Page 34 of Role Model
I shake my head softly. “You just don’t get it. That’s how things are now. At school, that’s how everything is.”
“It wasn’t with Txai and Niamh,” she fires back, suddenly no longer calm.
I close my eyes. “That’s different.”
“Yes. Because they’re different.”
“Sable, Jaya, Ana… they’re nice, they are! They can be, I–Ithoughtthey were nice. I thought they were like me–”
“When are you going to realise thatnooneis like you!”
The words linger in the air and I hate them. I hate them so much because they’re true.
Fizz suddenly leans forward, addressing Ilya.
“Take us to Hyde Park.”
I sniff. “What’s in Hyde Park?”
She smiles at me. “You’ll see.”
130
Chapter Sixteen
Winter Wonderland is in Hyde Park. A huge fairground of rides and games and fun. I stare at it from our secret VIP entrance. The whole park has been transformed into a funfair and I feel lit up like all of the lights on the rollercoasters.
“I know you miss the Christmas markets back in Scotland,” Fizz tells me as we look up at the brightness. “So I thought…”
“It’s enormous,” I say, looking at how far and wide the fairground goes.
“Yes. Is it too much? Too overstimulating.”
I turn to her. “Can we go on the flying chairs?”
The chairoplane promises to take me high into the cold December air and make me feel like I’m flying. Fizz pays for both of us to go on and I scream in delight as the ride climbs higher and higher into the sky.131When it starts to rotate, I close my eyes. The wind against my face at last. It feels incredible. I imagine I’m a bird. I’m far away from everyone below, none of them can touch me.
It’s over too quickly. As we’re lowered to the ground once more, I turn to Fizz and she laughs at whatever it is she sees in my face.
“We can go again,” she assures me.
We go seven more times. Once I’m finally ready to at least take a break, we walk among the food stalls for a while.
“You lied about it being a study group, didn’t you?” Fizz asks me gently.
“Yeah,” I reply. “But Sable did promise it would only be a small, quiet gathering.”
Fizz nods at that. “I’m sure. So all of that stuff about elephants…?”
I look down, feeling ashamed. “It’s just something I’m interested in.”
“A special interest?”
“Yes.”
When she doesn’t say anything else, I fill the silence. “Did you know that elephants mourn their loved ones? They return to the place that they died to touch the bones. Even when the bones are gone.132They remember. They come back to the same spot and touch the dirt where the bones once were.”
“I didn’t know that,” Fizz says and she sounds interested. Sometimes people try to humour me when I talk about something I’m passionate about, but Fizz doesn’t. She sounds truly engaged.
