‘You so are,’ said Lizzie. ‘Sitting in your corner, thinking you’re cool. It’ssofunny. The idea you two creeps, of all people, think you’re better than anyone else.’
‘Wedon’t.’ I blinked in a desperate attempt to stop the angry, miserable tears that were welling up in my eyes.
‘Oh my God,’ said Lizzie, in tones of genuine horror. ‘You’re not going to cry, are you? I was only telling you the truth.’ She turned on her heel and marched out of the room, followed by her friends. None of them looked at me as they left.
Things got worse at school from then on. Before that encounter in the loo, the rest of the class mostly ignored me and Roo, but if I were being generous I could describe it as a sort of benign neglect.
Then that lunchtime, while I was still shaking with nerves in the bathroom, Lizzie came into our form room and told the entire class that I had just basically attacked her in the toilets.
After that I discovered there are worse things than your classmates not paying any attention to you.
I don’t know if you could call it bullying. It wasn’t like bullying on a TV show. It was never violent or dramatic. It never involvedanyCarrie-esque public humiliation. It was just as though everyone had suddenly got permission to be alittlebit mean to us and so they were. Standing in front of my locker so I couldn’t open it. Smart remarks about our shoes or our hair. There was some sniggering when we spoke in class, until we stopped speaking up in class altogether unless a teacher really prodded us.
We ate our lunch outside or in one of the cloakroom alcoves almost every single day. It goes without saying that we were picked last for any teams in PE, and if anyone was paired with us for a class project they would basically ignore us and talk to the girls at the neighbouring desks. We would insist on going to school even when we were sick because, even though the thought of a day off was incredibly tempting, neither of us could bear to leave the other on her own all day.
I knew that I’d brought this down on us and blamed myself for it all. I was so scared Roo would blame me too. But she didn’t. I never told her what Lizzie and her friends had said about her in the loos that day. I just said I’d yelled at them because they’d called us both creepy goths who thought we were better than everyone else.
‘Well, wearebetter than them,’ said Roo.
And I know she believed it. There was always a shining core of self-confidence in Roo, one that allowed her to transcend the bullshit of school. I wasn’t as strong as her. I hated Lizzie Lattin with a fierce passion – I didn’t want to be part of her bitchy little gang, and I really did want to curse her.
But sometimes I did, desperately, just want to feel … comfortable. I wanted to go to school every day and not worry about people laughing at me.
‘Why do you care if they think we’re weird?’ said Roo. ‘They’re all arseholes. We should bepleasedthey think we’re weird.’
I think she said this just after we bumped into Lizzie and her friends in town and they saw us out of uniform for the first time in our witchy finery. Oh, theylovedthat. They called us the Corpse Brides for the rest of the year. We gave them so much ammunition, just by being ourselves.
‘But we’renotweird!’ I said. I wanted them to know that we were funny and normal andnice, and the stuff we liked wasn’t creepy, it was cool.Wewere cool.
Weren’t we?
When I was seventeen and Laura was in her fourth year of college, she and Tadhg were in a band together. Roo and I went to one of their gigs and I was stunned by how good they were, how fantastic my bossy big sister was on stage, how incredibly handsome her bandmate was. Laura’s friend Katie took us under her wing and bought us a pint each (‘Donottell your mother, Annie’) and we spent the night with their friends, who were all lovely to us. Tadhg’s ridiculously posh, beautiful girlfriend came up to Roo and told her she loved her dress. It was the best night of my teenage life.
And the whole time I kept thinking,I wish Lizzie and her mates could see us now, at this brilliant gig, hanging out with these cool, hot people. They’dhaveto be impressed if they saw us now.
Even then. Even when I should have been living in the glorious moment, having an amazing time. Those bitches got in my head even then.
I always cared, with all my heart, what they thought of me, but I hated myself for it at the same time.
Laura told me that when her and Tadhg’s reunion becamepublic knowledge a few years ago, loads of people from her past crawled out of the woodwork and got in touch with her. I never told her that the same thing had happened to me. And one of the crawlers was Lizzie. The week the world found out about Laura and Tadhg, she sent me a DM.
Hi Annie! I read about your sister and Tadhg Hennessy – so cool!! You know, we really should have a class reunion – can you believe it’s been almost 15 years?! Are you still friends with Rosa Maria? It would be great to see you both again! xxxxxx Lizzie
I didn’t reply. I looked at her profile, with its #bekind, then I screengrabbed it and the DM and sent the pics to Roo. I didn’t even bother blocking Lizzie. I didn’t give a shit if she saw my photos or not, and I didn’t want her to think I cared one way or the other. And, yes, it was pretty hilarious, Lizzie Lattin pretending we had ever been friends. But also, the sight of her face, even after all those years, made me feel weird and sick.
Well, fuck Lizzie Lattin and her cowardly mates. Look at Roo now. Look atmenow. We’ve come a long way since then. I got through school, and I’ll get through the next insane fortnight atNorthside, and if there is a saboteur they’ll give up and the show will return to a normal schedule and I’ll have months to write my next episode and it’ll all be easier. Things got better before. They’ll get better again. I tell myself this so often as the weekend goes on I almost believe it.
And then I get Bernard’s notes.
Chapter Sixteen
INT:NORTHSIDEOFFICES / EXT: DUBLIN STREETS
‘Are your notes as bad as mine?’ I say, as I close the door of our office behind me on Monday morning.
Art is sitting on the couch, looking as cheerful as I feel.
‘Did yours make no sense and also say you basically had to rewrite the entire fucking thing?’ he says. ‘Because if so, then yes.’