13 Minutes by Sarah Pinborough Read Free Book Online Page A

Abigail. But that wouldn’t be very Barbie -like of me, as they call us at school, and I am the Barbies.
    I said that maybe Mr Jones would play the role himself and that I couldn’t imagine a teenager taking it on, not even James. It needs rough skin and hands. I looked at my friends then. They were both thinking the same – an unbidden thought of Mr Jones naked and doing it , passion made somehow more powerful by the unlawfulness. Abigail and John Proctor all mixed up with the whole school’s crush on the Drama teacher. I could almost feel the temperature rising in the room.
    ‘But I hope not,’ I said, in the end. ‘That would be weird. And a bit disgusting. I mean, fucking someone that age. Even just acting it.’ I made a vom face. ‘Creepy.’ They made suitably appalled sounds – of course they did – but they looked guilty. (Sometimes they are so predictable.) I felt a strange warmth for them, though. Maybe I shouldn’t play with them so much.
    ‘What about that person who texted you?’ It was Jenny this time, bringing the conversation back to my story – my event – to pick over the bones of it. ‘The policewoman asked us about the number but we didn’t know it.’ She was trying to sound casual but I didn’t buy it. I told her I didn’t know it either and that it must have just been a wrong number and nothing to do with what happened to me.
    ‘She asked Becca, too,’ Hayley said. She was flicking through the pages of the play but her eyes looked up from the shield of her poker-straight hair and I noticed how perfectly arched her eyebrows were. I need to get mine done again. ‘Like Becca would know.’
    ‘She was here.’ I said it quietly. ‘She read to me when I was unconscious.’
    ‘Could you hear her?’ Jenny asked. She doesn’t care about Becca. She doesn’t share the betrayal Hayley and I do. She was never Becca’s friend. ‘That would be weird.’
    ‘I don’t know,’ I told her. I say: ‘Maybe a little bit like in a dream.’ I don’t even know if that’s true, but it’s what they wanted to hear.
    ‘What about . . .’ Jenny leaned in ‘. . . when you were . . . you know . . .’
    ‘Dead?’ I finished.
    Hayley was grossed out by that. Hayley hates death. We all do now we’re realising it will happen to us one day – although I may have reached that moment somewhat faster than my friends. We hate it and are fascinated by it, but Hayley has a real terror of it. She’s really grasped it, I think. Under her perfection she’s well aware of the fragility of her flesh. I’ve seen her worry over a freckle when she thinks no one is looking. Did someone in her family die when she was young? I don’t remember. Maybe. Perhaps it was something she didn’t talk about, but which stopped her swinging in trees and climbing walls and scaffolding – something more than just the advent of her boobs.
    ‘Well, it’s true.’ I smiled, but all I could think about was the blackness and the overwhelming enormity of my fear in that memory of trying to reach the branches. Like the darkness was waiting for me. Like it was laughing at me. It makes my breath catch a bit in my throat. Not that I can let it show. I want to get out of here in the next few days. I have to. I must stay normal . I told them I can’t remember anything. Judging from Hayley’s face, I don’t know if that was a good thing or a bad one for her many fears. Maybe she wanted stories of bright lights and tunnels and angels.
    When the nurse came to say that Hayley’s mother had arrived to take them home, I wondered for a minute how she knew which of my friends was which and then remembered that they spent the weekend crying around my bed. It’s strange to have been here but not here for that. It still makes me shiver, despite the warmth. It was like they’d attended my wake and I was some kind of vampire risen from the dead.
    My friends squealed their disappointment but the nurse told them I needed to rest