The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel by Schaffner Anna Read Free Book Online Page B

on, Tobe, be a gentleman,’ one of his friends sitting on the other side of the room shouted.
    ‘Just do it, you coward,’ another one cried. Everyone was laughing and firing Tobias on.
    Tobias looked totally embarrassed for a while, but then shrugged and finally said, in a resigned voice, ‘OK, just one quick kiss to make you happy then.’
    Just as he bent over to plant a quick kiss on my lips, cheered on by the entire room, Julia came back down. Everybody fell silent at once. For a split second, she just stood there and looked at us. Her skin was alabaster-white, her eyes were narrow green slits and her lips pressed together so tightly that they’d turned white, too. She looked like an angry goddess about to wreak havoc, but who didn’t really know where to begin. She let her gaze travel slowly across the room. She looked at Tobias, and at the half-empty beer bottle in my hand, and then she looked at Tobias again.
    Tobias got up immediately and said, ‘Look, Julia, don’t get angry, it’s not what it looks like. We were just having fun. Amy asked me to... ’
    But Julia interrupted him. ‘How dare you,’ she said very quietly. Her voice cut through the room like a whiplash. What followed happened very quickly. She walked over to where Tobias and I were sitting. She stood right up against Tobias and looked at him for a few seconds that felt like an eternity. Everyone was holding their breath. Then she took the half-empty beer bottle from my hand, and smashed it down on Tobias’s head. He howled, and sank to his knees, holding his forehead in his hands. Blood was beginning to trickle from a small wound on his left temple.
    ‘For fuck’s sake. Damn you,’ he shouted. ‘You’re totally mad, Julia. It was a bloody game – your sister asked me to kiss her.’
    But Julia wasn’t interested in his story. ‘That’ll teach you, you piece of shit,’ she hissed. Then she grabbed me by the hand and dragged me outside. We walked home in silence. I was crying, and Julia was still pulling my hand and going far too quickly for me to keep up. I wanted to tell her that it was true and that I’d asked Tobias to kiss me, but I didn’t dare. Eventually, she stopped her frantic walking and took me in her arms. She, too, was crying at that point.
    ‘I’m so sorry, Amy. I’m so sorry, forgive me, forgive me,’ she kept saying. ‘I’ll never leave you alone again like that in a room full of hormonal drunken arseholes, I promise.’
    Again I wanted to tell her what had really happened, but she stopped me: ‘Hush, hush, now, it’s fine, let’s not talk about it anymore.’
    Julia never spoke to anyone who was at that party again. I know I should have told her what had really happened, but I was too ashamed, and too scared to provoke her anger and lose her affection. It was all I had and cared for, you know? I’m not proud of it. Much later, I was to lose her affection anyway, but for a totally different reason.
    When Julia was seventeen she started to do volunteer work at a homeless shelter, where she helped in the soup kitchen one evening a week. She also worked at an Oxfam shop on Saturday afternoons. And she founded a debating society at school, and led a weekly discussion group on current political issues. The debates quickly became super-popular, and a huge crowd regularly flocked to the school library on Thursday afternoons to listen to Julia and her provocative speeches.
    I still followed Julia like a shadow at the beginning of that year, and tried to help with all her initiatives. At the homeless shelter, for example, Julia chatted away to the shelter’s visitors while they had their meals in the dining room, and in the meantime I’d collect their empty plates and put them in the dishwasher, clean up the kitchen and serve seconds, and things like that. Unlike Julia, I’m hopeless at small talk. But Julia was really interested in the stories of the homeless – she wanted to know everything about them: where