Heart-Shaped Bruise Read Free

into it, rolled around in it, swam in it, deeper and deeper, until it pulled me under. When I emerged, I had only one thought: Juliet. It was her fault.
That
’s how it started, the day I traced that line back to the night she stabbed Dad and everything fell apart. So I suppose I don’t always avoid straight lines.
    Sometimes I run across them.

Sunday. Music therapy.
    As a group, we don’t agree on much in here, but we are united in our hatred of music therapy. I actually
like
music, so it shouldn’t be such an ordeal. But if Her Majesty’s Prison Service is trying to teach me that violence isn’t the answer, they really shouldn’t make me do music therapy with Kim, an over-eager Australian girl who insists on playing ABBA songs as though we can dance the crazy right out of us.
    She’s twenty-two, so I guess we’re supposed to relate to her, but she’s
so
happy. Happy happy happy, all the time. Happy when Halina (16, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) wets herself. Happy when Reta (17, schizophrenic) starts bickering with the aliens sent to earth to protect her. Happy when Val refuses to stand up, let alone take an instrument from the box. Happy happy happy.
    She’s clearly the maddest one here.
    Once, I asked Doctor Gilyard what the point of it was.
    Of course she responded with: ‘What do you think the point of it is, Emily?’
    ‘It’s clearly a form of torture,’ I muttered. ‘If that lunatic plays “Dancing Queen” once more, I’m writing to Amnesty International. I’d rather be waterboarded.’
    ‘Which lunatic?’
    I huffed, but I suppose you do have to specify in this place.
    ‘Kim! Get her in here,’ I said with a wave of my hand. ‘Ask her about her mother. She’s off her nut if she thinks that banging a tambourine is going to stop Reta thinking that she’s BFFs with the High Priestess of Maladoth.’
    ‘You don’t think it helps?’
    ‘Of course not!’
    She took off her glasses and looked at me. ‘So it wouldn’t help to play the cello?’
    I’d been waiting for that. Waiting.
    ‘It’s impossible to play along to “Dancing Queen” on the cello,’ I told her with a smug smile, but I still felt my heart in my throat.
    She can’t.
    She won’t.
    She won’t.

Doctor Gilyard started our session this week by asking me if I often lose my temper.
    That’s all she ever does: ask questions. Questions. Questions. Questions. If the sun slants into her office at the right angle, you can see all the question marks floating in the air. Question marks and dust. I try to catch them on my tongue sometimes, as though they’re snowflakes. I can’t, of course, but it’s fun to see the look on her face as I try.
    The first time I did it, she looked so worried that I don’t know how I didn’t laugh. Now she knows me well enough not to flinch when I do stuff like that. She just closes her notebook and when she puts her pencil on top of it, I stop because what’s the point of giving her what she wants if she isn’t going to write it down?
    I swear I wouldn’t do
half
the stuff I do if someone wasn’t paying attention.
    But I guess she’s learned a trick or two over the last few months, which is why she didn’t tell me about Juliet’s letter today. Usually, she would try to hand it to me and I’d huff and puff and refuse to take it. But today she just put the envelope down on the coffee table in front of me and sat back in her chair.
    There was a ceremony to it, to the way she turned it over so that I could see my name and the address written neatly across it. And I looked at it, then at her, and when she picked up the pencil again, I felt the silence roll out between us like a red carpet.
    I didn’t say anything for the rest of the session and it actually hurt not to. There was this pain – this ache – in my stomach as I looked at the letter. She usually reads them out to me so I waited and waited, but she didn’t. She just let it sit there, on the coffee table, while she waited for