Page 18 of Good Sisters

I knocked gently on Jess’s bedroom door.

‘What?’

She was at that ‘charming’ stage where everything she said sounded aggressively defensive.

I opened the door.

She was sprawled on her bed, holding her phone up to her face. ‘What? I’m on the phone to Grace.’

‘Hi, Grace.’ I waved at the phone screen. ‘I need to talk to Jess now.’

‘OMG, you’re so annoying. We were having a really good chat,’ Jess muttered. ‘I’ll deal with this and call you back, okay?’ She hung up.

‘Did you get your report card?’ I ignored her rudeness.

Jess’s face dropped. ‘Yeah.’

‘Can I see it?’

She sat up and pulled her backpack onto her lap. ‘Okay, but you’re not to go mad.’

I tensed. ‘Why would I?’

‘Because I didn’t do great in all my tests this week.’

‘Why not?’ I tried to keep my cool, but Jess doing badly in school was a big trigger for me. I hadn’t worked in school: I’d foolishly relied on modelling for a career and my looks to get me a rich husband. It had worked, temporarily, until it had shattered into a thousand pieces.

‘Because they were hard, Mum. Maths was, like, impossible. Everyone did badly in it, and science was, like, insane. Mr Frederick asked us really hard stuff that we haven’t even studied.’

‘So you’re telling me that your science teacher asked you questions in a test that you had never studied in school?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, I’ll have to call him and tell him it’s not fair.’

Jess avoided eye contact. ‘Well, I mean he’d gone over a few bits, but it was really hard. I told you, everyone got bad results.’

‘How did Lisa do?’ I asked. Lisa was my benchmark: she was the kid you wanted yours to be best mates with. She was smart, sweet, studious, polite, always smiling, class captain, head of the science club … Lisa was the dream child.

Jess’s cheeks reddened. ‘You always do this. You always compare me to bloody Lisa, who is, like, a genius and has no actual life except studying. All she does, all day long, is work. Her life is hell.’

‘Really, Jess? Because she looks happy to me. Every time I see her, she’s smiling.’

Jess rolled her eyes. ‘She’s a total nerd. She has never even been to a disco.’

‘Wow, poor Lisa. I bet when she’s running some billion-euro company she’ll really regret that.’

‘When she’s living in her big mansion, alone with no friends and just, like, loads of books for company, she might actually,’ Jess snapped back.

‘I doubt she’ll be alone with her books if she’s that successful. Hand it over, Jess.’ I put out my hand for the report card that she reluctantly gave me.

It was not good: 53 per cent in science and 48 per cent in maths.

I glared at her. ‘What the hell, Jess? These are way down on last week. You obviously did no work. You need to spend less time on your bloody phone and more time studying.’

The front door opened. Jess jumped off her bed, raced past me and ran to her dad. ‘Help! Mum’s attacking me. It’s not fair, Dad, she’s being really hard on me.’

I went out to the hall, where Jess was standing beside Jack, hanging out of his arm.

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