Girl Saves Boy Read Free Page B

a cramped apartment in a dreary part of London, perhaps—and be a struggling artist, sitting with my charcoal and my canvas in the doorways of abandoned houses, drawing. Or in New York City, sleeping on the couches of talented but as yet undiscovered playwrights, drinking coffee all night and speaking rubbish and getting high.
    I wanted to run away from this suburb I’d lived in as a young child, which still haunted me with memories, the happy ones hurting me more than the sad ones. But I couldn’t go back to my grandparents. The years living with them on a farm outside a town in rural Victoria were now only bittersweet memories.
    My room hadn’t changed while I’d been away, but my mother had. After ten years without her (phone calls were a rarity near the end), it was so strange to call her Mum. When I’d left, she was still ‘Mummy’. She had been plump and had worn aprons and scrunched up her nose when she was concentrating on something. She’d had rosy cheeks and brown curls and got flustered easily.
    After ten years Mummy had become Rachel, small and gaunt, falling-out brown curls, sallow-faced, always on the verge of tears, it seemed. What had once been a pretty sort of fragility had become instability.
    I looked like my father—my sleek dark hair and olive complexion came from him—but the different-coloured eyes were my own personal curse. Everyone felt like pointing them out, whispering to each other.
    In ten years I’d changed too, from a bright eight year old with too much energy and a fondness for crayons to an anti-social and friendless eighteen year old who drew in charcoal and any sharpened pencil.
    I was once Jewel Valentine, her whole future ahead of her, each eye a different-coloured diamond, each day starting with vigour for life, like every child. Then I became Jewel Valentine, disenchanted, lonely, victim of the Curse of the Beautiful but Strange.
    I knew how I looked—it didn’t have any positive influence on the way I felt about myself. I was five feet and two inches tall, but my height wasn’t the part that mattered, wasn’t the part that bothered me. It was how sharp my features were, the fact that my eyes were so striking, the way my hair fell.
    It was these things that drew people in, but it was my personality that pushed them away. I wished they hadn’t noticed me in the first place. I was alone by choice, but I hadn’t counted on that causing me to feel lonely.
    One thing that always annoyed my teachers, back when I was living with Grandma and Grandpa, was my lack of involvement. I didn’t want to join teams. I didn’t want to take up basketball or robotics or join the anime club. Also (and teachers never say it, but you know they want to), I’d never had a boyfriend. It wasn’t as if I was gay, either; I hadn’t had a girlfriend. (It was kind of trendy and edgy then to say you were gay, or bisexual, or any of those other words people use to let you know that their sexual desires and the types of people they are attracted to aren’t the norm.) I think it would have made Mrs F happy if she had walked in the front gates of the school one day and seen me locking tonsils with someone of any gender in my year. I probably should have done that. Just to find out. Just to get them off my back.
    Nothing scared teachers at that school more than a potential teenaged sociopath. They thought I was going to walk in to school one day with a loaded gun and kill a bunch of Year 10s and say it was because I didn’t like Monday.
    Actually, I kind of hated Wednesday, like it was there to intentionally piss me off, sidling in between Tuesday and Thursday, mocking me with its innate Wednesday-ness.
    But where would I have got a loaded gun from anyway? I lived a bit out in the country, so I could have got a rifle off a farmer, but that’s not the weapon of choice in killing sprees, from what I’ve seen of late-night true-crime shows (the ones that always claim to have new and damning evidence,