Page 82 of Sad Girl Hours
“That’s … one way to look at it.” She smiles, pointing towards the stars on the ceiling. “I was never allowed those as a kid in case they damaged the paint getting them off, but I always wanted them.”
“That sucks.”
I swear, every fact I learn about her parents makes me want to punch them both even more. Let your kid stick stupid stars on her ceiling – her interests should have meant more to them than a tester pot of magnolia paint.
“I know it’s not the same, but you can enjoy them while you’re here at least? Oh.” I realise what I’ve implied. “That is, if you want to stay in here with me. We’ve got an air bed that I can sleep on, and you can take the bed. But we do also have a guest room that you’re also very welcome to stay in.”
“In here sounds good,” she says.
“Good,” I repeat stupidly. “In here it is.”
She smiles at me and then continues gazing around, flopping down on to my bed, the springs creaking as she does so.
My first thought is that I wonder whether there’s anywhere I can go before Christmas that’ll sellmorestars.
My second is that I’ve lived in this house since I was one year old. But somehow it feels even more like home with her here.
Chapter Forty
Saffron
Life in the Holloways’ home is even better than I imagined. Each morning, I wake up on an air bed on Nell’s floor (no way was I letting her give up her bed for me), staring up at fake, slightly green stars, and usually with a very large cat giving me pins and needles in one or both of my feet.
Then we go downstairs for breakfast where the twins offer us various juices that Nell always pours down the drain outside, and today, Xander offers me potato pancakes with tofu scramble and avocado.
“I hope you didn’t go to the trouble of making that just for me. I know it’s a pain me being veggie, but—”
“Not at all,” he says, cutting me off. “Any excuse to try a new recipe, honestly. And, besides, veggie’s easy enough. Gluten free, we’d have had issues with.”
“We are a family of bread lovers,” Nell notes, looking very sleepy and cute in her flannel pyjamas, her dark hair mussed up at the back from her pillow.
The tofu scramble was a little watery, I must confess (although obviously I say it’s the best I’ve ever had to a bashful but beaming Xander). I also don’t sleep particularly well on the mattress as it deflates slowly throughout the night – and also because of my brain that unfortunately continues to have depression attached to it – but at least when I do wake up from my fractured sleep I wake uphere, with Nell.
I messaged my parents to tell them I wasn’t coming home. I did it at 7 a.m. a few days before we came here and then turned my phone off for the day, not wanting to see whatever their reply was. I suspected it would either be flippant and unfeeling, much in the spirit ofCool. Now we can save the petrol money.Or its intention would be for me to feel an exponential amount of guilt, something likeChristmas is a time for family, Saffron(I know it is, that’s why I came here).If we expected any better, then we’d be disappointed that you’ve apparently forgotten this.
I braced myself for both variations when I turned my phone back on.
There was no response. Not an unfeeling one, no guilt trip, just … nothing. And somehow that made me feel even worse.
If I was being generous, I would say that they felt hurt and weren’t able to reply to my message because they were too upset.
But I know better than that. They read the message; they just didn’t think it warranted a reply. Or they were too busy being relieved to have time to send anything back.
“You OK?”
Nell’s voice brings me out of my head as we’re getting dressed several hours after breakfast (my mum would have made pointed comments about laziness if I’d done that at home), having got roped into an intense game of ‘made-up-word Scrabble’ (you can play anything: you just have to pronounce it and tell the group what it means) with the twins.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m good.”
Nell pulls that face that I love and hate in equal measure, the one that saysbullshitin every crinkle and frown line.
“I’m just … thinking about my parents.”
I’m trying, I really am, to be open with her. No more secrets.Or, I add to myself, trying not to stare at the softness of her body as she pulls on a shirt, sweater vest and tartan skirt,just a couple of them.
“Ah. Were they upset when you said you weren’t going home?”
“Not exactly,” I say, pulling out my phone and showing her the absence of a response and the two white ticks as a read receipt.
