Girl Saves Boy Read Free Page A

teachers want you to call them by their first name if you know them outside school.’
    ‘Yeah,’ I retorted, ‘if they want to be up on child sex charges.’
    ‘Why didn’t you talk to me, Sacha?’ asked True, sitting on the bed by my feet. ‘Fair enough you didn’t tell him ’—she frowned in Al’s direction—‘but you can trust me .’
    Instead of responding, I just stared at my hands. I listened to the machines whirring and nurses chattering and, in the distance, TV ads selling mobile screensavers. In the hospital, my past felt uncomfortably close. Elsewhere, it could be kept at arm’s length, but here, like at the cemetery and walking past our old house, things I’d rather forget breathed down my neck.
    The stench of bleach and sickness brought it all back to the front of my consciousness, to the place I’d been trying to keep it from for so long. Those years of tests, chemo, endless drugs and sleepless nights that swallowed up my childhood, and that time last year, just a few weeks before Mum’s death, when it was her turn to be confined to a hospital bed. Except I survived my leukaemia. She died of a self-inflicted illness.
    I guess that’s how she would have preferred it to be. Mother dies; son lives. How I wish it could’ve been the other way around.
    True frowned at Al again and turned back to me. ‘Who found you?’ she asked.
    ‘A girl,’ I replied. ‘Jewel Valentine.’
    ‘Was she hot?’ asked Al.
    ‘Michael!’ cried True. ‘Is there anything else you think about, other than chemical formulae and sex?’
    ‘Sorry,’ Al murmured.
    ‘Did you say Jewel Valentine?’ True asked. She looked thoughtful for a second, then sighed. ‘I really think you should speak to your dad.’
    ‘You’re not the first to say so.’
    ‘Sacha, Sacha, Sacha.’ She shook her head. ‘What are we going to do with you?’
    ‘Burying me alive seems attractive right now,’ I remarked. ‘Anyone got a shovel?’

Jewel
    I love last words in the same way I love opening lines. Not quite the same way Miles Halter loves them. I love the last words of criminals before they are executed. They often try to be witty, remarking to shooting squads that they haven’t got all day, or they insist on their innocence, which makes you comprehend the finality of the death penalty. How many times has it been proved that someone else was the murderer, long after the death of a blameless man or woman caught in a terrible situation? I love the last words of poets and writers and playwrights who say something magical in a suicide note, or gasp something about love on their deathbed. Or people who are true to their profession to their last breath—like a grammarian, or one of those freaks with word technicality obsessions who spurts in his final moments on earth something like ‘I am dying; or I am about to die—either is correct.’ I’m not sure if that’s what the quote was exactly, and it doesn’t matter; it’s just the idea that I care about.
    I love art and the freedom it offers, and I love last words for the way they provoke my mind—I could drift on a train of thought for years, if there was no need to eat and drink and go to school.
    I wish they recorded the last words of ordinary people—you can’t find any of those on the internet or in libraries. How unimportant you seem if you don’t do something that society values, if you never grow up and have the chance, or if you aren’t ever given the opportunities others receive, then your last words have no significance.
    I came back home to Rachel—Mum, sorry—because I had no one else left, because I hadn’t finished school yet, because I didn’t want to live on my own. I’d just turned eighteen but I was still treated like a child. I was too stubborn to keep a job for long—I couldn’t even work part time in a greengrocer’s— and art was the only thing that mattered to me.
    Now that I was back in the suburbs, I just wanted to disappear far away—to