watching her make her concoctions, lovingly handwriting the labels for the products she sold personally.

It was a relief. I felt as if I was inhabiting my body properly for the first time in months; had it only been five? February was almost upon us. Pain drew razor blades across the surface of my heart and brain. I had prescription drugs to numb it, but I refused to take them. In truth, I was almost enjoying my new power to connect heart and brain and soul and body. Grief, yes: overwhelming grief, but I was finally free to experience it. I was becoming human once more, and I welcomed it.